The U.S. Supreme Court has denied an emergency petition from the Trump administration, which sought a stay on a lower court’s injunction on a policy that would have denied gender-affirming care to federally incarcerated transgender people.
That policy was implemented by the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) after President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January 2025 that denied the existence of transgender people. The order also directed federal agencies to take steps that would be consistent with that view, and included specific instructions for the BOP.
“The Attorney General shall ensure that the Bureau of Prisons revises its policies concerning medical care to be consistent with this order, and shall ensure that no Federal funds are expended for any medical procedure, treatment, or drug for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex,” the order reads.
After the BOP conformed to the order, a group of incarcerated trans people who had been receiving gender-affirming care sued the administration. The group is being represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which argued that their Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment were being infringed upon.
A federal judge agreed, and, in August, ordered the policy to be blocked. The Trump administration challenged that finding, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld it, prompting Solicitor General John Sauer to submit an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court.
The court has regularly ruled against transgender people, allowing state bans on trans athletes’ participation in sports, ruling in favor of a ban on transgender people in the military, and upholding state laws that bar gender-affirming care for trans children and teens. Yet on Wednesday, the court denied the Trump administration’s request.
“The application for stay presented to The Chief Justice and by him referred to the Court is denied,” the order read, giving no further explanation. Two justices for the court — Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas — would have granted the Trump administration’s request for a stay, the document said.
Around 1,000 federally incarcerated trans people have also been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. The ruling means these individuals can continue receiving gender-affirming care while they remain in federal prisons or jails and the case moves forward in the lower courts.
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Oct. 21, 2026.It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
Democratic US congressional candidate Brad Lander said Wednesday that he was released by Israeli forces with a “warning” after he and dozens of others were detained while helping Palestinians harvest olives in the illegally occupied West Bank.
“Several dozen rabbis and participants harvesting olives with me are still in detention,” Lander, who is Jewish, wrote on social media. “They should all be released immediately. To be clear: Palestinians face far worse consequences every day. These detentions by the IDF are one more attempt to undermine Palestinians’ right to harvest their olive groves, travel on their roads, and live in their homes.”
Prior to his release, Lander posted a video from a bus that he said was “taking us away for processing” after settler security called the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on the group harvesting olives.
“Let’s be clear: Occupation is a crime under international law,” said Lander, who is running to represent New York’s 10th Congressional District in the US House of Representatives. “Harvesting olives is not a crime under any law.”
I’ve been released from IDF custody with a “warning,” apparently because of my public profile (I told them I wasn’t even a congressmember yet, just a nominee).But several dozen rabbis & participants harvesting olives with me are still in detention.
Lander was part of a group of around 80 American and Israeli rabbis and activists who were detained by the IDF on Wednesday as they helped Palestinians harvest olives from a grove near an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. Israeli lawyers toldNPR that the incident marked “the largest mass detention of activists in the occupied West Bank in at least a decade.”
Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the US-based advocacy group J Street, said in response to the detentions that “when the government of Israel and its military and law enforcement are arresting rabbis and volunteers who have journeyed 6000 miles to protect Palestinian farmers harvesting olives and not the violent terrorists harassing and attacking the farmers—it tells you all you need to know about this government’s moral compass.”
“This illegal and immoral occupation must end,” he added.
Heba Morayef, Amnesty International’s regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, said in a statement earlier this week that “Israel’s apartheid system is turning the olive harvest into a season of horror for Palestinian families across the occupied West Bank.”
“States must recognize that settler attacks are not isolated acts, but a central policy of the Israeli state,” said Morayef, calling on nations to “take concrete measures to respect their obligations under international law and to avoid complicity in Israeli violations and crimes against Palestinians by halting all trade, investment, and cooperation that contribute to maintaining the unlawful occupation, apartheid, and the ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing.”
“Hiding behind empty rhetoric is not only cowardly, it is enabling further abuses,” she added. “For Palestinians, it continues to be deadly.”
This story originally appeared in Panamerican Dispatch on Oct. 19, 2026, and is shared here with permission.
Supporters of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva returned to the streets on Sunday, October 18, for a nationwide mobilization in defense of democracy and the president’s reelection. The second round of the presidential election is set for October 25.
Demonstrations in various regions of the country brought together students, artists, social movements, and political leaders in a show of support for the president.
Carrying Brazilian flags, wearing red t-shirts, and holding signs, people occupied streets, squares, and avenues in state capitals, including Rio de Janeiro, Brasília, Salvador, São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre, Florianópolis, and Maceió. Many of the rallies were accompanied by musical performances.
The demonstrations also aim to engage undecided voters and encourage people to participate who did not cast a ballot in the first round.
Some of these mobilizations are part of the “Bora Virar” (“Let’s Turn It Around”) initiative, which seeks to bolster Lula’s candidacy in the final stretch of the race against Senator Flávio Bolsonaro. The movement gained momentum following the first round of voting on October 4, when the far-right candidate finished ahead of President Lula.
This Sunday’s rallies are the latest in a series of demonstrations organized primarily by students and social movements since the start of the second round campaign. On October 11, a huge demonstration took place on Avenida Paulista in São Paulo, with Lula himself in attendance.
Rio de Janeiro: Artists Gather in Support of Democracy and Lula’s Reelection
Copacabana Beach, in the South Zone of Rio de Janeiro, served as the setting for a major concert and political rally in support of President Lula’s reelection this Sunday, October 18. Organized by singer Caetano Veloso and the “342 Artes” movement, the “Musical Act for Democracy” brought together artists from various generations and musical styles, alongside supporters of the president. The concert began around 2:00 PM near Posto 5, with musical performances starting at 4:15 PM, opened by singer-songwriter Edu Krieger. Artists in attendance include Caetano Veloso, Djavan, Simone, Marina Sena, Chico César, João Bosco, Frejat, Fernanda Abreu, Ivan Lins, Rubel, Duda Beat, and Xamã.
The rally transformed the Rio de Janeiro waterfront into a space for political and cultural expression, uniting music with the defense of democracy during the final stretch of the race between Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro.
The musical event in Copacabana also faced a legal challenge aimed at stopping it.
The right-wing Novo Party petitioned the Superior Electoral Court to block the demonstration, arguing that the artists’ performances could constitute “disguised campaign rallies.” Justice Ricardo Villas Bôas Cueva, however, denied the request and allowed the event to proceed. The organizers clarified that the initiative is not part of Lula’s official campaign agenda and that a portion of the expenses would be covered by their own funds.
Actor Paulo Vieira, who hosted the event, criticized the legal attempt to block it. “They tried to prevent this event from happening, but they failed. Democracy is precisely this: the ability to create art, to sing, and to express oneself,” Vieira said. “This is not a campaign rally, it is not a ‘show-rally’, and it is not a campaign act.”
Members of the crowd wore T-shirts and displaying stickers supporting Lula. They also waved flags. Several politicians are present, including congressman-elect Guilherme Cortez (PSOL-SP) and Congressman Henrique Vieira, both from the left Socialism and Liberty Party.
Supporters of Brazil’s President and presidential candidate Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party (PT) attend a rally in Brasilia on October 18, 2026. Photo by Igo ESTRELA / AFP via Getty Images
Rio de Janeiro: Students Occupy Candelária, Chico Buarque Defends Democracy.
Also in Rio de Janeiro, students, social movements, and supporters of the president gathered in the Candelária area, in the city center, this Sunday morning. Organized by the National Union of Students and supported by political parties such as the Workers’ Party nd the Democratic Labour Party, the demonstration focused on defending public education, the youth, and democracy.
Participants occupied a stretch of Avenida Presidente Vargas, carrying flags, signs, and slogans in support of Lula’s reelection.
A major highlight was the appearance of singer-songwriter Chico Buarque, who was greeted by the crowd. Addressing the attendees, the artist spoke in defense of democracy and underscored the pivotal role of students in political mobilization.
Chico Buarque junto a los estudiantes en Río de Janeiro.
Como a fines de los 60’s, pero con 82 años, el cantante sale a enfrentar a quienes todavía enaltecen a la dictadura militar y quieren llegar a la presidencia. pic.twitter.com/2R5MALy1X9
“We are here to stand against brutality and subservience. Long live the students, long live democracy, and long live President Lula!” Chico Buarque said, to the cheers of the participants.
In Rio de Janeiro, a demonstration also took place near the Madureira Overpass, in the city’s North Zone.
Brasília: Supporters March Along the Esplanade Toward the National Congress
In the capital, Brasilia, supporters of Lula occupied the Esplanade of Ministries from the early hours of the morning. The gathering began around 9:00 a.m. in front of the National Museum of the Republic, with protesters setting off on a march in support of the president’s reelection. The mobilization led to road closures in the central area of Brasília.
Around noon, the participants headed toward the National Congress.
En Brasilia hay una regla:
No hagas fotos aéreas de tus manifestaciones porque todo parece pequeño.
This mobilization came just days after another event held on the Esplanade last Tuesday (13), organized by the student union of the University of Brasília. Thousands of people took part in that demonstration, highlighting the role of the student movement in the reelection campaign.
Lula remained in Brasília throughout the day but did not attend the demonstration in person.
Salvador: Gilberto Gil, Daniela Mercury, and BaianaSystem in Rally for Democracy
In Salvador, music and political mobilization converged at a “Rally for Democracy” held on Sunday, featuring prominent figures from Brazilian culture.
The gathering began at 1:00 p.m. A sound truck led the rally, which marched toward the Farol da Barra lighthouse. Among the artists who made an appearance were Gilberto Gil, Daniela Mercury, BaianaSystem, Zélia Duncan, Armandinho Macêdo, O Kanalha, Rachel Reis, and Buja Ferreira, lead singer of the band Timbalada.
The lineup also included traditional groups from Afro-Bahian culture, such as Ilê Aiyê, Cortejo Afro, Filhos de Gandhy, and Banda Didá.
Conceived by Daniela Mercury, the event was presented by its organizers as an independent civil society initiative aimed at defending democracy, freedom of expression, and collective rights.
The mobilization also expressed support for Lula’s candidacy.
São Paulo: Mobilizations Hit the City’s Poor Neighborhoods
In São Paulo, supporters of Lula organized demonstrations across different parts of the city, with a special focus on low-income neighborhoods. In the morning, crowds gathered at Largo da Batata and Vale do Anhangabaú. Aadditional events were scheduled for the afternoon in areas such as Grajaú and Itaquera.
The mobilization aimed to extend the campaign’s reach beyond the central districts of São Paulo, foster direct dialogue with the public and win over new voters during the final week before the election.
This Sunday’s events followed a series of demonstrations that gained momentum in São Paulo after the first round of voting. On October 11, supporters of the candidate occupied a long stretch of Avenida Paulista in an event that included the participation of Lula himself. Reports indicate that the gathering spanned approximately 12 city blocks along the avenue.
Belo Horizonte: Supporters Return to the Streets for the Second Consecutive Day
In Belo Horizonte, protesters gathered at Praça da Estação, in the city center, starting at 11:00 a.m. Organized via social media, the event brought together supporters of Lula’s reelection bid and sought to encourage popular participation in the runoff election.
The demonstration took place one day after another large rally was held in the city. On Saturday, October 17, participants marched through the streets of the city center.
Minas Gerais is a key state in the presidential race. In the first round, Flávio Bolsonaro received 47.03% of the valid votes in the state, while Lula garnered 45.16%. In light of this result, Lula supporters intensified their efforts to increase his vote share among Minas Gerais residents.
In the capital of Rio Grande do Sul, supporters of the president began gathering around 11:00 a.m. at Largo Zumbi dos Palmares. The demonstration brought together leftist political leaders from the state, with participants dressed predominantly in red and carrying flags of the Workers’ Party and Brazil.
Florianópolis: Thousands Participate in March in Support of Lula
In Florianópolis, thousands of Lula supporters took part in a march through the city center. The rally began around 11:00 a.m. and included the presence of artists, political leaders, and representatives from movements allied with the Workers’ Party candidate.
Following the march, the demonstrators gathered in front of the Metropolitan Cathedral of Florianópolis.
O Corredor Vera Arruda, em Maceió (AL) tá tomado pela maré vermelha!
Maceió: March Highlights Defending Education and Sovereignty
In Maceió, supporters of Lula took to the streets of the capital of Alagoas for a march in favor of the president’s reelection. Images shared by the account “Alagoas Que Queremos” (“The Alagoas We Want”) show a large gathering of demonstrators with flags, banners, and signs.
Among the causes championed by the participants are the promotion of public education, national sovereignty, and the continuation of social investments. The demonstration is also part of efforts to secure additional votes during the final stretch of the presidential campaign.
Rapaz, nunca vi nada parecido em Curitiba! Ato GIGANTE em apoio a Lula. Repito: EM CURITIBA!
Curitiba and Other Cities Also Join the Mobilizations
In Curitiba, supporters of Lula held a demonstration starting at 1:00 p.m. at Praça 19 de Dezembro, located in the center of the capital of Paraná.
In addition to the state capitals where demonstrations have already been reported, events also took place in cities across states in more than half of the country.
The runoff vote is scheduled for next Sunday, October 25.
This article was originally published by ICL Noticias. It was translated by Panamerican Dispatch. You can read it in its original language, Portuguese, here.
This story originally appeared in Panamerican Dispatch on Oct. 14, 2026, and is shared here with permission.
On August 18, Fernando Cerimedo was arrested in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, for hiring hitmen to assassinate his ex-partner, Nadia Beller, who was pregnant at the time, after she threatened to go public about his large-scale illegal bot farm operations to throw elections for far-right candidates across Latin America. Still recovering from the multiple gunshot wounds she miraculously survived, she gave an interview this week on the Ventana al Mundo program on Mexico’s public television network, Channel 14. During the interview, she explained how Cerimedo and a member of the Bolsonaro family, who is assumed to be Flavio’s brother Eduardo, met with Meta officials to plot interference in Brazil’s presidential elections. She also said Cerimedo’s largest bot farms are still operating, and that his group is planning to interfere in the Claudia Sheinbaum administration in Mexico. You can watch her interview below. Beneath that, is a transcribed and translated excerpt from her interview.
“In early August, Fernando sent me a photo with one of the Bolsonaros in the United States. I can’t pin down the exact date right now, because, as I told you, my phone is with the public prosecutor’s office. But between the first and the fifth of that month, while he was in the United States, he sent me a photo and told me they were discussing the campaign, that he was going to seek financing and that he was going to take part in that campaign, in that election, one way or another. And what they did with Meta is straight out of a playbook. They have very good contacts at Meta. In fact, there was a journalist whose page they had taken down themselves, and Fernando stepped in to get it restored, and he told me at least three times that he had very good relationships at Meta and could get any page taken down or put back up. I have no doubt that his team, his group, intervened for this. I understand there are complaints about electoral violations by Meta, that some dirty war campaigns were allowed through, along with the suspension of Lula’s accounts. I have not the slightest doubt that this was part of a strategy by this team to strip away Lula’s visibility.
The bot farm they took down here is tiny, it’s minuscule. From the very first day I gave interviews, I said there was a much bigger one. I told them where it was. They never touched it. I imagine it’s still active. I don’t think it’s in the same location anymore. It was in the business district. They never touched it, and the same goes for Argentina. I know they have their own bot farms there too. I imagine Fernando’s arrest caused some disruption, and for a moment they went inactive, but they’re fully active now. I’m a victim of it myself, because it spreads lies. His lawyer goes out and says some outrageous thing, and it immediately gets amplified by their bots. So I myself am a victim of their farms, and they use them everywhere, in every single country, with exactly the same modus operandi.
He also told me he was going to get involved in the Mexican election and would have his own candidate, because they were extremely interested in removing her, the president, from office. How do they get involved in elections? As you mentioned before: by distorting public debate, through cognitive fraud, dirty war tactics, buying influencers, their coordinated bot farms that organize attacks, that manufacture trending topics. All of that, what does it do? It distorts public debate.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered Israel’s attorney general and the heads of the Israeli military and Shin Bet security service to investigate the soldiers and officers interviewed anonymously in the documentary film NAZA.
Netanyahu called Sunday for the agencies to identify “all those who are involved or appear in the libel film” and to prosecute them for “serious information security offences, criminal defamation, and harming Israel’s diplomatic and security interests.”
In a letter to IDF Chief of Staff, the head of the Shin Bet, and Israel’s attorney general, Netanyahu decried the film for “present[ing] a false, misleading and biased narrative that defames the State of Israel and the IDF around the world and severely damages Israel’s standing.”
The film NAZA features anonymous interviews with 24 Israeli soldiers and officers involved in remote mass killings of Palestinians in Gaza over the past three years. The soldiers’ faces are obscured and voices are altered for anonymity as they speak with journalist and director Yuval Abraham on rooftops in Tel Aviv.
NAZA reveals how Israel’s AI-based surveillance systems have been used to facilitate and execute remote killings of thousands during Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The film’s title is a Hebrew military acronym for collateral damage – as in, the number of Palestinian civilians deemed acceptable to kill in a bombing with a military target. In one instance, a soldier tells director Yuval Abraham that the military approved the killing of 500 Gazans for one target.
The film and its directors have faced attacks by the Israeli government since its world premiere in September at the Venice Film Festival. Both the Israeli culture minister and Netanyahu have called for revoking the Israeli citizenship of the film’s directors, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, while accusing them of treason and defamation. The IDF chief called the film a “blood libel” and “an attack on the State of Israel.”
Upon the film’s premiere in the U.S. in late September, Netanyahu compared NAZA to “launching dozens of ballistic missiles at Israel.”
Several Israeli civil society organizations, including human rights group B’Tselem, criticized the attacks on the filmmakers, and called for “an end to the wave of incitement and threats of violence against them.”
Abraham and Szor produced No Other Land, the 2024 documentary focused on Israel’s displacement of Palestinian villages in the West Bank, along with Palestinian activist and journalist Basel Adra and Palestinian researcher and photographer Hamdan Ballal. After the film won major international awards, including an Academy Award, members of the film’s Palestinian crew were attacked by both Israeli settlers and soldiers.
Earlier this month, Israel put forward a hastily-produced rival film to counter NAZA; last week, the Israeli government announced that it was awarding the filmmakers “for their contribution to Israeli public diplomacy.”
The Guardian, which produced the film, has pushed back on the Israeli government’s attempts to discreditNAZA. On October 1st, a Guardian spokesperson said that “The process of assessing the credibility of the testimonies was rigorous. It included leaked classified documents, detailed verification of specific strikes and corroboration via a wider pool of confidential journalistic sources who did not appear on camera in the film.”
The Guardian added that the team that produced the film interviewed “more than 100 sources familiar with IDF systems used in the war in Gaza, including senior-ranking commanders directly involved in the authorization of strikes.”
Much of the material in the film had already been published in reports at The Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Israel’s left-wing publication, Local Call.
In a 2024 piece co-published by +972 Magazine and Local Call, Yuval Abraham explained how AI systems like “Lavender” and “Where’s Daddy” identified low-ranking Hamas and Islamic Jihad operatives as military targets. After October 7, 2023, Israel’s military decided that these tens of thousands of people could be bombed inside their homes with their families – even tracking and monitoring their children in order to strike their homes. In NAZA, one soldier spoke about using the gruesomely named “Where’s Daddy” AI system to track a 12-year-old girl before killing her. According to Abraham, the Israeli military was also aware that much of the AI systems’ data was also faulty – some 10-15 percent of the people identified as targets were not militants or operatives whatsoever.
In an interview, Abraham explained that NAZA also reveals the extent of the dehumanization of Palestinians within Israeli society – including among the self-identified Israeli “center-left,” which disproportionately took part in the aerial bombardment campaign on Gaza. The aerial bombardment campaign has constituted “some of the most heinous crimes in Gaza,” Abraham argued, as it led to the killing of thousands of Palestinian toddlers in their homes – and it was led largely by members of the center-left opposition against Netanyahu.
This story originally appeared in Panamerican Dispatch on Oct. 14, 2026, and is shared here with permission.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, said technical glitches impacted posts and ads from President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s campaign, but has categorically denied any electoral interference benefiting other candidates.
Lula’s campaign petitioned the Superior Electoral Court and the National Agency for Data Protection last week, alleging “strong suspicions of an attempted interference in the Brazilian electoral process to benefit the candidacy of Flávio Bolsonaro.”
The Superior Electoral Court gave Meta 48 hours to respond, and the company submitted a document on Monday, October 12, reiterating the claim regarding technical issues and asserting that its algorithms are neutral and auditable.
Meta Acknowledges Glitches but Denies Interference
In a document submitted to the Superior Electoral Court, Meta acknowledged the occurrence of technical glitches that affected ads and posts from Lula’s campaign but rejected the campaign’s central accusation: that it was favoring the far-right candidacy of Flávio Bolsonaro.
“Facebook Brazil categorically rejects such a premise. The claim is false, unsubstantiated, and does not hold up when confronted with the facts and objective data presented herein,” reads a statement from the company, which is led by Mark Zuckerberg, who has allied himself with President Donald Trump in the US.
The company maintains that “Meta’s content distribution systems do not operate based on ideological criteria” and that “Meta does not operate its systems to disadvantage or favor candidates.”
According to the document, community standards apply equally to all users, and neutrality is described as a “design attribute of the systems themselves, with criteria that are objective, public, and auditable by the Electoral Court.” The company also stated that the technical issues mentioned did not exclusively affect Brazil or specific accounts.
What Meta failed to provide, according to Lula’s campaign, was concrete evidence that the glitches had affected other Brazilian candidates or other markets to a similar degree. The lack of verifiable data to support the claim of widespread impact is precisely the point Lula’s team disputes; this makes the “technical issue” explanation insufficient as a response to the formal complaint filed with regulatory agencies.
Accusations by the Lula campaign and the Involvement of Regulatory Agencies
On Saturday, October 10, Lula’s campaign filed a formal complaint with the Superior Electoral Court and the National Agency for Data Protection describing a pattern of issues that has persisted, according to the campaign, since last December: ad account failures, interruptions in view counts, and restrictions on boosting posts. Collectively, Lula’s team said, these incidents systematically reduced the president’s digital reach on Meta’s platforms.
To support the suspicion that their opponent was being favored, the Workers’ Party’s communications department conducted an analysis revealing a significant figure: Flávio Bolsonaro’s page recorded, on average, 2.96 times more engagement than Lula’s, despite having 17.2% fewer followers.
The PT campaign questions the company’s explanation: “The company claims that this ‘glitch’ affected other advertisers and markets but provided no evidence of this—let alone proof that the problem affected other candidates in Brazil as well. Once again, Meta claims it was a ‘technical issue’.”
The involvement of regulatory agencies signals that the dispute will not remain confined to the realm of public statements. By setting a 48-hour deadline for the company to respond, the Superior Electoral Court acknowledged the seriousness of the allegation during the pre-election period. The Data Protection Agency, for its part, has the authority to investigate how platforms handle personal data, opening up a regulatory front that runs parallel to the electoral process.
Meta’s Track Record in Elections and the Issue of Neutrality
Meta cites its own track record as a defense against claims of bias. In the document submitted to the Superior Electoral Court, the company states that its “institutional conduct across more than 200 elections since 2016—and in Brazil since 2018—is incompatible, both logically and historically, with the theory of deliberate manipulation in favor of a candidate.”
The company also says it has made investments exceeding $30 billion in security teams and technology over the past decade, including artificial intelligence systems and human analysis teams covering more than 70 languages.
The problem with this argument is that the company’s track record is not free from controversy. In March 2018, the company then known as Facebook Inc. acknowledged “failures” that allowed Cambridge Analytica to harvest data from tens of millions of users to target campaigns during the 2016 US presidential election—when Donald Trump was first elected—and the UK’s Brexit campaign. In July 2019, the company was fined $5 billion by the US Federal Trade Commission for allegedly misleading users regarding privacy controls over their information, a direct consequence of the scandal.
The current context adds a significant political dimension: following Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, Mark Zuckerberg announced he would work alongside the Republican leader against countries or governments advocating for social media regulation, a stance that repositions Meta within the global contest over digital sovereignty.
In Brazil, where the debate on platform regulation is ongoing, citing a “technical issue” to explain reach disparities during an election campaign cannot be accepted as a sufficient response—especially given a history that combines admitted failures, multi-billion-dollar fines, and the declared political alignment of the company’s top executive.
This article first appeared in Revista Forum, was translated byPanamerican Dispatch with authorization from the author, and can be read in its original Portuguese here.
This story originally appeared in Jacobin on Oct. 12, 2026. It is shared here with permission.
Speaking with members of the newly formed AutoZone Workers Union, you would never guess that one of them had just been fired — and that another would be the next morning. That’s what happened to Nathan DuCongé and then David Valencia after they won their union election. On a Zoom call with Jacobin, though, their joy was contagious. DuCongé and his coworkers were all smiles and banter as they talked about their union campaign, how it feels to win, and the unexpected boost they received from filmmaker Boots Riley.
On Friday, September 25, an AutoZone store in White Plains, New York, became the first of the company’s nearly seven thousand American retail locations to unionize. DuCongé and his coworkers, now members of United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 259, said they hadn’t been sure which way the vote would go.
“The deck was really stacked against these workers trying to organize here,” said Brian Murray, an experienced organizer brought on in August by UAW Local 259 Vice President Mike DiGuiseppe. “It was because of their sticking together, the amount of fun they have, and their camaraderie, their solidarity for each other, [that] they were able to overcome a lot of union busting.” He added, “I would have expected [them] to not have succeeded in winning that vote, but they did.”
“We Were Already a Union”
DuCongé moved to New York City two years ago and soon started working for AutoZone as a part-time employee. A year later, he became a parts sales manager. He said he decided to start organizing his store after he was removed from the schedule one Saturday in April, and instead went to a joint meeting of the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) and the New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA). There he was connected with UAW members who encouraged him to unionize.
By then, DuCongé and Valencia, who was hired several months after him, had already discussed the possibility of a union. Valencia’s turning point came in 2025, when he worked a Fourth of July shift and found out from his paycheck that he wasn’t getting holiday pay. “I went in and I told my manager that day . . . I’m going to make a union.”
“I know this isn’t always the case, but for us, it was already there,’ said Valencia. ‘We were already a union.“
Valencia said he already knew DuCongé’s political orientation when he approached him about unionizing. “We got to talking about it, and it took a long time because we didn’t have the institutional knowledge on where to even begin, until by chance Nate met someone at a DSA meeting. They hooked us up with the UAW, and the rest is history.”
Given the store’s small size, the workers’ specific grievances, and the tight-knit relationships among several key employees, DuCongé and Valencia felt it would be a good place to test whether AutoZone could be organized.
“I know this isn’t always the case, but for us, it was already there,” said Valencia. “We were already a union.”
Do the Job Right
Juan Accostupa, a full-time sales associate who has worked at AutoZone for ten years and trained many of the organizers, described the extra responsibilities workers take on. “We’re not just a retail place. We do a lot of work,” he said. “We unload the trucks, we do installations — batteries, headlights, brake lights, wiper blades, whatever the case might be — and we’re just not getting paid properly.”
“You’re expected to do a lot for so little,” said DuCongé. “These are the kind of things that mechanics are paid to do, right?”
Accostupa said he has made minimum wage throughout his tenure at the store. “Some people think this is, like, a revolution thing. It’s not. We’re just asking for what should be done: better pay and better benefits. That’s it.”
Jess Omelia, a part-time commercial driver who previously worked for a Pepperidge Farm warehouse in Florida with “really great benefits,” said working for minimum wage with little to no benefits was a huge adjustment. “It was a job that I needed at the time, so I took it.”
“Some people think this is, like, a revolution thing. It’s not. We’re just asking for what should be done: better pay and better benefits.“
Omelia said the lack of holiday pay for part-time employees came as a shock. She recalled being put on the schedule for Mother’s Day even though she was the only one among her coworkers with a toddler. “I was the only one there working on Mother’s Day,” she said. “It was only my store manager there. He had given everyone the day off or people had called out to be with their families.”
Workers also cited other reasons for unionizing: inconsistent and last-minute scheduling, inadequate equipment, no say in how they handle their routine responsibilities or in disciplinary procedures, and a push to upsell customers known as “WITTDTJR” — short for the AutoZone slogan “What It Takes To Do the Job Right.”
“We would literally come in and underneath the [sales] numbers every day, there would be a threatening note underneath that you need to get these numbers up,” said Omelia. “You would be punished and your hours would be taken away if you weren’t upselling.”
What Makes a Supervisor?
Workers said their card drive proceeded with little incident until July, when corporate got wind of it. After the workers sent their demand letter and submitted their cards in late July, AutoZone promptly rejected them, saying DuCongé’s involvement as a parts sales manager — a position the company says is supervisory — nullified them.
DuCongé disputes that categorization. Under the National Labor Relations Act, a supervisor must have the authority, using independent judgment, to make or effectively recommend decisions like hiring, firing, disciplining, or promoting other workers — authority DuCongé said he did not have. Rather than fight the issue, which could have delayed an election, the workers resubmitted the cards without him.
“I just felt like it would be selfish if I tried to fight for my eligibility,” said DuCongé. “I never wanted to stand in the way of these people. They’re my friends, my coworkers. It was a good feeling to be able to just help.” He added, “As a member of DSA as well, I felt that as a responsibility. It was kind of like, hey, look, I’m in this organization, I might as well do something that lives up to the organization and the reason why I’m in it.”
Workers said that at a prehearing meeting in late August, AutoZone made clear that it intended to challenge the election not before the National Labor Relations Board but in federal court in Tennessee, where the company is based. At the same meeting, the workers and AutoZone signed an agreement that locked in the list of eligible voters to prevent challenges to votes on election day.
Yet other employees who hold the same position as DuCongé were allowed to vote. Two workers who were transferred to the store in mid-August were also deemed eligible.
“We Will Accept Your Invitation to Fire You”
In the lead-up to the vote, workers reported being subjected to heavy surveillance, multiple antiunion meetings per week, and threats of disciplinary action against the organizers.
“We were having three meetings a week. It was constant . . . and they were really just reading off of a script every time,” said Omelia. “It was just all anti-union. They were extremely against it, said that they would do everything in their power to fight it. If we didn’t like the conditions, [they said] that we could quit and go to another store.”
Valencia said the anti-union messaging relied on half-truths and accusations, including misleading claims about union dues and employees’ ability to communicate with their manager. Organizers, he said, were accused of misleading or threatening workers into voting yes, and were portrayed as using the campaign to land union jobs paid for by workers’ dues.
Workers said AutoZone brought in managers from locations around the country to surveil the store. “There were up to eight, nine people in the store a day, and even the customers were like, ‘What’s going on?’” said Omelia. “There would be times where they’re literally just standing at the back of the store with their arms crossed, just watching us.”
DuCongé said that after the workers submitted their demand letter on July 24, an account under the name of AutoZone CEO Philip Daniele showed up among the viewers of one of his Instagram stories.
In a September 4 recording shared with Jacobin, management threatened to fire DuCongé for union activity on the grounds that he was a supervisor: “If you continue to involve [yourself] in unionization activity, we will accept your invitation to fire you.”
LaborLab, a workers’ rights watchdog group, estimates that AutoZone spent around $200,000 trying to defeat the union. “They do everything except pay you more,” said Murray.
AutoZone in Six
Despite the onslaught of anti-union activity, the workers said the solidarity they felt with one another kept them moving forward. When Omelia’s mother died, her coworkers took up a collection. “I came into work, and they had a little envelope, and they all pitched in to help with my mom’s funeral costs. That’s how close we are.” Accostupa was quick to point out that every manager declined to contribute.
Support also came from outside the store. DuCongé, a filmmaker himself, had posted on social media about how inspiring he found Boots Riley’s new film, I Love Boosters. To his surprise, Riley started reposting updates on their organizing efforts. His first feature, Sorry to Bother You, follows a group of telemarketers who organize and go on strike.
“Boots has been massively influential on my personal life, my filmmaking efforts, but also really, really influential for this campaign,” he told Jacobin. “The solidarity is going beyond the movies and TV shows that he makes.” He added, “I just can’t thank him enough, truly, for helping us out.”
Workers said management kept talking to employees about the election in the twenty-four hours before the vote — and even during it. “On the day of voting, during voting happening, managers were pulling some of those people out of the store, and trying to sway those votes,” said Omelia.
Barred from voting and, he said, from entering the store, DuCongé stayed nearby. He recounted the moment:
I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I just stand on this hill that’s looking down at the store . . . I felt locked onto the ground, and there’s this groundhog sitting right next to me, just also looking out there too. I’m looking at the groundhog, and then eventually it just looks at me, like, “What are you looking at?” It turns out we’re both just looking down at the store. There’s this beautiful sunset and all these crows and everything, and that’s when Mike [DiGuiseppe] texted us the news, and said, “You won.” I just collapsed.
The final tally was 6–4 in favor of the union. Despite the prehearing agreement, and despite his serving as the union’s election observer, Valencia’s vote was challenged during voting, but, in the end, every eligible vote was counted.
After the Win
The day after the vote, AutoZone fired DuCongé. In a recording provided to Jacobin, management tells him: “Effective immediately, AutoZone is terminating your employment as a result of the failure to act appropriately as a manager by engaging in and/or facilitating union activity.”
The following day, another worker was fired for, in DuCongé and Valencia’s words, “not stopping the union.”
Valencia says he was fired too, on October 3, the morning after the Zoom call. Asked on the call whether he was worried about his job, he had said, “If I get fired, I get fired. They’re going to have to come up with a good reason, because I’m in the bargaining unit. It won’t be so easy.”
“If I get fired, I get fired. They’re going to have to come up with a good reason, because I’m in the bargaining unit.“
That same day, AutoZone filed three objections to the election with the National Labor Relations Board, a move the union sees as a delay tactic. The workers seem undeterred.
“We fought for this and we did it. It’s funny, I was telling the staff and everybody else, we were like the Knicks. Knicks in six,” said Accostupa. “The thing about it was we won six and four, 6–4. That was the key.”
Next they intend to help workers at other AutoZone stores organize. “I deliver to other stores, so I see the things that they go through,” said Omelia. “They were watching this election and waiting to see what happened with us to see if they could move forward.”
Valencia says AutoZone runs on the work of people like him and his coworkers. “People come into AutoZone frantic,” he says. “You help them out, you send them on their way with a smile on their face. It’s a good thing. We’re not saving the world, but one person at a time, we’re making their day better.”
“The workers on the ground are really providing all the value to the companies that eat up all the value,” Valencia says, “and all the people at the top that take all the profits that we create. And we just want some kind of compensation that looks closer to the value that we provide.”
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Oct. 13, 2026.It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
US Rep. Ilhan Omar on Monday forcefully condemned the Department of Homeland Security’s raid on her Washington, DC home as part of a broader effort to weaponize federal law enforcement against progressives who oppose President Donald Trump’s agenda.
“This is part of the fascist playbook to rile up Trump’s die-hard supporters and give them a big distraction in advance of the midterms,” Omar (D-Minn.) wrote in an email distributed by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee hours after the raid. “With this obviously political investigation, Trump is telling his voters: ‘Ignore the price of gas, ignore the war in Iran, ignore that you’re losing your healthcare—we want you to get angry about this instead.’”
The email followed a statement issued by Omar’s office saying that the congresswoman “has done nothing wrong” and condemning the raid as “an outrageous abuse of power.”
“For a decade, Donald Trump has relentlessly targeted Congresswoman Ilhan Omar with inflammatory rhetoric, repeatedly putting a target on her back,” the statement read. “Now, those attacks have escalated to a pointless federal raid.”
The Trump Justice Department said the raid, executed by the investigative arm of DHS, was “part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation.” Trump administration officials are reportedly probing whether Omar, who entered the US as a child refugee from Somalia and became a citizen in 2000, is in the country illegally. CBS News reported that the investigation centers on paperwork completed by Omar’s late father when she was a child.
Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday that he has “nothing to do with” the Omar investigation while attacking her as a “terrible person.” Omar and the Somali American community in Minnesota have been frequent targets of the president’s bigoted attacks, and Trump has called for the Democratic lawmaker to be jailed or deported.
“For ten years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns. This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation. I will not be silenced,” Omar wrote in a social media post on Monday.
In the campaign email, Omar called the federal investigation a “sham” and “further proof” that Trump is “willing to use the power of the federal government to try to intimidate and silence anyone who stands up to him.”
“It’s up to us to make sure it doesn’t work,” Omar added.
The raid on Omar’s home drew widespread condemnation, including from top Democrats in Congress. The leadership of the House Democratic caucus issued a statement calling the raid a “deeply disturbing” act that “raises serious questions about the continued corrupt weaponization of the federal government against Donald Trump’s adversaries.”
Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.) denounced the raid as “fascism in the extreme.”
“Trump is weaponizing the federal government to escalate his racist attacks against Rep. Omar, undermine her ahead of the midterms, and distract from his failures as president,” Kamlager-Dove added.
This story originally appeared in Panamerican Dispatch on Oct. 08, 2026, and is shared here with permission.
No doubt you’ve seen it yourself, or read about it: Meta, the tech giant behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, manipulating engagement on certain accounts or banning pages and posts outright to limit the reach of specific political groups.
Here’s something that happened to me. I recently set up a second Instagram account. I never interacted with, followed or liked any far right content. I only followed progressive accounts: Brasil 247’s page, the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement, Lula and a few others. So what showed up first in my feed? A reel from Lucas Pavanato. Yes, the same far right extremist who won more than 3 million votes for federal deputy on the strength of his viral social media clips. Let’s be honest about how he got those millions of views. It wasn’t charisma, and it certainly wasn’t political substance.
Jeferson Miola, a columnist and political analyst at Brasil 247, shared an account of his own: “Instagram took down the page of SAJU, the legal aid service run by the law school at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul,” he said. “SAJU was founded in 1950, and it provides free legal help to low income people. Instagram removed the page after it posted support for Lula’s reelection. That’s a university institution being shut down for political and ideological reasons. It’s a clear restriction of freedom of expression.”
When media personality Fábio Porchat, who has 7.5 million followers on Instagram alone, posted a video video calling out abuses at senatorial candidate Michelle Bolsonaro’s prosperity gospel church, Lagoinha, Instagram pulled it offline with no explanation. It only went back online after a wave of public pressure.
I could list case after case all day. But one account stood out to me in particular: someone who actually works at Meta Brazil. I’m protecting her identity, as journalism allows, so I’ll call her Lira. Here’s what she told me:
“At Meta, there’s a whole team of human moderators who review content. They decide what gets approved and what gets flagged, whether it’s political violence, sexual content, or anything else that crosses their line. These are people with judgment and critical thinking, making real decisions, even while working within the platform’s guidelines. Right in the middle of Brazil’s election season, a large number of them were laid off and replaced almost immediately by AI systems. That means decisions are now coming from a single automated command, possibly issued from the US, designed to boost certain content while burying the rest.”
It’s no secret that Meta has been cutting jobs worldwide. What’s not public is which jobs these were, what those employees actually did, or why the company chose this specific moment in Brazil’s political calendar to make the switch.
There’s a bigger issue here too. AI doesn’t just follow orders, it scales them, instantly and at massive reach, whether the intent behind them is good or bad. All it takes is one command. Maybe from one billionaire.
Zuckerberg’s Unapologetic Support for Trump
Lira’s story connects a lot of dots. Pavanato showing up in my feed, Porchat’s video disappearing, a university page getting banned: all of it could trace back to a single AI instruction, one that executes instantly with no human review at all.
In 2025, Meta’s CEO doubled down on his alignment with the Trump administration, the same administration that openly admits to meddling in Brazil’s politics. “The government can either be actively against you, adding friction and getting in your way, or it can actively help you break down barriers,” Zuckerberg said. Asked about backing Trump specifically, he called it “the right thing to do.”
This partnership isn’t subtle. The support runs both ways, and there’s a real appetite here to control entire countries, Brazil especially. Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court and federal government still try to regulate social media and hold Big Tech accountable to the Constitution, as we saw recently with Discord. For Meta, getting Flávio Bolsonaro into the presidency would mean restoring the lawless digital free for all his father presided over. That’s not just a preference. It’s a profitable mission for Meta, and one that’s more alive than ever. After all, how do you think those viral, extremist friendly clips that get far right candidates elected actually come about, if not with some help from Big Tech?
Laís Gouveia has been a reporter at Brasil 247 since 2018. Before that, she was educational policy director at the National Student Union (União Nacional dos Estudantes/UNE) and an editor at Portal Vermelho.
This article originally ran at Brasil 247, was translated, with consent, by Panamerican Dispatch, and can be read in its original Portuguese here.
This article originally appeared on Dean Baker’s Patreon. It is reprinted here with permission.
Virtually everyone who is not a billionaire, or owned by one, agrees that we have to limit the ability of the rich to buy elections. While the Republican Party has taken “policy for sale” politics to a new level, there are plenty of Democrats who have been happy to support obviously awful policy in exchange for contributions from the AI industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the crypto industry, and Wall Street more generally. It costs a lot of money to run a competitive campaign and it’s hard to raise that from small contributions, so there will always be a temptation to bend policy positions to get some serious money.
While most people favor limits on campaign contributions, the current Supreme Court has made this very difficult. They have ruled that campaign contributions are speech and therefore any effort to limit campaign contributions is an unconstitutional restriction on speech.
There are some promising alternative paths that focus on making small donors matter. Seattle has a system of “democracy vouchers” that give every voter in local elections a modest sum that they can contribute to a candidate(s) of their choice. To qualify to get the vouchers, candidates must agree to limits on spending and large contributions.
Super-matches are a comparable system. Under this system, small dollar contributions can be matched up to 8 to 1, which means that even a $50 contribution can make a difference to a campaign. New York City, along with several other cities, have gone this route.
While these paths for amplifying the voice of ordinary people are promising, it will take much more to match the power of the billionaires. It is important to realize they exercise their political power in ways other than campaign contributions, primarily through their ownership of the media.
The importance of billionaire ownership goes far beyond the constant stream of lies and right-wing propaganda from Fox News. Last year, the very Trumpy Ellison family took control of CBS and immediately began to shift its news to the right. They are now taking control of CNN through the merger of Paramount and Warner Brothers. They also got control over TikTok, after Trump wrestled it away from a Chinese company for them.
Trumper Mark Zuckerberg owns Facebook and Instagram and is not shy about banning political material he doesn’t like. And Elon Musk bought Twitter, explicitly to advance his right-wing agenda. The rest of the media landscape doesn’t look much better. The rich and very rich own the countries’ newspapers and broadcast outlets, and most of these people lean right, even if they have not yet joined the Trump Reich.
And let’s just be clear. The idea that the campaign ads bought by the rich can influence votes, but not the material that people see between the ads, is beyond absurd. Even if we banned all political contributions from rich people and corporations, the rich could still control elections by showing us nothing but their propaganda on television, in newspapers, and on social media.
This is why the Community News Act that Governor Gavin Newsom just signed is so important. The measure provides $20,000 each for up to five journalists per news outlet covering local news. This subsidy can keep newspapers and news sites across the state in business and help to support new ones that might start up. It is similar to other programs that have been started in Illinois, New York, and New Mexico.
This might seem like small change in a world with multi-billion dollar media empires, but it is not realistic to imagine matching the super-rich dollar for dollar; the goal is to sustain reality-based reporting that people can rely upon. (Repealing Section 230 protection for the mega-platforms like Facebook and X would be a big step towards leveling the playing field.) And support for local news reporting is likely to also lead to better national and international reporting, both by training more reporters and also increasing the comfort level with public funding, perhaps opening the door for a national system.
To be clear, there are no political conditions attached to this funding. Conservative news outlets are as eligible for this subsidy as more liberal ones. The point is to support local journalism, not to favor a particular political perspective.
To my view, this system is not ideal. I prefer support coming through an individual refundable tax credit to support local news. This would allow people to have a more direct attachment to the news outlets being supported with public money. Ideally, this would give them a sense of ownership that many feel towards other community organizations.
But whether or not this is the best approach, there is no doubt that the California bill, along with the ones already passed in other states, are big steps forward. It will help to reverse the collapse of local news reporting, which is giving corruption free rein in many areas. We need to build on the positive and make it better, rather than reject a plan because it may not be ideal. Progressive opponents of California’s wealth tax initiative may want to give that point some thought.
This story originally appeared in Panamerican Dispatch on Oct. 07, 2026, and is shared here with permission.
The CIA is allegedly working behind the scenes in Brazil’s election, planting stories to favor Flávio Bolsonaro and build a positive narrative about the senator.
The claims come from John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent who has become something of a celebrity in recent years. Earlier this week, he took to social media to flag what he called “credible” evidence of the spy agency’s involvement in Brazil’s election.
On Tuesday, Kiriakou gave more details on his podcast.
“I heard a rumor from a former CIA colleague of mine this past weekend that the agency is actively working behind the scenes to support Bolsonaro,” he said.
“And the way they’re doing it is by planting pro-Bolsonaro stories in both the Brazilian press and the international press,” he claimed.
He offered no evidence and was careful to say he doesn’t know whether this account is true. But he argued that it fits the agency’s pattern of behavior over the years.
“There’s a long history of CIA involvement in elections abroad, controlling the media narrative,” he said.
He noted that much of the Brazilian press has swung behind Bolsonaro.
“This is despite the fact that Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency was one mistake after another,” he said.
The former agent pointed to the former president’s 27 year prison sentence, calling his conduct “incredibly corrupt.”
Kiriakou said the runoff projections don’t favor Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and suggested the right has already secured one of its biggest wins in Brazilian history.
“Lula is likely to lose the election, and I think the younger Bolsonaro will end up pardoning his father,” he predicted.
He also noted that Donald Trump has already endorsed Flávio Bolsonaro’s candidacy, acknowledging that doing so could be a “violation of international rules.”
Earlier in the week, Kiriakou wrote on social media that he met with Lula three years ago. On Tuesday, he explained that a Lula aide had reached out so the two could discuss government transparency.
According to the former agent, one topic in that conversation was police violence under Jair Bolsonaro’s government. He said he suggested that Lula confront that issue directly, and that doing so had led police to turn against Lula.
Who Is This Former Agent?
In 2013, Kiriakou pleaded guilty to revealing the identity of an undercover agent, the first case of its kind in 27 years. He had worked for the CIA from 1990 to 2004 and was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison as part of a plea deal.
He admitted to disclosing to a reporter the identity of an undercover officer who had taken part in harsh interrogations of alleged Al Qaeda members held at secret CIA detention sites.
Kiriakou first drew national attention in 2007, during the George W. Bush administration, when he told ABC News in an interview that waterboarding, a technique that simulates drowning, had been used on a Guantánamo detainee named Abu Zubaydah.
Then CIA Director David Petraeus issued a statement praising the plea deal with Kiriakou, even though four other charges against him were dropped. The case “represents an important victory for our agency, for our intelligence community and for our country,” Petraeus said.
It was the first time in 27 years that someone had been found guilty of revealing the identity of an undercover agent.
This article first ran in ICL Notícias, was translated by Panamerican Dispatch, and can be read in its original Portuguese here.
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Oct. 06, 2026.It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
“Keep our city out of your reckless war talk,” said San Diego’s mayor, Todd Gloria, Monday night after President Donald Trump’s rambling speech at a rally in Nebraska included a particularly violent mention of the California city.
Gloria was among several Democratic political leaders who were incensed after Trump—moments after predicted the Republican Party would see a “tremendous victory” in the November 3 midterm elections—suggested that he would not object to an Iranian military or nuclear attack on San Diego and Los Angeles.
The president said that soaring prices for gas, groceries, and other essentials are a “small price to pay for keeping the world safe—keeping our country safe.”
Trump on Iran: Let 'em take out Los Angeles and San Diego, it's a small price to pay pic.twitter.com/Fc4BcjVDKj
He warned that Iran could “take out a city,” before adding that he would “let them” attack the two deep-blue cities—home to a collective 5.2 million people, with more than 20 million residents in the surrounding areas
“Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego,” Trump said at the rally in Grand Island. “This is a very small price to pay… It’s gonna be over very soon.”
The crowd responded to Trump’s comments with laughter and cheers. The president has frequently made Democratic strongholds like Los Angeles, Chicago, and his own hometown of New York City the targets of rhetorical attacks. He has also targeted those cities with the deployment of armed federal agents as part of his mass deportation agenda.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat whose name has been floated as a potential 2028 presidential candidate, condemned Trump’s remarks as “deranged and dangerous.”
“After sending the National Guard and Marines to occupy California, Donald Trump is now saying our foreign enemies should ‘take out’ Los Angeles and San Diego,” said Newsom, who later criticized Trump’s vice president and secretary of state for not speaking out against the comments.
Gloria added that San Diego, which is home to major military installations, “is not collateral damage. We are not expendable. And we are never a ‘small price to pay.’”
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass accused Trump of compromising the safety of the nation’s second-largest city.
“The role of a president is to protect the country, not to actively threaten it and encourage attacks on American lives,” said Bass. “In the face of irresponsible threats, as Angelenos, we know how to stand together and protect our city.”
Jim Desmond, a Republican running for Congress in California’s 48th District, which lies in San Diego, was also quick to distance himself from the president’s comments.
Some observers claimed the president had simply been speaking in an “especially confusing style,” as journalist Daniel Dale suggested, and did not intend to suggest that the two cities could be acceptable collateral damage.
“Of course you can say it’s inappropriate regardless for the president to casually float the possibility of a city being wiped out,” he added.
Trump’s comments came days after it was reported that the Pentagon is prepared to send thousands more troops and a third aircraft carrier to the Middle East, as talks between the US and Iran remain stalled. Gas prices remain elevated, at $4.36 per gallon on average, and nearly two-thirds of respondents to an Associated Press poll in June said they disapproved of how Trump had handled the war, which he joined Israel in starting in February without congressional approval.
Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) had a succinct response to Trump’s remarks, referring to the constitutional amendment that allows members of a president’s Cabinet to remove him from office on the ground that they cannot fulfill the duties of the president.
This story originally appeared in Panamerican Dispatch on Oct. 05, 2026, and is shared here with permission.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva spoke on Sunday, after the release of the results of the first round of the 2026 elections. He said his campaign for a second round of the presidential race begins this Monday, October 5.
Lula will face Senator Flávio Bolsonaro in the runoff, scheduled for October 25.
In his speech, Lula stated that he intends to present to voters the differences between the two candidates’ platforms.
“Starting tomorrow, we begin a new campaign,” he said. “We will be able to show the difference between the proposals that exist for Brazil. The Brazilian people will have no doubt about choosing who will win the election.”
Lula also launched direct attacks on Flávio Bolsonaro’s political track record and cited the candidate’s past.
“He has a dark history,” Lula said. “With dark connections, with extremely serious suspicions, with ties to militia members and organized crime. All of this will become clear.”
The president mentioned Banco Master. He claimed that Flávio had a hand in the institution’s creation.
“Banco Master resulted in the greatest corruption scandal in this country and the biggest free-for-all involving politicians,” he said.
The accusations raised by Lula are part of his runoff campaign rhetoric and are expected to be a key point of contention between the two candidates in the coming weeks.
The president also argued that the race should be framed as a choice over the country’s future. He stated that his candidacy represents an opportunity to drive change in the Brazilian economy.
“We will show what has been done and what society expects to be done,” he said. “No one is better positioned than us to offer a future to Brazilian society.”
Lula further stated that Brazil needs to take a “qualitative leap” to become internationally competitive.
“I’m very good at the knockout stage”
Commenting on the first-round results, Lula referred to the fact that he had won the second Rond vote in previous presidential elections.
“It didn’t work out [this time],” he said. “You know why? Because the people like seeing me compete in the runoff.”
In a lighthearted tone, he added, “I’m very good at the knockout stage.”
The runoff will be a head-to-head contest between Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro, after neither candidate secured more than 50% of the valid votes in the first round. The vote will take place on October 25.
“More than 20 million people didn’t turn out to vote,” he said. “We are going to make an appeal: at this historic moment for Brazil. Voting is essential to determine the country’s future.”
“Bolsonaro supporters had better get ready,” he said. “Because we are going to defeat them.”
You can watch Lula’s speech below.
This article was originally published by Revista Forum. You can read the original in Portuguese, here.
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Oct. 02, 2026.It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
An analysis published Friday by Democracy Docket warned that “tens of thousands” of voters across the US face “risk of disenfranchisement” thanks to actions being taken by the United States Postal Service.
The analysis, written by veteran election reporter Jim Saksa, points to a new USPS policy known as Regional Transportation Optimization (RTO) that “will eliminate evening mail pickups from post offices more than 50 miles away from a regional processing facility, most of which are located in major urban areas.”
For people who live in these areas, ballots sent on Election Day will be postmarked and delivered at least a day later than in previous election years, thus making it ineligible to be included in final election tallies.
“In every state, a day’s delay in delivery means that if mail voters wait until the last day or two before the election to mail their ballot,” Saksa explained, “they could be disenfranchised.”
Saksa reported that this policy is currently active in “about 42.5% of all ZIP codes” in the continental US, and is scheduled to eventually take effect in around 70% of all ZIP codes. No additional ZIP codes are expected to be added between now and election day.
Saksa also said that voters concerned about their ballots not being counted should deliver them in person to their local post office, where they can ask an employee to postmark it.
President Donald Trump has tried for the last several months to use USPS to meddle with states’ mail-in voting systems.
In March, the president signed an executive order that instructed the United States Postal Service to not deliver ballots in any states that have not given the federal government access to their voter lists.
The US Supreme Court last month rejected Trump’s efforts to interfere with mail-in voting, allowing states to continue sending ballots to voters as they’ve done in past elections.
Even with the Supreme Court loss, however, the president’s repeated attacks on voting by mail has had a major impact on the 2026 midterm elections.
An NBC News poll released in September showed that just 23% of Democratic voters said they planned to vote by mail this year, a double-digit drop from 2024 when 34% of Democrats said they were voting by mail.
In an interview with Politico published Thursday, Quentin James, founder and president of The Collective Political Action Committee, said Black voters have been expressing concerns about sending in their ballots for fear that Trump will order USPS to not deliver them.
“I think there’s confusion,” James said. “We know that the president has spent six months talking about changing the rules regarding mail-in voting, and a lot of folks are concerned about their ballot being secure.”
Indivisible co-founder Leah Greenberg also told Politico that her group is “absolutely hearing concern” about the mail voting process this year.
“But more importantly,” Greenberg added, “what we’re hearing is people trying to figure out what they can do and how they can organize locally in order to protect elections.”
Florida lawyer Jalal Shehadeh is convinced that the warrantless seizure of his cell phone by federal agents at the Newark International Airport after he returned from Palestine this September was not random.
Shehadeh, a Miami-based attorney and Palestinian rights advocate, was held for several hours for a secondary inspection and had his phone seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) after he refused to allow federal agents to search it.
“It’s just a wildly invasive thing to do to somebody with no individualized justifiable basis to do it,” Shehadeh told Truthout.
He suspects federal authorities targeted him for his activism. The lawyer is involved in a legal complaint against a federal judge in Florida over the judge’s anti-Palestinian statements.
Shehadeh is one of several Palestinian rights advocates who have been detained and had their personal devices searched by CBP while returning to the U.S. from international travel since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza in October 2023.
Other similar cases include Amir Makled, a lawyer from the Detroit area who was representing University of Michigan students involved in pro-Palestine activism, journalist Max Blumenthal, and Osama Abu Irshaid, the executive director of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP).
Jenin Younes, president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), which filed a legal motion earlier this week demanding the return of Shehadeh’s phone, said CBP appears to be escalating phone searches against opponents of President Donald Trump’s agenda.
“Common sense tells us that they are targeting people who have pro-Palestine views,” Younes told Truthout.
She stressed that the searches are illegal. The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects “persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”
Younes said the “border exception” that allows searches to ensure that no illegal items are brought into the country should not apply to phones.
Younes, a civil liberties attorney, said the authors of the Constitution would have certainly opposed giving the government blanket authority to search people’s phones without cause.
“Law enforcement can search shipping vessels coming into the Boston harbor to make sure that they don’t have contraband. That’s a totally different thing from searching the contents of people’s smartphones,” she said. “I don’t think the framers would have thought that you could read the papers of somebody coming into the country in their suitcase, and likewise, a smartphone, which has so much more personal information.”
The case of Shehadeh and other Palestinian rights supporters targeted for searches at the border has reignited the debate over the application of constitutional protections at ports of entry.
Shehadeh said that when he was stopped at Newark on September 17, CBP officers only conducted a “cursory” search on his bags because they did not appear to be interested in physical items.
“They are looking for our thoughts,” he said. “They’re looking to see what I’m thinking. They want to see who I’m messaging. They want to see what WhatsApp groups I am part of.”
The lawyer, who has Global Entry for expedited border crossing, said he was flagged by name for secondary inspection and led to a waiting room. He was asked general questions about his travels, work, and family before the agents asked to search his phone.
Shehadeh objected to allowing the officers to go through his device, citing the attorney-client privileged information on the phone. The agents kept him waiting and subjected him to another round of questioning as they took the case to a supervisor. As the clock ticked, the Florida-based lawyer missed his connecting flight to Miami.
Eventually, he was informed by an officer that CBP would take his phone and let him go. “I told them, ‘I just want to be very clear. I am not giving you permission, consent to search my phone, and I’m not giving any other arm of this agency or anybody else consent to search my phone,’” he said.
The cell phone still has not been returned.
Shehadeh told Truthout that if the goal of the episode were to deter his activism for Palestinian rights, it would not succeed.
“It will not move our advocacy work an inch. Literally, it will have no impact. If anything, it will fuel the importance of doing more of this work,” he told Truthout. “But when it comes to travel, I’m going to be much more careful about what my phone situation will be.”
The Trump administration has been cracking down on Palestinian rights activism, including through a deportation campaign targeting non-citizen students who participated in protests against the war on Gaza.
Shehadeh warned that the administration is creating a new norm of weakened constitutional rights that many people may take for granted.
“This search is a perfect example of that. Protection against search and seizure is one of those things that comes out of our Constitution that really empowers citizens to know you will not have government intrusion,” he said.
“What this administration is doing is chipping away at the rights of Americans — of all Americans. But sadly, Arabs, Muslims, and minorities tend to be the first victims of these abuses. But they’re certainly not going to be the last ones.”
Abu Irshaid of AMP said the government is turning border crossings into a “hunting ground for individuals it wishes to target” for political retaliation or to gather information about constitutional protected activity.
Abu Irshaid has sued the government, alleging that the repeated searches he has been subjected to at the airport, along with the seizure of his phone, amount to illegal discrimination.
A federal judge ruled in his favor in July, declaring that the government violated Abu Irshaid’s rights with the searches.
Some activists are pinning their hopes on a case before the Supreme Court, Anibowei v. Blanche, that could determine whether the Fourth Amendment applies to the electronic devices of U.S. citizens travelling internationally.
CBP argues that only a tiny fraction of travelers, less than one-half of one percent, are subjected to a device search. But official statistics show an uptick in such searches since Trump returned to the White House.
In 2024, federal officers inspected the devices of 47,047 travelers. The numbers increased to 55,318 last year. Of those inspections, 13,590 targeted U.S. citizens in 2025, compared to 10,541 a year earlier.
In January, CBP released a memorandum outlining its regulations and authorities around searching travelers’ personal devices. The document stressed that people at ports of entry have diminished privacy rights and that phone searches are essential “to identify and combat a wide range of illicit activities.”
A basic search, one where the officer goes through the phone manually, can be conducted “with or without suspicion.”
The bar is higher for carrying out an advanced search, which includes copying and analyzing the content of the phone through an external device. It requires “reasonable suspicion of activity in violation of the laws” enforced by CBP. But there appears to be a loophole. An advanced search can still be conducted “in the absence of individualized reasonable suspicion when there is a national security concern.”
The directive does not provide details on what constitutes a “national security concern” to enable an advanced search.
Officers can only search the device itself and may not access information stored remotely. That’s why they must disable the external connectivity of the phone, according to the memorandum.
The directive gives officers the authority to seize a device and keep it even after the traveler leaves the airport, which is what happened to Shehadeh. According to the memorandum, CBP could effectively keep his phone indefinitely. The agency is allowed to hold on to the device for a period of five days, which can be extended by 15 days and subsequently by seven days in increments without specified limits.
As of Thursday, CBP has kept Shehadeh’s phone for 14 days, meaning the agency has applied at least one extension to its hold on the device.
In response to Truthout’s request for comment, a CBP spokesperson told Truthout that the likelihood of a search at a port of entry “remains exceedingly rare” but did not answer specific questions about Shehadeh’s case, including why the agency is still holding on to his phone.
“U.S. Customs and Border Protection has statutory authority to conduct border searches of electronic devices for all persons entering or departing the United States, regardless of citizenship, to enforce laws addressing terrorism, child exploitation, drug- and human-smuggling, visa fraud, and national security threats,” the CBP spokesperson said.
In the face of the U.S.’s ever-expanding definition of “national security threats,” which now seem to include lawyers, journalists, and activists who have advocated for the rights of Palestinians, are now living in fear that border stops are being used as a form of intimidation.
“What is most disturbing is that many of these aggressive government actions target activists whose only ‘offense’ is criticizing Israel’s violations against Palestinians,” Abu Irshaid told Truthout in a statement.
A Personal Connection
As a reporter, I try to stay out of the stories I am telling. But my personal experience with being stopped and searched after returning to the U.S. from international travel is too relevant for this article to withhold.
After returning to Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C. from a trip to Lebanon in February 2025, I was detained for nearly five hours and faced similar treatment as Shehadeh.
CBP officers asked me intrusive questions relating to my work as a journalist and political leanings in my family’s hometown in Lebanon, which had been targeted by Israeli bombardment in the war.
After a brief search of my bags, a CBP officer asked me to hand my phone and unlock it. I initially refused. The federal agent handed me a piece of paper stating that CBP has the lawful ability to search electronic devices. When I highlighted that the flyer reflects CBP policy, not the Constitution, the officer threatened to seize both my phone and computer indefinitely if I didn’t hand the phone in.
CBP took the phone after pressuring me to write down its passcode and kept me waiting for around two hours before handing it back — with a disclaimer that they couldn’t “process” it because the system was down. They eventually let me go. Throughout the hours-long ordeal, the officers did not allow me to contact my family member who was waiting to pick me up at the airport.
I have traveled outside the country twice since then and have been flagged for secondary inspection on the way back each time, albeit without a device search. At the advice of press freedom experts, now I travel internationally with an alternative phone that does not contain sensitive personal or professional information.
The 18th-century notion of the panopticon — a circular prison design with a guard station in the middle, allowing a single officer to enforce discipline by keeping watch over all the prisoners — has become real in the 21st century through AI-driven surveillance against workers: It’s the Amazon warehouse.
It should be no surprise that the company that harnessed technology to create a vast, $2.7 trillion empire would employ the same sophistication to enforce workplace discipline and tamp down insurgent unionization efforts. A recent disclosure of Amazon’s internal “employee relations” documents reveals just how extreme Amazon’s methods of warehouse surveillance and control have become.
Amazon employs what it calls the “Atlas” model, inputting into a computerized model a staggering amount of information on workers, their thoughts and behaviors, the workplace environment, and myriad other factors — “hundreds of data points,” according to the company. Atlas produces not just a granular measurement of ongoing worker unrest, worksite by worksite around the world, but also a prediction model for future organizing. It’s like the “precrime” police in the film Minority Report who use psychic powers to identify and apprehend would-be criminals before they act — except in this case, it’s an AI-driven tool used by the billionaire owners of one of the richest companies in history to head off rebellion among its low-wage workforce. And this is not Tom Cruise play-acting; it’s very real.
Workers anywhere who have endured anti-union campaigns can relate to stories of overbearing surveillance by management; the Atlas model, however, takes the spying to an entirely new level.
Details of the Atlas model came to light recently as a result of a legal dispute between Amazon and Unifor, the Canadian private sector union. Last year, British Columbia’s Labour Relations Board awarded union certification to Unifor at Amazon’s YVR2 warehouse outside Vancouver, finding that the company had broadly interfered in the union drive. It was the second union certification at Amazon in North America — the other being the 2022 union win at JFK8 in Staten Island, New York. But in contrast to the U.S., where Amazon has managed to stall bargaining for four and a half years because of weak labor laws, the B.C. Labour Relations Board ordered Amazon to recognize the union and negotiate. Contract bargaining commenced last December.
Not surprisingly, Amazon has dragged its feet in negotiations, prompting the union to file unfair labor practice charges with the Labour Board. Following a series of hearings earlier this year, the Labour Board found that Amazon violated provincial law. In August it ordered a remarkable step — first-contract arbitration at YVR2. That fight remains in play, but as a result of the legal proceedings, Amazon was required to turn over documents to the Labour Board and Unifor. Unifor has shared them with Truthout, and they can be viewed here.
Atlas produces not just a granular measurement of ongoing worker unrest, worksite by worksite around the world, but also a prediction model for future organizing.
In addition to the Atlas model revelation (beginning on Page 19 of the document), the material includes more than 100 pages that reveal in great detail how Amazon trains its frontline managers in union-busting. My colleague at the Center for Work and Democracy, Ben Fong, has written about this other portion of the disclosed material.
“Amazon’s own documents pull back the curtain on what workers have been telling us for years,” said Justin Gniposky, Unifor’s organizing director. “Behind the friendly PR, Amazon sees workers as property and treats their fundamental right to unionize as a threat to be managed and then eliminated.”
Amazon did not respond to Truthout’s request for comment on the Atlas model.
The documents describe the Atlas model as “a labor risk framework to clarify how Amazon evaluates emerging workforce issues, labor union targets, and internal or external labor threats.” The Atlas model ingests hundreds of data points: employee trainings completed; health and safety incidents, from simple first-aid cases to serious injuries; feedback from workers on management; worker tenure and turnover; the proximity of a warehouse to another workplace experiencing union activity; local minimum wage rates and other area economic conditions; and even the temperatures inside and outside of the warehouse.
Amazon seems especially thorough about scraping data from worker communications channels to plug into the Atlas model — the company’s internal “Voice of the Associate” (VOA) electronic bulletin board, the answers to digital questions posed daily to workers, and externally, forums including Reddit — “to understand the tenor of the discussion at the site level,” according to the documents.
“Behind the friendly PR, Amazon sees workers as property and treats their fundamental right to unionize as a threat to be managed and then eliminated.”
Atlas uses AI to identify phrases and “common keywords” to allow managers to do a “deep dive into the worker population driving the discussion.” Atlas also looks at the upvotes or other responses — positive, negative, or neutral — that the comments elicit, and the volume of those worker reactions. All of these data points go into Atlas and let managers “look around corners to identify developing themes” so they can “tailor strategic responses for addressing emerging risk.”
Amazon also tracks and documents all organizing activities that managers detect, and records them under the category of “employee relations events.” Each activity is assigned a severity score. “High severity” events include employees signing union cards, delegations of workers approaching management with demands, protests, sickouts, and work stoppages.
Atlas uses mathematical modeling to create a point system for all these data points, assigning a “labor score” to each workplace. The scale is further broken down into tiers, with the Tier 5 designation applied to facilities with high scores, where there is “no immediate perceived risk,” and Tier 1 applied to facilities where “future activity is imminent.” Amazon’s union busters focus largely on Tier 1 and 2 facilities.
Atlas produces extensive spreadsheets ranking different facilities and looking not just at raw “labor scores” but also at monthly trends. In 2024, the year the documents date from, Amazon was most concerned about union activity at 16 warehouses it had ranked as Tier 1. For instance, at LDJ5, a Staten Island sortation center across the street from JFK8, Atlas noted that leading issues of worker concern were “bathroom breaks, equipment, rest breaks, leadership/management, temperature.” The spreadsheet noted that “internal activists” — workers — were organizing, and that by looking at month-over-month trends, LDJ5 was experiencing “Risk Increase,” with the phrase placed inside a bright red box. At four of these Tier 1 facilities, the spreadsheet noted, the threat of union activity was sufficiently high to justify deploying Amazon’s “rapid response” team: union busters who travel to hotspots of organizing throughout Amazon’s global network.
Union organizing at Amazon is not just a battle over economics; it’s also a fight for basic freedom and democracy.
But the main value of Atlas seems to be predictive. For the Tier 2 worksites (“future activity is highly probable”), the spreadsheet poses these questions: “Which sites are showing the most future risk that are not Tier 1 sites yet?” and “What is the risk in each business line and which has the most risk, is it increasing or decreasing? What is driving the risk?” Tier 2 spreadsheets in the document look at the number of investigations of workers that management has handled in the last month, whether that number is trending up or down, the number of worker appeals of those investigations, and — notably — the percentage of negative worker comments on internal bulletin boards.
Voice of the Associate and other internal bulletin boards are key focal points. Charts in the document track how often workers raise particular topics, like weather, time off, breakroom amenities, management treatment, and restroom cleanliness. They also analyze the “vector” of each issue: “What are the top drivers of negative Sentiment and change MoM [month over month]?” is one question posed in the document. “What Sites are spiking MoM in negative sentiment? What themes are driving the sentiment? What anecdotes can we pull?”
Atlas is not strictly a North American tool. One chart analyzes trends for warehouses globally, documenting “employee relations events” — worker organizing — and cataloguing the number of worker comments on Voice of the Associate and the percentage of those comments that were negative. Two warehouses in the English Midlands where workers have been organizing with the GMB union — both Tier 1 sites in Atlas’ taxonomy — showed high volumes of negative VOA posts. A warehouse in Melbourne, Australia, also showed mostly negative Voice of the Associate posts, while posts were mostly not negative in some of the warehouses in Poland, Germany, and Italy.
All this is surely a tiny sliver of Atlas’s output. The former head of Amazon’s HR platforms, Bud Cashatt, boasted on LinkedIn recently about how his department created “predictive site-risk ML touching every building in Amazon’s global network.” (“ML” stands for machine learning, where programmers train AI to learn patterns and build predictions based on analyzing vast quantities of data.)
Did Jeremy Bentham, the 18th-century British philosopher who dreamed up the panopticon, anticipate Atlas? Nearly 250 years ago, he imagined his panopticon as a useful tool for prisons, “madhouses,” and also “to the business of manufactories,” the industrialized manufacturing plants then just emerging in England. Speaking of his watchman in the center of the operation — the human Atlas of his time — Bentham wrote, “The concealment of his person will be of use.”
The documents uncovered at the B.C. Labour Board shine a light on Amazon’s concealed watchman. Atlas illustrates just how far Amazon will go to try to rule the warehouse floor. And its scope also underscores just how terrified Amazon’s masters are of their own workforce rising up and claiming their due.
Bentham theorized that the panopticon would facilitate social control: He imagined that incarcerated people would behave, not knowing at any moment whether they were being watched by the guard. It was, he wrote, “A new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind.”
But what happens when prisoners — or workers — resist such attempts at social control? There’s no level of AI sophistication that can erase the reality that Amazon’s workers move millions of packages every day, and without their labor, the Amazon supply chain collapses.
Peter B. Olney, the retired organizing director of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, calls Atlas “a promethean tool for union busting and the thwarting of any employee organizing.”
To fight back against this “existential threat” to basic worker rights and unions, Olney says, “we have to get real about deploying massive resources towards organizing the workforce and finding their serious vulnerabilities and choke points.”
Today we see emerging fights everywhere against a billionaire class intent on harnessing AI and technology to undermine basic democracy and impose authoritarianism, both in the workplace and throughout society: in revolts against the algorithmically driven content we are force-fed on the internet; protests against and sabotage of the Flock cameras on neighborhood lampposts; and resistance against the replacement of workers with bots and computers. The Atlas model places Amazon workers at the center of this global fight against the AI billionaires. And it highlights that union organizing at Amazon is not just a battle over economics; it’s also a fight for basic freedom and democracy.
This story originally appeared in Panamerican Dispatch on Sep. 29, 2026, and is shared here with permission.
The close relationship between the Bolsonaro family and key figures in the international far right like Steve Bannon and U.S. President Donald Trump has been public knowledge for over eight years. In this article, tech specialist Miguel Manso looks at the state of that relationship, right now, just days before Brazil’s first-round presidential elections. – ed.
Just days before the first round of Brazil’s presidential election, a confidential report from the Brazilian Intelligence Agency (Abin) warns that the United States is influencing the country’s electoral process. Titled “Threats to the 2026 Electoral Process,” the report was sent in late August to the presidency, the Superior Electoral Court and the Justice Ministry, warning that U.S. interference has reached a “critical” level.
Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro’s campaign has become the target of legal action over claims that it benefited from paid ads and mass messaging originating in the United States.
The coalitions backing Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party and Renan Santos of the Missão party asked the Superior Electoral Court and the Supreme Federal Court to investigate the senator for economic and political abuse of power and foreign interference.
The court filings allege the following:
Foreign amplification: U.S.-based right-wing profiles and influencers, including American political figures, allegedly ran paid campaign content on X in support of Flávio Bolsonaro.
Paid partnerships: The posts, labeled “paid partnership,” cited figures from the foreign betting platform Polymarket to claim that Bolsonaro was the favorite, distorting the actual state of Brazilian polling.
Prohibited financing: The parties allege that this amounts to the use of funds from outside the official campaign structure and financed from a foreign source, both of which are strictly prohibited under Brazilian electoral law.
The lawsuits ask for the immediate removal of the posts, a Federal Police investigation, and, if the irregularities are confirmed, the loss of candidacy and ineligibility for those involved.
Trump’s Shield of the Americas and the Fernando Cerimedo Case
The attempted murder of Nadia Beller has drawn investigators toward Fernando Cerimedo and a web of other connections, including drug-trafficking flights and Bolivia’s top anti-narcotics police official, who allegedly identified the hitmen. Cerimodo is known for his work with far-right political leaders in Latin America.
On August 17, 2026, two gunmen on a motorcycle shot Nadia Beller, a Bolivian lawyer and Cerimedo’s girlfriend, outside a hotel in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia. She survived but was wounded in the neck, chest and arm.
Bolivian police have identified Colombian national Aldúbar Henry Silva Peña as the lead shooter. He fled immediately after the attack, then released a video in September 2026 admitting his role in planning the crime, though he claimed the original plan was only to “scare” Beller. He led a group of five, including four other operatives — two Colombians and two Brazilians — whose identities have not been released by investigators. All four remain at large.
Police detained Víctor Hugo C.Z. and formally charged him as an accomplice who worked directly with the gunmen. They arrested Róger Aguilera on charges of supplying the .32 caliber weapon used in the attack, and arrested Paola Andrea Vargas on charges of hiding and storing it.
Bolivian authorities arrested Argentine political consultant Fernando Cerimedo, known for his work with Trump’s MAGA movement and Beller’s former partner, at Viru Viru International Airport. Bolivia’s public prosecutor’s office accuses him of masterminding the attempted femicide.
A forensic review of Cerimedo’s phone revealed real-time messages with Erik Correa González, the Bolivian government’s head of intelligence, confirming that the shooting took place at the exact moment the two were exchanging messages. Beller has said publicly that the attack was ordered to silence her before she could expose corruption, money laundering and illicit dealings involving Cerimedo and local government officials.
Investigators found two key pieces of evidence: a text note written six days before the attack that used the phrase “La Nadia” alongside an intent to “eliminate” the victim, and a message sent at 8:54 p.m. on August 17 to a contact identified as “E.C.G.,” reading, “Brother, they just shot her.”
The investigation also dug into Cerimedo’s finances. On his phone, police found a note referring to a “virtual wallet” that had moved about $66,000 over the previous 11 months across more than 320 transfers, and a larger “pass-through wallet” that had moved $1,386,997. In searches, police seized about $400,000 in cash, along with 500,000 Bolivian bolivianos, weapons, vehicles and equipment for a “bot farm” — automated accounts used to manipulate social media and elections.
The Earthquake Caused by Survivor Nadia Beller
Beller’s allegations against her former partner are shaking the governments of Rodrigo Paz in Bolivia, Javier Milei in Argentina, José Antonio Kast in Chile, Nasry Asfura in Honduras and Colombia’s Abelardo De La Espriella, along with their ties to the Bolsonaro family. Her account has helped expose a techno-fascist network aimed at manipulating and interfering in elections in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Colombia — and even in Mexico’s upcoming election — through bot and troll farms that Cerimedo’s team ran from Argentina and Santa Cruz de la Sierra in Bolivia.
The goal, investigators say, was to install leaders who would serve U.S. and Israeli interests, backed by the Shield of the Americas alliance, promotion from the outlet La Derecha Diario, and financing from Trump and his allies channeled through Milei. Cerimedo has been described as a CIA and Mossad asset.
Fernando Cerimedo, known as the “king of bots” for the Latin American far right, is also under investigation for money laundering and alleged ties to drug trafficking. Prosecutors are trying to determine whether he was part of a network that facilitated irregular flights carrying up to 500 kilograms of cocaine per trip and returning with large amounts of cash.
Searching properties tied to Cerimedo in Bolivia, authorities seized large sums of cash and found evidence of a technical setup built to automatically create fake online accounts — commonly known as a “bot farm.”
Fernando Cerimedo’s Ties to Donald Trump, Marco Rúbio and the Bolsonaro Family
It was already known that a global network links Donald Trump’s MAGA movement with right-wing leaders across Latin America, funded through an international web of businesspeople and drug traffickers and operating through artificial intelligence manipulation and integrated data networks used for cyberattacks.
These groups organize at high-profile political events and forums, such as Mar-a-Lago and the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), where strategists and data operatives share methods for digital engagement and fundraising.
Cerimedo has said in interviews that no one formally introduced him to Eduardo Bolsonaro. The two say they met by chance at Harvard University in 2010. But when news outlets asked Harvard directly, the university said it had no record that either Eduardo Bolsonaro or Fernando Gabriel Cerimedo had ever been enrolled there. Confronted with this, Cerimedo later claimed he had only taken open, non-degree classes.
As part of the Federal Police investigation into the attempted coup in Brazil, investigators found that in 2022, military officers and aides brokered Cerimedo’s ties to the hardline core of the Bolsonaro movement, producing false reports attacking the integrity of Brazil’s voting machines.
Reports based on the plea-deal testimony of Mauro Cid identify Army Col. Ângelo Denicoli as the officer who contacted Cerimedo and coordinated the technical details needed to carry out broadcasts and attacks on Brazil’s electoral system.
The Federal Police obtained electronic records showing that Cerimedo’s phone number and contact information were passed directly to Denicoli. Forensic analysis of seized phones showed that Denicoli became the main point of contact with the Argentine consultant, coordinating the materials sent to him.
Cid formally confirmed in testimony that Denicoli was the direct link between the criminal organization and Cerimedo, saying Denicoli was part of the group tasked with gathering data to support claims that the electronic voting machines had failed.
Technical evidence linked Denicoli, Cerimedo and technology entrepreneur Eder Balbino. Balbino and Denicoli compiled reports containing false arguments and data based on outdated voting-machine models, then passed the files to Cerimedo, who used them as visual material for his broadcasts.
Digital cross-referencing by the Federal Police showed that the data Cerimedo presented in his broadcasts from Argentina contained the same mathematical inconsistencies and formatting as the documents manipulated by the Liberal Party’s technical committee in Brazil. Investigators concluded that Cerimedo had not discovered the material independently, but received it from the structure Denicoli managed.
Investigators also found that Denicoli was part of what they called the Disinformation and Electoral System Attack Unit. The Federal Police traced digital records linking Denicoli directly to fake ballot-audit files stored in a public Google Drive folder belonging to Cerimedo, with Denicoli listed as the folder’s original owner and editor.
Denicoli coordinated the technical compilation of false reports with Balbino. The material was passed to Cerimedo, who used it in the “fraud livestream” broadcast from Argentina in November 2022 and amplified in Brazil by Eduardo Bolsonaro.
In a trial concluded by the Supreme Court, Denicoli received the harshest sentence among the defendants in his group: 17 years in a closed prison regime, on charges of attempting a coup, seeking the violent overthrow of Brazil’s democratic order, and participating in an armed criminal organization.
Billion-dollar Technology Infrastructure Serving Lies and Fraud
The connection between U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rúbio and Argentine digital strategist Fernando Cerimedo took shape starting in 2023, with lobbyist and political consultant Damián Merlo acting as the intermediary.
Merlo, who owns the Miami-based Latin America Advisory Group, serves as a link between conservative Latin American politicians and power centers within the U.S. MAGA movement. According to filings under the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act, Merlo used his relationship with Viviana Bovo, a senior adviser to Rúbio, to introduce Cerimedo and his data tools directly to the office of the then senator, who is now secretary of state.
Cerimedo founded the agency Numen and the outlet La Derecha Diario, specializing in “bot farms” and algorithm manipulation to shape social media trends. In Chile, he worked on the campaign that defeated the 2022 constitutional referendum. In Brazil, he helped the Bolsonaro family spread disinformation about voting machines after the 2022 election. And in Argentina, he led the digital strategy behind Javier Milei’s election in 2023.
Brad Parscale, the top digital strategist for Donald Trump’s U.S. presidential campaigns, became Cerimedo’s business partner at the political consulting firm Numen, based in Buenos Aires.
Through that partnership, Cerimedo took over managing the Latin American operations of tools such as Campaign Nucleus and Eyes Over — data-mining and artificial intelligence platforms created or linked to Parscale. The partnership combined Parscale’s expertise in U.S. data operations with the infrastructure Cerimedo had built across Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Bolivia.
Brad Parscale, Peter Thiel and the Data Ecosystem
Brad Parscale earned the trust of the Trump family and went on to design websites for their businesses, before being chosen to lead the digital strategy for Donald Trump’s 2015 presidential campaign.
In 2016, as the campaign’s digital media director, he led a data operation called Project Alamo, directing much of the budget toward highly targeted social media ads and producing as many as 60,000 different Facebook ad variations a day.
In February 2018, Trump named Parscale campaign manager for his 2020 reelection bid.
Parscale’s ties to Big Tech and to Peter Thiel’s Palantir Technologies span strategic data cooperation, political alignment and technology supply.
Thiel, a Palantir cofounder, was one of the major Silicon Valley billionaires who directly backed and funded Trump’s 2016 campaign. Palantir builds surveillance and analytical intelligence software for governments and defense agencies.
Parscale created Campaign Nucleus, a platform meant to build a communications structure and data ecosystem. The data-mining and AI model it uses mirrors the mass-processing and information-control concepts associated with Palantir.
The ecosystem functions as an integrated chain: Thiel’s Palantir develops surveillance and data-intelligence technology, which feeds into political software such as Parscale’s Campaign Nucleus, and Parscale in turn distributes that technology across Latin America through Cerimedo’s Numen.
The Link between U.S. and Israeli Companies
These companies’ ties to Israel and its government center on two main areas: artificial intelligence for military targeting, and cyberwarfare and digital influence operations.
In January 2024, Palantir signed a direct strategic agreement with Israel’s Defense Ministry to supply advanced AI technology supporting “war-related missions.”
In July 2026, international journalistic investigations revealed that Parscale was registered as a foreign agent of Israel in the United States. The Israeli government hired Parscale’s main firm, Clock Tower X, through a $46.5 million contract to carry out a digital influence operation.
According to the reporting, the company built a network of pro-Israel propaganda websites and blogs while also producing search-optimized content designed to shape the databases artificial intelligence systems draw on.
Cerimedo’s Numen is described as the Latin American link in that network, applying Campaign Nucleus data concepts and bot infrastructure through La Derecha Diario.
The relationship is described as symbiotic: Israel provides public contracts, Palantir supplies data technology, Clock Tower X uses that funding for digital influence operations, and Numen carries out the messaging and bot infrastructure in Latin America.
The Use of Artificial Intelligence and “AI Poisoning”
The tactics have evolved from spreading disinformation on social media to manipulating institutional digital ecosystems.
Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO, is described as a technique meant to flood the internet with doctrinal texts and fake academic research centers, so that the crawlers used by systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude absorb that propaganda as factual information. As a result, when people ask artificial intelligence systems about geopolitical topics or elections, those systems can end up repeating narratives that this network planted beforehand.
The dismantling of Cerimedo’s structures in Bolivia also revealed the use of tens of thousands of automated phones running AI software designed to simulate human behavior, making it harder for social media platforms to detect and block them.
Trump’s MAGA strategists, working with Eduardo and Flávio Bolsonaro, continue trying to interfere in Brazil’s election despite Cerimedo’s arrest — evidence of a powerful alliance working jointly to manipulate and defraud the political landscape and bring Latin America under U.S. control. The question is: for how long?
This article was originally published in Brasil 247. It has been translated to English by Panamerican Dispatch and can be read in its original Portuguese, here.
An NFL official reportedly threatened to remove Houston Texans linebacker Azeez Al-Shaair from his game earlier this month unless he removed his memorial for an 8-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israel in Gaza.
During the Texans’s week two game against the Cincinnati Bengals on September 20, Al-Shaair wrote the name of Wafaa Akila on his eye black, which refers to the strip or paint streaks that many football players wear on their cheeks.
Wafaa was an 8-year-old girl who was killed, along with her father, in an Israeli airstrike on a vehicle in Gaza City on September 6. She and her father were on their way home from her first day of school, according to Al Jazeera.
Al-Shaair, who is rated as one of the top linebackers in the league, was reportedly told by an NFL official that he would have to remove his eye black or else be barred from playing in the game, an anonymous NFL source told The Athletic. Al-Shaair complied, the reports said. Fox News’s sports vertical also confirmed the league’s threat.
The linebacker’s latest tribute came just days after the NFL gave him an $11,941 fine for writing Hind Rajab’s name on his eye black during the Texans game against the Buffalo Bills on September 13. In a show of solidarity, Dallas Mavericks player Kyrie Irving said in a post on social media that he would “take care of his fine.”
“It’s bigger to me. What’s a life worth? Is a life worth $11,000? I think it’s priceless,” said Al-Shaair when asked about the penalty.
“You can’t get so lost in your own problems that you can’t have compassion for other people in the world,” he went on. “We don’t have to have all the answers to everything to know that an innocent man, an innocent woman, an innocent child losing her life is not right … whether they’re here in America or somewhere halfway across the world.”
Ahead of the Texans game against the Indianapolis Colts this past Sunday, Al-Shaair once again wore the names of children killed by Israel — Lana and Bana Ahmed, two sisters who Israel killed along with their family in an airstrike earlier this month. The sisters were 12 and 8 years old.
The NFL gave Al-Shaair a similar fine in January when he wrote “stop the genocide” on his eye black during the pregame, but took it off for the actual game. At the time, he said that he was similarly told that he would be banned from playing in the game if he kept the message on.
“At the end of the day, it’s bigger than me. When things that are going on makes people uncomfortable — imagine how those people feel. I think that’s the biggest thing. I have no affiliation, no connection to these people other than the fact that I’m a human being,” Al-Shaair told reporters after that fine. “Even when I’m walking off this field, that’s the type of stuff that goes through my head, that I have to check myself — when I’m sitting here crying about football, when there’s people dying every single day.”
He was told that he violated league rules about displaying non-approved personal messages — but he pointed out that other players have written messages on their eye black without a fine.
“They always fine you, but I was told if I wore that in the game, I would be pulled out of the game,” he said. “I understood it was a fine, but I ain’t never seen Stef get pulled out of the game for having eye tape with writing on it.” Al-Shaair was referring to New England Patriots receiver Stefon Diggs, who frequently writes messages honoring his Christian faith on his face tape.
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Sep. 28, 2026.It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
The White House recycled material from President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign for a new taxpayer-funded ad that aired nationwide this past weekend, just weeks before the high-stakes November midterms.
The 30-second black-and-white adfeatures Trump walking down a hallway to audio of him vowing to “demolish the deep state” and “expel the warmongers from our government,” even as the president wages an illegal and deeply unpopular war on Iran that has killed thousands and driven up prices at home and around the world. During the final 10 seconds of the ad, white text appears at the bottom of the screen stating, “Paid for by the US government.”
The ad is just the latest taxpayer-funded, explicitly pro-Trump spot that the White House has launched in recent days, prompting alarm from lawmakers and government watchdog organizations who say the administration is using public funds to flood airwaves with the president’s campaign ads shortly before an election.
Watch the newly aired ad:
The U.S. Government is up on TV with this spot —
It aired nationally on FOX yesterday during Illinois at #7 Ohio State and also during Fox News Sunday this morning pic.twitter.com/8PP9FPzUZk
Richard Painter, who served as the White House’s chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, said the taxpayer-funded campaign ads “could be an impeachable offense,” noting that “Congress has expressly prohibited government-sponsored political propaganda, which is dangerous for democracy.”
The federal government appears to have spent more than $1 million on pro-Trump ads in recent days, The New York Timesreported on Sunday, citing an estimate from AdImpact.
Last week, as Common Dreams reported, the White House launched a taxpayer-funded ad in which Trump declares that “America will never be a communist country” and promotes tax cuts he signed into law, delivering a massive windfall to the rich and large corporations.
Norm Eisen, former White House special counsel for ethics and government reform, told the Times on Sunday that “the president and his administration have gone from breaking the law to trampling it.”
“The prior ad was bad enough,” said Eisen, “but this one openly repurposes prior political conduct.”
US Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) wrote on social media that Republicans shouldn’t be taken seriously when they claim to care about “waste, fraud, and abuse” as the president and leader of their party runs campaign ads with taxpayer money.
“What a cult this party has become,” Murphy added.
A massive backlog of voter registration applications in Texas could affect the outcome of local and state elections, including a contentious election involving a U.S. Senate seat.
Public officials in the Republican-controlled state have not yet acknowledged what the error actually is. It’s also possible that the error could have affected elections from before the primary elections in March 2026, officials have acknowledged.
“Texas county voter registrars across the state have received a flood of new voter registrations and updates to voter registration records submitted through the Texas Department of Public Safety,” said Chris McGinn, executive director of the Texas Association of County Election Officials. “Some of these submissions date as far back as October 2025.”
All 254 counties in the state appear to be affected. The Texas Secretary of State’s office alerted all counties to the issue in an email last week, writing:
Counties have alerted us to the fact that some older [Department of Public Safety] registrations are now appearing on their dashboard. We are actively investigating this issue to determine the source of these historical records.
The situation is dire, as the registration deadline for Texan voters for the upcoming general election is October 5. County officials have until October 19 to process registrations, which is the same date that early voting begins.
James Talarico, a Democrat and state representative who is running in the Senate election against State Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), called the situation “unacceptable,” and encouraged all voters to check their registration status.
“Less than two weeks before the voter registration deadline, thousands of Texans are now in the dark about their voter registration status — even more aren’t aware of this error at all,” Talarico said in a statement. “This is what a broken, corrupt political system looks like: Texans follow the rules, register to vote before the deadline, and still risk losing their God-given right to the ballot box because their government failed to do its job.”
The Senate race between Talarico and Paxton is a close one, and even a small error that goes unaddressed before the November election could affect the outcome.
A longtime Republican stronghold, Talarico is currently ahead in the polls with a slim lead against Paxton. According to an average of surveys collected by the polling aggregate site FiftyPlusOne, Talarico secures around 47.9 percent of the vote, while Paxton receives around 44.6 percent.
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