A new report by CorpWatch titled ”MAGA Inc.” reveals which allies of President Trump are profiting off of the administration’s policies. Pratap Chatterjee, executive director of CorpWatch, says that prison companies and Big Tech companies have cashed out on policies of mass deportation. “The people that we think are profiting the most out of MAGA [are in] the business of deportation, the business of gathering data,” says Chatterjee. Palantir, in particular, has provided the government with information to support the surveillance of immigrants and data to support war efforts.

The Trump family is also expanding their fortune through cryptocurrency, according to the report. “These are schemes by which you can move money anonymously around the world, something that drug dealers, gun manufacturers or gun dealers and criminals love,” says Chatterjee. “This is the sort of business that is now benefiting the Trump family.”

Today is Election Day in New York, with a number of primary challengers hoping to unseat Democratic establishment politicians. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have a packed slate of 10 candidates across congressional, state Assembly and state Senate races. “People are really looking for something else other than these corporate Democrats,” says Liza Featherstone, author and columnist for Jacobin. Describing the DSA as a key part of the “grassroots base” of the left wing of the Democratic Party, Featherstone says DSA members want elected leaders who have come out of movements themselves, not just lifelong politicians who only turn to movements for endorsements every four years.

Palestine is a key issue in many of the races, with DSA challengers taking a strong stand against genocide, while some incumbents have received large donations from AIPAC-linked super PACs. “People are absolutely disgusted with the U.S. relationship with Israel, absolutely appalled by the killing that we’ve seen,” says Featherstone. Today’s primary results will show to what extent the DSA is seen as a genuine alternative to the establishment wing of the Democratic Party.

Acclaimed conservationist Mona Khalil was killed by an Israeli strike on her beachside home in the village of al-Mansouri in southern Lebanon. The 76-year-old spent more than 25 years working to protect endangered sea turtles, and her work helped turn a stretch of southern Lebanon’s coastline into one of the most important nesting sites for endangered sea turtles in the eastern Mediterranean.

Khalil lived in “the Orange House” — her grandmother’s home, which she helped transform into a refuge for endangered sea turtles, an ecotourism site and a training ground in ecological conservation for a generation of volunteers. “This is not a project that belongs to me,” she once said. “It belongs to Lebanon. It belongs to the whole world.”

A refugee of the Lebanese civil war, Khalil returned to Lebanon from the Netherlands in 1999 and began her conservation work after seeing a turtle laying eggs on the beach near her family’s seaside home. Since then, Mona rarely left her home and the beach she had spent years protecting.

“Mona was like a symbol of hope, of life and of resistance in south Lebanon, and probably that’s one of the reasons she was killed,” says Rami Khashab, a Lebanese herpetologist who worked alongside Khalil. “They are trying to kill the hope of the Lebanese people.”

Israel is continuing to attack Gaza despite the so-called ceasefire. Israeli strikes killed Ahmed Wishah, a cameraman with Al Jazeera, and at least six people, including two children, on Saturday. Wishah’s brother Mohammed, who also worked for Al Jazeera, was killed in an Israeli strike this April. Israel has now killed over 260 journalists in Gaza, including at least 12 working for Al Jazeera, since October 2023.

“We don’t see the type of outrage that we would see if a Western journalist was killed by a country that is not a U.S. ally,” says Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Middle East and North Africa editor at Drop Site News. “It’s really a shameful state of affairs.” Kouddous also comments on the expansion of Israel’s “genocidal tactics” in Gaza that have now been “exported outside of Palestine in places like Lebanon.”

Right-wing Trump ally Abelardo de la Espriella has clinched a narrow victory in Sunday’s runoff presidential election in Colombia, defeating leftist Senator Iván Cepeda, an ally of current President Gustavo Petro. De la Espriella ran a fearmongering, “tough-on-crime” campaign, promising to build mega-prisons inspired by El Salvador’s authoritarian President Nayib Bukele, to bomb “narcoterrorist camps” and to abandon Petro’s peace efforts. His reported victory is also a win for U.S. President Donald Trump, whose administration is waging an intensifying “war on drugs” across Latin America, targeting left-wing leaders like Petro with false allegations and threats of military intervention.

“De la Espriella clearly represents a criminal approach to politics: lying, propaganda, coordination and collusion with criminal narcotrafficking, restriction of rights, and money laundering,” says longtime Colombian activist Manuel Rozental. With his victory, says Rozental, “We expect to have military operations and a U.S. intervention within the country. We expect to have human rights abuses. We expect to have militarization. And it’s all for the extraction of resources and the link of drug trafficking to the U.S. government, U.S. interests and global mafia.”

Keir Starmer has announced his resignation as the United Kingdom’s prime minister and leader of the Labour Party following growing pressure from within his own party to step down. During his time in office, Starmer faced mounting opposition over his embrace of austerity measures amid a cost-of-living crisis in Britain, as well as his brutal crackdown on Palestine solidarity protesters. Former Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham is widely expected to become the next prime minister. Some leaders of the British left have warned Burnham may do little to shift from Starmer’s policies, including his position on Israel.

Starmer “really lost support in the party because he was perceived as too right-wing for it and because he was too boring. He lacked charisma,” explains our guest, the Australian British human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson.

Robertson also discusses Britain’s Court of Appeal’s ruling that the government’s proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization is lawful, making it a criminal offense to belong to or support the organization. Four Palestine Action activists were recently sentenced as terrorists over their involvement in a 2024 raid on a British factory operated by one of Israel’s largest arms manufacturers, Elbit Systems.

Mediators from Pakistan and Qatar say the United States and Iran made “encouraging progress” during 18 hours of negotiations in Switzerland, where the two sides agreed to a roadmap toward reaching a final deal within 60 days. The talks took place despite Iran on Saturday announcing it was closing the Strait of Hormuz after Israel killed 83 people in Lebanon on Friday. Israel said it would agree to a new ceasefire in Lebanon but is also refusing to end its occupation of southern Lebanon.

“Iran has, through its throttling of the Strait of Hormuz, enormous leverage to produce pain on not just the United States, but global markets,” says award-winning journalist Spencer Ackerman. “We’re going to await how the Iranians will ultimately play that card when it comes to Lebanon.”

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, fellow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center, says that by demanding the ceasefire extend to Lebanon, “the Islamic Republic focused on creating a rift between Israel and the U.S., and I think, possibly, along with the successes in the war front politically, that was one of the most successful projects that they followed.”

“Another Wasted Life.” That’s the name of a remarkable new song by the Pulitzer Prize-winning, Grammy-winning artist Rhiannon Giddens. She released a video of the song on October 2 to mark International Wrongful Conviction Day. The song was inspired by Kalief Browder, a Bronx resident who died by suicide in 2015 at the age of 22 after being detained at Rikers Island jail for nearly three years, after being falsely accused at the age of 16 of stealing a backpack. He was held in solitary confinement for two years and was repeatedly assaulted by guards and other prisoners.

In the video for “Another Wasted Life,” Rhiannon Giddens features 22 people who were wrongly incarcerated. Together, they collectively served more than 500 years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit. The video includes two men, David Bryant and Tyrone Jones, who each spent 40 years in prison. Another seven of the men each spent over 25 years locked up after wrongful convictions. Rhiannon Giddens made the video in partnership with the Pennsylvania Innocence Project.

As part of our Juneteenth special broadcast, we feature our interview with pioneering musical artist Rhiannon Giddens, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her opera Omar, about Omar ibn Said, a Muslim scholar in Africa who was sold into slavery in the 1800s.

We feature a special broadcast marking the Juneteenth federal holiday that commemorates the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned of their freedom more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. We begin with our 2021 interview with historian Clint Smith, originally aired a day after President Biden signed legislation to make Juneteenth the first new federal holiday since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Smith is the author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America. “When I think of Juneteenth, part of what I think about is the both/andedness of it,” Smith says, “that it is this moment in which we mourn the fact that freedom was kept from hundreds of thousands of enslaved people for years and for months after it had been attained by them, and then, at the same time, celebrating the end of one of the most egregious things that this country has ever done.” Smith says he recognizes the federal holiday marking Juneteenth as a symbol, “but it is clearly not enough.”

The new documentary Shoot the People profiles the Nigerian British photographer and activist Misan Harriman, the first Black photographer to shoot the cover of British Vogue and an outspoken advocate of Palestinian rights. We speak to Harriman in New York City ahead of the film’s U.S. premiere, about his work, the repression and criminalization of pro-Palestine protest in the United Kingdom — including the unprecedented sentencing of four activists with the group Palestine Action as terrorists — and more. “I genuinely believe that through art and culture, we can see that the sum of all of our parts is stronger than the powerful few,” says Harriman.

The Department of Justice has intervened in a legal case involving the world’s first trillionaire, Elon Musk, asking a Mississippi federal court to toss a lawsuit from the NAACP against Musk’s company xAI, a subsidiary of SpaceX. The NAACP says xAI is violating the Clean Air Act by running dozens of unpermitted gas-burning turbines in majority-Black neighborhoods to fuel its data centers in Memphis, Tennessee. The Department of Justice, however, is arguing that the lawsuit violates national security by “seeking to shut off the power supply for artificial-intelligence innovation that supports the Department of War’s military operations.”

“We should be concerned about this type of authoritarian rule,” says NAACP attorney Abre’ Conner, who adds that communities themselves “should be the ones to make the decisions about our health, about pollution in communities, about stopping sacrifice zones from being furthered because of an agenda that does not serve everyday people.”

World leaders are returning home from the annual G7 summit, having failed to address issues such as income inequality, climate change and territorial conflict, while entertaining the wealthy executives of the artificial intelligence and fossil fuel industries. Oxfam International Executive Director Amitabh Behar calls the G7 “a club of the super-rich super-elites” and slams the summit’s focus on business, and business as usual, at the expense of humanitarian efforts and improving the lives of “the common people.”

The United States and Iran have officially signed a memorandum of understanding aimed at ending the war in Iran. The 14-point agreement includes an immediate end to fighting on all fronts including Lebanon, an end to the U.S. naval blockade on Iran and the full resumption of maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. It also proposes easing oil sanctions on Iran, unfreezing Iranian assets and launching a $300 billion investment fund to rebuild Iran, all while tabling the question of Iran’s nuclear program, which is instead set to be negotiated over in the coming months.

“The United States is more eager for this war to end than Iran is,” says professor Vali Nasr, who teaches at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “In Iran, they’re very triumphant.” We discuss the long-term effects of the war, from the growing U.S. distrust of Israel, to the new generation of political leaders in the Islamic Republic, to the evolution of Iran into a major power player in an increasingly multipolar world.

Israel has killed over 260 journalists and media workers in Gaza and 28 in Lebanon since October 7, 2023. Irish filmmaker Seán Murray investigates Israel’s killings of journalists in his new feature documentary Journacide: The War on Truth. He says the term “journacide” applies to Israel’s military actions because of the “explicit nature of the targeting and killing of journalists” as a way to silence the truth. Murray calls it “the Gaza doctrine that is now being applied in Lebanon.”

The United States and Iran are set to formally sign an agreement Friday to end military hostilities, reopen the Strait of Hormuz and begin negotiations on a long-term peace accord between the two countries.

According to terms of the memorandum of understanding obtained by CNN and other media outlets, there is to be “an immediate and permanent end to the war on all fronts, including Lebanon.” The leaked text also promises sanctions relief for Iran and access to the country’s frozen assets held abroad, as well as a $300 billion fund for reconstruction and development. The memo reiterates Iran’s long-held position that it will never produce nuclear weapons, with the fate of its nuclear program delayed until further negotiations.

Israel has vowed to ignore the U.S.-Iran agreement and maintain its occupation of southern Lebanon, with many Israeli leaders and commentators expressing outrage about the apparent terms of the deal for being too conciliatory to Iran. President Trump, meanwhile, has expressed criticism of Israel’s actions in Lebanon.

“Trump’s had enough,” says Israeli political analyst Ori Goldberg, speaking to Democracy Now! from Tel Aviv. “He hasn’t had enough because he cares about the Palestinians or about Lebanon. He’s had enough of Netanyahu’s disrespect. He’s had enough of the notion that it’s actually Netanyahu who’s calling the shots.”

Federal prosecutors in Minnesota have announced criminal charges against 15 people in connection with anti-ICE protests in the Twin Cities. The defendants are accused of “conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers” and of allegedly “violently” impeding immigration enforcement in Minneapolis during Trump’s so-called Operation Metro Surge, during which thousands of federal immigration agents were deployed and fatally shot two U.S. citizens.

The indictment focuses on Direct Action Minnesota, or DAMN, a broad activist coalition that prosecutors have linked to anti-fascist, or “antifa,” groups. Last fall, President Trump categorized antifa as a “domestic terror organization” even though it is not an actual group.

“All 15 of the defendants are members of the community, active in mutual aid, union members, workers, neighbors,” says defense attorney Bruce Nestor, who represents one of the 15. “The point of this is to spread fear to try to divide us.”

President Donald Trump’s name has been removed from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., after a judge ruled its addition was illegal. The Kennedy Center’s board, which was handpicked by Trump, voted to add Trump’s name to the center late last year. The battle over the Kennedy Center’s name comes during a broader push by Trump to overhaul the institution, which is closed for “renovations” amid mass cancellations by artists.

“We, the American people, have rarely been afforded the decency of a public conversation or process,” says Marc Bamuthi Joseph, who was fired from his role as vice president and artistic director of the Kennedy Center’s Social Impact initiative in March 2025. “There were no procedural protocols in the affixing of this person’s name on a national memorial, and so … this does feel like a small victory for the rule of law.”

The removal of Trump’s name “really does mean something. We have been fighting for it since it went up in December,” says Mallory Miller, who was fired from her job as assistant manager of dance programming at the Kennedy Center in August 2025. Miller is the co-founder of Hands Off the Arts, which has been rallying outside the Kennedy Center every week. “This is just the first step in rebuilding the trust that has been lost,” says Miller, pointing out that Trump “is still the boss” at the Kennedy Center and that workers at the center are still being fired.

Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire on Friday with the largest initial public offering in stock market history for his rocket and AI company SpaceX. The company is based in South Texas in a city controlled by Musk known as Starbase, which SpaceX has operated from since 2014. Environmental and conservation groups recently filed a federal lawsuit seeking to block a land swap approved by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that would give SpaceX more than 700 acres of a national wildlife refuge in South Texas.

With Starbase, “SpaceX has already burned down dozens of acres of wildlife habitat, is dumping polluted water on our beach, has sent rocket debris into our communities, into communities in Mexico,” says Bekah Hinojosa, co-founder of the South Texas Environmental Justice Network, which is part of the lawsuit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “Elon Musk is using our impoverished community as his laboratory to blow up dangerous experimental SpaceX rockets.”

While groups like the South Texas Environmental Justice Network are organizing opposition to Musk’s operations in South Texas, local officials are ignoring constituents’ complaints that SpaceX is degrading the environment and their quality of life, says Hinojosa. “We’ve seen elected officials take money from SpaceX here and lobby in favor of more bills that benefit SpaceX.”

The U.S. and Iran reached a memorandum of understanding on Sunday extending the ceasefire by 60 days. It is set to be formally signed in Geneva on Friday. The text of the agreement has not yet been released, but Iran has agreed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, while the U.S. will lift its naval blockade. According to Iran, the deal calls for a permanent and immediate cessation of hostilities on all fronts, including in Lebanon. But Israel, which is not a party to the agreement, says it plans to keep troops in parts of southern Lebanon. “The Israelis are trying to destroy this deal, and they will continue to try,” says Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “It will require persistent, consistent pressure by Trump on the Israelis in order to hold them back.”

We also discuss how The Free Press, founded by Bari Weiss, published an article last week claiming the State Department had opened a probe into Parsi that could lead to his deportation. The State Department issued a statement just hours later claiming that it had “no plans to revoke the green card of Mr. Parsi at this time.”

“I do believe that there were elements inside the State Department that wanted to move in this direction,” says Parsi. “They thought that this hit piece would help move things forward, but I think, frankly, it backfired.”

The Trump administration has approved media conglomerate Paramount’s $111 billion bid to acquire Warner Bros., one year after Paramount and Skydance Media signed a similar merger that placed Paramount’s movie studio, streaming service and broadcast network CBS under the control of the multibillionaire Ellison family, founders of Skydance and close allies of Donald Trump. The Warner Bros. merger, if completed, would bring an even larger slice of the industry’s market share into Ellison control. It’s been contested for months as a likely violation of antitrust laws amid a wider trend of corporate consolidation in the media and entertainment industry. “This has been one of the most shallow and corrupt merger review processes we’ve ever seen,” says Craig Aaron, co-CEO of the advocacy organizations Free Press and Free Press Action (not to be confused with Paramount Skydance’s conservative news outlet The Free Press), about the Justice Department’s greenlighting of the merger.

The deal will place two of the largest U.S. broadcast news networks — CBS News and CNN — under the control of a single company that “has shown it is willing to warp and manipulate news coverage to please the president,” Aaron says. He warns that the many violations of press freedom committed by CBS News since its acquisition last year could soon be seen at CNN, including “getting rid of independent journalists asking hard questions [and] spiking stories about crimes being committed by the Trump administration.” In a consolidated media landscape, he adds, “we get fewer and fewer choices, and we get more and more of the same kind of cookie-cutter content produced.”

Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman is in Belfast, where several days of racist riots have targeted immigrants and ethnic minorities with violence, threats and property destruction. It is the third consecutive summer of organized mob violence against immigrants in Northern Ireland, with roots in the extant paramilitary structures that remain there after decades of sectarian warfare. Our broadcast from the Northern Ireland capital features guests Sinéad Marmion, an immigration lawyer, and Patrick Corrigan, the Northern Ireland director of Amnesty International UK. Both were among the tens of thousands who attended a recent rally in Belfast condemning racism and standing in solidarity with immigrants. “The vast majority of people in Belfast, as across Northern Ireland, are antiracist and very welcoming to the people who have come here to make their lives from around the world,” says Corrigan. “We wanted to send, most importantly, a message to them, to say, 'You are welcome. This is your city. This is your home, just as much as it is ours.'”

As mob violence drives residents from their homes and leaves many fearing for their lives, “it’s the community that has picked up the pieces. It’s women in the community, it’s migrant women in the community, that have organized and mobilized the response. And our authorities have been left wanting,” says Marmion. “We have political parties that are stoking the flames and encouraging what they call a 'legitimate concern on immigration,' … and the conversation, resultingly, is always toxic.”

More than 100 days into hostilities, Iran and the United States say they have reached a preliminary deal to end the war. Israel, however, is not a party to the tentative deal and says it plans to keep occupying areas of southern Lebanon — a position still contested by Iran and the key sticking point to the partial ceasefire deal agreed to by the U.S. and Iran in April. Although the new agreement is set to be signed Friday, Israel’s unrelenting assault on Lebanon could once again spoil any deal.

“This is going to become the center of whether any actual agreement takes place,” says Drop Site News's Jeremy Scahill, who joins Democracy Now! to break down what we know about this latest round of diplomacy. As the U.S. now intends to end the war without accomplishing its initial goals of regime change and nuclear capitulation, it appears that Trump has “finally accepted some version of his manufactured and almost entirely false victory narrative.” Scahill, who has spoken extensively to Iranian officials about the negotiations, says it remains to be seen if Iran can successfully “decouple” the U.S.-Israeli alliance from Israel's expansionary front in Lebanon, or whether it has relinquished too much of its own “strategic leverage” by agreeing to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

We speak with Oscar-nominated filmmaker Rick Rowley about his new documentary, Hell’s Army. The film tracks the Wagner Group, the notorious Russian mercenary army that has fought in Ukraine and other parts of the world. The group’s founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was a confidant to Putin until a failed 2023 mutiny against the government. He died in a suspicious plane crash two months later.

“We realized that he could be killed, the leader of this army could be killed, but its model continues,” says Rowley. “Around the world, oligarchs are turning to mercenary armies, and it’s a scourge that needs to be stopped.”

Hell’s Army has its North American premiere Friday in Washington, D.C.

Palestinian activist and green card holder Mohsen Mahdawi, who was targeted by the Trump administration last year as part of a crackdown on pro-Palestinian campus activism, faces a new deportation threat. A federal immigration judge has sided with the administration and renewed removal proceedings against him, reviving a case that had been dismissed by an earlier immigration judge. Now he is taking his case directly to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit, telling Democracy Now! that he is “technically without a backup plan” and relying on the federal courts for justice “because I believe that what the Trump administration has done is unconstitutional.”

The Trump administration is continuing its assault on higher education, but in a departure from its earlier high-profile fights with individual institutions like Harvard, it is now rewriting the federal rules that govern all universities and colleges. Rules are being proposed by the Education Department and other agencies to impose the administration’s preferred policies on thousands of schools — including on racial equity, transgender rights, immigration and antisemitism — or face funding cuts and possible disaccreditation.

The pressure from the federal government comes at a time of intensifying austerity at many schools. Last week, one of New York’s most iconic universities, The New School, laid off 19 full-time faculty and 68 staff members. Along with coerced “voluntary” separations and early retirements since December 2025, these mass firings constitute a major gutting of The New School’s full-time faculty.

“It’s a chilling message to all of academia,” says Jeremy Varon, professor of history at The New School and president of the university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors. “We fear that the number will grow as universities act more and more like corporations, concerned above all with the bottom line.”

We continue our conversation with acclaimed Iranian environmental scientist Kaveh Madani, who comments on U.S. strikes targeting Iranian water reservoirs, which have exacerbated the country’s water shortage. He criticizes the “normalization of targeting civil infrastructure as a part of a war.”

“Who suffers from the consequences of this? The poor community, the vulnerable communities,” says Madani.

The environmental toll of the artificial intelligence boom continues to mount as tech companies use ever more power to run their data centers and enormous amounts of water for cooling. A new investigation by U.N. scientists warns that AI’s water use in 2030 will match the needs of 1.3 billion people, while its power use will be triple that of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria combined — countries with a total population of 650 million.

“Most people understand AI as a digital technology, as a virtual thing, as something that is in the clouds,” says Iranian environmental scientist Kaveh Madani, director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. “What we tried to do in this report was to remind people that there’s some physics to all of this.”

A key provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is set to expire Friday unless it is reauthorized by Congress. Section 702 allows for the warrantless surveillance of foreign nationals believed to be outside of the U.S., yet, in practice, it also sweeps up and stores vast amounts of data from people inside the country, including their emails, texts and cellphone data. The FISA provision was enacted in 2008 to legalize George W. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program that was developed after 9/11.

A bipartisan group of senators is opposing the reauthorization of Section 702 due to President Trump’s naming of MAGA loyalist Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence, to replace Tulsi Gabbard, who announced her resignation in May. Pulte has no known background in intelligence. He currently serves as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, where he has used his position to carry out Trump’s campaign of retribution against his political enemies.

“It took this nomination of a completely unqualified guy to get enough members of Congress to really stop [Section 702],” says Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “It’s time to take a look and listen hard about the privacy protections that are needed, at a minimum, for this program to go forward.” Cohn notes that the “massive national security surveillance state that was built after 9/11 has always been a threat to freedom.”

“People are really, really afraid … that ICE will go and raid communities where people are watching and gathering together” to watch the FIFA World Cup, says Nelini Stamp. She is an organizer with the Our Copa campaign, a grassroots initiative that aims to protect immigrant fans, center the sport’s working-class roots, and host accessible local watch parties during the World Cup. “We will keep each other safe as much as possible during these games,” says Stamp.

We continue our World Cup coverage in Mexico City, where local protesters are using the global event to bring attention to their causes. A sit-in by a teachers’ union is targeting World Cup festivities. And “the mothers of disappeared people have been protesting, trying to reach the stadium in the far south of the city,” says José Luis Granados Ceja, who covers Latin America for Drop Site News. Meanwhile, due to high ticket prices, “the people who love this sport are not going to be able to attend the games. They have been extraordinarily inaccessible to the population,” adds Granados Cejas.

The FIFA World Cup kicks off today with two games in Mexico. This will be the biggest World Cup in history, with teams from 48 countries playing over 100 games in 16 host cities across Canada, Mexico and the United States. With a new FIFA pricing system in place, tickets are significantly more expensive for this World Cup than for previous tournaments. And Trump’s harsh immigration policies are having another chilling effect on the games. Out of the 39 countries under either a full or partial U.S. travel ban, four — Iran, Haiti, Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal — are expected to play in the World Cup. Players from the latter three countries received visa exemptions, while the Iranian team must train in Tijuana, Mexico.

“This World Cup is shaping up to be one of extreme exclusion,” says author and former professional soccer player Jules Boykoff. “Working-class fans basically have no chance of buying a ticket to these games … and you have people who have chosen not to come to the United States because they fear getting scooped up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

The U.S. struck Iran on Wednesday for a second day in a row, and President Trump is threatening more strikes. Iran has claimed it launched retaliatory missiles at a U.S. Navy fleet in Bahrain, as well as at U.S. air bases in Kuwait and Jordan. Iran has also declared the complete closure of the Strait of Hormuz, despite claims by the U.S. that it now effectively controls the strait. Iran’s Foreign Ministry says the U.S. strikes have rendered the ceasefire “practically meaningless.”

The last time that the U.S. and Iran spoke directly was in April, but talks have been continuing through intermediaries. It is Israel, not the U.S. and Iran, that doesn’t want the war to end, argues journalist Rami Khouri. “Israel has made it clear that it’s not going to do what the U.S. tells it,” says Khouri. He adds that the U.S. doesn’t know how to get out of the war or how to “rein in” Israel. “So, I expect we’re going to see a continuation of these tit-for-tat military strikes.”