Longtime national security reporter Sharon Weinberger’s new book, Valley of Death: How Big Tech Is Fueling the Future of War, follows the rise of the military-industrial complex in Silicon Valley, where defense technology companies, like Palantir, Anduril and SpaceX, and their billionaire founders, are increasingly shaping U.S. foreign policy. Weinberger explains that because “the government doesn’t own the underlying technology” peddled by “this new class of entrepreneurs,” these companies have upended the traditional procurement relationship between the U.S. government and older defense firms, and now unilaterally control access to the new weapons and systems — including drones and artificial intelligence — used in modern warfare.

A new documentary titled Britain’s Gaza Secrets Exposed reveals new details about the U.K. government’s internal response to alleged Israeli war crimes in Gaza. Presented by journalist Ramita Navai and produced by Ben De Pear for Channel 4’s investigative program Dispatches, the documentary examines government records, some newly publicized, to show how the United Kingdom ignored or concealed mounting evidence of Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza after the October 7 attacks.

“We were looking at how our country, which prides itself on having an ethical foreign policy and as being one of the supporting members of the United Nations on human rights, was able to keep selling arms,” says De Pear. “And basically, what we found was a doctored process … It’s quite extraordinary the level of duplicity that was going on in order for us to keep selling Israel arms.” Ben De Pear also produced the 2025 BAFTA-winning documentary Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, which the British Broadcasting Corporation, or BBC, initially commissioned but later refused to air. Gaza: Doctors Under Attack was broadcast instead by Channel 4.

The eviction of 87-year-old María del Carmen Abascal Martín in Madrid, after an investment fund bought her apartment building and more than tripled her rent, has become a symbol of Spain’s rising cost of living and sparked nationwide protests against corporate greed and wealth inequality. Over 600 protesters are now camped outside Madrid’s regional government headquarters demanding new tenant protections.

“What we have is a lot of furious people, enraged people, that are demanding from the government and from the public institutions that they give us give us some sort of solution,” says Sabina Carrau, a spokesperson for the Madrid Tenants’ Union, which is supporting the “Maricarmen decree” named after Abascal, set to be debated by Spain’s government this week.

Housing in Spain, as in much of the world, “is really connected to tourism, really connected to having and buying a house to make a speculation,” says socialist parliamentarian Tesh Sidi, who is calling instead for the guaranteed right to housing and “the right to have an affordable life.” Sidi, the only Sahrawi member of the Spanish parliament, also comments on Spain’s colonial relationship to Western Sahara and the state of Sahrawi rights and self-determination.

We speak with journalist Akbar Shahid Ahmed, whose new book, Crossing the Red Line, looks at how President Joe Biden and top figures in his administration supported Israel’s brutal war in Gaza despite the soaring death toll and growing alarm over widespread war crimes committed by the Israeli military.

“The policies that we’ve seen entrenched and, frankly, worsened and become more dangerous and deadly under Donald Trump were really established by Biden’s team,” says Ahmed, who says there is “bipartisan continuity” on Israel-Palestine between the two presidents.

At the United Nations this week, President Trump repeated his attacks on the International Criminal Court and urged other nations to pull out of the global tribunal. The United States earlier this year imposed sanctions on the president of the ICC and a senior prosecutor who was part of the team that issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for crimes against humanity in Gaza, and the Trump administration is reportedly preparing more sanctions against the institution itself. Meanwhile, a coalition of nations has formed to defend international law in solidarity with the people of Palestine under the banner of the Hague Group, which was established last year by Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia, Senegal and South Africa.

“It’s an absolute low point for the sacred grounds of the United Nations that President Trump has shown up here and attacked the international legal order,” says Varsha Gandikota, executive secretary of the Hague Group.

We also air remarks from South African Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola, who spoke earlier this week at the historic Riverside Church in New York City to urge respect for international law.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a half-empty chamber at the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, after dozens of delegations walked out in protest at the start of his speech. Netanyahu assailed his critics as “antisemites,” defended his country’s conduct in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria, and lavished praise on President Trump for joining Israel’s strikes on Iran.

Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator under Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin, says Israel’s growing diplomatic isolation “needs to be translated into action” like sanctions, arms embargoes and other forms of accountability.

Over 100 protesters were arrested near the United Nations in New York on Thursday ahead of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the General Assembly. The sit-in, organized by Jewish Voice for Peace, denounced Netanyahu for perpetrating a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, building more illegal settlements in the West Bank, occupying parts of Lebanon and bombing Iran alongside the United States. Democracy Now! spoke with participants, including some congressional candidates and other prominent figures.

“One of the features we see in … a lot of the billionaire tech elites is a real kind of anger,” says Jacob Silverman, author of Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. “They’re angry at what they see as the excesses of woke culture and liberal and lefty politics. … And they’re angry that they don’t have free rein to enact the world they want to enact, and that includes areas like AI.” Silverman also discusses how tech elites like Peter Thiel and David Sacks are shaping the Trump administration’s approach to technology.

Seydina Moussa Ndiaye is a member of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, working on a strategy with the African Union to address the risks and benefits of AI for the continent. African countries face the threat of “colonial AI,” says Ndiaye. “When we talk about colonialism historically, that involves the control of resources, the control of knowledge and the control of terms of exchange, and we see that in Africa when we talk about AI.”

Leaders of top artificial intelligence firms, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, testified to the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday, urging nations to adopt international standards on the development of AI. This comes after AI agents at OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Google have gone rogue in recent months, hacking into other companies’ corporate systems and, in the case of OpenAI, into the portal of Australia’s public health insurance program.

“I think we’re headed in the right direction,” says Malo Bourgon, CEO of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, who has participated in several AI-related meetings on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly this week. “I do think that the CEOs, while there’s a bunch of reason to be cynical about them, are sincere that they think that the progress with this technology is moving too quickly and that they risk losing control of it, and that that could lead to permanent disempowerment or human extinction.”

A federal judge has temporarily blocked President Trump’s ban on CNN, MS NOW and Politico, ordering the administration to restore their White House access for two weeks. CBS, Fox News and NBC had suspended their coverage of President Trump Monday after he expelled CNN from the White House TV press pool. “People are standing up for press freedom,” says Filipino American journalist Maria Ressa, who won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize. “There are costs to standing up, but there are greater costs to giving up.”

Ressa is also co-chair of the United Nations Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence. “A small group of countries and companies should not be determining the fate of the world,” says Ressa about the current state of AI.

2026 is already the deadliest year for measles in the United States since the virus was declared eliminated in 2000. Four people died over the last month in Pennsylvania amid an ongoing outbreak in the state, which had not seen a measles-related death in at least 35 years. All four victims, including two infants, were unvaccinated (children do not receive their first dose of the measles vaccine until they have reached a year old). The deaths come as President Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continue to defund public vaccination programs and push debunked claims that vaccines cause autism.

Pediatrician and vaccine expert Dr. Paul Offit warns that the four reported measles deaths — which were reported by Pennsylvania health officials but have not yet been acknowledged by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — are likely a vast undercount. He estimates that there could be “closer to 4,000” cases in the Pennsylvania outbreak. “I don’t think people realize how contagious this virus is,” Offit says. “You don’t have to have direct contact with somebody who has measles. You just have to be within their airspace within two hours of them being there.”

We also speak to Offit about the COVID-19 virus, which he says is now affecting the United States “like flu” by causing “hundreds of thousands of people to be hospitalized and tens of thousands to die, just like influenza does, every year.” Yearly flu and COVID-19 vaccinations, he explains, are “effective at keeping people out of the hospital, effective at keeping them out of the intensive care unit, and effective at keeping them out of the morgue.”

In the wake of devastating flash floods triggered by glacial collapse in the Himalayas, Nepal is demanding climate reparations from polluter countries as it embarks upon the grueling process of rebuilding. Over 1,400 bodies have been recovered from the disaster, with around 6,000 others still missing. Nepal’s government estimates that the cost of infrastructure reconstruction is likely to exceed $4 billion. Nepal contributes less than 0.1% of global carbon emissions, yet as a mountainous country surrounded by glaciers, continues to be vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Recent studies estimate that global surface temperatures will likely exceed 1.5°C above preindustrial levels by the end of the decade.

We go to a rally outside of United Nations headquarters, where Nepali activists, including our guest Anisha Buda, are demanding climate justice, reparations and a just transition out of fossil fuels. Buda, a member of the region’s ethnic minority Kaike-speaking Magar community, says that almost 90% of the victims impacted by August’s flash flooding were part of Nepal’s Indigenous communities. “It is not just the lives of the people lost. It’s not just the houses swept, but it’s their culture, tradition and their very identity that is being lost by the floods, by the climate-induced disasters.”

On Monday, the South African delegation to the United Nations, in collaboration with Progressive International and the Hague Group, hosted an event in honor of the U.N. Charter at the historic Riverside Church in New York City, less than a day before the U.N. General Assembly convened for its 81st annual session. We play excerpts of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’s address at the event, in which he denounced the military-industrial complex fueling the U.S. war on Iran, Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the UAE-backed RSF paramilitary in Sudan, called for the end of corporate oligarchy and wealth inequality in the United States and warned about the risks of the unchecked buildup of artificial intelligence.

The annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly opened this week in New York City. On its opening day, President Trump in his address to all 193 U.N. member states threatened to annihilate Iran. “This is probably a new low in U.N. history,” says Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, joining us in our New York City studio ahead of the second day of the General Assembly. As Trump pushes for even more sanctions on Iran, “what you’re most likely to see in that scenario is that the Iranians will counter-escalate” in what threatens to become an “endless war.” Parsi also comments on the U.S. military’s growing reliance on artificial intelligence for strategic and targeting decisions, Trump’s upcoming meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Trump administration’s flouting of international law.

Reading the World is a remarkable new documentary about Paulo Freire, the acclaimed Brazilian educator whose revolutionary approach to teaching connected literacy to critical thinking and democratic participation. It draws on rare archival footage of 1960s Brazil and weaves together the memories of farmers, students and educators who took part in Freire’s culture circles, his method of teaching adults to read in as little as 40 hours by drawing on their own lives, communities and experiences. At the time, Brazil’s illiterate population was barred from voting, so education also opened the door to political participation. The experiment was abruptly halted in 1964 when Brazil’s military overthrew President João Goulart in a U.S.-backed coup that led to Freire’s imprisonment and exile.

“Paulo Freire was one of the most influential educators of the past century and is still widely studied all around the world. But the studies often focus on his ideas, his philosophies, his books, and much less is known about his original praxis,” says co-director Catherine Murphy.

“One of the most important points of his philosophy is that everyone has knowledge,” says Maria Luisa Mendonça, director of the Network for Social Justice and Human Rights in Brazil and a consulting producer.

As the United Nations General Assembly opens in New York, we speak with senior Cuban diplomat Carlos Fernández de Cossío, who says the Trump administration is seeking to “asphyxiate the people of Cuba into submission.” On Friday, millions in Cuba lost power in what was at least the sixth major blackout since President Trump cut off fuel shipments to the island in January. The fuel blockade comes on top of the six-decade-long U.S. economic embargo and countless attempts to topple the communist government.

“We will do all we can to stop any nation, the U.S. or any nation, from taking over Cuba,” says Fernández de Cossío, who has served as deputy Cuban foreign minister since 2022.

Ahead of the midterm elections, activist and writer Bill McKibben says he has been traveling across the United States with Third Act, the environmental group he founded to harness the power of seniors who care about the climate and democracy. “These elections are also starting to set the groundwork for 2028,” says McKibben, who calls the next U.S. presidential vote “maybe the last election that happens in a timeframe when we still really have an opportunity to affect some of the outcomes of these things.”

World leaders are in New York this week for the United Nations General Assembly, which coincides with Climate Week. It comes after months of climate-fueled extreme weather around the world, including heat waves in North America and Europe, wildfires in Africa, flash flooding in Asia and a record-breaking El Niño.

Climate campaigner Bill McKibben says that while it’s too late to prevent the climate crisis from unfolding, solar and wind energy are now cheap enough “to blunt its worst excesses.”

We also speak with Kavita Sthanumurthy, a former software engineer at Amazon and a member of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. She says the artificial intelligence boom is largely being powered by dirty fossil fuel, even as companies like Amazon claim they use 100% renewable energy. “We did our own independent research and found that it was closer to 22%,” says Sthanumurthy.

Sarah Jones has been described as “a one-woman global village” for her remarkable one-person, multi-character shows. The Tony- and Obie Award-winning writer and performer is best known for her Broadway hit Bridge and Tunnel. She is back in New York with her latest solo performance, America, Who Hurt You?, which is being presented by the National Black Theatre and the Theatre for a New Audience at Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn.

America, Who Hurt You? “starts with our history of genocide as a country, our history of enslaving African people, our history of indentured servitude,” says Jones. “This show … is about restoring the history that has intentionally been erased.”

Two men deported from the United States to Equatorial Guinea were arrested by local police forces and transferred to a prison earlier this month, in apparent retaliation for speaking out about conditions they faced in the Central African country. Samson Birhane, who is from Eritrea, and Ahmed Soliman, a gay asylum seeker from Egypt, were both deported by the Trump administration despite U.S. immigration courts granting them protections.

On September 11, police forces arrived at Hotel Bamy in the city of Malabo, where more than two dozen people have been confined after their deportation from the United States to Equatorial Guinea, a country they have no ties to, as part of President Trump’s secretive “third-country” agreements. Birhane and Soliman say they were arrested and taken to prison for speaking out about the inhumane conditions endured by U.S. deportees at the hotel and threats by armed forces. While confined at the hotel, U.S. deportees have decried denial of medical care and legal assistance, and abuses they’ve described as psychological torture.

“Starting in November 2025, … the United States started this horrendous policy of sending immigrants not from Equatorial Guinea to Equatorial Guinea, a country that the U.S. knows very, very well that is a human rights violator,” says human rights lawyer Tutu Alicante. “The State Department reports that the U.S. has been putting out for the last three decades are consistent about the fact that Equatorial Guinea uses torture, uses incommunicado detentions, and often extrajudicial killings of people that it keeps in prison.”

News organizations CNN, MS NOW and Politico are suing the Trump administration over the banning of their reporters from the White House on Friday. Their credentials were confiscated or deactivated when they attempted to enter White House grounds over the weekend. Trump’s decision is “sending the message that if you write stories that are critical of the president, you’re going to lose your access,” says Katie Fallow, a deputy litigation director at Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute, where she focuses on threats to freedom of speech and of the press. “The real victims of this war on the press are members of the public, which are entitled to know about what their government is doing.”

Fallow says the White House press briefing room is a “public forum” and that “the courts have said repeatedly the government is not allowed to kick people out of that forum based on their viewpoint.”

Fifteen years ago this week, thousands of activists marched on the Financial District in New York City. They formed the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park, launching a movement focused on economic inequality that spread across the nation and globe under the slogan, “We are the 99%.” Protesters would go on to sleep in Zuccotti Park for nearly two months before police raided the encampment.

“Occupy Wall Street changed the public’s common sense about class and class struggle and inequality in this country,” says Yotam Marom, who helped organize the Occupy protests in New York City. “It’s hard to see how you get a Bernie Sanders 2016 run without the public shifting its relationship to that story.”

Marom says Occupy participants were inspired by mass protests happening around the world at that time, including the Arab Spring and the anti-austerity movement in Spain known as the Indignados.

Still, “We got it wrong on a lot of things. We had a ton of internal conflict that really jeopardized the project,” he says.

Marom’s new book is For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond a Politics of Powerlessness.

“If we don’t connect those dots between the struggles, we’re never going to get anywhere,” says Pulitzer Prize- and Grammy-winning multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens. “That’s what music is for. … We have to make music with people from different backgrounds, because then we have that conversation.”

Giddens has had a wide-spanning career, including her time with The Carolina Chocolate Drops, an old-time Black string band, and her work as a musical consultant on Ryan Coogler’s landmark film Sinners. She won a Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2023 for her opera Omar about Omar ibn Said, a Muslim scholar in Africa who was sold into slavery in the 1800s. Her new album, Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, comes out on Friday.

As world leaders prepare to head to New York for the United Nations General Assembly and Climate Week, Democracy Now! speaks with Amitabh Behar, executive director of Oxfam International. “We live in a very different world from 1945,” when the U.N. was formed, says Behar. “You cannot continue with the veto power.” And with António Guterres soon stepping down, Behar stresses that the United Nations’ next secretary-general must be a woman — “a fundamental shift we need to make.”

He also argues that while the world is “torn apart” by inequality, “there are real possibilities of change.” Behar cites the G20’s International Panel on Inequality and “movements across the world” aimed at “changing regimes,” including in Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh and India.

We speak with moral philosopher Susan Neiman, author of the new book Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era. Neiman argues that evil — far from being an outdated religious concept — is a vital way to understand how injustice works in the world. The Trump administration’s abusive policies have been aided by a general reluctance to call them out as evil, part of how people are “brainwashed … by the idea that morality is for losers, suckers, fools,” she says.

“People worry that it’s polarizing, that it’s demonizing, and by that worry, we leave the strongest weapons we have in the language in the hands of people who are least responsible in using them,” says Neiman.

Amid growing concerns over food safety in the United States, President Donald Trump last month authorized the duty-free importation of 660 million pounds of cheap beef trimmings that will get mixed in with other cuts to make ground beef. Imported beef and pork were once labeled with their country of origin, but Congress voted in 2015 to end that requirement, so customers at the grocery store will have no way to identify this “mystery meat,” which is coming mostly from Brazil. President Trump’s proclamation in August came just a day after he met in the White House with Joesley Batista, whose family controls the Brazilian company JBS, the largest beef producer in the world. JBS is notorious for food safety violations and admitted in 2017 to bribing thousands of Brazilian officials for favorable treatment.

“It smells like a pretty corrupt deal,” says investigative journalist Eric Schlosser. He says Trump’s move is “basically screwing over American ranchers,” and the imported beef is “some of the meat most likely to be contaminated.”

Schlosser is author of the landmark book Fast Food Nation, published in 2001. He says that in the 25 years since then, the United States has developed “two food systems.” While affluent and well-educated people increasingly favor sustainable, organic foods and care deeply about how food is grown and consumed, working people and the poor are relegated to the “fast-food-industrial system” of cheap, mass-produced food of dubious safety.

Four years ago today, the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising erupted in Iran after the death in custody of Zhina Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman who had been arrested by Iran’s “morality police.” Over the next three months, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets protesting against Iran’s discriminatory compulsory veiling laws.

Amnesty International has released a new report concluding that the repressive measures used by Iranian authorities to crush the Woman, Life, Freedom protests in 2022 constitute crimes against humanity. Investigating the killings of 377 protesters and bystanders in 2022, Amnesty International’s report calls for international criminal investigations into 87 Iranian officials.

“Crimes against humanity are system crimes. This means that they require resources, organization, structures and state policy,” says Raha Bahreini, a human rights lawyer and researcher on Iran for Amnesty International, which also recently condemned the U.S-Israeli war on Iran. “We’ve been very clear that the suffering of victims of crimes against humanity must not be instrumentalized or weaponized by actors such as [the] U.S. and Israel,” she adds.

A major new report by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem titled “The Elimination Project” accuses Israel of “dramatically intensifying its attacks on every aspect of Palestinian life in the West Bank.”

“For too long, Israel’s policies in the West Bank have been treated or looked at as isolated events,” says Ori Givati, director of international relations at B’Tselem. “We actually find that there is one very coherent logic behind all of them, and this is the logic of elimination of Palestinian collective life in the West Bank.” Givati says tactics against Palestinians intensified with Israel’s 2022 election and again after October 7, 2023, adding that “We are definitely seeing a lot of the mechanisms, the tools that were used and are used still … in Gaza, being implemented in the West Bank.”

We also speak with Mohammad Sha’ban, a Palestinian farmer from Halhul in the Hebron area of the occupied West Bank, who says 11 gates and seven settler outposts have been installed around Halhul since 2025. “We cannot reach our lands. We cannot go outside Halhul. They open only one gate from 8:00 until 5:00 every day,” says Sha’ban. Settlers “attack farmers, beat farmers … damaging our cars, also damaging our fields, uprooting our trees.”

Congressional Democrats have opened an investigation after ProPublica revealed on Monday that a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin bankrolled part of Donald Trump Jr.’s Bahamas wedding in May. ProPublica reports that Umar Kremlev paid hundreds of thousands of dollars on wedding expenses, including the rental of a private island. Just weeks before the wedding, Putin awarded Kremlev the Order of Friendship.

Trump Jr. and his wife, Bettina Anderson, confirmed ProPublica’s findings in a social media post, specifying that Kremlev only paid for an afterparty.

“The most important thing to understand about Kremlev is the level of his connection with the Russian government. Right before the wedding … he was reportedly traveling in China as part of Putin’s delegation,” says Joshua Kaplan, the ProPublica reporter who was part of the team that broke the story. “He’s spent a lot of money seemingly successfully cultivating a relationship with the son of the president, and we have no idea why.”

Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor launch their new book, End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World on Democracy Now! It examines how wealthy elites are preparing for “the end of the world,” even as they contribute to growing inequality, political instability and the climate crisis. The rise of modern-day fascism is “not simply a rerun,” explains Klein. “We don’t believe that history repeats on a loop. We believe that we’re in something more like a sequel, where the logics of fascism, which are the logics of dehumanization, of othering, of racial supremacy and hierarchy, are now being applied in a time of global existential crisis.” In response, says Taylor, the growing movement seeking to resist this fatalistic vision “fundamentally needs to be grounded in a desire to stay here on Earth, to commit to this place.”