Democracy Now!

As climate activists from around the world gather in New York for the annual Climate Week, which coincides with the new session of the United Nations General Assembly, an estimated 75,000 people marched on the U.N. headquarters Sunday with a demand for President Biden to end fossil fuels." They escalated their demands by targeting financing for fossil fuel projects, with a series of direct actions at major U.S. financial institutions and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. We get an update from two of the protest organizers: Renata Pumarol, with Climate Defenders, and Alice Nascimento, campaign director at New York Communities for Change, who was arrested at Monday's protest. Climate chaos is not in some distant future," says Pumarol. It will only get worse if we do not stop the fossil fuel industry, and the only way to stop the fossil fuel industry is to stop the financing of fossil fuels."

Congress is almost certainly headed for another government shutdown due to Republican infighting that is preventing budget measures from being passed, says Ryan Grim, the D.C. bureau chief for The Intercept. The revolt is led by far-right members who oppose Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. What they're fighting for, whether they win, whether their situation actually gets worse as a result, is secondary to the kind of emotional release people want from seeing a clash unfold in Washington," says Grim.

The Biden administration helped Pakistan get a controversial new bailout from the International Monetary Fund after Pakistan agreed to secretly sell arms to the United States for the war in Ukraine, according to a new blockbuster report by The Intercept. The deal allows Pakistan to sell some $900 million in munitions while keeping IMF loans flowing to the government in Islamabad amid a spiraling economic crisis, which is driven at least partly by the austerity measures imposed by the IMF loan. Pakistan's position on the war in Ukraine has shifted significantly since Russia's invasion and the ouster of Prime Minister Imran Khan, who was removed from office in 2022 under pressure from U.S. diplomats who objected to his aggressively neutral" stance on the war. Khan is now imprisoned in Pakistan on corruption charges. Meanwhile, the caretaker government backed by Pakistan's powerful military has delayed planned elections, widely seen as an attempt to block Khan's supporters from power. When the United States has a primary foreign policy objective, in particular when it's a war, everything else falls away. That's what you're seeing in Pakistan now," says The Intercept's Ryan Grim.

As the Biden administration and Tehran carry out a prisoner swap that also includes the unfreezing of $6 billion in Iranian oil revenue, we look at the state of U.S.-Iran relations with journalist Negar Mortazavi, host of The Iran Podcast. The deal represents a major diplomatic breakthrough between the two countries since the end of the Iran nuclear deal, from which the Trump administration unilaterally withdrew in 2018. The prisoner swap came just after the anniversary of the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody last year, which set off nationwide protests against the Iranian government. What we saw over the past year after the death in custody of Mahsa Amini was nothing short of a mass movement and also, essentially, a cultural revolution," says Mortazavi, who notes the protests have led to a loosening of social restrictions despite the government crackdown. I don't think the government can push it back to where it was before the killing of Mahsa Amini."

We look at the dire conditions inside the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta, where Donald Trump and his 18 co-defendants were recently booked. Ten prisoners have now died in the jail's custody just this year - the latest on Sunday. Shawndre Delmore had been incarcerated pretrial for five months before he was found unresponsive in a cell on August 31. Delmore's family is demanding answers as to why a previously healthy 24-year-old would so suddenly suffer from cardiac arrest, and is calling for an immediate independent investigation into conditions at the jail, which is already under federal investigation. This is systemic. This is not a one-off," says the family's attorney Mawuli Mel Davis, whose firm represents three other families with relatives that have died at the jail in the past two years. In 2022, Fulton County Jail recorded 15 in-custody deaths, including that of Lashawn Thompson, a 35-year-old Black man who was eaten alive" by insects and bedbugs in his cell. We also speak to Davis about another client, the family of Johnny Hollman Sr., a 62-year-old Black grandfather and church deacon who died after a traffic stop in August, and about the Republican Georgia attorney general's sweeping indictment of 61 Cop City protesters on RICO charges. This is fascism," warns Davis. This is an attempt to have a chilling effect on people who are organizing against police violence."

In a unanimous decision, Mexico's Supreme Court issued a historic ruling Wednesday decriminalizing abortion on the federal level. While laws banning the procedure are still in place in a majority of Mexican states, people in those states can now receive abortions at federal medical facilities run the country's public health system, and states will be barred from penalizing those patients and providers. The ruling is part of a wave of reproductive rights wins in the region, as Mexico now joins Argentina and Colombia in decriminalizing or legalizing abortion since 2020. Latin America is actually leading the conversation on the protection of reproductive rights," says our guest Cristina Rosero, who worked on the lawsuit that decriminalized abortion in Colombia last year. Meanwhile, Mexico is on track to elect its first woman president, as its two major political parties have both named women candidates for next year's presidential election. In the face of continued political violence against women in the country, the representation of women in its highest office is definitely a step forward for our political rights here in Mexico," says Rebeca Ramos, executive director of the Mexico City-based reproductive rights nonprofit GIRE.

Spain's national prosecutor has announced a criminal investigation into Luis Rubiales, the head of Spain's soccer federation, after he forcibly kissed Spanish soccer star Jenni Hermoso during the recent World Cup trophy ceremony. Hermoso filed a sexual assault complaint against Rubiales, who has been temporarily suspended by soccer's international governing body FIFA but has refused to step down voluntarily. No permanent sanctions have been announced. Meanwhile, the rest of the Spanish women's soccer league is on strike over pay and working conditions after talks between federation leadership and the players' union broke down. We look at what has become a #MeToo moment in Spanish sports with Brenda Elsey, co-host of the feminist sports podcast Burn It All Down, who says institutional change is desperately needed in the male-dominated world of soccer. If they had listened to women for the last eight years, to the players, this wouldn't have had to happen, but they absolutely refused to make any changes," Elsey says of FIFA, noting that widespread support for Hermoso is bringing to light a spectrum" of abuse and exploitation in the sport.