Democracy Now!

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.

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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 Joao 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 Mendonca, 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 Fernandez de Cossio, 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 Fernandez de Cossio, 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 Nino.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.

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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."

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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 Antonio 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.

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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.

U.S. Declines to Join Saudi Attacks on Yemen After Secretly Meeting With Houthis, Trump on Iran: Hopefully We Are Towards the End of the War", Fed Raises Interest Rates for First Time Since 2023 as Iran War Drives Inflation, Oil Prices Dip Slightly From 4-Month Highs as Saudi Arabia Offers Additional Oil Shipments, Palestinian-American Journalist Naqaa Hamed Arrested by Israeli Authorities, Palestinians in Gaza Hold Funerals for People Killed in Building Collapse, Democratic Rep. Meeks Refuses to Clear Trump's $2.8 Billion Arms Sale to Israel, Interfaith Coalition Unveils 330-foot Memorial Shroud Bearing Names of Children Killed in Gaza, Palestinian Attorney Noura Erakat Arrested at Palm Beach Hearing on $1B Israel Bond Investment, OpenAI Discloses Six More Incidents of Concerning" Behavior by Misaligned"AI Agents, House OKs Ratepayer Protection Act to Shield Against Surging Electricity Costs from Data Centers, Pentagon Claims to Strike Vessel in the Eastern Pacific, Ex-Philippines President Duterte Appears at ICC to Face Charges Over War on Drugs" Killings, Toxic Haze Spreads Across Southeast Asia as Wildfires Rage in Indonesia, NYT: Trump Admin Guts Key Provision of the Endangered Species Act

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 o'clock until 5 o'clock 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."

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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."

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Yemen is at risk of spiraling back into all-out war as Houthi forces and Saudi Arabia exchange new strikes amid a fight over control of the key Bab el-Mandeb strait through which much of Saudi oil passes on its way to world markets. The Houthis, the Iran-allied force also known as Ansarallah, has seized Yemen's entire Red Sea coastline from the Saudi-backed Yemeni government. The United Nations says the latest escalation has displaced 86,000 people in Yemen as the U.S. war on Iran continues to wrack the Middle East and raise oil prices around the world.What's happening right now is essentially a break in the ceasefire between Ansarallah ... and Saudi Arabia," says Shireen Al-Adeimi, a Yemeni American associate professor at Michigan State University. This ceasefire has been in place since 2022, but it has not ended the war in Yemen."

Did Saudi Arabia play a role in the planning and execution of the September 11 attacks of 2001? That question was raised immediately after the attack, when 15 of the 19 hijackers were revealed to be Saudi citizens, and it has only grown louder in the 25 years since as more evidence emerged of the attackers' connections to Saudi figures inside the United States.We speak with ProPublica journalist Tim Golden, who reports that the FBI failed to fully investigate Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi intelligence asset who helped two of the hijackers as they arrived in California in early 2000. Key evidence, including a handwritten note by al-Bayoumi calculating an airplane's trajectory to a point on the horizon, was not fully disclosed to investigators.Al-Bayoumi was incredibly important, but this evidence ... sort of went missing for more than 20 years," says Golden. If the Saudi government is indirectly responsible, or even if this was some rogue cell of Saudis within the religious bureaucracy, we would hope that that should come out."

A quarter-century after the September 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in the United States, a group of victims' families is continuing a lawsuit against Saudi Arabia to hold the kingdom accountable for any role it played in the planning and execution of the plot. While the Saudi government has always denied advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, 15 of the 19 plane hijackers were Saudi citizens, including some with connections to Saudi officials and intelligence assets in the United States. Terry Strada, the national chair of 9/11 Families United, raised the issue during an official commemoration on Friday in New York while paying tribute to her husband Tom, who was killed in the World Trade Center. With Vice President JD Vance and all four living ex-presidents in the audience, Strada asked: How can it be 25 years and still we have no justice for the role that Saudi Arabia played in your murder?"Strada tells Democracy Now! that evidence has only grown that Saudi agents were directly involved with providing the support network" to carry out the 9/11 attacks, and that she hopes President Donald Trump will tell the Saudi government that they can no longer hide and that they need to confront the evidence and work things out with the families."

The film NAZA, which documents the Israeli military's use of secret AI-powered systems to deliberately and systematically target and massacre civilians in Gaza, won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival Saturday. The film was directed by Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham and filmmaker Rachel Szor, both of whom won an Oscar for the documentary No Other Land in 2025 along with Palestinian co-directors Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal. NAZA was shot in secret on rooftops in Tel Aviv over three years and builds on testimony from Israeli military and intelligence sources who spoke on the condition their identities be concealed. The film's title refers to an acronym used by the Israeli military as a shorthand for civilian killings in Gaza.The film's reception in Venice, where it received a record-breaking 25-minute standing ovation, was met with angry backlash from Israel's government as Culture Minister Miki Zohar threatened to revoke Abraham and Szor's Israeli citizenship.

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We look at how post-9/11 policies and the so-called war on terror reshaped the country and the world with two Columbia faculty members who convened a two-day symposium on The Forever War and the First Amendment." The symposium brought together journalists, scholars, lawyers and activists to explore the legacy of the war on terror," specifically focused on the impact on democratic rights, including the freedoms of speech and the press.First Amendment freedoms were tested right away in the days and weeks after 9/11," says Jameel Jaffer, legal expert and director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. All of the surveillance authorities that were put in place after 9/11," says Jaffer, their use was initially justified by reference to foreign threats. And now, increasingly, we're seeing the Trump administration use these things to suppress domestic dissent."If you go back to that climate after 9/11 ... newsrooms institute[d] shifts, so they started making beats for covering national security," says Azmat Khan of the Columbia Journalism School, who won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the massive civilian death toll from U.S.-led airstrikes in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. Legacy news media in that time period was incredibly dependent on anonymous sources, sometimes unvetted intelligence, leaks to journalists that oftentimes came from an administration that was trying to lead the public to war."

Friday marks 25 years since the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the crash of Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Around 3,000 people were killed that day, and nearly 10,000 more have died in the years since from 9/11-related illnesses connected to the collapse of the twin towers.In 2001, Democracy Now! was a radio show broadcasting from the attic of Downtown Community Television in Chinatown, just blocks away from ground zero. We were the closest national broadcast to the World Trade Center site. We were on the air when the second plane hit the south tower. Today, we reair a clip of that broadcast and hear Democracy Now! co-host Juan Gonzalez read the column he wrote for the New York Daily News in the hours after the attack, A Horror to Last a Lifetime."A catastrophe like that changes people forever," says Gonzalez.

Yemen's Houthis Seize Entire Red Sea Coastline, Consolidating Power Over Bab al-Mandab Strait, Oil Prices Surge Toward $110 a Barrel as More Ships Are Struck Near Strait of Hormuz, At GOP Midterm Convention, Trump Asks Supporters to Cheat Like Hell" to Win Election, Supreme Court Again Blocks Missouri from Using Gerrymandered Congressional Map in Midterms, Russia Bombs Shopping Malls and Gas Stations in Ukraine After Kyiv Orders Strikes Deep Inside Russia, Nepal Seeks $20 Million in Climate Compensation After Glacier's Collapse Triggers Deadly Floods, Study Warns Climate Feedback Loops Could Worsen Global Heating by 30%, September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows Holds Vigil Ahead of 25th Anniversary of Attacks, ICE Sends Somali Asylum Seeker to Guantanamo Bay Prison Camp, Maryland Officials Demand ICE Accountability After Agents Beat Protesters in Frederick Neighborhood, Civil Rights Groups Sue to Halt ICE Patrols at Voting Sites, Florida Bans Undocumented Immigrants from Public University Enrollment, Anthropic Threat Report Shows Bad Actors" Sought to Use AI to Build Weapons, New Documentary "NAZA" Reveals How Israel Uses AI-Powered Systems to Target Civilians in Gaza

As part of our weeklong coverage marking the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks and the launch of the United States' so-called war on terror, we take a look at the human, financial and environmental costs of U.S. military intervention around the world with Neta Crawford, co-founder of Brown University's Costs of War Project. Researchers at the Costs of War Project estimate that nearly a million people have been killed as a direct result of U.S. military violence in the Middle East since 2001. At least half are estimated to be civilians. An additional 3.8 million deaths can be attributed to the indirect effects of war, including injuries, famine and long-term health conditions. And the wars have also increased the U.S. debt, military footprint, greenhouse gas emissions, destruction and destabilization abroad and unchecked executive power at home. The consequences are all around us," says Crawford.

The 'war on terror' was always a construct to be waged, never quite to be ended." We discuss the origins and impacts of the global war on terror," launched by the U.S. government in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., with Spencer Ackerman, author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. We saw, beginning at the very outset of the 'war on terror,' our leaders told us to understand 9/11 as an assault of a foreign civilization, one that had nothing to do with the consequences of American extractive and exploitative foreign policy in the Muslim world or its support for Israel."Ackerman says the war on terror" and its repercussions have extended past U.S. ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to its current war on Iran, Israel's genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and the development of extensive surveillance architecture and state repression of Muslim minority groups around the world. A whole lot of regimes around the world, rising powers looking for their own advantage, saw what the United States was constructing and realized they wanted that for themselves," he says.

In the five years since the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan following the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country, millions of Afghan refugees have been forced out of neighboring Iran and Pakistan, where they had been living and dumped at the border" without immediate access to food, water or shelter. At the same time, conditions for women and girls in Afghanistan continue to deteriorate, as basic rights to education, freedom of movement and access to services are increasingly curtailed under the Taliban's authoritarian rule. It's a crisis for humanity," says Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, speaking to Democracy Now! from Kabul. We're so overstretched and underfunded. ... We're too alone on the ground here in Afghanistan," explains Egeland, one of the few international aid workers continuing to support displaced people in the country. The reason we have to lay off female aid workers, female teachers, teaching primary school girls, is because of lack of funding. It's not because of the Taliban."Despite the outsized role it played in destabilizing the country, there has been zero funding" this year from the U.S. to humanitarian organizations operating in Afghanistan. Don't forget your promises when you went for the door abruptly five years ago," Egeland says, addressing the United States and other, largely European, countries that made up the U.S.-led NATO coalition in Afghanistan.

Almost 25 years ago, just days after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, President George W. Bush addressed the nation, making the case for war against al-Qaeda, whose leader, Osama bin Laden, was based in Afghanistan. I sensed that something like this was not going to go unpunished," Afghan American New Yorker and women's rights activist Masuda Sultan told Democracy Now! at the time. Within a few weeks, the U.S. invasion began. Sultan would lose 19 members of her family when the U.S. military bombed their village outside of Kandahar. We revisit our coverage of the initial U.S. invasion, including our first interviews with Sultan in 2002, and speak to Sultan again today. She reflects on her experience, including working with Rita Lasar, the sister of a 9/11 victim, to advocate for acknowledgment and compensation for the families of Afghan civilians killed by the U.S. military.The United States war in Afghanistan lasted for nearly 20 years, the longest-ever active conflict in U.S. history. Now as the Taliban government - overthrown by the U.S. in 2001 and later reestablished following the end of U.S. military occupation in 2021 - tightens its patriarchal restrictions on women in Afghanistan, Sultan warns international actors not to repeat the [mistakes of the] 1990s, of turning our backs on the country. We need to engage with the Afghan people, support Afghan women and support civil society."

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The attacks on September 11, 2001, unleashed a wave of Islamophobia in the United States that resulted in widespread harassment and persecution of Muslim Americans. In addition to vigilante attacks targeting Muslims or those perceived to be Muslim, there was also state repression including police roundups, community surveillance, prosecutions on often flimsy terrorism charges and mass deportations. Meanwhile, the wars launched by the United States in the aftermath of 9/11 have killed close to 1 million people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University.There were so many responses to 9/11. One was obviously fear and grief and shock, but another was rage. And so much of that rage was towards Muslims and those who looked like Muslims," says award-winning journalist Rozina Ali, author of Seasons of Fury: Four Families and the Rise of Islamophobia in America.We also speak with Fahd Ahmed, executive director of Desis Rising Up and Moving, or DRUM, a grassroots organization for South Asian and Indo-Caribbean immigrant workers and families in New York City. He says that much of the anti-Muslim retaliation came from law enforcement.In New York City and in New Jersey and across the country, ... we saw these massive roundups of mostly Muslim men or people that were perceived to be Muslim, and this included citizens, green card holders and undocumented people," says Ahmed. There was at least 1,200 men that were picked up this way."

Ahead of the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has unsealed more than 170,000 pages of records that offer new insights into how the city responded to the disaster. Some of the papers indicate that officials lied about the hazardous toxins that burned and remained near ground zero for months afterward, even as the government assured New Yorkers the air was safe to breathe and rushed to reopen Lower Manhattan for business. In addition to the nearly 3,000 people killed on 9/11, thousands more are believed to have died from illnesses related to the attacks, including from cancer, heart disease and respiratory conditions.The Bush administration, the Giuliani administration all denied that there was an impact from these toxins," says Benjamin Chevat, executive director of 9/11 Health Watch, which sued for the release of the records. He faults successive city governments for inaction, saying that instead of mitigating the harm, they mitigated the city's liability."

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Bob Hennelly, general manager of WBAI Pacifica Radio in New York, broadcast live during the September 11 attacks in 2001 and has been covering developments ever since. He says officials rushed to reopen the city after the disaster, despite the health risks from toxic air and debris around ground zero. There was no Zoom back then," Hennelly says. People were ordered back to their desks in Lower Manhattan, which turned out to be a death sentence."

We speak with Sara Nelson, the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants, about how flight attendants were affected by the 9/11 attacks. Nelson was working in Chicago that day, but she lost five of her friends, who were fellow flight attendants, in the attacks. My handbook is in the 9/11 Memorial Museum, that gave us the exact wrong training for that day. We were told to keep everyone calm, appease the hijackers."Eighty-one billion dollars was given back by workers in the wake of 9/11, including transferring the cost of healthcare to us, destroying retiree healthcare, destroying pensions. And we're still trying to fight to get that back," adds Nelson.

Twenty-five years after the 9/11 attacks, many New York City residents are still grappling with complicated health conditions related to exposure to the toxic air and debris around ground zero.We were digging through the pile and using rakes to spread out all the debris to look for anyone's remains," says retired New York City firefighter Brenda Berkman. We were working alongside really heavy equipment, as time went on, that picked up big loads of debris and dumped it, creating a cloud. This went on for 10 months. And at first, there was no proper decontamination at all."EMS personnel were told, 'Oh, you couldn't be getting sick. You're not a firefighter. So don't worry. Just go back to work,'" says retired New York City EMT Marianne Pizzitola. Moving into the years right after, ... we started to find consistent diagnoses at our retiree meetings."Author and public health advocate Lila Nordstrom recounts how students at her school, Stuyvesant High School, located just three blocks away from ground zero, were also misled by officials after the attacks.

Twenty-five years after September 11, 2001, more people are believed to have died from cancer, respiratory and other illnesses due to exposure to the airborne toxins than the nearly 3,000 people killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center. In the weeks and months that followed 9/11, former New York City Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, as well as other city and federal officials, reassured residents and workers it was safe to return to the area surrounding ground zero, concealing the dangers of lingering toxins in the air after the collapse of the twin towers.Democracy Now! co-host Juan Gonzalez reads from his book, Fallout, in which he extensively reported on the toxic nightmare around ground zero. No one could guarantee the air around Ground Zero was safe because no one had ever confronted a disaster of such proportions," Gonzalez wrote in Fallout.

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A special broadcast: Highlights from Democracy Now!'s 30th anniversary celebration at the historic Riverside Church, featuring Angela Davis, Patti Smith, Mosab Abu Toha, Michael Stipe, Hurray for the Riff Raff, Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzalez, Nermeen Shaikh and a surprise appearance by Bruce Springsteen.

A new documentary titled Top of the World tells the story of Windows on the World, the legendary restaurant atop the World Trade Center, through the eyes of its former employees. Windows on the World served guests for 25 years, until the morning of September 11, 2001, when it was destroyed in the attacks on the World Trade Center. Seventy-nine workers and 91 diners were killed.We're joined by Top of the World's co-directors, Julie Cohen and Betsy West, and by Sekou Siby, a former line cook at Windows on the World. Siby, who immigrated to the United States from the Ivory Coast in 1996, was originally scheduled to work on the morning of September 11, but a co-worker asked him to switch shifts. He didn't make it," says Siby, who later became an organizer and longtime leader at the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC), an advocacy group founded by Windows on the World workers to support each other in the aftermath of the attack.The extraordinary immigrant workforce of Windows [of the World] and what they collectively created is just a reminder of the contributions of immigrant New Yorkers to the restaurant world and to the culture of the city," says Cohen. We want people to remember not just the tragedy, but the real beauty and the specific stories of what was lost on that day."Top of the World premieres on CNN Monday, September 7, 2026.

We go to Danbury, Connecticut, where residents held a mass demonstration this week to protest recent immigration arrests and to support the city's immigrant community. Danbury, like many other communities across the United States, has been the target of a spike in immigration enforcement under the Trump administration, including local reports of ICE arresting parents at school bus stops.We really have been describing it as the administration terrorizing our city, because that is what it felt like. The streets were empty. Kids stayed home from practice. Kids stayed home from school," says Juliana Soares, the lead organizer for Danbury Unites for Immigrants. Masked agents often would shut down the street to just abduct people. ... They just do a gross display of force and intimidation in a grocery store parking lot, where they're just walking around, kind of hunting their next target."

Tyson Foods, the United States' largest meatpacking and processing company, shuttered a beef processing facility in Joslin, Illinois, last month, laying off more than 2,500 primarily immigrant workers virtually overnight." Although Tyson Foods CEO and President Donnie King made over $34 million last year, nearly 800 times more than the median Tyson worker, the company cites a historic 75-year low in the U.S. cattle herd as a primary reason for the closure.We speak to Caitlyn Clark, director of the group Essential Workers for Democracy, which is working to institute democratic reforms within the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), a labor union that represents more than a million workers across the United States. These workers include the former Tyson plant meatpackers, who worked in some of the most dangerous jobs in America" while making billions of dollars in profit for Tyson." Clark ascribes the U.S. cattle shortage to climate change-induced drought in the American West, rising prices for diesel and fertilizer amid the U.S. war on Iran and years of corporate consolidation that has driven down profits for cattle ranchers.Since they were suddenly laid off, former Joslin plant workers have been protesting outside the shuttered plant, calling on Tyson to extend their severance pay, and calling on Illinois Governor JB Pritzker to intervene to help keep the plant open," Clark tells us. We need to take on the bosses and be serious about the level of inequality and exploitation that working people are facing today," she adds. Working people need more, they deserve more, and they're ready to fight for it. It's time that our union leadership catch up."