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  • The Trial of Gisèle Pelicot’s Rapists United France and Fractured Her Family

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    “Yes, that’s me, it’s my bedroom,” she said. “I never sleep like that.” She was struck by how floppy her cheek was. She told Perret, “I don’t know where I am anymore.”

    He showed her another photo, of a man in her bedroom with graying hair and a tattoo. “Do you recognize this location?” he asked.

    “Who is this guy?” she said. “I never wanted to have sex with him.”

    When he mentioned a Skype username that her husband had used to communicate with her rapists, she said, “You’re speaking Chinese to me.”

    Perret asked if she wanted to press charges. Her husband, he explained, had kept a list of more than fifty people in the past decade who’d raped her while she was unconscious. The thought of pressing charges hadn’t occurred to Gisèle, but she said yes.

    An officer drove Gisèle home while Dominique stayed at the police station. “I got caught up in a vicious cycle,” he confessed. “I realized that, with sleeping pills, it was very easy to get what I wanted, which I couldn’t get otherwise, which was normal, because it wasn’t her way of life.” He said that he had ruined his family. He was disgusted with himself. “I had fantasies that gradually came true, and I wanted to take them further,” he said.

    When Gisèle got home, she put a load of laundry into the washing machine. Then she asked her closest friend in Mazan to come over. As she waited, she hung Dominique’s boxers and pajamas on a clothesline in her garden. It was good that the sun was out, she thought—his clothes would dry quickly. She did some ironing and vacuumed the bedrooms.

    The next morning, her three children—David, Caroline, and Florian—came from Paris to the police station to meet with Perret, who filled them in on his investigation. As Gisèle drove with them back to Mazan, she felt relieved that there was leftover pumpkin soup in the refrigerator that she could serve for dinner. But her children were not interested in sitting down for a meal. Caroline, who was forty-one and a communications manager, said that the house suddenly looked uglier and older, and she no longer liked the smell. She and her brothers started going through her father’s drawers, where they discovered unpaid bills. A few hours later, Perret called Caroline and asked her to return to the station. He realized that he’d recognized her face. At the station, an officer showed her two photographs of her asleep in bed. In both pictures, she was lying on her side, her underwear exposed. “It should be noted that Mme. Caroline Pelicot is shaking and informs us that she feels very ill,” the officer wrote. “Let us suspend the meeting.”

    When Caroline returned to the house, she later wrote, her mother looked up at her “casually, as if I’d just come back from a pleasant walk.” David, the oldest child, who works in marketing, had always credited his father with giving him “a good education, values, a backbone.” He told me, “I decided very quickly to erase this man from my memory.” He and Florian put Dominique’s belongings in trash bags, and drove to the dump. They made ten trips. Caroline destroyed framed photographs and art on the walls, as well as a trunk of family photo albums. “I think my mother resented me for that—for being in that kind of frenzy,” Caroline said later. Gisèle remembers telling Caroline, “Don’t break everything, please. There are things I’d like to keep.” Of all her children, Caroline was the one that Gisèle struggled with the most. “She’s one of those highly strung people who love and lose their temper in the same breath,” Gisèle writes in her new memoir, “A Hymn to Life.” “She seems to have been filled since childhood with a feeling of insecurity that I have never really understood or been able to soothe.”

    As a child, Caroline considered her father “more motherly than my mother,” she said. She described him as a “dad who listened, who came to see me in my room, who sat on the edge of my bed and said, ‘But, Caroline, you can’t say that—you can’t behave like that.’ ” He helped all three of his children with their homework, played soccer with them, and cooked for the family. After Caroline had her own child, she and her husband, Pierre, spent a few weeks every summer with her parents. In the evenings, they drank cocktails and played Trivial Pursuit and sometimes stayed up until 1 A.M. talking. “I adored this man,” Pierre said later. Florian’s wife, Aurore, was similarly struck by the family’s rapport. “I remember telling my husband that they were U.F.O.s,” she said. “I, who came from a complicated family with taboos, arrived in a loving, demonstrative family. For me, it was a bit like the ideal family.”

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    Rachel Aviv

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  • Did a Celebrated Researcher Obscure a Baby’s Poisoning?

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    After a newborn died of opioid poisoning, a new branch of pediatrics came into being. But the evidence doesn’t add up.

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    Ben Taub

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  • Peter Navarro, Trump’s Ultimate Yes-Man

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    That phrase is at the heart of the free-trade lexicon. Free trade in goods or services, unencumbered by tariffs or other barriers, is likely to lead to greater total output than if there had been no trade. Specialization makes economic sense: not every country should grow its own peppers. (Years ago, Navarro described this as “one of the deepest truths in all of economics.” He now refers to “so-called gains from trade.”)

    In Cambridge, Navarro needed to produce a dissertation about the economics of corporate charitable giving. Dubin needed to pay his rent. (“I was a poor student, and he was rehabbing a triplex in Central Square.”) Money changed hands. “He told me the direction he wanted to go, and I helped him get there, theoretically and empirically,” Dubin said. “I might have used his data to set up models and get him going. And then he took over at some point and it became his own.” Dubin, speaking half seriously, described this as “one of my first consulting experiences.” He observed that “most people, at that level, would not pay someone else to help them.” But Navarro saw nothing improper in the exchange, and neither did Dubin.

    The two men become close friends. “We went to the Cape together,” Dubin said. “We double-dated.” They also co-wrote several papers. Dubin remembers that Navarro, who was “very into his health, into his body,” was an enthusiast of dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), a gooey, unregulated byproduct of the paper industry that purportedly soothes muscle strains. According to Dubin, Navarro wasn’t immune to the substance’s notorious side effect: “He reeked of garlic because of it.” (Navarro told me that, today, he doesn’t “drink, smoke pot, use any hard drugs or even prescription medicines,” adding, “Just not my thing. Live clean or die.”)

    Navarro’s dissertation, submitted in 1986, doesn’t acknowledge Dubin’s contributions. According to every economist I asked, that omission constitutes an academic violation. Harry Holzer, a public-policy professor at Georgetown, told me that, if someone “is actually developing his models for him, I think it crosses a boundary.” Holzer, who served as the chief economist at the Department of Labor during the Clinton Administration, is a former Harvard acquaintance of Navarro’s. “At a minimum, a footnote acknowledging a person’s input is appropriate,” Holzer said.

    Lawrence Goulder, the sole surviving member of Navarro’s dissertation committee, agrees. If Navarro received substantial help, he told me, then some recognition of that would have been “expected,” and its absence was “inappropriate.” (Goulder, who’s now at Stanford, noted that, at Harvard, Navarro had taught him to windsurf.)

    Navarro, asked if he’d engaged in an academic deceit, said, of Dubin, “I don’t recall him providing any substantive assistance on my dissertation.” Navarro also pointed to other publications in which he had thanked Dubin for his help.

    Later in life, Peter Navarro introduced readers of his books to a friend named Ron Vara. According to “If It’s Raining in Brazil, Buy Starbucks,” a 2001 book of financial advice that urged retail investors to be alert to world events, Vara had been the captain of a reserve unit at the time of the Gulf War. He now lived on a houseboat in Miami and was known as the Dark Prince of Disaster, for making “macroplays”—trades taking nimble advantage of sudden onsets of human misery. Vara had macroplayed Hurricane Andrew and a Taiwanese earthquake. In 1986, when Vara was a “struggling doctoral student in economics at Harvard,” he’d apparently been clairvoyant: two days before the Chernobyl disaster, he’d shorted companies invested in nuclear energy.

    Vara appears in several other Navarro books, including “Death by China,” where he’s quoted as saying, “Only the Chinese can turn a leather sofa into an acid bath, a baby crib into a lethal weapon, and a cell phone battery into heart-piercing shrapnel.” Vara was also credited as the executive producer (and the musical director) of the videos that Navarro showed to his Rising China class at U.C. Irvine.

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    Ian Parker

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  • Can Trump’s Peace Initiative Stop the Congo’s Thirty-Year War?

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    “What kind of power?” I asked.

    “All kinds of power,” he said and smiled.

    In June, when Trump announced that he had brought peace to eastern Congo, he described it as “a glorious triumph.” But the M23 had not agreed to disband. A militia spokesman told the Associated Press, “We are in Goma with the population, and we are not going to get out.”

    A Western diplomat in the region told me that the M23 seemed to be attempting to set down permanent roots in North Kivu. They had upended the traditional system of justice, administered by tribal chiefs. After registries of property deeds were burned during the fighting, the M23 had simply handed out land to people it favored.

    Taking Goma had given the M23 control of a vast arsenal left behind by the defeated Congolese Army—as much as a third of the country’s military equipment, the diplomat said. The militia had also acquired an estimated twelve thousand new troops, many of them captured government soldiers who were either enticed or forced to serve. “The M23 have never enjoyed this level of control before,” the diplomat said. “The risk for them is they now have fallen into the same trap as the D.R.C. government—having to administer the territory they control.”

    If the M23’s stewardship of North Kivu is a test case for running the country, it is not encouraging. Patrick Muyaya, the D.R.C.’s minister of communication, told me that electricity and banking services had lapsed in Goma, while the “ethnic cleansing of Hutus” had continued. In July, according to the U.N., M23 fighters massacred more than three hundred civilians in a group of frontline villages about forty miles from town. “Every day, there is killing,” Muyaya said. “The people running that part of the country—the only thing they know is crime.”

    An hour’s drive northwest of Goma, across a vast moonscape of black lava, is a shambolic roadside community called Sake. For several years before the fall of Goma, it was a frontline town in the fight between the M23 and government forces. Displaced people’s tents, made from plastic sheeting supplied by N.G.O.s, are pitched alongside abandoned homesites, many of them burned to their foundations. The settlement is dug into jagged rock around a Catholic church, the Miséricorde Divine.

    The priest, a burly man with wary eyes, explained that he had been appointed to Sake in 2023, when the Wazalendo were entrenched there. As the M23 moved in, he said, it captured several hundred Hutu refugees and forcibly trucked them away. The church was looted and burned, and the town became “like bush,” he said, with almost no inhabitants remaining. “We had to start from zero again.”

    Gradually, people had returned, but they struggled to sustain themselves, and attacks continued. Some drivers for a relief agency had been kidnapped during a visit to the priest’s compound, so no one stayed overnight at the church anymore. When I asked if he slept there, he retorted, “How could I leave? I’m the priest.” But many of the civilians were packing up and heading to Goma. “They think it’s an oasis of peace,” he said wryly. Along with the threat of violence in Goma, there was a shortage of food, because the farmers who supplied the city had fled their land. The priest said that he was forty years old and had known nothing but conflict in his life. With a disgusted look, he said, “I’m very tired of fighting, and I call upon the leaders to end it.”

    The Presidents of Congo and Rwanda have spent much of the past year trading insults. Tshisekedi has likened Kagame to Hitler and declared, “One thing is responsible for this situation, and that is Rwandan aggression.” Kagame tends to be cutting, rather than blunt. When Tshisekedi threatened to send his air force to strike Rwanda, Kagame responded, “Tshisekedi is capable of everything except measuring the consequences of what he says.”

    The son of Tutsi exiles to Uganda, Kagame served as an intelligence officer in the Ugandan Army before returning to lead the Rwandan Patriotic Front. As President, he has been the subject of both praise and condemnation abroad. He is a ruthless strategist capable of waging bloody wars, but he has also fostered a remarkable program to reintegrate tens of thousands of former génocidaires into Rwandan society. He has been accused of many authoritarian acts, including assassinating political opponents, but he has turned his country into a regional powerhouse, with a disciplined army that has been deployed to aid embattled allies. “Rwanda has made itself an amazingly efficient place to work and do business in—as long as you stay in your lane,” a former State Department official told me. “You want to root for them. But, on the other hand, they have been responsible for several decades of horrific actions inside D.R.C.”

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    Jon Lee Anderson

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  • The Runaway Monkeys Upending the Animal-Rights Movement

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    The collaboration between certain MAGA influencers and animal-rights activists has drawn out the most confrontational tendencies within each camp. This summer, Loomer and White Coat Waste took aim at an unusual target: Nicole Kleinstreuer, a toxicologist who is spearheading the N.I.H.’s effort to expedite, of all things, the replacement of animals in regulatory testing and research. Under Kleinstreuer’s leadership, the agency has launched a new office to develop and validate alternatives to animal studies, such as computer simulations and “organ on a chip” technologies. Kleinstreuer has said that she wants to “create lasting change for animal-free science.” But because she has echoed the scientific consensus—namely that, in the meantime, some animals remain necessary—White Coat Waste has branded her an enemy of progress and a “Fauci-loving ‘animal testing czar.’ ” Kleinstreuer, who subsequently received harassing messages and death threats online, has required security protection.

    White Coat Waste’s criticism of Kleinstreuer has set it apart from the broader animal-rights movement. (“Have they lost their fucking minds?” Lisa Jones-Engel, the PETA scientist, said.) It is far from the only group, however, peddling the claim that an immediate end to animal research would be not only ethically justified but scientifically sound. This absolutist framing elides the fact that, though non-animal methods are highly effective in certain areas—such as skin sensitivity and eye irritation—they cannot replicate the complexity of living, functioning organisms, especially in efforts to understand whole-body reactions, neurochemistry, and progressive disease. Monkeys remain critical, not least for vaccine development and studying reproductive health. As an N.I.H. official wrote in a letter to members of White Coat Waste’s board, “True progress in this area cannot occur overnight—it takes time, and pretending otherwise is misleading, counterproductive, and dangerous.”

    Pretending otherwise, though, holds greater emotional appeal. “People want the idea that we don’t need animals anymore to be true because they love animals,” Heather Sidener, a former head of clinical medicine at the Oregon National Primate Research Center, said. “They haven’t really had the hard conversation with themselves about, What if it was my husband? What if it was my child? Would I really say to them, ‘I think you should die because I don’t think we should use animals to see if this new medicine is safe’?” Cindy Buckmaster, a scientist and a former chair of Americans for Medical Progress, an advocacy group for animal research, told me that when we no longer need lab animals it will be the “happiest day of my life”—but that, until then, researchers should insure that each animal they do use is made to count. “The way we view animals has changed a lot in the past twenty years,” she said, “and we need to own up to our shortcomings.”

    After his disillusionment, Gluck, the primate researcher, retrained as an ethicist. In this role, he often finds himself giving lectures on the moral quandaries posed by his past career. Though his audience sometimes looks to him for prescriptions, he tends to avoid TED-talk bromides and ten-point plans, emphasizing, instead, his epistemic humility. There is still so much we don’t know about monkeys—but what we do know, he contends, should make scientists worry that the conditions of captivity are damaging their research. “The primary question we have to be concerned with is: how do we do this differently?” he told me recently. “Who are these animals? What is their life like? How can you create an environment that is least abusive?” Recognizing that animals are complex beings, with complex needs, may not only reduce their suffering but also yield better science.

    A few weeks after my trip to Yemassee, the remaining macaques were apprehended after trappers noticed their footprints in some freshly fallen snow. Westergaard announced that the monkeys were healthy, safe, and celebrating their reunion. PETA had its doubts. Someone in town had told the activists that a monkey had been hit by a car, and the group was now demanding that Alpha Genesis provide “proof of life.” On Facebook, Westergaard thanked the people of Yemassee for their support during the recapture mission. “As for PETA,” he added, “they can go f*** themselves.”

    Throughout the year, Westergaard did not respond to my texts, calls, voice mails, or e-mails; when I visited his office to request an interview, security escorted me off the premises. Neither he nor his company responded to questions about animal-welfare violations and allegations of negligence. Meanwhile, he continued to spar with PETA online. At one point, he denounced the documents that it had released from Strickland as part of a “misinformation campaign” that sought “to erode public trust in critical research institutions.” This seemed curious, since Westergaard had spent much of the spring and summer cozying up to an Administration that routinely attacked such institutions. In May, after Alpha Genesis passed its most recent U.S.D.A. inspections without any citations, Westergaard announced his company’s unwavering support for Trump’s Make America Healthy Again initiative. “We believe that cutting-edge science and compassionate care go hand-in-hand,” he said, adding that the recent inspection results reflected “the organization’s proactive, professional approach to research and animal husbandry.” One of his press releases featured an A.I.-generated illustration of three grinning macaques in MAHA baseball caps. Another euphemistically described the axe that the Administration has taken to the scientific enterprise as “programmatic changes in research priorities.” That these “programmatic changes” threaten to demolish not just animal research but one of its crowning achievements—the reduction of childhood illness and death through vaccination—went unmentioned.

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    Ava Kofman

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  • The Cocaine Kingpin Living Large in Dubai

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    Most of the Super Cartel’s top members have since been brought to justice. Taghi was arrested in Dubai in 2019 and deported to the Netherlands, whose ports have become drug-trafficking hubs. He stood trial and was sentenced to life in prison, in a courthouse so heavily fortified that it is known as the Bunker. (Despite the security precautions, the brother and the lawyer of a state’s witness, as well as the Dutch crime journalist Peter R. de Vries, were murdered during the proceedings.) Gačanin was arrested in Dubai in 2022, as part of a transnational effort known as Operation Desert Light. The next year, he was convicted by a Dutch court; Gačanin later made a deal with prosecutors in which he was sentenced to seven years in prison and forced to pay a million-euro fine. Riquelme is also imprisoned in the Netherlands; he was sentenced to eleven years. Imperiale was apprehended in 2021 and later deported to Italy, where he is now incarcerated.

    But Kinahan—who, through his lawyer, declined to comment for this article—remains at large in Dubai. In April, 2022, the Kinahan Organized Crime Group was sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which compared the group to “Mexico’s Los Zetas, Japan’s Yakuza and Russia’s ‘Thieves In Law.’ ” The U.S. Ambassador to Ireland announced that a five-million-dollar reward would be given for tips leading to the arrest of Kinahan; his father, Christy Kinahan, Sr.; or his brother, Christy Kinahan, Jr. But, according to a former D.E.A. agent, American law enforcement cared about only one Kinahan. As the agent put it, “It’s all about Dan.”

    Portlaoise Prison, which is in the center of Ireland, is a nineteenth-century penitentiary built like a fortress—a one-star establishment, at best. In 1997, twenty years before the Dubai wedding, Christy Kinahan, Sr., was imprisoned in a rodent-infested block called the E Wing. Inmates slept one to a cell and urinated in buckets.

    Kinahan, Sr., grew up in a middle-class family in Dublin. He became involved in petty crime at a young age, initially check fraud. Well-dressed, and able to affect a refined Anglo-Irish accent, Kinahan, Sr., was an adept con man. All criminals love nicknames, but the Irish do them best: the Penguin, the Viper, Fatso. Kinahan, Sr., became the Dapper Don.

    In the late seventies, heroin began ravaging Dublin’s inner-city projects. A man named Larry Dunne was the city’s first godfather of heroin importers, but he was jailed in 1985. Kinahan, Sr., seeing a business opportunity, filled the gap. A sharp young detective, Michael O’Sullivan, noticed him. “There was somebody new in the market, and it just didn’t fit,” O’Sullivan told me. “Often, people in the heroin business get messy. They know the heroin trade because they use heroin.” But, in O’Sullivan’s opinion, Kinahan, Sr., wasn’t a dope fiend, and he ran an efficient business.

    One day in 1986, O’Sullivan disguised himself as an electrician and followed Kinahan, Sr., to his apartment, where he caught him with a large quantity of heroin. The police later found other contraband, as well as various language-studies cassettes—Kinahan, Sr., was teaching himself French and Arabic. He was convicted of heroin possession, jailed for six years, and released in 1992. Months later, he was caught with stolen checks. The arresting officer told me that Kinahan, Sr., was an “impressive, kind of intelligent guy—no aggression.” After the arrest, Kinahan, Sr., was granted bail, then vanished.

    “Here’s your problem.”

    Cartoon by Edward Steed

    By the mid-nineties, Irish organized crime had outgrown the country’s policing capacity. Drugs were pouring in; kidnappings and bank jobs were being perpetrated with seeming impunity. In 1996, a crime journalist, Veronica Guerin, was shot dead by a member of a gang that she’d covered, the Gilligans. The public outrage that followed led the Irish government to establish the Criminal Assets Bureau, which allowed lawmakers to seize money and property from convicted criminals.

    The formation of the bureau, however, had an unintended consequence: it turned some Irish criminals into international potentates. Many Dublin mobsters moved to Amsterdam, which at the time was not unlike the cantina in “Star Wars”: a place where an assortment of major villains could freely hang out, exchange contacts, and collaborate. Kinahan, Sr., became one such expat. Another was John Cunningham, who’d been jailed, in 1986, on a kidnapping charge; he’d escaped from a prison south of Dublin in 1996. Cunningham and Kinahan, Sr., began working together, transporting heroin, cannabis, cocaine, Ecstasy, and guns to Ireland. During the same period, the Dutch police caught Kinahan, Sr., with a cache of drugs and weapons, and imprisoned him for a year. Upon serving his sentence, he went back to work. In 1997, Kinahan, Sr., returned to Ireland to attend his father’s funeral, where he was arrested for the check fraud that had led him to skip bail four years earlier. He wound up in Portlaoise.

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    Ed Caesar

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  • The Hague on Trial

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    It was “humiliating” to be called “a Mossad plant,” she told Khan, according to a recording she made of the call. “I have basically lost any friend that I did have at the court. . . . I don’t know where to look anymore. . . . I just think it’s time for me to go.”

    Khan warned her more than once of “wolves around us.” The call lasted an hour, and during it he asked six times if she was recording their conversation. (She lied and said no.) But his tone was supportive; he encouraged her to take the time off that she needed, and to get continued pay through medical leave. Occasionally, he sounded confident that he was innocent of any misconduct, reminding her repeatedly that it was her choice if she wanted to initiate a more comprehensive investigation, including of him. “The truth will come out,” he assured her. Yet, at other moments, he sounded anxious that she might pursue a complaint against him. He told her that speculation about this was “keeping things alive,” and he urged her to formally clarify that she had no intention of accusing him of inappropriate behavior. “Then it’s well and truly over,” he said, and the I.C.C. could end the “feeding frenzy” by telling journalists, “Fuck off now—leave her alone.”

    “Things are being pushed,” Khan told her, by forces out to “get rid of the warrants for Palestine, get rid of the warrants for Russia, get rid of the whole court.” Khan and the Malaysian woman were both married, and he warned her that a misconduct scandal would not only harm the woman and her family, and Khan and his family. The “casualties” would also include “the justice of the victims that now, finally, are on the cusp of progress.”

    Ninety minutes after the call ended, an anonymous X account began leaking details from the same secondhand report that had been included in the anonymous e-mail. Stories appeared in the media, including an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, on October 23, 2024, which reported that the woman had accused Khan of “locking her into his office and sexually touching her,” making “visits to her hotel room in the middle of the night, demanding to be let in,” and “claiming to have a headache and lying on her hotel bed, sexually touching her.” A few weeks later, the I.C.C.’s governing body requested an external investigation. By the time the U.N. began one, the woman was levelling an even more serious allegation: that Khan had repeatedly forced her into “coercive” sex. (Khan, who has denied any misconduct, declined requests for an interview.)

    Selective leaks from the ambiguous phone call—in particular, Khan’s references to Palestinians and other victims being “on the cusp of progress”—have improbably bound together the woman’s allegation of sexual abuse with the international power struggle over the Israeli arrest warrants. Khan and his lawyers have contended that Netanyahu and his allies are exploiting a vulnerable woman in order to discredit the case against the Israeli leaders. Netanyahu, in turn, has repeatedly claimed that Khan sought the warrants only to divert attention from the woman’s charges.

    Indeed, in a video interview in August with Breitbart, Netanyahu accused Khan of an elaborate scheme, claiming that, when Khan learned about the woman’s allegations, “he said, ‘I’m ruined. I have to get out of this somehow,’ so he decided the best way to get out of that was to hit the Jews, or to hit the Prime Minister of the Jewish state.” Dismissing the I.C.C. as “a completely corrupt organization,” and describing the female accuser as a Malaysian hostile to Israel, Netanyahu charged, without evidence, that the court had told her, “Listen, it’s more important to falsely accuse Israel of these war crimes than for your charges to be heard.”

    “Long story short: ‘Fred,’ I said, ‘what good are monkey bars without monkeys?’ ”

    Cartoon by Michael Maslin

    The Trump Administration and Netanyahu allies in the Republican-led U.S. Congress have seized on the sexual-abuse allegations as part of a broader defense of Netanyahu and Gallant against the I.C.C. charges. Six days after the October 17th call and leak, Senator Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, announced that the woman’s claims had put “a moral cloud” over Khan’s decision to seek the warrants. President Trump, in a statement, has accused the court of “illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and our close ally Israel” which constitute “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” The U.S. has now sanctioned Khan, his two deputies, and several I.C.C. judges—freezing their assets, blocking their access to the U.S. financial system, and restricting their ability to enter the country. Several I.C.C. staffers with American ties resigned.

    The international uproar over the sexual-abuse charges culminated in an article this spring in the Wall Street Journal, which reported the woman’s allegations and strongly suggested that Khan had sought the warrants as a tactical deflection. Six days later, Khan took a leave of absence that brought the work of the court to a virtual standstill.

    The attempt to link the sexual-assault allegations and the Israeli warrants is at odds with many facts. Khan’s pursuit of the warrants was hardly new or secret. A team of lawyers in the prosecutor’s office had worked for several months on an investigation of Israel’s assault on Gaza. Because accusing Israel of grave misdeeds was so explosive—Khan described it to Amanpour as “the San Andreas Fault of international politics and strategic interests”—he had also, in January, 2024, made the unorthodox choice to solicit a second opinion from an outside panel of experts.

    That panel included two former judges who had overseen international criminal tribunals, a former legal adviser to the British Foreign Office, and Amal Clooney, a British Lebanese human-rights lawyer and the wife of George Clooney. They concluded that there was sufficient evidence for charges of war crimes or crimes against humanity on both sides of the Gaza conflict, including at the top of the Israeli chain of command. The lawyers inside the I.C.C. prosecutor’s office agreed. The Hamas-led attack on October 7th had killed about twelve hundred people in Israel, including at least eight hundred civilians, and taken some two hundred and fifty hostages. By May, 2024, the Israeli assault on Gaza had killed upward of thirty-five thousand people, many of them women or children. According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, at least thirty-two Palestinians, including twenty-eight children, had died of malnutrition or starvation at Gaza’s hospitals. An internationally recognized panel of experts was warning that more than a million Gazans could soon face catastrophic hunger. (The reported death toll has now exceeded sixty-six thousand; at least four hundred and fifty people have died of malnutrition or starvation, including a hundred and fifty-one children.)

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    David D. Kirkpatrick

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  • Have Cubans Fled One Authoritarian State for Another?

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    The following week, I drove west from Miami toward the Gulf of Mexico—Trump’s “Gulf of America.” After the last row of strip malls and subdivisions, the Everglades took over, in a vast, hot expanse of subtropical wetland. In the Miccosukee Indian Reservation, I passed shacks where tourists take airboat rides into the swamp to see alligators.

    I was accompanied by Thomas Kennedy, a policy analyst at the Florida Immigrant Coalition. Kennedy is thirty-four, the son of Argentineans who came to the U.S. on tourist visas and stayed. After spending much of his childhood as an undocumented immigrant, he became a citizen, and has made migration issues his life’s work. A few days earlier, he had joined a group of Democratic state legislators who drove out to inspect Alligator Alcatraz and were refused entry by officials there. “What they told them was that they didn’t have the right to enter, and also that it was for their own protection,” Kennedy recalled. One of the legislators pointed out that it had been safe enough for the President of the United States. The officials still declined to let them in.

    As the road extended into the deeper wilderness of Big Cypress National Preserve, signs marked the entrance to the prison. Turning off, we stopped at a roadblock guarded by two armed officers in flak jackets. One of the guards told us that unauthorized visitors were forbidden, but she was willing to talk for a few minutes. Her face was red in the heat, and she acknowledged that the swamp was not the most comfortable place to stand guard. But she couldn’t complain, she said—she had plenty of drinking water, sunscreen, and bug repellent.

    The inmates were less well cared for. Kennedy was in touch with a Cuban woman whose son, a severe asthmatic, had been held in Alligator Alcatraz for a week, and was transferred only after his health significantly declined. Another Cuban man had been brought in with acute hemorrhoids; he was eventually taken away for surgery, then immediately returned to detention, despite being in constant pain. Kennedy said that it was difficult to keep track of detainees, because many were being transferred to prisons in Louisiana and Texas, but the cases of abuse were piling up. A fifteen-year-old boy had been held for a week before anyone realized that he was underage; another detainee who went on hunger strike had been chained up on the airstrip for several hours in the sun. (D.H.S. denies allegations of inhumane conditions.)

    By the entry, vans with tinted windows pulled in to deliver more detainees. Kennedy gestured toward a spot in the swamp where he’d seen alligators lounging when he visited with the legislators. The prison was intended to hold migrants who had committed crimes, but, according to the Miami Herald, only a third of the inmates had criminal records in the U.S. Kennedy pointed out that Alligator Alcatraz existed in a legal limbo: the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, and the State of Florida had all eschewed responsibility for the facility. “Lawyers still have no idea where to turn to file their cases,” he said. “It’s a concentration camp. It operates outside any judicial framework, where people are put into a legal loophole from which there is no recourse.”

    Later, Kennedy introduced me to Betty Osceola, a Miccosukee activist who was a prominent voice of opposition to Alligator Alcatraz. She told me that the abuses at the prison were obvious, but that no one in power seemed to care. “I’ve been trying to get people to listen, including local legislators,” she said. “Unfortunately, in Florida and across the U.S., the toxicity is such that, if you just talk about the human issues, they tune you out.” Instead, she and her allies had been raising concerns about the ecosystem. The prison, she pointed out, had been installed in the middle of a national preserve without an environmental-impact study. “What they’re doing to people there is not right, but it’s also affecting the panthers, the wood storks, and the fireflies, because of the light pollution,” she said. Given the number of violations, Osceola seemed astonished that the government had been allowed even to start construction: “If they had been any other group or individual, they’d have been arrested.”

    In August, a federal judge ordered the prison to be vacated on environmental grounds. As DeSantis complained of “an activist judge that is trying to do policy from the bench,” the state filed an appeal and secured a stay in the ruling. Still, inmates were hastily transferred to other facilities. Some went to Fort Bliss, in Texas, or to a prison in northern Florida called Deportation Depot. Others were sent to Miami’s Krome Detention Center—another facility that has been the site of disquieting incidents. In late June, a seventy-five-year-old Cuban American man died there, apparently of heart failure. He had been in the U.S. since the age of sixteen.

    From Miami, I spoke by phone with one of the women who were arrested in Las Cañas after the incident with Morejón. Alina, as she asked to be called, is fifty-five, the mother of a grown daughter and son. She had served three years of hard labor, working on a banana plantation and cleaning an office.

    Alina described Morejón as a “disgraceful human being,” but said that he did not seem to have suffered for his offenses or for trying to flee to the U.S. Since being deported back to Cuba, he had returned to Las Cañas. “We hear he’s going to be put in charge of a shop next to the slaughterhouse,” she said. In the years since the protests, Las Cañas had acquired a new police station, whose officers circulate frequently through the community in squad cars. “They want to send a message that if anyone ever thinks of doing anything like that again, they will go to prison for a long time,” she said. This summer, the state-owned telecommunications agency abruptly raised the price of data plans across the country, in what was seen as an attempt to stem the flow of information.

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    Jon Lee Anderson

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  • Enemies of the State

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    A few months after their arrival, Moises, a skilled electrician and handyman, earned enough money to pay a sixteen-hundred-dollar deposit on a one-bedroom apartment. He worked two jobs—on a construction crew, from seven in the morning till three in the afternoon, and at a pizzeria, from four till midnight—but the money he earned barely covered other costs such as food and a used car, without which he couldn’t get to work. That spring, the family learned that cheaper apartments were available at a housing complex in Aurora, a city of four hundred thousand people outside Denver.

    The property, on Dallas Street, was an unsightly cluster of brick buildings, each with a run-down interior courtyard. The problems began shortly after the family moved in. There were infestations of mice, bedbugs, and cockroaches. In the winter, the heat didn’t work. One evening, Moises and Carmen returned home from dinner to find the entire apartment flooded from a leak in the ceiling. The lobby doors wouldn’t close, because of busted locks. At night, the entranceway filled with homeless people who came inside to sleep; addicts smoked fentanyl in unoccupied apartments.

    “O.K. . . . we take a bite, we get the definitive explanation for why we’re all here and what happens afterward, then we go back to relaxing and hanging out.”

    Cartoon by Maddie Dai

    The complex’s management company, CBZ, which owned nine properties in the Denver area, had been receiving regular complaints and citations for building-code violations since 2020. The owners of CBZ, brothers from Brooklyn named Shmaryahu and Zev Baumgarten, had expanded their holdings to Colorado around the time that a tenant-protection law passed in New York in 2019. The legislation, Maureen Tkacik wrote in The American Prospect, “triggered a landlord diaspora toward more permissive regions.” But, even in Denver, CBZ racked up tens of thousands of dollars in penalties. (CBZ did not respond to a request for comment.)

    At the Dallas Street property, small cliques of armed men, mostly Venezuelans and Mexicans, fought an ongoing turf war. Some of them, according to Moises and Carmen, moved friends and family into the building. These apartments, the residents said, were tomados, or taken over. Many of the tenants were forced to pay a tax known as a vacuna, or vaccine, because it inoculated them from harassment. “You couldn’t come back late, because you didn’t know what you were going to find,” Moises said. “The guys had weapons.”

    Between 2022 and 2024, the Denver metropolitan area received more new immigrants, per capita, than anywhere else in the country—some forty thousand, the vast majority of them from Venezuela. At first, the Venezuelans found their own way to the city. But beginning in May of 2023, around twenty thousand Venezuelans arrived on a fleet of buses chartered by Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, who claimed that his state had been “invaded.” Many residents were unnerved by the sudden arrival of so many people. Venezuelans washed car windows for tips at stoplights and congregated in the parking lots of Home Depot and other stores, looking for work. “You wouldn’t see it, and then all of a sudden it was all you’d see,” a Mexican pastor of a local ministry told me.

    Certain events contributed to the impression that the city had lost control of its newest residents. On July 28, 2024, thousands of people gathered in the parking lot of a Target in Aurora to celebrate what was widely forecast to be the defeat of the Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in that day’s election. Many of the Venezuelans I met in Aurora had been there, including Moises and Carmen, who painted their car in yellow, blue, and red, the colors of the Venezuelan flag. Maduro appeared to lose the election but claimed victory anyway, and protests erupted in Venezuela. In Aurora, some of the attendees became drunk and rowdy. Someone fired gunshots into the air. “It allowed people to see a whole cross-section of the Venezuelans in Aurora,” Jesús Sánchez Meleán, the editor of El Comercio de Colorado, the state’s most prominent Spanish-language newspaper, told me. “The families who came out to celebrate, and others who were up to no good.”

    That same day, a gunfight broke out at a CBZ residence on Nome Street, injuring three people. By then, the city of Aurora was already planning to condemn the property. The three to four hundred people who lived there were given a week’s notice to vacate the premises. CBZ, meanwhile, was delinquent on a series of loan payments and mired in lawsuits. The company began to argue that Tren de Aragua members had prevented it from maintaining the property and collecting rent. On August 5th, journalists in the area received an e-mail from Red Banyan, a Florida-based public-relations company that CBZ had hired as part of its legal campaign. “An apartment building and its owners in Aurora, Colorado, have become the most recent victims of the Venezuelan Gang Tren de Aragua’s violence, which has taken over several communities in the Denver area,” the e-mail said. “The residents and building owners of these properties have been left in a state of fear and chaos.”

    On August 18th, Cindy Romero, an American tenant of CBZ’s Dallas Street property, recorded a video of six men with rifles storming a hallway in her building. The footage from her doorbell camera, which was later broadcast on the local news, went viral. Right-wing media seized on the story, using it to attack President Joe Biden. Danielle Jurinsky, a first-term city-council member, had been accusing the Aurora Police Department of failing to take the Venezuelan gang threat seriously. She visited the apartment complexes to interview residents and made regular appearances on Fox News. “It got to a point where I could identify a lot of these gang members myself,” she told me. Art Acevedo, then the chief of the Aurora Police Department, told me, “Was there Tren de Aragua presence? Yes. Were parts of the city overrun? Total hyperbole.” (All told, the Aurora Police Department has arrested ten people alleged of being tied to the gang.)

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    Jonathan Blitzer

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  • How a Billionaire Owner Brought Turmoil and Trouble to Sotheby’s

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    But the timing of Drahi’s acquisition of Sotheby’s was unfortunate. Six months after the deal was completed, the coronavirus pandemic shuttered the art market. The main auction houses, led by Sotheby’s, scrambled to take their business online, but public sales fell by around a third. Then, for a while, the good times roared back. But now the art market has become a stressed and anxious realm, enduring its first prolonged contraction in a generation.

    During the same period, Drahi’s broader business empire has experienced the worst crisis of his career. After amassing sixty billion dollars of debt, Altice was hit by rising interest rates while seeing indifferent performance by its brands on both sides of the Atlantic. In the summer of 2023, one of Drahi’s closest business partners was arrested following a corruption investigation. Altice USA’s shares currently trade for around $2.50, less than a tenth of their price in 2019.

    All the while, Sotheby’s has assumed a new, unstable identity: as both a billionaire’s indulgence and the subject of his latest corporate experiment. At a hearing in the French Senate in 2022, Drahi said that he did not buy Sotheby’s for power or influence. Instead, he intended to triple the value of his investment. “This is always the goal of the entrepreneur,” he said.

    For those caught up in the experiment, it has been torrid in the extreme. Since 2019, hundreds of employees have left Sotheby’s—up to a quarter of the workforce, according to some estimates—including dozens of specialists who bring in the consignments essential to the company’s bottom line. (Sotheby’s disputes this.) Last year, sales fell by twenty-three per cent. As the auction house has cut costs and shed staff, its holding company, which is controlled by Drahi, has extracted more than a billion dollars in dividends from the business—mainly to manage its debt load.

    Last fall, after a round of layoffs, Drahi sold a minority stake in Sotheby’s—close to a third of the company—to ADQ, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, for around a billion dollars. The move gave rise to speculation that he might sell the business outright. But people close to Drahi insist that he is more likely to give up his telecom holdings, at least in Europe, than to let go of Sotheby’s. “This is for his grandchildren,” the associate said.

    The question is what he will leave behind. Drahi and his team wouldn’t be the first, or the last, corporate titans to trip and stumble in the vagaries of the art market. “This is niche,” a leading New York art adviser told me. “And if you don’t get it, this is what happens. They’re not art people. And maybe they can never be art people.” But the other version is that Drahi is deliberately hollowing out one of the world’s great auction houses, turning it from an institution of taste and knowledge into something much closer to a generic platform that sets a price for things that have no price, taking a cut along the way. To make Sotheby’s more like everything else, in other words. “I think if he could automate this business, just put it online, take out all the people . . . that’s his goal,” a former director said. “It’s just pure money.” But was it ever about anything else?

    The word “auction” comes from the Latin auctio, which means “increase.” But it’s always been a bit more complicated than that. In the fifth century B.C.E., Herodotus described the Babylonian custom of selling girls for marriage. The more attractive ones were sold first, with ascending bids; then the process was turned on its head, with “the plainest” won by the suitor who would accept the smallest dowry. Auctions can be as varied as human desire. There are whispered auctions in Italy and simultaneous-yelling auctions in Japan. For years, cod was sold in the fish market at Hull, in northern England, by descending bids (the Dutch method) before switching to English, or ascending, bids later in the day. Seventeen miles downriver, in Grimsby, fish auctions worked the other way around.

    In 193 C.E., the Roman Empire was sold to the highest bidder, one Marcus Didius Julianus, giving rise to a memorable case of buyer’s remorse. “He passed a sleepless night; revolving most probably in his mind his own rash folly,” Edward Gibbon reflected. (Emperor Julianus was murdered two months later.) Auctions are built on an illusory symmetry of hope. Buyers sense a bargain, sellers hope for a war. What you want is validated because someone else wants it, too. Everyone believes in their own capacity to master the situation. In 1662, Samuel Pepys, the London diarist, watched three ships auctioned “by the candle” (the length of time it took a one-inch candle to melt) and noticed that one bidder was particularly successful: “He told me that just as the flame goes out, the smoke descends, which is a thing I never observed before, and by that he do know the instant when to bid last.”

    The task of the auctioneer is to dramatize the possibilities of the sale while attempting to control them at the same time. “To get the audience’s confidence right away, and after that to dominate it—in the nicest possible way,” Peter Wilson, a legendary Sotheby’s chairman, told this magazine, in 1966. Wilson, a former British intelligence officer, led the company’s expansion into the U.S. market and introduced the first evening sales—with ball gowns and television cameras—in the fifties. Even today, when people complain that much of the excitement of live bidding has disappeared, salesrooms at the major auction houses retain a singular atmosphere of politesse and extortion. Money is present like sin in church: sometimes its presence goes unsaid; sometimes it is the only thing being said.

    One Tuesday in early March, I stopped by Sotheby’s Modern and Contemporary Evening Auction in London. The equivalent sale in 2023 brought in more than two hundred million dollars and was led by a Wassily Kandinsky landscape that sold for forty-five million. This year, the top lot was a large, hypnotic study of a girl, “Cosmic Eyes (in the Milky Lake),” by the Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara, with an estimate of less than a quarter of that. The mood was brittle and unsure. Earlier in the day, tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump had unnerved global markets.

    A few minutes before the auction began, the walls were lined with Sotheby’s specialists, arranged sharply by the phones, while people in cashmere and expensive anoraks milled about. Oliver Barker, the company’s star auctioneer of the past decade, tucked in his shirt. Barker always looks happiest when the bidding is in “a new place,” which means that a fresh competitor has entered the fray. The rest of the time, he is more like a solicitous but firm personal trainer, asking for one more rep. “Give me six, please, Alex,” he said, not really asking, to Alex Branczik, a chairman of modern and contemporary art, who was wrangling the Nara’s lead bidder over the phone. Barker wanted another hundred thousand pounds. “It’s here at six million five hundred thousand,” Barker said. “Want to give me six?” Branczik gave him six.

    There were outbreaks of what the auction houses like to call “determined” or even “passionate” bidding. Lisa Brice’s “After Embah,” a bold, reddish mise en scène featuring a silhouette of Nicki Minaj, sold for £4.4 million, a record for the artist. A dark Alberto Burri, “Sacco e Nero 3,” from 1955, shot through its high estimate, to four million pounds. But most of the contests were thin and quick. A van Gogh drawing once owned by Taubman (“much loved at Sotheby’s here,” Barker said) sold on a single bid for less than its estimate. “Give me a bid, sir,” Barker pleaded, dropping the bid increments as he attempted to shift a large gray Christopher Wool canvas on the wall to his right. Again, Barker extracted a single offer, and again below the estimate. The Wool was sold in fifty-one seconds. In all, the evening sale—Sotheby’s first major auction of 2025—raised a little more than sixty million pounds, including fees, around forty per cent less than the previous year.

    Even people intimately involved with the big auction houses can’t figure out whether they are great or terrible businesses these days. Given that Sotheby’s charges a “buyer’s premium”—essentially a commission—of twenty-seven per cent on all lots up to a million dollars, and often a seller’s fee on top, the margins should be tremendous. “It’s never not been profitable,” the longtime employee insisted. It’s just that the profits are so much harder to come by. At the height of the eighties art boom, Sotheby’s made an annual profit of a hundred and thirteen million dollars. Twenty-five years later, in 2014, at the peak of the next wave, the auction house made just twenty-nine million dollars more—the price of a mid-range Basquiat.

    Part of the problem is the sheer expense of keeping the show on the road. Sotheby’s and Christie’s feel fancy because they are. Sotheby’s has premises in forty countries. At the time of the Drahi acquisition, it employed more than fifteen hundred people. The cost of parties, marketing, shipping, insurance, and the decorous administration of nearly five hundred sales a year only ever drifts one way. “You basically make profit in December,” a Paris-based art adviser who used to work for one of the big two told me. “Until November, you pay the fixed cost of the company.”

    A major auction house has many parts. “Sotheby’s is really three businesses, which had been run as one business,” a former employee who joined under Tad Smith told me. Since the late eighties, Sotheby’s has offered loans and other financial products, secured against art (in fact, anything that the auction house will sell) as collateral. When Drahi acquired the company, Sotheby’s Financial Services was lending around eight hundred million dollars a year.

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    Sam Knight

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