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  • ‘Is This Real?’: A Serbian Investigative Journalist Reflects on the Country’s Stunning Election

    ‘Is This Real?’: A Serbian Investigative Journalist Reflects on the Country’s Stunning Election

    Sunday’s election marked a turning point in Serbia, with the ruling SNS party of Aleksandar Vučić handed a resounding defeat by a student movement that capitalized on mounting public anger over years of corruption and criminality.

    Many of those abuses had been exposed by KRIK, an award-winning Serbian investigative outlet and OCCRP partner that has spent years covering the country’s criminals, its corrupt officials, and the connections between them. In return, its young journalists have withstood pressure most people can scarcely imagine: personal attacks by pro-government tabloids, an endless stream of lawsuits, and even death threats.

    Now, a new era is dawning. The seemingly unbreakable control exercised by Vučić — who served as information minister under dictator Slobodan Milošević — has been broken.

    In this interview, KRIK editor-in-chief Stevan Dojčinović reflects on what the last few days have meant for him, how the students did it, and what challenges lie ahead. As he spoke with OCCRP late at night, the sounds of celebration filtered in from the street.

    This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

    Stevan, what was it like on election day?

    First of all, I didn’t expect this. I’ve never experienced such energy on the street. It was so high energy, like everybody was happy. And you couldn’t find any Vučić supporters.

    Clearly, people were [openly] supporting the students, which was not the case before. Because, you know, Vučić was putting pressure on the media, and even on what people tweeted. So people were not really free to talk. But now, I went to my hometown, and there was all this energy in the street, and everything was bright.

    When I went to the voting site with my mother, I talked with the guys who were controlling the voting on the student side, and they showed me the numbers, and they were huge. I was there around noon, and an insane number of people had already turned out.

    In the end, almost 70 percent voted. There was never a case like this. Basically, Vučić can’t reach any new voters, so he was always fighting not to have a big turnout. So when it went up to 50 percent, you know, and then up to 70, it was done. It was completely clear.

    But I thought, and everybody was expecting, that he wouldn’t give up so easily. My idea was that he would do his best to rig the elections. Even with these big numbers, I thought he would just rig more and declare victory.

    And I thought, if this happened, it would be a nightmare. People would be on the street, and there would be violence, and somebody could die.

    When the electoral places were shut down, it was going in this direction. Because suddenly, Vučić started bringing a lot of armored riot police to the center of Belgrade. And, in parallel, which was a really bad signal, he started bringing these thugs, these criminals who protect him. They were coming in big numbers to meet in this park in front of the presidential building.

    And then it turned out that he lost by so much — like, half-a-million votes. And nobody can rig half-a-million. So, I believe what happened is that he figured out that nothing would work.

    When he started the press conference on election night, did you think he was about to say that he had really won?

    Yeah, I was expecting he would say he won, because of how the police and the hooligans [had been brought out]. But he immediately said, we lost. And when I heard this, I literally couldn’t believe it. Is this really happening? Is he serious?

    But it was real. And yet I didn’t even feel happy. I felt empty. I was like: Why do I not feel any euphoria?

    People started gathering in big numbers in the center of my hometown to celebrate. In every town, the whole center was full of people. I was going there to meet friends and celebrate. But I still had this kind of weird feeling. I really couldn’t enjoy it fully.

    I realized, I must have developed some PTSD. You know like when you’re kidnapped, and then you flee. And you can’t really celebrate and enjoy it. I was  like, okay, I need to process all of these 10 years of what was fucking going on and what he did to us.

    And, it was not only me. It’s interesting. Everyone who was around my age or older, it’s the same story. Especially for the people who fought against [Slobodan] Milošević in the 90s. They were like, I’m so empty. I feel like a victim who escaped, you know?

    So I thought, I need to process all of this shit. What happened during Vučić, what he did to us, and to journalists in general. It has been such a big trauma. I think he did it to the whole nation.

    Part of it is that he was always present. He was appearing on TV all the time. He was everywhere and putting pressure on everyone. Before the protests started [in 2024], that last year was really heavy. People were afraid to speak.

    But in the morning, I was finally okay. I woke up and I was happy.

    How’s the newsroom? Are your colleagues at KRIK relieved, now that the pressure on you guys will ease?

    All of us are happy. But we also feel like we’re in a parallel timeline. It’s like, is this real?

    We’re sitting in our office and talking freely. For 10 years, our rule was never to discuss any important stories in the office, because we understood that the secret service was spying on us all the time. We didn’t trust our office, it could have bugs. Usually we would go out to some place where we felt safe to discuss things.

    I never trusted my apartment in Belgrade. I was censoring what I could say in there. Because, I knew my apartment was definitely bugged. So you never really had a safe space where you could even talk.

    But, today, we can just sit, and we can really communicate in our office. It’s a completely different life than yesterday. And that was our first journalistic day of working in freedom.

    KRIK was founded in 2015. We were founded in Vučić’s time. And, every day we worked, it was in Vučić’s time. So now we’ll see what it’s like to work in freedom, which is something we never really had. So, it’s strange now, for everyone, this is new, new, new.

    If you had to boil down the reason for people’s dissatisfaction with Vučić, would you say corruption was the main thing?

    Yeah. He was connected to organized crime, but corruption was the first thing. You could feel the corruption, that’s the thing.

    Because people couldn’t get any jobs. Only members of his party could get jobs. People couldn’t start their own businesses. The financial inspectors would come and shut them down. But the party people can open businesses. So, people could really feel the corruption.

    Unfortunately, too, a lot of people died. When this rail station [in the city of Novi Sad] collapsed, people died.

    People didn’t just feel that they were losing money, that they weren’t living a good life. They saw people die, and that everybody who lives in Serbia could have been standing in that spot. In the end, they thought, we’re going to die because these people are stealing money.

    What did the student movement do? Is it correct to call them a student movement? Because, obviously, it’s not just students.

    Yeah, it’s not just students. Besides them, professors deserve credit, scientists, journalists, many others. But, still, the students were at the center of it. They’re the ones who started it.

    And, they’re the ones who now have a chance to make a political change. So, I mean, I still call it the students.

    Why do you think they succeeded? What happened this time that was different?

    I mean, there was no student movement before. When they started two years ago, they succeeded. The ones who didn’t succeed were the [traditional] opposition [parties in Serbia].

    I think this is a really good model for the world. It’s cool that, after Hungary, we have this in Serbia, a second big victory against the populist powers. I think that other populists are scared. I saw the tweets of AfD, the very extreme right-wing German party. They were tweeting, ‘now we lost Vučić. We need to rethink how we operate.’ This was their reaction to what happened in Serbia.

    So, I think this is a really good model. What you need is to have completely clean, uncompromised people. And part of [the problem in Serbia was] that the whole opposition were ‘old people’ — not by age, but people who already had some level of power. And they lost and then they tried to compete against Vučić.

    There were also a lot of connections between them. People felt that it was the same group of people. People understood that it’s not just about changing Vučić, you need to change the whole system. And they never felt the opposition were the ones [to do it].

    The opposition was really lousy. They never really went outside of Belgrade. They didn’t visit many Serbian villages — somewhere where you need to go to win. They were very elitist, which people didn’t like. And some people from the opposition were already in power, and had some scandals. So over the years, it looked like the opposition didn’t really have the power to take down Vučić.

    And then what happened is that the students were young, without any experience in politics, and completely clean. They didn’t have any history, any scandals. So the citizens trusted them. This was the first element that was really important: To have some new, fresh faces.

    The second element was that the students had this idea of unity, that all ideologies and politics should be put to the side. We needed now to have only one goal: to take down this corrupt and criminalized government.

    This is so powerful. And I agree with this, because also as a journalist, I believe that corruption is the first problem. And then we can talk: Are you in the center, more to the right, more to the left? Don’t do it now.

    Vučić was always trying to put them in a position to voice their opinions on different topics, because he knew that he needed to narrow them down. But if you look at their program, their program is anti-corruption. That’s it. And everything else we will deal with later.

    I’ve seen some people from abroad commenting that they don’t have anything in their program about how they’re going to deal with Russia.

    Russia, the EU, literally nothing. But that was super smart, because that’s the only way to gather so much support. I think that was maybe the most important element.

    And the third element was that the students were very open to learning. They know that they’re new. They don’t have much experience. But they were communicating. They were calling journalists, civil society organizations, everyone they could find who had some expertise, and asking them about how things work.

    That was really important. We’ve never witnessed such a perfectly executed system of monitoring the polls. The students managed to cover all the voting places in Serbia. And the monitors did perfect work. They caught a lot of people who were trying to carry out some abuses.

    They are not self-taught, they were getting help from other organizations who had expertise in this. I would say that these three elements for me are a kind of model, which managed to bring such a huge, huge victory.

    You mentioned that the established opposition would stay in Belgrade and not go to the villages. Did the students make an effort to go to smaller places? I remember that was also a big deal in Hungary, with Péter Magyar’s campaign.

    Yeah, that’s the fourth element … the students, they had a campaign called “a student in every village.”

    And Vučić, of course, put a lot of lies about the students, saying that they work for the Secret Service and this and that. But when you see them going to the villages and talking with the grannies, with peasants, with farmers, when you have this real life experience, that really changed people and helped them to earn huge support.

    I think that was one of the main focuses of their campaign. More than doing stuff in Belgrade. Belgrade is easy. You have the most progressive people, and it’s easier to win. You don’t need to really be there.

    So that’s one way of defeating a situation where the media is controlled by the government — you have to reach people in person, because otherwise the only thing they hear is the pro-government media.

    Yeah, exactly. But usually, nobody will do that.

    The typical opposition in Europe is complaining about social media. They complain that they cannot reach people because of these troll campaigns, but they will not actually go [in person]. But you really need to go to every village.

    And that’s nothing new. That’s like old school politics, right? We just have to literally get back to the ways of how politics was done, and not allow social media to make you lazy.

    The social media algorithms will always boost content that helps populists, right? All the hate speech, the anti-immigrant things, will always be pushed. So you have to literally meet people and talk. We in KRIK have a bit of experience, because we do a lot of crowdfunding, we have connections with our audience. So we understood how important it is to do that stuff.

    So I hope, at least in Europe and the U.S., politics will return to this old-school way a little bit.

    Turning to the future, what do you expect will happen now?

    Now we have a lot of work to do. Now comes the really tough period. I think it’s important to learn from history.

    There’s a chance to change things, but Vučić left a really strong system. All the big businesses, the whole economy is in the hands of his oligarchs. Organized crime is powerful. So this will not be easy.

    And we need to learn from what happened in the past. After Milošević was gone, [reformist Prime Minister Zoran] Đinđić was killed two years later, basically by a joint venture of the Secret Service and organized crime, because they didn’t want to allow the country to reform.

    So we can celebrate tonight, but tomorrow it’s the beginning of a really big job. Now it’s really important that everyone really does their part of the work. We as journalists should continue to investigate.

    I believe it will happen like in Milošević’s time — as we speak now, they’ll start destroying evidence and documents, bribing witnesses. In the next three months, we’re in a defining period where we need to discover as much as we can. And when the students constitute the assembly and the government, I hope that they’ll start prosecuting these people.

    But it won’t be easy. Now the very difficult part is coming.

    Who are the main entrenched forces that have to be defeated? Is it the security services? Is it organized crime?

    Yes, the security services are one of the most difficult parts. And I think that was the biggest mistake [in the past].

    [Đinđić] didn’t ever really reform them. He basically just changed the bosses and kept on working with them. And in the end, they were the part of the group that killed him.

    I think the students will do much stronger, deeper reforms, because the secret service we have now have been inherited from Tito and Milošević’s time. The people change, of course, but in a way it’s the same structure, even with older people bringing their sons and daughters into the service.

    It’s kind of like the state within the state. When they say “deep state,” it really does work that way in Serbia. I think they’ll be able to really cut and reform it completely, which is important.

    The second really difficult part is that it’s easy to remove the director of this or that state-owned company, or change ministers. But I’m really afraid about what will happen with the judiciary. Because this is a kind of a trick that Vučić performed with the judiciary. He adopted all the EU laws that offer really big protection to prosecutors and judges, so that they cannot be touched by politics. But the catch is he put his people in there. So what will happen now? Whoever comes, he’ll really have a hard time changing the corrupt judges and prosecutors, because they’re so protected that only the prosecutions and judges can change themselves. You will need to find a way to really clean them. I think you will need to kind of work with them. That will be really a hard thing to do.

    Then, another really hard thing will be the Vučić oligarchs. They bought everything in Serbia. If you go from my office to the center of Belgrade, literally along the main street, and you look right and left, 90 percent of the businesses that you see — doesn’t matter if it’s a small coffee shop or some big company selling computer equipment — everything is owned by his people. In these 14 years, they bought everything, and they all opened businesses because they were harassing everybody who’s not part of his party to prevent them from opening any business.

    So now the question is, you take power, but the whole economy is in the hands of his people. There it will also be really hard to find a solution.

    Of course, they will prosecute these people and they can seize their illegal money, but there’ll be a lot of actual legal businesses still in the hands of his people. So he will go, but after so many years, everything from the business structure, secret services, judiciary, are [run by] his people.

    Is it just about taking out his people and replacing them with your people? Don’t you have to change something about the rules of the game?

    Yes, the point is to change the rules, not just replacing people. That’s why people didn’t like the [old] opposition. The opposition defeated Milošević and put in their people, who could be better than Milošević’s people, but the system still worked to their advantage, not for society.

    So the whole idea of the students is that they will really try to change the system, which means not putting in our people to serve us, but trying to make the country really work. And I think they have a chance to do it for one simple reason — because they don’t have their own people. They’re just students.

    We won’t have a government with all students. Now that they won the election, they gathered a list of people [to become members of parliament]. And none of them are actually students. They gathered different experts and professors. And many of them are not connected to the students. They were just picking people who they believe are clean.

    It was really amazing because everything was built on trust that all of the students are honest and not corrupted. That’s very powerful. If they use this model to change the system, that will work. I believe they will scan the system and pick the best people. There were still good people in the police. In every place, there are still good professional people. So I hope the students will recognize these people, who are not tied to them, and help them actually reach the top positions.

    It will be based on a clean foundation. That’s the kind of thing that I’m relying on most.

    What about the criminal groups? They were heavily embedded in the Vučić regime. You’ve done a lot of reporting on that. Are they scared now? Are they running? Are they going to fight?

    They will do what they always do. They will not run. I believe the criminals are now thinking of finding a way to approach the students. I believe they will not succeed, but that’s how criminals work. They don’t care, in the end, for Vučić.

    But I need to say, this is really funny to see. So like I said, last night Vučić brought these strong police forces to the center of Belgrade, and all of these hooligans and criminals, a really big number of them, to this park next to the presidential building.

    And in the moment when he declared defeat on TV, and people started gathering in the center of town to celebrate, there is a video, the criminals who in the moment start running, you know, and you have like tens of them just running, literally running from this park. They’re only strong when they have protection, and when the police are working with them.

    You sound pretty optimistic, because it seems like you really trust the students, is that fair to say?

    I trust the students because I completely trust their intentions, in those terms I’m optimistic. But I’m realistic in what’s going to happen now, it will be really hard.

    Like I said, you need to reform entire structures — the oligarchs, the money side, the secret services, crime. I know they have good intentions, but it’s really hard to do it. We need to remember that Đinđić died and failed.

    And the second thing, I’m really afraid what would happen — this also happened in the time after Milošević, when the democratic [forces] won — I think that we will feel in the following years a lot of the damage which Vučić did to the economy. I think it will be a hard period.

    And I’m afraid of how people usually react — everywhere, not just in Serbia — if the economy isn’t perfect in two years, which is completely logical because we just now see how much devastation he left, if people aren’t happy in a year or two, they will not be able to make the connection to Vučić, they’ll most likely then blame the new power in Serbia.

    And that was how Vučić came to power the first time, right? Taking advantage of disappointment with the democratic generation before him.

    Exactly. They needed to deal with the country left by Milošević, which was under sanctions and embargos and completely devastated. But people will say, the ones now in power are the ones to blame. So I think this is a big danger.

    The problem is also that journalists need to change how they operate. I don’t think we can do old-school journalism anymore. So I think journalists can help, but also we need to find other ways to communicate these things and inform the audience. There’s a lot of fighting to be done.

    But literally everything changed — the atmosphere on the streets. Before the protests there was this kind of this dark atmosphere, cynical and dark, like there was no hope. Now it’s like living in a completely different country. It is insane and very refreshing.

    Source: OCCRP · 2026-10-27

  • Pentagon Fears Drone Attacks on U.S. and Foreign Bases

    Pentagon Fears Drone Attacks on U.S. and Foreign Bases

    Top defense officials are expressing increasing worry about the vulnerability of U.S. bases around the world and even within the United States as cheap drone technology upends long-standing defense strategies.

    The fear is mounting after a series recent attacks and threats against ground targets, including the destruction of key bases in the Middle East by Iran, plots against mega-bases in Europe, including to U.S. bombers at a British air base, and a Russian campaign that damaged European military facilities, according to two government officials.

    While the Pentagon is notorious for inflating threats to press for additional funding, the officials stressed that the anxiety is real, not invented. Despite the U.S. military’s enormous budget, they say, the United States now finds itself scrambling strengthen its fortifications, protect its costly equipment, and recall personnel from some locations.

    “Now all the world knows what the SecDef should have,” said one of the officials.

    Foreign adversaries have taken notice of Iran’s ability to defeat U.S. air defenses using missiles and drones, they said. The officials drew specific attention to Tehran’s ability to damage or destroy bases that have been the key to U.S. power-projection and war-making for decades in the Middle East.

    An Iranian missile and drone attack on February 28 destroyed Navy facilities in Manama, Bahrain, the region’s most critical logistics hub. The Combined Air Operations Center at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, was severely damaged by Iranian missiles early in the war, rendering it inoperable. Both were recently attacked again, raising questions about whether either will ever be rebuilt. The destruction of these bases has fundamentally altered America’s future force posture in the region, according to the officials. One of them called it a “seismic shift.”

    On Friday, the Trump administration leaked highly classified intelligence to Fox News and Axios suggesting Iran has “substantially increased” efforts to target U.S. diplomats and other officials in the Middle East and beyond. The October 23 memo claimed that “the lethal plotting efforts by the Iranians against U.S. citizens have reached advanced stages.” A U.S. official confirmed the accuracy of the intelligence but questioned the motives of the “official leak,” suggesting it’s part of a case being built to justify renewing the failed war.


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    The leak came as the State Department ordered a further reduction in staff at multiple diplomatic posts across the Middle East, including in Jordan, Lebanon, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. One of the officials said the move “definitely” spoke to America’s inability to defend its assets overseas. Those fears now extend to the United States, according to the officials.

    Last month, buried in an unhinged address to troops in which he attacked the press and those within the military he calls beardos, weirdos, and wimps, self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth tacitly acknowledged the vulnerability of U.S. domestic bases, noting that the Pentagon was now “hardening every installation on American soil” against “sabotage and drones.” And last week, the Pentagon quietly began seeking advice on new ways to protect bases by using innovative advanced materials, camouflaging facilities, obscuring their thermal and electromagnetic signatures, hiding them underground, and making them more resilient in the face of successful attack by adversaries, according to a special notice issued by a top Pentagon official.

    As the Pentagon refines this “base of the future” concept, Iran is teasing a “war of the future” effort that builds on its successes in throttling the Strait of Hormuz, regionalizing the war, and battering U.S. bases, according to Mahdi Mohammadi, a senior adviser to Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the lead negotiator and speaker of Parliament. “The second generation of surprises will be on their way; at the time and place of our choosing, in the manner we have devised, and with the creativity that only our unparalleled fighters can muster,” he wrote on X, teasing how Iran would respond if America ramps up the war.


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    Putting Fuel on a Ceasefire: Israel Tries to Kill U.S.–Iran Talks

    Iran’s successful attacks on U.S. bases have added to the growing realization that foreign adversaries, proxies, terror groups, and lone wolf actors can use low-cost, easily obtained drones to attack the military bases, aircraft, and military personnel of the U.S. and its allies.

    While Iran dominated the headlines for months, officials became increasingly worried about danger from Russian attacks. “When do we stop calling it gray zone?” asked a third official briefed on the intelligence, referring to a Russian drone attack on a massive air freighter, used to carry military assistance to Ukraine, at Leipzig/Halle Airport in Germany in August. One drone hit the cargo plane but failed to explode, another struck a different aircraft, and a third was found near the airport. “That’s what Putin always does. He keeps testing us, pushing us, to see how far he can go,” said the official. That official and another said that the intelligence proved there was “no question” that Russia was behind the operations. Russia has denied responsibility.

    The August drone attack was part of a monthslong campaign of nonstop sabotage, cyberattacks, and psychological operations against NATO nations. “These were happening in sequence from earlier in the year, through August, through September and they didn’t show any signs of stopping,” said the third official. But the attacks slowed or stopped after President Donald Trump announced earlier this month that the United States would buy Russian diesel in an effort to bring down fuel prices before the midterm elections and called on Ukraine to stop striking oil Russian refineries.

    The officials noted that Pentagon leadership has been slow to respond to the changing nature of warfare, specifically drawing attention to tactics honed by Ukraine in its war with Russia. Earlier this month, for example, intelligence suggested that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was planning a complex drone attack on U.S. B-1 bombers used to attack Iran, and U.S. personnel at Royal Air Force Fairford air base. The plot, they said, was to launch small drones from just beyond the bases’ fenceline, attacking the supersonic bombers, which were not in hardened shelters but in the open on the tarmac. They noted that the plot appeared to be patterned on a Ukrainian attack, dubbed Operation Spider’s Web, against Russia last year. The plot so unnerved top military officials that the bombers were flown out while some aerial refueling aircraft were still being deployed to support their panicked flights back to the U.S. In addition to RAF Fairford, U.S. officials referenced additional threats against other bases in Europe, including Ramstein Air Base in Germany.


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    Pete Hegseth’s Military of the Future: Defined by AI and an Utter Lack of Oversight

    Last August, Hegseth established Joint Interagency Task Force 401 to deliver “C-sUAS” or counter-small unmanned aircraft system “capabilities to America’s warfighters, [to] defeat adversary threats, and promote sovereignty over national airspace.” But an inspector general report from January said “immediate attention” was required to protect the most critical bases in the U.S. against drones and noted that Pentagon “documents contradict one another and do not speak to certain aspects of C-UAS authorities and capabilities.” The IG found also that key “military installations, government-owned, contractor-operated facilities, and contractor-owned, contractor-operated facilities conducting critical missions” were not even designated for protection.

    In March, small drones flew over Louisiana’s Barksdale Air Force Base, the home of Global Strike Command which oversees America’s bomber fleet and its intercontinental-ballistic missiles. And the IG report mentions “10 DoD installations and activities where Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) incursions have occurred.”

    Late last month, the Air Force awarded a contract for counter-drone systems for Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey. The military has also been looking into drone-killing technologies to defend Yokota Air Base in Tokyo, Japan; Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota; Battle Creek Air National Guard Base in Michigan; and Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, among other facilities.

    Two of the officials suggested that new Pentagon plans for military base modernization are rooted in an uneasy acknowledgment that U.S. outposts around the world — including within the continental United States — are increasingly vulnerable to complex and asymmetric attacks. A recent Pentagon inspector general report revealed Iranian strikes “damaged and destroyed hundreds of buildings and structures at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, and Jordan during the conflict.” 

    Hegseth’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment by The Intercept.

    One U.S. official told The Intercept that the cost of repairing and rebuilding these Middle East outposts could be “upwards of $50 million,” but said the “real cost” might be “far higher.” The Pentagon, however, refuses to disclose the price tag of the damage, which has only been shared in a classified briefing.

    “The American people deserve to know the full cost of the Trump administration’s unauthorized war against Iran. Even if DoD has not yet determined which facilities it is planning to rebuild, disclosing these costs represents the bare minimum transparency DoD owes the public,” wrote Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumentha, Mazie Hirono, Tammy Duckworth, and Gary Peters in a recent letter to Adm. Brad Cooper, the chief of Central Command. CENTCOM did not reply to a request from The Intercept for the total cost.

    Last week, the Pentagon quietly began seeking information for “near-term” procurement and long-term modernization strategies to “move past traditional ‘pour-concrete-and-hope’ hardening” of its facilities and increase the “survivability of these installations under kinetic and multi-domain threats,” according to a special notice from the office of Dale R. Marks, the assistant secretary of war for energy, installations, and environment.


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    As the Pentagon Expands Across the Pacific, Guam Offers a Warning

    Following the destruction of NSA Manama and Al Udeid Air Base, the Pentagon is seeking ways to promote “operational capability and survivability under kinetic impact,” by employing decentralized energy grids, “autonomous backup utility systems,” innovative base layouts, and modular structures. Recognizing the need to “protect assets and personnel from kinetic impacts, thermal effects, and blast overpressures,” the military is looking at ways to harden facilities. This means employing advanced construction methods involving metamaterials designed for surviving air attack, energy-dissipating composites, self-healing materials, and “novel concrete formulations.” 

    The U.S. is also seeking ways to lower the profile or conceal the location of its bases through technological means. This includes camouflaging facilities and integrating them into the natural environment to make them more difficult to spot, masking their thermal and electromagnetic signatures, and creating decoy structures to draw fire. 

    Beyond the use of “terrain-integrated facility design,” the U.S. is also seeking to take its most sensitive facilities deep below ground. Increased vulnerabilities to aerial attack have led to a reemergence and increased reliance on subterranean warfare in the Russia–Ukraine war, harkening back to World War I trench warfare and the use of massive underground tunnel networks and bases by Vietnamese forces in the American war.

    Iran, for its part, uses underground facilities to shield its missile and nuclear programs. The Pentagon, according to the documents, is interested in new methods of “high-speed tunneling,” the rapid creation of protected caverns, and “shock-isolated underground structural design[s].”

    Last week’s quiet plea from the Pentagon follows an announcement by Hegseth of a FORTRESS America initiative that he calls a “national insurance policy for the American homeland.” One former Pentagon analyst, however, said it sounded more like “cutting America and Americans loose” in the event of a major conflagration, tying it to Hegseth’s belief that the military is a warrior elite superior to civilians.

    “Every major military installation in America is going to generate its own power. Independent of the civilian grid. If an adversary takes down the grid by cyberattack, by sabotage, by any means, our bases stay lit. Our aircraft keep flying. Our command centers never go dark,” said Hegseth, explaining the FORTRESS concept. “We are building long overdue strategic reserves deep enough to fight through disruption. Think munitions. Fuel. Medicine. Blood. Deep enough that if the world’s supply lines break, and in a real war, they are going to break — America keeps fighting anyway.”

    The former advisor said that Hegseth’s plan appeared to send a message to 99 percent of the American public: “It sounds as if he is saying to people ‘fuck off and you’re on your own.’”

    Source: The Intercept · 2026-10-27

  • U.S. Court Sentences Lender to 15 Years over $76M Ponzi Scheme

    U.S. Court Sentences Lender to 15 Years over $76M Ponzi Scheme

    A U.S. federal court has sentenced a businessman to 15 years in prison for his role in running a Ponzi scheme that defrauded hundreds of investors out of millions of dollars. According to a statement from the Department of Justice, Edwin Brant Frost IV, the founder of a conservative, Christian lending firm in Georgia, defrauded more than 300 investors out of over $76 million in a massive Ponzi scheme. Frost, who was convicted of wire fraud in May after pleading guilty, will also have to pay back over $76 million in restitution to victims.

    According to federal prosecutors, Frost’s now-defunct company, First Liberty Building and Loan, LLC, ran the Ponzi scheme between at least 2021 and July 2025. Frost scammed investors by claiming he was making high-interest, short-term “bridge loans” to small businesses. Prosecutors stated that after most of the bridge loans defaulted, Frost began using new investor funds to pay interest to existing investors, while secretly diverting at least $5 million for lavish personal purchases and political contributions.

    Source: OCCRP · 2026-10-27

  • This Oil Company Is Linked to 1,000 Pollution Incidents and Other Violations. Oklahoma Never Punished It.

    This Oil Company Is Linked to 1,000 Pollution Incidents and Other Violations. Oklahoma Never Punished It.

    A grid of photos show a cracked sign with the words “Citation Oil & Gas Corp.” and “Bayou Unit”; a pressure gauge; water pooling under a rusted metal grid; a pipe emitting water; and white streaks of salt on two patches of land.
    Photo illustration by Jovelle Tamayo/ProPublica. Source images: Nick Oxford for ProPublica, courtesy of Mike Faulkner, and obtained in an open records request from the Oklahoma Corporation Commission.

    In June 2023, staff at an Oklahoma regulatory agency were fed up. The state isn’t known for cracking down on oil and gas companies for polluting the environment, but for over a year, the staff had been building a case to punish Citation Oil & Gas, one of the nation’s largest privately owned oil companies. 

    About 30 miles north of the Texas border, toxic wastewater was gushing from the ground outside the small city of Ardmore. In the mile-wide oil field known as the Bayou, an oily sheen glistened on creeks and long streaks of salt scarred the land. The so-called purges, bubbling up among stands of oak and walnut trees, also threatened drinking water sources, drawing attention from the Environmental Protection Agency, according to a federal report.

    State investigators pinned the blame on Citation’s injection wells, which pump wastewater from oil production back underground at high pressures and volumes in order to produce more oil. But this injection came with risks. 

    Days earlier, the agency had asked Citation to cut injection pressures in half. The company refused, prompting staff at the oil division of the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, the state’s oil and gas regulator, to recommend an official punishment through the agency’s court system.

    “This will be an important case to get some of these purges stopped and particularly concerning Citation’s operations,” Danny Ray, an agency manager at the time, emailed his colleagues.

    He restated the urgency three days later in an email to oil division leaders and Citation officials: “We consider this an emergency situation that needs to be addressed promptly.”

    A depression like a river bed carves a path through a dirt landscape, with white salt residue covering the dirt in places.
    A salt scar in a southern Oklahoma oil field known as the Bayou in 2022 Obtained in an open records request from the Oklahoma Corporation Commission
    A structure of rusted pipes sprays water into an area surrounded by grass and dirt.
    An old well releases a stream of wastewater in the Bayou in 2022. Obtained in an open records request from the Oklahoma Corporation Commission

    To stop the flow of wastewater, the agency temporarily shut down the Bayou’s 22 injection wells — all but three of which were owned by Citation — kicking off a yearlong fight over the terms under which injection could restart. 

    Under state rules, companies must not pollute, and oil and gas regulators at the Corporation Commission can revoke injection permits and issue fines to those that violate regulations. 

    But agency leadership ultimately did not follow staff guidance to punish Citation through the commission’s administrative law court. Instead, in April 2024, state officials, including the oil division’s then-Director Robyn Strickland, would allow Citation to restart injection at higher-than-recommended pressures. 

    Agency leaders’ reluctance to punish Citation reflects a longstanding pattern of Oklahoma regulators letting oil companies contaminate drinking water, farmland and people’s homes with scant consequences, The Frontier and ProPublica have found in a yearlong investigation. 

    In fact the commission has no record of ever fining or completing an enforcement case against Citation, the company named more than any other in the agency’s database of pollution reports and other rule violations, listed more than 1,000 times over the past decade. That’s hundreds more incidents than any other operator, including comparably sized companies. In recent years, purges linked to Citation include some of Oklahoma’s longest, most damaging oil field pollution events.

    Current and former employees at the Oklahoma Corporation Commission describe top agency officials as wary of going after habitual violators like Citation. Citation has become Oklahoma’s second-largest well owner after taking over collections of aging, low-producing wells from oil giants that have largely left the state for more lucrative oil fields in Texas and elsewhere; the company acquired its Bayou wells in 2010. Regulators treat Citation gently, current and former agency employees say, because the company holds onto aging wells that are worth little — wells that could easily become a financial liability for the state if Citation were to sell or walk away from them. 

    A spokesperson for the Oklahoma Corporation Commission declined to answer questions about the regulatory agency’s handling of Citation’s record, noting the possibility of future enforcement actions or litigation involving the company. 

    “The OCC Oil and Gas Conservation Division must remain mindful of its regulatory and adjudicatory responsibilities and avoid making public statements that could potentially affect future proceedings or legal considerations,” spokesperson Jack Damrill said in an email. 

    Strickland has since left the agency for a job as chief projects officer for the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, a quasi-governmental organization that often advocates for industry interests. She did not respond to requests for comment.

    A Citation executive declined to comment in response to written questions. 

    Regulators in other jurisdictions have at times come down hard on Citation, which owns wells in 11 other states. In 2017, the company settled with the U.S. Department of Justice for $2.25 million over allegations of underpaid royalties from drilling on federal land in Wyoming, though the settlement did not rule that the company was liable in the case. And in 2025, Utah reached a $700,000 settlement with the company after a crude oil and wastewater spill. Texas and Colorado have also fined Citation in recent years for violations. 

    “Citation has been the thorn in my side for a long time,” said a current manager at the Oklahoma agency who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their job. “They just operate however they want. They’ve had major pollution issues, and you can’t really touch them.”

    Signage for Citation Oil & Gas on a fence in front of a field with an oil well.
    A Citation Oil & Gas oil well in the Bayou. The company is named more often than any other in Oklahoma’s database of oil field pollution incidents and other rule violations. Nick Oxford for ProPublica

    Preparing a Case for Punishment

    In November 2023, five months into the wells’ shutdown, Citation was getting antsy. Its officials had repeatedly demanded permission to restart their wells and had even challenged the state through the commission’s court to prove the connection between the Bayou purges and its operations. Regulators and company officials packed into a small conference room in the Oklahoma Corporation Commission’s Oklahoma City headquarters to discuss how that might happen. More than a dozen others joined via video. 

    On the state’s side, a team of consultants took the lead, displaying a report with evidence that tied Citation’s injection to the wastewater that gushed to the surface in the Bayou. The state had hired the environmental engineering firm Halff earlier that year on a $550,000 contract to investigate the fast-growing number of oil field wastewater eruptions around Oklahoma. The consultants and agency staff presented a unified front in identifying the problem: Citation’s nearly two dozen Bayou injection wells were operating at unsafely high pressures, according to a video recording of the meeting obtained by The Frontier and ProPublica. Over the years, the injected wastewater had shattered underground rock layers, allowing the toxic fluid to spread uncontrollably. 

    “You definitely have overpressurization,” Carolyn May, Halff’s director of environmental remediation, told Citation officials as she presented her team’s calculations, which were based on well records, field data collected by agency staff and a standard set by the federal government. “It’s allowing that rock to fracture.”

    The consultants were meant to serve as independent experts to mediate any disagreements within the agency over what to do about the wastewater eruptions, according to current and former commission officials.

    In the meeting, May and agency staffers ticked off a number of problems with Citation’s wells that regulators had overlooked for years. Not only had they allowed the company to inject wastewater at excessive pressures, regulators had also given out more than a dozen exemptions to testing and well-construction standards that endangered groundwater. Several wells had checkered compliance records; agency documents noted that one had been in “perpetual violation” of its permit for “nine years running,” injecting tens of millions of gallons of wastewater beyond the legal limit. 

    Citation’s active wells weren’t the only issue, they said. Nearby were dozens of abandoned, unplugged wells that offered the pressurized wastewater open pathways to reach shallow freshwater sources and the surface. May singled out a handful of those wells that especially troubled her team, and oil division deputy director Mike McGinnis suggested that Citation permanently plug them.

    May noted that imaging below the surface by agency staff showed a distinct plume of highly polluted wastewater rising from deep underground, where injection took place. This posed a threat to the freshwater sources beneath the Bayou, she said — water that some residents rely on for drinking and cooking. “That’s our primary concern here.” 

    The consultants were not alone in this fear. Earlier in 2023, the Environmental Protection Agency had warned of “potential endangerment to underground sources of drinking water” in the Bayou from oil field injection. Groundwater tests taken near the purge sites showed evidence of oil field wastewater pollution, including high levels of salt, bromide and the carcinogen benzene, which exceeded the EPA drinking water standard by five times.

    For its part, Citation came to the meeting armed with a very different argument: the pollution was caused by a combination of historic oil drilling and recent rainfall — not by the company. 

    It was a claim the company had repeatedly made, especially in the months since the agency had shut down its wells. To bolster its case, the company’s consultants had produced a series of detailed reports citing the area’s history of oil production, along with Citation’s own water testing data. Oil drilling began in the Bayou in the 1920s, a time of lawless extraction, and for decades, companies would simply dump their wastewater into large, unlined pits, allowing the fluid to seep into the ground. Old pollution that saturated the land was being flushed to the surface by rainfall, the reports argued. Each one concluded that there was no link between Citation’s injection and the Bayou pollution. 

    At the meeting with regulators, company representatives reiterated these arguments. Jeff Lewis, a Citation engineering manager, assured the agency that the company’s data indicated that its wells were not behind the Bayou purges and that it could safely inject at pressures higher than Halff had recommended. He proposed that the company restart injection on its deeper wells because they were separated by layers of rock from the abandoned wells that Halff identified as likely pathways for the wastewater to surface. 

    Agency staff did not buy this. In prior internal meetings and emails, staff and consultants had criticized Citation’s water sampling practices as biased in favor of the company’s conclusion that rainfall was causing old pollution to resurface. There was no question that old pollution covered the Bayou, but in recent purges, wastewater had pushed to the surface in significant volumes, covering creek beds in layers of snow-white salt. Old pollution would not be this forceful, according to internal documents written by agency staff.

    “A purge is created by pressure and is not due to old pits,” Ray, the agency manager, wrote in a memo distributed months earlier within the oil division that urged agency leaders not to allow Citation to restart injection.

    May, the agency’s consultant, echoed these rebuttals during the meeting and said the state’s evidence pointed to an injection problem. She concluded her presentation with a warning: Citation must change its injection practices in the Bayou. 

    “If y’all want to start injecting again,” she told company representatives, “I think we’re going to have to look at those pressures and the volumes very carefully.”

    The meeting ended without a resolution.

    A structure made of pipes, with the lower ones deeply rusted, rises in a field with yellow flowers. Chain-link fencing encloses a small area around the pump.
    An injection well in the Bayou Nick Oxford for ProPublica

    “They Wore Us Out”

    Over the next four months, Citation and state regulators would continue to debate the terms of restarting the Bayou. Neither side budged. By the time they gathered for another face-off in March 2024, oil division leaders appeared weary of fighting.

    May and the Halff geologists from the consulting firm began by again insisting that Citation substantially reduce pressures in order to be allowed to restart a handful of wells. But even as they presented their case, Citation representatives including Lewis, the engineer, and Bob Redweik, a company vice president, repeatedly spoke over them. After more than two hours of disagreement, Redweik and Citation’s attorney ended the meeting abruptly. “We’re not going anywhere,” Redweik said.  

    Several top oil division officials attended, including Strickland, McGinnis and commission attorney Tyler Trout. They remained largely silent throughout. 

    The next week, Trout tried to end the impasse by passing along a memo from Citation. 

    “In an effort to reach an agreement and move this situation forward,” Trout wrote to top oil division officials and May, “would we consider meeting Citation in the middle as far as recommended injection pressures are concerned?” 

    May stood firm. “From Halff’s standpoint, our recommendations aren’t going to change,” she responded, adding that it would ultimately be up to agency leaders. 

    In early April, the agency went with a compromise, approving a plan to bring seven of Citation’s 19 Bayou injection wells back online. The company would be able to inject at pressures higher than Halff had recommended, though less than Citation had requested.

    Current and former employees say that the decision to restart injection came from the top of the oil division, including Strickland and McGinnis, among others — bypassing staff who objected to the plan. Like Strickland, McGinnis did not respond to requests for comment.

    “They wore us out,” said an agency manager who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their job. 

    Before injection restarted, three oil division officials chosen by Strickland conducted a walkthrough of the Bayou with Halff and Citation, according to an email from Strickland. The rest of the division was left in the dark. That same day, a pollution abatement manager noted in an email to the commission’s general counsel that agency critics of the plan had not been invited.

    Around the time agency leaders allowed Citation to restart injection in the Bayou, staff were drafting an extensive contempt case against the company for rule violations in other parts of the state, according to public records obtained by The Frontier and ProPublica. Field staff and consultants were still turning up considerable problems related to Citation’s injection, including excessive pressures at the sites of destructive eruptions of wastewater. The staff complaint called for the agency to issue fines and to terminate well permits. But oil division leaders never signed the paperwork for the case. 

    There was ongoing trouble in the Bayou as well. Weeks after Citation restarted injection, field staff discovered a “severely contaminated” private water well nearby that had been polluted by oil field waste. Testing showed high levels of salt as well as the “highest levels of bromide that we have ever sampled,” according to internal emails, referring to another chemical constituent of oil and gas waste that poses a public health risk. (The landowners declined to comment because of an ongoing lawsuit against Citation, but according to court records, they do not drink from the well. The company, which has fought the family’s claims, says in a court filing that it has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars addressing the pollution on their land as part of a plan approved by the commission.) 

    By the end of 2024, oil division leaders had allowed six more Citation wells back online, bringing the total to 13. And the next spring, the agency closed the Bayou investigation, along with several others related to Citation, without taking further action.

    Collection of New Complaints

    In the year and a half since the Bayou case closed, several of the oil division staff who had pushed agency leaders to punish Citation have left the agency, as have a handful of senior leaders. Staffers told The Frontier and ProPublica they grew frustrated with the agency’s unwillingness to crack down on repeat corporate offenders that agency staff had spent months — at times, years — investigating.

    Tracy Case, an attorney for the oil and gas division, admitted as much at a national conference for oil regulators in Oklahoma City in May. “I’ve been there 11 years doing this and we’ve never pursued what we call our ‘bad actors,’” she said, according to a recording of a meeting obtained by the news outlets. She explained that the oil division is extremely short-staffed while dealing with hundreds of potential enforcement cases at any one time. An agency spokesperson declined to comment on behalf of Case. 

    Less than a third of the roughly 750 enforcement cases filed by the oil division in the agency’s administrative law courts since 2023 have resulted in punishment so far, according to a review by The Frontier and ProPublica. The average fine given out by the agency was about $1,700. The most common punishment was a $500 fine, combined with using company insurance money to plug unused wells.  

    Neither the Oklahoma Corporation Commission nor Halff responded to questions about whether the consulting firm still has a role at the state agency.

    At the Bayou, nearly all of Citation’s wastewater injection wells are back on, many operating at pressures beyond Halff’s recommendations. And industry data indicates that Citation has ramped up oil production to pre-shutdown levels even as evidence of new purges continues to emerge. In September, fresh layers of salt — residue of the wastewater — covered the dirt near yellowish puddles of standing water. Nearby, streaks of oil shone on the ground. The preceding weeks had been hot and dry, with hardly any rain. 

    In early October, an agency field staffer requested that Citation install a specialized well in the Bayou to pump out polluted groundwater, according to a report in the agency’s incident database. 

    A slew of new pollution complaints against Citation have continued to appear in that state database, including more than 60 spills and leaks at well sites over the past year. Among the complaints were three purges that blew out in southern Oklahoma over the last three months. All those investigations remain active, according to state records.  

    Another ongoing complaint against Citation originated about 10 miles east of the Bayou, where a rancher named Mike Faulkner noticed an unusual amount of salt water gurgling to the surface and flowing down a creek on his land in April. Nearby, dozens of Citation wells pump wastewater underground.

    A man in a red shirt and cowboy hat holds a small device with its end in a cup while he stands on muddy ground.
    Rancher Mike Faulkner measures the water quality on his property in June. Nick Bowlin/The Frontier

    In response, Citation once again blamed the pollution on old drilling practices, according to an email from one of the company’s engineers to the Oklahoma Corporation Commission.

    Nevertheless, the agency told the company to temporarily shut down some of its nearby injection wells, and, according to Faulkner, the purge on his land dried up for the first time in years. 

    “That tells me that they know the why and the how of that saltwater purging,” he said in July. 

    The agency also instructed Citation to install monitoring wells to test for pollution and to build a pit with a rock dam on Faulkner’s land to catch the polluted water, along with a fence to keep the cattle out.

    An aerial photo of two trucks parked on grass near an oil well with white salt covering the area downhill from the well.
    Faulkner’s land was scarred by salt water and contaminated by oil after a Citation well blew out in June. Courtesy of Mike Faulkner

    But in the months since, the agency has given Citation multiple extensions on the deadline to build the dam and the fencing. In September, Faulkner learned that the agency granted Citation yet another extension — until December, seven months after his initial pollution report. 

    As of October, he said, the wells where the state had asked Citation to pause operations are injecting — at reduced pressure. 

    Faulkner said he is fed up with Citation’s yearslong pattern of degrading his pastures. But he blames state officials for their unwillingness to rein in the company. 

    “They’re like a spoiled kid,” he said. “They’ve just gotten away with it for a long time.”

    Source: ProPublica · 2026-10-27

  • A Chinese imaging satellite and an object from this month’s 63-satellite rideshare passed about 130 metres apart, according to public orbit data

    SuperView Neo-1 01, a Chinese commercial imaging satellite launched in 2022, flies at about 513 km in a sun-synchronous orbit. On 1 October a Falcon 9 rideshare put 63 satellites and dozens of other objects into almost the same orbit, and they have been passing it ever since.

    My tracker forecasts close approaches from Space-Track’s public orbit data and re-runs them with every update. For OBJECT BF, one of the rideshare’s objects Space-Track hasn’t identified yet, every forecast from 25 October on put the pass at 20:24 UTC on 26 October, between 120 and 700 metres apart, at 72 metres a second. After the pass, fresh data re-measured it at about 130 metres.

    That’s finer than public data can really resolve. These orbits are good to around a kilometre, so the true miss could have been a few hundred metres or more than a kilometre, and operators get far better tracking and collision warnings than this. But it shows how crowded the 500 km shell has become. In the past day the same rideshare’s satellites also passed within 2 to 6 km of PRSC-EO1, a Pakistani imaging satellite, three times, with another pass of about 1.3 km forecast for 28 October.

    The pair’s page has every forecast: https://overhead24.com/proximity/52320-100936

    submitted by /u/AlmostSneakers
    [link] [comments]

    Source: Reddit r/OSINT · 2026-10-27

  • ‘Students Have Won’: Overwhelming Turnout Shatters Serbia’s Entrenched Regime

    ‘Students Have Won’: Overwhelming Turnout Shatters Serbia’s Entrenched Regime

    When a handful of university students first spilled onto the streets two years ago to protest the deadly collapse of a railway station canopy, Serbia’s state-run media dismissed them as unruly kids merely looking for an excuse to cut class.

    They were grieving the 16 people crushed to death and demanding accountability for what they condemned as lethal state corruption and crony contracting, bearing banners that read: “Corruption kills” and “Your hands are bloody.”

    But those scattered demonstrations soon swelled into a generational revolt. Over two relentless years, the students slept in occupied lecture halls, barnstormed rural strongholds where state television branded them foreign mercenaries, and punctured a pervasive climate of fear with biting wit and viral banners.

    On Sunday, the kids actually did it.

    In a stunning ballot-box upset that shattered Aleksandar Vučić’s 14-year grip on power, Serbia’s student-led movement defeated the Balkan country’s formidable ruling machine, clinching a triumph so historic that even its young architects were left reeling in disbelief.

    “Fantastic. I can’t believe it,” Ilija Ratković, 30, told OCCRP. “A regime that ruled for 14 years, was corrupt, and killed people in Serbia is out.” He admitted he never expected Vučić to yield quietly: “I expected him to fight to the end.”

    The movement’s slogan, “Students are winning” (Studenti pobeđuju), mobilized Serbians at home and abroad to vote for the “Students’ List”—a slate of candidates chosen by activists to replace Vučić’s state apparatus. Though convinced the regime would try to manipulate the count, organizers aimed to counter fraud through overwhelming turnout, operating on a simple premise: elections can be stolen, but not in a landslide.

    “The higher the turnout, the less chance he has to steal it,” one voter who identified himself as David told OCCRP ahead of the poll.

    Then came Sunday. Even after Serbia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs adjusted overseas polling hours to align with Belgrade’s time zone, thousands of diaspora Serbs lined up outside embassies and consulates in Australia and the United States in the dead of night. Some traveled thousands of kilometers from Brisbane to Sydney. In New York, voters showed up at 2:00 AM singing defiant songs, with several wearing pajamas, bathrobes, and sleep masks to mock a rule they viewed as blatant voter suppression.

    Inside Serbia, queues at polling stations stretched around city blocks. Voters brought sandwiches and flasks of tea and coffee, waiting patiently for hours to cast their ballots.

    A video circulating on social media on Monday perhaps best captured that determination: just one minute before polls were set to close, a man was filmed carrying a woman wearing house slippers toward a polling station entrance. “She delivered a baby two days ago!” he shouted to the people at the door, as another bystander rushed over to help carry her inside. She was the final voter admitted to the station.

    “Change requires participation. Citizens who do not participate in the democratic process – not in the public square through protest and engaged debate, nor through the ballot box – will achieve nothing,” political analyst Jasmin Mujanovic wrote in a commentary.

    With turnout approaching 70 percent—nearing a historic record—Vučić did the unthinkable roughly an hour and a half after polls closed at 8:00 PM. Preempting the official election commission tally, he conceded defeat from party headquarters, announcing that based on his party’s samples, the youth-led Students’ List had won decisively, projecting roughly 2.2 million votes for the “List” compared to 1.72 million for his party. 

    His admission unleashed an immediate explosion of jubilation across the country. Car horns blared, red flares illuminated squares, and crowds of weeping, laughing students spilled into the autumn night, dancing well past dawn.

    Asked how she felt as the news broke, Ana Novak, 54, said she was “relieved, very happy, ecstatic.” She, too, had doubted Vučić would concede.

    “I’m really hoping for a change—for a normal state, for a normal life in Serbia,” said Novak, who lives in Belgium with her family and is now considering moving back.

    As morning arrived, the magnitude of the shift began to sink in across the capital. During a live news broadcast from Belgrade downtown, a passerby interrupted a reporter who in her report mentioned the movement’s signature battle cry: “Students are winning!”

    “No,” the man interjected with a smile before walking away. “Students have won.”

    Source: OCCRP · 2026-10-26

  • FBI Cybercrime Operation Nets Nine Arrests in Nigeria

    FBI Cybercrime Operation Nets Nine Arrests in Nigeria

    The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced on Monday the arrest of nine people in Nigeria as part of an international operation targeting cybercrime scam centers. According to a statement by FBI Director, Kash Patel, the operation resulted in identifying a total of $11 million in “potentially freezable funds” across multiple countries.

    The crackdown, code-named Operation Blackout, saw law enforcement confiscate 53 electronic devices used in the cybercrime operations. Patel added that the operation is aimed at dismantling international cybercriminal networks responsible for “stealing billions from Americans.”

    Source: OCCRP · 2026-10-26

  • Bankrolling American Empire in the Philippines

    Bankrolling American Empire in the Philippines

    Bankrolling Empire

    During the Cold War, the Subic Bay Naval Base in the Philippines was a key enabler of U.S. military operations in the Pacific and beyond. It served as a critical support facility for the U.S. war in Vietnam and a transit point for U.S. weapons destined for American military personnel in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. That all changed in June of that year, when the Philippine Congress, under pressure from a grassroots anti-bases movement, refused to renew the lease for Subic Bay and other U.S. outposts in that nation.

    After the closing of U.S. bases, military relations between the U.S. and the Philippines were conducted indirectly through arms transfers, joint training exercises, and deployments of Special Operations forces to aid Philippine counterinsurgency efforts, rather than by the permanent presence of tens of thousands of troops. The relationship was codified in 1999, when Washington and Manila entered into a Visiting Forces Agreement, which eased the movement of U.S. troops and equipment in and out of the Philippines and put U.S. personnel in the country under the jurisdiction of U.S. rather than Philippine authorities.

    But now Subic Bay is back in play as part of a new expansion of the U.S. military presence in the Philippines. And this time around, private capital is financing these empire games.

    Military Might Versus Human Rights

    The long-standing U.S. military ties with the Philippines have come at a high price for the residents of that nation. Washington’s military and economic interests there have prompted it to look the other way as repressive leaders like Ferdinand Marcos and Rodrigo Duterte engaged in systematic human rights abuses against their own people.


    Related

    “Trump Has Appointed Himself Judge, Jury, and Executioner”

    To its credit, the Reagan administration eventually cut ties with Marcos — who was overthrown through peaceful protests known as the “People Power” revolt in 1986 — throwing its support behind his democratically elected opponent, Corazon Aquino. But there was no such shift with respect to Duterte, whose regime ruled the Philippines from 2016 to 2022, and engaged in extrajudicial killings of thousands of Filipinos, including journalists and land reform activists, all under the guise of a “war on drugs.” Duterte is now under indictment by the International Criminal Court, which has cited him for “the crimes against humanity of murder and attempted murder.”

    While Marcos and his family fled the Philippines in the 1980s, his son — Ferdinand Marcos Jr. — returned and, in 2022, won the presidency in a landslide, in part by promising to continue some of the strongman policies introduced by Duterte. According to Human Rights Watch, since the younger Marcos took office:

    Serious human rights violations have continued in the country largely unabated, including arbitrary arrests, extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances by security forces. The murderous ‘war on drugs’ has continued, though with fewer killings. Leftist civil society activists, journalists, environmentalists, Indigenous leaders, trade unionists, and left-wing politicians remain under serious, at times deadly, threat.

    During the Biden presidency, the U.S. expanded a 2014 pact — the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement — which gave the U.S. military access to five major sites in the Philippines. In 2023, the number of bases was expanded to nine. The State Department has described the scope of the EDCA as authorizing “U.S. forces access to agreed locations in the Philippines on a rotational basis, for security cooperation exercises, joint and combined military training activities, and humanitarian assistance and disaster relief activities.” That official summary fails to admit the real reason for the signing of the EDCA: to give the U.S. access to territory that can be used in a future war with China.

    The Privatization of Subic Bay

    Building on his predecessor’s enhanced cooperation with the Philippines, President Donald Trump, who had been a staunch Duterte supporter, has pursued even tighter ties with Marcos’s government. This has been driven, in significant part, by the desire to use the Philippines as a platform for potential U.S. military interventions in the Pacific region and further economic penetration of Asia.


    Related

    The Philippine Missile Crisis: U.S. Deployed Arms to the Philippines and No One Noticed But China

    As part of the accelerating security partnership between the U.S. and the Philippines, military activities at Subic Bay have resumed. But this time, formal access has been secured by a private investment firm, Cerberus Capital Management, which controls the area through a 50-year lease granted through collaboration with a Philippine company, Agila.

    A report by the New York Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines, a member of the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines, summarized current activities at Subic Bay:

    In mid-2025, the U.S. Congress approved a plan to build a forward operating base and ammunition production facility in Subic Bay. It is projected to be the world’s largest weapons hub. … The shipyard [is home to] HD Hyundai Heavy Industries, deep sea fiber optic data cables manufacturer Sub Com, defense contractor V2X and the Philippine Navy, which operates a portion of the facility.

    Cerberus has strong ties to the Trump administration, first and foremost through its founder, Stephen Feinberg, who is deputy secretary of the Department of War, second in command at the Pentagon behind Pete Hegseth. In that role, Feinberg oversees the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital, which makes loans to military tech companies, many of which are current or former Cerberus clients.

    Feinberg “earned” his position the old-fashioned way — by giving millions to Rebuilding America Now, a super PAC devoted to supporting Trump, and hosting a $50,000-a-plate fundraiser, the proceeds of which also went to support candidate Trump in 2016.


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    Bloomberg News has identified four other former Cerberus executives now in key positions at the Pentagon: David Lorch, director of the OSC; George Kollitides, a special government employee who is simultaneously a director of D. Boral Acquisition, a company that brokers mergers and acquisitions in the weapons sector; and senior Pentagon advisers John Gallagher and Tom Rakusan.

    On the other side of the revolving door, Cerberus has hired major Republican figures like former Treasury Secretary John Snow and former Vice President Dan Quayle, who serves as chair of the company’s global investment unit. Given these connections, the Pentagon is all-in behind Cerberus’s activities in the Philippines. But this has prompted a backlash. Activists in the Philippines and beyond are speaking out against the role of Cerberus, calling for public pension funds to withdraw their investments in the company for underwriting the militarization of the Philippines.

    Another important avenue of increased cooperation between the U.S. and the Marcos government is the Philippines’ participation in Pax Silica, a U.S.-initiated cartel that the State Department describes as its “flagship effort on AI and supply chain security, advancing new economic security consensus among allies and trusted partners.” And by “supply chain security,” the declaration primarily means “reducing dependence on China” for critical minerals needed to feed and sustain the computing power now central to the Pentagon and the U.S. arms industry.


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    In addition to the Philippines, there are 24 other participants in Pax Silica, including two other key Asian partners, India and Japan, as well as Taiwan, which is an associate member of the cartel. Jacob Helberg, a former adviser to military tech giant Palantir who now serves as the State Department’s point person on Pax Silica, has stressed that the initiative goes well beyond just securing the supply of specific critical resources. “If the 20th century ran on oil and steel, the 21st century runs on [computing power] and the minerals that feed it,” he said. “This declaration [announcing Pax Silica] hails a new economic security consensus ensuring aligned partners build the AI ecosystem of tomorrow — from energy and critical minerals to high-end manufacturing models.”

    The China Syndrome

    Although it supplies many other benefits to U.S. corporations and America’s national security state, the enhanced effort to bring the Philippines more securely into the U.S. military, political and economic orbit is all rationalized as moves toward reining in China’s economic and military power and garnering Manila’s support in a possible war between China and the U.S.


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    The Pentagon’s Obsession With China Puts Hawai‘i at Risk

    The policy of economic warfare and aggressively preparing for a military conflict with China could not be more misguided. The oft-cited “need” to posture U.S. forces to do battle with China over Taiwan ignores the fact that there are diplomatic means of preventing such a conflict.

    What is needed is a joint understanding on the status of Taiwan. For over 40 years, peace in the Taiwan Strait has been maintained through the U.S.–China agreement that Washington will not take steps toward recognizing Taiwan as an independent state and China would agree not to resolve the issue of Taiwan by force — the so-called “One China” policy. That agreement has been weakened by actions taken during both the Biden and Trump administrations. The simplest and best way for Washington and Beijing to avoid a war over Taiwan would be to revert to the “One China” policy.

    Using trade wars and military buildups as the primary U.S. tool for influencing China simply will not work.

    China does not pose a direct military threat to the United States. Its last major war was its invasion of Vietnam in 1979, a conflict in which its troops were badly beaten by battle-hardened Vietnamese forces. The U.S. also spends almost three times as much on its military as China does, and is far ahead of Beijing in numbers of advanced combat aircraft, naval firepower, and nuclear weapons.

    “The Trillion Dollar War Machine,” by William D. Hartung and Ben Freeman Available on Bookshop.org

    In areas where China might be a peer competitor with the U.S. military, like AI-driven weapons, there need to be some rules of the road on how such systems can be used. Using trade wars and military buildups as the primary U.S. tool for influencing China simply will not work. The likely result of persisting in such an approach will be a dangerous arms race and an increased risk of outright war.

    A more productive approach to U.S.–China relations would be to seriously explore cooperation on central issues like arms control, addressing the climate crisis, and stabilizing the global economy. There would still be a U.S. military strategy for the Asia–Pacific region, but it should be genuinely defensive in nature, a posture that could save hundreds of billions of dollars in the years to come.

    Pursuing a more balanced policy toward China would open the way to developing more equal, less exploitative relations with the Philippines and other nations in the Pacific, and it would allow Washington to finally take a genuine interest in promoting human rights and opposing repression as central pillars of U.S. international relations.

    At a time when armed conflict and threats of war are the bedrock of U.S. policy, from the Western Hemisphere to the Middle East, a shift toward diplomacy seems daunting. But it is the only way forward if we want to move toward a more peaceful world where no one nation or group of nations dominates, and where corporations aren’t bending foreign and domestic policies to their will.

    Source: The Intercept · 2026-10-26

    Documents

  • Pentagon Records Missed Almost Half of Troops’ Domestic Abuse Killings

    Pentagon Records Missed Almost Half of Troops’ Domestic Abuse Killings

    Angelina Resendiz’s voice on the phone was frantic. She was calling a friend from the barracks room of Jermiah Copeland, a fellow sailor at Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia. They had spent the evening together, kissing and drinking, and now Resendiz, 21, needed to leave.

    It was the last time anyone would hear from her. When Resendiz’s friend arrived at the barracks 15 minutes later, the pair was nowhere to be found.

    “The Navy failed her,” Resendiz’s mother, Esmerelda Castle, told The Intercept. After her daughter’s disappearance, friends and family spent a week scrambling to find Resendiz. Castle found the Navy’s reports in that time unclear, delayed, or downright false.

    A first-of-its-kind Intercept investigation has found critical shortcomings in the U.S. military’s procedures for documenting and preserving records of homicides that result from domestic abuse, including intimate partner violence. The Pentagon’s mandated reports to Congress appear to substantially undercount these killings, omitting nearly half of cases.

    In the six years before Copeland’s murder of Resendiz, the Pentagon recorded 41 domestic abuse-related homicides committed by service members. The Intercept identified nearly twice as many: at least 73 potential cases involving 79 victims — almost all of them women — during the same period. Reports for fiscal year 2025, when Resendiz was murdered, are due in November.

    The Intercept examined publicly available news articles, obituaries, court records, memorials, and other data to investigate the specifics behind the Defense Department’s numbers. Reporters also used data obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request on Army noncombat fatalities to match names, because some news coverage did not mention the victims’ and alleged perpetrators’ military service.

    A killing qualified for the dataset if it occurred in fiscal years 2019 to 2024; if the perpetrator was a member of the military at the time of the crime; and if the case involved a homicide. The database only includes cases where a victim of the violence had dated or was in a romantic relationship with the suspected perpetrator, and it includes multiple women living abroad who were foreign citizens dating American troops.

    In the fiscal years since the second Trump administration took power, The Intercept found at least 10 service women or women working for the Defense Department have died from intimate partner and domestic violence, six of them killed by male co-workers. An additional 10 civilian women have been killed by male military personnel in intimate partner violence-related homicides during the same period.

    A Pentagon spokesperson acknowledged The Intercept’s queries about the discrepancy in homicide rates but did not respond to detailed questions before publication.

    “At this moment in our country’s history, I am afraid these numbers are going to increase even further,” said Jacquelyn Campbell, a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Nursing who has been studying domestic violence in the military for decades. “We need primary prevention for everyone in the military and their partners.”

    The findings come in the wake of President Donald Trump’s August announcement of a Military Spouse Commission, led by Jennifer Hegseth, the wife of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and other high-level military leaders. The commission’s mandate is to guide policy around issues affecting military families. Though intimate partner violence and spousal abuse have concerned military family advocates for decades and thousands of new cases are reported each year, the commission does not mention the issue as one of its areas of focus.

    The Navy and DoD have said in public statements and communication with members of Congress and Castle that while “proper procedures were followed” following the death of Resendiz, they have identified several processes that require further review.

    “What Are the Statistics?”

    Copeland killed Resendiz on May 29, 2025. In the days after Resendiz’s disappearance, her friends filed missing person reports and called Castle in Texas, who in turn called the Navy. None of them knew that Resendiz was dead.

    The Navy’s official timeline of events says it did not start investigating her disappearance as a crime until a missing person’s report was filed on the 31st, and that Castle did not reach out until that day. Phone records she shared with The Intercept and members of Congress show she started calling on the 29th.

    “I was told she was found, and that the original missing person’s report was exaggerated,” Castle recalled. “I didn’t think for a second that the Navy would lie to me.

    “I was told she was found, and that the original missing person’s report was exaggerated.”

    Technically, Resendiz had been found — a Navy chief searching for her had seen Resendiz’s body packed under the covers in Copeland’s bed around 10 a.m. on the day of her disappearance. They assumed she was asleep, according to evidence later revealed during trial. But as Castle tells it — including in a congressional inquiry she wrote requesting a deeper investigation— a Navy chief claimed on the phone to have spoken to her daughter in Copeland’s room.

    She had been dead for hours.

    “He had Angie wrapped up in a blanket on his bed,” said Castle. “It was against policy for her to be in the barracks. And they just turned their backs and left.”

    Intimate partner violence in the military has long been a problem with unclear signs of progress. Killings in the 1990s on bases such as Fort Campbell made national headlines, leading Congress to establish the Defense Task Force on Domestic Violence in 2000.

    Campbell, the nursing professor, was part of the effort, which issued over 200 suggestions for improvement by 2003. “Most of the recommendations we made a long time ago were never implemented,” she said. For one, she’d repeatedly requested better recordkeeping.

    “One of the things I kept asking was, ‘What are the statistics on intimate partner homicide in the military?’ We could never get them,” Campbell said. “And in the military’s suicide reports, you cannot determine how many suicides were part of homicide–suicides, where a service member killed a civilian wife or partner before killing himself.”

    This lack of clarity sounded familiar to Priscilla Rodriguez, who spent 10 years in the Marine Corps before working in strategic communications for the Navy.

    “The command chose not to pursue military legal action.”

    Rodriguez experienced domestic violence that met the Defense Department’s criteria from her husband, an active-duty Marine at the time, according to documents reviewed by The Intercept. Her husband pleaded guilty to misdemeanor child abuse in civilian courts, and military legal authorities recommended domestic violence charges. “The command chose not to pursue military legal action,” Rodriguez said.

    The Intercept’s analysis of the rates of domestic abuse reported in Pentagon data found intimate partner violence among married military couples was at least four times higher than the civilian rate. The Pentagon does not report the rate of abuse involving unmarried intimate partners, like Resendiz and Copeland.

    Gaps like these make it difficult to have a thorough reckoning of the problem’s scale. “When accountability is inconsistent,” Rodriguez said, “it sends a message that abuse can and will remain hidden.”

    Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and his wife, Jennifer, share a moment while serving Thanksgiving meals to service members supporting Joint Task Force–District of Columbia in Washington, D.C., Nov. 28, 2025. Leaders, families, and volunteers came together to honor troops working through the holiday. (U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. William Blankenship)
    Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth serves Thanksgiving meals to service members in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 28, 2025. He was joined by his wife, Jennifer Hegseth. Photo: Master Sgt. William Blankenship/U.S. Air Force photo Joint Task Force DC

    “I Knew My Kid Was Not Coming Back”

    Copeland kept Resendiz’s corpse hidden in his barracks room for four days, until June 2, 2025, when he put her body into a duffel bag and dumped it in a wooded area behind a nearby elementary school.

    By then, he was being questioned by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service on her whereabouts, and Castle was still wondering about her daughter’s safety. She’d asked naval authorities to have her daughter give her a call, and when it never came, she contacted the base again.

    A Navy official suggested her daughter may have gone AWOL.

    “I didn’t believe that,” Castle said. “My kid is scared to miss work. She won’t take off.”

    Castle flew to Virginia herself.

    Resendiz had been dead for a week. Castle felt she wasn’t getting the information she needed after the Navy and local authorities had put out a statewide missing person’s alert. She requested that she be let into her daughter’s barracks room.

    “I didn’t want anyone else touching her stuff,” Castle said. “It was how she left it. There was still paint out; she had started painting again. Her yoga mat was still out. She had planned on returning. I knew my kid was not coming back.”

    She spent two more days in Virginia searching for her daughter, talking to local news, and asking naval authorities to give more updates.

    “They didn’t declare her AWOL or dead,” Castle said. “They said she was duty status unknown. I was worried they were going to wash their hands of her.”

    On June 7, Castle flew back to Texas. Police found Resendiz’s body in the duffel bag two days later.

    A History of Violence

    Jermiah Copeland was convicted of Resendiz’s murder on June 8, 2026. According to evidence entered into court records in his murder trial, he had also been accused of two instances of domestic violence, three sexual assaults, indecent recordings, and other crimes from during and before his Navy service.

    “He had a history of violence against women starting in high school,” Castle said. “And was still allowed to join with the charges against him. Then he was accused of raping another service member, and he was transferred. There were no safeguards in place at the new command.”

    The absence of safeguards against intimate partner violence in the military is part of a broader set of structural and cultural failings, experts told The Intercept.

    “There are many disincentives for a couple, particularly when one or both partners are on active duty, to seek help,” Campbell said. “Active-duty women who were being abused told us: ‘If my commanding officer knew, I would never get the next promotion.’ There is considerable stigma, even for the victim. That makes the violence much more likely to escalate and makes it more likely that we eventually end up with homicides.”


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    Research indicates that the military’s hypermasculine culture and systematic mistreatment of women play a role in the increased risks of intimate partner violence. Some studies suggest that veterans offend at higher rates than those on active duty.

    A previous Intercept investigation found active-duty Army women were more likely to be killed by fellow service members than by enemy combatants and had a higher per capita risk of homicide than their fellow male soldiers between the years 2011 and 2025.

    More than 70 percent of the victims had an intimate relationship with the perpetrator at some point. Army women faced an intimate partner homicide rate at least three times higher than women nationally; controlling for those killed by service men and male veterans alone, it was double.

    The military’s systems for identifying and responding to abuse, meanwhile, have come under repeated scrutiny. A 2021 Government Accountability Office report found the department “has not collected and reported accurate data for all domestic abuse allegations received,” leaving it unable to assess the scope of alleged abuse.

    The same can be said for homicides.

    Almost a third of the 79 victims The Intercept found were killed in murder–suicides. Firearms were used in over two-thirds of the fatalities. Twenty-five of the victims were service members. Multiple homicides involved corollary victims who were not partners, including children, who research shows make up a sizable amount of intimate partner violence-related deaths.


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    In response to The Intercept’s questions, the Department of Defense stated that data in its domestic abuse reports does not constitute estimates, as it is only using aggregated data from the Family Advocacy Program Central Registry, a database run by the DoD. It further stated it did not have any more information to share on the matter.

    “Right now, unless an incident is reported to the Family Advocacy Program,” said Campbell, “nobody knows about it. Those reports are only the tip of the iceberg.”

    Data tracking failures have had deadly consequences. The Air Force failed to submit the criminal history of a former service member convicted of assaulting his wife and stepson to a federal database that could have prevented him from purchasing firearms. In 2017, he killed 26 people in Sutherland Springs, Texas.

    When Rodriguez reported her own abuse to the DoD, she felt that they didn’t consider the previous information they had available. Installation-level committees review reported allegations and determine whether they meet criteria to be input into the central registry. But the process is plagued with issues, experts who spoke to the Intercept revealed, from investigation procedures to data tracking.

    “I was terrified to disclose the full extent of the abuse I was experiencing,” Rodriguez said. “What stands out to me now is that the Family Advocacy Program already had access to my husband’s history. Given that history, I believe the conversation should have been much broader than simply asking whether I wanted to report anything. I left that initial interaction without understanding what support existed or how I could safely leave.”

    While navigating her own case, Rodriguez was also watching the same problem surface through her communications work for the Navy.

    “It felt completely disconnected from the reality my family and so many others were living.”

    “Headlines I monitored involved active duty and Marine veterans accused of intimate partner homicide,” Rodriguez said. “At the same time, I reviewed serious incident reports that were elevated to senior leadership. … The narrative often indicated that intimate partner violence or domestic violence was a contributing or co-occurring factor.”

    Navy criminal investigative data showed domestic violence-related deaths increasing as Rodriguez was trying to raise the issue in 2022. She tried to compile domestic violence awareness resources, but she recalled being told the need wasn’t there.

    “I was told there was ‘no demand signal,’” Rodriguez said. “It felt completely disconnected from the reality my family and so many others were living.”

    Castle feels that the knowledge of Copeland’s history of abuse could have saved her daughter’s life.

    “No one knew anything about him,” Castle said. “The leadership created an environment that allowed him to harm women.”

    Winnable Cases

    Since her daughter’s murder, Castle has been at work pushing the Navy and Defense Department to strengthen their responses to intimate partner violence. Her work led to the Navy changing its policies in July on how it transfers sailors with allegations of sexual violence.

    Her wins, including potential plans by the Navy to change how it classifies missing sailors, are the latest in a long string of limited efforts toward progress.

    “Records are important,” said Castle. “With my daughter, they didn’t want to classify her case properly at first. For the military, if something isn’t in a database, it doesn’t exist.”

    Following the high-profile 2020 murder of Army Spc. Vanessa Guillén at Fort Hood — and two years after domestic violence became classified as a crime under the Uniform Code of Military Justice — Congress gave independent military prosecutors the power to decide which cases to bring to trial.

    Domestic violence prosecutions climbed, with charges brought in 359 cases last year alone, up from dozens of cases four years earlier. But Pentagon data identified at least 25,000 intimate partner and spouse abuse victims, and 37,000 cases, from 2021 to 2024.


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    And while domestic violence prosecutions increased, military prosecutions of sexual assault — often related to intimate partner violence — fell by almost 60 percent in the past five years, based on data from its annual sexual assault prevention reports. A 20 percent drop occurred from 2024–2025 alone, and The Intercept’s analysis of military court data shows the trend is continuing into 2026.

    “In the Pete Hegseth era, sexual assault prosecutions have dropped significantly. Domestic violence is essentially filling that gap,” said Paul Newell, an Army veteran and activist who tracks military suicide, sexual assault, and domestic violence while engaging with members of Congress on the issue.

    “In the Pete Hegseth era, sexual assault prosecutions have dropped significantly.”

    Newell thinks the trial counsel’s office is “going for what they feel are stronger, more winnable cases,” he said. “They’ll tell you that their conviction rates at trial are still high, which shows that really, they’re just getting rid of the bad cases,” he said. “But we’re not down 60 percent in sexual assaults happening.”

    The Pentagon stated in response to The Intercept’s questions that it does not have any additional information to share on why prosecution rates for certain crimes are dropping.

    The Intercept also discovered preferential treatment in trial outcomes: Analyzing over 650 military court cases with guilty verdicts from 2021 on, reporters found less senior Navy, Marine, and Army service members had higher chances of losing their benefits and received more jail time after being convicted for domestic violence. Senior ranks closest to retirement received the best conviction outcomes, even compared to those of the same rank as them who had fewer years in service.

    Newell feels that these discrepancies give perpetrators increased power over their victims. “The justice system should not take time in service into consideration since that’s prioritizing the perpetrator. If the punishment for domestic violence is a discharge where you lose benefits, it should be applied equally.”

    In April, Hegseth directed installation commanders to allow service members to request permission to carry privately owned firearms on bases while off duty. He framed the change as a way to protect service members from attacks on military installations.

    Campbell disagrees.

    “I have reviewed far too many domestic violence homicide records,” Campbell said. “It is clear to me that, in many cases, there might have been a fight, and somebody might have been hit, but nobody would have died if there had not been a gun right there.”

    Rodriguez, who is now studying public health, is calling for recurring anonymous surveys using specific questions to measure the prevalence of intimate partner violence, standardized tracking, independent evaluation, and public reporting.

    Castle is still mourning her daughter and still pushing the Navy to reveal the full details about the investigation into her death. To add to the insult, she remembered the shock she felt late last June, when the Navy sent Resendiz home to Texas in a casket. Naval officials had told Castle that everything was taken care of, she recalled, including cleaning the body.

    The Navy acknowledges that it failed to clearly inform Castle of her daughter’s true state. She was returned to Texas in decay, her body crawling with maggots.

    “There’s nothing that can be done for her,” said Castle. “That’s injustice, and that’s what drives me. None of these women volunteered to be violated in this way.”

    How we analyzed the data

    Reporters searched through multiple databases to identify the number of potential victims of intimate partner violence, using definitions provided by health and policy research alongside government organizations, comparing it to the last six years of available DoD reporting from 2019 through 2024. The case of a U.S. Air Force airman who kidnapped and murdered a Mennonite woman in 2020 didn’t meet criteria because evidence revealed no previous or current relationship. The case of a soldier who was convicted a year later of the murder of a woman in Texas did, as evidence indicated they had a relationship before the woman’s death.

    Cases were broken down by the year of the offense, gender of the alleged perpetrator and victim, and branch of the perpetrator and victim, if applicable.

    To analyze court data, reporters from The Intercept pulled all court cases pertaining to domestic violence from the years 2021 to 2026 from the websites of the Air Force, Navy/Marines, and U.S. Army. Navy/Marine data was only available starting in 2021.

    Data included the offense type, rank of the accused, and whether the cases ended in acquittal, dismissal, or conviction. For those convicted, the analysis included the amount of jail time given and whether offenders received a punitive discharge, which costs them military retirement and other benefits.

    Retirement eligibility was calculated based on pay information provided in court documents, which in the military is based on years served. Air Force data could not be used for this analysis due to a lack of documentation and apparent discrepancies between the number of cases reported to Congress and those available on the Air Force portal.

    To obtain the number of cases the DoD is prosecuting for sexual assault, reporters utilized Annex B of the DoD’s Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military to calculate the number of unrestricted reports made to military authorities and the amount sent to the military justice system to begin the judicial process. 

    The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline offers 24-hour support for those experiencing suicidal thoughts or for those close to them, by chat, text, or telephone. Service members can dial 988 and press 1 to reach the Military and Veterans Crisis Line. Support is free and confidential.

    Source: The Intercept · 2026-10-26

    Documents

  • In a Newly Drawn District, Black Voters May Get a Representative Who Spent Years Undermining Their Interests

    In a Newly Drawn District, Black Voters May Get a Representative Who Spent Years Undermining Their Interests

    A man in a suit holds his finger to his ear in an “I can’t hear you” motion as he walks through a government building. In the foreground are a crowd of people raising their arms at him, cameras pointing at him and people in uniform holding the crowd back.
    State Sen. Brent Taylor, R-Memphis, interacts with protesters as he leaves the Senate chamber after a special session of the state legislature to redraw the U.S. congressional voting map in Nashville, Tennessee, in May. George Walker IV/AP

    Not two weeks after the Tennessee legislature carved Memphis into three congressional districts this spring, in a move designed to eliminate Democratic representation, Republican state Sen. Brent Taylor made his electoral expectations clear in a photo posted on social media. 

    Taylor and U.S. Rep. Tim Burchett, a fellow Republican, sat side by side on the U.S. Capitol steps. “My friend Tim Burchett showing me the dadgum ropes,” Taylor wrote in a Facebook post.

    On May 7, the same day that the new districts were approved, Taylor had announced his bid to represent the redrawn Congressional District 9, which for more than four decades had stood as the state’s sole majority Black district. During that time, it covered mostly the Memphis area; it now stretches across half the state and is majority white.

    Taylor, 58, already has a track record with many of the voters he is now seeking to represent in Washington, D. C.: In his nearly four years as a state senator, he has taken steps to strip authority from local officials elected by many of those same voters. With the backing of a Republican supermajority, Taylor, who is white, pushed through half a dozen laws that superseded the power and priorities of local politicians.

    Around the country, state legislatures from both parties have used preemption laws to control local governments. That tactic has been embraced by Republican-dominated statehouses in recent years as a way to restrict the ability of Democratic-led cities to enact policies state leaders disagree with, including protections for civil rights, public health and workers. 

    Memphis has long struggled with high rates of violent crime that have begun to fall only in the last couple of years. This is where Taylor focused his legislative efforts. He led the charge to prohibit judges from considering a defendant’s ability to pay when making bail decisions. He has tried to oust Steve Mulroy, the first Democrat elected as Shelby County district attorney in 25 years, and pushed through legislation authorizing the state to review every decision made by his office. And he co-sponsored a law that voided the Memphis City Council’s ban on police stops for minor traffic infractions, which had been passed after the 2023 beating death of Black motorist Tyré Nichols.

    The question of how to keep communities safe has drawn divergent political approaches in Memphis — from Mulroy’s focus on rehabilitation as part of his effort to lower violent crime, to Taylor’s emphasis on aggressive prosecution and incarceration. Those approaches can mean very different experiences for the people of Memphis, which makes up most of Shelby County. Some elected officials and criminal justice experts warn that the laws Taylor has championed will embolden police to detain drivers without justification and the criminal justice system to lock up more people for longer periods in the already overcrowded county jail, where more than 65 people have died since 2018. 

    “I think he’s very dangerous for Shelby County, and he’s going to be very dangerous for the Ninth District if he gets elected,” said former Shelby County General Sessions Court Judge Bill Anderson, referring to how Taylor’s policies could especially harm Black men. Anderson retired in May 2025 after clashing publicly with Taylor over bail reform measures. (Anderson supported them; Taylor opposed them.)

    Taylor is favored to win because of redistricting by Tennessee Republicans after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in April made it harder to challenge gerrymandering that dilutes the Black vote. The Mississippi native, who lives in an antebellum-style mansion in a tiny and heavily white community east of Memphis, has loaned his congressional campaign $1.5 million. The candidate made millions after selling his funeral home businesses to a private equity firm. 

    Taylor’s opponent is state Rep. Justin J. Pearson, a 31-year-old Black Democrat who has taken a very different approach to what the district needs. Pearson has called for addressing the root causes of crime by improving schools and economic opportunities instead of a singular focus on incarceration. He first made national headlines for his role in stopping the construction of an oil pipeline in a Black Memphis neighborhood. He is also one of two Democratic legislators expelled by the Republican supermajority after leading a protest calling for gun control following a 2023 school shooting. With deep family roots in southwest Memphis, Pearson has positioned himself as the better fit for the historically Democratic Ninth Congressional District. He has also received support from national Democrats and has outraised Taylor in campaign donations.

    A man wearing a suit speaks to a crowd of people who are holding signs that say, “Justin Pearson” and “Stop Toxic Data Centers.”
    Democratic congressional candidate state Rep. Justin J. Pearson speaks to supporters after an election night watch party for the state’s primaries in Memphis, Tennessee, in August. Kevin Wurm/MLK50/CatchLight Local/Report for America

    Taylor, who declined to be interviewed for this story, has said that the laws he has championed prioritize public safety. He did not respond to detailed questions.

    But John Pfaff, a professor at Fordham School of Law who has studied how state preemption laws impact prosecutors, said tough-on-crime laws like the ones Taylor helped pass have historically been “a form of social control against disliked minority groups” under the guise of public safety.

    Non-urban voters, Pfaff said, “do feel, however incorrectly, sort of victimized by expanding civil rights” that urban voters choose. While these voters cannot cast ballots in city elections, he said, they have another path by which to exert power: “If the suburbs and rural areas control the governor’s mansion and the state legislature, they then can use their power there through preemption laws that finally tell Memphis what they want Memphis to do.”

    Prohibiting Limits on Police Traffic Stops

    In January 2023, the month Taylor took office, the nation was shaken by video of violent policing in Memphis.

    A street surveillance camera and police body cameras captured what happened after undercover Memphis police officers pulled over 29-year-old Nichols just a few blocks from his mother’s home. For three minutes, officers repeatedly punched the unarmed man in the face, hit him with a baton and kicked him as he screamed for his mom. Nichols would die from his injuries in the hospital three days later.

    After pressure from Nichols’ family and community organizers, the Memphis City Council unanimously passed an ordinance in April of that year barring police from pulling motorists over for minor traffic violations, such as a broken tail light, as a pretext for investigating an unrelated, more serious crime. Research shows that these stops are disproportionately used to detain Black drivers, undermine the public’s trust in police and create unnecessary police encounters that can turn deadly. 

    A woman speaks into numerous microphones. She is in the midst of a crowd of people outdoors. The other people hold signs that say, “Tyre” and “I am a man.” Behind them, a large sculpture spells out the words “I am a man.”
    RowVaughn Wells, center, with family, friends and supporters during a community rally and celebration of what would have been Tyré Nichols’ 32nd birthday outside of the I Am a Man Plaza in Memphis in June 2025. Brad Vest for MLK50

    Taylor, who had been in the state Senate for a few months when the city ordinance passed, said it made the public less safe by limiting the potential for police to investigate more serious crimes. The next year, he and state Rep. John Gillespie, a Shelby County Republican, sponsored legislation that prohibited local government from curbing law enforcement’s ability to conduct traffic stops, effectively undoing Memphis’ ordinance.

    Nichols’ mother, RowVaughn Wells, pleaded with lawmakers to drop the bill. Speaking on the Senate floor, Taylor responded, saying that as a funeral home director, he empathized with the Nichols’ family, but “we can’t let that empathy, Mr. Speaker, cloud our judgment in protecting 7 million Tennesseans.”

    Taylor’s intervention suggests “that Memphis voters don’t know what their best interests are,” said Martavius Jones, who was chair of the Memphis City Council when the city ordinance passed. “What we were trying to do would not jeopardize the safety of anyone — not even in Memphis, but much less the rest of the population of Tennessee.” 

    Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, told reporters before signing the law that no one should limit police in their enforcement methods and officers should be held accountable for their actions.

    “I think what’s most important for us to remember is that we can give law enforcement tools,” Lee said, “but we’ve got to hold law enforcement to a standard of using those tools appropriately, where there’s an appropriate interaction with the public.” 

    Eight months after Tennessee lawmakers passed Taylor’s preemption bill, the U.S. Department of Justice released its investigation of the Memphis Police Department, finding that its aggressive traffic enforcement had harmed Memphians. The Justice Department recommended that the city limit the use of pretextual stops. Such police activity enabled the “regular use of excessive force with impunity” and unlawfully discriminated against Black residents, the Biden administration’s report said. When President Donald Trump took office in 2025, his Justice Department retracted those findings. 

    Over the last year, law enforcement has ramped up the use of such stops, especially in immigration enforcement, as Trump’s Memphis Safe Task Force — a collection of more than two dozen state and federal law enforcement agencies, including the National Guard — descended upon the city. Taylor supported the effort, testifying before the U.S. Senate days before it began that the task force would “succeed in doing the hard work to infiltrate gangs and arrest more routine criminals.”

    Unprecedented Scrutiny of a District Attorney

    Since his first year in the state Senate, Taylor had also been working to displace the decision-making authority of another locally elected office: district attorneys, especially Mulroy, one of Tennessee’s two Democratic county prosecutors. Taylor called him a “far-left zealot” who “has the potential to make the scourge of violent crime even worse.”  

    A man holding a microphone gestures with his hand as he speaks. In the background, a crowd is holding signs that say, “Still Seeking Justice. Tyre Nichols.”
    Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy speaks at a vigil for the third anniversary of Nichols’ death in Memphis in January. Andrea Morales/MLK50

    In 2023, Taylor sponsored a law that transferred the power to review certain death penalty cases from county prosecutors, who are elected, to the state attorney general, who is appointed by the state Supreme Court. While the law applied statewide, it disproportionately impacted Shelby County, where half of the state’s 40 death row prisoners were prosecuted. The law, Mulroy said at the time, “effectively disenfranchises the voters” who chose their district attorney. 

    Taylor would go on to further weaken Mulroy’s office following Trump’s 2025 deployment of his crime task force to Memphis. As arrests soared, Taylor worked to place the district attorney’s decisions under unprecedented scrutiny, saying he wanted to ensure that the prosecution of task force cases was as aggressive as the task force itself. 

    One new law, co-sponsored by Taylor, authorized the state attorney general to review every case that comes through Mulroy’s office, including those that stem from arrests made by Trump’s task force, “to ensure the proper administration of justice necessary to protect the safety of the community.” The dispositions of each case, along with bail recommendations, would be reported to legislative leaders. 

    Republican state Rep. Andrew Farmer, who introduced the bill in the House, noted that it is designed to ensure that “all crimes that deserve to be prosecuted are prosecuted.” 

    Mulroy is “just going to have to work harder and ensure that people are continuing to stay safe,” Farmer said on the House floor. “We want Memphis to continue on the path that it’s going —  up.”

    The state’s district attorneys general conference, led by Republican former District Attorney Stephen Crump, opposed an early version of the bill, which would have applied to district attorneys across the state, because it could lead prosecutors to second-guess their decisions. He dropped his objections after the bill was narrowed to apply to only Mulroy.

    That law has another provision aimed at Mulroy as well: If he declines to prosecute specific categories of crime, the state attorney general can ask the state Supreme Court to intervene by installing a temporary district attorney who would then decide whether to prosecute. Taylor has long sought to limit Mulroy’s authority, and the provision would be a way to do so. Mulroy said the effect would be “an unelected shadow DA operating in parallel to the duly elected DA.” 

    “Prosecutorial discretion and prosecutorial independence is a key fundamental part of our criminal justice system,” Mulroy said. “It’s clear under both the text of the Tennessee constitution and Tennessee Supreme Court case law, and this bill does great violence to those principles.”

    Taylor co-sponsored a second law, passed in May, that requires Mulroy’s office to report to the state and the U.S. Department of Justice within 10 business days every time it has entered into a plea deal, or dismissed or lowered the charges on a felony offense that resulted from a task force arrest. 

    “Memphis residents deserve confidence that the significant investments being made to combat violent crime are matched with accountability at every level of the justice system,” Gillespie, who co-sponsored the bill in the House, said at the time. 

    Taylor argued the reporting requirements were necessary to give the federal government an opportunity to prosecute cases Mulroy dismissed. In a post on X and a statement made before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, he called Mulroy “the weak link” in the task force’s efforts. He’s also claimed, without evidence, that Mulroy refuses to prosecute crimes.

    In a rebuttal, Mulroy noted that more than 40,000 defendants are prosecuted by his office each year.

    Mulroy has sued to stop both laws, claiming they are unconstitutional because they unfairly single out Shelby County and create an administrative burden. The lawsuit is pending in state court. Meanwhile, Mulroy has objected to his staff spending time on the reporting requirements, which he called “pointless busywork.” 

    Mulroy’s election in 2022 as the county’s first Democratic district attorney in more than two decades came on the heels of a year with a record number of homicides. But Republicans’ tough-on-crime approach had grown unpopular with voters, and Mulroy vowed to be an alternative. He promised to deprioritize the prosecution of low-level offenses such as marijuana possession and shoplifting; emphasize rehabilitation such as drug treatment, mental health counseling and job training; and establish a unit to examine the validity of convictions.

    One of the people who campaigned for him was William Arnold, who had spent nearly seven years in state prison before his conviction was dismissed following examination by a Davidson County conviction review unit. The community organizer said he saw Mulroy’s candidacy as a way to “support someone who could help Memphians in a different way.”

    To see Mulroy’s power being muted by Taylor is disheartening, Arnold said. But that is not surprising to him, given how the state legislature has long treated the predominantly Black city, including replacing the Memphis Shelby County Schools’ elected board with a state-appointed one.

    A close-up photo of a man with a serious expression.
    William Arnold, who spent nearly seven years incarcerated for a crime he did not commit, is now a community organizer and a supporter of Mulroy. Brandon Dill for MLK50

    Bail Calculator Scrapped

    Among the preemptive legislation Taylor has sponsored, a 2023 effort stood out: the dismantling of a bipartisan effort to ensure Shelby County’s bail practices did not discriminate against poor people, who are disproportionately Black.

    Under state law, magistrates are to “impose the least onerous conditions” when deciding bail and should set bail “as low as the court determines is necessary” to assure the defendant returns to court.

    But in practice, hundreds of people were being detained at the Shelby County Jail simply because they couldn’t afford bail, according to Just City, a Memphis criminal justice reform organization, which along with the American Civil Liberties Union threatened to sue the county in 2021 for violating existing state law. Being jailed while awaiting trial can cause arrestees to lose jobs and child custody, the organizations argued.

    In August 2022, the organizations and county officials — including Mulroy’s predecessor, Republican District Attorney Amy Weirich — agreed on a new bail order that included an “ability to pay” calculator. 

    That tool quickly drew Taylor’s ire, and by the following January he had co-sponsored a bill to kill it, characterizing the calculator in a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting as a way of “essentially asking defendants how much money they happen to have in their pocket so that they can make bail.”

    The bill’s supporters said judges should prioritize public safety when deciding whether to release defendants. “There is blood running in the streets of Memphis today because they’re letting people out,” state Rep. William Lamberth, a Republican, said on the House floor.

    State law requires judges, when setting bail, to consider several factors, including a defendant’s financial condition. And Josh Spickler, executive director of Just City, said that’s exactly what the tool helped judges do. 

    Under Taylor’s law, however, “the defendant’s ability to pay shall not be considered.”

    “That tied our hands as judges,” Anderson, the former Shelby County judge, said in an interview. 

    A 2025 University of Memphis study found that the median bail amount increased after Taylor’s law took effect. And the law’s impact falls hardest on Black residents, Anderson said, because they are more likely to be low-income and make up a disproportionate share of Shelby County jail occupants. 

    “To those of us in the system, it’s obvious what he’s doing,” said Anderson, who resigned in 2025 with six years left of his eight-year term. “He called them reform acts, but they’re not reform.”

    Source: ProPublica · 2026-10-26

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