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President Trump is demanding the Smithsonian Institution install a 30-foot colossal statue of George Washington outside the National Museum of American History and to curate a five-year special exhibit about Washington’s legacy. The proposed massive statue would replace an abstract sculpture titled “Infinity” by José de Rivera that was installed in 1967. In a Truth Social rant, Trump said “That strange modernist sculpture tells visitors nothing about America, inspires no one, and honors none of our Great American Heroes.” This comes just days after the Smithsonian’s head Lonnie Bunch III last week announced he’s stepping down from the position. Bunch and others in the Smithsonian Institution’s leadership have faced repeated attacks from President Trump. In July, Trump ordered the installation of signs in front of the National Museum of American History claiming that some of the exhibits are inaccurate. The signs have not been installed yet. In 2019, Bunch became the first African American and historian to be named secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, and has worked for the museum’s education and research complex for nearly 40 years. He was also the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

In Lebanon, the Israeli military says it used more than 1,000 tons of explosives–triggering seismic activity equivalent to a magnitude 4.1 earthquake, according to the US Geological Survey. Israel claimed the explosives were used to destroy two tunnels operated by Hezbollah beneath the Ali Taher Ridge. This comes despite a U.S.-brokered ceasefire earlier this year. Israeli forces continue to occupy 5% of Lebanon. According to the UN, about 330,000 people in Lebanon have been displaced by Israeli attacks.

A major new report by the Israeli human rights group B’tselem titled “The Elimination Project” accuses Israel of systematically dismantling the conditions that allow Palestinians in the occupied West Bank to function as a community. The report says Israel is “dramatically intensifying its attacks on every aspect of Palestinian life in the West Bank” including “the ability to get to work, take children to school or university, receive medical treatment or municipal services, meet family and friends, cultivate land or go on vacation … routine activities that make up human life.” Since October 7, 2023, at least 1,107 Palestinians have been killed by Israel in the occupied West Bank. Over the weekend, an Israeli soldier shot a Palestinian man in the leg during a confrontation between Israeli settlers and Palestinian villagers in the West Bank town of Faqqua.

As Nebraska’s Republican Governor Jim Pillen publicly backs Trump’s ICE raids in the state, more details have emerged of Pillen’s multimillion-dollar hog business that employs undocumented workers. The New York Times and The Flatwater Free Press report that over the span of more than a decade Pillen’s company — Pillen Family Farms — has relied on undocumented workers to grow into one of the largest hog producers in the U.S. Despite that, Pillen has often echoed Trump’s racist rhetoric about immigrants and a so-called “invasion.”

In Ukraine, at least five people were wounded in a Russian drone attack in the city of Odessa Sunday. Meanwhile, Russia accused Ukraine of killing two Russian servicemen at the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine. It comes as another Russian drone hit a train near the Ukraine-Poland border shortly after former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and top European security officials had passed through. Former US CIA director David Petraeus was at the Ukrainian train station at the very moment a Russian drone struck a passenger train. This is the EU’s Foreign Policy Chief Kaja Kallas. Kaja Kallas: “I think about that Russian drone strike on train on the border with Poland), that it is clearly meant to scare Western countries from supporting Ukraine, from going to Ukraine to show support. That was meant, it was clearly message to the Western world. I think the question for us is, what do we take from that message?

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

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

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

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

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