Morning erections are the gold standard for gauging testosterone, according to several male-oriented forums on Reddit, where an entire subcategory is devoted to the hormone, which is referred to online simply as T. In those groups—some aligned with the manosphere and others not—members swap and compare blood tests every six months. Being labeled in that universe as low T (low in testosterone) is a stigma that taps into several male anxieties: weak sexual drive, low energy, a certain timorous attitude toward life and a precarious bank balance.

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Italia e Stati Uniti rafforzano il dialogo sulla sicurezza energetica, le materie prime critiche e le infrastrutture strategiche, con il nucleare di nuova generazione che emerge come uno dei principali terreni di convergenza. Il confronto riflette l’ambizione di Roma di consolidare il proprio ruolo di partner transatlantico e di hub energetico tra Europa, Africa e Indo-Mediterraneo, valorizzando le capacità industriali nazionali e la posizione geografica del Paese.

Questi temi sono stati al centro dell’incontro a Washington tra la viceministra dell’Ambiente e della Sicurezza energetica, Vannia Gava, e Jarrod Agen, direttore esecutivo del National Energy Dominance Council della Casa Bianca. Un confronto che ha permesso di approfondire le prospettive di cooperazione bilaterale in settori destinati ad assumere un peso crescente negli equilibri economici e geopolitici internazionali.

“Con Jarrod Agen abbiamo condiviso alla Casa Bianca una visione che unisce Italia e Stati Uniti: la sicurezza energetica è sicurezza nazionale”, ha dichiarato Gava. Per Paesi a forte vocazione manifatturiera, ha spiegato, questo significa garantire energia affidabile a costi sostenibili per le imprese, diversificare le fonti, includere nel mix energetico il nucleare di nuova generazione e scegliere partner stabili e affidabili.

Uno dei principali argomenti affrontati riguarda le materie prime critiche, la cui disponibilità è sempre più determinante per la transizione energetica, le tecnologie avanzate e la competitività industriale. La concentrazione delle attività di raffinazione in un numero ristretto di Paesi rappresenta una vulnerabilità strutturale per le economie occidentali, che rende necessario rafforzare la cooperazione sulle catene di approvvigionamento e sviluppare nuove partnership con i Paesi produttori.

“È una vulnerabilità che l’Occidente deve affrontare insieme, costruendo filiere condivise e partenariati con i Paesi produttori, molti dei quali si trovano in Africa”, ha osservato la viceministra. In questo quadro si inserisce anche l’accordo tra Italia e Stati Uniti sulle materie prime critiche, che potrebbe rafforzare il ruolo di Roma nell’iniziativa americana Pax Silica. Parallelamente, la Commissione europea ha selezionato cinque progetti strategici italiani dedicati alla lavorazione e al riciclo di materiali critici, confermando il potenziale contributo dell’industria nazionale alla costruzione di filiere europee più resilienti.

La dimensione africana occupa una posizione centrale nella strategia italiana. Gava ha richiamato il Piano Mattei come strumento per sviluppare partenariati con i Paesi del continente e rafforzare l’integrazione tra sicurezza energetica, cooperazione industriale e diversificazione degli approvvigionamenti. “Ho voluto sottolineare che è proprio in questa prospettiva che si inserisce il Piano Mattei, attraverso il quale l’Italia ha ridefinito il proprio rapporto con l’Africa, una regione strategica per il nostro Paese”, ha spiegato.

Il nucleare rappresenta un ulteriore elemento di convergenza strategica tra Roma e Washington, soprattutto per le prospettive di collaborazione tecnologica e industriale. Già in un’intervista rilasciata a Decode39 nel 2023, Gava aveva illustrato le ragioni del rinnovato interesse italiano per questa fonte energetica, sostenendo il principio della neutralità tecnologica e sottolineando il potenziale dei reattori avanzati nel completare il contributo delle rinnovabili, sostenere le industrie energivore e rafforzare l’autonomia strategica nazionale.

Durante la visita negli Stati Uniti, la viceministra ha inoltre visitato Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a Boston, una delle realtà più innovative a livello internazionale nello sviluppo della fusione nucleare. Si tratta di una tecnologia ancora in fase di sviluppo, ma con il potenziale di offrire in futuro una fonte energetica pulita, sicura e sostenibile. Gava ha evidenziato il contributo delle imprese italiane, degli investitori, delle aziende coinvolte nella filiera industriale e delle eccellenze accademiche e della ricerca nazionale, sottolineando come la partecipazione italiana a questo settore rappresenti un esempio concreto della capacità del Paese di contribuire alle grandi trasformazioni tecnologiche del sistema energetico globale.

La centralità della sicurezza energetica nella politica industriale e nelle relazioni internazionali italiane era stata ribadita dalla stessa Gava anche in occasione della riunione ministeriale dell’Agenzia internazionale dell’energia a Parigi. Come riportato da Decode39, la viceministra aveva richiamato l’importanza della diversificazione delle fonti, dell’accesso alle materie prime critiche e del rafforzamento delle partnership internazionali per tutelare la competitività economica e la sicurezza nazionale.

Il confronto alla Casa Bianca ha riguardato anche le nuove direttrici energetiche e infrastrutturali, considerate strumenti di integrazione economica e geopolitica. In particolare, Gava ha richiamato il corridoio India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), con la sua componente energetica, e le interconnessioni tra Nord Africa ed Europa, destinate a modificare i flussi commerciali ed energetici tra India, Medio Oriente, Mediterraneo e continente europeo.

“L’Italia può diventarne l’hub naturale, contribuendo così concretamente all’Occidente, che potrà superare le sfide dei prossimi anni soltanto restando unito”, ha affermato la viceministra.

L’incontro di Washington colloca dunque le ambizioni energetiche italiane all’interno di una più ampia cornice transatlantica. Roma punta a combinare le proprie competenze industriali, la posizione geografica nel Mediterraneo e le partnership africane con una cooperazione più stretta con gli Stati Uniti sulle tecnologie, sulle catene di approvvigionamento e sulle infrastrutture strategiche.

La prospettiva più significativa riguarda la possibilità di tradurre questa convergenza politica in progetti concreti, soprattutto nel settore nucleare, dove le competenze industriali e scientifiche italiane e le capacità tecnologiche americane possono costituire la base per una collaborazione più strutturata. Un percorso che si inserisce nella più ampia ricerca di sicurezza energetica, competitività industriale e autonomia strategica delle economie occidentali.

L’Arabia Saudita ha deciso di rinviare al 2027 la Future Investment Initiative (FII), il grande appuntamento internazionale dedicato agli investimenti che avrebbe dovuto svolgersi a Riad dal 26 al 29 ottobre. La decisione arriva dopo settimane di attacchi missilistici e con droni degli Houthi contro infrastrutture saudite, tra cui l’aeroporto internazionale King Khalid della capitale. La cosiddetta “Davos nel deserto”, uno degli strumenti di promozione economica del principe ereditario Mohammed bin Salman, diventa così una delle vittime più visibili dell’instabilità regionale.

Gli organizzatori hanno motivato il rinvio con la volontà di garantire la qualità e la portata della decima edizione, senza attribuire esplicitamente la decisione alla situazione militare. Il contesto appare tuttavia determinante. Secondo Reuters, le preoccupazioni sulla sicurezza avevano già indotto alcuni grandi gruppi finanziari a riconsiderare la partecipazione dei propri dirigenti. Il rinvio rappresenta un passaggio significativo per un evento concepito per attirare capitali internazionali e sostenere la trasformazione economica del Regno.

Una vulnerabilità già emersa

Il problema era stato anticipato da Formiche.net il 14 ottobre, quando Riad stava valutando la possibilità di trasformare la FII in un evento ibrido. Già allora gli attacchi contro l’aeroporto saudita avevano mostrato come la pressione militare degli Houthi potesse incidere direttamente sulle ambizioni economiche di Vision 2030.

La cancellazione dell’appuntamento per quest’anno rende questa vulnerabilità ancora più evidente. L’Arabia Saudita ha investito enormi risorse per presentarsi come piattaforma internazionale per finanza, tecnologia, turismo e grandi eventi. La capacità degli Houthi di colpire infrastrutture strategiche introduce un elemento di incertezza che può condizionare la mobilità dei dirigenti, l’organizzazione degli appuntamenti internazionali e la percezione del rischio da parte degli investitori.

Il problema riguarda anche l’asimmetria del confronto. Gli Houthi, sostenuti dall’Iran, possono imporre costi economici e reputazionali a un Paese dotato di risorse militari e finanziarie largamente superiori. Come emerso dalle recenti informazioni sulle loro capacità tecnologiche, l’accesso a componenti industriali e strumenti digitali avanzati potrebbe inoltre contribuire a rendere più sofisticata una minaccia già operativa.

La dimensione europea della sicurezza saudita

La crescente pressione sul Regno sta coinvolgendo anche i partner europei. Il Regno Unito ha annunciato il dispiegamento di velivoli da combattimento per contribuire alla difesa dell’Arabia Saudita dagli attacchi Houthi, secondo quanto riportato dalla Bbc. Una decisione che conferma la rilevanza della sicurezza saudita per gli interessi strategici occidentali nel Golfo.

Anche l’Italia dispone di Eurofighter schierati in Arabia Saudita, trasferiti dalla base kuwaitiana di Ali Al Salem a quella di Taif. Il capo di Stato maggiore della Difesa, generale Luciano Portolano, ha chiarito al Corriere della Sera che il ridispiegamento non costituisce una nuova missione militare, ma una modifica della dislocazione degli assetti nell’ambito di un’operazione già autorizzata dal Parlamento.

La scelta di Taif rispondeva a valutazioni di sicurezza e operative, dopo i bombardamenti subiti dalla base in Kuwait. Tuttavia, durante gli attacchi Houthi di settembre, anche un Eurofighter italiano è stato danneggiato da un drone. Portolano ha precisato che gli assetti italiani non erano obiettivi diretti delle azioni ostili, ricordando comunque che “nelle operazioni militari la garanzia del rischio zero non esiste”.

La presenza europea riflette dunque un contesto di sicurezza sempre più complesso, nel quale la protezione del personale e la continuità delle attività militari richiedono continui adattamenti.

Per Riad, il rinvio della FII è soprattutto un segnale politico ed economico. Vision 2030 conserva risorse e prospettive considerevoli, ma la sua realizzazione dipende anche dalla capacità del Regno di offrire un ambiente stabile agli investitori internazionali. Gli Houthi hanno dimostrato di poter interferire con questa ambizione, trasformando la vulnerabilità delle infrastrutture saudite in uno strumento di pressione ben oltre il campo di battaglia yemenita.

One might think that the meaning of a word as common as strategy is clear, but it is not. The invaluable Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus inadvertently captures the confusion: “master plan, grand design, game plan, action plan, policy, program, tactics.” But a master plan is something more specific than a grand design, a policy is what should direct strategy, and tactics exist at a level of intentional action below strategy.

The muddle becomes serious when applied to strategy’s original and most important field of human endeavor: war. The roots lie in ancient Greek, which is why stratēgos was the word for “general.” Many weighty works on strategy in war make the basic ideas clear, and yet, as one can see from the badly botched American war with Iran, strategy is acutely difficult. Here we have a war in which the United States has the world’s most advanced technology, highly skilled personnel, and well-trained and -staffed organizations. The U.S. is operating in a theater of war that it has studied for many decades, in partnership with Israel—the most militarily advanced country in the Middle East—as well as, more quietly, most of the Gulf States, and it is receiving the tacit support of countries such as Great Britain. Its enemy is poor and corrupt, and recently lost a large chunk of its senior leadership in a series of bombings and assassinations. But the result is, in important respects, a shocking setback, as Iran continues to throttle one of the world’s most important waterways.

This happened not because America’s weapons malfunctioned, its sailors and airmen were incompetent, or the problems were novel and unanticipated. Rather, America’s battlefield reversals represent a strategic failure of an acutely embarrassing kind.

Nor is the issue simply incompetent American political leadership, although that has played its role. The history of strategy is a tale of errors, misjudgments, poor assessments, and inadequate follow-through. It was true of the ancient Greeks, when Athens held the high cards in the Peloponnesian War and lost; it was true of Germany and Japan in the two world wars they launched at times and places of their choosing; it is true of Russia today in Ukraine; it is, for that matter, true of the Iranians themselves, who suffered their own strategic failures against Iraq in the 1980s and Israel in recent years.

The seven core questions of strategy may seem extremely simple, and yet they are rarely answered well.

The first is What else is going on? Strategy requires its practitioners to orient themselves to the surrounding environment, for almost never is a country simply facing off against another in isolation. When the Trump administration launched the current round of fighting with Iran, it did so having neglected its environment—indeed, in some ways, having made that environment worse. The U.S. had alienated its European allies, whose active help it needed in keeping the Strait of Hormuz open in the face of mine and surface attacks; it failed to prepare the ground with Gulf allies who would be exposed to Iranian attacks; and it underestimated the extent to which Russia and China had put themselves into a deep partnership with Iran, providing targeting intelligence, the components of military systems, and even some weapons. By fixating on the enemy at hand, the administration neglected the context that had shaped everything else.

Governments collect a great deal of intelligence about things that can be counted—tanks, ships, missiles. They do a much worse job of answering the second question, which can be derived from an unlikely classic of strategy: the 1969 movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Paul Newman and Robert Redford play two relatively nonviolent train robbers in the last days of the frontier. One day, as they are holding up a train, a boxcar door slides open and they are pursued by half a dozen men on horseback. Exciting chase scenes ensue as Butch and Sundance try every trick in their extensive playbook to shake them off, but still the pursuit continues. In bafflement, Butch asks Sundance, “Who are those guys?” It is the second great strategic question, and a subtle one.

The two robbers knew how many riders were pursuing them and what weapons they carried. They could probably even tell the breed of horses they were riding. But they did not know what made this band of lawmen so much more persistent and so adept in seeing through their dodges—what motivated them, and what that would mean for Butch and Sundance.

That sort of intelligence is difficult to come by, particularly if you do not know that that is the information you need. President Trump and his key advisers likely knew little about the leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who are now their primary opponents. It is clear that they still cannot fathom how their enemy makes decisions. It is not uncommon for Western leaders to underestimate or simply fail to grasp the ideological or religious motivations of their enemies, and that seems to be part of what has happened in the conflict with Iran. But it seems as well that the administration and its advisers misjudged Iran’s preparedness to launch a protracted, complex war in which it would be outgunned but not necessarily outsmarted.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Don’t ask how this war ends]

The problem is probably reciprocal: If Iran’s leaders have taken the so-called TACO bet—“Trump Always Chickens Out”—they have been repeatedly proven wrong, as indeed have been many of Trump’s domestic critics. They may understand Trump, his motivations, his stock of resolve, and his fears as little as he understands them. Or for that matter, as little as the Israelis understood Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, even though they had had him in their prisons for 10 years, or as little as Americans understood the calculus of Japanese decision makers in the fall of 1941.

Sometimes it is possible not even to know who is in charge on the other side. During most of the Vietnam War, American leaders believed that the charismatic Ho Chi Minh or the experienced General Võ Nguyên Giáp were making the decisions. Later they suspected that it was a collective leadership. In reality, the dominant figure was the colorless first secretary of the Communist Party, Lê Duẩn. In the current war, Trump has frequently expressed his frustration at not knowing who is in charge on the other side.

What are we trying to do? is the third and most obvious strategic question, perhaps the easiest to pose and the most deceptive. When critics have gone after the Trump administration over the Iran war, they have usually focused on the supposed unclarity of its goals. They have something of a point, but to a more limited degree than one might think. In truth, the setting of goals, although vital, is a murky and shifting enterprise.

Carl von Clausewitz, who in his lifetime witnessed numerous strategic defeats as well as the ultimate victory of the allied coalition over Napoleonic France, taught that war is a continuation of policy by other means. It may be the most important teaching to take away from his classic, On War, and is certainly the most memorable. But if the ultimate objectives in war are political, then they also have political characteristics—that is, they may be vague, inconsistent, and above all changeable.

George H. W. Bush famously outlined four objectives for American forces in advance of the 1990–91 Gulf War, in an oft-cited example of strategic clarity. A closer look, however, shows that they were anything but clear. The first objective was ensuring the safety of American citizens in the Gulf—but before the bombs fell, that had already been achieved, because the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had released his American and European hostages. American citizens—the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines going into Iraq—were the ones endangered by the war. Expelling Iraq from Kuwait was straightforward enough, but restoring the “legitimate government of Kuwait”—a monarchy backed by a citizenry that included scarcely a quarter of the country’s inhabitants—was not. And as the events of the past 35 years have proven, the fourth objective, ensuring the stability of the Persian Gulf, was a pipe dream.

Moreover, some of the objectives the United States pursued either were unstated (stripping Saddam of his nuclear program and setting up the conditions for his overthrow) or evolved only in reaction to events on the ground (protecting the Kurdish population in the north and, to some degree, the Shia in the south).

This kind of shift in objectives occurs in all wars. Britain entered World War II nominally to save Poland from Germany. It ended up prohibiting Polish troops from marching in the victory parade in London. The United States invaded Afghanistan to destroy al-Qaeda; it ended up attempting to create an Afghan democratic republic.

Considered in this light, the Trump administration’s objective-setting in the Iran war, though messy, is not entirely implausible. Clearly, one objective has been to destroy, or at the minimum badly damage, Iran’s nuclear enterprise; another to limit its ability to threaten its neighbors with missile and drone attacks by dismantling some of its key military industries. A third, and the most questionable, seems to have been to overthrow and replace the regime. That last goal is evidently beyond the current reach of the U.S. military, although the other two have been achieved in some measure. As the war has wound on, the administration has reached for other goals, including the bizarre one of keeping “oil and gas cheap for Americans all over the country,” which Vice President Vance has declared now has primacy over avoiding a nuclear Iran.

One problem with the Trump administration’s objective-setting is the president’s foolish insistence that he has achieved more than he has: His repeated use of the word obliteration actually obscures some real, if far from absolute, successes in pursuit of his first two objectives. As for the third, it was always bound to be a reach but was not beyond the realm of possibility. The administration’s real failures have come in setting what were essentially defensive objectives in addition to the offensive ones, above all securing the Strait of Hormuz. For the rest, like many administrations before, it has promised much more than war can ever deliver—think of the hubris of the “war to end all wars,” or the objective of ending tyranny. In democratic societies, the temptation to justify the hazards and sacrifices of war with overblown rhetoric and absurd aspirations usually overcomes the good judgment of political and military leaders alike.

[Read: The Middle East still to come]

What are our means? is the fourth question. At a strictly quantitative level it is usually easily answered by counting tanks, missiles, or ships. But those are often the least important variables in the equation. The real variables are whether organizations can do what we want them to do; whether the technical means we have at our disposal are adequate to the task; and whether, if new challenges arise, we have the resources to meet them.

The United States entered the current war with limited stockpiles of its most advanced weapons, limited mine-clearing capabilities, and no frigates whatsoever to escort convoys. It had very little in the way of hardened bunkers for its aircraft in the Persian Gulf, and so suffered some shocking losses on the ground to accurate Iranian missiles (possibly guided by Russian intelligence). And the entire campaign has been predicated on expectations about what bombing could do that were at best highly improbable and at worst totally unrealistic.

The administration clearly overestimated what the U.S. military could do, but one has to wonder whether the armed forces also misjudged their own capabilities. Decades of underinvestment in both passive defenses (for example, concrete shelters, underground command posts) and active ones (for example, surface-to-air missile batteries), not any particular decision of the Trump administration, have exposed the U.S. Air Force to high losses. A similar decades-long lack of commitment to the counter-mine-warfare and the escort-of-convoy missions has made the Strait of Hormuz operation so difficult.

“Know the enemy and know yourself and in a hundred battles you will not be defeated,” goes the saying of the Chinese general Sun Tzu. But military organizations and their leaders frequently fail to understand themselves, and in particular their own weaknesses. America’s lack of preparedness to conduct classical counterinsurgency warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan cost it dearly in blood, money, and time. Most militaries fail to conduct a sober reckoning with their own deficiencies by examining their lack of resources, organizational preparation, or aptitude.

The fifth and sixth questions are What is our priority? and In what sequence should we act? For a country as wealthy and powerful as the United States, these are particularly uncomfortable questions. American leaders often act as though their resources are infinite and few really difficult strategic choices need to be made. That flexibility is one of the blessings (and occasionally the curse) of an astoundingly wealthy and populous country.

Economists like the word trade-off—to get this, you have to give up that. The military uses instead phrases such as economy of force or acceptable risk that mask the blunter truth that some things are more important than others. In the current Iran war, it has become clear that getting control of the Strait of Hormuz has never been the top priority—had it been so, the U.S. would have conducted a variety of operations, probably including seizing some of the smaller islands near the strait.

Setting priorities can be acutely difficult in war. The best decision Franklin D. Roosevelt made during the Second World War was one of priority. Military and political leaders alike had believed in 1941 that Germany would be a more important enemy than Japan and needed to be tackled first. But the war began for the United States with the Pearl Harbor attack of December 7, 1941. Over the next six months, Roosevelt agreed to the British proposal to invade French North Africa in November 1942. General George C. Marshall, the chief of staff of the U.S. Army, and Admiral Ernest J. King, the chief of naval operations, thought it a strategic error and opposed it, favoring instead an invasion of France in 1943.

Roosevelt’s calculation was chiefly political: To sustain domestic support for the “Germany first” policy, American forces had to be in action somewhere in the European theater of operations within a year of Pearl Harbor. He got his priorities right, and Marshall and King, who did not think politically, were wrong. (As it happened, a 1943 invasion would probably have been an operational debacle as well for the untried U.S. Army, but that was a separate matter.)

If Roosevelt got priority right, however, he got sequencing wrong. Like most politicians, he did not want to feel trapped by prior decisions—what political scientists call “path dependence.” He believed that he could have the North Africa invasion and still invade France in 1943, and he was wrong. The defeat of German armies in North Africa took longer than expected, and was not completed until March 1943. Sicily loomed as an easy target, and besides, shifting large forces to Britain, particularly before the U-boat menace in the Atlantic was defeated, would take time, so in July the Allies attacked the island and took it. That triggered the fall of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini; the logical next Allied move was therefore a landing in Italy. That occurred in September 1943, in the immediate aftermath of Italy’s defection from the Axis. And that, in turn, led to a swift German occupation of Italy and an ensuing front in Europe that no one had anticipated.

[Timothy W. Ryback: How Hitler dismantled democracy in 53 days]

Sequencing, then, was only partially under Roosevelt’s control, or anyone else’s for that matter. One thing led to another, and as is so often the case in war, the contenders looked as though they were playing chess one move at a time, seizing an opportunity without fully anticipating the consequences of doing so.

The final question is in many ways the most difficult: What is our theory of victory? Or, put more simply, Why do we think this will work?

In the case of the Iran war the theory of victory seems to be: We will inflict so much economic pain on the regime that it will give in, either because it will hate to see the Iranian economy ruined or because its people will rise up and overthrow it. But Iran has been suffering self-imposed economic misery for decades, and its leaders, with their own corrupt networks, can live in splendor while others suffer. And as for an uprising, the time to support that would have been when Iranians took to the streets in December and January 2026, before 30,000 were massacred by the Islamic Republic’s repressive apparatus. If there is any theory of victory left for the United States, it is that more reasonable Iranian leaders will replace the extremists—but it would appear at the moment that the hardest of the hard-liners are the ones with the guns.

Articulating a theory of victory is no different from constructing a plausible story—the different characters find themselves in a situation, they do this and that, and there is an outcome. In practice, though, such theories are rarely offered in governmental deliberations—and here I speak from personal experience. I saw that play out while sitting in the Situation Room as senior officials discussed sending more soldiers, or diplomats, or aid money to Afghanistan, without anyone quite broaching the question of how the moves under consideration were supposed to lead to success.

Such failures are entirely common, as the perusal of archival records confirms. Strategy is chiefly about execution—the exceedingly complicated and difficult task of moving forces from one place to another, guiding them through combat, and responding to unforeseen circumstances. There are ancillary activities—diplomatic initiatives, the public presentation of the reasons for war or expositions of why it is going the way it is, the gathering and deployment of financial and industrial resources. All of this requires serious, detailed, and extremely consequential work. To begin telling a story, or even to ask for one, in such a circumstance can seem frivolous at best, and at worst downright subversive of the efforts officials are investing and the sacrifices soldiers are making.

Why is it all so hard? One reason lies in the sheer uncertainty of all wars, in which personalities, contingent events, accidents, bloodlust, shifting political calculations, and sheer good or bad luck play their part. But no less important are the weaknesses of the decision makers themselves.

For one, they are often, if experienced, old and suffering the afflictions of age, or if young, inexperienced and either cocky or timid. Historians will parse the records of the Trump administration or, like the cardiologist of the late Vice President Dick Cheney, wonder what it meant that the president was clearly in poor physical and possibly mental health. He would hardly be alone.

Prime Minister Anthony Eden launched the Suez operation of 1956 against Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. At the time, he had been hospitalized with a fever of up to 106 degrees following a set of badly botched gallbladder operations. He had been taking amphetamines and sleeping pills. In a fascinating study of Eden, David Owen, himself a former foreign secretary and a physician, concluded that Eden’s physical health played a large role in the poor decision making that helped produce a major debacle.

Roosevelt was on the edge of death in the last year of World War II; Winston Churchill had a heart attack; and Joseph Stalin, in addition to suffering from hypertension, had become increasingly paranoid. John F. Kennedy took a horrifying cocktail of drugs for his bad back and suffered from Addison’s disease. Woodrow Wilson had an incapacitating stroke that left the U.S. government largely in the hands of his protective wife. These are not isolated cases.

Even healthy younger leaders may find themselves suffering from acute sleep deprivation and other disorders. A flattering portrayal of President Biden’s national security adviser noted that, during the American withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, Jake Sullivan was getting two hours of sleep a night for days on end. As those who have studied medical residents know, going that short of sleep practically guarantees poor decisions.

The psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky have examined many heuristic shortcuts that distort rational decision making. Almost all of them apply in strategic decision making as well. Take anchoring, our tendency to judge an event, problem, or cost based on some existing piece of information. The trivial case is the extremely expensive bottle of wine put on a restaurant menu with the idea of making the second- or third-most-expensive bottle look reasonably priced.

Strategic anchoring occurs frequently. In the run-up to the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, not only Hitler but also his generals concluded that Russia was a fragile giant. They anchored their perceptions on the 1939–40 winter war between the U.S.S.R. and Finland, when 200,000 Soviet troops were killed, wounded, or captured by Finnish militiamen. They paid no attention to the way in which the Soviets had learned swiftly from their failures in that war, and did not account for all of the advantages that Russians would derive from fighting on their own ground.

In a similar vein, both the Russian military and Western observers anchored their perception of Ukrainian fighting power in the 2014 and 2015 rounds of conflict in the Donbas as well as the Russian seizure of Crimea. They had discounted, or simply ignored, the improvements in Ukrainian training and equipment since then, or, in parallel with the 1941 case, the differences that would emerge when Ukrainians were fighting to protect their villages and cities from an army that would commit rape and murder with abandon.

Strategic decision making is rarely a matter of individual choices; more often it is the result of some kind of deliberation. This is true even in the most extreme totalitarian countries. Stalin called the shots, but Marshal Georgy Zhukhov could get a hearing. This leads to another obstacle to sound strategic judgment: collective pathologies. The phenomenon described by Irving Janis as groupthink applies particularly forcefully to strategic decision making: illusions of invulnerability, collective discounting of warnings, unquestioned belief in one’s own inherent morality, stereotyped views of adversaries, self-censorship, and the exclusion of dissidents, or their reduction to marginal status. Lyndon Johnson heard out George Ball, the in-house dissenter on Vietnam, and then moved swiftly on.

These and many other pathologies have beset not only the Trump administration in Iran, but most countries at war. They can be mitigated but not resolved. Formal procedures are less helpful than qualities of character. Of these the most important are empathy, to understand both the enemy and one’s own side; curiosity, because every war is new and distinctive; humility, to accept that one has made mistakes; and above all moral courage, to face facts for what they are and to make decisions accordingly.

The president is singularly deficient in all of these aspects. He finds it difficult to imagine the world as seen by others; he seems to be incurious about the important details of military operations; he is far from humble; and if he is averse to anything, it is admitting that he might be wrong. These traits do not seem, moreover, to be confined to him but are shared by many in his administration.

[Listen: The ‘great man’ presidency]

The strategic virtues, to be clear, are rarely found. But they do exist. Churchill, whose courage was justly famous, was a great war leader. He benefited as much, however, from his empathy as from his courage. His great advantage over Hitler, as the historian John Lukacs has shrewdly noted, is that he could imagine what it was like to be Hitler, but Hitler could never imagine what it was like to be Churchill. One cannot study Abraham Lincoln’s conduct of the Civil War without being struck by his curiosity and humility—neither of which interfered with his resolve and decisiveness.

Nor is it the acknowledged great figures of history alone who show these qualities: When President George W. Bush made the call in December 2006 to surge forces to Iraq despite the apprehensions of his military and political subordinates, he exhibited considerable moral courage. Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol made a number of decisions in the run-up to the Six-Day War that bought Israel at least a modicum of the support and understanding that it would need from abroad, and which, in very different circumstances, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has so profligately squandered.

Some view strategy as so difficult that it is not even worth attempting. These are not only counsels of despair but of nihilism. Some decision makers have shown excellent strategic judgment and used war to achieve their political objectives. The most notable might be Anwar Sadat, the long-underestimated Egyptian president who launched the 1973 Yom Kippur War and used a spectacular early success that could have easily ended in catastrophe to secure the peace he wanted.

War is a hideous thing. There are even more hideous things, however, as anyone who has visited the mass graves of Sarajevo or the slaughter field of Bucha in Ukraine will know. A war with Iran now may well be far less terrible than a war launched by an Iran with nuclear weapons later. Moreover, sometimes war is unavoidable: True pacifists are few, and no nation committed to pacifism has survived the predations of a hostile neighbor that is not.

The chances are good that anyone reading this article lives in a country that is currently at war, or has been at war, or is closely affected by war. It is a near certainty that they live in a country whose borders have been shaped by war, and quite probably one whose form of government has resulted from war. All of us therefore have, or should have, a keen interest in strategy.

Unfortunately, however, its practice will not get any easier in the future. War is spreading to new domains, and employing new and terrible conventional weapons, many capable of acting on the basis of decisions that machines will make in fractions of a second. Nuclear weapons are spreading, and we now face the potential of devastating biological weapons manufactured with the aid of artificial intelligence. The previous experiences and professional knowledge of generals and admirals become ever more swiftly obsolete; the hazards of untried political leaders wading through such uncertainty, immensely greater. More countries have the capacity to do terrible things, and are seemingly willing to do so.

None of that is an excuse for neglecting the subject that Aristotle thought essential for a citizen. In his Rhetoric, he talks at length about the subjects an orator must master, including “the military strength of his country, both actual and potential, and also the nature of that strength; and further, what wars his country has waged, and how it has waged them. He must know these facts not only about his own country, but also about neighboring countries; and also about countries with which war is likely, in order that peace may be maintained.”

Strategy is one of the oldest of subjects. It is powerfully shaped by current events and technologies but best learned through a deep encounter with the history of war. It can be studied but rarely mastered, and it is the domain of both calculation and inevitable error. Of one thing we can be certain: As we look at a world in which violence is not the last resort for many countries and organizations hostile to our values and interests, and may very well be the first, strategy will be needed more than ever.

This article has been adapted from Eliot A. Cohen’s new book, The Strategist: How to Think About War & Politics.

Questo è un articolo del numero de Linkiesta Etc dedicato al tema dei limiti, disponibile in edicole selezionate a Milano e Roma, e negli aeroporti e nelle stazioni di tutta Italia. E ordinabile qui.

C’è chi ha annusato oltre 5600 piedi e ascelle, chi ha rotto 46 sedili del water con la testa in un minuto e chi ha saltato 6 taxi in fila con un saltarello a molla. Consultare i record contenuti nel Guinness dei primati provoca quel leggero spaesamento di chi non sa se ammirare la dedizione o compatire l’ostinazione di chi si è dedicato a simili imprese, investendo tempo, energie e a volte denaro per raggiungere primati spesso di nessuna utilità. Eppure sono in molti a subire il fascino di queste prove di irrefrenabile fantasia, al punto che ogni anno il Guinness Book of Records vende 3 milioni e mezzo di copie nel mondo. Come se l’umanità avesse un urgente bisogno di sapere chi ha costruito la piramide di lavatrici più alta o fatto il maggior numero di flessioni con un gatto addosso. Il successo del volume, d’altra parte, supera le aspettative dei suoi fondatori fin dalla sua prima edizione. 

Nel 1951 Sir Hugh Beaver, direttore della birreria Guinness di Dublino, manca un uccello durante una battuta di caccia e si ritrova a discutere con i compagni su quale sia il volatile più veloce d’Europa. Nessuno lo sa. Beaver coinvolge quindi i gemelli Norris e Ross McWhirter, due giornalisti ossessionati dai fatti e dalle misurazioni, nel raccogliere pareri sull’argomento e nel 1955 pubblica la prima edizione del Guinness Book of Records. Doveva essere un gadget per i pub che servivano la birra Guinness, un divertimento da bancone: diventa invece un fenomeno culturale globale e, per chi entra a farne parte, una forma di immortalità, pure se non sempre in luce lusinghiera, cui ogni anno ambiscono 36.000 persone, che si candidano per nuovi primati.

La selezione però è spietata: i record non nascono dal caos, ma da un sistema di regole rigidissime. E ciascun risultato deve essere misurabile, verificabile, ripetibile. Per questo motivo, un tempo, per asseverare un risultato, un giudice doveva essere presente al tentativo: ecco perché uno come Mick Meaney, un irlandese che nel 1968 è rimasto in una bara per 61 giorni, non è mai finito nel Guinness. Meaney è rimasto sì disteso sottoterra, con un buco per respirare e alimentato attraverso un tubo (per defecare ce n’era un altro). Ma ha trascurato di invitare un giudice del Guinness a verificare il suo tentativo e così ha buttato due mesi di vita (in cambio di un certo riposo, probabilmente). 

Oggi invece, prima di fare il tentativo, l’aspirante primatista deve inviare una domanda online e, se la sua proposta viene accettata, è obbligato a osservare linee guida specifiche che spiegano esattamente cosa fare, come misurare la prova e quali evidenze raccogliere per la valutazione della sua impresa in video. Proprio questa sistematicità ha consentito al Libro dei Record di diventare qualcosa di più di un atlante dell’assurdo: una garanzia di veridicità. In un’epoca in cui tutto è fluido, incerto, falsificabile, non è poco: l’inclusione del testo offre al suo pubblico il sigillo dell’autenticità. Se qualcosa è nel Libro, fosse pure una stranezza come una casa di carte da gioco alta 75 metri, è reale e come tale è stata misurata, certificata, registrata. Se qualcuno è nel Libro, questa persona ha davvero lasciato un segno nella storia dell’umanità (non necessariamente migliorando il mondo, con esso). Forse è proprio la solidità della prova che ha reso il Guinness così resistente al tempo.

Ora però il Libro dei record non è più l’unico palcoscenico dell’impossibile. Da un lato esistono piattaforme come RecordSetter che ampliano la formula del “record”, certificando attività assurde come  la “la più veloce spoliazione dalle decorazioni di un albero di Natale” o il tempo più lungo trascorso dentro un sacco di carta (299 minuti per chi volesse batterlo). Dall’altro lato, su YouTube ci sono canali come Dude Perfect che ogni settimana propongono qualche sfida estrema, come un tiro da basket lanciato dal tetto di un un grattacielo. Non c’è nessun giudice né alcuna regola da rispettare: eppure il canale raccoglie milioni di visualizzazioni più del canale del Guinness Book. È la prova che il monopolio delle imprese eccezionali, siano esse straordinarie o bislacche, non appartiene più al Guinness. 

Per continuare a esistere, allora, il Guinness dei primati ha dovuto diventare qualcosa di più di un archivio: si tramutato in un ecosistema commerciale fatto di eventi, tour, format televisivi e soprattutto di una divisione di consulenza che aiuta aziende e brand a inventare record su misura a fini promozionali. In pratica, Guinness invia i propri giudici (con la loro uniforme ufficiale) a valutare i “record” stabiliti da varie aziende, i quali ricevono una certa attenzione mediatica, perché infrangono frontiere impensate (letteralmente, dato che non li aveva mai concepite nessuno al di fuori del reparto marketing). Per questa bella visibilità Guinness chiede 330 000 dollari a tentativo. Nel 2013, secondo il periodico Vox queste attività rappresentavano il 20% dei ricavi; oggi arrivano al 50%. È così che nascono record come quello per la “più grande coreografia di auto”, detenuto da Nissan o per la pizza più lunga del mondo, tentato da Domino’s Pizza. Sono iniziative sponsorizzate che danno visibilità ai marchi e che il Guinness non si limita solo a certificare: contribuisce a farle accadere. Ed è qui, con il suo snaturamento commerciale, che il tentativo di segnare un limite delle possibilità umane mostra tutta la sua… limitatezza. Anzi, il suo essersi trasformato in un fine in sé, a prescindere dal senso.

Come ha brillantemente spiegato il filosofo C. Thi Nguyen nel suo libro The Score (Penguin), ormai viviamo in un mondo in cui punteggi, classifiche e numeri non si limitano a misurare i valori, ma finiscono per sostituirli. Il fatto è che una metrica chiara, semplice, comparabile ci dà l’illusione di capire ciò che è complesso e perciò, gradualmente, utilizziamo quel numero come un rimpiazzo del valore stesso. È un meccanismo chiamato value capture: il numero finisce per diventare lo scopo di un’attività, lo standard su cui ci regoliamo. Ecco allora che, per esempio, la qualità di un’università si riduce alla sua posizione in un ranking o  la creatività di un artista al suo numero di follower. È riduttivo, ma il Guinness in fondo rispetta lo stesso criterio. 

Nessuno ha davvero bisogno di impilare M&M’s o di indossare cento T shirt in un minuto. Eppure, nel momento in cui questa impresa diventa un record, un numero da battere, un certificato da ottenere, quell’attività diventano improvvisamente significativa. Il valore non precede la metrica: è la metrica a generare il valore. Ecco perché le aziende investono milioni in attività non necessarie, come un ballo eseguito da automobili. Ecco perché le persone si allenano per mesi a mangiare più hot dog in dieci minuti o progettano oggetti giganteschi solo per entrarci a beneficio del Libro, trasformando un gesto qualunque in una performance misurabile. È un’ottimizzazione distorta: non si cerca più ciò che ha valore, ma ciò che fa superare una soglia.

Nel Guinness vediamo amplificato ciò che accade ovunque: la complessità si appiattisce, il gesto si svuota, il punteggio diventa un feticcio. E forse la lista dei primati bizzarri ci affascina proprio per questo: perché in quelle imprese assurde, come la gara per il minor tempo necessario a far rotolare un’arancia per 1,5 km con il naso  (per la cronaca: il record è di 22 minuti e 41 secondi), riconosciamo la stessa logica aritmetica che governa le nostre giornate, dai passi contati dal pacer alle ore di sonno controllate via smartwatch ai like sui social. Ogni primato, allora, è un piccolo specchio: ci mostra come la metrica possa diventare un feticcio e come, senza accorgercene, rischiamo di vivere dentro meccanismi che non abbiamo scelto, fissandoci su obiettivi irrilevanti, inseguendo numeri che non dicono nulla di ciò che conta davvero.

L'articolo La strana ossessione di misurare e classificare ogni cosa proviene da Linkiesta.it.

Matt Gaetz resigned from the U.S. House of Representatives in November 2024, shortly before the House Ethics Committee released a report accusing him of having sex with a 17-year-old girl in 2017, when he was 35, and "regularly pa[ying] women for engaging in sexual activity with him." The probe was widely discussed as a sex trafficking probe, but the ethics committee "did not find sufficient evidence to conclude that Representative Gaetz violated the federal sex trafficking statute," per its report.

Now two women have filed a civil lawsuit accusing Gaetz of sex trafficking.

The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, says that Gaetz and two other men (Joel Micah Greenberg and Christopher Dorworth) broke federal anti-trafficking laws by using "their public office, power, and wealth to prey on the economic vulnerability" of Jane Doe 1 and Jane Doe 2.

Gaetz, who now hosts The Matt Gaetz Show on One America News Network, said many of the suit's allegations against him are false. "The lawsuit relies almost exclusively on a Congressional Committee report that didn't allow me to confront my accusers," he said. "Now I will finally have that chance."

On X, Gaetz posted an image of three women in bikinis seated next to bottles of beer and looking at the ocean and wrote "Jane Doe Strikes Again! Two adult women sued me today alleging they were sex trafficked to the Bahamas. I'm shocked nobody responded to their repeated cries for help, posted to instagram."

Jane Doe Strikes Again! Two adult women sued me today alleging they were sex trafficked to the Bahamas. I'm shocked nobody responded to their repeated cries for help, posted to instagram. https://t.co/HPvX2xypzs

— Matt Gaetz (@mattgaetz) October 15, 2026

This does not seem like especially helpful behavior from a public relations perspective, to say nothing of whether it's legally wise to for Gaetz to be posting to social media about the suit against him.

But Gaetz's point isn't entirely off base. The actions described in the suit against him are hardly what most people would consider sex trafficking.

Jane Doe 1 and Jane Doe 2 were adult women willingly advertising on Seeking Arrangement, a site aimed at connecting young women with rich men for mutually beneficial relationships. And by their own account, that is what went down. They were taken on trips and paid thousands of dollars while hanging out, partying, and having sex with Gaetz and his friends.

Needless to say, advertising on a sugar baby website does not make you fair game for forced prostitution or sexual assault. But nowhere in the lawsuit are forced prostitution or sexual assault alleged.

Instead, we get sentences like this: Gaetz and the other defendents "led [Jane Doe 1] to believe they could solve her financial problems as long as she kept performing sexual acts for them and their associates," states the suit. But "the money never came as a single payment that would have solved Jane Doe 1's financial issues."

So…it's sex trafficking because he didn't pay her enough at one time? I don't think that's how the law works.

Overall, it's a stretch to say that Gaetz's actions as described in this suit fall under the scope of the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. Under federal law, sex trafficking must involve an element of force, fraud, or coercion, and/or must involve commercial sex involving someone who is under age 18.

In this case, both alleged victims were in their 20s at the time of the alleged trafficking. No element of force or fraud is claimed. And the type of "coercion" alleged seems more appropriate for a college debate than a courtroom.

There was no suggestion that harm would come to the women or their families, that a job or housing would be lost, or that failure to engage in sexual activity with Gaetz and his friends would result in some sort of other (physical, reputational, legal, etc.) harm befalling them. There was nothing on Gaetz's end that would seem to arise to "coercion" under federal trafficking statute, which defines it as involving "threats of serious harm to or physical restraint against any person," a scheme to make someone believe that serious harm will befall them if they don't comply, or abuse or threatened abuse of the legal process.

The suit contains a lot about Greenberg—a former tax collector who is in prison after pleading guilty to charges that include sex trafficking—and comparatively little about Gaetz. It seemingly attempts to make up for the lack of direct allegations against him by noting findings from the Ethics Committee, even though that committee specifically said it could not find evidence of sex trafficking.

Gaetz is accused of having sex with Jane Doe 1 at a party while Jane Done 1 was on MDMA. But the suit does not accuse Gaetz of foisting drugs on her, simply saying "controlled substances circulated at the party, and Jane Doe 1 took MDMA during the evening." Nor does it say that anyone forced Jane Doe 1 to be at the party or to have sex with Gaetz.

Gaetz is also accused of paying Jane Doe thousands of dollars—never directly after sex or as a direct quid pro quo, but during the same time period during which he was having sex with her. The payments were labeled things like "Being my friend," "Being awesome," "Here," and "Just because," the suit says.

And Gaetz is accused, along with the other defendants, of paying to fly Jane Doe 1 and Jane Doe 2—whom Greenberg met through the sugar baby website and introduced to Gaetz—"to Venice Beach, Miami, Las Vegas, the Florida Keys, the Bahamas, and New York City" and paying for their hotel rooms. The suit does not say that they were forced or coerced on these trips, merely that the trips exposed them to "men they would never otherwise have met, and every part of that access, from the flights to the hotel rooms, was paid for by men, including the Defendants, who expected sex in return."

The women's lawyer told the Associated Press that there was "an exploitative power imbalance," because on one side you had a congressman and some other powerful men and on the other "young financially vulnerable women in their early twenties."

Morally speaking, that might be relevant. And for a congressman, it may have been grounds for sanction. But the fact that these women were younger and less financially successful does not make a relationship between them and Gaetz de facto "coercive" or illegal.

Age gaps in relationships—even substantial ones—are not outlawed. And relationships in which an older man is attractive precisely because he has more money and power than the younger female involved, and offers to spend it lavishly, are not uncommon. The idea that this violates federal criminal law simply showcases how distorted our ideas of sex trafficking have become.

In the News

Children have a fundamental right to access the internet, says India's Supreme Court. The Free Press Journal reports:

"The safety of our children and their freedom are not at odds with each other. Our children are entitled to both," the court observed.

The bench explicitly recognised the right to access and use the internet as a fundamental right under Article 21, which protects life and personal liberty, read with Article 19(1)(a), which guarantees freedom of speech and expression.

Meanwhile, in the U.S.: "A federal appeals court panel has ruled that Florida's 2024 law restricting access to social media for teens is likely constitutional and can continued to be enforced while the legal challenge continues," notes the Florida Phoenix.

We were promised REPEATEDLY that age-verification law was narrow, and would ONLY apply to porn. But— as we warned —it was always a ruse.Since conservatives got their ruling in FSC v Paxton, they've pushed to age-gate anything and everything. It's not going to stop with social media or chatbots.

— Mike Stabile (@mikestabile.bsky.social) 2026-10-15T18:24:17.874Z

Florida isn't just using legislation to go after young people's internet freedom more broadly:

Florida is using litigation to implement digital ID through universal age verification - one platform at a time.

Florida's lawsuit against Discord is so far, the most aggressive, in pursuing age verification and surveillance under the guise of "protecting kids."

— Protecting Kids Online (@PKOproject) October 18, 2026

'Appropriate safeguards.' A small change in the language of the Apple App Store's app review guidelines could portend big changes. Via 9to5Mac:

Under Section 1.2, which covers user-generated content, the guidelines now read (changes in bold):

Apps that enable users to create, generate, upload, share, or otherwise contribute content present particular challenges, including intellectual property infringement, nonconsensual intimate imagery, and anonymous bullying.

Apple's new terms add that "Developers who fail to implement appropriate safeguards or fail to remediate identified violations after notice may be considered in violation of the Developer Code of Conduct."

The change is being reported as a crackdown on "nudification" apps, and that certainly seems to be part of it. But the language about going after "developers who fail to implement appropriate safeguards"—combined with the broad warning about user-generated content—could signal a broader intent to crack down on social media platforms and other types of apps that don't implement ID verification or engage in more intense content moderation.

On Substack

Don't sacrifice due process to outrage. We can't let anger over allegations of gang rape at Cornell convince us to re-implement old Title IV policies that disregard due process, writes Robert Shipley of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression:

There's a groundswell of demand to "do something" in the wake of the sexual assault claims at Cornell. But amid the outrage and concern over the incident, it's critical to remember that one attempted remedy we actually know will not work is to return to a campus justice system in which the burden of proof is on the accused and basic civil liberties are cast aside. That social experiment has already been run. It failed.

Title IX, the law against sex discrimination in federally funded education programs, was passed in 1972. Debates at the time focused on how it would affect single-sex colleges and college athletics. Explicitly aimed at sex discrimination, the text of the law itself mentions neither sexual assault nor sexual harassment. Those became matters for Title IX gradually over the next couple of decades, as courts determined that sexual assault and sexual harassment were both forms of sex discrimination, and therefore covered under Title IX.

The Jane Doe lawsuit against Cornell and the accused students (as well as a fraternity, a sorority, and a local bar) hit national news at nearly the same time that the Trump administration officially removed the Biden-era regulations from the Federal Register. While almost certainly not related, some have connected the two, citing the Cornell incident to argue that regulations surrounding Title IX need to be changed again to reduce due process protections for the accused.

More here.

Read This Thread

Not to pick on Sam here, but this is a useful point to highlight some of the impossibility of trust & safety work. Meta actually used to have a program *exactly* like this, BUT it became a central feature of Frances Haugen's Facebook Files as an example of Meta being evil.I'll explain…

— Mike Masnick (@masnick.com) 2026-10-17T20:27:37.894Z

More Sex & Tech

• A new pair of high-tech sunglasses from Meta "can read your mail, describe the person in front of you, tell you what is on a restaurant menu, and help you find your way home," writes Reason's Reem Ibrahim. "For the approximately 700,000 Americans who are blind, it is potentially life-changing."

• "The Supreme Court of Canada has upheld a decision ordering new trials for two people facing human trafficking and sexual services offences, after concluding they should have been able to cross-examine a complainant about the commercial aspect of her prior sex work," reports The Canadian Press. "The case looked at the application of section 276 of the Criminal Code, known as the rape shield law, which limits use of evidence about a complainant's sexual history in court proceedings."

• Markets in everything:

This website lets you attend the wedding of complete strangers

Couples list their weddings and users can buy a ticket to attend https://t.co/8b7EawyFod

— Dexerto (@Dexerto) October 18, 2026

• Reclaim the Net explains Germany's new digital ID.

• The People First Transportation Alliance has been campaigning against robot taxis in D.C. "But just who is behind the group remains unclear, even as it has sought to sway the outcome of a contentious issue with vast sums of money and thousands of jobs at stake across the country," reports The Washington Post.

• From Reason's Meagan O'Rourke: In a race that could flip the U.S. House of Representatives, nobody wants to be the pro-tech candidate.

• A proposed App Store Accountability Act in Idaho "is a de facto digital ID," warns Julie Barrett.

The post Matt Gaetz Lawsuit Shows How Twisted the Term 'Sex Trafficking' Has Become appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Il gala per il 51° anniversario della National Italian American Foundation (Niaf), svoltosi sabato al Washington Hilton, ha riunito alcuni dei principali protagonisti del mondo imprenditoriale italiano, rappresentanti politici e personalità di spicco della comunità italoamericana, mettendo in evidenza i due pilastri su cui poggiano le relazioni tra Italia e Stati Uniti: cooperazione politica e partnership economica.

L’evento ha offerto una rappresentazione concreta del ruolo della Niaf come ponte transatlantico, capace di collegare istituzioni, industria e una comunità la cui influenza va ben oltre la dimensione culturale. In una fase segnata da incertezze geopolitiche e trasformazioni industriali, la diplomazia economica assume un’importanza sempre più paragonabile a quella del dialogo politico nel sostenere il rapporto bilaterale. La serata di Washington ha mostrato come queste due dimensioni si rafforzino reciprocamente.

La presenza delle imprese ha rispecchiato l’ampiezza degli interessi economici italiani sulle due sponde dell’Atlantico. Tra i principali protagonisti figuravano Fincantieri, Leonardo, Intesa Sanpaolo, Ferrovie dello Stato, Almaviva, Terna, Italgas, GE Healthcare, SHRO, Colavita, Ferrero e Campari Group, espressione di settori che spaziano dalla difesa alla cantieristica navale, dall’energia alle infrastrutture, dalla finanza alla tecnologia, fino alla sanità e ai beni di consumo. Il gala ha ricevuto inoltre il sostegno di HHH – Hospital Healthcare Holdings, parte di GKSD Investment Holding, a ulteriore conferma del coinvolgimento del settore privato.

Questa dimensione economica si inserisce in un contesto più ampio di dialogo transatlantico, al quale contribuisce anche l’American Chamber of Commerce in Italy (AmCham), impegnata a favorire i collegamenti tra imprese, investitori e istituzioni dei due Paesi. Le partnership industriali assumono infatti un peso crescente per la sicurezza nazionale, la competitività tecnologica e la resilienza economica. Per Italia e Stati Uniti, il coinvolgimento delle aziende garantisce continuità e sostanza operativa a una relazione tradizionalmente costruita sulla diplomazia e sulla condivisione di priorità politiche.

Altrettanto significativa è stata la partecipazione politica e istituzionale, rafforzata dal videomessaggio della presidente del Consiglio Giorgia Meloni, che ha inquadrato l’anniversario nel contesto dei 250 anni dell’indipendenza americana e del contributo storico della comunità italiana alla costruzione degli Stati Uniti.

“La storia degli italoamericani è la storia stessa dell’America”, ha affermato Meloni, ricordando una nazione costruita attraverso il coraggio, il sacrificio e la ricerca di un futuro migliore. La premier ha richiamato anche la figura di Filippo Mazzei e la sua influenza su Thomas Jefferson come esempio del contributo italiano alla nascita degli Stati Uniti.

“Da oltre cinquant’anni, la Niaf rappresenta un ponte essenziale tra Italia e Stati Uniti”, ha aggiunto, descrivendo un legame fondato sulla storia condivisa, sui rapporti familiari, sulla cultura e sui valori comuni.

Il suo intervento ha assunto anche una dimensione geopolitica più ampia. “In questi tempi di crisi, il legame tra Italia e Stati Uniti rimane cruciale”, ha sottolineato Meloni, richiamando la necessità per i due Paesi di continuare a difendere la libertà e la democrazia.

La rappresentanza politica comprendeva l’ex segretario di Stato americano Mike Pompeo, l’ex ministro degli Esteri Angelino Alfano, il vicepresidente della Camera Giorgio Mulè e i parlamentari Carlo Fidanza, Alessandro Cattaneo, Christian Di Sanzo ed Elena Murelli. Tra le personalità diplomatiche e istituzionali erano presenti l’ambasciatore italiano a Washington Marco Peronaci, Damiano Beleffi, Raffaele Cattaneo, Giampiero Zinzi e Antonio Giordano.

Significativa anche la partecipazione delle Regioni, con i presidenti del Lazio Francesco Rocca, della Lombardia Attilio Fontana e del Friuli Venezia Giulia Massimiliano Fedriga. Il programma della Niaf ha inoltre ospitato un confronto sulle relazioni tra Italia e Stati Uniti tra Pompeo e Alfano, moderato dalla giornalista economico-finanziaria Maria Bartiromo.

L’ampiezza della partecipazione politica ha evidenziato i diversi livelli attraverso cui si sviluppa il rapporto bilaterale: dalla diplomazia nazionale agli scambi parlamentari, dalla cooperazione regionale alle partnership industriali. Le parole di Meloni hanno richiamato le fondamenta storiche e politiche di questa relazione, mentre la presenza di rappresentanti istituzionali e imprenditoriali ne ha mostrato la dimensione operativa.

Un’attenzione particolare è stata riservata alla Lombardia, scelta dalla Niaf come Regione d’Onore 2026 per il suo contributo all’industria, al design, alla moda e all’innovazione, oltre che per i consolidati rapporti economici e istituzionali con gli Stati Uniti. Fontana ha ribadito l’impegno della Regione nel rafforzamento delle relazioni transatlantiche, mentre la celebrazione ha offerto l’occasione per valorizzare uno dei principali poli manifatturieri e dell’innovazione europei. Il riconoscimento ha sottolineato come la relazione economica tra Italia e Stati Uniti sia alimentata non soltanto dalle politiche nazionali e dai grandi gruppi industriali, ma anche dagli ecosistemi produttivi territoriali.

Tra i protagonisti della serata figurava Pierroberto Folgiero, amministratore delegato di Fincantieri, insignito del Niaf Dea Roma Special Achievement Award for Outstanding Leadership in the Maritime Industry. Il riconoscimento ha valorizzato il posizionamento internazionale del gruppo e la sua crescente rilevanza strategica, in particolare nella cantieristica avanzata, nelle tecnologie digitali e nelle capacità subacquee.

“Sono orgoglioso di guidare una squadra concentrata sulle navi digitali del futuro e sul dominio subacqueo, facendo leva sull’affidabilità tecnica italiana”, ha dichiarato Folgiero, descrivendo il premio come un ponte tra «Italia e Stati Uniti, tradizione e futuro, ambizione individuale e orgoglio collettivo».

La presenza industriale di Fincantieri negli Stati Uniti conferisce al riconoscimento una dimensione concreta. Attraverso Fincantieri Marine Group, l’azienda opera in quattro cantieri americani, impiega circa 3.000 persone e ha investito oltre 800 milioni di dollari nelle proprie attività statunitensi, anche nell’ambito della collaborazione con la Marina americana.

Il tema della leadership imprenditoriale si è esteso oltre la cantieristica. Anche Anthony Capuano, presidente e amministratore delegato di Marriott International, è stato premiato per la sua leadership nel settore dell’ospitalità, a testimonianza dell’influenza della comunità italoamericana in alcuni dei principali comparti dell’economia statunitense.

Per il presidente e amministratore delegato della Niaf Robert Allegrini, l’anniversario ha rappresentato un’occasione per riaffermare la missione della Fondazione nel collegare generazioni diverse e rafforzare i rapporti tra Italia e Stati Uniti. “Da 51 anni, la Niaf funge da ponte tra l’Italia e gli Stati Uniti”, ha dichiarato, sottolineando come la serata rappresentasse un’espressione concreta della missione dell’organizzazione.

Anche il presidente del consiglio di amministrazione della Niaf John Calvelli ha evidenziato l’importanza di investire nelle nuove generazioni e di preservare i legami che hanno contribuito a plasmare la comunità italoamericana.

Il gala ha così mostrato come un’istituzione nata per valorizzare un patrimonio culturale condiviso possa svolgere anche una funzione di piattaforma per il dialogo politico, le relazioni imprenditoriali e la cooperazione transatlantica.

Il fine settimana di Washington ha ospitato inoltre la quarta edizione degli Italpress Awards, organizzati dall’agenzia di stampa fondata e diretta da Gaspare Borsellino, in collaborazione con la Niaf. La cerimonia ha premiato personalità italiane e italoamericane che contribuiscono alla valorizzazione internazionale delle eccellenze italiane.

Tra i riconoscimenti figuravano quelli assegnati al presidente lombardo Fontana, all’ambasciatore Peronaci, al rappresentante permanente italiano presso le Nazioni Unite Giorgio Marrapodi, al giornalista Gianni Riotta e al presidente di Ferrovie dello Stato Tommaso Tanzilli. L’evento ha riunito rappresentanti della diplomazia, delle imprese, delle istituzioni e dei media. La galleria fotografica pubblicata offre una panoramica degli ospiti e delle personalità presenti alla manifestazione.

Nel complesso, il 51° anniversario della Niaf ha restituito l’immagine di una relazione bilaterale sempre più sostenuta dalla convergenza tra diplomazia politica, cooperazione industriale e legami culturali. I governi continuano a fornire il quadro istituzionale, mentre imprese, economie regionali e reti transatlantiche contribuiscono a tradurre questa partnership in rapporti economici e strategici duraturi.

Police appear to have been taken by surprise by scale of looting that began after protests turned violent in Paris and other cities

• Europe live – latest updates

Just before 1am on Monday morning, two motorbikes carrying one passenger each stopped at a traffic light on a backstreet near rue de Rivoli, one of central Paris’s busiest shopping streets.

“You’ve got to go where there are a lot of people, where they’ve done the shop windows,” said one motorbike rider to another. Minutes later 10 other men, their faces covered with ski balaclavas, came down the street on foot pursued by a police van.

Às vésperas do segundo turno, o ministro da Secretaria de Relações Institucionais do governo Lula, José Guimarães (PT-CE), tem a tarefa de articular essa semana a votação da PEC da Segurança Pública no Senado Federal. A pauta foi retirada de votação pelo presidente do Senado, Davi Alcolumbre (União Brasil-AP), na última quinta-feira, 15 de outubro, sob a justificativa de ter recebido críticas ao calendário especial e para prevenir um pedido de verificação. A proposta segue como uma das prioridades do governo e da oposição.

A votação da PEC da Segurança Pública foi atrapalhada pelo interesse da oposição de incluir a análise da redução da maioridade penal pela Casa Legislativa. O senador Rogério Marinho (PL-RN), coordenador da campanha presidencial de Flávio Bolsonaro (PL-RJ), apresentou uma proposta de emenda que reduz a maioridade penal de 18 anos para 16 anos de forma geral, e em casos de crimes graves, passaria para 14 anos. 

Na sequência, o líder do Partido dos Trabalhadores, Camilo Santana (PT-CE), apresentou outra proposta mantendo a imputabilidade penal até os 18 anos, mas com penalização para adolescentes a partir de 16 anos que cometerem crimes hediondos.

O objetivo dos líderes governistas é levar a PEC ao Plenário sem a inclusão da emenda sobre a maioridade penal. Na última tentativa de votar a mudança constitucional, o próprio Alcolumbre relembrou que, caso haja alteração no texto, o texto retornaria para a Câmara dos Deputados.

Debate na Globo fecha encontros entre presidenciáveis 

A Rede Globo ficou com a responsabilidade de transmitir o último debate entre os dois principais candidatos da corrida eleitoral de 2026. Tanto o presidente Lula como o senador Flávio Bolsonaro foram convidados pela emissora para apresentarem suas propostas na próxima sexta-feira, 23 de outubro. O encontro será no Rio de Janeiro, com a mediação do jornalista César Tralli e exibido após o Jornal Nacional, a partir das 21h20.

Na próxima quarta-feira, 21 de outubro, o Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF) julgará a Ação Direta de Inconstitucionalidade (ADI) 5059 que questiona o poder do delegado da polícia de requisitar informações e registros de conversas telefônicas sem autorização judicial. A ADI foi proposta pela Associação Nacional das Operadoras Celulares (Acel). A entidade alega que o art. 2º, §2º, da Lei n. 12.830/2013, que “dispõe sobre a investigação criminal conduzida pelo delegado de polícia”, afronta os direitos fundamentais à privacidade e à intimidade, o sigilo das comunicações e a separação de poderes.

Estão na agenda da semana de 19 a 25 de outubro:

• TSE:
  • Pesquisa de Opinião (19/10): Último dia para a realização das pesquisas de opinião pública realizadas em data anterior ao dia do segundo turno, para conhecimento público.
  • Preso ou delito (20/10): data que inicia procedimento em que nenhuma eleitora ou eleitor poderá ser preso ou detido, salvo em flagrante delito.
  • IA e impulsionamento pago (22/10): Data na qual fica vedada a publicação e a republicação, ainda que gratuitas, bem como o impulsionamento pago de novos conteúdos sintéticos produzidos ou alterados por inteligência artificial ou por tecnologias equivalentes que utilizem imagem, voz ou manifestação de candidata ou candidato ou de pessoa pública.
  • Propaganda Eleitoral (22/10): último dia de propaganda eleitoral.
  • Segundo turno (25/10): Segundo turno das eleições.

• STF:
  • Exclusão do ISS (RE 592616, 21/10, 14h): Ministros avaliam recurso extraordinário que trata da exclusão do ISS da base de cálculo do PIS e da COFINS.
  • Repasses integrais dos tributos (ADI 7324, 21/10, 14h): Ministros avaliam se as distribuidoras de energia elétrica devem repassar integralmente aos consumidores os valores tributários pagos.
  • Fundo de Combate e Erradicação da Pobreza (ARE 1493655, 21/10, 14h): Recurso extraordinário sobre o adicional de 2% da alíquota do ICMS destinado ao Fundo de Combate e Erradicação da Pobreza (FECOMP).
  • Gratificação para policiais penais (ADI 7469, 21/10, 14h): Ministros discutem se há incompatibilidade que veda a gratificação por horas extraordinárias dos policiais penais. 
  • Atribuição do delegado da polícia (ADI 5059, 21/10, 14h): Ministros avaliam a atribuição de poder ao delegado de polícia para ter informações e dados para apurar os fatos durante uma investigação criminal.
  • Exigência de Ordem Judicial (ADC 91, 21/10, 14h): Ministros julgam a constitucionalidade da exigência de ordem judicial para a disponibilização de registros de conexão e de acesso a aplicações de internet e de dados pessoais e do conteúdo de comunicações privadas.

Agenda da semana da Pública é um serviço apresentado aos leitores, concebido com base nas informações dos portais da Câmara, Senado e STF.

Amine Kessaci, 23, lives under constant threat as trial of five men becomes focus of nation’s battle with mafia-style crime

At 23, he is one of the most heavily protected people in France, constantly sleeping in different locations to escape the threat of contract killers from the country’s biggest drug cartel.

“Narcos and drug traffickers only have one language, one method: violence,” said Amine Kessaci, a young law student from a Marseille housing estate, who, after the murders of his two brothers, has become the most outspoken voice against the Latin American-style narco gangs expanding their reach across France.

Katie Zacharia's short time as White House press secretary has brought renewed attention to the high-profile role.

(Image credit: Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

American journalist Evan Gershkovich talks about his arrest by the Russian intelligence services in 2023, his 16-month detention, and the swap deal that eventually took him home. Get in touch at tif.questions@theguardian.com

Evan Gershkovich was in an American-style steakhouse – with fake deer heads on the walls – talking to a contact in an eastern Russian city when masked agents of the Russian intelligence service burst in. ‘It was a trap from the start,’ he says. The American journalist who was working for the Wall Street Journal was detained, beaten and charged with espionage.

Evan talks to Annie Kelly about his arrest, what happened during his detention in a high-security jail, and the swap deal that finally took him home.

For the first time in her career, Cynthia Short let a folder of crime-scene photographs lie untouched on the corner of her desk, because she couldn’t bring herself to look at them. Short had been a criminal-defense attorney in Kansas City, Missouri, for 12 years, and on the payroll of the Missouri State Public Defender’s Office for the past decade. She had spent much of that time immersed in graphic records of the worst human conduct. Even so, the case of Richard DeLong had shocked her.

DeLong, 34, was facing capital punishment for five counts of murder. In January 1999, he had killed his ex-girlfriend Erin Vanderhoef—who was shortly due to deliver their child, a daughter they had named Hannah—as well as the three school-age children she’d had with two other men. DeLong had entered their decaying clapboard house in Springfield, Missouri, on the morning of January 19 and strangled each member of the family using scarves and cords, hog-tying Erin and gagging two of the children. When he was arrested several days later, he promptly confessed to each of the murders and immediately became the most hated man in Springfield. Short wished she didn’t have to take the case, but it was her duty as a public defender.

When, after several weeks, she finally forced herself to look at the crime-scene photos, she saw that the bodies of the children were partly hidden by debris—clothes, a plastic lawn chair, an overturned lamp. One of the boys, 10-year-old Chris, was still in bed; the other boy, 11-year-old Jimmy, had been left on the floor. Vanderhoef herself lay on her side on a rug in the living room, her blue top riding up over her pregnant belly. The youngest of the children, 8-year-old Darlene, was found in her sky-blue pajamas, tossed upside down onto a heap of garbage in the corner of her room, a jacket thrown over her face.

Short was then raising two young children of her own, and she wasn’t sure she would be able to hide her revulsion from a jury. “As a public defender, I’d seen all sorts of things, but it was the first time where I thought, I don’t know that I can stand in the courtroom next to him,” she told me when we first spoke by phone, in January. She also doubted that she could do much to help DeLong. He had committed a horrific crime and then admitted to it in a hateful taped confession.

In capital trials in the United States, proceedings are typically split into two phases: The first phase establishes a defendant’s guilt or innocence; if a jury returns a guilty verdict, it then determines in the second phase whether the defendant is sentenced to death or to life in prison. Prosecutors sometimes agree not to pursue capital punishment in exchange for a guilty plea, and on Short’s advice, DeLong did offer to plead guilty and waive all appeals in exchange for life without parole. But the prosecutors had no interest in a deal.

Because DeLong’s guilt was not in question, Short would focus on the sentencing phase. In capital cases, juries are instructed to consider statutorily defined aggravating factors cited by the prosecution—including, for instance, the death of multiple victims or of children, or the use of particularly sadistic methods of killing, all of which applied in DeLong’s case. Juries are told to weigh these aggravating factors against a much broader category of mitigating factors presented by the defense. These may include mental illness, intellectual disability, and a history of significant trauma or abuse. If the jury finds that the aggravators outweigh the mitigators, then it will likely hand down a penalty of death; if the mitigators prevail, then the jury will likely elect a lesser sentence, usually life in prison without parole. DeLong’s fate depended on Short’s ability to investigate his background and determine whether any possible mitigating evidence could be found that might persuade a jury to spare his life.

Despite deep misgivings, Short threw herself into the case. She had inherited her work ethic from her father, who helped manage the Apollo program as NASA’s vice president of space operations. His job took the family all around the country, from New Jersey to California, Virginia to Texas. Both she and her husband were attorneys; she’d earned her degree at Saint Louis University School of Law. Short worked grueling hours, spending six days a week at the office and traveling so often that her children became accustomed to her absence. Once, Short startled her 5-year-old son when she arrived home early from a long work trip. Assuming that she had lost her case, he asked, “Is the man dead?”

Short wasn’t opposed to the death penalty when she first started practicing law, but as she gained experience in capital cases, she came to doubt that the criminal legal system was capable of consistently producing fair and equal outcomes. Capital punishment is inherently arbitrary. Some defendants have money and seasoned legal teams at trial; others do not. Some prosecutors favor the death penalty and others don’t, meaning defendants might be executed not strictly because of the nature of their offense but because of the side of a state or county line on which they happened to commit it. As she came to understand the capriciousness of criminal justice, Short changed her mind about capital punishment. The experience of representing several defendants whom she believed had been wrongly accused strengthened her opposition.

To defend Rick DeLong, Short knew, she didn’t need to make the jury believe that he was a good man or that he shouldn’t receive a terrible punishment. In capital trials in Missouri, as in most states, juries must return a unanimous verdict for a death sentence to be handed down, so Short needed only to introduce a shred of doubt in a single juror’s mind that her client had forfeited his right to live.

But even that seemed daunting, given the repugnance that she, DeLong’s own lawyer, could not suppress. Short may have wished that she didn’t have to take this case, but it would ultimately change her perspective on criminal behavior and set her career on a new path, taking her from the public defender’s office to a field known as mitigation, then still developing but now a central feature of every legal defense in capital cases. Mitigators are investigators whose mission, now mandated by law and precedent, is the granular search for circumstances that might convince a jury that their clients deserve a lesser sentence; in their most crucial cases, these specialists are the final advocates for a defendant’s life. Short would help pioneer the field and become one of its foremost practitioners. But in January 1999, all she had was a guilty client and bad odds.

Doubt is central to mitigation: creating doubt that a person is wholly given over to evil, or doubt that there is no universe—no set of terrible circumstances—in which you yourself might commit a horrific crime. I do believe that there are people who commit acts of perfect evil; a frank appraisal of human nature suggests as much. But those who oppose capital punishment, as I do, oppose the death penalty even for the worst criminals in the worst cases. The reason to stay the executioner’s hand has less to do with the nature of the defendant than it does with the nature of society: Showing mercy is morally beneficial to everyone. The legal system, of course, does not think this way; it needs a solid rationale to hang decisions on, and it must establish that what appears to be abject wickedness, and nothing else, may in fact be more complicated and tragic.

The work of mitigation—searching for reasons a defendant’s life should be spared—is, unsurprisingly, not always well received in the legal community or by the public. As a society, we like to believe that our choices and actions are entirely within our control. Mitigators introduce an element of uncertainty. Their investigations routinely produce information that calls into question whether defendants would have, in better circumstances, committed their crimes at all. To some, this seems like making excuses for criminals.

For Short, now 65, mitigation isn’t about rationalizing crimes. “It is about telling the truth,” she told me. “The crime is real. The harm is real. Nothing I do changes that.” She does not wish to downplay suffering or to pretend that something awful did not happen. The goal of a mitigator, she said, is to understand how a person becomes a criminal. “Every life leaves a trail. Abuse, neglect, poverty, brain injury, trauma, addiction, resilience, acts of kindness, moments of courage—all become a part of that person’s story,” Short told me over email. “Mitigation is not the art of making people less guilty. It is the discipline of making sure we judge them as a whole human being.”

When Short was preparing for the DeLong case, mitigation had only just begun to emerge as a routine component of a legal defense in capital cases. It became formalized not long afterward, with the case of Kevin Wiggins. In September 1988, Wiggins, a Maryland construction worker, was charged with the murder of 77-year-old Florence Lacs. He had been arrested while driving her car and had already used her credit cards and pawned her jewelry. A jury convicted him of murder and sentenced him to death. But Wiggins, who was intellectually disabled and had been sexually abused as a child, appealed the sentence on the grounds that his attorneys had not presented sufficient evidence of extenuating circumstances in his defense. His case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled in his favor in Wiggins v. Smith in 2003.

The Wiggins decision held that capital defendants have a right to an effective defense, including an investigation into circumstances that might explain their crimes—a ruling that fueled the rise of mitigation work. In 2008, the American Bar Association revised its guidelines to direct defense teams in capital cases to include both an investigator, who conducts an independent inquiry into the crime itself, and a mitigation specialist, who is responsible for producing information that might convince a jury that there is something more to a client than their crime suggests.

Mitigators sift through the past and familiarize themselves with all elements of a defendant’s personal history. Fragments of clients’ lives may be strewn across the country or around the world, hidden among scattered documents and scattered memories. Mitigation specialists conduct scores of in-person interviews for each case—with extended family, friends, teachers, coaches, doctors, co-workers—to put the pieces together. The Marshall Project estimates that there may be fewer than 1,000 mitigation specialists nationwide; the majority of them deal with capital cases. About twice that number of people are currently on death row.  

Because mitigation specialists often have little time to prepare their cases for trial, they frequently continue their investigations during the long death-penalty appeals process. Legal teams involved in capital cases are typically reluctant to discuss their findings if judicial processes remain ongoing, but at the Mwalimu Center for Justice, a law office in New Orleans that handles capital appeals, mitigation specialists on staff agreed to share information they had uncovered about some of their clients. Benjamin Cole, an Oklahoma man who murdered his infant daughter a few days before Christmas 2002, was found by specialists on his defense team to be schizophrenic; a brain scan revealed a severe lesion. Cole spoke in riddles and frequently broke into song while interacting with his defense team, until his disease became so advanced that he chose to sit in his dark prison cell hoarding religious pamphlets and rotting food while his hair grew matted and his mind decomposed. The mitigators argued that he was too sick to be subject to execution under the Supreme Court’s 1986 decision in Ford v. Wainwright, but state authorities were undeterred. Oklahoma executed Cole in 2022.

Sometimes mitigation, no matter how legitimate, cannot overcome people’s inherent disgust with horrific crimes. Cynthia Short was facing that very possibility.  

Short still hadn’t looked at the crime-scene photographs when she first met Rick DeLong, a few days after he was taken into custody in January 1999. But she had watched his maniacal taped confession, which would later be played at trial and shared with the Springfield News-Leader. “Now laugh,” he had reportedly said to 8-year-old Darlene Vanderhoef’s lifeless body as she lay thrown over a piece of bedroom furniture with an electrical cord around her neck. Even so, Short insisted on speaking with DeLong in person, with no partition between them and no shackles to hold him in place. He was much smaller than she had expected, thin and balding, and had a scraggly mullet and a dirty-blond beard.

In Short’s experience, clients facing capital charges sometimes open a first conversation by declaring suicidal intent: The path ahead otherwise leads to either death in a prison cell or death in an execution chamber. But DeLong clearly wanted to live. And surprisingly, he was obsessed with the well-being of another person: Stacie Leffingwell, his long-term partner and the mother of his youngest child. Leffingwell had helped him kill Erin Vanderhoef and her children. And she was dying from AIDS. “Everything in that first conversation was what could I do for Stacie?” Short recalled. “How could I help Stacie?”

In a photograph Short has seen, Leffingwell kneels next to DeLong and their infant son on a sunlit lawn, a mischievous smile flashing across her face. They had met in the early 1990s when DeLong was barbecuing in a friend’s backyard in Springfield and Leffingwell, a neighbor, dropped by and struck up a conversation.

Leffingwell was dark-haired, petite, and funny. Born in California in 1967 to a teenage heroin addict, she had dropped out of high school and never learned to read. DeLong and Leffingwell both used drugs, especially methamphetamines. When they met, Leffingwell was HIV-positive, but she didn’t tell DeLong. He himself was the child of a teenage mother. Born in Springfield in 1964, he grew up in poverty and was subjected to vicious assaults by his stepfather. He began using drugs at the age of 15 and was eventually snorting or smoking meth several times a week. He got by on intermittent jobs as a mechanic and manual laborer.

These details and more were revealed as Short worked with a mitigation specialist and former welfare caseworker named Kathy Schneider. The pair traveled six hours from Kansas City to Springfield and back each week to interview everyone they could find who knew DeLong. They interviewed people in parks and churches, and once went into a drug house in the middle of a snowstorm. Every month, Schneider went to see DeLong in jail, where she also interviewed his mother and sisters. Schneider created a history of DeLong’s family going back three generations, documenting the life of his biological father, a man known as Howard Littles, and his stepfather, Buzz, who had been diagnosed as mentally ill and institutionalized.

DeLong was a twice-divorced father of four when, in 1996, he was introduced to Erin Vanderhoef, who worked at a McDonald’s in Springfield. Vanderhoef had also suffered a life marked by poverty and loss, and she took a liking to DeLong right away, confiding in others that she was interested in him romantically, even though he was already involved with Leffingwell. They formed a close friendship.

DeLong had a child with Leffingwell, a son born in 1997 whom they named Lyle. Leffingwell had tried to stay clean during her pregnancy, but she resumed using drugs after the baby was born. She disappeared for a time, leaving DeLong alone to care for their newborn. Vanderhoef stepped in to help. When Leffingwell came home, she was in treatment for depression. DeLong and Vanderhoef by then were sleeping together. DeLong’s place was often in a state of chaos and frequented by drug users. Despite the infidelity and the strangeness of the arrangement, Leffingwell and Lyle moved in with Vanderhoef and her three children. A volatile love triangle developed.

In February 1998, DeLong and Leffingwell abruptly moved into a motel in Joplin, roughly 70 miles west of Springfield, near the Kansas border. But DeLong still saw Vanderhoef, and by summer she knew she was pregnant. The news sent Leffingwell into a bout of jealousy and deeper into addiction. That July, she was admitted to a hospital for pancreatitis and stayed for three weeks. She weighed less than 90 pounds. Leffingwell and DeLong told family and friends that she had stomach cancer. In fact, she was dying of AIDS. In September, DeLong himself was diagnosed with HIV. He began using meth every day.

In the days leading up to the murders, DeLong and Leffingwell went on a meth binge. On the night of January 18, 1999, Leffingwell was high and distraught, racked with fear that Vanderhoef was going to replace her. DeLong, for his part, was furious with Vanderhoef for messing up his relationship with Leffingwell. The couple came to the shared belief that Vanderhoef presented a problem, and Leffingwell demanded that DeLong fix it—permanently. Early the following morning, DeLong drove from Joplin to Springfield to kill Vanderhoef. Leffingwell rode with him, as did Harold “Bobby” Lingle, a friend and neighbor who had agreed to help carry out DeLong’s plan in exchange for an eight ball of meth.

At around eight that morning, they pulled up to Vanderhoef’s three-bedroom house. Lingle, who had met Vanderhoef before, lured her out of the house on the pretext of a grocery errand so that DeLong and Leffingwell could wait and catch her by surprise when she returned. Then DeLong slipped inside, where he found Vanderhoef’s three children getting ready for school. Wired on meth, DeLong killed them one by one. When Vanderhoef came back, Lingle told her that the children had been sent to their rooms. Then he and Leffingwell helped DeLong subdue and murder Vanderhoef. It was a cold mercy that she died thinking her children were still alive.

DeLong, Leffingwell, and Lingle were quickly apprehended. Leffingwell died of AIDS before the year was out. The lead Greene County prosecutor, Darrell Moore, decided not to seek the death penalty against Lingle, who was said to have an IQ of 72; he was eventually sentenced to life in prison without parole. But Moore was adamant about bringing capital charges against DeLong.

A series of delays pushed DeLong’s trial to June 2001. Public furor in Springfield ran hot, and press coverage was intense. When Short stood before the jurors, the first thing she said was that DeLong was unquestionably guilty. She acknowledged the horror and disgust that they were surely feeling. “There are things that we need to do in this courtroom,” she recalled telling the jury. “And one of those things that you’re going to need to do is, you’re going to need to really look closely at his mental state. That will be your job.”

But it would have to be a job mainly for phase two—the sentencing phase—rather than phase one, the guilt-or-innocence phase. No one was surprised when, on June 28, after a week and a half of testimony and less than four hours of deliberation, the jury convicted Rick DeLong on all five counts of murder.

Short knew that the sentencing phase would be difficult. She knew this in part because she had used her own extended family and friends—some of whom were highly conservative and generally skeptical of the defendants she represented—as test subjects, a kind of informal focus group.

When Short and her team had finished their mitigation work, well before DeLong’s trial was scheduled to begin, they collated the findings into spiral-bound books, each more than 100 pages long. Inside were detailed descriptions of DeLong’s crimes, a DVD of his confession, photographs of the crime scene, and a photograph of Vanderhoef and her three children, young and bright and beautiful, posed on a bench in front of their mother, who is holding Lyle in her arms. The books also contained a detailed account of the mitigating factors in DeLong’s case, including his abusive stepfather, his drug addiction, and his HIV status. Scattered throughout were questionnaires asking readers for their reactions at various stages. The prompts had a clinical feel, as though Short were asking for opinions on a company’s new logo or a politician’s campaign slogan, not the killing of three children and a pregnant woman. If you did choose to look at the photographs, please describe what you learned from them. But it was the best simulation of a jury’s deliberation that Short could create.

The responses from her family and friends were not encouraging. At the beginning of the book, readers were asked to gauge their support for capital punishment in general. One reader put her support at a 5 on a scale of 1 to 7, but after reading through the mitigation evidence, this same woman put her support for executing DeLong specifically at a 6. Her views were aligned with those of the prosecutor, Darrell Moore, who told reporters in advance of the sentencing phase that he and the judge had received numerous phone calls from angry citizens who wanted DeLong to die for his crimes. In front of the jury, Moore read a letter written by Vanderhoef’s brother in which he told DeLong, “You do not deserve the right to live, in a prison or any other place. You are not a man, you are a coward and an animal.”

On DeLong’s behalf, Short introduced the array of mitigating information that she and Kathy Schneider had compiled. Some of the material had been presented in phase one—a tactic known as front-loading. The idea was not to try to sway jurors on the question of guilt or innocence—in this instance, there was nothing to be done—but to prepare the jury for arguments that would be presented again, and enhanced, later on. Short was aware that much of the information could be seen as all too familiar: When it comes to defendants facing the death penalty, a life like DeLong’s is normal; very few people guilty of aggravated first-degree murder have peaceful, healthy backgrounds. But two aspects of his story had taken Short by surprise. First, as she combed through the police files, Short had noticed a coincidence: Mark Deeds, the officer who had coaxed the confession out of DeLong and emerged as the hero of the investigation, had encountered her client before.

In 1991, when DeLong was 27, he was arrested for selling cocaine and marijuana to Deeds, who was then working undercover for the Springfield Police Department. DeLong was so deeply enmeshed in the local drug culture that Deeds saw an opportunity. According to the testimony of DeLong’s former defense attorney, who negotiated a plea deal, Deeds threatened DeLong with decades in prison unless he began working as an informant. DeLong agreed. Police and prosecutors paid DeLong for information and granted him leniency on subsequent drug-related charges. At one point, his bond on arrest was reduced from $75,000 to $2,500. At another point, he received a sentence of five years’ probation for charges that ought to have resulted in prison time.

The policies of the Missouri Board of Probation and Parole specifically prohibited offenders on probation from serving as police informants, but the department kept working with him anyway. Because of his protected status, DeLong continued to get little to no prison time when he was caught using. His addiction deepened. By the time of the murders, DeLong had helped Deeds and the Springfield Police Department clear a number of high-profile narcotics cases, even as he himself disintegrated from years of dependence. His career as a police informant came at the expense of any attempt at rehab—the one had simply precluded the other. Given all of this, Short asked, did the police bear any responsibility for DeLong’s condition?

The second discovery that Short and her team made came while going through DeLong’s medical records. A week before the murders, he had begun taking Sustiva, an experimental drug that can help slow the progression of HIV but whose side effects include dizziness, insomnia, confusion, abnormal thinking, amnesia, agitation, and hallucinations. Patients abusing drugs or who have preexisting mental illness are at increased risk of developing neurological symptoms. And the drug’s side effects tend to be most severe when a patient is just starting to use the drug, as DeLong had been.

The witnesses for the defense included an addiction specialist who testified that DeLong’s meth use easily could have contributed to a shattered mental state; a medical specialist who confirmed that Sustiva is known to induce delusions, hallucinations, and psychosis, and that the drug combined with meth could have disastrous results; and a psychiatrist who testified that DeLong had likely been in the grip of a psychotic episode when he carried out the murders.

Short did not know what to expect when the jury began to deliberate. The new information had raised provocative questions about a case whose conclusion had once seemed preordained. In the end, the jury declined to impose the death penalty. It instead sentenced DeLong to life without parole.

In 2003, Short left her job with the Public Defender’s Office due to a round of funding cuts, and decided to become a full-time mitigation specialist. In the 23 years since then, she says that she has worked with approximately 200 clients, none of whom has received the death penalty. Her attitude toward the field, as a practical matter, can be simply put: If mitigators are able to present a full picture of a defendant’s life, then no reasonable jury will return a verdict of death, not even for the most brutal killer. Her job is to persuade jurors to bestow something that she feels everyone deserves. “Mercy is not something that is earned,” she said to the jury during DeLong’s trial. “Mercy is something that is given.” Her words were printed in large display type in the Springfield News-Leader’s front-page story about DeLong’s sentencing.

Short is well aware that much of the public—including thoughtful citizens and community leaders—finds mitigation not only unjustifiable but incomprehensible. Still, she cannot set aside her principles or her obligations: Every defendant deserves a full measure of effort, even if onlookers deem it a waste of time and money for people who deserve nothing. She is sustained by some of those she encounters along the way. Several weeks after DeLong’s sentencing, Short received a note from James Spindler, the Greene County medical examiner. She had cross-examined him on the stand, and had probed him about his own struggles with drugs. Addiction, she suggested, was not something that happens strictly to evil and hopeless people. That resonated with Spindler, who wrote that although he had come across a number of dangerously antisocial defendants in his career whose executions he would by no means oppose, Short had convinced him that DeLong was not a “sociopath beyond redemption.”

The past few years have been among the busiest in Short’s career as a mitigator. After a federal moratorium on new death sentences during the Biden administration—and the mass commutation of most federal death sentences already handed down—the Trump administration has reinstated the federal death penalty. Trump’s former attorney general Pam Bondi encouraged states to aggressively pursue capital punishment and take advantage of foreshortened appeals processes that would fast-track executions. Mitigation specialists have seen their workload increase in volume and urgency.

Short’s determination to try to see beyond the worst of what her clients have done struck me as rare and admirable, and I kept it in mind when I picked up the phone to call the Missouri prison where Rick DeLong is incarcerated. I have spoken with many people who have committed murder, and many people on death row. Capital punishment, and the victims and perpetrators of capital crimes, have long been a focus of my reporting. But I had never spoken with a child killer before.

A prison receptionist answered, and after a pause put DeLong on the phone. His voice was both hoarse and soft; his disease is advanced now, and he has had several heart attacks. He told me what his life had been like before he committed the murders, how he loved working as a mechanic—“There was nothing I couldn’t do to a car,” he said. He recalled his stepfather, and how abusive he was, and how the meth had made the bad moments more bearable. Meeting Leffingwell had made things better, too, because she came from the same world, and for once he felt understood. They had loved going to rodeos and carnivals together, a kind of fantastic escape.

DeLong talked about his five children, only three of whom will speak with him. He also talked about his grandchildren, though he has seen them only in photos. His son Lyle is in prison, convicted of murder in 2022 and now serving a 32-year sentence. DeLong told me he had loved being a father to Lyle—“That’s my joy,” he said. “I took him everywhere.” He recalled bringing him on fishing trips, and once, in a misguided display of devotion, buying a heavy-duty backpack, cutting holes in it for arms and legs—a makeshift infant carrier—and taking him for rides on his motorcycle. Now the boy was a man, and had followed his father behind bars.

As for his own crimes, DeLong told me that he was glad he’d been caught, and that he knows he deserves the sentence he received. I could not forget that the thin voice on the other end of the line belonged to a man who had taken five lives. It was also the voice of a frail 61-year-old slowly dying in prison. DeLong remembered Cynthia Short fondly, though he told me that he had initially doubted that a woman would be able to see past what he had done to a mother and her children. But Short, he admitted, had understood everything: the crime, his life, how he might appear in the eyes of a jury. And she knew what it would take to save him. He didn’t have much of a life anymore, but thanks to this woman, he was alive. “You couldn’t ask for better,” he told me. “There’s no way.”

No primeiro turno das eleições de 2026, a alteração de locais de votação pelo Tribunal Regional Eleitoral do Rio Janeiro (TRE-RJ) impactou mais da metade dos eleitores do Complexo da Maré, na zona norte da capital fluminense. A justificativa do tribunal é que as comunidades da Maré são uma “área de risco” pela dominação de facções e do tráfico de drogas.

“O Estado reconhece que aqui [na Maré] não é seguro para votar e coloca os moradores para votar do lado de fora. Qual o impacto disso? [Que a] gente está sempre no antagonismo”, afirma Tainá Alvarenga, coordenadora da organização Redes da Maré, no eixo direito à segurança pública e acesso à Justiça.

Para Alvarenga, várias instâncias do poder público utilizam a falta de segurança como argumento, mas acabam interferindo no acesso a direitos fundamentais dos moradores das comunidades como transporte, saúde, investigações de crimes e, entre eles, o de “não ter os espaços de votação mudados com o discurso da segurança pública”, declara à Agência Pública. 

“A escola oferece menos dias de aula por causa da segurança, a defensoria não pode vir sem uma autorização por causa da segurança, o Ministério Público não pode vir porque é um território conflagrado, não pode ter perícia [pelo mesmo motivo]”, afirma a coordenadora.

Em um artigo publicado no Jornal O Globo, a diretora fundadora da organização Redes da Maré, Eliana Sousa Silva, explica que a Zona Eleitoral (ZE) 161ª é a mais representativa para a Maré porque cerca de 60% de suas seções estão localizadas dentro do território ou em seu entorno.

Um levantamento feito pelo Consultor Jurídico mostra que as nove zonas eleitorais do Rio de Janeiro com locais de votação alterados apresentaram um índice maior de abstenção. Nelas, a média de abstenção foi de 25,83% enquanto o índice nacional ficou em 21,08%. A 161ª ZE foi justamente a que teve o maior número de endereços trocados, segundo a pesquisa, e alcançou o maior índice de abstenção, 28,46%.

No total, 72 locais de votação do Rio de Janeiro foram alterados pelo TRE-RJ, atingindo 20 municípios do Estado e cerca de 200 mil eleitores, segundo Eliana Sousa Silva. No Complexo da Maré, eleitores foram remanejados para locais com até 7 quilômetros de distância do local original.

A fundadora da Redes Maré também aponta em seu artigo que na 161ª ZE, Lula venceu Flávio Bolsonaro por uma diferença de 14 pontos percentuais, alcançando quase 10 pontos a mais do que obteve na cidade do Rio. E, para governador, Eduardo Paes teve 8 pontos percentuais a mais do que a sua média no restante da capital. “Falta transparência sobre quais critérios justificam a retirada de algumas seções e a manutenção de outras na mesma região” avalia Silva.

“Os locais transferidos funcionam em escolas municipais. Se esses prédios recebem crianças diariamente, por que seriam inadequados para adultos votarem por algumas horas? Sem critérios transparentes, a decisão reforça o estigma da favela como território perigoso e desconsidera a sua organização comunitária”, complementa.

Não é a primeira vez que o TRE-RJ transfere eleitores para outros lugares. Em 2024, a Redes da Maré calculou que 50,6% dos eleitores aptos do local foram impactados pelas mudanças de locais de votação. O estudo “Como vota a Maré”, realizado pela organização, ressalta que o alerta sobre o risco de abstenção em função das constantes alterações de endereço feitas pela Justiça eleitoral do estado já era feito na votação anterior.

Segundo a análise, os moradores da Maré que antes votavam dentro do território foram os que mais sofreram com as dificuldades de acessibilidade e mobilidade urbana. “A transferência pode significar aumento do tempo de caminhada, necessidade de atravessar grandes vias como a Avenida Brasil e Linha Amarela, ausência ou inadequação de transporte público, […] o que impacta desproporcionalmente jovens, mulheres chefes de família, pessoas com deficiência e pessoas idosas que vivem na Maré”, detalha.

A pesquisa ainda destaca que, por mais que o transporte público gratuito nos dias de votação seja “fundamental para reduzir barreiras econômicas ao voto”, não é o suficiente para garantir o direito ao voto. “Gratuidade não significa, por si só, acessibilidade territorial. Essa distinção é especialmente importante na Maré, onde o transporte coletivo se concentra nas grandes vias que margeiam o território”, avalia.

A Justiça Eleitoral, neste ano, incluiu a Maré no projeto “Seu Voto Importa”, destinado a auxiliar pessoas com mobilidade reduzida e pessoas com deficiência para se locomover até suas áreas de votação, em Bonsucesso.