After nearly 10 months abroad, María Corina Machado, the anti-Chavista opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, has returned to Venezuela. “I am here, with you,” the opposition figure wrote on social media on Sunday morning.
© Vente Venezuela (EFE)
Lidia Sánchez, a Nicaraguan immigrant who arrived in California as a child, had two items on her agenda on a warm October morning: a routine doctor’s appointment and personally dropping off her ballot at an election office drop box in Los Angeles. She had always voted by mail, but this time she feared her ballot might not reach its destination and that her vote would not be counted.
Dawn breaks under rainfall in Kramatorsk, a Ukrainian stronghold under Russian threat on the eastern front. What makes it harder for drones to fly becomes an opportunity for Russian infantry to try to gain ground. These are, in any case, small skirmishes. EL PAÍS reports this from a military command post in Kramatorsk based on images captured by drones on October 15. The front line shows hardly any change and the war is stuck in a complex tangle as the fifth anniversary of the full-scale invasion approaches. Kyiv has also recently suffered serious setbacks: at home, with attacks across around 20 of its regions, and internationally, the blow represented by the United States’ overt alignment with Russia.
It looked like any other house in a residential neighborhood in the city of Trujillo, in northern Peru: a three-story structure, with iron railings and varnished wooden doors. But inside, it concealed a cell.
© Cedida
Within the first two months of the state of emergency in El Salvador imposed by President Nayib Bukele back in 2022, two of Gladis Álvarez’s sons were arrested and accused of being gang associates. Since then, the 53-year-old woman’s life has fallen apart. “There were eight of us in my family. Now, I’m the only one left,” Álvarez laments. “Since my sons were arrested, our lives have been destroyed in a terrible way,” she adds.
© Jose Cabezas (REUTERS)
Patrick Crusius, a withdrawn 21-year-old, drove nine hours from the outskirts of Dallas to El Paso, on the U.S.–Mexico border. After driving all night, he spent another hour behind the wheel with no fixed destination until he parked outside a Walmart. Shortly after 10:30 a.m., he posted a manifesto on an online forum warning of “a Hispanic invasion of Texas” and pulled a semiautomatic rifle from his trunk. Crusius killed 23 people and wounded 22 others, most of Mexican origin. That August 3, 2019 attack was the deadliest racist attack suffered by the Latino community on U.S. soil.
© Brian McConkey (Brian McConkey)
When Hulk Hogan sued the tabloid Gawker in 2016 for publishing a sexual video without his consent, no one gave him a chance of winning. But Hogan won the case and was awarded $140 million in damages, which led to the online outlet’s demise. Peter Thiel, one of Silicon Valley’s most shadowy figures, tipped the legal battle: he secretly funded Hogan’s lawyers. He wanted revenge on Gawker because it had ridiculed him for years and outed him as gay.
Mirihai Ngilepoi knows what it means that his cattle can’t graze in his Tanzanian village. A carbon-trading and emissions-reduction program restricts the use of his land. Across the Indian Ocean, JA Shivu has witnessed the expulsion of thousands of families. In India, to make room for a tiger reserve, they’ve been kicked off their ancestral lands.
© Diego Menjíbar
The rivers near the capital look brown from an altitude of 3,600 meters. It rained lightly in Honduras a week ago, and some of the murky water is returning to the Humaya river, one of many parched streams that 20 years ago did not show such arid scenes. Aboard the King Air C90, Víctor Torres, a Mexican pilot and member of Startup Renaissance, enlarges a patch of dark clouds near Comayagua on the screen and receives a clear instruction from the meteorologist on the ground: a dart-in-a-bullseye emoji. “Hold on,” he warns.
For the past two decades, Zoe Kazan, 43, has built a low-key career, moving between independent films and more ambitious projects. The former include Ruby Sparks (2012), a comedy she also wrote and produced. The latter include hits such as She Said (2022), in which she starred alongside Carey Mulligan as one of the New York Times reporters who exposed Harvey Weinstein’s abuses.
© Rob Kim (WireImage)
Robert Reich is one of the most tireless critics of American economics and politics. Millions of people turn to his Substack essays and social media videos to make sense of the complexities of the moment. He is an academic turned influencer, and at 80 he does it with an effectiveness, rigor and simplicity that the savviest millennials and Gen Zers would envy.
© Kyle Parker (Inequality Media Civic Action)
Tractors swarm across Iowa’s cornfields. Farmers are rushing the harvest before rains arrive and ruin their season. Chip Hoffman is among the lucky ones. He has already gathered nearly the entire crop from the family farm, which spans several dozen hectares. It’s Wednesday morning and the 66-year-old farmer is helping his older brother position a hopper to unload grain from the truck into the silo. “These are hard times. Fuel, insurance, even machinery repairs have gone up and they’re extremely expensive,” says Chip. He blames tariffs and the war with Iran for the surge in inflation and the squeeze on profit margins that has hit Iowa’s farmers.
© Jesús-Sérvulo González Moreno
The U.S. midterm elections come after aggressive efforts by both Democrats and Republicans to redraw district maps in their favor, a practice known as gerrymandering.
The ad opens with James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate from Texas, seated at a desk, apparently rewriting the Book of Genesis from the Old Testament. “In the beginning,” Talarico says, hunched over as he writes, “God was nonbinary. And was not Christian. And God said: ‘Let there be six genders’; and there were.”
The United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) neither forgets nor forgives. On its official website it hosts a microsite called “Justice for Kiki” dedicated to agent Enrique Camarena, who was killed in Guadalajara in February 1985. In the welcome message for the memorial, the DEA names Rafael Caro Quintero as the principal perpetrator of the kidnapping, torture and murder of its most famous agent, describing him as “a cartel kingpin who unleashed violence, destruction, and death.” The “Narco of narcos” is back in the headlines as he negotiates a deal that could lead him to plead guilty for events that took place 41 years ago. The story of this drug trafficker — one of the founders of the powerful Guadalajara Cartel in the 1980s — could end with an image far removed from the terrifying legend that surrounds Mexican kingpins of that era: a 74-year-old, battered man with a head full of gray hair, asking forgiveness for his sins before a jury in the U.S. Federal Court in Brooklyn.
© Jane Rosenberg (REUTERS)
For decades, lithium has been the most coveted element in energy storage. It has been called “white gold,” a label that has brought major problems, including soaring prices, fragile supply chains and a geopolitical dependence that worries both governments and industry. Enter sodium: abundant, cheap and a major promise for a more sustainable energy revolution.
When we talk about more sustainable batteries it’s important to ask how their recycling works. “[Sodium batteries] are much easier to recycle, but also much less interesting from an economic perspective,” says Jon Ajuria of CIC energiGUNE. They typically contain fewer high-value metals, so technologically there is less need to recover materials for second use. Paradoxically, that also means recovering less money from recycling. “This makes it especially important to design batteries from the outset to be easy to disassemble and recycle,” says Professor José Luis Tirado, although Ajuria says policies that truly promote recycling will be essential.
© Tetra Images / GETTY IMAGES (EL PAÍS)
“This is a story about the family that sustains you when all your other family ties break,” says Julián Delgado Lopera, a 38-year-old trans writer from Bogotá, Colombia. His latest novel, Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You (2026), is a finalist for the National Book Award, one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the United States.
Mikey Madison burst onto the scene, won an Oscar and disappeared. Just a couple of seasons ago, the 27-year-old Los Angeles actress was everywhere in Hollywood. After a long awards campaign in which Demi Moore seemed poised to triumph at every ceremony, the Oscars delivered a surprise. Madison, still virtually unknown to the wider public, took home the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in Anora, in which she played a sex worker in a gritty portrayal far removed from Pretty Woman and other fairy tales.
© Monica Schipper (WireImage)
Studio Ghibli took shape in 1984 when Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata made the film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, based on a manga by Miyazaki. A year later, they founded the studio with the support of producer Toshio Suzuki, and in early 2026 the Princess of Asturias Foundation announced it had awarded Studio Ghibli the 2026 Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities. The jury justified the award thus: “Employing a highly imaginative artisanal process, they have created universal stories brimming with sensitivity and humanistic values: friendship, empathy and tolerance, as well as respect for people and nature. The studio’s films transcend generations and borders, and serve as a reference for the challenges of globalized society and the protection of the environment.”
© picture alliance / United Archives (CORDON PRESS)
Sitting in the suite of an upmarket hotel with an iced latte in hand, Paul Banks (Essex, 48) shows few visible aftereffects of the intoxicated lifestyle that nearly sent him to the other side. The Interpol singer looks happy in middle age. His band, which shone in early-2000s New York amid the post-punk revival, is now enjoying a second youth, lifted up by a generation that once again reveres the archetype of the tormented indie figure à la Ian Curtis, with whom Banks has long been compared.
© ángela suárez (EL PAÍS)
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