The Pentagon said Wednesday that it had finished pulling all U.S. forces out of Iraq. The final troops departed from an air base in northern Iraq under an agreement between the Iraqi and U.S. governments. U.S. forces first invaded Iraq in 2003 to overthrow Saddam Hussein and left in 2011, before returning in 2014 at Iraq’s invitation to fight the Islamic State group, which had seized much of the country. The withdrawal comes amid the ongoing U.S. and Israeli war on Iran, which has spilled into Iraq through clashes between U.S. forces and Iran-backed militias. Some Baghdad residents welcomed the withdrawal of U.S.-led coalition forces from Iraq. This is a local resident.

Ahmed Saleh: “Our feeling? It fills our heart with joy, and I feel on the day of the U.S. forces’ withdrawal is like I am born again, and I am 70 years old. The withdrawal of American forces is the withdrawal of the occupier. We should invest, invest to let militias, as well, surrender their weapons to the government. There’s nothing left. Surrender your weapons to the government, and let the government be the one responsible to protect me and you on the ground, sky and water.”

In Iran, the rial has hit yet another record low, trading at more than 2.5 million to the dollar, less than a month after its previous record low, as the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran continues to take a heavy toll on the economy. This comes as the Trump administration has imposed new sanctions on 10 people and companies in China, Hong Kong and Pakistan that it claims helped Iran acquire weapons.

Meanwhile, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi received U.S. feedback via Qatari mediators in ​Doha on Tuesday on a seven-day plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Iran had made the proposal last week, which President Trump rejected, leading Qatar to step in and mediate.

In the occupied West Bank, more than 100 Israeli settlers rioted overnight Monday in the village of Jalud, stopping a displaced Palestinian family from going back to their home. Settlers had taken over two houses belonging to the Tubasi family weeks earlier. Israel’s High Court had ordered Israeli forces earlier this month to make sure the family could return. But roughly 10 minutes after soldiers escorted the family to their home, the settlers swarmed in, according to witnesses. The settlers torched the houses, blocked roads and threw rocks at Israeli officers and Palestinians. This is Wael Tubasi, who was forced to flee his home due to Israeli settler attacks.

Wael Tubasi: “When we arrived, the houses were damaged beyond description. They damaged everything — the doors, the tiles were removed, the stairs were removed. They smashed the bathrooms, doors and windows. They left nothing. Everything was broken and removed.”

In Gaza, Israel killed a senior Hamas commander, Izz al-Din al-Beik, in an airstrike. Palestinian officials say the Israeli strike hit a residential apartment building in Gaza City. A second person died from wounds after the attack, according to Gaza health officials. Later on Tuesday, an Israeli airstrike near a medical clinic in the ​Jabaliya ⁠refugee camp killed one person. This is a resident of the refugee camp.

Abdel Rahim Abu Kouaik: “The camp is full of residents. Of course, the residents are not a small number, and the houses in the camp are weak. They cannot withstand strikes like these. As you can see, no house avoided damage from this bombing.”

In a 6-3 ruling, the conservative majority in the Supreme Court is temporarily allowing the Trump administration to continue swiftly deporting immigrants to third countries they have no ties to. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson argued to keep a lower court order in place that had blocked the policy, forcing Trump officials to cancel at least one deportation flight with about 70 immigrants bound to third countries. During Trump’s second term, an estimated 25,000 immigrants have been deported from the U.S. to third countries, where many have faced torture, arbitrary detention, persecution and other dangerous conditions. The Supreme Court is expected to hear arguments in the case in December, which will lead to a final ruling. Among the countries immigrants have been sent to are Liberia, Equatorial Guinea, Honduras and the Central African Republic, under secretive third-country agreements with the Trump administration.

California is banning local, state and federal law enforcement agents from using gloves that can release painful electric shocks to people in custody. The ban will take effect next year and remain in place until 2030. In August, it was reported ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, would spend up to $20 million to purchase thousands of these gloves. The devices are manufactured by Compliant Technologies LLC based in Lexington, Kentucky, and have been used in recent years by police departments and jails.

This comes as ICE is preparing to hire an additional 5,000 new employees by the end of this year. The latest hiring surge was reported by The New York Times and comes after ICE quietly fired a wave of recent hires — who were quickly employed by the agency in 2025 without proper vetting or training amid Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

In Texas, the Trump administration has filed federal criminal charges against Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, the 28-year-old Venezuelan asylum seeker who was shot by an ICE agent in Austin earlier this month while making deliveries for DoorDash. Federal prosecutors are accusing Garcés Pérez of resisting and assaulting a federal officer. The ICE agent who shot Garcés Pérez was not wearing a body camera.

His attorney, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, had a scheduled call with him Tuesday morning from ICE detention when she heard he had been taken to a federal courthouse in Austin. She posted this statement on social media.

Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch: “We were able to get to the courthouse, and I was able to see Wilber. He was clearly very emotionally distraught and in so much pain. He was dizzy. He was lightheaded. He was wincing. He couldn’t believe that this was happening to him, everything that has happened to him. This is the ninth day since he’s been shot, and he still has a bullet inside his body.”

Clergy leaders of different faiths in California have begun an eight-day, 96-mile pilgrimage demanding the shutdown of ICE jails. The march started Tuesday from the troubled Adelanto ICE jail in the Mojave Desert and is headed to Los Angeles. This is Michelle Arkin with the group No Camps California.

Michelle Arkin: “This is about bringing awareness and helping people understand the inhumane conditions that exist in this facility here, where they have been holding people, many of them illegally, and they have been exposed to abuse and lack of medical care and go without water.”

Former special counsel Jack Smith faced off with Republican senators Tuesday at a tense Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, defending the two prosecutions he brought against President Trump for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Smith said his team followed standard practice, and dismissed claims he was politically motivated. This is former special counsel Jack Smith on Tuesday.

Jack Smith: “I stand by my decisions as special counsel, including my decision to bring charges against President Trump. I made those decisions without regard to President Trump’s political association, activities, beliefs or candidacy in the 2024 presidential election.”

In Spain, the government has issued a ban on all evictions until 2030, as well as an automatic renewal of rental contracts. The proposal still needs to be approved by the Spanish parliament, where leftist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s coalition does not hold a majority.

This comes after mass protests over Spain’s housing crisis erupted in the wake of the eviction of 87-year-old Madrid pensioner Maricarmen Abascal. According to her lawyer, Maricarmen will now be returning home, where she’s lived for 70 years, nearly her entire life.

Protesters have set up a camp of more than 100 tents in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol square, and tens of thousands have taken to the streets nationwide. This is a protester.

Rocio Mollano: “We all have a right to a home. Now it could happen to a person like Maricarmen, but later on it could happen to you. They can kick you out of your house, and you must defend it, because it is a right.”

President Trump and the world’s wealthiest tech executives on Tuesday signed a set of voluntary safety standards for artificial intelligence. Trump hosted several members of his Cabinet and Congress, as well as SpaceX’s Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, Google’s Sundar Pichai and others in the industry, for an event at the White House.

Trump has also renamed artificial intelligence to “super intelligence” and launched a new AI-powered government chatbot, named America.gov, where people can access federal government sources. The AI tool so far cites facts that contradict Trump’s allegations of election fraud and other false claims made by his administration.

This comes as Trump has repeatedly rejected calls to regulate AI, calling warnings about the threat of superintelligent machines a ”HOAX.”
Meanwhile, in California, protesters gathered outside OpenAI’s annual DevDay conference in San Francisco Tuesday.

Yuan Wang: “We are demanding that OpenAI do the bare minimum, that they cut their contracts with the Pentagon, that they stop allowing ICE to use their technologies to hire new employees, and that they sign the democracy pledge to be one among many businesses who will stand up and defend free and fair elections.”

The 2026 Right Livelihood Awards were announced on Wednesday in Stockholm, Sweden. The award is widely known as the Alternative Nobel Prize. The winners include Jalila Haider, a human rights lawyer who defends some of Pakistan’s most vulnerable communities; the Rural Women’s Assembly, for organizing rural women across South Africa; the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association, for building and safeguarding democracy in the nation of Georgia; and AI researcher Timnit Gebru, who is the founder of the Distributed AI Research Institute. Timnit Gebru spoke to Democracy Now! last month about how artificial intelligence is entrenching societal biases and inequality.

Timnit Gebru: “And so, we warned about also people interacting with these kinds of texts output by these kinds of systems, attributing a mind behind whatever text they’re seeing. And so, you know, right now, these chatbots, like Claude or ChatGPT, are designed to make you believe that there’s some sort of superhuman brain behind whatever is outputting these texts. And that’s hugely dangerous. And even though we weren’t speaking about chatbots back then, we were already talking about the tendency of people to attribute a mind behind these texts, and so, which means that, you know, they can be deceived into believing that there’s something that the — something more than a model outputting text.

“And the final thing we warned about was: What is the cost of pursuing this singular direction in terms of research and resources? What is the cost of shutting out all other possible futures, all other ways of building machine learning systems, which is a subspecialty of artificial intelligence, or any other kind of paradigm? Because it seemed like the whole field was only investing in this singular direction of building larger and larger models, that are guzzling all of the data — I mean, stealing so many people’s works — and based on exploited labor and killing the environment. …

“I want people to understand that tech does not have to be the way it is right now. But I always loved math and physics, and I also thought it was a refuge from the messy world of war, and which is what made me leave Ethiopian politics. But I later learned that that’s not true, actually. The war and politics that I left is what drives the world of math and science and technology, as well. And if we don’t understand that, we’ll continue to harm our own people and, as engineers and scientists, build terrible and harmful products instead of ones that actually support our communities.”