Every day now, I sit at my computer and ask myself: What is there left to say about the two news stories I care about most? One is unfolding in my hometown, on the banks of the Mississippi River; the other is unfolding on the West Bank of the Jordan and on both banks of the Wadi Gaza.

Which video should I linger on longest? The footage of Renee Good, shot in the face by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis while she was clearly trying to evacuate the scene? Or the video from Saturday of federal agents shooting Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an intensive care nurse, after he tried to help a woman who was being pepper-sprayed? Or perhaps the video from Wednesday showing the aftermath of Israeli strikes that killed three Palestinian journalists, among others, in the Gaza Strip? The journalists had been working for a committee providing Egyptian aid and were documenting its distribution at a displacement camp. Or perhaps the videos of Hamas executing rivals and refusing to yield, despite that the war the group ignited Oct. 7, 2023, has resulted in nothing but catastrophe for Palestinians?

These stories have much more in common than you might think. All are driven, in my view, by terrible leaders who prefer easy, violent solutions to the hard work of negotiated problem-solving. These leaders see an ironfisted approach as the best way to win their next elections: President Donald Trump in the 2026 midterms; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who is expected to call elections around the same time; and Hamas, in its desperate effort to lead the Palestinian movement in the postwar era, despite having lost the war.

Hamas and ICE also share one very visible trait that I never thought I’d see in the United States: Almost all of their foot soldiers wear masks. My experience as a reporter in the Middle East taught me that people wear masks because they are up to something bad and don’t want their faces captured on camera. I saw it often in Beirut and in Gaza; I never expected to see it in Minneapolis. Since when have America’s domestic policing forces, charged with defending the Constitution and the rule of law, felt the need to hide their identities?

I understand why Hamas fighters wear masks — they have both Israeli and Palestinian blood on their hands and fear retribution. But if you placed a photo of an ICE officer next to a Hamas militiaman in a news quiz, I would defy you to tell them apart. Memo to the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem: That is not a good look. What are you hiding?

Good and Pretti were both clearly present as observers — and trying to defend others — yet both were drawn into the chaos and shot at close range by agents who should never have pulled a trigger. Yet the Trump team insists that ICE is blameless. That is not how you build legitimacy for a government effort to track down and deport immigrants lacking permanent legal status.

That same instinct for “fire, ready, aim” is one of the morally corrupting legacies of Israel’s war in Gaza. One of the Palestinian journalists killed by the Israeli airstrike Wednesday, Abdel Raouf Shaath, had worked for years as a cameraman for CBS News and other outlets; the others were local journalists Mohammad Salah Qishta and Anas Ghneim. They were reportedly on assignment to film aid distribution by the Egyptian Relief Committee when their vehicle was targeted.

Really? Was that the only way to handle the situation during a ceasefire? Immediately launch an airstrike and ask questions later? Israel can assassinate nuclear scientists in Iran in the dead of night from 1,200 miles away, yet it can’t distinguish a journalist from a combatant in broad daylight next door? It’s shameful. This comes only months after Israeli forces killed Reuters journalist Hussam al-Masri on the stairs of Gaza’s Nasser Hospital in August.

Netanyahu apologized for that earlier killing. But regarding the three journalists killed last week, the Israeli military released a boilerplate statement saying troops identified “several suspects who operated a drone affiliated with Hamas” and “struck the suspects who activated the drone.” The military added that details are being reviewed. That is what it always says. That is how a nation and an army loses its soul.

Here is what is really happening: Netanyahu is running for reelection. Israel currently occupies approximately 53% of the Gaza Strip, with Hamas holding the other 47%. Trump — with help from Egypt, Qatar and Turkey — is pushing for Hamas to disarm, for its military leaders to leave and for the organization to become a purely political entity. In return, Trump expects Israel to begin a withdrawal toward its own border.

Netanyahu knows that if he runs for election with Hamas still holding political influence in Gaza and the Israeli military pulling back, he will be savaged by the far-right extremists in his coalition. Those allies don’t just want to stay in Gaza; they want to annex the West Bank. So Netanyahu wants the war to continue; he wants to provoke Hamas into fighting so he never has to withdraw.

Meanwhile, Hamas is clinging to its weapons to maintain control on the ground. Even if forced to become a political entity, it will do everything in its power to hijack the technocratic Palestinian government the Trump administration is trying to install.

Back at home, Trump seems to believe the chaos in Minneapolis will work for him in November — even though polls show a majority of Americans disapprove of ICE’s tactics. He is betting he can run on a “law and order” platform fueled by anti-immigration sentiment.

There is, however, another view inside the White House. Vice President JD Vance visited Minneapolis last week to urge local officials to cooperate with federal agents to “lower the temperature and lower the chaos.” Suddenly, the cynical Vance — of all people — was the voice of calm and reason. I suspect he was channeling the fears of Republican lawmakers who worry that ICE’s activities could lead to an electoral disaster in the midterms.

To my friends and family in Minnesota: Stay proud of the way you are documenting abuses and standing up for your neighbors — those with legal papers and those without them — who abide by the law, work hard and enrich our city. But it is vital that this campaign be accompanied by a loud commitment to immigration reform that both controls the border and creates a legal pathway to citizenship.

The winning message remains: high wall, big gate. Control the border, but increase legal immigration. Democrats must never forget that one reason Trump returned to power was the previous administration’s failure to control illegal immigration. Independent voters still care deeply about that.

Trump, Netanyahu and Hamas each have their eyes on the prize: the 2026 elections. The people of Minnesota, Israel and Gaza must keep that in mind. Because if Trump maintains control of Congress, if Netanyahu wins reelection and if Hamas seizes control of the Palestinian movement, all three societies will head into a darkness from which recovery will be agonizingly difficult.

Thomas Friedman writes a column for the New York Times.

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By MICHAEL R. SISAK and LARRY NEUMEISTER

NEW YORK (AP) — The brothers operated in the glitz and glamour of the Hamptons and South Beach. Two were high-end real estate brokers dubbed “The A Team.” The third went to law school and ran their family’s private security firm, which caters to heads of state and the rich and famous.

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They frequented nightclubs, cruised on yachts and flew on private jets. One lived alongside celebrities and corporate titans on Manhattan’s Billionaires’ Row. The others had multimillion-dollar waterfront mansions in Miami.

But behind their posh, peripatetic façade, prosecutors say, Tal, Oren and Alon Alexander — known collectively as the Alexander Brothers — were predators who sexually assaulted, trafficked and raped dozens of women from 2008 to 2021, often after incapacitating them with drugs and sometimes recording their crimes on video.

The brothers met victims at nightclubs, parties and on dating apps, and recruited others for trips to ritzy locales, paying for their flights and lodging at high-end hotels or luxe vacation rentals before drugging and raping them, prosecutors said. In all, dozens of women have accused them of wrongdoing.

Now, the brothers — Tal, 39, and twins Alon and Oren, 38 — face a reckoning that prosecutors say was more than a decade in the making: a sex-trafficking trial that could put them in prison for the rest of their lives.

Opening statements are slated for Tuesday in the brothers’ trial in federal court in Manhattan, after they were delayed a day because of heavy snowfall over the weekend in New York.

Oren and Tal Alexander, the real estate dealers who specialized in high-end properties in Miami, New York and Los Angeles, have pleaded not guilty, along with their brother Alon, who graduated from New York Law School before taking his position with the security firm.

All three have been held without bail since their December 2024 arrests. They were indicted months after several women filed lawsuits alleging sexual misconduct.

A spokesperson for the Alexander Brothers said they “categorically deny that anyone was drugged, assaulted, or coerced, and the government has presented no physical evidence, medical records, contemporaneous complaints, or objective proof to establish those claims.”

“This case highlights a broader concern about how the federal sex-trafficking statute is being applied,” said the spokesperson, Juda Engelmayer. “Congress enacted that law to address force, coercion, and exploitation; not to retroactively criminalize consensual adult relationships through inference or narrative.”

“As the defense has consistently said, allegations are not evidence,” Engelmayer added.

The brothers’ attorneys have promised to show the jury of six men and six women that prosecutors have taken innocent romantic and sexual encounters and converted them into criminal activity through clever lawyering.

Oren Alexander’s attorney, Marc Agnifilo, has said the defense plans to prove that witnesses have lied to the government and that their testimony can’t be trusted.

Judge Valerie E. Caproni, who will preside over the trial, has rejected defense requests to toss out the charges or send the case to state court. The Alexanders’ lawyers have said the allegations against them resemble “date rape” crimes more commonly prosecuted in state courts, but Caproni disagreed.

FILE – In this screenshot, Miami Dade Circuit Court Judge Mindy S. Glazer is seen via video presiding over the first court appearance of Alon Alexander, who is charged with sexual battery along with his twin brother, Oren Alexander, on Thursday, Dec. 12, 2024, in Miami. (Miami Dade Circuit Court via AP, Pool, File)

“That badly misrepresents the nature of the charges,” the judge wrote.

Agnifilo has said the jury will hear evidence of group sex, threesomes and promiscuity. During jury selection last week, prospective jurors were asked questions related to sexual activity and sex crimes.

“The case is about sex and sexuality,” said Agnifilo, who represented Sean “Diddy” Combs last year as the hip-hop mogul was acquitted of sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy charges but convicted on lesser prostitution-related counts.

In court papers, the Alexander Brothers’ lawyers wrote that among the accusers they expect to testify at trial, they had located evidence “that undermines nearly every aspect of the alleged victims’ narratives.”

Prosecutors have said their evidence will show that the brothers “have acted with apparent impunity — forcibly raping women whenever they wanted to do so.”

BRUSSELS (AP) — NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte insisted on Monday that Europe is incapable of defending itself without U.S. military support and would have to more than double current military spending targets to be able to do so.

“If anyone thinks here … that the European Union or Europe as a whole can defend itself without the U.S., keep on dreaming. You can’t,” Rutte told EU lawmakers in Brussels. Europe and the United States “need each other,” he said.

Tensions are festering within NATO over U.S. President Donald Trump’s renewed threats in recent weeks to annex Greenland, which is a semiautonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark.

Trump also said that he was slapping new tariffs on Greenland’s European backers, but later dropped his threats after a “framework” for a deal over the mineral-rich island was reached, with Rutte’s help. Few details of the agreement have emerged.

The 32-nation military organization is bound together by a mutual defense clause, Article 5 of NATO’s founding Washington treaty, which commits every country to come to the defense of an ally whose territory is under threat.

At NATO’s summit in The Hague in July, European allies — with the exception of Spain — plus Canada agreed to Trump’s demand that they invest the same percentage of their economic output on defense as the United States within a decade.

They pledged to spend 3.5% of gross domestic product on core defense, and a further 1.5% on security-related infrastructure – a total of 5% of GDP – by 2035.

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“If you really want to go it alone,” Rutte said, “forget that you can ever get there with 5%. It will be 10%. You have to build up your own nuclear capability. That costs billions and billions of euros.”

France has led calls for Europe to build its “strategic autonomy,” and support for its stance has grown since the Trump administration warned last year that its security priorities lie elsewhere and that the Europeans would have to fend for themselves.

Rutte told the lawmakers that without the United States, Europe “would lose the ultimate guarantor of our freedom, which is the U.S. nuclear umbrella. So, hey, good luck!”

By JENNIFER SINCO KELLEHER

HONOLULU (AP) — Seven Japanese American soldiers will be promoted to officer ranks in a solemn ceremony Monday, eight decades after they died fighting for the U.S. during World War II despite having been branded “enemy aliens.”

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The seven were students at the University of Hawaii and cadets in the Reserve Officer Training Corps, on track to become Army officers, when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. They initially served in the Hawaii Territorial Guard, but soon after the attack the U.S. barred most Japanese Americans from service and deemed them enemy aliens.

The seven cadets instead worked with a civilian labor battalion known as “Varsity Victory Volunteers,” which performed tasks such as digging ditches and breaking rocks, until American leaders in early 1943 announced the formation of a segregated Japanese American regiment. The seven were among those who joined the unit, known as the 442nd Regimental Combat Team.

The combat team, along with the 100th battalion comprised of mostly Japanese Americans from Hawaii, went on to become one of the most decorated units in U.S. history. Some of its soldiers fought for the Allies even as their relatives were detained in Japanese American internment camps because they were considered a public danger.

“It is important for us to really kind of give back and recognize our forefathers and these veterans that we stand on the shoulders of,” said 1st Sgt. Nakoa Hoe of the 100th Battalion, 442nd Regiment, what the unit is now known as in the Army Reserve. He noted the once-segregated unit now includes a “multitude of cultures.”

The seven “sacrificed so much at a challenging time when their loyalty to their country was questioned and they even had family members imprisoned,” he added.

The seven men — Daniel Betsui, Jenhatsu Chinen, Robert Murata, Grover Nagaji, Akio Nishikawa, Hiroichi Tomita and Howard Urabe — died fighting in Europe in 1944. All but Murata were killed during the campaign to liberate Italy from Nazi Germany. Murata was killed by an artillery shell in eastern France.

They will be promoted Monday to 2nd lieutenant, the rank they would have had if they completed the ROTC program. Relatives of at least some of the men are expected to attend the ceremony, scheduled to be held in a Honolulu park.

Even though Hawaii was not yet a state, the cadets were American citizens because they were born in Hawaii after its annexation in 1898.

“Fighting an injustice at home, these seven men later gave their lives fighting on the battlefields of Europe,” said a news release from U.S. Army Pacific. “They were unable to return to school and finish their commissioning efforts.”

Monday’s ceremony capping efforts to honor the men comes amid growing concern and criticism that President Donald Trump’s administration is whitewashing American history ahead of the nation celebrating 250 years of its independence, including last week’s removal of an exhibit on slavery at Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park.

Last year, the Pentagon said internet pages honoring a Black Medal of Honor winner and Japanese American service members were mistakenly taken down — but it staunchly defended its overall campaign to strip out content singling out the contributions by women and minority groups, which the Trump administration considers “DEI.”

Honoring the seven isn’t about DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion — but recognizing them for their merit and that “they served in the ultimate capacity of giving their lives for the country,” said Lt. Col. Jerrod Melander, who previously led the University of Hawaii’s ROTC program as professor of military science.

Melander said he launched the commissioning effort in 2023 during former President Joe Biden’s administration and that the promotions were approved last year during the Trump administration.

The university awarded the men posthumous degrees in 2012. Laura Lyons, interim vice provost for academic excellence at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, called their promotions especially important.

“Everyone’s contribution to and sacrifice for the ideals of freedom and the security of this country should matter and should be acknowledged, regardless of who they are,” Lyons said.