With negotiations in their second week here at the COP30 climate conference in Belém, Brazil, we get an update on the United Nations talks from Asad Rehman, chief executive of Friends of the Earth. He says COP30 is taking place against a backdrop of rising far-right authoritarianism, climate denial, and genocide in Gaza, which are all testing the “rules-based system” underpinning the U.N. climate framework.

Democracy Now! is broadcasting from the U.N. climate summit in the Brazilian rainforest city of Belém, near the mouth of the Amazon River, where the COP30 summit has entered its second week of negotiations. The gathering comes 33 years after the Rio Earth Summit, which created the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

To kick off our week of coverage from the COP30 climate summit in Brazil, we play video of a major protest that took place Saturday, when tens of thousands of people took to the streets of the host city Belém to demand urgent climate action. The Indigenous-led action was the first major climate protest at a United Nations climate conference since 2021; protests were banned by Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Azerbaijan, the three previous host countries.

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is less than two months away from taking office in New York City. Mamdani’s history-making campaign, grounded in community organizing, propelled the little-known Assembly-member to victory. Candidate Mamdani famously began the campaign polling at just 1% and overcame the intense scrutiny, Islamaphobic attacks, criticism for his support for Palestinian rights, and more.

Democracy Now! speaks to William Hartung about his new book “The Trillion Dollar War Machine” and who profits from the United States’ runaway military spending that fuels foreign wars. Hartung says that U.S. policy is “based on profit” and calls for a rethinking of our foreign entanglements. “We haven’t won a war in this century. We’ve caused immense harm. We’ve spent $8 trillion,” he says.

252 Venezuelan immigrants in the United States were flown to El Salvador in the dead of night and indefinitely imprisoned at the Salvadoran mega-prison CECOT, the Terrorism Confinement Center. The detainees had no ability to communicate to the outside world before they were finally released to Venezuela in a prisoner exchange.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has announced the launch of Operation Southern Spear to target suspected drug traffickers in South America, Central America and the Caribbean. The U.S. now has 15,000 military personnel in the region. Over the past two months the U.S. has blown up at least 20 boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. “80 people have been killed in what are extrajudicial executions under international law,” says Juan Pappier, Americas deputy director at Human Rights Watch.