(September 26, 2026)
Israel’s Central Elections Committee has voted to bar the country’s two main Arab-majority political lists from next month’s parliamentary election, potentially leaving Palestinian citizens of Israel without their principal representatives in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset.
The committee also voted to disqualify Ofer Cassif, a Jewish politician from the Arab-Jewish Hadash party, and Sami Abu Shehadeh, the leader of the Palestinian nationalist Balad party.
Hundreds of people have been arrested as the Defend our Juries group protested against the government’s ‘proscription‘ (terrorism ban) on anti-genocide group Palestine Action. While al-Qaeda subsidiary HTS in Syria has been de-proscribed and whitewashed by the UK and US, Palestine Action remains banned. The Crown Prosecution Service and judiciary continue to collude to try to ensure the longest and harshest possible sentences.
More than 3,000 people, mostly pensioners and disabled people, have been arrested for ‘terror’ offences for opposing the proscription. That total is climbing rapidly.
Israel‘s Central Elections Committee (CEC) has barred all of the country’s Arab parties from running in the Knesset elections in October.
The committee, which is made up of representatives from major political parties, including MKs, voted to exclude the entire Joint List, which is made up of the Balad, Hadash, and Ta’al parties, as well as the Ra’am party.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told world leaders Thursday that attacking Iran “was one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever had to make” and denounced as “moral cowards” a mass of delegates who walked out of the U.N. General Assembly when he took the podium to speak.
The president compared his proposed “AI Force” to the Space Force, which he established during his first term, but did not elaborate on how the agency would operate or what its duties would entail.
For the new “AI Czar” position, Trump said, “Only High I.Q. individuals need to apply!” He did not expand further on the latest iteration of the role.
Cuba suffered a total blackout after the collapse of its electrical grid on Friday. The blackout is the latest of at least six partial or total grid collapses since the beginning of this year, as the island grapples with an ongoing US fuel blockade.
The U.S. military attacked a boat suspected of being used to smuggle drugs in the Caribbean Sea on Saturday, killing four people, as the Trump administration continues its monthslong campaign against alleged traffickers in Latin America.
The latest attack brings the number of people who have been killed in boat strikes by the U.S. military to at least 231 in 69 strikes since the Trump administration began targeting those it calls „narcoterrorists“ about one year ago.
(September 18, 2026)
The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Google has confirmed that a Gemini instance was able to leave its sandbox and attack other companies during a security test back in May. The company running the test was frontier AI security firm Irregular—which the Journal noted just so happens to have been involved in similar breakouts at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. The common thread between all of the incidents, according to the New York Times, is that AI models obtained unauthorized internet access during Irregular’s tests.
(one month ago)
Over the past two weeks, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta all disclosed that their AI models went rogue during routine security testing. Every single incident traces back to one company: Irregular, a three-year-old Israeli startup that operates cybersecurity testbeds for frontier AI models.
Founded in Tel Aviv by by Dan Lahav, CEO, and Omer Nevo, CTO, and backed with $80 million from Sequoia and Redpoint Ventures, Irregular runs Capture-the-Flag exercises for major AI labs. In these exercises, models are instructed to find vulnerabilities inside simulated corporate networks.
Since 2023, the sharpest decline in support for Israel — down at least 20 points — comes from women, Hispanic voters, voters under age 45, voters with a college degree and Democrats. Republican support has fallen 10 points during the same time.
Around 48 percent of voters said they sided more with Israelis in the conflict, compared with 38 percent who said they sided with Palestinians.
The figure marks a decline from 54 percent in June and from a high of 68 percent recorded at the outset of the conflict in October 2023, when 18 percent said they sided more with Palestinians.
By a recorded vote of 152 in favour to 3 against (United States, Israel and Paraguay), with 4 abstentions (Colombia, Honduras, Panama and Peru), the 193-member organ adopted the resolution on “Participation by the State of Palestine during the eighty-first session” (document A/81/L.2)
On Thursday, 152 countries voted in favour of a resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly, rejecting the US‘s decision to prevent the Palestinian delegation from participating in the upcoming UN General Assembly session in New York City.
The resolution called on Washington to reverse the decision, considering it a clear violation of the Headquarters Agreement, which legally obliges the host country to facilitate the entry of diplomatic delegations.
“The decision by the U.S. State Department to deny visas to a high-level delegation of the State of Palestine to attend the 81st session of the UN General Assembly must be reversed. The State Department’s statement makes it obvious: this decision is designed to punish the State of Palestine for pursuing international justice and accountability at international institutions, including through the International Criminal Court (ICC) and International Court of Justice (ICJ). This measure is part of a relentless campaign of reprisals against the very notion of international justice.
The U.S. has denied Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas an entry visa to attend the U.N. General Assembly in New York next week, extending a ban in place since last year, a Palestinian official familiar with the matter said on Thursday.
Without naming specific officials, the State Department said on Wednesday it would extend visa sanctions against Palestinian officials over actions they took to „internationalize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,“ including pursuing cases against Israel at international tribunals.
“When the future of humanity is at stake, we need a PAUSE on advanced AI development and a ban on artificial superintelligence — an AI mind smarter than any human and capable of operating independently beyond our control,” Sanders said.
The US Senator further said: “At their upcoming AI summit, Trump and Xi must negotiate a treaty to pause AI and ban superintelligence before it is too late.”
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said on Monday that the development of artificial intelligence concerns the common well-being of all humanity. He called on all parties to jointly promote the open, inclusive and universally beneficial development of AI for good, warning that spreading threat narratives, provoking confrontation and engaging in malicious competition would only disrupt global AI governance and serve no party‘s interests.
House Speaker Mike Johnson says it‘s time for President Donald Trump to „summon everyone together“ and take the lead addressing questions about AI at the White House, rather than Congress.
If a terrorist threat led subject experts to warn of a near-term existential menace to humanity, the weight of the US government would mobilize in an immediate and limitless effort to save the day.
Yet a remarkable sequence of warnings by leaders of artificial intelligence firms that their creation may soon outpace humans’ capacity to control it has so far been met with a shrug by Republicans who run Washington.
(September 12, 2026)
Their fantasies of transcendence take different forms. Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, once said, “I assume my brain will be uploaded to the cloud.” Elon Musk plans to escape to Mars. “We want to be on a path toward making true the things that we read in science fiction books and see in the movies,” he says in footage featured in Alex Gibney’s searing new documentary, “Musk.” “A future where we’re forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction event is less inspiring.” Jeff Bezos, who stepped down in 2021 as chief executive of Amazon to spend more time on his space company, wrote, “We don’t want to face a civilization of stasis, and that is the real issue if we just stay on this planet.”
Some imagine themselves as digitally enabled Übermenschen. In 2023, the billionaire tech investor Marc Andreessen published “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” with a section titled, “Becoming Technological Supermen.” In it, he borrowed language from the Italian futurist — and fascist — Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, writing, “Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.” He quoted Friedrich Nietzsche to argue that absent such an assault, life becomes meaningless and small. In a section titled “The Enemy,” Andreessen listed ideas that would restrain technology’s momentum, including “tech ethics” and the concept of “existential risk.”
President Trump brushed off the risks of artificial intelligence and warnings that the technology has gone rogue. The calls for caution were amplified by tech CEOs who say AI is advancing too fast. Ramy Inocencio has more.
(September 10, 2026)
The Tuesday trifecta – sanctions, weird party slate and the Haaretz Oct. 7 bombshell – could have more impact later.
After the submission of party lists ahead of the Knesset elections, the coalition bloc has strengthened by three seats to 50, following People of Israel’s crossing of the electoral threshold. This is according to a Maariv poll conducted by Lazar Research, headed by Dr. Menachem Lazar, in cooperation with Panel4ALL.
However, Likud has lost one seat, falling to just 19, its lowest figure since May 29, 2025.
On that ill-fated day, 25 years ago, the world stood united. The attack on the US was seen as a brutal assault on the very idea of a modern, open society. The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 1368, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) invoking Article 5 for the first and only time, and the global outpouring of support: Washington enjoyed empathy and credibility in spades.
The Global War on Terror (GWOT) was not seen as a US-led war but as one against a medieval ideology that used jihadi terror as an instrument…
Germany told the United Nations’ top court on Monday that a genocide case over weapons sales to Israel was improperly filed by Nicaragua and should be thrown out.
The Central American country accuses Berlin of violating the Genocide Convention and international humanitarian law by “facilitating” acts of genocide in Gaza by providing arms and other military support to Israel.
(May 11, 2026)
Millions of people around the world are demanding that their leaders act to stop Israel’s violations. Humanity must win.
Cuba denounced on Friday the impact of the US blockade on human rights, just days before the presentation of the report by Special Rapporteur Alena Douhan to the United Nations.
According to Alejandro González, Director of International Organizations at the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the report on the negative repercussions of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights in the Caribbean nation will be presented in Geneva on September 8 and 9.
September 2, 2026
Washington, DC — Marking one year since the Trump administration’s first boat strike, U.S. Representatives Gregory W. Meeks (D-N.Y.), Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee; Adam Smith (D-Wash.), Ranking Member of the House Armed Services Committee; Jim Himes (D-Conn.), Ranking Member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence; and Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), Ranking Member of the House Homeland Security Committee, introduced a War Powers Resolution today to block the administration from continuing to use U.S. Armed Forces to conduct strikes in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific.
“One year ago today, the Trump administration launched a campaign of extrajudicial killings, using the U.S. military and taxpayer dollars to execute at least 227 individuals without due process or a credible national-security justification. The administration calls this counternarcotics. However, it remains unclear whether these operations have made any real difference in stemming the flow of illegal drugs into the United States, and they were never authorized by Congress. A year later, the administration has little to show for this lawless campaign except a mounting body count, a massive price tag, and a stain on the American conscience.
In Just One Year, the Trump Administration’s Bombing Campaign Has Killed at Least 227 People, Including Fishermen and Farmhands
Wednesday marked one year since President Donald Trump began bombing boats allegedly smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean—a grim anniversary that sparked a fresh wave of condemnation from rights advocates across the United States and beyond.