Global Pulse

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  • Pro-Palestine activist wins mayoral Democratic primary in Rhode Island

    Pro-Palestine activist wins mayoral Democratic primary in Rhode Island

    In a political upset that underscores shifting currents within the U.S. Democratic Party, 27-year-old progressive state representative David Morales has defeated the incumbent Democratic mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, to win the party’s nomination for November’s general mayoral election. The victory, secured in the nation’s smallest U.S. state, puts Morales on track to become the youngest mayor in Providence’s recorded history, given Rhode Island’s long-standing status as a reliably deep-blue state where Democratic nominees almost always win general election contests. What makes Morales’s triumph even more striking is the lopsized resource gap he overcame: the first-time candidate’s total campaign budget amounted to less than a quarter of the spending by his rival, former city official Brett Smiley.

    A self-identified Democratic Socialist who counts Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders as a key endorser, Morales’s path into politics was directly shaped by Sanders’ transformative 2016 presidential campaign, which pushed progressive economic and social policy into the mainstream of U.S. Democratic discourse. Inspired by that movement, Morales won a seat in the Rhode Island state legislature at just 22 years old, and built his 2025 primary campaign on the grassroots model that has brought other young progressives to power across the country. Like New York City progressive mayor Zohran Mamdani, Morales leaned heavily on viral social media content to connect directly with Providence residents, centering his platform on pocketbook affordability issues that resonate with working-class households while maintaining a tightly focused, consistent message that resonated with primary voters.

    The Israeli-Palestinian conflict emerged as a defining flashpoint of the race, reflecting broader trends across U.S. Democratic primaries over the past two years. Morales, a longstanding public critic of Israeli policy and vocal supporter of Palestinian rights, openly challenged Smiley over his advisory role with the Combat Antisemitism Movement, a group known for its unwavering pro-Israel stance. Shifting attitudes within the Democratic base have seen support for Israeli policy among younger voters, particularly those under 25, plummet following the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza war, a trend that worked heavily in Morales’s favor.

    Advocacy group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), which has thrown its organizational weight behind pro-Palestinian progressive candidates across the country, celebrated Morales’s win as part of a growing wave of electoral success for candidates prioritizing Palestinian rights. “David has been in the streets with the Palestinian rights movement for years… He has consistently called for an end to U.S. support for apartheid and genocide,” the group said in a post-primary statement. JVP also highlighted that Morales has publicly backed a first-of-its-kind city ballot initiative that would reallocate an estimated $2.5 million in city funds currently invested in Israel and other nations accused of committing genocide. If approved by voters, the measure would mark the first legally binding divestment vote of its kind in U.S. history, a proposal that drew criticism from Jewish Insider, which claimed the legislation carried antisemitic subtext.

    Morales’s victory aligns with a surge in voter enthusiasm for progressive candidates that has been seen across other key primary states including Michigan and New York, where early voting numbers hit record highs this cycle. Overall early in-person voting in Rhode Island hit 37,444 ballots by the close of business before primary day, more than double the 16,900 early ballots cast in the 2022 cycle and three times the 12,100 early votes recorded ahead of the 2024 primary. According to 2020 U.S. Census data, Providence is home to just under 200,000 residents, making the turnout jump all the more notable.

    JVP emphasized that Morales’s win is not an isolated incident, noting that he is the 16th candidate the group has endorsed this election cycle to win the Democratic nomination. “Our Palestine champions have been winning up and down the ballot – from city government, to state legislature, to the House of Representatives, to the Senate,” the group said.

    National progressive leaders quickly hailed the outcome, echoing Morales’s message of rejecting establishment politics. “From coast to coast, Americans are clear: No more status quo politics. We want real change,” Sanders wrote on the social platform X, echoing his own longstanding call for systemic change within the Democratic Party and U.S. politics more broadly. Mamdani, whose campaign strategy Morales emulated, echoed that sentiment, noting “What is the Democratic Party if not its voters?”

    The November 3 general election will see Morales face Republican challenger David Talan. With Rhode Island’s deep Democratic lean, Morales is widely expected to secure the mayoralty, capping a rapid political rise that began less than five years after he first won state office. The contest is one of thousands of local and congressional races up for grabs in this year’s midterm elections, which have been framed as a national referendum on the policies and direction of the Trump administration.

  • Anthropic blocks ‘malicious use’ of AI that could develop biological weapons

    Anthropic blocks ‘malicious use’ of AI that could develop biological weapons

    In a landmark first public threat intelligence report released Thursday, U.S. artificial intelligence firm Anthropic has detailed a sweeping array of malicious misuse incidents targeting its popular Claude AI models over an eight-month period, spanning from biological and conventional weapons research to state-linked cyber espionage and disinformation campaigns. The disclosures come as global alarm over unregulated advanced AI development reaches new heights, with leading researchers and policymakers pushing for urgent action to mitigate catastrophic risks.

    Between December 2025 and August 2026, Anthropic’s security teams identified and disrupted multiple bad actor attempts to leverage three of its public Claude models — Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus — for harmful activity, the report confirms. Notably, the more restricted Claude Fable and high-capacity Mythos-class models were almost entirely unaffected, with only one minor incident involving model distillation, a process that uses large AI models to train smaller, cheaper alternatives.

    Among the most serious threats documented are five separate cases where bad actors attempted to use Claude to advance work on biological weapons, a risk Anthropic identifies as one of the most severe posed by cutting-edge frontier AI. The company confirmed it blocked access for researchers whose work violated its usage policies by pursuing research that could support offensive biological weapons development. While Anthropic acknowledges that the same AI capabilities that can aid weapons development also enable critical public health breakthroughs like vaccine development, it warned that unregulated use without proper safeguards could lead to catastrophic global consequences.

    Jacob Klein, Anthropic’s head of threat intelligence, told the *New York Times* that the misuse scenarios are far more nuanced than popular fictional portrayals. “You are not seeing someone in a comic book kind of way say, ‘Hey, I want to build a biological weapon to kill everybody,’” he explained.

    The report also documents six cases of actors using Claude to develop software for conventional weapons systems, including firearms, missiles, armed drones, bombs, munitions, and the targeting and control infrastructure that operates these weapons. Beyond weapons development, Anthropic detailed a wide range of other harmful use cases, from common cybercrime schemes such as fake dating applications and compromised hotel Wi-Fi scams to state-sponsored surveillance tools designed to track political dissidents.

    Multiple state-aligned and criminal hacking groups were named in the report. A hacking group linked to Russia’s Midnight Blizzard was found to have used Claude to build an automated system that detects when the group’s malware is flagged by cybersecurity defenses, then rewrites the malicious code repeatedly until it evades detection. The report also confirmed that Claude was exploited in a Russia-linked cyber espionage campaign and utilized by an Iranian state propaganda outlet. Anthropic also accused Chinese AI companies of attempting to copy and replicate the core capabilities of its Claude models, and named China-based research labs among the actors misusing its technology. Notorious criminal hacking group ShinyHunters was also linked to misuse of the platform.

    Anthropic justified its public disclosure of the incidents by stating that the company has a core responsibility to be transparent about malicious misuse of its AI services. Since identifying the patterns of abuse, the California-based developer has updated its internal safety protocols to better prevent, detect, and disrupt similar harmful activity going forward, and has shared relevant threat intelligence with law enforcement authorities and industry partners where appropriate.

    The release of the report follows a high-profile warning from a top Anthropic AI safety researcher, who recently cautioned that unregulated rapid AI advancement carries a greater than 10% risk of human extinction within the next decade. That warning has echoed across the global tech and policy communities, with other leading AI leaders backing calls for urgent action to slow development until robust global safeguards can be put in place.

    Jakub Pachocki, chief scientist at ChatGPT developer OpenAI, published a call for the industry to implement voluntary slowdowns in advanced AI development just last week, noting that “no one is prepared for the consequences of a continued rapid rise in machine intelligence.” Pachocki added that while OpenAI is investing heavily in building its own internal safety systems, broader collective action from governments and the global industry is required to manage systemic risks.

    The growing chorus of warnings from AI insiders has already spurred policy action on both sides of the Atlantic. A group of safety advocates recently published an open letter to UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham calling for a new multinational treaty to govern the safe development of AI, urging global governments to collaborate on establishing binding frameworks for superintelligence development. In the U.S., independent Senator Bernie Sanders has introduced new legislation that would ban the development of unregulated AI superintelligence and impose a temporary pause on cutting-edge advanced AI research.

    Speaking to BBC’s *Newsnight* on Thursday, Sanders defended the controversial proposal, arguing: “When scientists tell you there is a chance, a chance that it could have a cataclymic impact on humanity, you’ve got be a moron not to say, slow it down.”

  • NAZA: Film exposing systematic killing in Gaza gets record 24-minute standing ovation at Venice

    NAZA: Film exposing systematic killing in Gaza gets record 24-minute standing ovation at Venice

    The 83rd Venice Film Festival made global headlines Thursday when a groundbreaking documentary investigating Israeli military systems responsible for mass civilian deaths in Gaza received the longest standing ovation in the event’s history.

    Directed by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, NAZA drew a rapturous 24-and-a-half-minute ovation from the festival audience following its world premiere, according to entertainment industry outlet Variety. This unprecedented reception shattered the previous record of 22 minutes, set just one year prior for Kaouther Ben Hania’s *The Voice of Hind Rajab* — another work centered on the Gaza crisis, which chronicles the killing of six-year-old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab by Israeli forces in January 2024.

    As applause echoed through the theater, audience members unfurled Palestinian flags in a show of solidarity. A visibly moved Abraham and Szor were embraced by executive producer Jonathan Glazer, the acclaimed director of *The Zone of Interest*, a Oscar-winning film that examined the bureaucratic banality of atrocity during the Holocaust.

    Online reaction to the premiere was immediate and intense, with festival attendees and human rights activists praising the documentary across social media platforms. The core of NAZA draws from rare, confidential testimonies: 24 Israeli soldiers, most serving in military intelligence units that participated in the Gaza campaign, agreed to share their experiences on camera. Filmed in secret overnight on Tel Aviv rooftops to protect the interviewees, the accounts lay bare how soldiers systematically planned and carried out operations that killed thousands of people, including entire Palestinian families.

    Writing for the Israeli-based independent outlet +972 Magazine ahead of the premiere, Abraham and Szor outlined their core purpose: rather than calling out isolated acts of abuse by individual soldiers, the film seeks to expose the institutional framework that enables mass killing. “We focus on orders, policies, and patterns of operation,” they explained. From their analysis of the collected testimonies, the co-directors reached a searing conclusion: the mass death of Palestinian civilians in Gaza is not an unintended side effect of military conflict, but “a premeditated, calculated, and intentional act.”

    The soldiers interviewed in the film occupy key roles in the Israeli military’s strike approval process: they carry out surveillance on targeted residential structures, calculate projected civilian casualty numbers for individual home strikes, and sign off on deadly attacks. The filmmakers argue that these first-hand accounts eliminate any plausible deniability around the scale and intentionality of civilian deaths in Gaza.

    The film’s title itself carries deliberate meaning: NAZA is a Hebrew military acronym for “collateral damage,” the term routinely used by the Israeli military to refer to projected civilian deaths in planned strikes. Abraham and Szor emphasize that this clinical euphemism intentionally obscures two critical facts: that military leadership knew in advance how many civilians would die in each strike, and that the campaign targeting civilian populations is a deliberate, policy-level choice.

    The documentary’s official synopsis underscores this focus, stating that NAZA offers a granular, documented account of “the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.”

    This is not the first high-profile work for the directing duo: Abraham and Szor were two of the four co-directors behind *No Other Land*, which took home the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2025. Produced in partnership with the Guardian and James Wilson’s JW Films, NAZA is the only documentary selected to compete for the festival’s top honor, the Golden Lion, this year.

    On social media, observers quickly drew parallels between NAZA and Glazer’s *The Zone of Interest*, noting both works center on the bureaucratic systems that normalize mass atrocity through routine, procedural calculation and dehumanizing language. One social media commentator summarized the connection as NAZA being a documentary spin-off of Glazer’s Oscar-winning film, with the added layer of perpetrators directly describing their actions on camera, a choice that many observers described as deeply visceral and unsettling.

  • Former New York Mayor Giuliani designated ‘anti-Muslim extremist’ by Muslim advocacy group

    Former New York Mayor Giuliani designated ‘anti-Muslim extremist’ by Muslim advocacy group

    On Wednesday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) officially designated former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani as an anti-Muslim extremist, a move that follows a series of virulently bigoted comments he made during a recent primetime television interview on Newsmax.

    During that interview, Giuliani, who served as a senior advisor to former U.S. President Donald Trump during his first term in office, called for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to be barred from attending the upcoming 25th anniversary 9/11 memorial service this Friday. “It offends me that he’s coming,” Giuliani told the outlet.

    The former mayor went even further, pushing unfounded conspiracy theories about global Muslim communities, claiming that Muslims are actively seeking to seize control of regions across the United States and Western Europe. He doubled down on his racist rhetoric by perpetuating harmful religious stereotypes, arguing “They (Muslims) want to dominate us. That’s what they’re taught the day they begin their extremist religious education. Mamdani is a clear supporter of that. All of the Muslims he supports are murderers.”

    In an official statement announcing the designation, Corey Saylor, CAIR’s director of research and advocacy, noted that Giuliani has targeted American Muslim communities for decades solely on the basis of their faith. “Mr Giuliani has a decades-long record of targeting our community simply because of our faith, and we are designating him an anti-Muslim extremist as a result of his hateful views,” Saylor said.

    Giuliani’s comments are just the latest development in a growing public dispute over Mamdani’s attendance at the memorial, which already has more than 100,000 signatures on a petition calling for the mayor to be excluded. Two New York City Republican councilmembers – Vicky Paladino and Joann Ariola – have spearheaded the petition effort, and Paladino held a press conference on the steps of City Hall Tuesday to reiterate her demand that Mamdani stay away from the ceremony, claiming “he does not belong there.”

    Paladino is no stranger to open Islamophobia: last year, she took to social media platform X to call for the mass expulsion of Muslims from Western countries, and in February of this year, she compared Mamdani’s tenure in office to an “Islamic conquest,” repeating the white nationalist “great replacement” conspiracy theory that claims non-white people are intentionally displacing white Westerners.

    Afaf Nasher, executive director of CAIR’s New York chapter, pushed back against this coordinated political attack, noting that American Muslims should never be forced to prove their patriotism after politicians exploit the national trauma of 9/11 to target their community. “American Muslims should not have to defend our patriotism every time a deranged politician exploits that tragedy (9/11) to attack our community,” Nasher said.

    Mamdani himself has declined to directly engage with Giuliani’s personal attacks, choosing instead to center his work in the lead-up to the 25th anniversary on honoring 9/11 victims and advancing long-overdue transparency around the aftermath of the attacks. When asked about Giuliani’s comments earlier this week, Mamdani said he wanted the week to focus on “the families whose loved ones were stolen from them 25 years ago in the horrific act of terror of September 11, and a focus also on the first responders who did everything they could.”

    On Tuesday, Mamdani took a major step toward that transparency, releasing 170,000 pages of previously unreleased government records related to the 9/11 attacks through a public online portal. The release event was attended by first responders, 9/11 victim family members, and comedian and long-time 9/11 advocacy activist John Stewart, host of *The Daily Show*.

    The newly released documents confirm long-held allegations that city leadership knew the air in Lower Manhattan was toxic in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, and that inspectors found dangerous asbestos contamination at nearly every test site in the area. To date, more than 140,000 people have enrolled in the World Trade Center health program for 9/11-related illnesses, with 49,000 diagnosed with certified 9/11-linked cancers. Data from the 9/11 Memorial shows that more people have now died from 9/11-related illnesses than were killed in the attacks themselves on September 11, 2001.

    Mamdani placed direct blame for these avoidable deaths on the city leaders who were in power at the time of the attacks – a group that includes Giuliani. “People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air. And then when they began to contend with the symptoms of the illnesses that followed, the government that had not hesitated to send them into harm’s way was nowhere to be found,” Mamdani said.

    When asked after the release of the documents whether Giuliani should be barred from the memorial out of respect for the victims of 9/11-related illnesses, Mamdani reiterated that the day should be centered on victims, not political fights. He responded that this day was about the victims and the families, not about any politicians.

    In addition to releasing the records, Mamdani signed two executive orders earlier this month related to the 9/11 anniversary: one formally codifying September 11 as an official city day of remembrance, and a second strengthening New York City’s operational and emergency preparedness protocols.

  • Romania’s secret CIA prison: Two decades of denial and unanswered questions

    Romania’s secret CIA prison: Two decades of denial and unanswered questions

    Decades after the 9/11 attacks launched the United States’ global “war on terror”, newly declassified court filings and confirmed evidence have pulled back the curtain on one of the Central Intelligence Agency’s most secretive overseas black sites: a downtown Bucharest detention facility where scores of detainees were held and systematically tortured between 2003 and 2005. Among the men held at the site, codenamed Detention Site Black, is Ammar al-Baluchi, nephew of self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, whose firsthand account of cruelty paints a damning portrait of life inside the secret prison.

    Baluchi, who was detained at the facility for nearly two years, says the most searing memory of his captivity is the unrelenting cold. Held nearly naked in cells illuminated 24 hours a day by harsh fluorescent bulbs, he described his imprisonment as “living inside a refrigerator”. Court documents detail a consistent pattern of abuse at the site: prolonged solitary confinement under constant artificial light, deliberate sleep deprivation that sometimes kept detainees shackled in a standing position for days on end, repeated dousing with ice-cold water, and degrading forced procedures that interrogators labeled with euphemisms such as “attention grasps” and “facial holds”. Earlier this year, Baluchi’s legal team released the first ever publicly circulated photograph of a CIA black site detainee: an image of Baluchi stripped naked and photographed by intelligence personnel, one of tens of thousands of similar images secretly held by the U.S. government.

    More than 23 years after the 9/11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people and prompted the U.S. to launch deadly invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that have killed at least 940,000 people directly, a U.S. military judge has finally scheduled a long-delayed trial for Baluchi and four other co-defendants in the 9/11 case. Proceedings are set to open on June 5, 2028, more than a decade after the case was first brought. The decades-long delay stems from a core legal dispute: whether confessions and statements coerced through torture at CIA black sites before the detainees were transferred to Guantanamo Bay can be used as admissible evidence in court. In a landmark 2025 ruling, a Guantanamo military judge found that statements Baluchi gave to the FBI in 2007 were involuntary and inadmissible, ruling they were permanently tainted by the torture and cruel, inhuman treatment he endured in CIA custody, including at the Bucharest site. The judge ruled that even the slightly improved conditions of detention at Guantanamo could not erase the “lingering taint” of abuse he suffered in the black site network.

    The Bucharest black site was part of a sprawling network of secret CIA prisons spread across three continents in the years after 9/11, part of the agency’s controversial rendition, detention and interrogation program that was formally shut down by the Obama administration in 2009. Declassified records and independent research from the Rendition Project, an NGO that has spent years tracking the CIA’s secret detention network, reveal that Romanian senior state officials agreed to host the site as a goodwill gesture ahead of Romania’s 2004 accession to NATO, in exchange for a total payment of at least $8 million plus additional millions in ongoing funding.

    The agreement to build the site was finalized in mid-October 2002, and the first group of five detainees arrived at the facility in autumn 2003. Former Romanian president Ion Iliescu confirmed the broad outlines of the deal in a 2015 interview, acknowledging that U.S. allies requested a site for detention operations “around the turn of the year 2002 and 2003”, which he approved in principle without asking for details. “We did not interfere with the activities of the USA on this site,” Iliescu said, framing the decision as “a gesture of courtesy ahead of our accession to Nato”. The deal was handled by then-national security advisor Ioan Talpes, who admitted in a 2014 interview that he personally approved the lease of a government-owned building to the CIA, and that Romanian officials deliberately chose not to investigate what the agency was doing at the site in order to prove Romania’s reliability to Washington.

    Independent investigators have confirmed that top Romanian officials, including former president Traian Basescu, who took office in 2004, were fully aware of the site’s existence and purpose. A 2019 Rendition Project report added a previously undisclosed detail: after September 2004, senior U.S. diplomats and CIA officials formally briefed Romanian authorities on the full scope of the program, including clear descriptions of the torture techniques used on detainees. “It’s definitively the case – the allegations of torture, the money, the people who were held there – it’s definitively the case that that’s Romania in the court files,” said Crofton Black, a former Rendition Project investigator who spent nearly a decade tracing the black site network through flight logs and declassified documents. Black told reporters that Romania made the deliberate choice to host the site because it aligned with the country’s geopolitical goals, and officials believed the U.S. would shield them from accountability.

    Unlike black sites in Poland and Lithuania that were built in remote, isolated areas, Detention Site Black was located in central Bucharest, in a government building housing the National Registry Office for Classified Information (Orniss) on a quiet residential street in northern Bucharest, according to a 2011 joint investigation by the Associated Press and ARD Panorama. Orniss has “categorically denied” any connection to the prison. Despite disputes over the exact location, overlapping court testimonies from multiple detainees confirm consistent details of the facility’s harsh conditions: six prefabricated, white-painted cells tiled with impact-resistant glass, mounted on springs designed to keep detainees constantly off-balance and disoriented, with unbroken fluorescent lighting that gave the site the unofficial nickname “Bright Light”.

    Another high-profile detainee held at Detention Site Black is Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the accused mastermind of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole that killed 17 U.S. sailors. Nashiri was held at the Bucharest site between April 2004 and November 2005, and his case reached the European Court of Human Rights, which issued a landmark 2018 ruling that found Romania had violated international human rights law by enabling the CIA’s torture program. The court confirmed Nashiri endured “extremely harsh” conditions including permanent blindfolding, total solitary confinement, constant exposure to loud noise and unbroken lighting, permanent leg shackles during movement, sleep deprivation, painful stress positions, physical assault, and forced rectal feeding.

    A 2014 U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report confirmed what independent investigators have long alleged: the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program never produced unique, life-saving intelligence that could not have been obtained through legal interrogation methods. The report found that the CIA held at least 119 detainees across the black site network, 39 of whom were subjected to the brutal unauthorized interrogation techniques, and that the agency deliberately misled Congress and the public about the program’s brutality. To date, almost no U.S. or foreign officials have faced criminal accountability for the abuses.

    For more than two decades, successive Romanian governments have officially denied any involvement in hosting the black site. When contacted by Middle East Eye for this report, the Romanian foreign intelligence service said the matter had already been fully investigated by national and international judicial bodies and declined further comment. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Justice and former president Basescu did not respond to requests for comment, while the domestic intelligence service SRI said it lacked legal standing to address public claims about the site.

    Despite Romania’s official denial, the 2018 European Court of Human Rights ruling formally confirmed that the country violated Nashiri’s human rights by enabling his torture and failing to launch a credible investigation into the abuses. A domestic criminal investigation into the allegations, opened in 2012 after a complaint from Nashiri’s legal team, was deliberately stalled for years, and by 2016 the statute of limitations for all alleged crimes had expired, with no suspects ever formally identified. The case was officially closed in March 2021, with prosecutors labeling the perpetrator “unknown” despite access to international evidence sharing. In 2021, the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers expressed “profound regret” that Romania had failed to use all available means to investigate and establish the full facts of the case, as required by the Strasbourg court ruling.

    Ben Keith, a British barrister who represents Baluchi outside the U.S., said senior Romanian officials intentionally enabled the CIA’s torture program. “We know from the ruling in al-Nashiri the Romanians knew about it; they might have not known exactly what was happening, but they facilitated the CIA to create a black site to torture these men,” Keith said. “Our contention is that Romania not only facilitated the CIA black site but knew they were being used to torture individuals.”

    With the 9/11 trial now scheduled for 2028, the role of Romania and other host countries in the CIA’s black site network, and the torture inflicted at Detention Site Black, will take center stage in the legal proceedings. For independent investigators, Romania’s ongoing refusal to acknowledge its role despite overwhelming evidence is indefensible. “There’s been years of compelling evidence that Romania hosted a black site, and the more the evidence has grown, the government continued to deny it was involved,” Black said. “It’s ridiculous, it’s nonsense.”

  • Is Trump’s $5,000 pledge a sign of panic?

    Is Trump’s $5,000 pledge a sign of panic?

    Long known for rejecting the conventional guardrails of American political campaigning, former president and current Republican Party leader Donald Trump has once again upended expectations with a startling, understated campaign promise: a $5,000 cash payout to every U.S. citizen if Republicans seize control of Congress in the upcoming 2026 midterm elections. Even by Trump’s own history of norm-breaking political theater, the trillion-dollar pledge stands out as an extraordinary departure from standard campaign messaging. The promise was not delivered as a marquee highlight of Trump’s keynote opening night address at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas; instead, it was slipped into the speech roughly an hour in, as audience attention began to fade, with no advance warning to party allies or advance policy preparation. In the weeks following the announcement, the White House has offered no concrete details on how the massive $1 trillion-plus program would be funded, how payments would be distributed to eligible citizens, or what administrative framework would be required to roll it out. When pressed for clarification by reporters, a White House statement only reiterated that the pledge proves Trump can deliver results that establishment experts dismiss as impossible, offering no additional clarity on implementation. Inside the Dallas convention arena, the offhand announcement drew enthusiastic applause from Trump’s loyal base of supporters in attendance. But the reveal exposed deep rifts within the Republican Party, particularly among candidates competing in competitive battleground races who need to win over skeptical swing voters, including moderate Republicans and independent voters. Most high-profile vulnerable Republican incumbents skipped the Dallas convention entirely, and many party members were caught completely off-guard by the unannounced pledge. Reactions ranged from quiet acceptance to scathing condemnation, especially among fiscal conservatives who have long criticized Trump’s record of expanding the federal deficit. Among the most prominent critics is Kentucky Republican Representative Thomas Massie, who lost his primary election earlier this year after publicly clashing with Trump. Massie took to social media platform X to mock the promise, writing “I don’t know about you all, but frankly I’m insulted by the notion that my vote this November could be bought for 5k. Not to mention the inflation this would cause. All things considered, I cannot in good conscience accept a penny less than 10k!” Maine Senator Susan Collins, who skipped the convention to campaign on the ground in her competitive re-election race, issued a more measured rebuke, noting that “Tax and spending decisions should be made based on the needs of the American people and the state of the economy, they should not appear to be tied to election results.” For their part, Democratic party leaders have uniformly labeled the pledge an empty, unserious vote-buying gimmick. Legal experts have cast significant doubt on whether Trump could implement the policy without congressional approval, a point the president addressed during an interview with CBS News, the BBC’s U.S. partner. Trump claimed he did not believe congressional approval would be required for the spending, though he added that he expected Congress would approve the plan if it proved necessary. Even so, a large bloc of fiscally conservative House Republicans would almost certainly reject the massive new spending commitment. Former Republican Representative Bob Good went as far as to dismiss the plan, which some supporters have dubbed the “Trump dividend”, as a “socialist vote-buying scheme”. The 2026 Republican convention served as another clear reminder that Trump retains an iron grip on the Republican Party, and has already forced House Republicans to abandon long-held traditional conservative fiscal positions to align with his policy agenda. This is far from the first time Trump has made broad cash promises to American voters during a campaign. To date, Americans have still not received the $2,000 per person checks Trump promised would be funded by trade tariff revenue during a prior campaign, and a $5,000 payout proposal floated by Elon Musk, funded by proposed federal spending cuts, also never materialized. Trump does hold a track record of delivering on some similar pledges: he followed through on creating Trump savings accounts with a $1,000 government contribution for every child born in the U.S. during his presidency, and all active-duty U.S. military personnel received a one-time $1,776 payment to celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence. Political analysts are now debating what prompted the last-minute, unvetted pledge, with many questioning whether it is a sign Trump expects major Republican losses in the November midterms. While Trump himself is not on the ballot this cycle, midterm elections are almost always treated as a referendum on the sitting sitting president, and the party holding the White House typically faces strong headwinds. With less than two months until election day, Trump’s national approval rating sits at historic lows. His ongoing conflict with Iran has grown increasingly unpopular with voters, and its economic ripple effects have driven up gasoline prices for American households. Cost of living remains the top issue for voters across the country, and while inflation has fallen from its post-Covid peak, it still remains far higher than most voters find acceptable. The fact that Trump rolled out the policy without notifying even his closest party allies has led some observers to speculate that the pledge is a sign of panic from the Trump campaign. It is undeniably a highly unorthodox approach to rolling out a major policy proposal, but Trump’s entire political career has been built on rejecting established political norms and breaking long-held unwritten rules of campaigning. The question now is whether this latest tactic will pay off: it can only work if a majority of voters believe Trump is actually serious about delivering the cash he has promised.

  • We want to move beyond elections, face of India’s ‘cockroach’ movement tells BBC

    We want to move beyond elections, face of India’s ‘cockroach’ movement tells BBC

    Three months is all it took for 30-year-old Abhijeet Dipke to rise from obscurity to national fame – a level of public recognition that most grassroots Indian activists and politicians spend a lifetime chasing, and many never achieve at all. Today, Dipke is the public face of India’s viral Gen Z ‘cockroach protests’, a grassroots movement that has already forced a high-profile government concession and emerged as one of the most significant challenges to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration in recent years.

  • Ukraine’s fortress cities under fire as Russia bids to seize rest of Donbas

    Ukraine’s fortress cities under fire as Russia bids to seize rest of Donbas

    As Russian military pressure escalates in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, Ukrainian authorities have ordered mandatory evacuation orders for remaining civilians in the strategically critical cities of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk, where daily bombardment has turned urban life into a lethal nightmare. These two adjacent settlements are the largest population centers still fully under Ukrainian control in Donbas, a territory that forms the core of Moscow’s stated war aims more than two years into its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

    Pavlo Dyachenko, a senior official with Donetsk region’s police force, confirmed that forced evacuations are already underway for households with children in the hardest-hit districts, describing the evacuation order as the only viable path to saving civilian lives amid a catastrophic collapse in local security. “The frequency of attacks has spiked dramatically,” Dyachenko explained, noting that where Slovyansk once faced roughly one glide bomb strike per week, it now endages deadly bombardments on a near-daily basis.

    Slovyansk, Kramatorsk, and the nearby southern city of Kostyantynivka form a critical segment of Ukraine’s eastern “fortress belt” — a layered network of heavily fortified defensive lines designed to halt Russian advances deeper into Ukrainian-controlled territory. But recent frontline reports indicate only a limited Ukrainian troop presence remains in Kostyantynivka, while Russian officials have claimed full control of the city, a development that would leave the two larger northern cities even more exposed to offensive operations.

    Capturing the entirety of Donbas, which encompasses the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, has been one of the Kremlin’s most prominent stated objectives since it launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. Moscow has repeatedly framed its military campaign in the region as a “liberation” and “protection” of ethnic Russian-speaking communities, a justification that has been widely rejected by the international community as a baseless pretext for territorial aggression. Russia already controls nearly the entire Luhansk region, and currently holds approximately 80% of Donetsk — the oblast where all three fortress belt cities are located. For months, Russian ground forces have concentrated their offensive operations around the Kramatorsk-Slovyansk axis, and a full Russian seizure of the two cities would open a clear path for Moscow to push further west into Ukraine.

    Civilians still residing in the two cities face constant threat from Russian drone and artillery strikes. Viktor Makurin, a London-based volunteer working on the ground in the region, described daily life as saturated with violence: key city thoroughfares are now draped in protective anti-drone netting, and FPV (first-person-view) attack drones routinely patrol roadways in search of moving targets. “Driving anywhere in the city is a death sentence,” Makurin told the BBC. “You can hear the constant buzz of drones through your window, explosions never stop ringing out in the distance, and Ukrainian air defense teams are constantly engaging incoming unmanned aerial vehicles.”

    Data compiled by Ukrainian police, analyzed by the BBC, lays bare the rapidly worsening human cost of the intensified bombardment. Over the summer months, the number of civilian wounded jumped from 70 in June to 212 in August. Monthly civilian fatalities have held steady in double digits: 16 people were killed in June, 20 in July, and 15 in August. Residential apartment blocks are as frequently targeted as critical infrastructure, leaving widespread destruction across residential neighborhoods. The number of Russian glide bombs — widely considered one of the most lethal weapons in Moscow’s current arsenal — has surged from 40 in June to 109 in July and 92 in August.

    Unlike unguided free-fall munitions, Russian glide bombs are fitted with wing kits that let them navigate precisely to their targets from long range, putting most of Kramatorsk and Slovyansk within strike range from Russian-held positions. They typically weigh between 250 and 500 kilograms, though Russian forces have been documented deploying 1,500-kilogram variants capable of leveling entire city blocks. “The destruction they leave behind is unimaginable,” Dyachenko said. John Auckland Abbey, another British volunteer working in the region, described the weapons as silent killers that have shattered civilian morale. “They come without warning, and after the first explosion you know more are on the way,” Abbey wrote on social media. “As you lie motionless in the dark, the only question is: will the next one land on me?”

    One of the deadliest recent strikes hit Kramatorsk on August 25, when nine glide bombs targeted the city. Seven of the munitions hit civilian apartment buildings, wounding 24 people including a two-month-old infant. A second major strike followed just two days later, when seven glide bombs hit Kramatorsk and another five struck Slovyansk. As of this week, seven additional civilians were wounded in a new round of shelling targeting Kramatorsk.

    Strategically, Kramatorsk holds major political significance for Ukraine: it currently hosts the headquarters of the Donetsk regional civilian administration, after the original oblast capital of Donetsk was seized by Russian-backed separatist forces in 2014.

    The fate of remaining Ukrainian-held Donbas has recently moved to the center of international diplomatic efforts around the war. Last weekend, U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner held talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky following a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, with Donbas’s status reported to be a core topic of discussion. Witkoff has previously expressed public sympathy for Russian territorial claims to the region, but Zelensky has repeatedly ruled out withdrawing Ukrainian troops from any portion of Donbas.

    Zelensky confirmed that Putin has set an end-of-year deadline for his military to fully occupy all of Donbas, with the Kramatorsk-Slovyansk-Kostyantynivka axis remaining the Kremlin’s top military priority. To shore up defenses in the region, Zelensky has recently established two new defense taskforces led by seasoned Ukrainian commanders Andriy Biletsky and Denys Prokopenko, tasking them with holding the remaining Ukrainian-held portion of Donetsk. One senior unnamed Ukrainian general described the ongoing fighting for the area as far more than a battle for territory: it is shaping up to be the defining conflict of this year and next, the general said.

  • Can Europe recharge its battery industry?

    Can Europe recharge its battery industry?

    In recent years, Europe has made ambitious attempts to carve out a foothold in the global battery industry, but high-profile setbacks have left the continent scrambling for a new competitive edge. Two major European battery players – Sweden’s Northvolt and Norway’s Morrow – have recently filed for bankruptcy, stoking widespread fears that Europe is already falling behind in the next wave of global battery technology transformation. Against this backdrop, Chinese manufacturers currently dominate global battery production, and the sector’s long road to commercialization combined with cutthroat global competition makes entering large-scale manufacturing a high-stakes gamble for any new entrant.

    Now, a growing cohort of European investors and researchers are pinning their hopes on an unexpected solution: innovation at the nanoscale. A single nanometer measures just one-billionth of a meter, but this tiny scale is where many experts believe the next generation of transformative battery improvements will be born.

    One pioneer in this space is Dutch deep tech firm LeydenJar, whose namesake draws from an 18th-century early electric cell prototype. The company leverages a semiconductor-derived technique called plasma deposition to manufacture an advanced pure silicon anode – a core component of lithium-ion batteries. While silicon has long been recognized as a low-cost, high-performance material for anodes, pure silicon naturally expands and contracts during charging and discharging cycles, causing the material to crack rapidly and degrade battery performance. Through plasma deposition, LeydenJar builds ultra-thin pure silicon foil one microscopically thin layer at a time, creating a stable structure that resists cracking. The innovation delivers dramatic improvements: according to the company, it can boost battery energy density by up to 50%, extend overall battery lifespan, and drastically cut charging times. “Where normally a pure silicon anode would fall apart, this remains stable, so it was a very wonderful invention,” says Christian Rood, LeydenJar’s chief executive officer. “We address the bottleneck in the battery.”

    After a decade of research and development, LeydenJar is set to launch commercial-scale production at the end of 2026 – a timeline that underscores the heavy time and capital investment required for deep tech innovation. The company’s choice of Eindhoven, Netherlands for its production facility is no accident: the city is already a global hub for semiconductor manufacturing, home to industry giant ASML and a vast ecosystem of specialized suppliers. “A lot of people talk theoretically about ecosystems; I can tell you this is one of our sources of competitive advantage,” Rood explains. “It’s really the crossover from semiconductors to batteries that makes us different. Once you’ve demonstrated the principle in the lab, industrialization requires you to work with the semiconductor technology and suppliers. That means a lot of risk, but also a lot of opportunity in terms of patenting, in terms of securing your whole intellectual property. And that’s much more difficult to do in the US or in China.”

    LeydenJar is not alone in its nanotech-focused battery push. Across the Netherlands and wider Europe, dozens of small deep tech startups are developing nanoscale innovations for the global battery supply chain. One of these is Delft-based startup Powall, which builds commercial-scale manufacturing equipment that applies nanocoatings to the raw powder materials used in conventional modern batteries. Like LeydenJar’s technology, the coating technique originated in the semiconductor industry, and operates at an incredibly tiny scale: individual powder granules measure in micrometers, while the protective coatings applied to them measure in nanometers. The process uses atomic layer deposition to uniformly coat each granule.

    Roderik Colen, CEO of Powall, explains that the nanocoating solves a major durability problem that has kept many promising new battery materials from reaching commercial markets. “Your battery works less well than before after using it thousands of times – that degrading or aging can be slowed down when you’re using a nanocoating,” Colen says. “You can have an exciting new material with a higher capacity or fast charging, all these novel developments. They typically have one element which is very good, but they suffer on the durability side. And that means they will never be a commercial product. That’s where we then come in, to give them the protective coating to effectively enable these new materials.” The process, which mixes coated powders and coating materials in a gas stream to trigger a controlled chemical reaction, offers precise control over coating thickness and can be adapted to a wide range of battery materials, unlocking flexible performance improvements for manufacturers.

    Unlike the large-scale gigafactory projects that have failed in Europe in recent years, neither LeydenJar nor Powall aim to produce full batteries end-to-end. Both firms maintain commercial partnerships with Asian battery manufacturers, positioning their innovations as critical niche components in the global supply chain. Their ambition echoes the strategy that made ASML a global leader in semiconductors: rather than competing directly in mass production, European firms can carve out a competitive position by owning critical, high-value technology steps. “The easy comparison is with semiconductors, where there’s really a race for the best chip technology,” Rood says. “ASML is not producing chips; it focuses on a critical step in the production of chips, and in that way, has a seat at the table when it comes to the whole semiconductor battle. This is our ambition as well – to have a position where our battery anode is so unique that we have an important position in the supply chain.”

    Alexander Brown, a senior analyst at the Berlin-based Mercator Institute for China Studies (Merics), notes that niche high-tech innovation could be a strong strategic fit for Europe’s existing industrial strengths. “I think having one part of the supply chain based in Europe is great and if that can be a very advanced technological part, which offers the opportunity for high margins, that’s fantastic,” Brown says. But he also cautions that competition and coexistence exist simultaneously in the global market, and China is actively working to develop domestic alternatives for all critical battery technologies, just as it is pushing to develop domestic alternatives to ASML’s semiconductor lithography equipment. “China is working very hard to develop local alternatives for technologies, including these niche technologies. It’s no secret that China would love to replace ASML – they’re working very hard to do that, and it’s not unforeseeable that they will achieve that goal eventually,” Brown says. “So, I think Europe has traditional strengths in developing very exquisite high-quality products, which can find markets all over the world. But I also think it’s important for that not to be the only strategy from the continent’s policy makers.”

    Beyond technological hurdles, the sector also faces financing challenges in Europe. Even as LeydenJar prepares to launch commercial production, Rood notes that raising capital for deep tech battery innovation is far harder in Europe than in the U.S. or Asia, due to a lower risk appetite among European investors. “There is sufficient financing in Europe, but the risk attitude is quite different than in Asia and in the US,” Rood says. “That means for a company like us that you have to work with different sources of funding at the same time – government grants, debt financing, help from the European Investment Bank and investors willing to buy a share of the business. They set a lot of challenging conditions, and they all want to do their own due diligence. It’s hard work.”

    Still, Colen argues that Europe’s existing innovation ecosystem, particularly in the Netherlands, puts the continent in a strong position to capitalize on nanotech battery innovation, as long as policymakers and investors are willing to accept the inherent risks. The global battery industry is still young, with massive new production capacity being built globally and manufacturers actively searching for performance-boosting new technologies. “It’s a relatively young industry where factories are being built left, right and centre. They’re searching for the right tech. So that’s where you can play a big role, because the volumes are huge,” Colen says. For Europe, the path to relevance in the global battery race may not require competing with Chinese manufacturers to build massive gigafactories. Instead, it may lie at the opposite end of the size scale – as Colen puts it, “small changes make big differences.”

  • Jimmy Kimmel says interview with Democrat won’t air on TV, cites regulator ‘threats’

    Jimmy Kimmel says interview with Democrat won’t air on TV, cites regulator ‘threats’

    A growing clash between the Trump administration and mainstream broadcast media has reached a new flashpoint, after late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel announced that a planned television interview with Democratic U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico would not air on linear TV, blaming direct threats from the Trump-aligned Federal Communications Commission. Kimmel made the revelation during his Wednesday broadcast of ABC’s *Jimmy Kimmel Live!*, outlining that the agency, which is currently led by a Trump appointee, had issued threats against his show, network, and local affiliate stations over the booking — a standard editorial decision the administration disapproves of.

    Talarico is locked in a high-stakes 2026 midterm election race against Trump-endorsed Republican Ken Paxton for Texas’ open Senate seat. The result of this competitive contest will play a decisive role in determining whether Democrats can flip control of the U.S. Senate for the final two years of Trump’s first term. This is not the first time Kimmel has clashed with the current FCC: the host noted he has interviewed dozens of political candidates throughout his career, including Trump himself during his 2016 first presidential campaign, but the regulatory environment has shifted dramatically since Trump took office.

    “Now that he’s president, his FCC has threatened me, threatened our show, threatened our network, ABC, our affiliates, our local stations, based on simple, traditional editorial decisions, guest bookings it would seem they don’t like,” Kimmel told his audience Wednesday. Out of concern for ABC’s local affiliate stations, particularly those based in Texas, Kimmel confirmed the Talarico interview would not run on scheduled Thursday linear TV, and would instead be released exclusively on the show’s YouTube channel.

    The White House has forcefully denied all allegations of regulatory intimidation. Spokesman Davis Ingle dismissed Kimmel’s claims as a manufactured performance designed to push a false narrative about the Trump administration’s policies. “FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has not threatened him regarding interviewing James Talarico, or any other candidate,” Ingle said in a formal statement to the BBC. The BBC has also reached out to the FCC directly for additional comment on the matter, which is still pending.

    This latest dispute is the culmination of months of escalating tension between ABC, its parent company Disney, and the Trump-led FCC. In September 2026, Kimmel was temporarily pulled from the broadcast schedule after comments he made regarding the shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. That blackout came just hours after Carr threatened regulatory action against ABC and Disney over the remarks. Earlier this year, Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump called on ABC to discipline Kimmel over a joke he made about the first lady. Shortly after that public call-out, the FCC ordered an accelerated review of Disney’s national broadcast television licenses — a move ABC pushed back against aggressively with a lawsuit filed last month, arguing the network is being specifically and unfairly targeted because of its independent editorial choices that have at times been critical of the Trump administration.

    Trump has openly raised the possibility of revoking FCC broadcast licenses for major U.S. networks that run content critical of his presidency on multiple occasions. This is also not the first time a late-night host has alleged the FCC’s political pressure is shaping interview coverage of the 2026 midterms. Back in February, fellow late-night host Stephen Colbert of CBS claimed the network refused to air his own interview with Talarico over fears of regulatory retaliation from the FCC. CBS rejected the claim of a ban, stating it had only issued standard legal guidance related to the segment.

    As the independent regulator that issues broadcast licenses and oversees all radio, television, and satellite airwaves across the U.S., the FCC’s actions have drawn growing scrutiny from press freedom advocates who warn the agency is being weaponized to stifle dissenting political speech ahead of the critical November midterm elections.