Global
BANGKOK, Thailand -- A coding flaw in China's artificial intelligence application DeepSeek allows it to reveal subversive details about Beijing's extensive censorship, "hundreds of millions of surveillance cameras," human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Tibet, and other contradictions to the Chinese Communist Party.
DeepSeek's AI R-1 artificial intelligence app also warned any Chinese trying to "Make China Great Again" would be charged with sedition.
"DeepSeek is well-suited for use cases such as unmanned aerial vehicles, autonomous surface vessels, and forward fire-control nodes where limited power and communications bandwidth have historically restricted AI use," the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation reported on Oct. 27, analyzing "DeepSeek's use in China's military and public security systems."
China's "public security literature also frames DeepSeek as a tool for intelligence-led governance."
Chinese "official discourse further elevates DeepSeek as critical to a 'new-type public security combat power'," Jamestown said.
Hours before New York City voters elected Zohran Mamdani as their next mayor, right-wing pundit and MAGA podcast superstar Megyn Kelly stated Muslims like New York City's mayor-elect shouldn't hold office in the U.S. Kelly said Mamdani, a U.S. citizen born in Uganda, is "not American" and that Muslims should not be allowed to hold a public office in America because she said that “the tenets of Islam are not consistent with Western civilization.” I will get to that in a minute.
First, one has to wonder if Megyn Kelly had ever met a Muslim in her home state or if her parents are closely related. Either way, this hatemonger thinks that she will not be held accountable for her bigoted and insulting comments about Muslims. Miss Kelly sounded like Archie Bunder with a law degree. She is the one who is un-American and just plain sick.
American citizens regardless of origin are entitled to run for elected offices as long as they qualify by law. It is up to voters to decide whether they should serve or not. Kelly is basically saying she doesn't like his politics therefore he shouldn't be eligible.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is a federation of seven emirates that tightly controls speech and where political parties are illegal. The tiny Gulf state is home to 10 million people of whom just 10 percent are Emirati citizens. The UAE has recently made international new when it deported a Palestinian telecom engineer, identified as S.M., after living in the UAE for 20 years, following a casual comment during a celebration at a government agency in Abu Dhabi in which he refused to drink Pepsi, saying: "Boycott."
According to informed sources quoted by Sunna Files, the Palestinian engineer was summoned to a security agency in Abu Dhabi just two days after the incident and informed that he had to leave the country within days. This forced him to liquidate his business and withdraw his children from their schools before leaving for Jordan with a temporary passport.
UAE's repressive measures against free speech supersede those of Israel and US
Kratom.
As the Mayo Clinic describes it: “Kratom is a supplement that is sold as an energy booster, mood lifter, pain reliever and remedy for the symptoms of quitting opioids, called withdrawal. But the truth about kratom is not so simple. And there are safety problems linked to its use.”
The article continues: “Kratom is an herbal extract that comes from the trees of an evergreen tree called Mitragyna speciosa. The tree grows in Southeast Asia.” However, “some kratom sellers add more of the active ingredient than kratom naturally has….Depending on the amount of active ingredient in the product…taking kratom can be harmful…The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has warned people not to use kratom because of possible harm it can cause.”
A key aspect of the kratom issue is something called 7-OH. It makes up a tiny portion of the kratom leaf—less than 1 percent—but can be, and is being, synthesized to a strength of many, many times its potency in the plant.
A couple of recent stories relating to the utter bestiality of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians have exposed the criminality of successive US governments in supporting the Jewish state no matter what it does. Observers of the lopsided relationship understand very clearly that Israel’s lobby in the United States, backed up by Jewish billionaires who are willing to spend whatever it takes to corrupt the political system and buy up the media, has succeeded in making Washington a totally controlled client state manipulated by extreme war criminals like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is rewarded by the near complete loyalty of Congress and the White House. The one sided relationship dominates both Republicans and Democrats and has been most evident in the Presidencies of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, who have chosen to ignore the reality of the Israeli slaughter of some hundreds of thousands of Palestinians using US weapons and Washington’s political protection in international fora. For what it is worth, neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump has spoken out effectively on the murder and torture of the Palestinians by Israel.
Somewhere between New York’s Studio 54 disco and the White House, Donald Trump became infused by militant Christianity. At the same time, he also seems to have been imbued by the most extreme, far-right Zionism.
Politics do odd things. Trump may espouse a lot of oddball causes, but he’s no fool. He lives and breathes politics.
This week’s political rabbit out of the hat is, of all places, Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nations, with 232 million rambunctious people. As with many of today’s world problems, Nigeria was a creation of British imperialism. The British took a very large swathe of West Africa comprising all sorts of peoples, religions and tribes, drew a line around its borders, and called it Nigeria.
Northern Nigeria, which abuts the Sahara, was predominantly Muslim. Southern Nigeria, where vast stores of oil were eventually discovered, became largely Christian thanks to intense British missionary activity. The two huge communities occasionally squabble or fight, most often over land disputes, cattle rusting and kidnapping of women.
In the face of the international legal and political systems' paralyzing silence and utter failure to hold Israel accountable for its genocide in Gaza, international civil society has refused to stand idly by. Instead, it continues to forge a path, presenting essential working models for what true justice in Palestine must look like.
Let him rest in . . . peace?
I don’t know. The irony of those words is a little too much for me to grasp as I sit here contemplating the death of Dicke Cheney at age 84. Cheney, mastermind and primary organizer on the “war on terror,” which, in a 20-year span of insanity, cost the United States some $8 trillion and killed (murdered) nearly a million people, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project.
And as though that total weren’t high enough, the Project notes that this number is very much an undercount, since it doesn’t include indirect deaths of the war caused by “disease, displacement and loss of access to food or clean drinking water.”
In November of 2025, Zohran Mamdani—a youthful progressive who, just a few months before, was polling in the single digits—won the mayoral election in New York City. He succeeded in the country’s largest city, home to the highest Jewish population of any city in the world. He achieved this despite the political establishment, billionaires, and media landscape pivoting against him with unusual bipartisan cohesion. For a country that has spent the past decade doubting its own democratic immune system, this is a matter of consequence. It tells us that America may still be able to self-correct when it counts the most.
As someone who has seen public life in the United States move further away from any moral center—particularly concerning the Middle East, justice, and the worth of Palestinian life—Mamdani’s win represented something I had not experienced in years: American democratic hope.