Cabinet ministers are turning on Ed Miliband, accusing him of blocking AI investment to protect Net Zero – while families pay the price in lost jobs and holidays.
The post Ministers Turn on Ed Miliband Over Net Zero Block on AI Investment appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
A recent breakthrough in airborne drone control has offered a tangible glimpse into the future of US air combat, signaling the US Air Force’s accelerating push to integrate autonomous wingmen alongside frontline fighters. This month, The War Zone (TWZ) reported that a US Air Force F-22 Raptor pilot successfully controlled an uncrewed YFQ-44A Fury fighter […]
The post US racing to field drone wingmen to close fighter gap with China appeared first on Asia Times.
No âmbito do XIX Festival Internacional de Órgão do Algarve, a Igreja Matriz de Lagoa recebe, no dia 1 de novembro, pelas 18h00, o Concerto com Ricardo Toste (órgão) e Rebeca Csalog (Harpista) e a entrada é livre.
Natural da Ilha Terceira, nos Açores, Ricardo Toste iniciou os estudos de órgão em 2001 e desenvolveu a sua formação na Universidade de Aveiro, onde concluiu a Licenciatura em Música e dois mestrados, em Teoria e Formação Musical e em Órgão de Tubos. Tem realizado concertos a solo em Portugal continental e nos Açores, afirmando-se como intérprete e pedagogo. Atualmente, leciona Formação Musical e Órgão em várias instituições de ensino artístico e exerce as funções de organista titular da Catedral de Aveiro, mantendo uma ativa ligação à música litúrgica e à formação de jovens músicos.
Rebeca Csalog, harpista luso-húngara nascida em Lisboa, cresceu num ambiente familiar ligado à música, iniciando-se no violino e mais tarde na harpa. Após concluir os estudos musicais, licenciou-se em Antropologia e obteve um mestrado em Migrações, Inter-Etnicidades e Transnacionalismo. Regressou à música em 2020, realizando um Mestrado em Harpa na ESML e uma pós-graduação em Milão. Atualmente, atua como harpista com algumas das principais orquestras portuguesas, bem como em projetos a solo e de música de câmara, explorando repertórios para além da tradição clássica.
Integrado no XIX Festival Internacional de Órgão do Algarve, organizado pela Associação Música XXI. Entrada livre, limitada à lotação; qualquer donativo será bem-vindo para apoiar as instituições que acolhem o festival.
As a free speech absolutist, Elon Musk is making a mistake going after Nitter, says Dr R P. He should instead be praising the site that helps users speak freely, uninhibited by login screens that undermine their privacy.
The post Musk’s Perplexing Battle With Nitter and the Problem With Locking the Internet Behind Login Screens appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
The Australian government has introduced its digital duty of care legislation to parliament today. The bill includes an “off switch” to allow social media users to opt out of recommender algorithms. If passed, Australians could choose to switch off their algorithmic recommendation and consume a news feed populated by the accounts they subscribe to. It’s […]
The post China previews a world where the algorithm is switched off appeared first on Asia Times.
On a recent episode of the Bulwark podcast, journalist Ron Brownstein described the election as a contest between “the wave versus the wall.” The wave being voter anger and President Donald Trump’s plummeting popularity. The wall being structural impediments to voters’ voices, such as gerrymanders and the Republican Party’s stark spending advantage. Now we know […]
The post Don’t let Musk and the billionaires buy America’s elections appeared first on Asia Times.
This article was originally published by Truthout on Oct. 14, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered Israel’s attorney general and the heads of the Israeli military and Shin Bet security service to investigate the soldiers and officers interviewed anonymously in the documentary film NAZA.
Netanyahu called Sunday for the agencies to identify “all those who are involved or appear in the libel film” and to prosecute them for “serious information security offences, criminal defamation, and harming Israel’s diplomatic and security interests.”
In a letter to IDF Chief of Staff, the head of the Shin Bet, and Israel’s attorney general, Netanyahu decried the film for “present[ing] a false, misleading and biased narrative that defames the State of Israel and the IDF around the world and severely damages Israel’s standing.”
The film NAZA features anonymous interviews with 24 Israeli soldiers and officers involved in remote mass killings of Palestinians in Gaza over the past three years. The soldiers’ faces are obscured and voices are altered for anonymity as they speak with journalist and director Yuval Abraham on rooftops in Tel Aviv.
NAZA reveals how Israel’s AI-based surveillance systems have been used to facilitate and execute remote killings of thousands during Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The film’s title is a Hebrew military acronym for collateral damage – as in, the number of Palestinian civilians deemed acceptable to kill in a bombing with a military target. In one instance, a soldier tells director Yuval Abraham that the military approved the killing of 500 Gazans for one target.
The film and its directors have faced attacks by the Israeli government since its world premiere in September at the Venice Film Festival. Both the Israeli culture minister and Netanyahu have called for revoking the Israeli citizenship of the film’s directors, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, while accusing them of treason and defamation. The IDF chief called the film a “blood libel” and “an attack on the State of Israel.”
Upon the film’s premiere in the U.S. in late September, Netanyahu compared NAZA to “launching dozens of ballistic missiles at Israel.”
Several Israeli civil society organizations, including human rights group B’Tselem, criticized the attacks on the filmmakers, and called for “an end to the wave of incitement and threats of violence against them.”
Abraham and Szor produced No Other Land, the 2024 documentary focused on Israel’s displacement of Palestinian villages in the West Bank, along with Palestinian activist and journalist Basel Adra and Palestinian researcher and photographer Hamdan Ballal. After the film won major international awards, including an Academy Award, members of the film’s Palestinian crew were attacked by both Israeli settlers and soldiers.
Earlier this month, Israel put forward a hastily-produced rival film to counter NAZA; last week, the Israeli government announced that it was awarding the filmmakers “for their contribution to Israeli public diplomacy.”
The Guardian, which produced the film, has pushed back on the Israeli government’s attempts to discredit NAZA. On October 1st, a Guardian spokesperson said that “The process of assessing the credibility of the testimonies was rigorous. It included leaked classified documents, detailed verification of specific strikes and corroboration via a wider pool of confidential journalistic sources who did not appear on camera in the film.”
The Guardian added that the team that produced the film interviewed “more than 100 sources familiar with IDF systems used in the war in Gaza, including senior-ranking commanders directly involved in the authorization of strikes.”
Much of the material in the film had already been published in reports at The Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Israel’s left-wing publication, Local Call.
In a 2024 piece co-published by +972 Magazine and Local Call, Yuval Abraham explained how AI systems like “Lavender” and “Where’s Daddy” identified low-ranking Hamas and Islamic Jihad operatives as military targets. After October 7, 2023, Israel’s military decided that these tens of thousands of people could be bombed inside their homes with their families – even tracking and monitoring their children in order to strike their homes. In NAZA, one soldier spoke about using the gruesomely named “Where’s Daddy” AI system to track a 12-year-old girl before killing her. According to Abraham, the Israeli military was also aware that much of the AI systems’ data was also faulty – some 10-15 percent of the people identified as targets were not militants or operatives whatsoever.
In an interview, Abraham explained that NAZA also reveals the extent of the dehumanization of Palestinians within Israeli society – including among the self-identified Israeli “center-left,” which disproportionately took part in the aerial bombardment campaign on Gaza. The aerial bombardment campaign has constituted “some of the most heinous crimes in Gaza,” Abraham argued, as it led to the killing of thousands of Palestinian toddlers in their homes – and it was led largely by members of the center-left opposition against Netanyahu.
“We have fallen into habits that are steadily deskilling the human body,” writes Melanie Challenger. “This is a strange turn of events for an animal whose success comes mostly from the extraordinary ability to learn through experience.” For Aeon, Challenger explores how modern technologies, from GPS to AI, are eroding our body’s physical skills by replacing the embodied experiences through which we learn.
After all, the brain is itself a physical organ, continually shaped by what the body does and encounters. Once we decide that the mind is the real human and the rest of the body only hardware, it becomes easier to disregard the physical work, including the neurocognitive work of a biological brain, through which we move, find our way, put thoughts into words, and recognise our own needs. A machine may do some of that work faster, but each act it takes over is one that the body no longer performs and that the body, including the brain, no longer learns through. The irony is that a project motivated by the desire to overcome bodily fragility is helping to produce more fragile bodies.
Anthropic, the maker of the Claude AI models, is preparing what could be the largest initial public offering in history, raising more than $100 billion, according to The New York Times, at a valuation near US$2 trillion. According to Reuters, which reviewed the draft prospectus (the document has not yet been made public), the company […]
The post Postpone AI public offerings until US Congress acts appeared first on Asia Times.
Famous Indian author Shashi Tharoor was famously quoted as saying: “Everything in India is recycled, even the dreams “ In October 2010, The Economist ran a cover titled “How India’s growth will outpace China,” citing India’s young population, dynamic private sector and a strong democratic system as advantages over China’s state-led model. The IMF projected […]
The post India’s superpower dream is just another recycled Modi slogan appeared first on Asia Times.
Artificial intelligence is rapidly making its way into national defense. Reconnaissance, early warning, target detection, mission planning—everywhere, machine-learning systems promise faster analysis, faster responses, and faster decision-making. In a military context, this sounds like progress. In reality, AI exacerbates a security problem that cannot be solved technically. Anyone who attempts to do so anyway risks […]
The post When AI takes control of weapons systems appeared first on Asia Times.
China’s artificial intelligence and digital-infrastructure investments in the Gulf Arab states are increasingly colliding with a far larger and more strategically privileged American technology presence, particularly in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). While Beijing offers Gulf governments cloud platforms, 5G networks, smart-city systems, surveillance technologies and lower-cost digital infrastructure, Washington offers the […]
The post US-China race is on for the Gulf’s AI future appeared first on Asia Times.
This story originally appeared in Panamerican Dispatch on Oct. 08, 2026, and is shared here with permission.
No doubt you’ve seen it yourself, or read about it: Meta, the tech giant behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, manipulating engagement on certain accounts or banning pages and posts outright to limit the reach of specific political groups.
Here’s something that happened to me. I recently set up a second Instagram account. I never interacted with, followed or liked any far right content. I only followed progressive accounts: Brasil 247’s page, the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement, Lula and a few others. So what showed up first in my feed? A reel from Lucas Pavanato. Yes, the same far right extremist who won more than 3 million votes for federal deputy on the strength of his viral social media clips. Let’s be honest about how he got those millions of views. It wasn’t charisma, and it certainly wasn’t political substance.
Jeferson Miola, a columnist and political analyst at Brasil 247, shared an account of his own: “Instagram took down the page of SAJU, the legal aid service run by the law school at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul,” he said. “SAJU was founded in 1950, and it provides free legal help to low income people. Instagram removed the page after it posted support for Lula’s reelection. That’s a university institution being shut down for political and ideological reasons. It’s a clear restriction of freedom of expression.”
When media personality Fábio Porchat, who has 7.5 million followers on Instagram alone, posted a video video calling out abuses at senatorial candidate Michelle Bolsonaro’s prosperity gospel church, Lagoinha, Instagram pulled it offline with no explanation. It only went back online after a wave of public pressure.
I could list case after case all day. But one account stood out to me in particular: someone who actually works at Meta Brazil. I’m protecting her identity, as journalism allows, so I’ll call her Lira. Here’s what she told me:
“At Meta, there’s a whole team of human moderators who review content. They decide what gets approved and what gets flagged, whether it’s political violence, sexual content, or anything else that crosses their line. These are people with judgment and critical thinking, making real decisions, even while working within the platform’s guidelines. Right in the middle of Brazil’s election season, a large number of them were laid off and replaced almost immediately by AI systems. That means decisions are now coming from a single automated command, possibly issued from the US, designed to boost certain content while burying the rest.”
It’s no secret that Meta has been cutting jobs worldwide. What’s not public is which jobs these were, what those employees actually did, or why the company chose this specific moment in Brazil’s political calendar to make the switch.
There’s a bigger issue here too. AI doesn’t just follow orders, it scales them, instantly and at massive reach, whether the intent behind them is good or bad. All it takes is one command. Maybe from one billionaire.
Lira’s story connects a lot of dots. Pavanato showing up in my feed, Porchat’s video disappearing, a university page getting banned: all of it could trace back to a single AI instruction, one that executes instantly with no human review at all.
In 2025, Meta’s CEO doubled down on his alignment with the Trump administration, the same administration that openly admits to meddling in Brazil’s politics. “The government can either be actively against you, adding friction and getting in your way, or it can actively help you break down barriers,” Zuckerberg said. Asked about backing Trump specifically, he called it “the right thing to do.”
This partnership isn’t subtle. The support runs both ways, and there’s a real appetite here to control entire countries, Brazil especially. Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court and federal government still try to regulate social media and hold Big Tech accountable to the Constitution, as we saw recently with Discord. For Meta, getting Flávio Bolsonaro into the presidency would mean restoring the lawless digital free for all his father presided over. That’s not just a preference. It’s a profitable mission for Meta, and one that’s more alive than ever. After all, how do you think those viral, extremist friendly clips that get far right candidates elected actually come about, if not with some help from Big Tech?
Laís Gouveia has been a reporter at Brasil 247 since 2018. Before that, she was educational policy director at the National Student Union (União Nacional dos Estudantes/UNE) and an editor at Portal Vermelho.
This article originally ran at Brasil 247, was translated, with consent, by Panamerican Dispatch, and can be read in its original Portuguese here.
The European Union’s technology chief expects countries that oppose stricter artificial intelligence rules to change course, as AI systems are becoming more capable and harder to evaluate.
“I’m sure that all those countries who are not willing to regulate the use of AI, they will come back to that quite soon,” European Commission Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen told the European Newsroom (enr) on Friday. She warned of a “risk of very serious incidents” in the absence of any guardrails and called for the establishment of safeguards at an international level.
Concerns about the risks of AI have been at the centre of public attention for weeks, sparked mainly by hacking attacks carried out by AI software that acted autonomously during test runs. Some industry insiders have sounded the alarm, warning that artificial intelligence could potentially cause large numbers of deaths if the technology were to spiral out of control.
Virkkunen warned that fierce global competition is creating a risk that “companies are coming to the markets with products that they haven’t been testing enough.” She pointed to incidents in which AI agents had escaped from test “sandboxes” and service providers or developers had been unable to control their own systems.
At the same time, she said, some AI models “have become so capable that it’s more and more difficult also to evaluate them.” Adequate testing required highly qualified experts, sufficient expertise and enough time, she added.
The EU began enforcing its AI Act, the world’s first comprehensive legal framework to regulate AI based on the level of risk it poses, in August. Virkkunen said that the Commission had already sent a Request for Information (RFI) to two major US-based AI companies – OpenAI, known for ChatGPT, and Anthropic, known for Claude – as well as to some Chinese companies not further specified.
An RFI is a formal investigative tool used by the Commission to gather facts, data, and internal documentation from businesses, governments, or member states.
China and the United States have emerged as frontrunners in the development of AI systems, showing no signs of hitting the breaks. Governments in both countries have rejected calls to slow down its development, arguing it would create a competitive, strategic and economic disadvantage.
“Currently the risks are mainly focused and related to cyber security,” Virkkunen said, but she warned of more serious risks in future, including the possibility that highly capable models could be used in connection with biological weapons or fall into the hands of terrorists.
The Finnish politician called for the establishment of international rules to mitigate the risks of AI. She said the security of AI models had already been discussed within the Group of Seven (G7) this year as well as among G20 countries, and that the discussions would continue.
Talking about the EU’s role in AI development, Virkkunen said the Union should avoid dependence on a single company or third country for critical technologies and develop AI systems based on European values, languages and culture.
In a remote part of Utah, the world’s largest data center project—allegedly—is being fast-tracked in secret. Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame was brought in to hype the 40,000-acre complex. But the backlash among Utahns has been strong. Josh Dzieza reports from the front lines of the popular resistance to data centers:
[Brenna] Williams, a former government econometrician and college instructor, speaks methodically in a calm monotone as she enumerates the many reasons why the data center “doesn’t make sense”—a refrain. First among them is the water, an acutely sensitive issue in Utah in part thanks to Gov. Cox himself, who has declared repeated drought emergencies and urged residents to take shorter showers and cut back on watering their lawns. There is no more potent symbol of the state’s water crisis than the Great Salt Lake, which has been shrinking for years, exposing heavy metals on its lakebed that become airborne dust. Now here came a data center on its northern shore, or where its northern shore would have been if it hadn’t receded several miles.
“We have to report on our neighbors if they’re watering at the wrong times or on the wrong days,” Williams says. (There’s a hotline.) “But we have water to cool a power plant and cool the data center? It doesn’t make sense.”
We are fortunate to live at an incredible moment in history. As more and more AI applications have become available, people have turned to them to seek advice, build businesses, express ideas, learn, and improve their health and quality of life. Nowhere is this more clear than in Asia. AI is already turbocharging small businesses […]
The post Choices that will define Asia’s AI future are coming into focus appeared first on Asia Times.
For Oakland Review of Books, Stephanie Uchino-Beach writes about getting laid off at an education tech company that transformed into an “AI-first outfit.” As as customer success manager, she acted as a liaison to district administrators, school principals, and teachers. While AI could automate some of her tasks, what about the core responsibilities of her CSM role: building real relationships and understanding an educator’s needs? An AI sees data points, not people. This is a sobering read from a former tech worker living in the Bay Area, and an edtech company that has gone all in on AI and forgotten about its mission.
Before I went to work for Silicon Valley, I was a lot of things. A few jobs before this last one, I was an elementary school teacher in Chicago, helping kids learn to read, creating units, planning lessons, and buying supplies with my own money on the weekends, like countless other teachers around the country. I grew up on the Peninsula, and I made the move into Customer Success to get a job that would let me move home. Tech was never my dream; it was a means to an end. My dad studied computer science and still works in tech to this day and enjoys it, so it seemed like a satisfying and fruitful career was plausible. I figured that once I broke in, all my problems would be solved: I could get a house, have a kid, and fulfill every middle-class dream that had always felt slightly out of reach for a millennial like myself.
And yet, job after job, I consistently left feeling unsatisfied. Unsatisfied by how I wasn’t growing and wasn’t developing my skills. Unsatisfied with poor managers who were just in the right place at the right time to be promoted but so often lacked the skills to provide the same success for their employees. Unsatisfied with how the products I worked on could do wrong by the communities we sold them to, even though every company said they were “mission-driven” and “put our customers first.”
Every major technological shift reshapes not just the economy but the tax system that pays for it. When big corporations emerged, corporate and payroll taxes followed. When mass car ownership took hold, fuel duties emerged to pay for the roads it required.
As AI shifts work from people to machines, it will force a rethink of who gets taxed, on what, and where. Nowhere is that question more urgent than in Europe, which funds the world’s most comprehensive welfare states primarily through taxes on work.
Taxes on work make up 51.5 percent of all tax revenue in the EU-27, according to the European Commission’s latest Taxation Trends data — a share that rose in 2024. These charges are taken straight from the payslip. They’re hard to avoid, and scale with employment.
AI, by replacing human work with software and machines, eats away at exactly this tax base.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that around 40 percent of jobs worldwide are exposed to AI. If that leads to fewer workers, it will also mean fewer payslips, pension contributions and social charges, weakening the revenue streams that fund Europe’s pension and healthcare systems. This is not a distant problem; the costs are already mounting.
The obvious response is to shift more of the tax burden onto corporate profits, which will increasingly reflect the gains firms make by deploying AI instead of hiring workers.
Unlike a tax on machines and equipment themselves, a profit tax falls mostly on excess profits and need not distort investment. The case for shifting weight from payroll taxes to profits is strong and strengthens as AI replaces more workers with machines.
But profits, unlike payrolls, move. A company can locate its intellectual property in a low-rate jurisdiction — a pattern Europe knows well from decades of profits routed through Ireland and Luxembourg — and ensure that profits are booked far from where the jobs are lost. It is how the world’s largest technology and AI firms already operate.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD’s) Inclusive Framework was designed to address exactly this: profits shifted across jurisdictions to avoid tax, and e-commerce allowed sales where firms have no physical presence. AI makes these reforms more urgent.
Pillar One of the framework put forward by the Paris-based wealthy nations’ club addresses where a corporation is taxed. It shifts partial taxing rights for the largest multinationals away from where they are headquartered and toward where their customers and users are located.
Still under negotiation, it would apply only to a handful of the largest firms, but many AI companies would qualify.
These firms are concentrated in a select number of countries, very few of them European, but the displacement they cause, and the public services that displaced workers will require, will weigh heavily on European budgets.
Pillar Two of the OECD framework introduces a global minimum corporate tax of 15 percent on multinationals with revenues above €750m.
The EU moved first and furthest: Council Directive (EU) 2022/2523 made the minimum tax binding across the Union from 2024, and 22 of the 27 member states now apply it in full. The United States, notably, has not implemented the rules.
But the obstacles are real. US ratification of the OECD proposals is unlikely, and many of the largest companies are headquartered there.
The pressure is already reshaping Europe’s own rules: under the G7’s June 2025 ‘side-by-side’ agreement, US-parented groups would be exempt from the EU’s minimum-tax rules: a carveout the European Commission confirmed in January 2026 and which several member states consider legally fragile.
The Commission also dropped its proposed EU digital levy under US trade pressure, leaving a patchwork of national digital services taxes in France, Italy, Spain, Austria, and elsewhere.
Such exceptions and carveouts show that big-power politics can hollow out the framework. These reforms were designed to address the tax challenges for an AI-economy. They were good policy then. They are fiscal necessities now. Fairer corporate taxation will not be enough, but it is a start.
The EU has instruments on the table, the BEFIT common corporate tax base and the proposed Corporate Resource for Europe, but both remain politically contested.
European governments that fail to act will be managing the social costs of technological disruption with a tax system built for the industrial age, while the profits that fund their rivals accumulate beyond their reach.
Even if Europeans work less, their needs for health care, pensions, and consumption remain. As wage-based contributions shrink, Europe must shift more of the tax burden onto corporate profits and close off the routes that let those profits move beyond the reach of the states bearing the costs of automation.
Productivity gains may soften the arithmetic; they will not repeal it. The tax base must follow the economy.
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