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Loui Ridi, a Palestinian American man who lives in Ohio, traveled to the occupied West Bank on Monday to help relatives defend their family home in the village of Qusra, south of Nablus. Israeli settlers have surrounded the home, which Ridi owns, for more than a week. Settlers have besieged several Palestinian houses in the village, trapping people inside and cutting off water and electricity in some cases.
"I'm not getting no protection here. I still fear for my life. I still fear for my family's life here," says Ridi, who joins Democracy Now! from the occupied West Bank. Ridi has raised an American flag on his home and reached out to the U.S. Embassy for help. "The IDF is not even making it better here. They're not allowing us to leave the house. They're not allowing anyone to come to my house freely," says Ridi, explaining that getting food to the house takes "hours, if not days."
The settlers "can act like this because of the active support from the Israeli government that gives them weapons, gives them ATVs," says Israeli reporter Oren Ziv, who has traveled to Qusra twice in recent days. Ziv says the Israeli government also supports "the establishment of more and more [settler] outposts that are kind of front bases for these terror attacks."
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Senator Darline Graham has argued that her lack of political experience is a strength as she runs to succeed her brother, Lindsey Graham. But a debate misstep has rattled some of her supporters.
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Median Strategies, a fake polling firm, claimed it was a "social experiment." The fraudulent poll received some attention but was shunned by mainstream poll aggregators and exposed by a reporter.
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James Muldoon is a sociologist who writes about the changing nature of human-technology relationships. Love Machines: How Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Our Relationships investigates how people form emotional attachments with large language models, including OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude. Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labor Powering A.I., co-written by fellow researchers Mark Graham and Callum Cant and based on more than a decade of fieldwork, follows Global South workers whose knowledge and labor are the basis of AI tools and assistants.
"A lot of people see artificial intelligence as something that is largely automated, frictionless, and just appears as a useful tool for us. But most of the human hours that go into making artificial intelligence possible are not done in labs in Google or OpenAI. The majority of the work is actually very piecemeal 'data annotation' work, which is outsourced to various locations in the Global South, everywhere from India to East Africa to the Philippines," explains Muldoon.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the production process, consumers are increasingly turning to artificial chatbots to fulfill social needs, incentivizing tech companies to amplify the "addictive and manipulative, controlling behaviors" embedded into their systems to keep users increasingly dependent on their products. "We need much stricter regulation to stop these companies … that can get people hooked and give people harmful and dangerous advice," says Muldoon.
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Restrictions on women's rights have expanded in Afghanistan since U.S. forces withdrew from the country five years ago, ceding control to the Taliban in the process. Afghan women are banned from attending schools and gyms, books written by women are removed from libraries, doctors and nurses are unable to practice, and child marriage rates have increased. Wives have been rendered legally subordinate to their husbands, and women are required to stay silent in public. "Women and girls of Afghanistan are suffering the most darkest situation in the world," says Negina Yari, an Afghan women's rights activist living in exile in Germany, who discusses the impacts of what some advocacy groups are characterizing as "gender apartheid," as well as the effects of regional diplomatic normalization on the Taliban's political influence.
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Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Maggie Haberman is the co-author of the new book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. In the book, Haberman and her fellow New York Times journalist Jonathan Swan provide an inside look at how the administration has handled many of the biggest crises of Trump's second term.
Haberman, who has been reporting on Trump since the 1990s, details his frequent attacks on the press over critical reporting, particularly against female reporters. She also discusses the renewed controversy over his close aide Natalie Harp, whom Haberman describes as "something like a human binky" for Trump.
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