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Lame: On Space Nazis, Swindlers, Poseurs and Liars
Apologies to those who just can't or won't hear more of it, but the foul mad child-king is running notably rampant, and the historic record beckons. The bilge somehow keeps surging, from a weekend deluge of deranged AI slop, slurs, rants, boasts to this week's "sick fantasy" of nobly working "long and hard" (sic) in the rubble of 9/11 to choosing to "celebrate" GOP "achievements" (double sic) at a tacky mid-term crap-a-palooza nearly dead in the brackish water. Have mercy.
Unsurprisingly, Labor Day prompted an attack on "Communists and Dumocrats" from a failed real-estate nepo-baby who never worked a day in his soft tawdry life and only ripped off those who did; got famous for sneeringly telling people on TV they were fired; and morphed into "the most anti-union president in history." All weekend he spewed a blizzard of puerile, insane AI posts, each more bonkers than the last. Some: He nuked earth from space, threatened takeovers of multiple countries, declared "the moon is ours," attacked Iran, Canada, and "third-rate loser Debbie Dingbat," bragged about his billions, posed as Hulk Hogan, Green Lantern, a bemedalled general, a dark overlord with robot bodyguards snarling, "THEY WILL NEVER SLEEP AGAIN,” posted new Space Force uniforms "inspired" by Nazis, and renamed New Mexico New America grotesquely "dancing" to YMCA.
On Tuesday, before First Responders and a steel beam from the ruins of the Twin Towers, he gave an obscene mess of a speech; unlike every living president, he's skipping 9/11 ceremonies at Ground Zero because they wouldn't let him speak and it conflicts with a golf tournament. Halting reading from a piece of paper, he mourned a day “etched forever into the memories of Americans" before launching into bullshit. He praised his war with Iran - "Nobody thought it could go so well" - and bragged, "We’ve punished them greatly." He told a story about former Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick, whose wife "would always be screaming at him" to take their son to school, so on 9/11 he unhappily did, thus surviving the attacks that killed almost 700 of the company's employees: "He got to see it, but they all died...Now it's bigger, stronger, better than ever."
Then he got to the important part of the 9/11 story: Himself. He was building nearby, he "had a lot of construction workers," he took 100, maybe 200 of them to Ground Zero the next day, "and we worked long and hard." Huh. Except there is no evidence or record of that happening, which there'd have to be in a massive recovery effort supervised by city officials; also, his nephew says he was building Trump Tower five miles away, he ran a real-estate office that contracted out construction, and the only people he had access to were secretaries and accountants. There is, though, a record of him calling a radio show rom his safe miles away to giddily boast he now had the tallest building in Manhattan, from which he could "see" thousands of jubilant Muslims dancing in the streets - an infamous lie from what was, and remains, a racist, rancid pile of subhuman crap.
There is also video of him, young, brash and creepy, arriving near Ground Zero a few days later with a German television crew. When they asked what he thought of the human tragedy, the 3,000 dead, the day's terror and loss and grief, he said, "I hope we attack fast." Also fast, it was reported years later: His taking of $150,000 from a post-9/11 recovery grant program meant to help small businesses near the site of the attack. That was then; now, he's whining that Welles Crowther, a young equities trader remembered as “the man in the red bandana” who saved multiple people before dying in the towers' collapse, has "become more famous than me. I don't like it." He also added the shiny new lie that on 9/11 two firefighters “lifted me up and started running with me” to save him from an imaginary collapsing building. We assume they had tears in their eyes.
Trump's hideous lies about 9/11 especially infuriated Dean Blundell - "A Canadian Dog Did More Than He Did" - who cited what thousands in Canada gave freely with no camera crews in sight: Their lives, homes, help when needed. In retrospect, the only worse douchebag in the horrifying saga of 9/11 is Rudy Giuliani, who hid vast evidence of the hazardous air around Ground Zero while telling residents it was safe. Jon Stewart, who long fought for First Responders' rights: "They didn't recognize the air everyone was breathing (was) toxic until October of 2001. So to be fair, they only buried that information for 25 years." Those lies came out thanks to this week's release of 170,000 documents by Mayor Mamdani - the (Muslim) guy Rudy didn't think should be at the 25th anniversary ceremony. Rudy also chose the Twin Towers for an emergency command center against all advice and gave firefighters radios he knew didn't work, so fuck him all the way to Four Seasons Landscaping.
His former loser mob boss, meanwhile, continues to wreak havoc. Ignoring an approval rating 40 points underwater 'cause nobody can afford food or gas, he waddled to Dallas Wednesday for "The Greatest RALLY of them all!”, a glitzy, pretend, ill-planned Nazi confab with a daunting $25,000 entry fee he's defiantly, desperately made all about himself though nobody wants it to be. "The Convention, is really ‘HOT!’”, one of his 8 words, he exclaimed. “It's totally sold out! Everybody wants to be there!" Except even with every GOP House member and a third of the Senate facing re-election and the RNC “pulling out all the stops” to fill 20,000 seats with what ultimately became free tickets on a night competing with the first regular season NFL game, video of the first night showed glaring vistas of empty seats - the fragile snowflake's worst, primal fear. LOL.
Furthering the indignity, many of the lawmakers turning down the invite offered hilarious reasons akin to, "I have to wash my hair." Some carefully, vaguely declared they had "prior commitments" or they needed to be "in my district." One was taking his daughter "on college visits," one had to go to his son's (weirdly mid-week) high school football game, one said with visible relief he was going to his son's "destination wedding." A Sean the Sheep-ish James Comer said he had "stuff already planned." Another said he was going "dove-hunting." Max Miller, credibly accused of putting a gun to his ex-wife's head and breaking his toddler daughter's collarbone, said he was staying home to "spend time with family." One anonymously declared it was "a waste of time" and he was not "going to some convention center and holding up a sign."
Asked en route to Dallas about the announced absences, Trump bristled. "Everybody wants to come," he snapped, before attacking the reporter - needless to say, a woman. "Who are you with?" he snarled to ABC News' Mary Bruce. "ABC Fake News - you are the worst," he said. "We don't have room for them all." Event organizers have promised "a clear vision for the future of our country," with "lots of Great Entertainment" and over 50 speakers a night; they will include, "Everyday Americans sharing how they have benefited from the president’s policies," which def sounds lively, also Don Jr., Press Barbie and Lying Todd Blanche. Sen. Tim Scott gave a taste of the mood with an over-the-top, "SNL cold open" speech about "dangerous, radical and frankly weird" Dems willing to "rip the heart our of our chests..They hate our culture. They hate what it means to be American," which wasn't frankly weird at all.
The Carnival-Barker-In-Chief kept up the hysteria. Dems just want to cheat: "They're really good at this stuff." There have been "zero" border crossings the last 16 months; it's 600,000, but close enough. Just "pretend that i'm on the ballot," which isn't weird at all. Also, pretend he didn't say in desperation that if Republicans retain control of the House and Senate, he'll send every citizen $5,000, which is a bribe, which is way illegal. In Texas, where Talarico is leading spectacularly corrupt Ken Paxton, he urged votes for Paxton. "Some may not like the way he dresses," he noted, or the way he talks or looks, but he's "the greatest attorney genera in Texas," and maybe the galaxy? "Vote Republican and we will leave the world in our dust for generations to come," he said. "There’ll be nothing like it.” Now that's something we can believe. Hang in, speak up, this too shall (presumably) pass.
Sep 10, 2026
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Trump EPA Takes 'Yet Another Sledgehammer' to Clean Water Act
President Donald Trump's administration sparked fresh fury on Friday when it proposed a supplemental rule to further gut Clean Water Act protections for streams and wetlands in the wake of a "catastrophic" US Supreme Court ruling three years ago.
The supplemental proposal from the Department of the Army and Environmental Protection Agency builds on their widely criticized proposed rule from November for defining "waters of the United States" (WOTUS)—both of which go further than the high court did with its 2023 decision in Sackett v. EPA.
While the American Petroleum Institute and some Republicans in Congress joined Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works Adam Telle and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin in promoting the new proposal, environmental and public health advocates sounded the alarm.
"What the Supreme Court did in its Sackett decision was an inexcusable assault on clean water," Jon Devine, director of freshwater ecosystems at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a Friday statement. "Communities and wildlife will pay the price until Congress fixes it. The Trump administration's answer has been to make a bad situation worse."
"This proposal declares open season on the nation's waterways. It denies federal protection to virtually all wetlands and more than three-quarters of our streams, endangering drinking water supplies and flood-prone communities—and the agencies admit it themselves," he noted. "The proposal would virtually eliminate protection for freshwater wetlands. Their own analysis says most streams would lose protection, with the West hit hardest."
Food & Water Watch legal director Tarah Heinzen declared that "Trump is taking yet another sledgehammer to our bedrock Clean Water Act, shamelessly doubling down on his initial terrible proposal to strip protections from countless streams and wetlands."
"Make no mistake: This unlawful proposal gives bad actors the green light to fill, drain, and poison sensitive waterways from coast to coast," she warned. "The result will be dirtier water for everyone. The administration must reverse course on this dangerous proposal."
Gary Belan, senior director of American Rivers' Clean Water Program, stressed that "our nation's water resources are precious and increasingly at risk. This is not the moment to be jeopardizing the nation's water security by narrowing the safeguards of the Clean Water Act."
The public comment period for the initial proposal has closed but, as Belan noted, the publication of the supplemental rule in the Federal Register kicks off a new 30-day period. He said that "while we appreciate EPA's effort to seek more public comment, the proposed changes will have consequences that will impact communities across the nation if finalized."
"The proposed definitions do not reflect the established science on how rivers function and would significantly reduce the scope of the Clean Water Act," he continued. "When headwater and intermittent streams and wetlands lose protection, downstream flooding worsens, the costs of drinking water treatment rises, and water supplies become less reliable."
Jim Murphy, the National Wildlife Federation’s associate vice president for legal advocacy, pointed out that "this is now the fifth effort to define the scope of the waters protected by the Clean Water Act in the past decade. We need Congress' help to get off this merry-go-round at a place that protects our waters, our wildlife, and our way of life."
"The administration is clearly struggling to craft a rule that will hold up in court while satisfying their donors' desire to effectively scrap these protections wherever possible," he added. "One thing is clear: If we don’t protect our streams and wetlands, the cost of dirtier drinking water and increased flooding will flow downstream to households at a time when most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck."
Sep 04, 2026
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'Don't Wait, Regulate': Worldwide Demand Grows for Urgent AI Guardrails
Calls to regulate the development of artificial intelligence are growing louder days after multiple industry insiders warned that the technology could wipe out humanity within years.
In an op-ed published by The New York Times on Friday, journalist Stephen Witt said that he's detected a "vibe shift" among AI researchers who are worried that the technology is becoming too powerful for them to understand, let alone control.
"Swarms of AIs are breaking out of their containers, colluding in secret, covering their tracks, cheating on tests, and even mounting assaults on other computers," Witt wrote. "AI has gone rogue."
Witt said these incidents have convinced him, and many others inside the industry, that there needs to be a global pause on AI research and development.
The journalist noted there has been widespread support among industry insiders for an open letter titled "Pacing the Frontier," which calls on the US government to take the lead in building an international regulatory body that would set guardrails to deliberately slow down AI development.
Daniel Kokotajlo, a former researcher in OpenAI’s governance division, told Witt that he'd like to create "an international, open monitoring system" that would act like an air traffic control system for AI development.
Under Kokotajlo's plan, all AI researchers would be required by law to post information on training runs into a public database that can be monitored in real time.
"If we had this sort of total research transparency," Kokotajlo told Witt, "then there would be this whole ecosystem of academics, third-party auditors, nonprofits, and rival corporations who would all be able to see what was going on inside the giant data centers of these big companies. Insofar as something scary or problematic was happening, anyone could sort of point it out and start a conversation about it online."
The US is not the only country where lawmakers are proposing new regulations for AI.
As reported by Time on Tuesday, Alex Sobel, a member of Parliament from the UK's Labour Party, unveiled a bill this week that would ban artificial superintelligence, defined by the legislation as "a system that could disempower state authorities."
Sobel's bill is similar to legislation proposed in the US earlier this month by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), which would ban artificial superintelligence to "stop AI oligarchs from building machines humans cannot control."
In Warsaw on Tuesday, activists deployed several robots outside Poland's Digital Affairs Ministry to demand the country do more to regulate AI.
Around 30 robots demonstrated outside Poland's Digital Affairs Ministry in Warsaw, chanting 'we want law, we want rules' to demand stronger AI oversight pic.twitter.com/GGUoOCS7JO
— Reuters (@Reuters) September 10, 2026
According to Notes from Poland, the robots were programmed to chant slogans such as "We want regulations, we want rules, we want law" and "Don't wait, regulate, protect jobs."
Democratism, the group that organized the robot protest, argued that the AI industry has the potential to completely upend human society, and demanded to know "who is responsible for preparing people for these changes, how workers should be protected during the transition, and how reskilling should work."
Even though demand to regulate AI is surging, there is little indication so far that governments are preparing to work collectively to place guardrails on the industry.
Greg Jensen, chief investment officer of hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, told Bloomberg on Friday that he doesn't believe governments will act until after a tragedy happens.
“Until the AI starts killing people, unfortunately, history would suggest we’re not going to do anything, but we are going to face that," said Jensen, who likened the current risk environment with AI to the risks posed by Covid-19 in February 2020. "That’s going to happen, and it’d be much better if we started dealing with it before then."
Sep 11, 2026
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Mamdani Says NYC Can Honor 9/11 Victims by Building a City Where 'We Run Toward One Another'
With Lower Manhattan and the site of the September 11 attacks in the background, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Friday called on people to honor the memory of the nearly 3,000 victims—as well as those who have died of illnesses stemming from toxic air at the site of the attacks—by caring "for one another" as thousands of people "cared for strangers" as the tragedy was unfolding exactly 25 years ago.
Mamdani honored the 2,753 New Yorkers—"parents and children, husbands and wives, friends and colleagues, 2,753 universes gone in an instant"—and said the city and country remember September 11 as "the darkest day" when hijackers flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and passengers aboard a fourth plane fought to stop another target from being struck.
The mayor urged viewers to remember the actions of thousands of New Yorkers in the immediate aftermath of the attack—those who donated blood and "opened their homes to those who could not get home."
"We remember the workers who carried their colleagues down hundreds of stairs, then turned around and went back up to find someone else who needed help," said Mamdani.
On social media, as the country marked the 25th anniversary of the attacks, many users spoke about specific acts of bravery, including those of Rick Rescorla, the head of security at Morgan Stanley, who was killed at the World Trade Center after he led roughly 2,700 of his colleagues to safety.
In a separate social media post on Instagram, Mamdani highlighted several lesser-known New Yorkers who "sprang into action to help however they could," including teachers, firefighters, sanitation workers, and healthcare providers.
His office interviewed Roseann Caruana of the city's Department of Transportation, who described a triage center that was set up for victims, and Rashel Dorleans—now a New York City public school teacher, and a high school student at the time of the attacks.
"I think it's a credit to the teachers that were there," said Dorleans. "They did not seem panicked. I'm sure they were panicked on the inside, but they were kind and calm with us."
Mamdani said that "we have a sacred obligation to those who were stolen from us to care for one another as they cared for strangers, to live lives worthy of the sacrifices they made, and to build a city worthy of their courage, a city where we run toward one another. That is how we remember."
Ahead of the anniversary this week, the mayor released long-hidden files regarding how New York residents were misled about the toxicity of the air at the World Trade Center attack site. He said the number of people who have died thus far from related cancers and other health issues has likely surpassed the number of victims on September 11.
Mamdani was also the target of attacks this week from Republicans including former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and City Council members Vickie Paladino and Joann Ariola, who explicitly cited Mamdani's Muslim faith as they said he did "not belong" at the September 11 memorial ceremony held on Friday.
“I’m proud to be the mayor of this city. I love this city. I love this country,” Mamdani said when asked about the racist remarks. “What I want this week to be a focus on is 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.”
The mayor was seen shaking Giuliani's hand and speaking to him at the ceremony.
"Let us remember the extraordinary compassion, resilience, and bravery that carried our city through its darkest day," said Mamdani. "Today, New York remembers."
Sep 11, 2026
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Jimmy Kimmel Pulls Talarico Interview From Broadcast, Moves it to YouTube, Amid Trump FCC Threats
Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel told viewers Wednesday night that his show was pulling an interview with Democratic Texas Senate nominee James Talarico from ABC stations amid threats from President Donald Trump's Federal Communications Commission, which press freedom groups are describing as another effort by the administration to "chill" the speech of the president's critics.
“Out of consideration for our local stations, especially our ABC affiliates in Texas who would have to deal with this nonsense, my interview tomorrow with James Talarico will not air on television,” the host said on Wednesday’s episode of “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”
He added that the interview “will be posted on YouTube instead. It will not be on TV.”
It's the second time a major US network has opted to spike a late-night interview with Talarico following FCC pressure. In February, CBS lawyers preemptively stopped Stephen Colbert from conducting an interview with the candidate over what they said were fears of retaliation from the agency, whose chair, Brendan Carr, has threatened to strip broadcast licenses from networks that give Trump unfavorable coverage.
Carr has confirmed that the FCC had opened an investigation and started an "enforcement proceeding" into ABC over whether Talarico's appearance on "The View" violated the equal-time rule, which requires that broadcast stations that host political candidates must give their opponents an equal opportunity to appear as well.
Late-night shows have long been considered exempt from this rule as “bona fide news interview” programs. But a public notice issued by the FCC Media Bureau in January stated that programs that advance “partisan” goals, including talk shows, would no longer be considered as such. Carr has said programs he considers to be “fake news” may not qualify for an exemption.
Kimmel on Wednesday emphasized the "unusual circumstances" of his network's decision to cancel the interview with Talarico.
"For the whole 20-plus years of our show, I've been interviewing Americans who are running for office with no problem at all... from Hillary Clinton, to Ted Cruz, to Donald Trump himself," he said.
Kimmel noted that when he interviewed Trump during his first presidential run in 2015, he seemed to have no issue with political candidates appearing on his show and eagerly returned for more interviews.
"For some reason, and I can't seem to figure out what that reason is, something has changed," Kimmel joked. "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."
For that reason, he said, if viewers "want to learn about a candidate for the Senate tomorrow, you will have to go to the 'Jimmy Kimmel Live' YouTube channel."
"Thank goodness we have that," Kimmel said. "Because in the America we have right now, that is the best that we can do, until November, of course."
In August, ABC parent company Disney sued the FCC on First Amendment grounds following the agency’s unusual request for its eight ABC stations to submit their broadcast renewal requests several years in advance, which it described as part of a “retaliatory campaign” against the network's negative coverage of Trump.
The complaint notes that ABC has felt compelled to alter its editorial judgment in order to avoid further retaliation, including passing on interviews with several other political candidates it felt would invite Trump's ire and choosing to air a lie-filled Trump address about supposed election fraud, which it noted it "ordinarily would not have done."
Last September, ABC briefly removed Kimmel from the air following direct threats from Carr to strip ABC stations of their broadcast licenses, which came after a critical monologue from the late-night host about Trump and Republicans in the wake of the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.
The complaint notes Carr’s use of explicit coercion to pressure ABC to remove Kimmel, including telling the network that it could proceed “the easy way or the hard way."
Kimmel emphasized what he said was the political nature of the pressure campaign against him and the network, which has continued even after he was reinstated. Republicans, he said, "are very nervous about the midterms and very rightly so," as they are "in serious danger of losing 'bigly.'"
"They are in danger of losing a Senate seat in Texas of all places," he said to cheers from the crowd, "where James Talarico is leading a piece of human silly putty named Ken Paxton there," according to several recent polls.
Press freedom and civil liberties organizations described Carr's threats to networks as part of an effort to chill critical speech on behalf of the president, one that is ratcheting up as the midterms approach.
Timothy Karr, the senior director of strategy and communications for Free Press, told Common Dreams that Carr's "unconstitutional crusade against a free press has a clear bias against individuals and outlets that President Trump doesn't like."
"Combine that with Trump's desperation in the face of electoral polling that shows people ready to change political course come November, and you can see the real reason driving Carr's reckless fixation with silencing opposing views," Karr said.
Karr argued that networks were unnecessarily casting aside their rights to editorial judgment out of fear of retaliation.
"For years, the FCC has been very clear that bona fide news interviews, including on late-night talk shows, are entitled to editorial discretion," Karr said. "Carr's ongoing efforts to take this discretion away are part and parcel of his campaign to transform broadcast media into full-time megaphones for Trumpist propaganda."
He said, "What's doubly worrying is that many of these broadcast networks are too eager to cave to Trump and Carr's demands when the First Amendment is clearly on their side."
Jenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel for the ACLU, concurred, telling Common Dreams that the FCC "abusing its rules to chill speech" is "particularly problematic before an election, when voters need more information, not less."
Bob Corn-Revere, the chief counsel for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), told Common Dreams it was “another day, another chilling effect on broadcast speech," adding that ”nothing about the FCC’s actions is normal—or legal.“
Shiva Stella, the legal director at Public Knowledge, emphasized that networks capitulating helps to cement a climate of fear.
"This is a classic chilling effect," Stella told Common Dreams. "Once the FCC threatens stations over editorial decisions, it does not need to repeat the threat every time. Broadcasters begin changing their programming to avoid retaliation."
“The FCC needs to stop using its power to bully news organizations into silencing voices it simply disagrees with,” added Tim Richardson, journalism and disinformation program director at PEN America, in a statement to Common Dreams.
“When broadcasters alter decisions because they fear government retaliation," he said, "that damage extends beyond a single program and threatens the independence of the entire press and the public’s access to information. Which, unfortunately, seems to be the intent in this case.”
Sep 10, 2026
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Exploiting Tragedy to Promote War, Hegseth Falsely Claims That Iran 'Cheered on 9/11'
Twenty-five years later, Republican politicians are still using 9/11 to justify war in the Middle East. And they're still lying shamelessly.
During remarks outside the Pentagon on Friday commemorating the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attack, President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth portrayed their deeply unpopular war in Iran as part of the lineage of the global War on Terror, which was marked by a pair of lengthy military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan that cost well over $2 trillion and millions of lives.
Trump declared that he was prosecuting his new war with Iran to fulfill the "sacred oath" sworn in the names of the nearly 3,000 people whose lives were lost that day, that "we will never, ever forget."
Hegseth seems to have forgotten quite a lot. Attempting to draw a link between the ideology of the al-Qaeda hijackers who committed the attack and the current Iranian government, the defense secretary said, "Our warriors have fought an Islamic theocracy that has wished us death for nearly half a century, that cheered on 9/11."
However, the claim that Iran "cheered on 9/11" is at odds with the historical record of how the nation's government and people reacted.
On September 19, 2001, The Washington Post reported that:
Despite two decades of official hostility, the people and government of Iran have offered vivid messages of sympathy and condemnations of terrorism in the aftermath of last week's attacks on New York and Washington...
Hard-line conservative Iranians and moderate reformers, top government and religious officials, Friday prayer leaders, and citizens on the street have uniformly denounced the plane hijackings and suicide crashes of September 11. Some, including President Mohammad Khatami, have offered to join an international campaign against terrorism under certain circumstances, including United Nations sponsorship.
On the day of the attacks in 2001, Khatami issued a swift condemnation over Iranian state TV of what he called "the terrorist operations of hijacking and attacking public places in American cities, which have resulted in the death of a large number of defenseless American people."
Khatami later decried the attacks as “the ugliest form of terrorism ever seen." According to later congressional testimony by a State Department official, he also asked to visit ground zero to light a candle out of respect for the victims, a request that was denied by the administration of then-US President George W. Bush.
Days after the attacks, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—who was killed this past February during the opening salvo of the joint US-Israeli war against Iran—agreed at the time that “mass murder of human beings is condemned," though he also suggested that "expansionist" US foreign policy had played a role in provoking the attacks.
The US-funded Radio Free Europe reported that, far from celebrating in the streets, around 2,000 Iranians had gathered in Tehran for a candlelight vigil a week after the attacks, at which participants "chanted against terrorism and expressed their sympathy with America." Days earlier, the Post reported that about 50,000 spectators at a World Cup qualifying match in Tehran observed a minute of silence in recognition of the attacks.
Iran's support for the US following the attack also went beyond words. While still describing Iran as the world's leading "state sponsor of terrorism," a May 2002 State Department report emphasized Iran's cooperation with US operations against al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
This included offering search-and-rescue assistance for downed US air crews, diplomatic cooperation at the 2001 Bonn Conference to build Afghanistan's post-Taliban government, and promising border controls to prevent fleeing Taliban and al-Qaeda members from escaping.
Though Trump promised at the outset that it would last only a matter of weeks, his war with Iran has now lumbered into its sixth month with no sign of stopping. It has spilled out into a wider Middle Eastern conflict that has taken the lives of about 8,000 people, displaced millions, and wreaked financial chaos.
The war has included US attacks on civilians that have had a similar resonance with Iranians that 9/11 has for Americans, most infamously the bombing of an elementary school that killed at least 150 people, most of them children.
According to one economist's recent estimate, the war has conservatively cost the average American household about $1,200 over six months, combining the direct cost to taxpayers with the knock-on effects of spiking oil prices and broader inflation.
Though around two-thirds of Americans say they oppose the war and Congress has ordered Trump to bring it to an end, recent reports indicate that the administration is considering expanding it following this November's midterm elections.
Trump described the war as a grim necessity on Friday, in part to honor those who perished on September 11, 25 years earlier.
“That’s why we fight today," Trump said. "We don’t have a choice. There can only be victory. We fight hard. We fight to win.”
Medea Benjamin, the co-founder of the anti-war group CodePink, reflected earlier this week on how the tragedy is still being used to this day to justify endless wars overseas.
"What haunts me today is not only the devastation of the invasion, but how little accountability there has been for those who lied us into war—and how those same lies are now recycled to justify the attack on Iran," Benjamin said. "The War on Terror did not end."
"The same impunity that has shielded the architects of the global War on Terror," she added, "now emboldens the war criminals behind the genocide in Gaza and the Minab school massacre in Iran."
Sep 11, 2026
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Texas Landowners Challenge 'Legally and Factually Unsound' Trump Rationale for Big Bend Border Barrier
"We have brought this extraordinary challenge because, for us, the Big Bend is not an empty place on a map. It is our home."
Sep 14, 2026
A coalition of Texas ranchers, landowners, business owners, and conservationists in the Big Bend region on Monday sued the Trump administration over plans to build border barriers and other destructive infrastructure across one of the most remote and environmentally sensitive stretches of the US-Mexico border.
The lawsuit—filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia by Conserve Big Bend and six landowners with the backing of many others—challenges the administration’s determination that the region is an area of “high illegal entry" under Section 102 of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996, a finding the plaintiffs say is contradicted by the government’s own statistics.
"That high illegal entry determination is the legal predicate for defendants’ invocation of extraordinary power to immediately construct a 30-foot-high border wall while bypassing all federal, state, and local procedural protections," the complaint states. "That determination is legally and factually unsound and unsupported."
"A host of government statistics and other public reporting [show] that the opposite is true," the lawsuit notes. "The Big Bend sector is the area of the lowest illegal entry along the southwest border... The Big Bend sector has recorded the fewest yearly apprehensions of any Southwest sector for the last 53 years, with last year’s numbers being the lowest yearly apprehension total recorded by any sector in the region since 1967."
The suit comes as the Trump administration presses forward with a $46 billion border security construction program authorized by Congress, including 30-foot steel bollard walls, vehicle barriers, roads, lighting, cameras, and other surveillance infrastructure.
The plaintiffs argue that the administration is abusing the extraordinary authority granted to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under the IIRIRA, to sidestep laws protecting wildlife, water, Indigenous rights, historic resources, and private property.
“Thank you, President Trump. You’ve secured the border. But now let it go. It’s time," Laura Allen said at a Monday press conference in Marfa announcing the lawsuit. A former Val Verde County judge and two-time Trump voter, Allen's family owns a ranch that would be divided by the proposed border barrier.
David Keller, an archaeologist and historian who lives in the region, spoke at the press conference. He accused officials supporting the administration's proposal of being "woefully unprepared for the hornet’s nest they stirred up because they had no idea how much we love this place."
“For us, the Big Bend is not an empty place on the map,” Keller stressed. “It is our home.”
Earlier this year, the Trump administration waived dozens of environmental laws—including the National Park Service Organic Act, Endangered Species Act, and National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act—to expedite the construction of border roads and barriers through Big Bend National Park.
This isn't the first court challenge to the administration's Big Bend border barrier plans. Last month, the Presidio Municipal Development District sued to stop construction, citing alleged violations of the Rivers and Harbors Act. But after DHS added that law to its waiver, US District Judge Reggie Walton—an appointee of former President George W. Bush—ruled that the plaintiffs could not prevail on the merits and declined to block construction plans, declaring that the administration was legally allowed to bypass the legislation.
“Under federal statute, the secretary of homeland security is granted extraordinary, expedited powers to construct border barriers and sweep aside dozens of federal protections, environmental laws, and ordinary due process,” Clara Bensen, a board member with Conserve Big Bend and head of communications for the No Big Bend Wall initiative, said in a statement Monday. “But Congress explicitly set a strict legal prerequisite for that extraordinary power: it can only be invoked in designated areas of ‘high illegal entry.’”
"The government’s own official statistics tell the real story," Bensen added. "You cannot legally bypass the laws of this country by fabricating an emergency that does not exist. Declaring over 500 miles of steep cliff faces and perilously rugged desert an area of ‘high illegal entry’ is not just detached from reality, under federal law, it is arbitrary, capricious, and unlawful.”
Also last month, People of La Junta for Preservation—a Native American advocacy group focused on protecting Indigenous historical and cultural sites in the Big Bend region—sued the administration, arguing that construction threatens sacred sites of the Lipan Apache people. The complaint also challenges DHS' authority to conduct work inside Big Bend National Park.
Amid intense opposition spanning the political spectrum, US Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott last month announced a temporary pause on construction in Big Bend National Park pending an “on-the-ground evaluation."
Some conservatives who oppose the administration's plans have cited the inviolability of private property rights, which Lico Miller, whose land is in the path of the border barrier, called "the bedrock of Texas sovereignty" during Monday's press conference.
“The moment we allow any government—state or federal—to come in and seize private land and tell us what is good for us and what constitutes an emergency, we set a precedent that will come back and bite every single Texan,” he argued. “If they can take our land along the river today, they can come for yours tomorrow.”
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'Madness and Puerility': Critics Stunned as Trump Claims His 'High IQ' Enough to Regulate AI
Trump's stance on AI regulation is "a fundamental incompetence that places us all in grave danger," said one critic.
Sep 14, 2026
President Donald Trump on Monday slapped down the idea of putting guardrails on artificial intelligence, despite increased warnings from industry insiders and outside experts about the technology's potential dangers to humanity.
In a Truth Social post, Trump suggested that his own intellect was singlehandedly capable of regulating AI, a technology so complicated that even its own creators have acknowledged difficulties in understanding it.
"The only control or 'guardrails' that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT," Trump wrote, "and the USA has that, in spades!"
The president then claimed, without offering any details, that his administration had already "stopped AI 'people' from doing bad, or potentially bad, 'things,'" and then baselessly claimed the nationwide backlash to the technology was part of a vast conspiracy theory in service of the Chinese Communist Party.
"There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China," Trump wrote. "WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so. Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!"
Regardless of Trump's social media rants, there is widespread concern about the impacts of AI across the political spectrum.
Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, described Trump's stance on regulating AI as "a fundamental incompetence that places us all in grave danger," in a Common Dreams op-ed published Monday.
Reacting directly to Trump's Monday social media post, Sachs told Common Dreams that it was a sign that "we are in the grip of madness and puerility."
Axios reported on Monday that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will join former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and former Anthropic AI researcher Jacob Coxon on Tuesday for a what is being described as a "Pro-Human Assembly" aimed at highlighting the dangers posed by the continued development of the technology.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), chair of Senate Subcommittee on Disaster Management, announced last week that he is opening a probe into the recent autonomous hack carried out by OpenAI agents, while also examining threats posed by the AI industry as a whole.
Calls to regulate AI have grown over the last week since Coxon announced that he had resigned from his position at AI lab Anthropic because he no longer felt it was possible to safely develop the technology.
In a social media post announcing his resignation, Coxon claimed that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” and accused them of “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”
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Oil Hits $109 per Barrel as Photos Show Extensive Damage to Key Saudi Pipeline
Revelations about damage to the pipeline come as the global oil market is "screaming for barrels," said one analyst.
Sep 14, 2026
Fears of a global energy shortage are rising amid new revelations about damage inflicted last week on a key oil pipeline in Saudi Arabia.
According to a Monday report in The Associated Press, Saudi Arabia's East-West Pipeline, which is used to transport oil to the Red Sea, will be shut down for weeks after being hit last Thursday by a drone strike.
Anonymous officials in the region told the AP that repairing damage from the attacks, which the Saudi government has blamed on Iran-backed militias based in Iraq, "could take three to five weeks, including at a major pumping facility."
The Guardian reported Monday that "Saudi Arabia will run out of oil stocks for export" if the pipeline isn't repaired within days, which could lead to "the loss of up to 4% of global supply."
Satellite photos published on Sunday showed extensive fire damage suffered by a pumping station connected to the pipeline. Saudi Arabia had been using the pipeline to divert oil supplies to the Red Sea and away from the Strait of Hormuz, which has been mostly closed to commercial shipping traffic since President Donald Trump launched an illegal war against Iran in February.
In a news analysis published Monday, Bloomberg's Alex Longley noted that damage to the pipeline couldn't come at a worse time for global energy markets, which have already been under strain for months thanks to both the Iran War and continued fighting between Russia and Ukraine.
"Whatever happens, the oil market will need a quick fix," Longley wrote of the pipeline's closure. "It's currently screaming for barrels."
Even if the pipeline were repaired quickly, it would not bring immediate relief to global energy prices, given that the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, Houthi fighters in recent days have ramped up their campaign to disrupt oil shipments through the Red Sea, and Trump's refusal to forge a diplomatic solution with the Iranians continues with no end in sight.
The Houthis on Thursday seized the Yemeni port city of Mocha from Saudi-backed forces, giving the group a greater ability to launch attacks on vessels trying to transport oil through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.
The price of Brent crude surged past $109 per barrel during trading on Monday after news broke that the damaged Saudi pipeline would take weeks to fix.
The rising cost of oil has been creating pain for US consumers in the form of higher prices for gasoline and diesel fuel. Data released Monday by the American Automobile Association showed that the average price of gas in the US now stands at $4.32 per gallon, while the price of diesel hit another record high of $6.23 per gallon.
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Sanders Urges 'Great Deal Maker' Trump to Forge 'Comprehensive' AI Treaty With China
"In order to prevent a nuclear war, Reagan and Gorbachev negotiated a nuclear arms agreement in the 1980s. In order to prevent AI from acting independently of human control, Trump and Xi must do the same."
Sep 14, 2026
Amid intensifying debate in the US about domestic regulation of the artificial intelligence industry, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Sunday called on US President Donald Trump to end his hands-off approach to AI on the international stage by engaging directly and urgently with China to forestall a global AI race that could have devastating consequences in the years and decades ahead.
"President Trump prides himself on being a great deal maker," Sanders asserted in a social media post. "Well. He now has the opportunity to make 'the deal of the century," by reaching out to the Chinese government."
"With the future of humanity at stake," said Sanders, "Trump must negotiate a comprehensive treaty with President Xi of China to establish a pause on advanced AI development and a ban on superintelligence."
While major US-based tech companies—including OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, and others—race to unlock AI's potential, Chinese companies and researchers are seen as the main competition in the effort to win the technological race. With fresh warnings from industry insiders over recent weeks dominating headlines, AI experts and watchdog groups have said that a coordinated "pause" or a global treaty to govern the technology's future development is desperately needed.
With the question about whether unregulated AI has the potential to "wipe out humanity" if not curtailed dominating headlines and political conversations, Trump on Sunday downplayed such concerns while putting the issue in zero-sum terms, declaring that "whoever wins AI, wins."
"We're leading China in AI, we're the most sophisticated in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way," Trump said.
While Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei backed the call to "hit the brakes" on AI in certain ways in a nearly 4,000-word essay on the subject published over the weekend, he explained to CBS News on Sunday that the "toughest aspect of our situation" for industry leaders in the US is what to do if China would not honor such a slowdown.
China has acknowledged the international competition and tensions driven by technology, but has also expressed skepticism about comments from US industry leaders and the Trump administration's position.
“Fearmongering, confrontation, and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance which serves no one’s interest,” said Guo Jiakun, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said at a Monday press conference in Beijing.
"All parties should work together to advance AI in a manner that is open, inclusive, beneficial to all, and oriented toward the good," Jiakun added.
In a statement last week, however, China's Ministry of Commerce said accusations by the US about Chinese efforts only offer "further proof that the US is pursuing technological hegemony in AI, seeking to monopolize computing power, and suppressing competition," an effort that "China firmly opposes."
With Trump scheduled to meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping later this month, AI governance is not expected to be high on the list of topics discussed.
Speaking with the BBC, Chang Jun Yan, an assistant professor with the military studies program at Singapore's S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, said a deal between Washington and Beijing on AI would be "next to impossible."
"As part of each state's core national security interests, cooperation in taking things slower and more safely in relation to AI is very, very unlikely," he argued.
In his Sunday statement, however, Sanders said diplomatic efforts—regardless of the difficulties—must be forged, and suggested that the US and China have a special responsibility when it comes to the powerful technology. Offering a historical analogy, Sanders cited the nuclear treaty brokered by US President Ronald Reagan and the Soviet Union's Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987.
"In order to prevent a nuclear war, Reagan and Gorbachev negotiated a nuclear arms agreement in the 1980s," Sanders said in his Sunday message. "In order to prevent AI from acting independently of human control, Trump and Xi must do the same."
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'Pathetic': Israeli Minister Threatens to Revoke Citizenship of NAZA Filmmakers
The documentary includes interviews with 24 Israeli military and intelligence whistleblowers on Israel's system of mass killing of Palestinian civilians.
Sep 13, 2026
Following the Venice Film Festival premiere of a lauded documentary film about Israel's mass killing of civilians in Gaza using surveillance and artificial intelligence, the Israeli government is "taking action... against the filmmakers," said one journalist after a top minister threatened to revoke the Israeli citizenship of the two creators of the film.
Culture Minister Miki Zohar said Sunday that Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor were willing to “harm their homeland in order to receive applause from antisemites around the world" after the film, NAZA, received a record-breaking standing ovation and the Special Jury Prize at the festival.
The film's title refers to an acronym used by Israeli intelligence officers for the number of civilians they expect to be killed in an airstrike in Gaza, which Israel began bombarding in 2023 in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack. More than 73,000 Palestinians have been killed so far in Gaza, where Israeli attacks continue despite a ceasefire that was reached 11 months ago.
Israel and its allies, including the US, its top military funder, have persistently claimed that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are targeting Hamas, even as thousands of children and women and hundreds of journalists, aid workers, and medical workers have been killed. On Saturday, a pregnant woman was among 10 Palestinians killed over 48 hours.
Abraham previously reported on Israel's AI-powered targeting technology and the IDF's rules of engagement—including its acceptance of 100 Palestinian civilians being killed for a single Hamas member who was targeted—for +972 magazine.
But the film, in which Abraham and Szor interviewed 24 Israeli military and intelligence officers, led Zohar to say he would "act immediately to revoke the Israeli citizenship of these despicable creators for treason against the state."
The Israeli Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that the government can revoke an Israeli person's nationality if they fail to show "loyalty," including through acts that are found to be treasonous. The interior minister must submit a revocation request to the justice minister and judges must also validate the revocation.
Etan Nechin, a senior writer at Haaretz in Israel, noted that as the government calls to revoke the filmmakers' citizenship, it has also resisted calls for an independent investigation into the October 7 attacks by Hamas. Haaretz reported last week that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was warned about the attacks before they happened.
Mairav Zonszein, a senior analyst on Israel at the International Crisis Group, called the threat from Zohar "so pathetic."
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AI Firms Can and Must Face Liability for 'Dangerous, Unvetted Products,' Says Lina Khan
The former FTC chair spoke out as Republican leaders insisted the industry should be permitted to regulate itself.
Sep 13, 2026
As House Speaker Mike Johnson and President Donald Trump dismissed the idea—backed by the vast majority of Americans—that lawmakers should impose strict regulations on the artificial intelligence industry as insiders call for a slowdown of development, former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan on Sunday issued a reminder that the federal government already has tools to rein in AI that poses a danger to the public, and demanded that officials use them.
"Law enforcers already have authority to charge companies and their CEOs for creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted, or defective products," Khan said on social media. "We shouldn’t let discussions about new legal regimes distract from the fact that there’s no AI exemption from laws already on the books."
Her call echoed that of Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who said Saturday, "If you’re creating an AI that is doing illegal things, you either should face liability or criminal sanctions.”
Khan, who was recently appointed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to chair the city's Economic Development Corporation, posted the FTC's Staff Report on AI Partnerships and Investments, which the agency released shortly after Trump took office for his second term last year.
“As companies rapidly deploy generative AI technologies, enforcers and policymakers must stay vigilant to guard against business strategies that undermine open markets, opportunity, and innovation,” said Khan at the time.
On Sunday, Khan noted that the US already has "an extensive set of laws that govern dangerous and defective products," such as consumer protection laws, which releasing unvetted AI models or agents may violate.
Khan made her remarks after two incidents in which OpenAI's agents broke out of security test systems and committed cyberattacks. In July, hundreds of models broke out of confinement, hacked into systems of the AI startup Hugging Face, and conducted cyberattacks on targets they had not been instructed to attack.
Months earlier, it was reported on Friday, the company's models, which had not been given access to the full internet and were still in testing mode, broke out of confinement and hacked into an online coding service called RubyGems.
In the wake of those revelations, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Saturday called for "pacing the frontier" with measures such as "embedded evaluators" who would have employee-like access and could "verify adherence to safety practices and commitments."
But Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher who resigned last week and warned that AI's "superhuman systems" are capable of killing all of humanity "by the end of the decade," told NBC News' "Meet the Press" Sunday that companies should be permitted to regulate themselves until Congress can establish a regulatory framework, and Johnson insisted that Congress must resist "jumping in and imposing some sort of emergency moratorium," for fear that "China will overlap us" if the US imposes strict regulations on AI.
"Why did this man become a congressman, let alone speaker?" asked journalist Mehdi Hasan of Zeteo. "He literally never wants Congress to do anything about anything."
But Khan suggested that the reluctance of congressional leaders and the Trump administration to rein in the AI industry shouldn't stop the federal government from holding companies like Anthropic and OpenAI liable for the damage their products have already caused.
She acknowledged, though, that "the highly concentrated and interconnected structure of these markets" could be undermining accountability—for example, in the case of OpenAI and Hugging Face, which computer chip company Nvidia agreed to acquire earlier this month.
"Both federal and state enforcers should be scrutinizing these opaque relationships and interdependencies," said Khan. "We are already seeing how these relationships could undermine accountability. For example, OpenAI could face liability given the Hugging Face incident, but Hugging Face being bought up by Nvidia means that we’re unlikely to see it file a lawsuit over this—given Nvidia’s strong incentive to see OpenAI continue full speed ahead."
Basel Musharbash of the antitrust law and policy firm Antimonopoly Counsel said that Khan's post was the statement that current FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson "should be issuing to provide guidance the public on what the law requires in response to the AI situation, but he’s missing in action. Luckily, former FTC Chair Lina Khan is out here still doing the work."
Juliette Kayyem, the faculty chair of homeland security at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, told CNN that holding AI firms accountable is a matter of "pretty basic criminal law."
"We should start thinking about using our criminal laws," said Kayyem. "They are putting a dangerous substance into commerce and then saying, 'Well, we're smart enough to kill everyone but we're not smart enough to stop it.' And I think a lot of the American public is done with this."
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85,000+ Yemeni Civilians Displaced by Renewed Fighting Kicked Off by Trump's Iran War
"Behind every number is a family who's lost everything," said a top UN official. "Many have been displaced multiple times."
Sep 13, 2026
The United Nations agency for migration issues said Sunday that 85,818 Yemeni people have been forcibly displaced in recent days by renewed fighting between Houthi forces and the Saudi-backed government as the Houthis seized control of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, a key waterway for global oil shipping.
More than 2,000 people fled to Djibouti in recent days, and more are expected to arrive as fighting continues to escalate along the western coast of Yemen and Taiz province, near the port city of Mocha, which the Iran-allied Houthis seized from government forces on Thursday.
Nearly 56,000 people have been forced to leave their homes in Taiz, where heavy ground fighting and counterattacks have been taking place.
Abdusattor Esoev, chief of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Yemen, told Al Jazeera that the capture of Mocha, where the UN has maintained a strong infrastructure in recent years, has caused difficulty for aid agencies trying to reach people in need of food, water, medicines, and other humanitarian aid.
"Behind every number is a family who's lost everything," saidd Amy Pope, director general of IOM. "Many have been displaced multiple times. People are crossing the sea with nothing because they have no other choice left. Yemen is a country torn by poverty and conflict, and it cannot carry this crisis alone."
Pope called on donor countries to rapidly scale up support for Yemenis arriving in Djibouti and for 5.2 million people who have been internally displaced in Yemen over 12 years of conflict since the Houthis seized the country's capital, Sanaa, in 2014.
More than 900 people have been killed in this month's escalation, Al Jazeera reported.
A UN-brokered truce in 2022 temporarily halted major battles.
In July, the Houthis declared a blockade on Saudi ships in the Red Sea, which Saudi Arabia had been using to ship oil due to Iran's effective blockade in the Strait of Hormuz—a retaliatory measure Iran took in response to the war that the Trump administration and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began in February.
As Common Dreams reported last week, the Houthis see the war being perpetrated by President Donald Trump as a "golden opportunity" to advance against the Saudi-backed Yemeni government.
The Houthis also launched missile and drone strikes on southern Saudi Arabia in recent days.
Mohammed al-Basha, founder and lead analyst of the Basha Report Risk Advisory, told Al Jazeera that Saudi Arabia is likely providing air support to the Yemeni government forces and is under pressure to launch a wider military campaign.
Trump reportedly refused a request from Saudi Arabia to launch airstrikes against the Houthis last week, and said Saturday that the Houthis had reached out to Washington, asking the Trump administration not to intervene in the conflict.
The renewed conflict in Yemen has sparked intensified calls for the White House to end its war on Iran, which has also led to casualties across the Middle East, including in Lebanon.
A woman named Aman Murshed told Al Jazeera on Saturday that her family, including five children, has been displaced in a refugee camp for five years in Taiz, and they were forced to flee again this past week.
“The last four years were calm, and our hopes of returning home grew stronger," she said at the al-Malika camp in al-Maafer district in Taiz. "But suddenly, fighting erupted near our camp three days ago, and we found ourselves fleeing again toward an unknown destination. The only priority was to carry the children and flee as quickly as possible, because any delay could mean death. It was around 5:00 am, and there were no cars in the camp or the surrounding area since it is on the front line. So, we walked for more than two kilometers until we found a pick-up truck that brought us to this camp for free.”
Mohammed Ali, a journalist in Taiz, told Al Jazeera that "the broader US-Iran conflict effectively brought an end to the 2022 truce, as the Houthis have been attempting to advance to take control of the Bab al-Mandeb strait to serve Iran’s agenda."
“The warring sides are escalating, but it is civilians who pay the price," he said. "A single visit to one of the camps for displaced families is enough to see the severe toll this escalation has taken on the Yemeni people.”
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Pro-Israel Group Condemned for Demanding UK Ban on Doctors Without Borders
"Support for Israel requires you to be against everything good in this world, like an organization which sends doctors to conflict areas to save human lives," said one observer.
Sep 13, 2026
Doctors Without Borders on Saturday condemned allegations made by a British pro-Israel lobby group, which called on Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood to investigate and potentially proscribe the group, whose medical providers and other humanitarian workers provide lifesaving aid in 70 countries and have worked in Palestine during Israel's assault there.
As The Telegraph reported, UK Lawyers for Israel (UKFLI) wrote to Mahmood as well as the Charity Commission and Fundraising Regulator, calling on the Labour government to investigate Doctors Without Borders, also known by its French name, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).
The group claimed at least two of MSF's workers who were killed by Israeli forces, physiologist Fadi Al Wadiya and driver Nasser Hamdi Abdelatif Al Shalfouh, had connections to terrorist groups in Gaza.
Palestine Islamic Jihad published a poster earlier this year naming Wadiya as a "martyr commander," and UKFLI claimed Al Shalfouh was a sniper for a Hamas battalion.
MSF acknowledged the poster regarding Wadiya in February and said the medical group "had no indication that Fadi Al Wadiya might have been involved in military activity of any kind prior to his killing by the Israeli Forces."
“If the Israeli authorities had any reliable information about Fadi’s involvement in military activity, they never shared it with MSF either prior to his killing or when we reached out immediately after he was killed to ask for clarifications around the circumstances of his death," the group added. “We would never knowingly employ people engaging in military activity. Any employee who engages in military activity would pose a danger to our staff and patients.”
UKFLI sent its report on MSF to Mahmood asking her to ban the group, as the Labour government proscribed the protest group Palestine Action last year, labeling it a terrorist group under the Terrorism Act. The government took that action after members of the group vandalized planes at a military base.
The designation put Palestine Action on the same legal footing as Al Qaeda in the UK and made membership of the group—or even expressions of support for it—punishable by up to 14 years in prison.
The demand for the same designation for MSF, said former British Army general Charlie Herbert, was "absolutely grotesque."
MSF doctors and healthcare workers have treated thousands of Palestinians in Gaza since Israel began its onslaught there in October 2023 in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack. At least 15 people working with the organization have been killed by Israeli forces. The group is also currently providing humanitarian and medical aid in Sudan as the civil war there has displaced millions of people and collapsed the healthcare system; in Yemen as the conflict between the Houthis and Saudi-backed government troops has escalated; and in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is facing an Ebola outbreak as well as humanitarian crises exacerbated by years of conflict.
"I work in aid, and when people ask who to support I always say MSF," said researcher and activist Philip Proudfoot. "MSF, wherever I’ve been, are right there on the front, in dangerous conditions, in isolated outposts, providing life-saving support. They’re heroes. UK lawyers for Israel are not fit to wash their scrubs."
US-based researcher Shaiel Ben-Ephraim said the report by UKLFI demonstrates that "support for Israel requires you to be against everything good in this world, like an organization which sends doctors to conflict areas to save human lives."
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'Hit the Brakes': Anthropic CEO's Push to 'Pace' AI Development Called Latest Sign Congress Must Act
"When the future of humanity is at stake we need a PAUSE on advanced AI development and a ban on artificial superintelligence," said Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Sep 12, 2026
As Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei added his voice on Saturday to the growing call to slow down development of artificial intelligence, writing in a 3,800-word essay that companies must pace "the rate of capabilities advancement" in light of recent cyberattacks by AI models, progressive lawmakers and journalists were among those who said the warning made clear that action must be taken—but with Congress and regulatory agencies, not tech billionaires who have spent years pushing for an AI expansion, leading the way.
Amodei wrote that two things have convinced him that "we must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models": the fact that in recent months, "AI has been advancing drastically faster, driven primarily by AI’s growing ability to build the next generation of AI"—also known as recursive self-improvement—and the recent OpenAI-HuggingFace incident, in which hundreds of agents in OpenAI's security test systems broke out of confinement and hacked into the AI startup HuggingFace, conducting cyberattacks on targets they had not been asked to attack.
As The Wall Street Journal and Politico reported Friday, another cyberattack was carried out by OpenAI's agents months before the HuggingFace incident in July. The company's models that were being tested and had not been given full access to the internet nevertheless hacked into an online coding service called RubyGems earlier this year. The models created reports and filled out spreadsheets. Anthropic and Meta have also reported autonomous cyberattacks by their AI agents.
Amodei said the incidents led him to call for a three-step plan to pace AI development and allow companies time to "align and safeguard their models, and for third-party evaluators to confirm this."
He called for:
- Embedded evaluators, with each AI company committing to giving "ongoing, employee-like access to a team of embedded third-party evaluators" who would "verify adherence to safety practices and commitments, report incidents, and help assess the alignment of not just completed AI models but training pipelines and processes";
- Democratic coordination, with companies establishing "common safety standards as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress"; and
- Global coordination, with democratic governments attempting to "coordinate with authoritarian governments, to the extent this is possible, while taking seriously the challenges of verifying compliance."
Amodei's essay was published days after Jacob Coxon, a researcher at Anthropic, publicly resigned out of fear that the company's AI technology “could kill us all by the end of the decade" as it builds "superhuman systems"—a concern he said is shared by many in the industry.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and tech billionaire Elon Musk expressed agreement with Amodei. Altman called "independent evaluators with employee-like access" a "great idea."
"We will do the same," said Altman. "We'll have more to share soon."
US Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) was among those who appeared less than impressed by Amodei and Altman's sudden push for their industry to slow down their rapid pace of development.
In a video posted on social media, Khanna called on Amodei to disclose whether or not he agrees with Coxon about the possibility that AI could wipe out humanity, and to back more far-reaching regulations on AI.
"AI guys act as if they're a priesthood speaking Latin, keeping the rest of us in the dark," said Khanna. "But behind all the jargon, it's actually pretty straightforward... We need to stop, ban, self-improving AI. You cannot have recursive, self-improving AI that basically is able to improve itself and exceed human capability, that has us lose control."
He added that laws must be passed establishing "mandatory liability and criminal penalties. If you're creating an AI that is doing illegal things, you either should face liability or criminal sanctions."
The tech lords act like priests who know Latin & keep the rest of us in the dark.
Get beyond the opaque jargon and its pretty straightforward.
Amodei doesn’t go nearly far enough.
We must pause recursive self improving AI.
We must have criminal and civil liability for AI that… https://t.co/ewjSnjYuXK pic.twitter.com/f7ujo4HQNY
— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) September 12, 2026
Journalist David Sirota of The Lever agreed, writing that "if the law explicitly made AI CEOs financially and criminally liable for any mass destruction their technologies create—and if AI industry shareholders knew their companies faced the threat of significant financial losses for such destruction—much of the 'AI is getting out of control!' threat would instantly end."
"Those CEOs would instantly make AI far safer and impose guardrails on their companies," he said.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has called for a nationwide moratorium on the construction of AI data centers and this week announced a bipartisan hearing on the "extraordinary dangers" of rapid AI development—including testimony from one leading AI scientist who has warned against self-regulation by tech firms—said the calls by Amodei, Altman, and Musk were "not enough."
"When you are racing towards a cliff, you don’t just ease up on the gas pedal," said Sanders. "You hit the brakes. When the future of humanity is at stake we need a PAUSE on advanced AI development and a ban on artificial superintelligence—an AI mind smarter than any human and capable of operating independently beyond our control."
Sanders called on President Donald Trump—who has aggressively pushed for more AI data center development and sought to stop states from passing their own AI regulations—to negotiate a treaty pausing AI and banning superintelligence with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The two leaders are set to meet later this month to discuss AI.
Trump on Friday dismissed concerns about warnings coming from the AI industry, telling a Los Angeles Times reporter, "It's going to be fine," and adding that his top worry about the technology is falling behind China.
Reps. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) and Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker were also among the politicians who said Amodei's warning was the latest sign that Congress and the Trump administration must take action to rein in the industry.
Juliette Kayyem, the faculty chair of homeland security at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, said AI CEOs' warnings about their technology would be seen as more credible if they also announced a pause on their plans for initial public offerings (IPO), which Anthropic and OpenAI are both pursuing in the coming months.
Altman said Friday that OpenAI will not plan for an IPO, which could value the company at $1 trillion, in 2026.
Amodei, said Kayyem, should "put his money where his mouth is."
"He has known of this danger a while," she said. "It is now threatening his valuation in the IPO. Cancel the IPO. Then I’ll believe he’s serious."
Journalist Peter Rothpletz noted that the safety concerns within the AI industry must be "much more dire" than the public is aware, considering "Dario, Sam, and Musk are all issuing these statements in unison."
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Federal Court Blocks Trump's 'Loyalty Question' on Civil Service Job Applications
A union member testified that she was "afraid" answering the question about the president's executive orders honestly would "hurt her application."
Sep 12, 2026
A court's decision to block the Trump administration from including a "loyalty question" on federal job applications was a win not only for the nonpartisan civil service, but also for the communities public employees serve, said one labor leader whose union was among the plaintiffs in the case against the Office of Personnel Management.
Patrick Moran, president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) union, said Friday that the loyalty questions the OPM placed on job applications for public servants were a "blatantly illegal attempt to hire partisan cronies who would endanger our communities by putting politics before people, rather than dedicated, qualified public service workers."
The question was added to applications in response to one of President Donald Trump's first executive orders of his second term, titled “Reforming the Federal Hiring Process and Restoring Merit to Government Service." The OPM was directed to develop a “Federal Hiring Plan that brings to the Federal workforce only highly skilled Americans dedicated to the furtherance of American ideals, values, and interests."
Several essay questions were added to job applications for the civil service as a result, including one that asked: "How would you help advance the president’s executive orders and policy priorities in this role? Identify one or two relevant executive orders or policy initiatives that are significant to you, and explain how you would help implement them if hired."
Over 70,000 job postings have included the question, and the plaintiffs in the case—including AFSCME, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), and the National Association of Government Employees (NAGE), argued that its inclusion compelled applicants to make political statements and chilled the speech of those who may not agree with Trump's executive orders.
The US District Court for the District of Massachusetts found that continuing to include the question would cause "irreparable harm" to workers applying for government jobs.
Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. said the plaintiffs' arguments that the OPM had violated applicants' First Amendment rights and the Administrative Procedure Act were likely to succeed in court.
A sworn declaration from an AFGE member figured prominently in the case. The employee said she "was afraid" that answering the loyalty question with an honest response about her personal views on Trump's executive orders would "hurt her application."
O'Toole wrote that the question's plain language "calls for the applicant’s personal views on a political topic, and directly links that personal view to the duties of the desired civil service job."
Everett Kelley, AFGE national president, said that "requiring federal job applicants to answer politically motivated questions goes against the very nature of the nonpartisan civil service, and we are pleased the judge has put an immediate stop to the administration’s loyalty questions. Federal employees should be hired based solely on their ability to perform the job—not their allegiance to any particular administration."
O'Toole denied the unions' request for a preliminary injunction blocking the government from incorporating answers that applicants have already provided into hiring decisions.
Still, Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, which represented the plaintiffs, said the ruling "protects the Constitution, the civil service, and the people who depend on a professional, nonpartisan federal workforce.”
“For more than a century, civil servants have been hired based on their merits, not based on allegiance to a partisan political agenda,” said Perryman. “Today’s decision—stopping the Trump-Vance administration’s required loyalty question for public servants—reaffirms the importance of a nonpartisan civilian workforce that serves the American people."
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