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(First column, 6th story, link)
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(First column, 10th story, link)
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The GEO Group has profited from the administration's mass deportation campaign. A subsidiary donated more than $1.4 million to the president's super PAC last month.
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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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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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Todd Blanche's nomination for attorney general cleared a major hurdle this week after two Republican senators who had raised concerns agreed to back him. Blanche gave written assurances that a $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization fund" designed to pay Trump allies would not be resurrected, and that a settlement between Trump and the Internal Revenue Service only gave the president retroactive immunity from audits rather than perpetual protection. The Senate Judiciary Committee votes on Blanche's nomination Tuesday, with the full Senate expected to vote later in the week. Blanche, President Donald Trump's former personal attorney and acting attorney general since April, has been central in many of the administration's most controversial episodes, including prosecutions of Trump opponents and the botched rollout of files related to Jeffrey Epstein.
If confirmed, Blanche would entrench a culture of corruption at the Justice Department, warns legal expert Norm Eisen. "There have been a series of offenses against the rule of law, miscarriages of justice," he tells Democracy Now!
Eisen is co-founder and executive chair of Democracy Defenders Fund. He previously served as White House special counsel for ethics and government reform in the Obama administration. The Justice Department recently dropped charges against his client, former Olympic athlete Davey Hearn, who had been accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
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 Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Reuters/GettyWelcome to October Surprise, the Daily Beast's daily countdown to the biggest election of our lifetime. It's only 20 days until Election Day and here's what's happening in the race to the White House between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
THE DOWNLOADMore than 100 Republican officials who support Kamala Harris for president planned to join the vice president in Pennsylvania on Wednesday for a stunning public rebuke of Donald Trump, their own party's presidential candidate.
Read more at The Daily Beast.
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