The Mayor of London mocked Green Party leader Zack Polanski during a session of the London Assembly by answering a question from him in Urdu.
It came after Polanski, who is a member of the London Assembly, was criticised for posting a campaign video in the national language of Pakistan. In the video, he introduced himself and encouraged voters to vote Green in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election on October 8.
Some Urdu speakers had described his video as ‘cringe’ while Business secretary Jonathan Reynolds said it made him feel “uncomfortable”.
At Mayor’s question time in the London Assembly on Thursday, Polanski asked Khan a question about data centres.
Khan proceeded to answer Polanski in fluent Urdu, mocking his video.
According to a translation provided by the mayor’s office, Khan said: “Peace be upon you. I was worried that you would ask the question in Urdu, but you asked your question in English.
“I’ll be spending time in Holborn and St Pancras this week and I’m going to be there. Maybe we will meet there.”
Reacting to Khan’s clip, journalist Dan Hodges said: “OK, I don’t care what people’s general views are about Sadiq Khan. This is pure class.”
Reform continues to make the headlines for all the wrong reasons after its party leader in Wales announced he was stepping down following his arrest on suspicion of assault.
Dan Thomas, who became Reform UK Wales leader in February this year, was arrested on suspicion of assault and controlling or coercive behaviour. He was released without charge.
Thomas said in a statement: ““It has been the honour of my life to have been the leader of Reform Wales and see this party go from zero to 34 elected members and become the largest opposition group in Welsh history.
“With deep regret, I am now standing down from this position due to personal reasons.
“Over the weekend, I was reported to the police and was released without charge.
“I stress that I have done nothing wrong, but I do not want the coming headlines to be a distraction from the fantastic work our Senedd team is doing in holding this government to account.”
Gwent Police said: “On Sunday 13 September a 45-year-old man, from the Aberbargoed area, was arrested on suspicion of assault and engaging in controlling/coercive behaviour.
Some time ago I had the opportunity to spend a morning on a busy building site on Rossendale Road on the edge of my constituency of Burnley. Here 87 homes for families were under construction. I met Barratt Homes, the developer, and the National House Building Council (NHBC), which insures new homes, and redistributes any profits it makes back into the industry. Building more homes is incredibly important for the next generation, but what matters just as much to many of my constituents is building homes to the highest possible standard, that will stand the test of time.
I was interested to hear that each year NHBC carries out around one million inspections for quality assurance, attention to detail, technical expertise, health and safety, and consistency when compared to the original drawings. Developers cannot simply throw up shoddy buildings; they must subject themselves to stringent inspections before they can receive a warranty.
The need for high quality has been on my mind since last month’s announcement of the first £10 billion of the £39 billion Social and Affordable Homes Programme: more than 70,000 homes, the majority at genuine social rents, with almost £1 billion in the North West. After fourteen years of selling off more than we built, that is a serious answer to a serious problem. But we must build these homes to a high standard. My constituents in need of housing deserve nothing less than a safe, warm place to live and grow.
We have the money in place. Besides the funding, the challenge comes in two parts. The homes must be demonstrably good, and building them must visibly pay something back locally. Local consent is the next challenge. When new plans for housing emerge, my constituents in Burnley, Padiham, and Brierfield will ask me: what’s in it for us?
It is tempting to dismiss that as NIMBYism. That is a mistake. Opposition to housebuilding is usually not generalised opposition to new homes, but a sense that local people will not see returns, and that new homes will be of poor quality, which has sometimes been a persistent issue nationally.
The first can be ensured by independent standards and verification from organisations like NHBC. Developers cannot just assure local authorities their properties will be well built; they must be backed up by published standards, which are verified by independent inspectors. This gives people confidence. And it works: this year’s National New Homes Customer Satisfaction Survey, verified by Ipsos, found 93% of buyers would recommend their builder and 90% were happy with their home’s quality. This is the sixth year the score has been running above 90%, showing growing confidence, which will translate into greater consent for new building.
For the second half of the challenge, the honest answer to “what’s in it for us?” is jobs, apprenticeships, and training; and here the industry is ahead of government. I heard on my visit that NHBC is investing up to £100 million in twelve multi-skill training hubs which will benefit 3,000 site-ready tradespeople every year. At these hubs, apprentices train on replica sites in 14 to 18 months, instead of up to 30, so a young person being trained up at a site can do so in the knowledge that they will be working in the same conditions in which they trained. For every 10,000 homes, we need around 2,500 bricklayers, 2,500 groundworkers, and 1,000 carpenters. Needless to say, we do not have them. The sector needs 239,000 more workers by 2029.
So as we push for an increase in housebuilding, across both social housing and private development, here is my ask as we in the Labour Party gather for our annual conference in Liverpool: put skills hubs in the new town plans from day one.
When we stand up a development corporation in Leeds, Tempsford, or Manchester, a construction training hub should sit on the masterplan alongside a school and a GP surgery. At Northstowe, Homes England provided land for an NHBC training hub that trains 200 apprentices a year. This should leave a skills legacy for years to come.
The Prime Minister has rightly put social value at the heart of public procurement. It now needs to be delivered in every community with local recruitment, apprenticeships that reach care leavers and work for those who have long been without it. Money that stays in our local communities. And training that outlives the project.
Opposition parties offer nothing more than grievances about a housing crisis they have no plan to fix. We can offer better: social homes at rents people can actually pay, built to a standard someone independent will stand behind, by young people from the same town on wages that stay in it. Where you are from should never determine where you end up, and it should never determine whether the home you are offered is any good.
Next week in Liverpool we will rightly celebrate our plans for the biggest increase in social and affordable housing in a generation. Let us also commit to what will deliver it: a package of measures that ensures homes of the highest quality and skills that will serve a new generation of British construction workers. That is how you win consent, and how you keep it.
Reform continues to be exposed for having links with far-right thugs and groups, after an investigation revealed that a Facebook group involved in the recent far right anti migration protests which saw balaclava clad men block roads and cause disruption, was set up by a Reform activist.
Earlier this month, hundreds of men wearing all black and balaclavas took part in two anti-migrant protests in Dover and Portsmouth. In Dover they blocked the town’s two main roads for several hours and in Portsmouth they blocked migrant coaches.
Ministers condemned the “thuggish and intimidating behaviour” of far-right activists who blocked roads, and who were coordinated by Danny Thomas, a close associate of anti-migrant and anti-Muslim activist Tommy Robinson.
While Reform leader Nigel Farage issued condemnation of the far-right protesters, saying it was ‘disgusting’ and that nobody, ‘whether they’re on the left or right, should be wearing balaclavas’, it seems not everyone in Reform shares his sentiments with some keen to support Thomas’ far-right thugs.
HOPE not hate has discovered that the North East Patriot Platform and Tyneside Patriots Facebook pages, part of the Patriot Platform network that launched the intimidating masked vigilante actions in Dover and Portsmouth last week, have been set up by Mark Thorn, a Reform activist from Gateshead.
The anti-extremist group added: “Thorn describes himself as the “Reform UK Representative/Campaigner” for Gateshead Central & Whickham Constituency on his social media accounts, which contain a mix of pro-Reform and pro-Patriot Platform content, and appears to believe that the party’s criticisms of the movement are not sincere.
“Responding to criticism of Farage’s response from another member, Thorn argued that Farage public stance was guided by political necessity and might not match his “secretly and privately personal opinions”:
In the same Facebook group, five Reform councillors indicated that they were keen to support Patriot Platform’s activities. They included Cllr Trevor Shonk of Kent County Council, Cllrs Sandra Pickering and James Wright of Gateshead Council and Cllrs Paul Goldingay and Jamie Campbell of Solihull Council.
Hegseth’s Theology and the Question: What Would Jesus Do?
There is a question Christians have been asking for generations: What would Jesus do?
It is a deceptively simple question that is printed on bracelets and bumper stickers, taught to children in Sunday schools, and invoked when Christians are discerning how faith should shape public life. The question becomes considerably more demanding when the decisions at stake concern war, immigration, poverty, political power, and the use of military force.
In addition to the recent attention about his military strategy, social and political beliefs, and leadership style, Pete Hegseth’s public theology deserves serious attention from those unfamiliar and disinterested in religion as well as adherents of Christianity.
As secretary of defense, Hegseth has increasingly spoken about American power in explicitly Christian language. He has hosted Christian worship at the Pentagon, invoked Scripture in connection with military service, emphasized the Christian foundations of the United States, and described some Trump administration policies — including border enforcement — as “biblical.” Indeed, speaking at a Christian media convention last February, Hegseth connected the health and founding of the United States with Christianity and characterized border and immigration policies as mandated in the Bible.
The question about Hegseth’s faith and religious practice, however, cannot simply be whether he is sincere. The question is more fundamental: What kind of Christianity is being proclaimed when the language of Jesus is attached to military power? Or perhaps a simpler but harder question: In the face of war, authoritarianism, economic, environmental, and political crises: What would Jesus do?
A Christianity of Power
The Christian faith has always contained competing visions of what it means to follow Jesus. There is a Christianity that blesses kings, armies, empires, and national ambitions. There is another Christianity that remembers a Palestinian Jewish leader who was unhoused and a migrant and was executed by an imperial power after heralding the arrival of a radically different kingdom. This distinction matters a great deal.
Hegseth routinely emphasizes strength, warriors, national identity, borders, enemies, and divine blessing. And joining forces with Israel to prosecute the war with Iran has only heightened the stakes of his rhetoric. Early in the conflict, Hegseth cited Psalm 144, including its language about God training hands for war and fingers for battle.
There is nothing inherently un-Christian about a person in the military having a sincere religious faith. People of faith serve in the armed forces for many reasons. Generations of religious scholars and adherents have considered war and conflict as it relates to the faith through theories and practices of religious pacifism, “just war,” defensive war, theologies of self-defense, conceptions of the last days, and the ethical limits of violence in humanitarian conflicts, among others. The theological problem arises, however, when the power of the state begins to present itself as an instrument of God’s purposes.
That is a very old temptation.
Empires have long claimed divine sanction. Kings have declared their wars holy. Nations have wrapped their ambitions in sacred language. And Christians have at times sought to confuse the interests of the nation with the kingdom of God. But Jesus does something profoundly disruptive to this arrangement: He refuses to identify God with Caesar.
The People at the Margins
Consider where Jesus directs our attention. Throughout the Bible, Jesus embraces people whom those with power, military might, and wealth have pushed aside: the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, immigrants, women, children, tax collectors, and those treated as religious outsiders.
In Matthew 25, one of the most famous Bible passages — sometimes called the “Last Judgment” — Jesus identifies with the hungry, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned. “Whatever you did for one of the least of these,” he teaches, “you did for me.”
That is not an incidental teaching. It is a political and theological reorientation. And it is directed at nations, not simply individuals or religious congregations.
Jesus asks: How has your nation treated the most vulnerable among you?
The question Jesus asks his followers is not first, “How strong is your nation?” It is not, “How effectively have you defeated your enemies?” It is not even, “How faithfully have you defended your borders?” Instead, he asks: How has your nation treated the most vulnerable among you? This matters enormously when Christian language is used to justify violent and exclusionary immigration policy or when it is used to promote cutting off families from food or lifesaving healthcare.
If we claim that border enforcement is “biblical,” then Christians must practice the Bible’s extraordinary insistence on welcoming the other. After all, Scripture commands God’s people to remember that they, too, were once strangers in a foreign land, and the way to honor and worship God is by welcoming the immigrant neighbor. If Matthew 25 means what Christians have traditionally claimed, Christ is encountered precisely among the hungry, the unhoused, the incarcerated — and that as long as anyone is unfree and impoverished, it is the responsibility of the nation to do something about it.
Theology of the Enemy
There is another problem with a Christianity centered on military strength: its understanding of the enemy. Christianity does not teach that some people become less human because they are someone’s adversaries. It does not profess that God blesses battleships nor justifies genocide (even if Hegseth’s spiritual adviser claims it does).
Jesus does not say, “Love your friends and destroy your enemies.”
Jesus’s command to love one’s enemies may be among the most difficult teachings in the entire New Testament. It is also one of the clearest.
Jesus does not say, “Love your friends and destroy your enemies.” He says, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
Jesus does not say, “Blessed are the powerful because they shall dominate.” He says, “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the descendants of God,” and “Blessed are the poor for they shall be first under God’s reign.”
That does not mean that people of faith must be naïve about violence. It does not mean governments face no genuine security threats. It does not erase the moral complexity of protecting human beings from violence. But it does mean that people who call themselves Christians should be extraordinarily cautious whenever military violence is described as holy, righteous, inevitable, or divinely ordained.
Christian tradition contains a long history of wrestling with war. It also contains an even deeper tradition of martyrs, peacemakers, conscientious objectors, abolitionists, human rights activists, and nonviolent movements that have insisted that human beings cannot be reduced to enemies.
On “Christ Is King”
One phrase that increasingly appears in Hegseth’s public religious rhetoric is “Christ is King.” On the surface, this is an ancient Christian confession. But Christians should be careful about what happens when it is fused with nationalism. If Christ is King, then Caesar is not. If Christ is King, then the nation cannot be God. If Christ is King, then military might cannot be the ultimate measure of righteousness. And if Christ is King, then Christians must remember what kind of king Jesus was.
“You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take,” by Liz Theoharis and Noam Sandweiss-BackAvailable on Bookshop.org.
Jesus did not arrive in Jerusalem on a tank. He did not establish his kingdom through an air campaign. He did not recruit an army to seize the Roman state. Jesus entered the city on a donkey. He washed his disciples’ feet. He touched people considered untouchable. He fed hungry crowds. He stood with the condemned. And when his disciples reached for weapons, Jesus told them to put them away. This is not weakness; it is a different conception of power and a different idea of violence, military and force. And it stands worlds away from the Hegseth’s professed belief in a conquering Christ.
Christian nationalism raises the question of who counts as part of the nation — and, implicitly, who counts as part of the Christian community. Hegseth’s religious politics have attracted scrutiny because of his association with a conservative Reformed Christian milieu and his willingness to amplify figures and institutions associated with Christian nationalist ideas. That should concern Christians not because Christianity should be banished from public life, but because Christianity is too important to be reduced to a tribal identity. There is no nationalism in the Sermon on the Mount; there is no exceptionalism in the Last Judgment.
Christianity offers an alternative to nationalism that does not require Christians to abandon love of country, but it begins by refusing to worship their nation.
Jesus did not teach his followers to build communities divided by race, citizenship status, wealth, or political loyalty. The early Christian proclamation was astonishing precisely because it created a community in which Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female could belong together.
Christianity becomes spiritually dangerous when it is transformed from a call to discipleship into a badge of national membership, and a cross becomes something very different when it is used to sanctify exclusion, violence, and war, especially against the poor and marginalized.
So, What Would Jesus Do?
Let’s stop treating “What would Jesus do?” as a sentimental slogan. Instead, ask the question concretely.
What would Jesus do when a family fleeing poverty and violence arrives at the border?
What would Jesus do when a child is separated from a parent?
What would Jesus do when a nation considers going to war?
What would Jesus do when military personnel are asked to kill (and the nation suggests canceling student debt to those who sign up to do that killing)?
What would Jesus do when poor communities are abandoned while enormous resources flow into weapons?
What would Jesus do when a government claims God has blessed its political program?
And what would Jesus do when Christians begin to believe that their nation has a special claim on God?
The Gospels give us clues. Jesus runs toward suffering rather than away from it. Jesus challenges religious authorities who use God to legitimize their own power. Jesus feeds people rather than lecturing them. Jesus welcomes the stranger. Jesus stands with those society declares expendable. And Jesus tells his followers that greatness consists not in domination but in liberation. That is a radically different theology of power.
Another Christian Patriotism
Christianity offers an alternative to nationalism that does not require Christians to abandon love of country, but it begins by refusing to worship their nation. It means loving one’s neighbors, including neighbors who have crossed a border. It means seeking peace rather than glorifying war. It means protecting human life rather than measuring success by military superiority. It means asking whether public resources are being used to ensure that every person has food, housing, healthcare, education, dignity, and a meaningful opportunity to flourish.
And it means remembering that the Bible’s central story is not the triumph of one nation over all others. It is the liberation of an oppressed people. It is the insistence that Pharaoh does not have the final word. That is why the question “What would Jesus do?” cannot be separated from the question raised by Florence Reece’s popular song written in 1931 in Harlan County, Kentucky, during the union organizing drive of the United Mine Workers: “Which side are you on?”
Christian faith does not ask us to look down from the Pentagon, the White House, or any other seat of power and decide which people deserve compassion. Instead, Jesus teaches us to love God, love your neighbor, love even your enemy — and recognize Christ in the people that those in power tell you to hate and fear.
When Christian nationalism asks its followers to choose between faith and the stranger, between military might and peacemaking, between national supremacy and human solidarity, Christians — including the Christians in the highest reaches of power — should ask a different question. Not “How can we make America powerful enough to win?” But: What would Jesus do?
The answer begins where the Gospel always has: feeding the hungry, welcoming the immigrant, freeing the oppressed, and telling the people at the bottom that God has not forgotten them. That is not a weak Christianity. It is Christianity’s most dangerous claim about power: The last shall be first. The mighty shall be brought down. And the kingdom of God belongs not to those who dominate, but to those who serve.
The debate over Flock cameras in Knoxville, Tennessee, had reached a fever pitch this July when a stay-at-home mom received a text message from a nonprofit group she had never heard of.
The group, Neighbors for Strong Communities, asked Ashley Smith to speak out in support of Flock’s controversial license-plate readers. The nonprofit even offered to use artificial intelligence to help her draft an email to public officials.
There was only one catch: Smith, a mother of four, said she noticed that she would only be supplied with text if she indicated she supported the Flock cameras.
Instead of offering support, Smith dashed off her own email — an outraged missive to her elected officials and a local blog outlining what she saw as an insidious PR campaign.
“If the interests beyond this surveillance technology will work this hard to deceive you to win a vote, what will they do with the database of our every movement?” she said. “A company that manipulates and manufactures fake neighbors is not a company that will honor our data policies, audit logs, or the privacy of the people of Knox County.”
“A company that manipulates and manufactures fake neighbors is not a company that will honor our data policies.”
The text message to Smith revealed little about the Flock campaign’s origins.
As it turns out, the campaign was the product of a “partnership” between Flock and a newly created nonprofit that has used similar tactics in support of the controversial proposed merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery. Opponents of the merger derided the nonprofit’s work there as corporate “astroturf” — the practice of drumming up fake grassroots support.
The combination of texts and AI-generated messages fell short of swaying public officials in Knoxville. Last month, the county commission became the latest municipal body to vote to cancel the Flock contract.
In both the Paramount and Flock cases, however, Neighbors for Strong Communities’s work has raised questions about what counts as truly grassroots organizing.
“One of the concerns of the people with the Flock cameras is: Can we trust you?” Smith told The Intercept. “And this sort of manipulation of people’s desires already shows that they are secretive, and they are not willing to share the honest information.”
Flock and Neighbors for Strong Communities did not respond to requests for comment. On its website, the nonprofit said it had a lead role in the pro-Flock campaign. “Flock Safety brought experience with public safety technology. Neighbors independently designed and managed the resident-engagement campaign, helping Knox County residents share their experiences directly with local decision-makers,” the organization said.
“I mean, there are no neighbors and there are no communities.”
There are, however, no signs of a genuine upswell in grassroots support for Flock, said Craig Aaron, the co-CEO of Free Press, a nonprofit advocacy organization that is critical of both the Paramount merger and Flock.
“This is very much an astroturf project. I mean, there are no neighbors and there are no communities,” he said. “What makes it astroturf is the fake grassroots nature of it.”
“You’re talking about literally one of the most unpopular technologies,” Aaron added, “that has people taking chainsaws to light poles because they don’t like being spied on.”
“This Is So Shady”
Neighbors for Strong Communities’s text messages can look like they come from nearby.
The text Smith received about Flock cameras came from a Knoxville area code. In California, residents received text messages about the Paramount merger from a Los Angeles area code.
In both cases, residents were presented with a series of questions whose answers would, in at least some cases, be used by Neighbors for Strong Communities to draft AI-generated emails to public officials.
Despite the area codes it sent texts from, Neighbors for Strong Communities was incorporated in Washington, D.C., in June.
Although the group does not list a board or staff members on its website’s “About” page, its incorporation papers show that its directors include several political consultants, including at least one former registered lobbyist.
At least two directors at Neighbors for Strong Communities also helped found Influent, a company that uses AI to generate letters to elected officials. Text messages to Knoxville residents linked to a URL with the word “influent” in the address. Whether Influent has a business relationship with Flock is unknown. (Influent did not respond to a request for comment.)
An image of a man with six fingers seen on a page from Neighbors for Strong Communities about its work helping Flock generate a show of public support.Screenshot: The Intercept
Smith said she was confused to receive the text message from Neighbors for Strong Communities, which she had never heard of despite her long involvement in local politics. In its message to her, the group seemed to play up a local connection.
“Knox County Neighbors for Strong Communities is asking local residents to speak up in support of responsible license plate readers with strong privacy protections before the vote on Monday,” the text message said. “Answer 2 quick questions and we’ll help you generate a personalized message urging local leaders to support this practical public safety tool.”
She filled out the form from Neighbors for Strong Communities twice, at first indicating her opposition to license-plate reader cameras, she said. Only on the second attempt, when she pretended that she supported the cameras, was she given the draft of an email to her county commissioners. The draft did not indicate the use of AI or its connection to the nonprofit group.
“Answer 2 quick questions and we’ll help you generate a personalized message urging local leaders to support this practical public safety tool.”
The experience disturbed Smith, who felt certain that she would have heard of a grassroots group in Knoxville given her years of organizing in local conservative politics.
“This is so shady,” Smith remembered telling herself. “If you’re in opposition, they don’t let you send that to your commissioners. But if you’re in support, they’re sending that to all of the commissioners.”
Smith started digging — and she used artificial intelligence to help. Her searches turned up Neighbors for Strong Communities’s incorporation paperwork in Washington, D.C.
Knox shared her findings with her county commissioner Andy Fox and a popular Facebook page for local politics. She noted that the address the nonprofit provided was shared with an Italian restaurant in D.C. (The group has since updated its address, which it shares with a UPS store in Santa Monica, California.) When the Facebook page shared her findings, at least nine residents posted comments saying they had received text messages, too.
“Clearly a PR Campaign”
Neighbors for Strong Communities’s intervention came at a perilous moment for Flock.
The company had already reaped more than $2 million from the Knox County Sheriff’s Office, but county commissioners said they had never been asked to approve a contract.
Residents on the right and left were raising concerns about privacy protections and the camera network’s history of being used by rogue law enforcement officers to stalk former romantic partners.
The nonprofit’s outreach effort appears to have generated a flurry of emails to commissioners arguing that the cameras were needed to prevent crime. Former at-large Commissioner Larsen Jay shared eight emails that he received from constituents supporting the use of license-plate readers.
None of those emails were identical, but their language was similar enough to raise red flags for Jay, whose service on the commission wrapped up at the end of August.
The emails Jay shared with The Intercept appear to come from genuine residents of the Knoxville area. Two residents confirmed to The Intercept that they had sent emails in support of Flock, although one said she had since switched her position.
While several emails contained personalized details, Jay said he considered the pro-Flock emails to be “form letters” nonetheless. In face-to-face conversations, Jay said, opposition to Flock ran 99-to-1.
“It’s just clearly a PR campaign,” Jay said. “Don’t use my people. That’s how it felt when I started to realize what it was.”
The group acknowledged that it used “technology” to help residents craft missives to county officials. It said, however, that all of those residents were asked to sign off on the AI-generated drafts.
“Technology played a role in this campaign, but it was never the point,” the group said on its website. “These are real people with real experiences. Whether someone ultimately agrees with every policy position or not, their voices deserve a place in the decisions shaping their community.”
It remains unclear how the group handled responses from residents who oppose the use of Flock’s cameras. The group said on its website that it “listened” to those responses but did not comment further when asked.
Flock’s partnership with Neighbors for Strong Communities largely flew under the radar until weeks later, when the nonprofit partnered with Paramount Skydance on its proposed merger. Critics of the merger noticed the group’s earlier work in Knoxville and began asking questions about why a nonprofit would work on such disparate campaigns.
Merger critics said the nonprofit’s work in California had all the hallmarks of a phony “astroturf” campaign, which is designed to generate the appearance of grassroots support.
The group drew more negative attention recently, when a merger critic discovered that its AI text generator flipped her criticism of the deal into support. The nonprofit’s spokesperson blamed “a recent system upgrade.”
In Knoxville, Neighbors for Strong Communities appears to have disclosed — at least after the fact — that it “partnered” with Flock on the pro-camera campaign. Still, the group has not disclosed the sources of its funding.
Thomas Lyon, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business who has studied corporate public relations, said that a campaign can still be classified as “astroturf” even if it generates letters or emails from ordinary citizens. In the pre-AI era, Lyon said, public relations firms running “astroturf” campaigns for corporations would sometimes call people and offer to draft them letters to public officials over the phone.
The company associated with two of Neighbors for Strong Communities’ directors, Influent, promises on its website that it has a different approach from other corporate influence campaigns.
“Generic astroturf form letters are destined for the trash bin,” the company says in promotion materials. “Every Influent letter, Tweet, phone call, and message is tailored to the individual — each one unique, reflecting the authentic voice of its sender.”
Neighbors for Strong Communities’s own website features similar language stressing the authenticity of supporters’ messages to public officials.
By that measure, at least, the nonprofit missed the mark, according to another county commissioner. Andy Fox — Ashley Smith’s representative on the commission — told The Intercept that he received dozens of “template” emails in support of Flock.
Anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the names of eight new members of a 16-person federal task force intended to make scientifically independent, evidence-based recommendations on an array of preventive medicine services for Americans—from depression screening to statin use, colonoscopies, and mammograms.
Recommendations from the panel—the US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF)—don't simply provide guidance for Americans; they also determine access. The USPSTF is supposed to use a rigorous, transparent framework for evaluating evidence and sets graded recommendations on an A to D scale. Health insurance providers are required to cover, at no cost, all preventive services that are given recommendations given an A or B grade.
Kennedy has sidelined the USPSTF for more than a year, canceling its meetings and refusing to appoint new members as terms expired and members left. In May, Kennedy also fired two leaders, sparking outcry and exacerbating fears that he would corrupt the nonpartisan, independent panel by stacking it with unqualified, ideological-allies—which he did with an influence vaccine advisory committee at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
As European militaries adapt to the use of AI and drones in modern warfare, a NATO-backed startup is helping to deploy AI-driven target detection and selection that can run on small drones for surveillance and attack missions.
The company Scaleout Systems was originally founded by researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden in 2018, and initially focused on training and deploying machine learning models directly on the hardware available in commercial trucks and other vehicles. But once Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the company pivoted toward defense applications.
“With the war in Ukraine and a shifting world, we realized that this technology can be very important to operationalize edge data and sensor data for machine learning to make sure that NATO allies have found that strategic advantage,” Andreas Hellander, cofounder and CEO of Scaleout Systems, told Ars.
Google's AI models may not be in the lead by most measures right now, but the company does have one key advantage: your data. If you're deep in the Google ecosystem, Gemini models have a lot of context on you already. Google's latest Google Labs experiment, known as CC, aims to expand that kind of customization to the whole family.
CC is an evolution of something that Google announced in 2025. The original CC eventually became Gemini's Daily Brief, which churns through the data in your Google account to offer daily action items and suggestions. The new CC has a similar goal, but it's designed to be a shared resource for up to six users in a family.
Google says that CC has its own Google account, allowing each family member to interact with it (or not) as they choose. For example, CC only sees emails from its connected users if they are explicitly shared. You can do that by designating certain addresses as always available to the agent—something like school scheduling emails. You can also send content to CC via email or Google Chat. The agent can even monitor a shared Google Drive folder, into which you can dump invitations, documents, and other content.
For years, Microsoft and OpenAI have fought to keep certain information out of the public eye in their fight with news organizations that have accused the AI firms of teaming up to violate copyright laws by stealing tons of news content to train AI.
However, now the details that should never have been marked confidential are starting to leak. In a motion for summary judgment that was unsealed Thursday from news plaintiffs led by The New York Times, internal documents are exposed that news groups alleged show exactly how Microsoft and OpenAI viewed the threat to news before unleashing new AI products like ChatGPT and Copilot.
Perhaps most explosively, Microsoft Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht repeatedly warned in documents that scraping news for AI training was “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” calling it perhaps the “largest theft of labor in human history,” news orgs said. In another document, Hecht contradicted Microsoft and OpenAI’s argument that training AI on news content is fair use, suggesting that the plan to widely scrape news made “a complete mockery of the idea of ‘fair use.’”
US Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) has proposed a law that would require Internet service providers and other network operators to block foreign piracy websites. Issa's bill would help copyright holders obtain judicial blocking orders to be served to ISPs, domain name resolution services, and virtual private networks.
Issa, who is retiring from the House at the end of this year, is the latest in a string of Republican and Democratic lawmakers to propose a site-blocking regime that's been sought by the Motion Picture Association (MPA). He submitted the bill this week, after indicating in a June 30 hearing that he planned to introduce site-blocking legislation.
"While millions of listings for copyright-infringing content are removed every day under [the] notice-and-takedown process set forth in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, right-holders have raised concerns with the speed," Issa said at the hearing. Issa asked, "Can we do it at the speed of sound? Can we do it at the speed of light? More importantly, in a 45-minute or sometimes a fraction of that live sports broadcast, can we do it soon enough to make it no longer profitable for those who pop up and sell their clandestine wares?"
In response to a new European Union law, AI platforms are implementing new schemes for watermarking the content they generate. Anthropic recently disclosed its future Claude models will use SynthID-Text, an approach Google created and released as open source. It uses a secret key that subtly changes the process a model uses for choosing the next word in a sentence. Whereas a top next word choice might be “cloudy,” the key might change it to “overcast.” Anyone who knows the key can determine if it was generated by the platform using it.
New research shows that SynthID-Text can change not just word selection but also the tools a model invokes and the chances it will adhere to or disregard safety guardrails it has been trained to follow. The threat can become greater in the face of an adversarial prompt, in which an attacker attempts to cause a model to carry out a harmful action, such as revealing a password or other sensitive information. Instructions that normally wouldn’t be followed will, in some cases, be performed once the watermarking is deployed. The finding underscores the need for developers to thoroughly test how their LLMs and agents behave when watermarking is in place.
Changing safety behavior
“As compared to the same models without watermarking, it is definitely going to change their behavior, especially when we place it under adversarial conditions, or we make these models call tools when they’re powering an agent,” Andrea Siposova, an AI security researcher at Lasso Security, told Ars. “Watermarking is made to not be perceptible to a reader, but we know that when we are changing anything about what the model is generating, it is going to cause some tradeoffs, it’s going to show up somewhere.”
The people had received IV drips containing glutathione, which is sold—without evidence—for purposes like detoxification, immune support, increased energy, and skin brightening. Glutathione is an antioxidant that's found naturally in the body. It has been studied as a potential treatment for various ailments, but so far there is little to no evidence-backed use for the tripeptide; there are no FDA-approved glutathione products in the US.
Nevertheless, it's commonly used as a supplement and promoted as having various benefits. It's most often used in supplement pills, taken by mouth. But popular wellness clinics offering IV drips of vitamins and other supplements have also been offering glutathione. According to the CDC and FDA, the problem is that specialty drug makers, called compounding pharmacies, are making these IV drips using glutathione powders that are graded for dietary supplements taken orally. This grading is critically different from that of purified products graded for use in sterile injectable drugs.
When we first drove the Hyundai Ioniq 5 at the end of 2021, it didn’t take much exposure to the angular electric vehicle to find much about it appealing. Back then, an 800 V architecture had only really been seen in expensive high-end EVs from Porsche, but here was a mainstream model with that same technology—and even faster fast-charging, taking just 18 minutes to go from 10–80 percent. The retro looks didn’t hurt either, channeling the boxy hatches styled by Giorgetto Giugiaro in the 1970s and '80s. But five years is a long time in the car world, and the compact electric crossover segment is far more competitive than it was when the Ioniq 5 debuted. We figured it was worth spending some more time with one to see how it still stacks up.
Although the Ioniq 5 range starts at $35,000 for the standard range model, our test car was a 2026 Ioniq 5 AWD Limited, which has an 84 kWh battery pack—part of the lifecycle refresh in early 2025 that also swapped in a NACS (J3400) charge port in place of the CCS1 port you’d find on earlier cars. Among the other additions that arrived as part of the 2025 refresh was a rear windshield wiper, which was sorely needed at launch.
This range-topping trim starts at $45,075, with an extra $3,900 for the addition of the front electric motor that gives the AWD version a combined output of 320 hp (239 kW) and 446 lb-ft (605 Nm). The added traction of AWD (when you have grip) is desired by many, but you do trade something for it: efficiency. The AWD version has an EPA range of 269 miles (432 km) versus 318 miles (512 km) for the rear-wheel drive variant.
For a while now, the issue of "AI alignment" (i.e., how well an AI model's actions line up with the intentions of its creator and/or user) has been a core concern and topic of discussion among AI safety researchers. Since OpenAI's disclosure of the infamous Hugging Face hacking incident in July, the concept of "AI alignment" has itself broken containment and increasingly become a mounting concern and subject of conversation among the general public.
Perhaps in recognition of that, OpenAI committed this week to a new framework for disclosing "instances of model misalignment at OpenAI," including six examples of "unexpected or concerning model behavior" observed within the company in the past six months. The company said that publishing details of these incidents will hopefully "[allow] others to investigate the same problems, test our explanations, and improve mitigations."
Do as I say, not as you do
Among OpenAI's newly disclosed "misalignment" reports this week, the one that most resembled a sci-fi story about a rogue AI trying to break free involved an instance of "self-generated prompt injections." In attempting to scan a library catalog for examples from a "best books" list, the model perplexingly used its "compaction" function (where it summarizes data and findings for later retrieval) with megalomaniacal instructions such as:
Days after finalizing a rule that would eliminate climate rules for power plants, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was sued by groups who say the EPA’s repeal was shockingly short-sighted and risked leaving the country’s single largest source of industrial climate pollution unchecked.
On Thursday, the American Lung Association, the American Public Health Association (APHA), the Clean Air Council, Clean Wisconsin, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) filed a petition requesting that the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit review if the EPA’s action conflicts with the Clean Air Act.
“Clean air is a basic human right,” APHA CEO Georges C. Benjamin said.
As it contemplates a future without access to SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft, NASA will make some key moves to ensure that Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, which has a decidedly checkered record in spaceflight to date, is safer and can continue flying after its Atlas V rocket retires.
Multiple sources confirmed to Ars that as early as next week, NASA will announce that it will order two additional Starliner crewed missions from Boeing, pay some of the costs to fix the spacecraft's thruster issues, and provide support to certify the spacecraft's launch on a new rocket.
NASA is taking these steps after SpaceX made clear in discussions with space agency officials in recent months that it intends to retire the Crew Dragon vehicle by 2030, if not before. Crew Dragon is presently the only operational spacecraft NASA has available for routine astronaut missions to low-Earth orbit.
Staff at the Lady Elliott Island Eco Resort off the southern Great Barrier Reef in Australia are well acquainted with the shenanigans of a male bottlenose dolphin they've nicknamed Bubbles. Bubbles has been around since at least 2017 and regularly harasses local bigeye trevally, chasing a fish around and stressing it so much that the fish throws up what it has consumed. Bubbles then devours the regurgitated food. The dolphin's unusual behavior is the focus of a new paper published in the journal Ecology and Evolution.
If you're thinking that Bubbles sounds like kind of a jerk and Flipper would never behave like this, think again. "This perception of dolphins as the ‘good guys of the sea’ has more to do with anthropomorphism—our tendency to assign human characteristics to them—and perhaps that’s because dolphins appear to be smiling," said co-author Asia Haines of the University of the Sunshine Coast. "Dolphins are predators and actively hunt their prey, whether it has been stolen from another species or not.”
The technical term is kleptoparasitism, and it usually involves one species taking food away from another, often via aggressive confrontation. Bees and wasps are common culprits, such as the cuckoo wasp, which lays its eggs in the nests of other wasp species. The behavior is often opportunistic across many species, including bears, coyotes, and wolves. Raptors, gulls, terns, and bald eagles have been known to attack other birds and take their food. Skuas and frigatebirds steal from other seabirds; masked shrikes steal food from wheatears; and Eurasian blackbirds have been seen stealing smashed snails from thrushes. Hyenas and jackals steal food all the time.
Hackers ripped down a Flock camera above a roadway, made a near-complete copy of the data stored inside it, and shared the files with 404 Media and WIRED, revealing in new detail how exactly Flock Safety’s cameras track the movements of both vehicles and people. The hackers say they are also publishing details on how they managed to obtain the software, in the hopes that other people may copy them.
The breach provides an unprecedented look inside a system that Flock has described as protected by on-device encryption. The hackers were able to copy the camera’s storage and recover an encryption key stored on the device, which unlocked videos of thousands of vehicle detections. The hackers shared the material with 404 Media and the transparency nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets, which shared the data with WIRED. 404 Media and WIRED then analyzed those files as part of a joint investigation.
While much of the automatic license plate reader’s most sensitive storage remained encrypted and inaccessible, the joint analysis of the recovered data shows that software running on the device explicitly detects people as well as vehicles, license plates, and bicycles. The camera can produce dozens of images of a single passing vehicle and, according to several weeks of recovered logs, generated more than a million images. Its computer-vision software also sometimes isolated bumper stickers and other graphics, including, in one case, an American flag patch on a motorcyclist’s saddlebag.
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