Monday, September 14, 2026

"It’s worth remembering that no one actually asked for AI, and yet here it suddenly is trying to kill us. And even if that’s averted, it’s embedding itself in our workplaces and in our emotional lives (ChatGPT may be the largest provider of mental health services in the US), robbing us of the capacity for critical thinking, and threatening economic and social stability." Brigid Delaney

‘Flourishing is having a direct relationship with the natural world – not the world through a screen, or the natural world itself destroyed and degraded to create more capacity for screen-based existence.’ Photograph: Martyn Williams/Alamy

Opinion

AI (artificial intelligence)

We greet the news that AI could extinguish us with a glazed indifference. What is the way out of this nihilism?

There are several answers, and none of them will be provided by tech. One thing we must do is identify the ingredients for human flourishing

Brigid Delaney

Sun 13 Sep 2026

Imagining the future as almost entirely bleak has somehow crept into the collective consciousness this year.

Last week I was having coffee with an old friend. He was telling me about what his kids wanted to study when they went to university, when he suddenly broke off, stared into the middle distance and said, “I wish I’d never had children.”

He’d been a father for 20 years and I’d never heard him say that.

“Oh my god, why?”

He loves his kids beyond measure, but right at that moment, he looked desolate.

“AI,” he replied.

“What about it?”

It could have been anything AI-related at this point in time. Was it that AI was going to take all the jobs his kids would have done, rendering their lives impoverished and without purpose or meaning? Or was it environmental, with all the water and energy AI consumes that is going to create further stress on the climate and make the planet uninhabitable? Or was it the news that week that AI could “kill all humans” within the next 10 years?

It was the latter. We talked listlessly about the “killing all humans” thing for a bit, then moved on. But the shadow had fallen and I started wondering: is the polycrisis that we are facing so overwhelming that we don’t even have the capacity to talk about it with urgency any more? Instead it’s just there, in the air, ambient, like pollution, each particle containing its own particular doomsday scenario – and the only way to be in this atmosphere is to be numb to it.

Currently, for so many, all our past and future decisions are being refracted through this strange and dark moment.... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/14/we-greet-the-news-that-ai-could-extinguish-us-with-a-glazed-indifference-what-is-the-way-out-of-this-nihilism

AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine, or at least fair and just laws and policies here, there- and everywhere]

"There is something historically inevitable in this. Immigration from countries and backgrounds against which the US has waged military and ideological war eventually yields not a cowed assimilation, but a sort of political cosmopolitanism – kryptonite for American exceptionalism."

Zohran Mamdani after the ceremony to mark the 25th anniversary of the September 11 2001 attacks in New York, 11 September 2026. Photograph: Adam Gray/Reuters

The US right still paints Muslims as the ‘enemy’. But they are fighting for a brighter future for Americans

Progressive politicians such as Zohran Mamdani offer answers to the bitter post-9/11 legacy of failures at home and abroad

Nesrine Malik

Mon 14 Sep 2026

Twenty-five years after 9/11, two pieces of journalism, describing two different phenomena in contemporary New York, tell us a great deal about a city, and indeed a world, caught between two eras. In one, New York Magazine dives into “Habibi City”, a New York where a “cultural shift is underway, led by a generation of New Yorkers coming into its own”. This new generation is labelled as originating in “SWANA” – south-west Asia and north Africa, a region that “includes countries from Palestine to Iran to Sudan”. In the other, Vanity Fair describes calls for Zohran Mamdani to not attend the 9/11 memorial ceremony as partly founded in “inchoate, emotional” impulses, that see “the city’s first Muslim mayor as a stand-in for the 19 Muslims who hijacked four planes and turned them into deadly weapons, part of the ‘them’ who attacked ‘us’.”

Together they capture what has changed over a generation, and what remains stubbornly the same. Members of a diaspora of Muslim background are indeed breaking through and accumulating, as New York Magazine says, “clout”. They are no longer simply a fixture of bodegas and halal carts, but of Saturday Night Live, upmarket dining, entertainment and politics too. Mamdani is both the expression of that cohort and the catalyst of its recognition as an emerging force. They care deeply for their local communities but also for those in Gaza and beyond.

I use the descriptor “of Muslim background” rather than “Muslim” because this diasporic identity is a diverse one that is rooted in a religion but expands to encompass everyone from the practising to those for whom Islam is a cultural totem.The capaciousness of this heritage is demonstrable in its integration – without compromise – into mainstream American society. Mamdani and the Democratic Senate nominee for Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, recuse themselves from the rote fealty to American glory and dare to point out both US support for Israel and the calamitous outcomes of the “war on terror” in the Middle East.

This is the result of this new generation of Americans coming from an immigrant background that has cultivated a less parochial and supremacist view of the US. There is something historically inevitable in this. Immigration from countries and backgrounds against which the US has waged military and ideological war eventually yields not a cowed assimilation, but a sort of political cosmopolitanism – kryptonite for American exceptionalism.... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/14/9-11-anniversary-islamophobia-us-politics-zohran-mamdani

Report by Israeli human rights group [B’Tselem] says systematic and broad assault being waged on conditions required for Palestinians’ existence

A Palestinian shepherd from the hamlet of Anizan, where residents have been repeatedly driven out of their homes by settlers. Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum/The Guardian

Israel accused of trying to ‘eliminate’ living conditions for Palestinians in West Bank

Quique Kierszenbaum in Sair, and Peter Beaumont

Mon 14 Sep 2026

Israel is working towards the systematic “elimination” of the conditions that sustain Palestinian collective life in the occupied West Bank, according to a major report published by the human rights group B’Tselem.

The Israeli organisation’s hard-hitting report, shared with the Guardian in advance of publication, says Israel is “dramatically intensifying its attacks on every aspect of Palestinian life in the West Bank”, including “the ability to get to work, take children to school or university, receive medical treatment or municipal services, meet family and friends, cultivate land or go on vacation … routine activities that make up human life”.

According to B’Tselem, the assault on Palestinians is “governed by a coherent organising logic” and comprises five “interwoven domains of action”: violence and intimidation, movement restrictions, economic strangulation, social and political destruction, and ethnic cleansing and territorial takeover.

The publication of the Elimination Project, B’Tselem’s most comprehensive piece of work on the West Bank since its launch in 1989, comes less than a week after the British foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, accused settler terrorists, supported by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, of committing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, in the UK’s starkest condemnation of Israel since the foundation of the state.

By looking more broadly at the conditions required for Palestinians’ collective existence, however, the B’Tselem report goes further still. It says various arms of the Israeli state – led by Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister with broad powers over civilian matters in the West Bank – are seeking to “create a reality in which millions of Palestinians live in constant fear of Israeli military and civilian violence”.

“Palestinian communities are being pushed out in an accelerating process of ethnic cleansing, while an ever-expanding Israeli presence is being established in their place in the form of settlements, outposts, farms and Jewish-only civilian infrastructure,” the report says. “Elimination in this context means sustained harm to the conditions that enable Palestinians to exist as a people with land, institutions, language, culture, social ties, leadership, shared memory and history, and a social and political horizon.

“It is an ongoing political project that seeks to re-organise space and the conditions of life so that Jewish presence becomes contiguous, institutionalised and permanent, while Palestinian existence becomes fragmented, vulnerable and dependent.”

One of the most obvious aspects of this fragmentation is the closure of roads and villages to Palestinian passage...READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2026/sep/14/israel-palestinian-living-conditions-eliminated-west-bank-human-rights-report

Children. Displaced people. Farmers. Shepherds. People returning to check their homes. Israeli drones track their movements, and strike them with precision.

Euro-Med Monitor

@EuroMedHR

Israeli forces are using armed quadcopter drones to hunt down and kill Palestinian civilians in #Gaza.

Since the ceasefire began on 10 October 2025, Euro-Med Monitor has documented at least 60 civilians killed by gunfire or munitions fired from these drones.

Children. Displaced people. Farmers. Shepherds. People returning to check their homes. These drones can identify people, track their movements, and strike them with precision.

https://x.com/EuroMedHR/status/2099432059861184725

The violence and the creation of new outposts are two different aspects of settlement activity, but together they show how illegal settlement expansion is occurring not only through established communities and government planning, but also through new activity on the ground.... Animated map shows spread of illegal Israeli settlements across Palestine

An aerial view of the illegal Jewish settlement of Maale Adumim in the occupied West Bank, on June 29, 2020 [Ilan Rosenberg/Reuters]

Settlements are illegal under international law as they violate the Fourth Geneva Convention, which bans an occupying power from transferring its population to the area it occupies.

Animated map shows spread of illegal Israeli settlements across Palestine

Some 750,000 settlers live across more than 500 illegal settlements and outposts, as Israeli pogroms hit record highs.

Over the past six decades, the settlement network has grown from scattered hilltop outposts into a sprawling system of settlements, roads and highways binding them to each other and to Israel.

According to Peace Now, an Israeli anti-settlement watchdog, there are at least 148 illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and 15 in occupied East Jerusalem, 163 in total, now home to some 750,000 Israelis, roughly 10 percent of the country’s Jewish population.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/14/animated-map-shows-spread-of-illegal-israeli-settlements-across-palestine

Why protect nature with criminal law (#EcocideLaw)? Criminal law: 👼 Shapes moral boundaries 💰 Redirects financial flows 🤵 Creates personal accountability

Why protect nature with criminal law (#EcocideLaw)?

Stop Ecocide International

@EcocideLaw

Why protect nature with criminal law (#EcocideLaw)? Criminal law: 👼 Shapes moral boundaries 💰 Redirects financial flows 🤵 Creates personal accountability More🔗 stopecocide.earth/about

Ecocide - mass damage and destruction of nature

While most human interaction with the environment creates some level of impact, ecocide refers only to the very worst harms, usually on a major industrial scale or impacting a huge area.

Legal recognition of ecocide as a serious crime

Criminalisation of ecocide creates enforceable accountability for these key decision-makers, so that where there is a threat of severe and either widespread or long-term damage, the dangers will be better researched and taken very seriously. Appropriate safety protocols will be employed or alternative approaches developed in order to protect nature, climate and people, and in order to avoid criminal liability.

Scientific and on-the-ground knowledge

Detailed knowledge of risks to nature, climate and people in specific contexts is extensive, and readily available to decision-makers in policy and industry.

Route to justice for the severest environmental harms

Ecocide law provides a route to justice for the worst harms inflicted upon the living world in times of both peace and conflict, whenever and wherever they are committed.

For history of ecocide law and academic articles, see our sister site www.ecocidelaw.com

Some examples of large-scale destruction that ecocide law could address:

Destruction of endangered species or habitats

Mass Deforestation

Severe water and land contamination

Chemical disasters

International Criminal Court

While we wholeheartedly support ecocide legislation at national and regional levels, our work aims ultimately to support recognition of ecocide as a standalone crime in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

At present, the Statute lists four crimes: Genocide, Crimes Against Humanity, War Crimes and the Crime of Aggression. The Statute can be amended to include a fifth crime of Ecocide.

https://www.stopecocide.earth/about