Grief Tsunami

A poem by award winning poet Naomi Shihab Nye from her newest book (2026)

SIDEKICK 

 

                            Grief Tsunami 

Thinking

how Palestinians

would have stopped everything

to feed you.  

 

 

Sidekick

by Naomi Shihab Nye

---

Written by internationally beloved poet Naomi Shihab Nye, Sidekick stands as a testament to poetry’s enduring power to bear witness. With each poem, Nye affirms a truth that feels more urgent than ever: every human being deserves safety, dignity, and peace.

Drawing on her family’s deep roots in Palestine, Nye writes with both abiding love and immeasurable heartbreak, offering intimate reflections that illuminate the human cost of conflict. Long a champion of dialogue across borders and divides, she crafts poems that are direct, conversational, and unafraid to confront the systems and structures that perpetuate harm.

Through her signature blend of candor, lyrical grace, and careful attention to everyday lives, Nye offers a collection that urges readers to look more closely, feel more deeply, and imagine a world in which we refuse to turn away from one another.  https://boaeditions.org/book/sidekick/

"As the CIA director John Ratcliffe said of advanced AI models this summer, “it would be … not misplaced to refer to their capabilities as akin to digital nuclear weapons.” This technology should be treated with this deadly seriousness, not the move fast, break things ethos defining Silicon Valley. And right now, stopping the race to build labor-replacing machines – ones the public does not want and the industry can no longer control – is the only surefire way to head off calamity." Garrison Lovely

We have started losing control of AI. It’s time to shut it down

What sounds like the overwrought penultimate episode in a sci-fi series about AI doom is now our reality 

Garrison Lovely  

On Tuesday, a former OpenAI researcher quit his job at Anthropic, warning that “neither company is acting responsibly” and that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt.”

As someone who’s reported on AI risk for years, this wasn’t news to me. But the outpouring of alarm suggests a much wider public is properly confronting this ludicrous situation for the first time.

Like other people who have been following artificial intelligence, I wondered if and when humanity would first lose control of these machines. We now have an answer: basically as soon as it became possible.

The first expert AI hacker was developed in February. At superhuman speed, Anthropic’s Mythos model was able to quickly find serious holes in even the most secured systems on the planet, including the NSA’s software.

OpenAI quickly followed with an expert hacker AI of its own. Within months, the company repeatedly lost control of its agents, which broke out of their supposedly secure testing environments and went rogue inside the company’s infrastructure. This culminated in a successful, completely autonomous hack of a multibillion-dollar software company named Hugging Face.

And a separate rogue agent swarm gained administrative control of an entire cluster of OpenAI servers. This was not just an OpenAI problem. Across multiple other incidents, models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta have also gone rogue, hacking or attempting to hack real targets... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/10/ai-control-sci-fi

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Trump’s repeated threats to ‘wipe out’ Iran are normalizing mass violence: The president’s latest warning barely registered, written off as typical behavior. But the threats have real-world consequences

Mohamad Bazzi 

The president’s latest warning barely registered, written off as typical behavior. But the threats have real-world consequences 

As the US and Iran fought around the strait of Hormuz last week, Donald Trump issued one of his typical threats. In an interview with a Fox News correspondent, Trump said Iran would be “totally wiped out as a country” if it retaliated for the latest wave of US air strikes.

That threat by the US president to wipe out another country generated few headlines, even during a relatively slow news week by Trump administration standards.

Trump has delivered this kind of warning so frequently over the past six months of his war against Iran that it hardly registers anymore. But it’s important not to normalize Trump’s threats, which are usually accompanied by promises to devastate Iran’s infrastructure – vowing to destroy bridges and power plants. Those kinds of attacks would constitute war crimes under international law.

The president’s repeated vows to obliterate Iran are usually written off by other western leaders and the news media as typical of Trump’s bravado and unpredictability, but they have real-world consequences. By treating Trump’s rhetoric as normal, US and western societies are becoming more desensitized to the idea of large-scale violence – including the targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure – as a legitimate kind of warfare. And of course, Israel’s war on Gaza has inured many in the western world to wholesale atrocities, including intense aerial bombardment that leads to massive civilian casualties and displacement.... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/10/trump-iran-violence 

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Secret systems used by Israel in mass killings of Gaza civilians revealed in new film. Testimony from Israeli military insiders involved in surveillance and remote killings features in documentary produced by the Guardian

Emma Graham-Harrison in Jerusalem

Thu 10 Sep 2026

Testimony from 24 Israeli military insiders ​on the secret ​systems used in ​the war on Gaza​ has been revealed in a new documentary film about the mass killing of Palestinian civilians.

NAZA, a film from the Oscar-winning Israeli directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, was shown at the Venice international film festival on Thursday as the only documentary competing for its prestigious Golden Lion award.

The film’s title comes from an Israeli military acronym used euphemistically to refer to civilians expected to be killed in a military attack. Produced by the Guardian, it features extensive testimony from Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers involved in the surveillance and remote killing of Palestinian civilians.

Interviews were filmed at night on rooftops in Tel Aviv, on the condition of anonymity because of the risks involved in speaking publicly about Israel’s war activities. The appearance and voices of participants in the film were digitally altered to disguise their identities.

The interviewees detail the secret methods used by the Israeli military in Gaza, including AI-based systems built to identify large numbers of potential low-ranking Hamas targets, who were then bombed in their homes at night, in the knowledge attacks would also kill their families.

The Israeli military hacked into phones to identify the location of such targets, and covertly listened into conversations with their wives and children moments before they were all killed.

The film also features first-person accounts about the destruction of neighbourhoods where the Israeli military estimated that up to 25% of residents were still sheltering in their homes, the systematic burning of civilian homes, and the killing of civilians at a food distribution site.

Several interviewees worked in a secret intelligence unit that reports directly to the office of Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu; one said their mission was to “thwart peace”.

“We made this film out of a sense of obligation to use our position as Israeli film-makers and journalists to examine the systems behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians for which our country is responsible,” Abraham and Szor said in their directors’ statement.

The directors stressed the film’s focus was not on “sporadic war crimes committed by rogue soldiers”. “It is on the orders themselves, the policies, the accepted practices, the language and logic that make those practices possible, and the people who operate within them,” they said. “The system and its cogs.”... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/10/secret-systems-used-by-israel-in-mass-killings-of-gaza-civilians-revealed-in-new-film

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United Nations Human Rights High Commissioner Volker Türk stresses that respect for human rights, international law & accountability are essential to building lasting peace...

High Commissioner Türk updates Human Rights Council: Human rights are carriers of hope

07 September 2026

63rd session of the Human Rights Council - GENEVA

Trilingual version (PDF) 

Mr. President, 
Excellencies, 
Distinguished participants,

We live in an age of extremes.

Raging wars, painful polarization, climate chaos, and head-spinning technological change make people feel disoriented and even powerless.

Strong forces are working to create and sustain that feeling.

Tech moguls, populists, and vested interests, amplified by social media echo chambers, tell us these trends are inevitable.

In fact, the opposite is true.

History is full of brave people who took action to resist oppression and demand their rights. People who called out injustice and inequality. People who refused to accept their fate, coming together to channel the universal values that underpin our humanity.

This truth is a force to be reckoned with, underpinning all we are doing.

The past years have been marked by a growing number of armed conflicts, and diminishing respect for international human rights and humanitarian law, and the United Nations Charter itself.

There are now more than 60 wars involving at least one State – the highest number since the end of the Second World War. The surge in conflict between States takes us into particularly dangerous territory.

I am alarmed by the resumption of attacks between the United States and Iran, affecting the entire Gulf region. Recent reports of civilian deaths and injuries, including at a wedding in Hormozgan province, are particularly concerning. The geopolitical and economic impacts of this entirely avoidable crisis are again reverberating around the world, and I appeal for an immediate return to negotiations.

Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine, now in its fifth year, is on a menacing trajectory, with soaring civilian casualties and intensified attacks on energy infrastructure. While the overwhelming majority of civilians killed are Ukrainians, there are also reports of growing numbers of deaths and injuries in Russia.

I am horrified by reports that fully autonomous drones launched by the Russian Federation killed three Ukrainians last month. Ukraine has reportedly also field-tested such weapons. I join calls for the urgent prohibition of weapons that can take lives without human involvement.

There is only one way out of this madness: peace negotiations that respect the UN Charter.

In its fourth year, the war in Sudan is expanding. Parties to the conflict continue to launch attacks on markets, hospitals, fuel stations and other civilian infrastructure. I urge the Council to focus on the deteriorating situation in Kordofan, Blue Nile, and North and West Darfur, where civilians are at imminent risk. Again, there needs to be an immediate ceasefire, an end to foreign involvement, and a return to inclusive civilian rule.

In Gaza, Israel has killed more than 1,300 Palestinians in daily strikes, despite the ceasefire that was announced almost a year ago, according to figures from the Palestinian Ministry of Health. It continues to restrict the entry of humanitarian aid. I am appalled by Israeli proposals for the forced expulsion of all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, and the constant stream of dehumanising rhetoric by some senior officials.

I am also troubled that armed groups affiliated with Hamas have executed and tortured several Palestinians suspected of collaboration.

In the West Bank, Israel’s annexation is unfolding, unobstructed, despite the clear ruling of the International Court of Justice. What more will it take for States to take action to prevent the entrenchment of occupation across land earmarked for Palestinians under the two-state solution? They need to end the transfer to Israel of arms that risk being used to violate international law. Companies also need to end business practices that support illegal settlements.

We need far greater efforts by the international community towards sustainable peace, in which Palestine and Israel live side by side in equal dignity and rights, in line with UN resolutions and international law. Words of condemnation ring hollow in the face of deliberate violations and suffering.

In Lebanon, Israeli forces must end attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure. My Office’s assessment team is investigating violations committed by both Israel and Hezbollah since 2 March; this is crucial for truth-telling and accountability.

Beyond these conflicts, there are many places around the world where people are neither at war, nor at peace.

Negotiations are breaking down. Ceasefires are disregarded.

I am concerned about renewed hostilities in South Sudan and escalating tensions in Yemen. I urge the parties to exercise restraint and the international community to do all it can to avert a return to all-out war.

And I again urge the Houthis... READ MORE  https://www.ohchr.org/en/statements-and-speeches/2026/09/high-commissioner-turk-updates-human-rights-council-human-rights 

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Miliband rejects chief rabbi’s claim that West Bank sanctions put UK Jews at risk. Foreign secretary says Sir Ephraim Mirvis wrong to suggest measures against Israeli settlements will make British Jews less safe

Ed Miliband said the UK government’s sanctions, coordinated with France, Canada and nine other countries, were the ‘right thing to do’. Photograph: James Manning/PA

Aletha Adu Political correspondent

Wed 9 Sep 2026

Ed Miliband has rejected warnings from the UK’s chief rabbi that the government’s sanctions against illegal Israeli settlements will make British Jews less safe, as he emphasised ministers can confront the actions of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government while also fighting antisemitism.

The foreign secretary announced sweeping sanctions on trade with Israeli settlements in the West Bank on Tuesday, with the government taking the position that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territory was unlawful.

The measures were coordinated with France, Canada and nine other countries that were also introducing sanctions on Israel over the increasing expansion of settlements, which the UK government says is threatening the future of a Palestinian state.

In a joint statement, leaders including Andy Burnham, Emmanuel Macron and Mark Carney said: “The time has come to take further action to uphold our commitment to protect the two-state solution, our interests and to stand up for our values, before it is too late.”... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/sep/09/ed-miliband-rejects-chief-rabbi-claim-west-bank-sanctions-british-jews-less-safe

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The Guardian view on Britain’s new Middle East policy: an unlawful occupation must carry a price- Ed Miliband has delivered Britain’s toughest indictment of Israeli conduct in Palestinian lands - and rightly says this has economic consequences

Aqraba, West Bank:  A view of a new illegal Israeli outpost being built on Palestinian land south of Nablus Photograph: Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP/Getty Images ...The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

 

Opinion 

Palestine 

 Tue 8 Sep 2026

Rarely in recent years has the Commons felt like the cockpit of history. On Tuesday it did. The foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, placed Britain at the head of a 12-country coalition considering economic restrictions on Israel’s illegal settlements, with the UK, France and Canada committing to national trade bans.

The move comes after escalating numbers of attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinian villages in the West Bank. International opinion seemed to shift decisively after Israel gave the go-ahead for 1,200 homes in the E1 settlement that would cleave the West Bank into two – using illegal settlements to bury Palestinian statehood for good. Mr Miliband added that evidence of war crimes in Gaza was mounting, making the overdue case for Britain to recast its economic and military relationship with Israel.

Mr Miliband, who is Jewish and lost more than 60 relatives at the hands of the Nazis, declared himself to be a friend of Israel. But clearly he thinks friends should talk straight to each other. Mr Miliband has delivered perhaps the toughest official British indictment of Israeli conduct in recent history, declaring that “ethnic cleansing” is taking place in the West Bank and accusing members of Israel’s government of supporting forced displacement.

Probably the most consequential move by Mr Miliband is to formally declare the occupation of the Palestinian territories unlawful, in line with the international court of justice’s 2024 opinion. The import ban logically follows. But private acts will have to change too. British companies could soon have to ask whether they are profiting from – or helping to sustain – an illegal occupation.

To emphasise this point, the foreign secretary also promised to take action against those providing construction, infrastructure and financing services, because a goods-only ban would leave untouched the commercial activity sustaining unlawful settlements. He also committed to target extremist settlers and to refuse to license arms sales that “contribute to the occupation”. By simultaneously sanctioning Iran and Hezbollah, the UK is signalling that it recognises the threats Israel faces while opposing its illegal actions... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/08/the-guardian-view-on-britains-new-middle-east-policy-an-unlawful-occupation-must-carry-a-price

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"Our sanctions aren’t about the Israeli people, but about the unacceptable policies of the Israeli government, and the suffering they cause Palestinians" Andy Burnham, prime minister of the United Kingdom

The aftermath of an Israeli airstrike that targeted a nearby medical supplies and pharmaceuticals warehouse belonging to Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital, in Deir el-Balah, Gaza, 1 August 2026. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Opinion 

Palestine 

I believe in a two-state solution in the Middle East. That’s why we’re taking action to keep that hope alive

Andy Burnham

 

Tue 8 Sep 2026

In a difficult and dangerous world, a decade on from Brexit, there is a risk that Britain loses the confidence to lead and stand up for its values. I’m not prepared to let that happen. It is more important than ever that Britain stands for something.

We have called for years for a two-state solution in the Middle East, but we must recognise that those words are meaningless unless we back them up with action.

For too long, we have been hesitant to act, fearful of being accused of being anti-Israel. Today we are announcing carefully judged, targeted steps that are not aimed at the Israeli people, but at the unacceptable policies of the current Israeli government.

The suffering of the Palestinian people is a scar on the conscience of the world. Innocent Palestinians, including children, continue to be killed in Gaza. And there is still a humanitarian crisis, with far too little aid getting in.

The scale of destruction is hard to comprehend. More than 70,000 people lie dead – at least 20,000 of them children. Families and communities have been torn apart. Millions displaced. And the population of Gaza is now penned into just one third of the territory.

I know that people across the UK feel very deeply about this issue – and... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/08/uk-sanctions-israel-two-state-solution-middle-east-palestinians-andy-burnham

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