In a week that marks 25 years since 9/11, Americans paused to pay tribute. Six bells tolled to signify six fatal moments in New York, at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania, with a seventh bell rung this year to commemorate those who later died from 9/11-related illnesses.
The private ceremony for families of the victims and dignitaries sparked controversy, with a 100,000-strong petition against the attendance of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. We’ll ask who gets the right to remember. And look at how al-Qaeda has fragmented and track where it has morphed a quarter of a century on.
It’s been a week in which relations between the UK and Israel hit a new low. Britain’s new Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband, accused the Israeli government of turning a blind eye to “settler terrorism” and ethnic cleansing in the occupied West Bank, and, alongside France and Canada, announced a ban on the import of any Israeli goods coming from the settlements. “Outrageous lies, a morally distorted stunt,” said Gideon Sa’ar, Israel’s Foreign Minister. “A grave miscalculation,” said President Isaac Herzog. Within hours, Israel closed the British consulate in East Jerusalem and kicked out UK staff from a security training mission in Ramallah, along with an aid coordination team for Gaza. No comment from the White House. We’ll discuss whether the new sanctions can help stop settler expansion, or whether they provide a pre-election PR gift for Benjamin Netanyahu…
And it’s been a week of headlines warning of the grave risks of AI from people inside the leading labs, as researchers estimated the odds of humanity being wiped out within three and a half years! Up to a ten per cent likelihood was the forecast of Evan Hubinger, a senior researcher at Anthropic, who was responding to a similarly apocalyptic viral tweet posted by Jacob Coxon, a former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher who resigned this week, accusing his former employers of acting irresponsibly. His thread, which had more than 153 million views, warns that AI could wipe out all humans by the end of the decade, and that the tech giants racing for AI superintelligence supremacy are gambling with our lives in the process.
Produced by Gavin Lee, Margot Loizillon, Théo Vareille, Daniel Whittington and Laura Burloux
