The irony of OpenAI crying foul over spying

Al Jazeera English

Americans can rest easy – for the moment, at least. The fine folks at the Federal Bureau of Investigation have thwarted a major national security threat.

On October 9, the FBI arrested 35-year-old engineer Abdulrahman Alfozan, a Saudi citizen employed at the California-based artificial intelligence company OpenAI, which makes the chatbot ChatGPT and describes its corporate mission as ensuring that “artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity”.

A press release from the United States Department of Justice said that Alfozan was accused of installing a “surreptitious audio recording device” in an executive conference room at the OpenAI offices in San Francisco. . . .

The covert device was reported to have been concealed in toilet paper and attached to the back of a television monitor. The Gizmodo website has noted with amusement that, despite being cast as a “sophisticated” spying apparatus, the device in question can in fact be easily ordered online “for the low low price of $13.99”. 

If convicted, Alfozan faces up to five years in jail and a fine of $250,000. Now, some of you may still be asking what the big deal is - and why the US government is acting like it's 1950 and the Soviets are stealing our nuclear secrets.

The spectacle becomes all the more curious when we consider that the company up in arms over the alleged attempted theft of its technology owes much of its existence – and massive valuation – to stealing stuff from people. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Genocide Treated as Afterthought by Media on Third Anniversary of October 7 Attacks

FAIR

October 7 marked three years since the Hamas attacks on Israel that left some 1,200 people dead and 251 taken hostage. It also marks three years since Israel launched its genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip with material and moral support from the United States, with an official death toll surpassing 74,000—including more than 20,000 children.

The official death toll is no doubt an underestimate, given the large number of missing and disappeared persons. (When Western corporate media outlets cite this toll, they often feel compelled to qualify it—e.g., as the BBC [10/7/26] had it, the “war between Israel and Hamas has killed more than 74,200 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, whose overall figures are seen as accurate by the UN”—lest, presumably, they be seen as taking Hamas’s word for it that the figure is so high.)

The killing spree continues in spite of an alleged ceasefire implemented last year, although the Jerusalem Post (10/5/26) charitably reckons that “less than 50%” of the casualties have been civilians.

The genocide was not, of course, a sudden violent outburst that came out of nowhere. Rather, it was a climax of genocidal momentum that had been building since the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, which was itself achieved via the destruction of some 530 Palestinian villages, the killing of 15,000 Palestinians, and the expulsion of three-quarters of a million more.

Now, three years later, the corporate media still can’t bring themselves to refer to the genocide of Palestinians as such—notwithstanding it being a pretty textbook case of the phenomenon. Predictably, then, the third anniversary of the commencement of mass slaughter and devastation in Gaza has been cast in corporate media as an afterthought to the anniversary of the Hamas attacks. READ MORE AT FAIR. 

The double standards of a failed execution

 Al Jazeera English

Let’s pretend that the Islamic Republic of Iran had undertaken to execute a 50-year-old woman for a crime committed when she was an 18-year-old.

Let’s say the crime was murdering a fellow female student. Let’s also say that the woman slated for execution had suffered rape and sexual abuse since she was a toddler and had been diagnosed with mental illness, later admitting: “It took me numerous years to even realise the gravity of what I’d done.”

A fair amount of international uproar would presumably ensue, alleging Iran’s barbarity in choosing to kill a woman with such a troubled past. The United States would no doubt be at the helm of the criticism.

And yet no such uproar has transpired since Wednesday’s attempted execution in the US state of Tennessee of 50-year-old Christa Pike, to whom all of the above details pertain in reality. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Corporate Media Don’t Understand the Houthis—and Don’t Want You to, Either

FAIR

It’s that time of year again: The Houthis are making the news—and so is the Western corporate media narrative that surrounds them.

The Houthis—formally Ansar Allah, “Supporters of God”—are from the Zaydi Shia minority in Yemen, and have governed the most populous sections of the country, including the capital Sanaa, since the start of Yemen’s civil war in 2014.

Like many a “civil” war, the conflict has plenty of outside participants—most notably Saudi Arabia, which led a coalition of Arab states (with the backing of the United States) in an effort to bomb and starve Yemen away from Houthi control.

In 2022, a tenuous truce took hold between the Houthis and the Saudi-backed Yemeni government, but the Saudi blockade of the country was never lifted.

This July, the Houthis declared their own naval blockade of Saudi Arabia, in response to the Saudi siege and resumed bombing of Yemen. In a rapid September offensive, the group completed its takeover of Yemen’s Red Sea Coast and the strategic Bab al-Mandeb strait, putting Saudi oil shipping operations in a decisive bind. The Houthis have also launched missiles at Saudi Arabia in response to Saudi attacks on the country.

The offensive has prompted a slew of media interventions to ostensibly explain to everyone who the Houthis are. The New York Times (9/23/26), for instance, ran the headline “Who Are the Houthis, and What Do They Want?”; the BBC (9/24/26) ran the very same title, minus the comma. READ MORE AT FAIR.

 

To the victor belong Venezuela’s spoils: Delcy Rodriguez’s UNGA about-face

 Al Jazeera English

Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodriguez took to the stage yesterday at the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York City to deliver a rather bland speech, in which she thanked United States President Donald Trump for resuming “diplomatic relations and cooperation” with Venezuela.

This was a different vibe, to be sure, than the one she opted for at the same venue in September 2019, when, as vice president under Nicolas Maduro, she accused the US of perpetrating “economic terrorism” that did not require the use of bombs “but rather through banks and insurance companies”.

Denouncing the global superpower’s militarisation of international relations and punishment of millions of innocent people “in order to apply regime change doctrines and steal other nations’ resources”, the Rodriguez of 2019 went on to cite Venezuelan economic losses to the tune of $130bn between 2015 and 2018 alone on account of US sanctions.

She additionally offered her opinion that the domination of the US political system by “plutocratic minorities” made the country unqualified to impose its model on other countries.

Seven years later, US plutocracy is going strong with Trump at the helm – the same Trump alongside whom a grinning Rodriguez appeared in a photograph taken in New York on Tuesday, less than nine months after he oversaw regime change in Venezuela by kidnapping Maduro.

The kidnapped president is now also in New York, albeit in jail, and is scheduled to stand trial in June 2027. This despite his attempts to remind everyone that, as a sitting head of state, his prosecution in a foreign court contravenes international law. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Flock cameras are the latest weapon of America's post-9/11 surveillance state

 Middle East Eye

In December 2021, nearly two years into the coronavirus pandemic, I flew from Mexico, which had become my de facto place of residence, to the United States, my country of birth and the place I had spent nearly two decades avoiding like the plague - the short explanation for which was that I found it incredibly creepy.

Arriving at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, I discovered that things had become even creepier than usual when, in the immigration line for US citizens, I was told to simply look at the camera rather than produce my passport.

A sign on the wall sponsored by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) featured a smiling grey-haired man and the assurance to air travellers that this was all in their best interest: "Our policies on privacy couldn't be more transparent. Biometric Facial Comparison. Faster meets more secure."

Of course, hardly anyone bats an eye anymore at such technology. Last year, the US government's Federal Register cited CBP's calculation that only about 0.13 percent of US citizens arriving in the country by air opted out of biometric processing. . . .

A quarter of a century after 9/11 set the stage for the present moment, it's safe to say that some bipartisan hullabaloo over Flock cameras is not enough to stop the surveillance state.

And as we hurtle down the camera-lined highway to doomsday, it's way too late to put on the brakes. READ MORE AT  MIDDLE EAST EYE.

9/11 at 25: Trump finds new targets for America's endless war on terror

 Middle East Eye

On 11 September 2001, I was driving to work on the freeway in Austin, Texas when I heard the news on the radio that planes had crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

As I went about nearly crashing my own car while trying to phone my best friend in New York City, I remember thinking that we were going to be hearing a lot about this particular date for a long time to come.

Sure enough, a quarter of a century has now passed since 9/11, and the events of that day continue to shape daily existence in the US - as trite as it sounds to say it.

Those of us who are old enough may remember the pre-9/11 panorama, when it was still possible to go through airport security with your water bottle and shampoo and Muslims could go to mosque without being pursued by FBI informants.

And while the US was never exactly all it was cracked up to be in terms of democracy and respect for basic rights, 9/11 definitively obliterated the right to privacy and other civil liberties upon which the country was supposedly founded. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Is Trump making Latin America great again?

 Al Jazeera English

The calamitous war on Iran and continuing failure to rein in Israel have brought United States President Donald Trump collapsing approval ratings and growing public animosity at home. Yet there is one area of his foreign policy that is perhaps serving as a consolation: Latin America.

Over the past year and a half, a slew of right-wing leaders has taken power in the region through electoral victories for which Trump has more or less taken personal credit. These leaders appear eager to facilitate the resurgence of US power projection in what Trump has, with characteristic pompousness, called the “Donroe Doctrine”. This, to put it mildly, is not great news for the average Latin American.

One need only glance at the extensive history of US collaboration with right-wing Latin American regimes in the ostensible fight against leftist politics and “narco-terror” to assume that what is coming will entail a whole lot of civilian casualties.

In Colombia, for example, where far-right millionaire businessman and former criminal defence lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella was just sworn in, the US track record of funnelling heaps of money to a homicidal army joined at the hip with right-wing paramilitary outfits produced a good deal of bloodshed. And what do you know: De la Espriella amassed a portion of his lawyerly fortune defending paramilitary leaders.

In addition to having charmingly pledged to “disembowel” the left, de la Espriella is obsessed with jumpstarting fracking and pursuing other environmentally destructive projects. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel's 'pilot zones' turn Lebanese sovereignty on its head

MIDDLE EAST EYE

Imagine, for a moment, that Country A is conducting an illegal occupation of Country B and regularly slaughtering its inhabitants despite an alleged ceasefire agreement.

By any modicum of logic, a resolution to the situation would first require Country A to stop occupying and slaughtering people in Country B, right?

Wrong - at least if Country A happens to be Israel, which has never felt compelled to abide by international legal or moral standards. Israeli impunity is most egregiously on display in the Gaza Strip, where Israel's genocidal war has killed at least 73,375 Palestinians - or one out of every 33 people - in less than three years, with thousands more buried under the rubble.

Now, Lebanon has also been cast in a Country B role with the help of the so-called "Trilateral Framework" signed in June between the Lebanese government, Israel, and Israel's genocidal sponsors in the United States.

As per the fanciful hallucinations of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the agreement "establishes a clear and structured process to restore Lebanon's sovereignty, disarm Hezbollah and dismantle its terrorist infrastructure, and enable Israel to return to its borders once that threat to its citizens is removed". READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Is Spain being punished?

Al Jazeera English

Earlier this week, at least 57 migrants died while trying to cross the border from Morocco into Ceuta, one of two Spanish enclaves located on the African mainland. In a span of just 24 hours, tens of thousands of people entered Ceuta in what Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez denounced as a “violation of territorial integrity”.

Many of the migrants interviewed in news reports claimed they had been encouraged to undertake the journey by social media posts. 

Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, wasted no time in taking to X to whine that “Spain, which never misses an opportunity to lecture Israel, has declared a state of emergency in Ceuta following the crisis over its immigration policy.”

Indeed, the Sanchez government has been increasingly critical of Israel, labelling it a “genocidal state” and cancelling major arms deals accordingly. In 2024, Spain recognised the State of Palestine.

Now, in the aftermath of the Ceuta episode, Israel – a country where hypocrisy might as well be declared an official state policy – has jumped at the chance to call the Spaniards out for alleged hypocritical behaviour. In his X post, Danon went on to argue that “maybe before [Spain] continues lecturing us, it’s time it explained to the world why it still maintains colonial enclaves in Africa.”

Of course, you can’t get much more hypocritical than complaining about “colonial enclaves” when your own country is perpetrating not only a straight-up genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip but also a brutal colonial occupation that has given way to a de facto annexation of the West Bank. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.