Polls ahead of Brazil’s 2026 presidential election on Sunday point to a likely runoff between Lula da Silva and Flávio Bolsonaro, son of convicted coup plotter and longtime Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro. Stephanie Weatherbee Brito of the International People’s Assembly joins Zoe Alexandra and Rania Khalek from São Paulo to unpack what’s at stake in Latin America’s most consequential election this year.

The mobilization that drove Lula’s past campaigns has cooled, Weatherbee Brito explains, under the narrative that his Workers’ Party (PT) is bringing Brazil back to normal. But peoples movements across the country are frustrated. She breaks down Flávio’s links to the Banco Master scandal – and explains why they may not be enough to bring him down in a tight race likely to be decided by annulled votes. And with brother Eduardo lobbying the White House from Florida for sanctions against Lula’s government, Weatherbee Brito says US interference in the election is a given:

“I do think that if Lula loses this election, it effectively marks the end of an era for the PT. Of course the United States is invested in that outcome.”

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Chinese President Xi Jinping “holds all the cards” as he meets with Trump on Thursday, says Amanda Yee, host of BreakThrough News’ The China Report. She joins Zoe Alexandra and Rania Khalek to break down Xi’s first White House visit in 11 years. 

With Trump facing a massively unpopular war on Iran, surging inflation, growing resistance to ICE terror – and with US midterms weeks away – Washington wants quick deals it can sell as big wins. But Yee says Beijing is playing a longer game, with massive implications for the global future. Take AI: Washington’s Pax Silica forces allies to pick sides, while Beijing’s open model is available to all and centered on the Global South. Two systems, representing “the choice that’s in front of the world right now.”

Despite a stated pivot away from China as a military priority, Yee points to Latin America and Iran as proxy fronts where the Trump administration continues to target Beijing. Meanwhile the military encirclement of China continues, from US bases in South Korea, Okinawa and the Philippines, to Japan’s remilitarization and expanding war games like RIMPAC and Freedom Shield. 

But Yee says “the Cold War on China is a bipartisan affair.” From TikTok to Huawei to BYD, she traces the pattern of trumping up national security threats to mask efforts to protect US companies from competition. It’s all part of the same Red Scare targeting BT News, subpoenaed by the House Ways and Means Committee in an effort to paint anti-war voices as Chinese assets.

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Why is Pakistan’s military so afraid of Imran Khan? With Islamabad on lockdown and 35,000 additional troops deployed to stop the September 27 march in support of the imprisoned ex-prime minister. Junaid S. Ahmad, professor of religion and world politics and director of the Center for Study of Islam and Decoloniality, tells Rania Khalek and Zoe Alexandra the 2022 US-backed regime-change operation meant to neutralize the country’s most popular politician instead gave rise to a movement bigger than Khan himself: a new opposition coalition, TTAP, including the left-wing Awami Workers Party, as Khan’s PTI party has shattered the army’s legitimacy in Punjab.

Ahmad says Pakistan, under military rule in all but name, has become “nothing less than a police state.” Its only legitimacy, he says, comes from Washington and Rawalpindi, the home of the army’s headquarters. And with past demonstrations ending in massacres and the Shehbaz Sharif-Asim Munir regime telling hospitals to prepare for a “mass-casualty event,” Ahmad explains why this Sunday’s march has gone global, with solidarity protests planned from Washington to London to Kuala Lumpur, and why Khan refuses to call it off, even as his sisters and wife are jailed.

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Ed Sheeran picked the wrong side on Palestine, and it’s blowing up his career. But as Irish Palestinian activist, author, and influencer Alana Hadid tells Zoe Alexandra, billionaire Zionist Robert Kraft’s push to axe Macklemore from the Loop Tour for speaking out for Gaza at MetLife Stadium is real-time evidence of a “huge cultural shift” in US public opinion on Palestine. With cultural capital and actual capital now aligning against the tour, ticket refunds are looming, and the crew is reportedly walking too.

Hadid unpacks Macklemore’s sacrifice to make this critical tidal wave happen, and why it matters that Aaron Rowe, Lukas Graham, Beoga and FINNEAS are all Irish, versus Sheeran’s “spiritually Irish” claims now fueling mockery online. She slams the propaganda that’s been spread for years – that you can stay “neutral” on the Gaza genocide but not on Ukraine or BLM – and explains why Israel’s propaganda playbook is finally falling apart.

“Culture is the shift. And artists are at the center of this.”

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AI could kill every human on Earth by the end of the decade. If it sounds like a sci-fi headline, that’s the point, says Dr. Thejas Wesley, postdoctoral associate at MIT. He joins Rania Khalek and Zoe Alexandra to unpack why Anthropic researchers Evan Hubinger, Samuel Marks, and Jacob Coxon – who resigned this week to go public – are sounding the alarm now, as competition from Chinese open-weight models like Kimi K3 heats up and Anthropic heads into its IPO.

Wesley argues the “rogue AI agents” framing coming out of both Anthropic and OpenAI (last week from CEO Sam Altman himself) is less a scientific warning than a coordinated business strategy, recasting corporate recklessness and unregulated competition as an alien invasion, rather than what it actually is: a series of choices made by executives chasing profits. He points to OpenAI’s Hugging Face incident earlier this summer: rather than nascent digital consciousness breaking free, this was OpenAI shipping software without basic safety guardrails, following the same corporate cost-cutting logic behind disasters like the East Palestine, Ohio train derailment or the BP Deepwater Horizon spill. As polling shows 71% of Americans oppose new data centers, and 68% support stricter AI regulation, Wesley outlines Bernie Sanders’s proposed sovereign wealth fund plan and ban on AI superintelligence, versus Elon Musk’s counter: letting a small “cabal of technofascists” govern AI development themselves. Wesley says the real fix isn’t billionaires regulating themselves; it’s public, democratic control over a technology with very real life or death consequences for humanity.

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“A far-right party with roots in Holocaust complicity is now Germany’s most pro-Israel political force, with AfD winning nearly half the vote in Saxony-Anhalt’s state election. Germany’s political establishment is calling it a shock; anti-fascist activist Phillipp Slanina says it isn’t one.

Support for Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) was roughly halved in what analysts are calling an AfD testing ground for more state elections this fall. Slanina argues the party isn’t the anti-establishment political outsider it styles itself as. It was built from inside the center, founded by both conservatives and liberals before neo-Nazi factions moved in and took over its core, and its rise has been fueled by CDU and SPD’s commitment to neoliberalism. 

Slanina says the same parties now claiming to present a “firewall” against the far right actually mainstreamed the platform that ushered in victory for AfD: on immigration, on militarization, on cuts to social services, on the crackdown on Palestine solidarity. He explains that by branding itself as the most aggressively pro-Israel parliamentary bloc and backing unconditional support for Tel Aviv, AfD can get away with claiming it can’t possibly be neo-Nazi – even while pushing some of the harshest crackdowns on pro-Palestinian speech in Europe.

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“South Lebanon has become Gaza.”

Breakthrough News’s Rania Khalek tears apart Netanyahu’s “security” strategy that’s killed 27 people in Lebanon over the last three days, with relentless Israeli attacks on the country’s south designed to render entire villages unreturnable –  paving the way for future annexation and “Greater Israel” expansion. Lebanon’s government provides the political cover, with President Joseph Aoun condemning Israel’s strikes while remaining committed to the US-brokered framework that cements its occupation.

The so-called November 2024 “ceasefire” has never functioned as one: Israel violated it more than 15,000 times before Hezbollah entered the US-Israeli war on Iran in March, at which point Israel ramped up its attacks, killing over 4,300 people in Lebanon since then and occupying 600 square kilometers of the country, according to Israel’s own figures. Meanwhile new data shows 65% of the destruction in the south occurred after April. And, Khalek says, Hezbollah has barely responded: “It’s totally one-sided at this point.” 

Over the weekend, Israel leveled a hospital in Nabatieh al-Fawqa, then tweeted, without evidence, that it was a Hezbollah “command and control center” — the same justification used repeatedly for now-normalized hospital strikes in Gaza. And Israeli forces have pushed into Sunni-majority Kfar Shuba, in a pattern Khalek compares to West Bank-style occupation. She also draws a direct line to Syria, where Israel continues striking a country that has never once fired on it.

“Israel is completely out of control,” Khalek says — and still faces no real consequences for it.

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As Israeli plans emerge to expel all two million Palestinians from Gaza and Itamar Ben-Gvir shares what can only be described as genocidal AI fantasy videos on X, Mouin Rabbani, non-resident fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies, says Israeli election season means everyone from Ben-Gvir to Israel Katz to Bezalel Smotrich to Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to one-up the other, with the most extreme proposals for the mass forcible transfer of Palestinians from their homeland, all to score points with voters. Rabbani says the global impunity Tel Aviv has enjoyed for decades has taught Israel there’s no cost and no accountability for war crimes against humanity, all with unflinching US support.

Without ruling out Trump greenlighting Israel to “march into Gaza City to load families onto trucks bound for the Egyptian Sinai,” Rabbani says the more likely scenario is Israel continuing to make Gaza unfit for human habitation, leaving Palestinians a “choice” between leaving or eventual death. In Zionist parlance, that’s called voluntary transfer.

Rabbani explains how the “Board of Trump” is camouflage enabling Israel to continue annihilating Gaza, comparing this to the Oslo Accords of 1993, which set the same double-standard pattern: Palestinians held to the letter of the agreement while Israel keeps expanding settlements unchecked — a pattern Rabbani says is playing out in Lebanon today, too.

But Western governments are finding it increasingly impossible to ignore changing public sentiment on Palestine — from last summer’s wave of Palestine recognitions to the UK’s new settlement ban. The task now, Rabbani says, is making sure these first steps become binding policy to end the genocide, not just symbolic gestures.

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Meta would rather pay out billions to teen mental health programs than risk losing teen addicts on Instagram. 

The day before running full-page ads across the New York Times, Washington Post and LA Times calling on competitors TikTok and YouTube to adopt tougher child safety standards, Meta settled a landmark lawsuit brought by 52 state attorneys general accusing Instagram of intentionally addictive design. Community organizer and parent advocate Amanda Getty says Meta’s efforts to spin its predatory business model as a responsible parenting issue are meant to distract users: Big Tech’s bottom line depends on hooking teens as young as possible. 

Meta denied knowingly exposing minors to serious harm and misleading the public, but agreed to pay up to $18 billion over 10 years – workable for a company that made $60 billion in profit last year alone. Getty points to Meta’s track record of failing to implement – and actively lobbying against –  the kinds of guardrails this settlement ostensibly imposes, including a 2024 investigation that found only a fraction of Instagram Teen Account safety protocols were functional. Meanwhile teens are still being bullied and nudged toward features associated with predatory grooming. Getty cites a 2018 internal strategy memo instructing Meta employees to “win big with teens” by bringing them in “as tweens.”

Meta fears losing young users to less regulated platforms; Getty argues that’s why it’s begging Google and TikTok to get in line, all the while shifting responsibility onto parents for a business model built on addiction by design.

 “There’s no version of reform here that leads to an actual win for parents,” Getty says, arguing the fight isn’t about better parental controls – it’s about confronting economic predation targeting kids at scale

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