Do you remember Megyn Kelly? I once walked past her in a Chicago O’Hare bathroom in 2016, shortly after Donald Trump had won his first presidential election, and was momentarily stopped in my tracks by both her nuclear-grade charisma and her pixie cut. For a woman to have short hair on Fox News, where Kelly was a star anchor at the time, seemed as seditious to the network’s established order as reading Judith Butler or Karl Marx live on air. But this was a moment during which Kelly seemed to be leaning into the role of crusader for women—speaking out about being sexually harassed by the former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes and so inflaming Trump with her rigorous questioning during one debate that he later insinuated on CNN that she must have had her period.
All of which makes it so disconcerting, 10 years later, to see Kelly now, on her daily SiriusXM and YouTube show, cursing and sneering with long barrel curls and the gusto of someone hosting not a discussion of polling data but a Two Minutes Hate. “I’m just gonna be honest, she’s not the most attractive gal,” Kelly said on Monday, discussing the anonymous woman who has filed a lawsuit detailing her alleged gang rape at Cornell University. (The men named in the lawsuit have denied any wrongdoing.) “She’s extremely”—here Kelly screwed up her face in disgust—“beefy in, like, her arms and her legs. She has a whole video online talking about her cankles. And she possibly enjoyed being admired. This is how women make these mistakes. Admired, wanted—some women even foolishly say loved—by these guys at Cornell. This is probably a first for her. She’s probably thrilled to be so admired because she clearly didn’t grow up the incredibly beautiful one.”
[Sophie Gilbert: Is college getting less safe for women?]
We’ve seen some drastic heel turns in the media over the past few decades, but none quite as morally appalling as a former self-described advocate for female empowerment suggesting that a woman in this situation might have craved the attention because no one would have wanted to have sex with her otherwise. (Not to mention the contentions that the woman Kelly seems to be referring to, whose name has been leaked by some commentators, is not actually Jane Doe, based on her age and the fact that she would have been too young at the time to attend college.) Normally, I have a pretty strong constitution for this kind of bad-faith rage bait. But Kelly’s display this week of what I can describe only as performative hysteria has been hard to watch. Less than a minute into her show on Monday, she invoked the Salem witch trials. Twenty-three minutes in came her first pronounced use of the word fuck (I counted seven in total). That the whole performance was interspersed with ad reads for supplements and a tiny avatar of Kelly pointing giddily at the “Subscribe” button just added to the cognitive dissonance. It felt like watching morning television in Gilead.
I’ve been stuck all week on the question of how much of Kelly’s performance these days is attention-seeking behavior for the YouTube algorithm and how much is reflective of what she actually believes. Kelly, 55, grew up outside of Albany, where she also went to law school, becoming an editor at the Albany Law Review. She was an attorney for almost a decade, but has said that watching live newscasts on 9/11 inspired her to change careers and become a TV reporter. She was hired full-time at Fox News in 2004. Before long—according to her allegations—Ailes began making inappropriate comments, such as how sexy he imagined her bras must be. In January 2006, Kelly claimed, Ailes tried to kiss her; after his third attempt, she said she got up and walked out of his office. (Ailes denied Kelly’s allegations; he died in 2017.) Three months later, Kelly made a name for herself with her skeptical coverage of the Duke lacrosse team’s alleged gang rape of an erotic dancer. (The woman in question eventually admitted to fabricating the assault.)
All of this matters, I think, because it communicates to what extent Kelly’s apparent worldview—where she herself can face sexual harassment due to patriarchal power structures that protect and even reward abusive men, but other women are likely lying—has been shaped by her rise and fall on TV news. In 2016, she declined in an interview with NPR to call herself a feminist. (She dislikes the label, she said, as though it’s just a branding issue.) Her 2016 book, Settle for More, was published just a week after Trump won the presidential election, and became a No. 1 New York Times best seller. Reviews were lukewarm, perhaps because of the news environment: “For all the disgust that she claims to feel for the misogyny and male entitlement” that seemed to be ramping back up in the national culture, Isaac Chotiner wrote in Slate, “and for all the personal harm it caused her, our bleak future is one in which Megyn Kelly is likely to find herself right at home.”
But things took a downward turn when Kelly left the Fox fold. In 2017 she was poached by NBC News, which offered her an annual salary reported to be more than $20 million to host a daytime talk show, Megyn Kelly Today, and a Sunday-night news magazine, which was criticized for softball interviews with Vladimir Putin and Alex Jones and ultimately canceled. Megyn Kelly Today didn’t fare much better—Kelly, with her flinty self-possession, was criticized for being too chilly for daytime TV. During her first week, she awkwardly grilled Jane Fonda about whether she’d had plastic surgery while Fonda was promoting a movie next to her co-star Robert Redford. (“We really want to talk about that?” Fonda responded, after an agonizing few seconds of icy silence.) In October 2018, Megyn Kelly Today was canceled when Kelly defended blackface in a segment on Halloween costumes. Soon, she was dropped by her agency, CAA. A few months later, her NBC contract expired.
This moment seems to have influenced Kelly’s current persona. Public humiliation is hard for anyone to endure, but for someone with a renegade streak (“I’ve never been a ‘pc’ kind of person,” she reportedly wrote in her apology email to NBC staffers after her blackface comments), seeing so many people celebrating her failure must have been immensely painful. By the time The Megyn Kelly Show launched as a podcast in September 2020, mid-pandemic, Kelly was snidely describing her guests as lefties, complaining about the assault allegations against the Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh, and raging at the “dishonesty” of the press covering Trump.
The pivot, whatever its reason, seems to have done what it was supposed to. Kelly has more than 4 million YouTube subscribers and The Megyn Kelly Show is one of the top podcasts in the country. Because Kelly is half-Italian and half-Irish, she told Semafor in 2024, “if you choose to watch the show, you will definitely glean something from the hand gestures and facial expressions that you might not pick up from listening alone.”
Having watched Kelly all week, I can attest to this. Although she injects real poison in her voice to rage against, say, the singer Olivia Rodrigo for expressing support for Cornell’s Jane Doe, she accompanies this with the shrugs and waves of a waiter trying to describe tonight’s special of veal parmigiana. “Olivia, in sum, you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” she said. “Shut up and stick to singing. I liked you better when you were in front of a microphone singing your weird little depressing songs. Shut UP. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
You can sense she’s imagining clips being spliced for TikTok and Instagram, and tailoring her delivery to provoke maximum indignation. As a rant, it feels much too phony—and cynical, given how fury seems to be the sole emotion that can build an audience in 2026, and the fact that Rodrigo is one of the most popular women alive. (“The only reliable way to reach mainstream or even moderate recognition against all the noise,” Rebecca Jennings wrote earlier this year in New York magazine, “is to either carpet-bomb social media with clips or to enrage wide swaths of the public.”)
But in moments, Kelly does seem to slip out of character. Although she seems perfectly happy excoriating Jane Doe, Kelly draws the line at revealing her name. “I know her name,” she said on Monday. “It’s been well publicized online. But no one in the mainstream media has said it. And as you know I’m seriously considering just saying it. And the reason I haven’t is because I don’t want to do anything to hurt this young woman, to get her hurt, or to add to the pain I’m sure she’s feeling.” Her voice is surprisingly gentle. Her hands stay down in her lap. Could it be that this woman who herself had to hire armed guards for her family after being personally targeted by Trump actually feels for someone caught in a similar nightmare? Is all this spewed-out ire and provocation really just about a reward as soul-rotting as clicks and followers? I don’t think Megyn Kelly will ever tell us, but I have my suspicions.
© Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Gary Gershoff / Getty.
Giorgio Agamben spicca per curiosità intellettuale, capacità analitiche e spirito ribelle nei confronti dell’attuale situazione sociale, politica e culturale. Di formazione poliedrica, il suo pensiero riflette l’influenza di pensatori assai diversi tra loro, Carl Schmitt, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, Max Weber, Karl Marx, Franz Kafka, Tommaso d’Aquino, Aristotele, San Paolo, Baruch Spinoza. La sua opera più importante è il monumentale Homo Sacer, in cui sviluppa una complessa quanto ambiziosa indagine filosofica sulla politica occidentale. Agamben individua una logica violenta che chiama macchina antropogenetica, in virtù della quale la vita naturale si qualifica come vita umana. Ciò gli consente di stabilire una continuità tra le teologie politiche premoderne e la biopolitica liberale contemporanea.
La pandemia ha stimolato in Agamben incisive riflessioni sulle conseguenze politiche, sociali e culturali. Le condotte di massa dimostravano, da un lato, che le società occidentali non credono che alla “nuda vita” (zòe), pronte quindi a sacrificare tutto in cambio della sicurezza. In termini schmittiani, ciò conduce a uno stato di eccezione permanente che mette in discussione i fondamenti delle democrazie liberali. Dall’altro lato, significa il trionfo della scienza sulla religione. Il sapere scientifico è secondo Agamben “la vera religione del nostro tempo” e la sua egemonia dimostra il fallimento del cattolicesimo, spogliato della dimensione veritativa spirituale a favore di un generico umanitarismo. Stiamo assistendo all’instaurazione di una teologia politica scientista, “in cui gli esseri umani credono di credere”; il suo fondamento è la “religione medica”.
Il tentativo di sostituire la religione trascendente con la scienza non è nuovo. Risale all’Illuminismo, a figure come D’Holbach, La Mettrie, Helvétius, Condorcet; poi al pensiero positivista di Auguste Comte a metà del XIX secolo. Il pensatore francese concepiva la conoscenza scientifica in senso dogmatico. Non si considerava un rivoluzionario, sebbene le sue idee abbiano avuto conseguenze rivoluzionarie. Aborriva l’anarchia prodotta dalla Rivoluzione Francese e credeva che solo la scienza potesse stabilire un “potere spirituale” (?) abbastanza forte da garantire stabilità sociale. Arrivò a dichiararsi ammiratore dei filosofi controrivoluzionari Joseph de Maistre e Louis de Bonald. Il suo modello organizzativo era la Chiesa cattolica e si considerava il papa della nuova religione “positiva” di cui gli scienziati sarebbero stati i sacerdoti. Teorizzò una sorta di provvidenzialismo storico attraverso la legge dei tre stadi – teologico, metafisico e infine positivo – i passaggi evolutivi di tutte le società civilizzate. L’impronta positivista fu molto profonda e permeò tutte le ideologie politiche dell’epoca: socialismo, liberalismo e anche conservatorismo.
Il termine scientismo fu introdotto dal filosofo, storico e filologo francese Ernest Renan, uno dei profeti della modernità nel fondamentale testo Il futuro della scienza, scritto nella temperie rivoluzionaria del 1848 ma pubblicato nel 1890. Come Comte, Renan non era un rivoluzionario. Sacerdote spretato, scandalizzò i cattolici con la Vita di Gesù, interpretazione laica e immanente della figura di Cristo. Tuttavia, la sua filosofia sociale e politica era profondamente conservatrice. Dopo la sconfitta francese a Sedan (1870) e la rivolta della Comune di Parigi (1872), pubblicò testi in cui propugnava per la Francia un regime politico analogo a quello tedesco guglielmino di Bismarck. Ne La dottrina del fascismo, Benito Mussolini e Giovanni Gentile affermarono che Renan aveva avuto illuminazioni pre-fasciste.
Renan sosteneva che la conoscenza scientifica avrebbe sostituito la religione come fondamento delle società, risolto i problemi della vita e distrutto i pregiudizi. L’ideale scientista, ottimista e progressista, ricevette pesanti critiche a fine secolo XIX con l’emergere del pensiero di Nietzsche, dell’ermeneutica, del neoidealismo, dello storicismo e del marxismo. Fu poi influenzato dalle due guerre mondiali, che mostrarono come la scienza possa produrre tanto avanzamento di civiltà quanto distruzione e nuove forme di potere. Soprattutto è incapace di offrire orizzonti di senso. Nel Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein osservava: “Sentiamo che anche se si trovassero risposte a tutte le possibili domande scientifiche, i nostri problemi vitali non sarebbero minimamente risolti”. Per il filosofo austriaco “il mistico”, l’inverificabile, resta l’ elemento decisivo dell’esperienza umana.
La scienza, per sua stessa natura e dinamica, è incapace di stabilire confini etici. Ciò è oggi evidente nei dibattiti riguardanti l’ aborto, la manipolazione genetica, i progetti per eliminare i neonati con disabilità, la maternità surrogata, il transumanesimo, l’eutanasia. Un notevole contributo allo scientismo arrivò dal Circolo di Vienna, sorto nel 1924, le cui figure principali furono Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, A.J. Ayer. Il volume collettivo Positivismo logico sosteneva un empirismo radicale, ritenendo priva di senso qualsiasi metafisica. Solo il principio induttivo e la verifica potevano avere legittimità scientifica. Il positivismo logico declinò alla fine degli anni Cinquanta a causa della sua debolezza epistemologica.
Lo scientismo continua ad avere ferventi sostenitori. Alcuni anni fa è stato pubblicato Elogio dello scientismo del filosofo argentino Mario Bunge. Non della scienza, ma dello scientismo! I bersagli di Bunge sono le correnti postmarxiste della Scuola di Francoforte, la sociologia della scienza, il postmodernismo, la religione, la psicoanalisi, tutte accusate – con non poche ragioni – di irrazionalismo. Lo scientismo è la filosofia della tecnocrazia, il governo degli esperti. Ultimamente è emersa una singolare tendenza detta Illuminismo Oscuro, i cui principali esponenti sono Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen. Alcuni etichettano questa corrente intellettuale come neoreazionaria e la collegano al pensiero conservatore. Non siamo d’accordo: ricorda piuttosto le utopie scientiste del XIX e XX secolo. Lo dimostra il suo sostegno al transumanesimo, al tecnofuturismo e all’accelerazionismo. Si tratta di una nuova declinazione dello scientismo, nettamente anticonservatrice e antitradizionale. Non ha validità alcuna il tranciante giudizio di tecnofascismo (Donatella Di Cesare).
L’uomo non può rinunciare alla scienza: tutt’altro. Deve usare la ragione critica contro la teologia politica secolare e scientista per collocarla al suo autentico livello: uno strumento al servizio della specie umana. A questo proposito, è essenziale l’opera di Karl Popper, che sottolineò i limiti del neopositivismo e dello scientismo. Popper, liberale, proveniva dalla tradizione razionalista, ma dopo aver criticato il neopositivismo, si inclinò verso un “razionalismo critico”. Sostenne, utilizzando la logica matematica, che la metafisica può avere un significato. Attraverso il metodo ipotetico-deduttivo affermò che un’ipotesi non può mai essere definitivamente provata, ma al massimo “corroborata” e sottoposta al tentativo di falsificazione per provarne la validità. Cercò altresì di liberare la scienza dal dogmatismo.
Le obiezioni di Popper hanno lasciato un segno profondo nella filosofia della scienza. Senza di lui non ci sarebbe stata la svolta nel pensiero scientifico guidata da Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos e Paul Feyerabend. Con loro la scienza ritorna ciò che deve essere: un raffinato strumento. Tutte le critiche citate sarebbero sufficienti a respingere lo scientismo come alternativa filosofica, culturale e politica; eppure chiunque contraddica le sue argomentazioni viene ancora definito oscurantista, negazionista o revisionista. Temi come il cambiamento climatico, le pratiche biopolitiche, l’energia nucleare, vengono affrontati da una prospettiva dogmatica scientista. Può sussistere un consenso maggioritario su alcuni temi, ad esempio sulla questione del riscaldamento globale, ma non c’è unanimità ed il dibattito rimane assolutamente necessario. Tutto va messo in discussione.
Anche nella scienza le maggioranze non hanno necessariamente ragione. Le figure di Copernico, Galileo, Newton ed Einstein lo dimostrano. Il consenso è revocabile anche in campo scientifico. I paradigmi dominanti (Thomas Kuhn) prevalgono per un certo periodo e vengono poi sostituiti da altri. Un esempio: potrebbe apparire plausibile produrre esclusivamente auto elettriche, ma da dove verrà l’energia per caricare miliardi di batterie se l’acqua, il vento e altre risorse naturali dovessero esaurirsi? Contro la teologia politica scientista, l’antidoto è sempre la ragione critica. E un’etica aperta al trascendente.
L'articolo Contro la teologia politica scientista proviene da Blondet & Friends.
In 2017, when French voters first elected Emmanuel Macron as president, pundits hailed him as the antidote to their nation’s “decline.” The term, in the parlance of that moment, seemed to encompass a condition that was not just economic and cultural but existential: France, as an idea and ideal, was decaying as surely as its national debt was deepening.
Nearly 10 years later, as Macron’s second presidential term comes to an end, the French are nearly unanimous in their belief that their country is still on a downward slope. In a recent Ipsos-BVA poll, 85 percent of French respondents said that France was in decline, and 98 percent were dissatisfied with the present state of the country.
One might have seen such numbers in the spring of 1789, if opinion polls had existed then. In that prerevolutionary time, France was burdened with staggering debt, skyrocketing prices, and in a sclerotic state overseen by a clueless and corrupt elite. Today similar factors, together with the memory of past glory, are driving the public’s belief that France’s Fifth Republic is faltering. And declinism, in turn, seems to be fueling the rise of extremist radicals intent on remaking the republic itself.
Gallic morosity might be easy to dismiss. After all, few peoples are more inclined toward claims of national decay than the French. Members of the country’s political and intellectual elite point to auguries of its descent throughout the 19th and 20th centuries—a sweep of time punctuated by the rise and fall of authoritarian states (whether Bonapartist or Pétainist) and republican governments (from the Second to the Fifth). Charles de Gaulle’s assertion that France could not be France without la grandeur could be said to channel a certain anxiety as much as pride.
Soon after de Gaulle’s death in 1970, le déclinisme was again on the rise. Thirty years of economic growth came to an end with the global energy shocks and financial crises of that period. In 1976, the distinctly non-Gaullist president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, declared that France was no longer a fully autonomous power as it had been in the past, but was instead what commentators have described as a “world middle power”—an observation that angered his opponents across the political spectrum. An influx of immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East had helped fuel decades of industrial growth; they then became scapegoats for growing fears over national decline and disintegration.
[Eliot A. Cohen: Our oldest ally]
As the 20th century gave way to the 21st, this French fixation expanded and darkened. Following Robert Frank’s fine historical account La hantise du déclin (The Obsession With Decline), published in 1994, came works such as Nicolas Baverez’s wildly polemical 2003 tract, La France qui tombe (Falling France). And then the public appetite for books proclaiming the End Times for France grew fiercer. Pundits furiously supplied the grim prognoses—most notoriously Éric Zemmour, who a little more than a decade ago published his best-selling Le suicide français, which married xenophobic rage to potted history. The book boosted the “Great Replacement” theory, which claims that Western elites are enabling great waves of Muslim immigrants to replace les français de souche—the loaded term for those of “purely French heritage.”
Zemmour went on to found a political movement named Reconquête!, a heavy-handed reference to the medieval “reconquest” by Catholic rulers of Moorish Spain. The party remains politically marginal, but its message—that France’s immigration policies amount to national suicide—has gone mainstream. The current justice minister, Gérald Darmanin, recently proposed a three-year moratorium on legal immigration, declaring that France has reached “the limit of our capacities for integration and assimilation” of immigrants. This view, and the moratorium idea, have the approval of 63 percent of the public, judging from a CSA Institute opinion poll conducted in May.
Those numbers partly explain Marine Le Pen’s remarkable lead in polling for next spring’s presidential election. The movement she inherited from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, then called the National Front, once gathered neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, and die-hard supporters of the French colonial administration of Algeria. Now called National Rally, the party mainly demonizes Muslims in place of Jews as the source of all of France’s ills. But just last week, the party’s president, Jordan Bardella, was revealed to have spent his late teens marinating in the writings of the Holocaust denialist Alain Soral. In line with her party’s ethno-nationalist ideals, Le Pen promises a policy that she calls a “national priority,” which would give French citizens preferential treatment over noncitizens for an array of social benefits, and she has said she’d be willing to change the constitution by referendum.
The most recent Ifop-Fudicial poll, published on September 30, put Le Pen in the lead with 31 to 36 percent support. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the founder of the extreme-left party France Unbowed, is fighting for second place, at 14 to 17 percent. Like Le Pen, Mélenchon has pledged to disobey certain European Union regulations that infringe on French sovereignty; also like her, he seems to trust Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky less than Russian President Vladimir Putin; and, along with some members of Le Pen’s party, he enjoys flirting with anti-Semitic tropes. Both candidates exercise full control of the parties they either created or re-created and seem to satisfy the public’s broad desire, according to a 2019 Ipsos poll, for a “strong leader who will break the rules.”
Le Pen, the reactionary, and Mélenchon, the revolutionary, share a common goal: to bury the French Republic in its current form. Mélenchon seeks to replace the hybrid regime of the Fifth Republic, which fuses presidential and parliamentary institutions, with a Sixth Republic dominated solely by Parliament. Le Pen’s “national priority” would undermine the universalist foundation of French republicanism—and imposing it by referendum would elevate that instrument as a means of circumventing the legislature.
For French voters repelled by both extremes, the prospects are grim. Their predicament stems from a decision President Macron made in 2024. His party, Renaissance, and other centrist parties took a beating in elections for the European Parliament that year. Infuriated, Macron dissolved the National Assembly and called for snap elections. Rather than the usual face-off between the traditional right and left, three blocs of roughly equal size emerged: the remnants of Renaissance, the National Rally, and a hastily slapped-together coalition of left-wing parties—France Unbowed, Communists, Socialists, and the Ecologists—that purported to form a “republican rampart” against Le Pen.
Personality clashes have since reduced the republican rampart to rubble, allowing the National Rally and France Unbowed to solidify their places in the polls while a now-lame-duck president has meanwhile presided over a series of flailing governments that can’t seem to pass a budget through Parliament. The National Assembly has been paralyzed, and a host of politicians have tossed their hat into the ring for the upcoming presidential election. The first round of votes will happen on April 18 and, in the extremely likely case of no candidate winning a majority, the second round will take place on May 2. At last count, 34 presidential candidates have declared themselves, mostly from the center left and center right. Several others, including former President François Hollande and former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, are testing the waters.
[Thomas Chatterton Williams: The violence sweeping France was never really about schools]
The proliferation of candidates attests to the fragmentation of a political landscape that once neatly divided into left and right. It is a sign not of healthy competition but of democratic fragmentation: This multitude of candidates, most with relatively few supporters, will ultimately help secure the second-round election for one of the two contenders who represent the greatest danger to democracy in France.
The growing prospect of this face-off reinforces a widespread perception of decline—of a nation not just reduced to the ranks of middle powers, but where the political center no longer holds. This explains, in part, what the Le Monde columnist Solenn de Royer describes as “a spirit of defeatism” now haunting French politics. During an August visit to a town in southern France, Macron adopted that language, urging a small crowd to resist “the rampant spirit of defeatism,” whether in response to recent wildfires or in politics. A few weeks later, two well-known establishment political figures, the conservative Xavier Bertrand and the socialist Bernard Cazeneuve, joined forces to press their followers not to give in to despair in response to Le Pen’s seemingly irresistible rise.
The call to resist such fatalism has been sounded before in France—from within the walls of the Paris Commune of 1871, and across the trenches of World War I. A presentiment of decline was thought to fuel pacifism in the interwar period, and de Gaulle decried such thinking in his BBC address in 1940. But perhaps no one in France has offered greater insight into the declinist mentality, and greater courage to combat it, than Marc Bloch, the historian who chronicled France’s defeat by Nazi Germany, in 1940. He attributed the debacle in part to an elite “only too ready to despair of the country they had been called upon to defend, and of the people who furnished the soldiers they commanded.”
More than 80 years later, the problem is less that France’s political elite is ready to despair of the country than that the nation is ready to despair of its political elite.
© Artur Widak / NurPhoto / Getty
And the man with the biggest target on his back is Porsche superstar Thomas Preining.
The Austrian arrives at the legendary Hockenheimring with a commanding 23-point advantage over his nearest challenger.
But with 56 points still available across the final weekend, the champagne will have to stay firmly on ice.
Preining, already a DTM champion, knows exactly what it takes to survive the pressure of a title fight. Driving for Manthey, the Porsche ace has put himself in the driving seat for a second championship crown.
But Mercedes-AMG star Maro Engel is breathing down his neck, and BMW veteran Marco Wittmann, a two-time champion, is lurking dangerously in the background. Both have the experience, machinery and determination to turn Preining’s dream weekend into an absolute nightmare.
Then come the outsiders. Mercedes driver Lucas Auer, Ferrari racer Matteo Cairoli and Aston Martin’s Nicki Thiim all retain mathematical chances of snatching the championship.
For those three, however, it would take something approaching a motorsport miracle. They need brilliant results — and some serious misfortune for the men ahead.
There could hardly be a more fitting battlefield.
The Hockenheimring has hosted the DTM season finale more than 30 times, earning its reputation as the place where champions are crowned and reputations shattered.
Its 4.5-kilometre Grand Prix circuit demands precision, courage and nerves of steel.
Get your braking wrong and a rival can pounce. Make a mistake in traffic and an entire season’s hard work could disappear in seconds.
And nobody needs reminding what happened here last year.
Turkish racer Ayhancan Güven snatched the 2025 championship with a breathtaking late move against Wittmann at the Sachs-Kurve.
It was the sort of dramatic finish that makes motorsport irresistible.
Now Wittmann is back, determined to ensure history does not repeat itself at his expense.
The DTM is no ordinary racing championship. This is a contest in which some of the biggest names in the motor industry throw their engineering expertise into a furious battle for supremacy.
Porsche, Mercedes-AMG, BMW, Ferrari and Aston Martin are represented among the six title contenders, and with GT3 machinery producing spectacular performance, the racing promises to be fierce.
Unlike Formula One, where aerodynamic advantages can sometimes leave the field stretched out, DTM’s competitive format regularly produces close battles, aggressive overtaking and unpredictable finishes.
Track position is precious. Pit-stop execution matters enormously. And a poorly timed safety car can transform the championship picture.
One moment a driver can be heading towards glory, the next, he can be staring at disaster.
Saturday’s race begins at 1.30pm local time, with Sunday’s championship decider scheduled for 4.30pm.
That leaves precious little room for error.
For Preining, the equation is straightforward: protect the advantage without becoming so defensive that his challengers seize the initiative.
For Engel and Wittmann, the message is equally clear. Attack.
They cannot afford to sit behind the Porsche and hope for the best.
And should Saturday’s race produce a major surprise, Sunday’s finale could become an extraordinary winner-takes-all spectacle.
Away from the championship battle, Hockenheim is preparing a full-blown motorsport festival.
The supporting programme includes the ADAC GT Masters, Porsche Carrera Cup Germany, ADAC GT4 Germany and BMW M2 Cup. Fans can also enjoy pit-lane walks, driver appearances and live entertainment.
But the biggest attraction remains the battle on the circuit. Six drivers started the weekend with a mathematical chance of becoming champion. Only one can leave with the crown.
When the chequered flag falls on Sunday evening, there could be tears, triumph — and the sort of last-lap drama that makes the DTM one of Europe’s great racing spectacles.
There are few spectacles quite so nauseating as a former democratic leader enthusiastically embracing the dictator whose aggression has brought death and destruction to Europe.
Yet there was Gerhard Schröder, Germany’s former Chancellor, grinning alongside Vladimir Putin at the Russian president’s 74th birthday celebrations, apparently oblivious to the moral obscenity of the occasion.
According to Reuters, Schröder visited Putin’s home in Moscow, where the two old friends were photographed smiling and shaking hands against a suitably cosy backdrop of traditional Russian furnishings.
How touching. While Ukrainians endure another year of Russian bombardment, Schröder enjoys the hospitality of the man responsible.
The photographs could scarcely provide a more damning illustration of how completely one of Germany’s former leaders has lost his moral compass.
Schröder’s relationship with Putin has long since ceased to be merely an embarrassing personal friendship. It represents one of the most troubling examples of the revolving door between European political office and Russian commercial interests.
Having served as German Chancellor between 1998 and 2005, Schröder promptly embarked upon a remarkably lucrative second career in the Russian energy industry.
His involvement with Nord Stream was particularly scandalous.
While still Chancellor, Schröder championed the Baltic Sea gas pipeline linking Russia directly to Germany. Shortly after leaving office, he accepted a senior position with the consortium responsible for the project.
The arrangement raised an obvious and deeply uncomfortable question: had German energy policy been shaped exclusively by national interests, or had the groundwork also been laid for an exceptionally rewarding retirement?
There is no need to allege criminal wrongdoing to recognise the appalling appearance of a conflict of interest.
Schröder subsequently became chairman of the supervisory board of Rosneft, Russia’s state-controlled oil giant, in 2017.
This was three years after Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea, when any responsible European statesman should already have understood the dangers of strengthening Moscow’s financial and strategic position.
Instead, Schröder continued to prosper within the Russian energy establishment.
The Nord Stream controversy was never simply about natural gas.
It was about geopolitical leverage, European security and the extraordinary willingness of successive German governments to disregard warnings from Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic states.
Those countries understood precisely what Berlin preferred not to acknowledge: energy dependence on an authoritarian Russia was a strategic vulnerability.
Schröder became one of the most prominent advocates of precisely that dependence.
The Nord Stream 2 project subsequently became entangled in further controversy surrounding a foundation established in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, ostensibly for environmental purposes, which helped companies involved in completing the pipeline navigate American sanctions.
The foundation received €20 million from Nord Stream 2 AG. The affair prompted parliamentary scrutiny and questions about Russian corporate influence over German political decision-making.
Schröder’s involvement in the wider Nord Stream enterprise remains a central feature of that controversy.
Even Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 failed to produce the moral reckoning that Schröder’s conduct demanded.
He eventually relinquished his Rosneft position and declined a proposed Gazprom board appointment. His political reputation, however, was already in ruins.
The Bundestag stripped him of his parliamentary office and staff privileges. His own Social Democratic Party faced demands to expel him, although attempts to remove him ultimately failed.
Yet Schröder apparently remains incapable of recognising why his behaviour disgusts so many Germans.
His latest Moscow appearance has provoked outrage from Chancellor Friedrich Merz, whose government described the birthday visit as profoundly immoral. SPD co-leader Lars Klingbeil condemned it as completely unacceptable.
There is another dimension to this disgrace.
Putin has previously suggested that Schröder could serve as an intermediary in negotiations concerning European security. European governments understandably rejected the proposal.
Why would Europe entrust its security to a man whose professional judgement has been so closely associated with Russian commercial interests?
Schröder’s latest Russian appointment, on the supervisory board of supermarket operator Hyperglobus, merely reinforces the impression that Moscow remains an irresistible attraction.
Perhaps he regards himself as a bridge between Russia and Germany. If so, it is a bridge built upon extraordinary political misjudgement.
Schröder is entitled to choose his friends. Europeans are equally entitled to judge him by those choices.
History will remember that, while Ukraine fought for its survival, a former German Chancellor travelled to Moscow to celebrate the birthday of Vladimir Putin, the man directing its destruction.
It is difficult to imagine a more humiliating epitaph for a once-powerful European statesman.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents shot seven rounds into the vehicle of a New York father while his five-year-old son was in the car on the afternoon of Thursday, October 8. Oscar Belgal, a Dominican man, who had just picked up his son from school, was hit in the neck but survived the shooting.
He is currently being detained by ICE in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn after being discharged from the hospital Thursday night. His lawyers have reported that he still has a bullet lodged in his body more than 24 hours after being shot.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that they were conducting a “targeted enforcement operation,” calling Belgal a “criminal illegal alien.”
Local officials describe the incident differently. In a press conference, held by immigrant rights groups and officials a couple hours after the shooting, speakers described that disguised agents approached Belgal’s vehicle with their guns drawn. When Belgal started to move his vehicle forward at least one agent opened fire. Video emerged online of one of the agents carrying a large gun that reports say was a modified AR-15.
“They wore construction vests and masks that concealed their faces,” said New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to press later that night.
“There was no reasonable way to identify them as ICE agents.”
The mayor claimed that he attempted to negotiate with President Trump directly for the release of Belgal, but “those negotiations were unsuccessful.” He then described ICE as “vicious” and “cruel,” saying that ICE undermines public safety.
“This is an agency that must be abolished.”
New York City Public Advocate Jumaane D. Williams said that federal officials would certainly try to justify the shooting by painting a narrative that makes Bengal seem like “the worst human being you ever heard of.” But he emphasized that what actually happened is that a father picking up his child was shot by a federal agency after school dismissal in a residential area.
Later that night, in a separate press conference with the mayor, New York City Police Department (NYPD) Commissioner Jessica Tisch announced that Oscar Belgal had been arrested in 2023. Hecklers and protesters then began disrupting the mayor and the police commissioner, accusing them of demonizing the victim and justifying ICE violence.
“Tisch and the NYPD are effectively running cover for the Trump administration” over the federal shooting of a Dominican father, said Andre Easton, candidate for New York’s 15th Congressional District, in a statement on Friday, October 9.
Easton called on the mayor to back up his call to abolish ICE with action. “He must fully enforce his own Executive Order 13 and kick every ICE agent out of our city.”
He also slammed Ritchie Torres, the current representative of NY-15, for only demanding an investigation into the shooting. Torres’ demands represent a “betrayal of the Bronx.”
The same politicians that built the deportation machine won’t dismantle it, he argued.
“We need a mass movement powerful enough to dismantle it and win full, equal, and permanent rights for all immigrants.”
Sparks of that very movement may already be breaking out in New York.
Hours after the shooting, hundreds of New Yorkers took to the streets and marched to the hospital where Belgal was being treated. They carried banners and placards reading “Abolish ICE” and “Full Rights for All Immigrants” and “Justice for Lorenzo, Joan, and All Victims of ICE Terror.”
The protests were met with force by the New York City Police Department, who attacked protesters with barricades, pushing and shoving several, including congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier, and making a handful of arrests.
However, New Yorkers have continued pushing for ICE to leave the city, organizing protests on Friday and Saturday.
The shooting in New York is yet another in a series of ICE shootings across the United States, including the killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, and Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine. Each of these cases has left families and communities traumatized and provoked eruptions in the movement against ICE violence.
Now in New York, demonstrators are elevating the pressure on their elected officials and making a distinction between mere demands for investigation and concrete action that ends ICE operations and takes steps toward abolition.
© Igor Martins
Updated at 1:36 p.m. on October 10, 2026
For more than four months, since this hurricane season began, the Atlantic has been eerily placid—a remarkable stretch without a single hurricane. That prolonged calm has been rudely interrupted by Hurricane Isaias, a Category 2 fastball that slammed into the Gulf Coast last night along the Florida panhandle. “I think we knew at some point we would likely have a hurricane,” Daniel Brown, the operations-division chief at the National Hurricane Center, told me.
Not to be outdone, the Pacific Ocean has two major storms brewing, including Hurricane Simon, a dangerous Category 4 storm off the coast of southwestern Mexico. A smaller one, Tropical Storm Rachel, is forecast to bring potentially more storm surge and flooding as far north as Southern California. “It’s a busy day here,” Brown said on Friday.
This season’s dynamic—an unruffled Atlantic and a frothing Pacific—has been right out of the El Niño playbook and was predicted months ago. El Niños tend to generate opposing winds—low-altitude trade winds out of the east and higher-up westerlies—that tear apart Atlantic storms as they try to form and also keep them from gaining strength. This type of wind shear is affecting Hurricane Isaias now, Brown said, and weakened the storm a little before it made landfall.
Isaias landed along the Gulf Coast with sustained winds of more than 100 mph; in places, it dropped more than a dozen inches of rain. Coastal counties had ordered evacuations; the governors of Alabama and Florida had declared emergencies; residents had scrambled through hurricane prep. During the storm, the wind ripped off roofs and toppled tree. t\Two people, one in Florida and one in Alabama, died after trees fell on their house, authorities said. Nearly 800,000 people were without power across the Southeast as of Saturday morning, according to poweroutage.com.
In the Pacific, by contrast, a Category 4 hurricane is almost par for the course this season. By this time of year, the Pacific has usually generated 13 storms potent enough to warrant their own name, Brown said. This year, we’re on number 19. This onrush of hurricanes has a great deal to do with the buildup of abnormally warm waters in the equatorial Pacific—which, at this point, are in certain areas more than 4 degrees Celsius warmer than usual. This warming gins up storm activity in that ocean; it’s been spinning up hurricanes and hurling them toward Hawaii for months. The storm swells have also eroded Southern California beaches and swamped homes, and they keep coming. On Friday, seawater flooded the streets of Balboa Peninsula, California, inundating cars and homes, well before Tropical Storm Rachel was anywhere close to arriving.
The coast of Mexico is at particular risk from Hurricane Simon, which is forecast to bring potentially dangerous flooding and landslides to coastal states such as Jalisco and Nayarit. Further north, on the Baja California peninsula, communities are still recovering from the effects of Hurricane Polo, which caused widespread flooding last month and displaced hundreds of people.
The storm scorecard in these oceans has only reinforced the notion that the world is in the midst of an unusually powerful El Niño. As I reported in August, key areas of the Pacific Ocean had already gotten hot enough to make this a “Super El Niño”; the experts I spoke with then were anticipating that the event could end up peaking at twice that amount of warming. If those trends hold, this could be the strongest El Niño ever recorded, and right now, “everything seems to be on track with this being a remarkable event,” Nick Novella, a National Weather Service meteorologist, told me.
This season has set a record already—this is the latest in the year that a hurricane has formed in the Atlantic at any time during the satellite era, since 1966. And it isn’t even close. “This record was broken by nearly a month,” Novella said. Normally, five Atlantic hurricanes form by the end of September. For residents of the Gulf Coast, the beleaguered hours after a storm makes landfall are all too familiar. As they assess the wreckage, hopefully the year’s first Atlantic storm will not have changed too dramatically how we remember this season of relative calm.
© Octavio Jones / AP
© The Washington Post via Getty Im
© Google Maps
A Jeep emplacou 10.464 unidades em setembro e registrou um crescimento de 16% em relação a agosto. Com esse número, a marca superou as 85 mil unidades vendidas em 2026. Com a chegada do novo Avenger ás concessionárias, o modelo acabou impulsionando as vendas da Jeep no mês de setembro, com 1.867 emplacamentos.
O Renegade emplacou 3.669 unidades em setembro, um crescimento de 21% em relação ao mês anterior. Desse volume, 53% são das versões híbridas MHEV. No acumulado do ano, o Renegade já soma mais de 30 mil vendas em 2026.
O Compass, por sua vez, segue como líder entre os SUVs médios do país no acumulado do ano, sendo o único da categoria a superar as 40 mil vendas em 2026. Em setembro, o modelo emplacou 3.867 unidades e já soma 40.302 emplacamentos no acumulado do ano.
O Commander segue crescendo no acumulado do ano e já soma 11.646 emplacamentos em 2026. Em setembro, o modelo emplacou 1.053 unidades e manteve a liderança entre os SUVs de 7 lugares no Brasil.
Ram cresce 22% entre as picapes
No mês de setembro, a Ram, marca pertencente ao Grupo Stellantis, que controla também a Jeep, apresentou crescimento de 22% em relação ao mesmo mês do ano passado. Destaque para a linha Heavy Duty, composta pelos modelos 2500 e 3500. No acumulado do ano, a Ram soma 24.538 picapes vendidas, aumento de 20% em relação ao mesmo período de 2025, quando emplacou 20.454 unidades.
A dupla de picapes a diesel mais potente à venda no Brasil, que leva sob o capô o motor Cummins® 6.7 Turbodiesel High-Output de 436 cv de potência e 1.458 Nm (148,7 kgfm) de torque e a nova transmissão automática de 8 velocidades, ocupa as duas primeiras posições do segmento de picapes grandes.
A 2500 foi a líder em setembro, com 187 unidades comercializadas, enquanto a 3500, a picape mais capaz no Brasil quando o assunto é capacidade de reboque, teve 156 unidades vendidas. Juntas, 2500 e 3500 alcançaram 63,9% de participação de mercado entre as picapes grandes no nono mês deste ano. Ao acrescentar a 1500, a picape a gasolina mais veloz e potente à venda no Brasil, a Ram conquistou impressionantes 78% do mercado de picapes grandes em setembro.
Entre as picapes médias, a Dakota registrou o melhor mês em vendas desde seu lançamento, no primeiro semestre de 2026. Foram 673 unidades, rendendo a quinta posição no segmento de picapes médias.
Já a Rampage segue firme na segunda posição entre as picapes intermediárias, com mais de 1.950 unidades vendidas no mês de setembro. No acumulado do ano, a primeira picape Ram desenvolvida e produzida fora da América do Norte soma 18.605 unidades vendidas, quase mil unidades a mais que o acumulado do ano passado, quando a picape alcançou 17.608 emplacamentos.
The post Jeep cresce em vendas em setembro e Compass segue líder no acumulado do ano appeared first on Diário da Manhã - O Jornal do leitor Inteligente.
I primi notebook con NVIDIA RTX Spark N1X si possono già configurare e ordinare in Italia: per la nuova piattaforma NVIDIA si parte da poco più di 3.000 euro e si arriva a oltre 6.000, con la differenza di prezzo legata quasi esclusivamente alla memoria.... Leggi tutto A Turkish court on Tuesday handed down prison sentences to two Kurdish journalists on charges of targeting a public official in their outlets reports alleging that a gendarmerie commander tortured civilians during a raid in southeastern Turkey, C'est partage entre soulagement et dchirement que Sylvie Cathaly, 64ans, a trouv, il y a trois ans, une place dans une maison d'accueil spcialise pour son frre polyhandicap Gilles. Aprs une trentaine d'annes s'occuper de lui, dont sept tempsO Renault Boreal passa a ser o primeiro veículo produzido no Brasil a oferecer o Gemini de série. A inteligência artificial do Google amplia a experiência conectada a bordo, proporcionando interações mais naturais, intuitivas e personalizadas, transformando a cabine em uma verdadeira extensão digital da rotina dos ocupantes.
O SUV médio da Renault já havia elevado a experiência conectada a um novo patamar ao se tornar o primeiro veículo produzido no Brasil com Google Automotive Services (GAS), plataforma que integra Google Maps, Google Play e, agora, o Gemini como assistente virtual. O sistema substitui o Google Assistant e amplia suas capacidades com inteligência artificial generativa.
Agora, o Boreal dá mais um passo à frente com o Gemini. A tecnologia também está disponível como atualização opcional para os veículos Renault equipados com o openR link com Google integrado. Como evolução do Google Assistant, o Gemini amplia as capacidades do assistente virtual da plataforma, preservando todas as funcionalidades já disponíveis aos usuários e adicionando novos recursos baseados em inteligência artificial generativa.
Além de compreender contextos mais complexos e interpretar comandos mais naturais, o sistema passa a permitir o controle de um número ainda maior de funções do veículo por voz.
Além de realizar todas as tarefas já disponíveis com o Google Assistant, o Gemini integrado ao openR link amplia as possibilidades de interação com o veículo. Agora, os usuários podem controlar diretamente um número ainda maior de funções por comandos de voz, incluindo novas funcionalidades como abrir e fechar o teto solar e os vidros.
Com a nova tecnologia, o motorista não precisa mais recorrer a comandos específicos para interagir com o veículo. Em vez de dizer frases exatas, como “Ok Google, ligue o ar-condicionado”, basta utilizar a linguagem natural, por exemplo: “Ok Google, está muito calor aqui dentro”. O sistema compreende a intenção do usuário e pode ajustar automaticamente a climatização.
O comando de ativação por voz continua o mesmo. O Gemini pode ser acionado por meio das expressões “Hey Google” ou “Ok Google”, pelo botão de voz no volante ou pelo ícone do assistente na tela do openR link. Para iniciar uma conversa contínua com o Gemini Live, basta acionar o botão Gemini Live ou dizer: “Hey Google, vamos conversar” ou “Hey Google, vamos conversar ao vivo”.
O openR link com Google integrado é um sistema multimídia que oferece uma experiência conectada fluida, escalável e em constante evolução. O Gemini amplia ainda mais o conjunto de serviços disponíveis na plataforma, mantendo todas as funcionalidades já oferecidas pelo Google Assistant e adicionando novos recursos de inteligência artificial generativa e controle por voz.
Projetado para interagir de maneira mais natural com os ocupantes do veículo, ele é capaz de compreender o contexto das conversas, responder perguntas com maior precisão e lidar com solicitações mais complexas.
A atualização é gratuita, realizada remotamente por meio de tecnologia FOTA (Firmware Over-The-Air), e não altera a duração do pacote de conectividade. Sua implementação baseia-se em:
– Conexão à conta Google no openR link utilizando a conectividade nativa do Boreal, sem necessidade de visita à concessionária.
– Uma notificação na tela do openR link permite ao cliente decidir se deseja migrar para o Google Gemini.
– Disponível para todos os veículos compatíveis, de acordo com os idiomas suportados e a versão do openR link.
O sistema multimídia aprimorado está disponível sem custo adicional para clientes conectados a uma conta Google em um dos idiomas compatíveis. O usuário escolhe se quer ativar o Gemini e também pode retornar ao Google Assistant a qualquer momento.
Como evolução do Google Assistant, o Gemini representa um grande avanço nos assistentes de voz embarcados. Alimentado pela tecnologia de IA do Google, ele é capaz de:
– Compreender o contexto da conversa e as intenções dos usuários.
– Executar solicitações mais complexas.
– Manter conversas naturais e contínuas.
– Alternar idiomas durante a conversa.
Isso significa que os motoristas podem falar de forma natural, sem precisar memorizar comandos específicos. Os usuários também poderão ativar o Gemini Live para uma interação conversacional mais avançada. Esse recurso permite:
– Conversas livres e naturais.
– Interromper o assistente a qualquer momento.
– Fazer várias solicitações em sequência sem repetir a expressão “Ok Google”.
– Alternar idiomas durante a conversa.
– Uma experiência simplificada, projetada para segurança e conforto
Ao permitir tarefas mais complexas por comando de voz e reduzir a necessidade de interação por toque, o Gemini ajuda a:
– Minimizar distrações do motorista, mantendo o foco na estrada.
– Ampliar e simplificar o acesso às funções do veículo por comandos de voz.
– Melhorar o conforto e a praticidade no dia a dia.
Totalmente integrado ao veículo e ao ecossistema Google, o Gemini consegue responder a situações reais e executar várias tarefas em sequência sem necessidade de novas interações. Navegação inteligente com compreensão de contexto:
“Ok Google, leve-me para o centro de São Paulo, mas evite a Rebouças.”
→ O Gemini analisa o contexto e sugere uma solução adequada.
Controle por voz das funções do veículo:
“Está frio aqui dentro.”
→ O sistema ajusta automaticamente a climatização, elevando a temperatura da cabine.
Acesso a informações e conteúdos durante a viagem (modo Gemini Live):
“Ok Google. Está muito quente hoje. O que economiza mais combustível: abrir as janelas ou ligar o ar-condicionado?”
“Conte uma história sobre carros e dinossauros para meu filho de 8 anos.”
“Crie um quiz sobre a história do Brasil para adultos e adolescentes.” |
“Quais foram os resultados dos jogos do Brasileirão de ontem?”
→ O sistema consegue responder perguntas abertas, além de fornecer informações gerais, notícias e conteúdos de mídia.
O openR link com Google integrado é um sistema multimídia evolutivo que proporciona uma experiência conectada cada vez mais rica e intuitiva em qualquer lugar do mundo. Desde o lançamento, o Gemini oferece suporte a 16 idiomas, entre eles inglês, espanhol e português.
O Gemini contribui para uma experiência conectada consistente para clientes Renault em todos os mercados onde o sistema está disponível.
Os clientes Renault continuarão recebendo melhorias ao longo do tempo por meio de atualizações remotas, sem necessidade de levar o veículo à concessionária. Como plataforma de IA escalável, o Gemini recebe:
– Atualizações contínuas e automáticas.
– Capacidades e competências linguísticas ampliadas.
– Novos recursos ao longo do tempo.
The post Renault Boreal estreia sistema de Inteligência Artificial do Google appeared first on Diário da Manhã - O Jornal do leitor Inteligente.
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