On October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong stood in Tiananmen Square and declared the founding of the People’s Republic of China, bringing an end to the “Century of Humiliation” and setting a nation representing a quarter of humanity on a path toward self-determination. Seventy-seven years later, China stands as a global superpower, navigating a rapidly shifting multipolar world order and escalating containment pressures from the United States.

Professor of East Asian and global history Dr. Ken Hammond joins Amanda Yee to break down the historical, economic, and geopolitical forces that have shaped modern China’s development and foreign policy over the past 77 years.

Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Brett McGurk, and the rest of the Biden team that armed and abetted Israel’s genocide in Gaza landed cushy jobs at think tanks, universities, and on cable news. Dr. Annelle Rodriguez Sheline, a research fellow at the Quincy Institute who resigned from the State Department over Gaza, joins Rania Khalek and Zoe Alexandra to talk about accountability in Washington.

As a new “Drop the Genocide 20” campaign pressures institutions to shut the revolving door, Sheline unpacks why Kamala Harris is missing from its list; why her own colleagues urged her to go public with her March 2024 resignation; and why higher-ups like Samantha Power never walked out, despite literally having written the book on genocide. Trump’s suppression of the Palestine movement, Sheline argues, was enabled in the Biden era, when Washington believed it could kill the normal human reaction to watching a livestreamed genocide by rebranding criticism of Israel as antisemitism.

From Bush to Obama to Biden, Sheline describes a bipartisan culture of impunity that lets officials behind foreign policy catastrophes recycle themselves into the next administration. And in the Epstein files era, Americans have had enough.

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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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Is Ukraine becoming an “Eastern European Israel” for the EU? Sociologist and author Volodymyr Ishchenko joins Rania Khalek and Zoe Alexandra to discuss Ukraine’s eroding sovereignty, who profits from keeping the fighting going, and whether an off-ramp still exists to a war with Russia now costing Ukraine 27,000 casualties per month, according to Poland’s prime minister.

Europe is pushing record defense budgets and warning that Russia could test NATO within months. But this month Ukraine launched its largest drone attack yet on Moscow, Washington approved a $2.68 billion air defense sale, and the EU unblocked €6.6 billion in military aid. Is Europe readying to defend itself from a Russia with imperialist ambitions? Or preparing for a forever war, where profiteers abound and working-class Ukrainians do the fighting and dying at the direction of a state they’ve come to hate?

Ishchenko describes an emerging vision for Ukraine amongst Kyiv’s power brokers: a militarized, ethnonationalist frontier state serving as outsourced security for the European Union against Russia. Sound familiar? 

“Maybe NATO at this point is not an alliance for security, but actually a source of insecurity in Europe.” 

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The Trump administration’s assault on the ICC isn’t just about protecting Netanyahu from war crimes prosecution. It’s about preserving “imperial impunity” – Israel’s just “the smokescreen,” says Noura Erakat, professor of criminal justice and Africana studies at Rutgers University and human rights attorney. She traces Washington’s bipartisan refusal to ratify the Rome Statute to explain why the International Criminal Court has spent two decades indicting mostly African and Arab leaders. The 2024 warrants for Netanyahu and former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant just show the court “between a rock and a hard place”: finally give up its legitimacy entirely, or face destruction by the US.

Now more than a dozen ICC judges, prosecutors, and the court’s president have been sanctioned, as Washington reportedly prepares sanctions against the entire institution, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio calling it an “intolerable threat” to US sovereignty. Can the court survive a war with Washington? Should it? And why do Global South states stay invested in a court that’s clearly stacked against them?

Plus: Erakat describes her arrest at a Palm Beach County budget hearing on their $1 billion-plus investment in Israel bonds; warns that Gaza’s Board of Peace could become a blueprint to replace the UN; and explains why she believes, even as public opinion on Palestine shifts, “there’s no way to be safe in this moment by hiding.”

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Can the United Nations be saved? Should it be? As world leaders and war criminals gather for the 81st session of the UN General Assembly in New York, Vijay Prashad, executive director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, says that despite today’s gangster rule by the likes of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, the UN Charter still sets the standard for judging powerful states, making it “the most important treaty document that the world has ever had” – even with the institution built on it in shambles.

Prashad slams Secretary-General António Guterres’s failure to get “creative” to end the genocide in Gaza or to stand up to Trump on Iran, instead opening a free lane for the US president who has “put a loaded gun on the table and has threatened the world.” 

After the US denied visas to the Palestinians for a second year and heavily restricted Iran’s delegation, Prashad makes the case for moving the high-level UNGA out of the US: “New York doesn’t deserve it anymore,” he says, offering alternatives in Geneva or Nairobi. “Let’s move it to the Global South. Why not?”

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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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Diesel is approaching $9 a gallon in California, the Federal Reserve just raised interest rates for the first time since 2023, and Americans have lost roughly 30% of their purchasing power in just six years. That’s not the economy malfunctioning – it’s proof of the American empire in decline, says Dr. Richard Wolff, economics professor and founder of Democracy at Work. He tells Zoe Alexandra and Rania Khalek the Strait of Hormuz is where Washington’s unchecked economic conquest finally hit a wall, and the costs are being offloaded onto working families.

From Washington’s “lucky” inheritance of a global empire after World War II, to Trump’s war on Iran choking the world’s oil supply, to a $40 trillion national debt now costing more in interest than the entire Pentagon defense budget, Wolff argues the capitalist system is doing just what it was designed to do: protect the interests of the ulta-rich. But history is instructive: Wolff points to Europe, where the end of empire and “decolonization” paved the way for extreme far-right (and left) politics in countries like France and Germany – a pattern he says is already unfolding stateside in real time.

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Is the UK about to break apart? For the first time ever, Scotland, Wales, and the north of Ireland are led by pro-independence parties committed to “the right of each nation to determine its own future.” Declan Kearney, Sinn Féin’s national chairperson and a Member of the Legislative Assembly in the north of Ireland, joins Zoe Alexandra and Rania Khalek to break down the historic Cardiff agreement, and why he says the United Kingdom is truly on the edge of becoming “disunited.”

Kearney digs into how Brexit set off a populist realignment across British politics that’s still reshaping the map, and why Westminster’s refusal to set a date for an Irish reunification referendum may violate the very terms of the Good Friday Agreement – a treaty that still hasn’t delivered the vote it promised the north of Ireland 28 years ago. And what would a UK breakup mean for the world beyond these islands, considering Ireland’s deep solidarity with Palestine, Cuba, and the wider Global South, and growing anger at the British government’s continued role in arming and supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza?

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ICC fugitive Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to arrive in New York on Thursday to address the UN General Assembly – under an active arrest warrant for war crimes and crimes against humanity that the US has vowed not to enforce. Taher Dahleh, an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement, joins Rania Khalek and Zoe Alexandra ahead of the mass protests that have forced Netanyahu to reroute his flight through New Jersey.

Dahleh says the world is waking up to the fact that the architects of the Gaza genocide aren’t the outlier, but the mainstream norm for Israeli politics. He points to the irony of a fugitive war criminal speaking on ‘Restoring Trust’ at the United Nations. And he lays out the stakes of Democrats failing to respond to the cultural sea change on Palestine – as evidenced by Ed Sheeran’s career implosion – including why Zohran Mamdani’s choice to sit out Thursday’s protests sends a troubling if clear message to the movement that got him elected.

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China is cracking down on billionaires and corruption. Following the landmark sentencing of Evergrande founder Hui Ka Yan (Xu Jiayin) to life in prison and the seizure of his assets, independent journalist Ben Norton joins Amanda Yee to break down President Xi Jinping’s ongoing anti-corruption campaign and how a socialist government disciplines capital.

Norton explains how in China, capital may create wealth, but the Communist Party maintains control over the steering wheel of the economy. And while Western regulatory systems often protect private oligarchy and corporate impunity, Xi Jinping since 2012 has taken aggressive action against high-profile tycoons and corrupt Party officials alike.

Norton is a Beijing-based journalist and the founder and editor of Geopolitical Economy Report.

Ansar Allah’s Red Sea wins last week torched Saudi’s decade-long strategy in Yemen – and the tens of billions it poured into trying to hold one of the world’s most vital shipping chokepoints. Shireen Al-Adeimi, Yemeni-born anti-war activist and Michigan State University professor, joins Zoe Alexandra to unpack what the seizure of Mokha and control of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait means for a global economy already brought to its knees by record $6/gallon diesel prices.

With the Strait of Hormuz still slowed to a trickle by the US-Israeli war on Iran and Riyadh’s East-West pipeline offline, Al-Adeimi says it’s in the whole world’s interest to “push the Saudis to just end this war. Admit that you’ve lost, cut your losses, and move on.” She breaks down how Riyadh’s violation of the 2022 ceasefire capped a decade of failed Saudi and UAE intervention, and why it matters that Pakistan just refused, for the second time, to back the Saudis under the Mecca joint defense pact – leading Riyadh to claim Mecca is under attack in a desperate PR stunt to shore up support it’s been cut off from in the West.

“This is hugely significant for Yemen as part of its long fight to end foreign intervention in Yemen… A strong Yemen – an anti-imperialist Yemen, a Yemen that is not going to allow the Gulf countries to treat it any way they wish, or to have a puppet government there in Yemen as we had before — is an inconvenience to these oil-producing countries.”

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Robert Kraft tapped friend Jeffrey Epstein for legal advice after he was charged in a Florida police sting targeting suspected human trafficking. Zoe Alexandra traces the legacy of scandals and crimes behind the billionaire Zionist and owner of Gillette Stadium – and ostensible destroyer of Ed Sheeran’s career – after Kraft pushed NFL stadium owners to drop Macklemore from the Loop Tour for speaking out on Gaza at MetLife Stadium.

From an alleged AI surveillance command center at Gillette, to winning Israel’s Genesis Prize, to the Blue Square Alliance/Foundation to Combat Antisemitism and his ties with Friends of the IDF — this is the story of the American billionaire who bankrolled a decades-long “Speak Out for Israel” campaign to silence criticism, and how his latest attempt has backfired spectacularly into a global watershed moment for Palestine solidarity.

“You can’t make this stuff up: billionaires helping billionaires get out of sex crimes, sharing defense strategies — all while they promote ethnic cleansing, genocide, and other horrific crimes against humanity being carried out against the Palestinians by Israel.”

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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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Is Türkiye next? That question is dominating Israeli airwaves as Ankara – a NATO ally that’s suspended trade with Tel Aviv but not Tehran – may be running out of room to stay neutral in the US-Israeli war on Iran. Giorgio Cafiero, CEO of Gulf State Analytics, joins Rania Khalek and Zoe Alexandra to break down what’s really driving Israel’s growing antagonism toward Erdogan’s Türkiye: no longer just a difficult diplomatic counterpart, but a country that may hold the power to reshape the region’s entire security architecture in ways that threaten Netanyahu’s “freedom of action” – Israel’s ambition for total dominance.

Cafiero lays out why, after the fall of the Assad government in 2024 and the start of the genocide in Gaza, Israel fears a strong, centralized Syrian state aligned with Ankara. He draws a line between Israel’s deepening relationship with Greece, Türkiye’s expanding influence in Somalia near the Bab-el-Mandeb strait, and the new Mecca Defense Pact linking Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan – a configuration Israel sees as a direct threat to regional hegemony. And with Turkey a NATO member, Cafiero breaks down the real question everyone’s asking: if Israel strikes Turkish forces directly, does NATO’s Article 5 actually kick in?

Cafiero also explains why Doha and Ankara have built one of the Middle East’s most consequential partnerships – and why, a year after Israel’s strike on Qatar, Doha is working to diversify its security relationships beyond Washington, with Türkiye’s partnership central to that strategy.

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Palestinians across the West Bank are facing at least six settler attacks per day – the highest rate ever documented – with nearly two dozen people killed, more than 1,000 injured, and more families displaced in the first months of 2026 than in all of last year. This is Israel’s apartheid carceral system working exactly as designed, Basil Farraj tells Zoe Alexandra and Rania Khalek.

Farraj, an assistant professor of philosophy and cultural studies at Birzeit University, joins from the occupied West Bank to break down the surge in Israeli settler violence in cities like Hebron, Nablus, Ramallah, and increasingly Birzeit, connecting it to a decades-long Israeli displacement policy he says is finally becoming impossible for the world to ignore. This week, the UK, France, Canada, and nine other countries announced a coordinated trade ban on Israeli settlement goods, with UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy accusing settlers of “ethnic cleansing.”

Farraj explains why he sees sanctions against Tel Aviv’s settlement enterprise – even as the US under Secretary of State Marco Rubio refused to join them and Ambassador Mike Huckabee accused Britain of “Jew hate” – as a meaningful but insufficient first step, making the case for a full boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign against the Israeli state. He connects the West Bank escalation to Israel’s plans to forcibly expel Palestinians from Gaza, and to his own research on Israel’s prison system – arguing that the abuse, starvation, and isolation faced by Palestinian detainees, intensified under Benjamin Netanyahu and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, mirrors the same architecture of control now expanding across the occupied territories, increasingly reaching Palestinian citizens of Israel as well.

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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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