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A month after he left OpenAI amid disagreements regarding the safety of the company's products, Dr. Ilya Sutskever announced a new venture called Safe Superintelligence (SSI). “Building safe superintelligence (SSI) is the most important technical problem of our​​ time,” read the new company's announcement also signed by fellow co-founders Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy. “We have started the world’s first straight-shot SSI lab, with one goal and one product: a safe superintelligence. It’s called Safe Superintelligence. SSI is our mission, our name, and our entire product roadmap, because it is our sole focus. Our team, investors, and business model are all aligned to achieve SSI.”

The founders of SSI have deep ties to Israel. Sutskever (37) was born in the USSR before immigrating to Jerusalem at the age of 5. He began his academic studies at the Open University but completed all his degrees at the University of Toronto, where he earned a doctorate in machine learning under the guidance of Prof. Geoffrey Hinton, one of the early pioneers in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).

The primary for New York’s 16th congressional district, which takes place on Tuesday, has drawn record-breaking spending, with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) and a crypto-currency Super Pac behind the lion’s share of the funding.

The two are battling to represent a district that spans parts of the Bronx and Westchester county. Latimer is leading in polling, and if he wins, he will be the first challenger to successfully unseat a member of the progressive “Squad”.

The huge haul of outside spending – most of it funding ads attacking Bowman and supporting Latimer – underscores Bowman’s precarious position as a high-profile “Squad” member whose criticism of Israel and outspoken support for Palestinian rights has drawn the ire of the pro-Israel lobby.

But the race is more than a referendum on Israel-Palestine policy. It’s also a test of the fledgling progressive wing of the Democratic party, whose ranks Bowman joined after winning an upset primary victory in 2020 and defeating former representative Eliot Engel, an incumbent who had held the office since 1989.

Among Bowman’s highest-profile supporters are the senator Bernie Sanders and the representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (known as AOC), who will appear at a rally on Saturday to turn out voters for the incumbent. Meanwhile, Latimer has earned the support of the former secretary of state and Democratic party establishment stalwart Hillary Clinton.

The White House, State Department, and Pentagon say they do not know what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was talking about when he said this week that Secretary of State Antony Blinken was working to remove "bottlenecks" holding up weapons shipments to Israel. But one U.S. official offered an explanation for the Israeli leader's accusation.

The U.S. has been reviewing one shipment of 2,000-pound and 500-pound bombs since May. As Israel was preparing for a major offensive in Rafah, the Biden administration paused the shipment because, as President Biden put it in an interview last month, "Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs.

According to the U.S. official, Netanyahu's remarks in the video are apparently based on IDF chief of staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi's belief that the U.S. is slow-rolling Israel on smaller-ticket items like aircraft spare parts. However, the official insists there's been no such delay, except for the shipment of 2,000-pound bombs, which were about to leave an East Coast weapons depot by ship when the delivery was halted in early May. They were about to leave an East coast weapons depot by ship when the delivery was halted. Israel doesn't need them for Gaza, but it would if the conflict in Lebanon escalates further.

John Kirby, the White House national security communications adviser, told reporters Thursday the administration didn't know about Netanyahu's video in advance and said it was "perplexing" and "disappointing."

"There's no other country that's done more, or will continue to do more than the United States to help Israel defend itself," Kirby said.

The United States is expected to lift its hold on the shipment of ammunition and weapons designated for the IDF, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Office said on Tuesday, just one day after the Israeli leader accused the Biden administration of preventing the delivery of those arms.

“US Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew told Prime Minister Netanyahu yesterday that the ammunition and weapons that the PM referred to are in the process of being delivered to Israel,” the PMO wrote in an English language post on X.

Israeli strikes on the so-called Al-Mawasi "safe zone" in southern Gaza and on a neighbourhood in Gaza City have killed 14 people.

The bombing of tents for displaced people in Al-Mawasi, which was previously designated a safe area, killed eight people and injured dozens of other people, The New Arab's Arabic-language sister site Al-Araby Al-Jadeed reported.

The US has indicated it is open to backing an Israeli offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon, amid mounting frustration that the group continues to link a truce with Israel to an elusive broader ceasefire in Gaza.

In his meetings in Beirut on Tuesday, US envoy Amos Hochstein delivered "blunt" warnings to Lebanese officials that Israel is preparing to launch a limited offensive on Hezbollah and will have the US's support if a diplomatic solution isn't found, a senior Arab official told Middle East Eye.

Hochstein met with Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati and Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri on Tuesday, both of whom the US has used as intermediaries with Hezbollah, the Iran-backed group the US designates a terrorist organisation.

Hochstein told Lebanese officials that Israel anticipates roughly five more weeks of intense fighting in Gaza, after which it will pause its main offensive across the enclave. However, it will continue to target senior Hamas officials and conduct attacks to recover hostages.

The Israeli military said on Tuesday night that it had approved plans for an offensive in Lebanon. Earlier in the day, Israel launched strikes on Hezbollah drone launch squads, the Israeli military said.

"The US will stand by Israel and not condemn them publicly if it launches an offensive against Hezbollah," Hochstein warned the Lebanese officials, according to the Arab official.

Hezbollah has been trading fire with Israel for more than eight months in parallel with the Gaza war. On Tuesday, the Iran-backed group published what it said was drone footage of sensitive military sites deep in Israeli territory.

In a televised address on Wednesday, Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said "there will be no place safe from our missiles and our drones" in Israel in the event of a broader war.

The group also had "a bank of targets" that it could target in precision strikes, he said.

Israel "knows that what also awaits it in the Mediterranean is very big ... In the face of a battle of this magnitude, it knows that it must now wait for us on land, in the air, and at sea," Nasrallah added.

Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz had warned on Tuesday that a decision on an all-out war with Hezbollah was coming soon and Israel's military said "operational plans for an offensive in Lebanon were approved and validated".

Nasrallah also threatened Cyprus - the EU member state in closest proximity to Lebanon, with which it has cordial relations - accusing it of allowing Israel to use its airports and bases for military exercises.

Israeli forces have re-arrested the elderly Palestinian parliament speaker Aziz Dweik less than a week after his release in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron.

Local Palestinian media reported that Dweik was arrested late on Wednesday with footage showing Israeli soldiers taking him from his home and into a military vehicle.

Dweik was released on 13 June after originally being arbitrarily detained in October. He was held in military detention in the Negev desert for six months, which was later extended by Israeli authorities.

Activists and social media users raised the alarm about his condition after appearing significantly thinner on his release than before his detention in October.

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Israel's government is set to discuss on Sunday a proposal to restrict the use of administrative detention to cases involving terrorist activity against the state or its citizens.

The Ministerial Committee for Legislation is scheduled to discuss the revolutionary proposal devised by MK Simcha Rothman that would limit the use of administrative detention and restraining orders to members of specific terrorist organizations.

The result is very clear: Jewish terrorism in the West Bank will be immune to such measures.

It must be said: Administrative detention – that is, detention without trial – is a draconian tool that deprives persons of their liberty without even minimal due process on the basis of classified evidence and, in some cases, without the detainees knowing the allegations against them. There is no place for such an instrument in a democratic state, and at the very least its use should be limited to specific emergency situations.

However, a selective and racist restriction of the kind that Rothman proposes does not do this: It permits the continued use of administrative detention, with all its faults, against Arab citizens of the state, while prohibiting it entirely regarding settler terrorism in the West Bank.

IDF Spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari on Wednesday cast Israel’s war aim of eradicating the Hamas terror group as unattainable, appearing to underscore tensions between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and top defense officials over his handling of the war in Gaza.

“This business of destroying Hamas, making Hamas disappear — it’s simply throwing sand in the eyes of the public,” Hagari told Channel 13 news in an interview.

“Hamas is an idea, Hamas is a party. It’s rooted in the hearts of the people — anyone who thinks we can eliminate Hamas is wrong,” he continued.

The Israeli military had advanced notice about a plan by Hamas to raid southern Israel including accurate predictions about the number of hostages the group would seize, a new report has found.

The internal report shared with Gaza Division commanders, entitled 'Detailed raid training from end to end', was released on 19 September and found that Hamas fighters had been training for a huge assault on Israel, a warning that was ignored by officers, Israeli broadcaster Kan reported.

Three weeks later, Hamas and its allies launched a series of assaults into southern Israel, killing 1,190 Israelis and taking 251 captives back to Gaza, sparking a brutal Israeli war on the Palestinian enclave that has seen more than 37,000 people killed.

"I feel like crying, yelling and swearing," one of the authors of the report said about the ignored warnings, according to Kan.

October 7 was almost a mirror of how the report warned an assault would play out, even predicting the number of hostages who would be seized by Hamas at between 200 and 250, while detailing how its fighters from its elite units would assault military posts and towns.

The 7 October events remains a hugely sensitive issue in Israel with demands for commanders and politicians to step down due to the collapse of the southern front on that day.

Israel’s High Court issued an injunction on Sunday to suspend an investigation by State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman into the military and Shin Bet over alleged failings that led to Hamas's surprise attack on 7 October.

Wikipedia's editors voted to declare the Anti-Defamation League "generally unreliable" on Israel and Palestine as well as the issue of antisemitism, adding the organisation to a list of banned sources, according to a report by the Jewish Telegraph Agency (JTA).

The report said that an "overwhelming majority" of Wikipedia editors voted to deem the organisation unreliable.

The decision puts the pro-Israel organisation, which has a long history of demonising Palestine activism, in a group alongside the National Inquirer, Newsmax, TMZ, and the conspiracist website Infowars.

Many editors at the online encyclopedia said that the ADL undermined its credibility as a reliable source of information by altering how it categorises antisemitic incidents, which include pro-Palestine protests.

The editors also cited controversial statements by ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, who has claimed student protests were proxies of Iran and compared the Palestinian keffiyeh head scarf to the swastika.

The ADL also has a long history of attacking Palestinian rights movements with labels of antisemitism, and has previously worked with US law enforcement to spy on Arab-American groups. It has also facilitated and funded US police training trips to Israel.

As the war in Gaza rages, the Biden administration has deployed a record number of U.S. troops to Jordan, a new report to Congress reveals. The troop buildup has not been previously reported.

There are now a record 3,813 American troops in Jordan, according to the White House’s war powers report to Congress released on June 7. That’s a 625 troop increase over December, with the number of soldiers and airmen exceeding the number at any time since the second Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq, a review of past war powers reports reveals.

The President’s war powers report to Congress is intended to keep the American public informed about situations in which U.S. military forces might find themselves in combat. In the case of Jordan, this isn’t a hypothetical: in January, an Iran-backed militia group killed three American Army soldiers stationed at a secret U.S. military base in Jordan, called Tower-22. Since October 7, Iran-backed groups have launched over 170 attacks on U.S. military assets in Syria, Iraq and Jordan. The Biden administration has repeatedly tried to downplay these attacks, insisting that the Israel-Hamas war has not spread to the rest of the region. The war powers report makes no mention of Iran-backed groups, saying only that U.S. troops are there to “support Defeat-ISIS operations, to enhance Jordan’s security, and to promote regional stability.”

U.S. Vice President's remarks come amid allegations from Israel's critics that claims of sexual and gender-based violence were either fabricated or exaggerated in order to provide justification for its military response in Gaza

Speaking at an event dedicated to raising awareness on conflict-related sexual violence, including the airing of Sheryl Sandberg's "Screams Before Silence" documentary, "On October 7, Hamas committed horrific acts of sexual violence," Harris said.

Her remarks come amid steady criticism from Israel's critics on the left that claims of sexual and gender-based violence were either fabricated or exaggerated in order to provide justification for its military response in Gaza following October 7.

"In the days after October 7, I saw images of bloodied Israeli women abducted," she continued. "Hamas committed rape and gang rape at the Nova music festival, and women's bodies were found naked from the waist down, hands tied behind their back and shot in the head."

Under pressure from the Biden administration, Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) approved the multibillion-dollar sale despite lingering concerns about the death toll in Gaza.

Two key Democratic holdouts in the House and Senate signed off on a major arms sale to Israel, including 50 F-15 fighter jets worth more than $18 billion, after facing intense pressure from the Biden administration and pro-Israel advocates to allow the transaction to move forward, said three U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

The decision, which has not been previously reported, underscores the substantial appetite in Washington to continue the flow of arms to Israel despite concerns from younger members of Congress that the United States should use its leverage to pressure Israel to reduce the intensity of the war and allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza.

This spring, Rep. Gregory W. Meeks (N.Y.), the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, publicly vowed to hold up the arms package unless he received assurances from the administration about how the warplanes and munitions would be used in Gaza, where more than 37,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to local health authorities. Besides the F-15s, which are not scheduled to arrive in Israel for years, the administration sought sign-off on air-to-air missiles and Joint Direct Attack Munition kits, which retrofit unguided bombs with precision guidance.

“I don’t want the kinds of weapons that Israel has to be utilized to have more deaths,” Meeks told CNN in April. “I want to make sure that humanitarian aid gets in. I don’t want people starving to death, and I want Hamas to release the hostages. And I want a two-state solution.”

After months of holding up the arms sale, Meeks and Sen. Ben Cardin (Md.), the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, signed off on the transaction several weeks ago, according to U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss arms transfers. Cardin, a staunch supporter of Israel, had been widely seen as standing with Meeks in an act of collegial solidarity.

Meeks and Cardin are two of four lawmakers who can effectively veto a foreign military sale. In the case of the F-15 and munitions package, the two top Republicans on the committees — Sen. James E. Risch of Idaho and Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas — signed off on the sale months ago.

Athens, Greece – Last summer, a shocking video of asylum seekers cable-tied and blindfolded in the back of a van on a Greek holiday island went viral online. At the time, the veracity of the video was questioned and Theodosis Nikitaras, the mayor of Kos, filed a defamation case against the NGO that published it.

Now, new documents obtained from the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) confirm the incident and pin the responsibility on individuals it describes as “likely working in concert” with Greek authorities.

The 44-second video was published by the Aegean Boat Report NGO on June 26, 2023, the same day the incident took place. Since then, it has been seen by more than 660,000 people on X. They included a child and many of them were Palestinians having arrived as asylum seekers from Turkey to Kos.

One woman had managed to conceal a phone in her bra and contacted the NGO via WhatsApp pleading for help. In a video she sent, the people are told to “shut up” in Greek by two unidentified men in the van after asking for the toilet.

The report details how the woman was slapped by the masked men after recording the scene. They destroyed her mobile phone when they saw her video being shared at pace online. Those detained were unable to use the toilet for the duration of their captivity and spent 16 hours in the van before being released by the masked men and apprehended by Greek police accompanied by a Frontex patrol.

The Warsaw-based body had been rattled for years by media investigations and accusations by NGOs of complicity in human rights abuses at the EU’s external borders – namely forcing would-be refugees away from a border before they could claim asylum. The practice, known as pushbacks, is considered a violation of international and EU law.

Former Israeli Knesset member Moshe Feiglin quoted Adolf Hitler as he called for Israel to resettle the Gaza Strip and create a "Hebrew Gaza."

Feiglin, who quit Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party to found the right-wing Zehut Party and plans to challenge Likud in Israel's next elections, made the comments during a panel discussion on Israel's Channel 12 that was shared on social media on Sunday, as Middle East Eye reported.

"We are not guests in our country, this is our country, all of it..." Feiglin said, adding, "As Hitler said, 'I cannot live if one Jew is left.' We can't live here if one 'Islamo-Nazi' remains in Gaza."

The House voted on Wednesday to block the U.S. from funding the reconstruction of Gaza, whose destruction was financed by the U.S. to a large degree.

Other Republicans filed amendments combating the movement to boycott, divest, or sanction Israel for its illegal occupation of Palestine.

The provision was introduced by Reps. Brian Mast, R-Fla.; Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y.; and Eli Crane, R-Ariz., as an amendment to the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, the annual defense budget. While Democrats opposed the amendment, which passed by a simple voice vote, they did not request a recorded vote.

Among the amendments with Democratic sponsors are ones expressing support for joint military ventures between the U.S. and Israel.

Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., for his part, filed an amendment to require an assessment of the accuracy of the Gaza Ministry of Health’s death toll accounting. Over the last eight months, supporters of Israel have pointed to the fact that Hamas — as Gaza’s governing entity — controls the health ministry as a way to undermine its death count. Nonetheless, the Ministry of Health’s figures have in the past been corroborated by the United Nations, Doctors Without Borders, and even the Israeli government itself.

As academic institutions across the world are rethinking their relations with Israel, a number have moved toward cutting off ties completely. In the United States, this call has not gained much traction and, in fact, many states have forms of anti-BDS laws that could potentially dictate public universities' actions.

This might change.

If the current proposed legislation requiring the immediate firing of academics for their speech passes, denying faculty their tenure protections and making a mockery of academic freedom, it may expose Israeli academia to repercussions that were hitherto unthinkable.

While Israeli academia is often presented as a bastion of democracy in a country with an increasingly shrinking public sphere, others have highlighted the many ways in which the academia is complicit in the occupation and the current crisis in Gaza.

But the role of student activists as the foot soldiers of the current right-wing government has not been well-known among the American public. This trend might be due to the privatization of education in Israel, the increasing radicalization of the public and the demographics of the student body – Israeli students are older and significantly more likely to have military background than their counterparts in the U.S.

Their activism reflects a lack of understanding of the meaning and value of humanities or a liberal education. If they succeed, they will ensure that their educational deficits will now be shared by Israeli academia at large.