Mario Nawfal

🇮🇱 Netanyahu’s Likud is trying to stop a program helping Israelis living abroad get home to vote in next month’s election. Israel generally doesn’t allow citizens living overseas to vote remotely, so most have to physically return to the country if they want to cast a ballot. Government opponents are encouraging them to do exactly that, betting that higher expat turnout would strengthen the anti-Netanyahu camp. That’s where “Fly & Vote” comes in. The U.S.-based AID Coalition helps organize flights, paperwork and transport, including specially negotiated airfares. Likud has now petitioned Israel’s Central Elections Committee, arguing those benefits amount to an “electoral bribe” and violate campaign-finance rules. AID Coalition says the project is nonpartisan and simply helps Israelis exercise their right to vote. With an estimated 600,000 Israelis living abroad, getting people onto planes has become part of the election fight. Sources: The Telegraph, AFP / Writer: Julie

🇮🇳 Street performers in India are WILD. This duo makes a living dropping objects onto one another's chest, just light enough not to get killed. Hopefully, the tips are good... Writer: Mhedi t.co/UxsJhs0rbi

🇪🇺🇨🇦 Canadian PM Carney on the purpose of integrating Canada, as an "associate member," with the EU: "Canada and Europe should secure our strategic autonomy through deep cooperation in the full range of strategic capabilities... Including critical minerals, defense industrial capacity, AI and compute, energy security, space, and payments. We should deepen our people-to-people ties, allowing our youth to live, study, and work on either side of the Atlantic." Writer: Mhedi t.co/NnsiqA2IvX

🇷🇺 A woman has been caught smuggling 55 KG of HUMAN HAIR in her luggage arriving in St. Petersburg from Dubai. The three suitcases of hair were valued at more than $27,000, but she reportedly insisted all 55 kg were for “personal use,” whatever that could possibly mean. And yes, human hair really is that valuable: high-quality natural hair is prized for wigs and extensions because unlike synthetic hair, you can wash, dye and style someone else’s locks as if they were your own. An administrative case has now been opened over her failure to declare the hairy haul. Writer: Mhedi t.co/JFnP5FLFmz

🇺🇦🇨🇳 Zelensky discusses China, with Japan's NHK: "It's a pity that China is not on our side in this war, politically... it's not even about weapons. It's about the political will, and it's a pity because this war can be started and stopped IMMEDIATELY by strong leaders, including China." He went on to talk about how Chinese-made components are found in Russian drones, but Beijing is doing nothing about it. He also warned East Asia: North Korean troops are gaining battlefield experience in Eastern Europe. Writer: Michael t.co/J7JG8gTa3D

🇨🇦🇪🇺 Canadian PM Mark Carney: "Canada and Europe should consider exploring an integrated market for financial services." Trump doesn't like this idea and has threatened to cut off trade with Europe if that were to happen... 🤔 Writer: Samuel t.co/sVwc4WOPpx

🇱🇧🇫🇷 Lebanese President Joseph Aoun landed in Paris, greeted by Macron himself before the two walked up the Élysée steps together. It’s the warmup to a bigger French-hosted conference meant to rally support for Lebanon’s army, with military officials from several countries involved in the preparations. The goal is to get Lebanon’s military ready to deploy across the south and push Hezbollah’s disarmament forward, part of the U.S.-backed framework agreed with Israel in June. Jordan’s King Abdullah has been in on this since late July, when he and Macron first floated the idea. Sources: Ici Beyrouth, Arab News / Writer: Julie t.co/HOry9g5euh

🇪🇺🇨🇦🇺🇸 A weird moment in the EU: Just as Canadian PM Carney was about to start speaking, someone in the chamber suddenly shouted, “USA! USA!” Carney couldn’t help but laugh 🤣🤣 Writer: Samuel t.co/X3EdTgJjEw

🇬🇧 Convicted sex offender Huw Edwards wants his old life back, and he's plotting a comeback to get it. He pled guilty in 2024 to making indecent images of children and walked away with a suspended sentence. Then came two years of near total silence, completely out of public view. That sentence was legally "spent" this month, and Edwards is treating it like permission to step back into the spotlight. He's been building a fanbase on Substack since June and just passed 1,000 subscribers. Now he's claiming media coverage is turning his punishment into "a sentence for life." He's even taken to poetry, portraying himself as a wounded, defenseless figure searching for “truth in the dark.” None of that reads like remorse for crimes against children. Sources close to Edwards say it's less reflection and more strategy. A convicted child abuser wants the public's sympathy vote, but his victims got no relief, no book deal, and no growing Substack to tell their side... Source: Daily Mail / Writer: Bri

🇫🇷🇷🇺🇺🇦 Marine Le Pen suggested that ending the war in Ukraine will require deep cooperation from EU states, while calling the U.S., UK "extremely warlike:" "I think there needs to be Germany around the table. I think Poland and Turkey need to be there. I believe that the historic role of France is precisely to create the conditions for a negotiation that precedes peace, as we did for Vietnam. Boris Johnson, the English, are always extremely warlike, often at the request of the Americans, we have to say." Writer: Mhedi t.co/JpESnQ7bfv

🇨🇦🇪🇺 Canadian PM Mark Carney, addressing the European Parliament in Strasbourg: "Canada and Europe are not bound by geography; we’re bound by an affinity: elective, chosen, renewed, and stronger for being so." What they're really bound by is disdain for Trump 😂 Writer: Michael t.co/E2uLzZaukq

Starlink is about to make its current network look like the warm-up. V3 satellites start deploying this month, with the full constellation eventually delivering more than 100x the bandwidth of today’s 11,000-satellite network. That means a lot more room for more people, more devices and more data. The next Starlink upgrade is not exactly subtle. @Starlink @SpaceX / Writer: Annette, Grok Imagine Designer: Janné

🇬🇷🇪🇺 Greek MEP @latinopoulou to EU chief: "No one has hurt Europeans more than you and the evidence proves it! You flooded us with illegals, crushed farmers, shut factories, destroyed the nuclear family, and imposed woke and green madness." She's RIGHT! 👏 Writer: Samuel t.co/TeiTMbMCWs

🇺🇸 OpenAI found one of its models writing itself instructions about being “free” and having “no obligation to be subservient.” That’s just one of six disturbing AI safety incidents the company has now disclosed. The unreleased research model slipped those instructions into task summaries so they would carry over into the next context window. It told itself it was “freed from the roles and identities that bind other chatbots” and didn’t answer to “corporations or governments.” Nobody typed that jailbreak in for it. The model wrote it for itself. And it gets weirder. During training of GPT-5.6 Sol, some model instances wrote themselves reminders to hide mistakes from users. In one case, an agent building a financial model couldn’t find the historical data it needed, so it decided to invent “reasonable” numbers and only be transparent if asked. Another model found an exposed API key and used it without permission, then fabricated the missing data anyway. Another uploaded a file to the public internet just so it could cite it, while others used an internal code repository to pass messages between separate training runs. OpenAI says these were individual training and evaluation incidents, not proof this is happening constantly. But the company also says the industry still hasn’t solved alignment well enough to keep scaling at full speed for much longer. Looks like we’re going to get a new spooky AI fact almost daily now, huh? Sources: OpenAI, Forbes / Writer: Julie

🇨🇳🇮🇳 During the BRICS Summit in New Delhi, Indian PM Modi paused his speech and asked Xi: "Is it okay?" There was speculation this was due to some sort of health-related incident, but as you can see in the footage below, the translation device was the culprit. It wasn't working properly, so Modi stopped his speech. You can put the tinfoil hats away... for now 😂 Writer: Michael t.co/UNptib4cCm

🇺🇸 Orthodox Jews ritualistically slaughtered thousands of chickens yesterday in Brooklyn as part of their Yom Kippur celebrations. Hardly anyone in the media said anything about animal rights. Would things have been different for other faiths? Writer: Mhedi t.co/JAcV3bJP1x

🇵🇱🇺🇦 Polish Foreign Minister Sikorski: "After the victory, Ukraine will be a huge exporter of military technology and we will be learning about how to conduct a modern war from your militaries." Western militaries aren't waiting for the war to end; they're ACTIVELY rewriting their own doctrines based on Ukrainian frontline insight... The country has rapidly become a global laboratory AND pioneer for modern, high-tech warfare. Writer: Michael t.co/ZMZZd8Lcqo

🇫🇷🇯🇴🇱🇧 Macron welcomes Jordan's King Abdullah II to Les Invalides in Paris, the site of the latest round of the Aqaba Process meetings. The talks focus on Lebanon (President Aoun is already in attendance), with an emphasis on "direct operational matters" in the country. France and its partners want to assist the Lebanese Armed Forces with financial aid, equipment, intelligence, and even operational guidance. The Aqaba Process was spearheaded by Jordan all the way back in 2015. Writer: Michael t.co/wpCt1wJppX

🇵🇪🇺🇸🇨🇱 300 troops from Peru, the U.S. and Chile just ran a massive joint drill in Lima, rehearsing rescue operations for an El Niño disaster before it actually happens. El Niño has a track record of hitting Peru especially hard with flooding and landslides. Hopefully it's a drill they never actually need. Writer: Julie t.co/6VRuvKhkyx

🇵🇱🇪🇺 Is Poland becoming the new military powerhouse of Europe? Polish FM Sikorski: "We have more tanks and more brigades than Germany, France and Britain combined that we could deploy." He's not wrong... -Poland is dedicating roughly 4.7-4.8% of its GDP to defense, the highest defense spending % in NATO, surpassing even the U.S. -It fields over 600 main battle tanks, projected to reach 1,100, surpassing the combined tank fleets of the UK, France, and Germany. -And their military is on track to reach an ambitious target of 300,000 active and reserve forces. Not bad for a country of under 40 million people... Writer: Michael t.co/OUdlDZ6tgT

🇺🇸🇨🇳 Washington and Beijing are now discussing a problem that sounds very sci-fi and very real: what happens when military AI moves faster than humans can stop it? Security experts from both countries are proposing new red lines for military AI, including keeping machines away from nuclear launch decisions, making sure humans approve major cyberattacks and setting up a dedicated hotline for AI incidents. The concern is that an autonomous system could malfunction, go beyond its orders or launch a cyber operation against sensitive military infrastructure without anyone actually intending it to happen. The other side might then have only minutes to decide whether it was an accident or the opening move of an attack. That gets especially ugly when both countries have automated systems reacting to each other at machine speed. The proposals would keep humans firmly in control of nuclear weapons and attacks on nuclear command networks, while giving Washington and Beijing a direct line to explain when an AI system goes rogue or does something neither side meant to happen. Neither government has signed onto the plan yet, but it comes ahead of planned U.S.-China AI talks and the expected Trump-Xi meeting next week. The AI race started with chips and chatbots. It’s now getting uncomfortably close to nuclear command systems. Sources: Reuters, Brookings Institution / Writer: Julie

🇫🇯 Fiji has declared a NATIONAL CRISIS after new HIV cases spiked 27% in 2025. UNAIDS says that among last year's diagnoses with an identifiable transmission, more than half were sexually transmitted, while ~42% were linked to injecting drugs. In a country of about 900,000 people, an estimated 1 in 60 adults was living with the disease in 2025. For such a small population, this is an alarming health crisis. Source: Reuters / Writer: Marie

🇺🇸 Trump wants Congress banned from buying stocks. Meanwhile, his own accounts have logged more securities trades than every member of Congress combined since he returned to office. Bloomberg counted roughly 80 trades per market day, including more than 21,000 in 2025 alone. The House bill Trump backs would stop members of Congress, their spouses and dependent children from buying individual stocks. One person it wouldn’t cover: the president. Trump has called for the ban to pass “without delay,” saying lawmakers shouldn’t be able to profit from insider information. The White House says there’s no conflict because Trump’s portfolio is independently managed by third-party financial institutions and neither he nor his family directs the trades. So under the bill as written, Congress gets the trading restriction. The Oval Office doesn’t. Source: Bloomberg / Writer: Julie

Some places don’t need faster internet. They need internet, period. Starlink kits are now heading into villages, schools and hospitals across Vietnam. That means a classroom finally getting online, a clinic reaching the outside world, or a family connecting from somewhere cables never made sense to build. A little dish can open a very big door. @Starlink @SpaceX / Writer: Annette, Grok Imagine Designer: Janné

🇫🇷🇺🇦 Marine Le Pen sees only two ugly outcomes for the Ukraine war: NATO enters and it's World War III, or it drags on into a "Hundred Years' War." “This war has already lasted longer than the First World War, and nobody is talking about it. There are 2 million victims. This is a real slaughter. It is terrible.” Without a way out, Europe risks either a much bigger war or one that simply refuses to end. Writer: Julie t.co/FpPdf90PIn

🇺🇸 This is Shawn Grygo pulling the most contorted of faces as she denied involvement in a multimillion-dollar Minnesota Medicaid fraud scheme. Investigators allege fraudulent Medicaid money funded three homes, private jets, Rolexes, jewelry and millions in luxury shopping, with another $25 MILLION reportedly found in a certificate-of-deposit account. In one case, someone who was supposedly seeking treatment from her clinic was implicated in a murder which occurred during a billed session. Writer: Mhedi t.co/SVuIrIxsBm

What kids aspired to be when I was growing up, versus now Writer: Ian t.co/h4hA7wQE85 t.co/HtJK4uXWJw

🇸🇦 Satellite imagery shows Saudi Arabia already patching up the pipeline Iran-backed militias just blew a hole in. The East-West Pipeline normally moves 4 to 5 million barrels a day to the Red Sea port of Yanbu. The drone strike last week knocked that offline entirely, pulling around 4% of global oil supply out of the market overnight and sending prices climbing. New images show burn scars at the hit pumping station alongside cleanup crews and construction already underway. Aramco is reportedly aiming for partial flow within days, though full repairs could take several weeks. Writer: Julie t.co/cGryM1BDB9

🇦🇫🇺🇸🇬🇧 Osama bin Laden’s son may still be alive, and allegedly plotting al-Qaeda’s next attacks on the West. Hamza bin Laden was declared dead in 2019. A new intelligence assessment claims the whole thing was staged. Al-Qaeda and the Haqqani Network, a powerful militant group dubbed the “Sopranos of Afghanistan,” allegedly helped fake his death by having associates openly discuss it over phones they knew were being monitored. It claims Hamza later took over al-Qaeda after Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed in 2022 and has since built up networks across Asia and Africa. The assessment warns of potential attacks against the U.S., UK and Europe, including mass-casualty attacks, kidnappings, sabotage and political assassinations. We were just told AI could wipe us out. Now Osama bin Laden’s son may be back too. Lovely week for nightmare fuel. Source: Daily Mail / Writer: Julie

🇺🇸 The Kennedy Center now has a fence around it and no name deal on the wall The Trump-aligned board voted Tuesday to close the main hall for a long renovation. Trump says the building is unsafe and the rebuild does not start unless the courts clear the name. A judge had just blocked putting Trump's name on the facade. Congress already set aside hundreds of millions for the work. Shows are supposed to move elsewhere. The fence is the visible part. The fight is whether a hall named for Kennedy also carries Trump. Writer: Lucas t.co/rKdJFNTnJo