As Trump prepares to meet with Xi Jinping at the White House, a small group of exiled Tibetans has departed from New York City for a cross-country march on Washington, to join a demonstration planned there against the Chinese dictator. The group departed Sept. 17 from the gates of the United Nations, where Lobga Rangzen, a longtime New York Tibetan activist, self-immolated on July 2. After a stop at Philadelphia's Independence Hall—clearly chosen for its symbolic value—the "Independence Walk" will arrive in DC Sept. 24, the date of both the rally against Xi and the dinner honoring him at the White House (also to be attended by giants of the tech industry).

The global food supply is under threat from laws that criminalize the sale and exchange of traditional peasant seed varieties, a group of UN experts said Sept. 16. In their latest report to the Human Rights Council, the UN Working Group on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas indicated that almost all of the world's food comes from seeds and that traditional systems supply 70 to 90 percent of the seeds sown in many countries.

Human Rights Watch urged Philippine authorities on Sept. 3 to drop charges against 11 indigenous rights protesters arrested during a police operation to clear an anti-mining blockade in Kasibu, Nueva Vizcaya province.

Amnesty International on Aug. 19 accused Argentina of putting in place a "techno-authoritarian" surveillance infrastructure without adequate legal safeguards, as the government's newly created AI security unit expands state monitoring powers over citizens' online communications and physical movements.

Eighty-one years after Nagasaki, there is growing awareness of the heightening threat of nuclear war. There must be similar awareness of the existential threat to humanity posed by AI, and the hegemony of digital technology generally. The past week has seen cyber-attacks on critical water infrastructure in the US. The Flock AI-boosted surveillance system is being used for doxxing and stalking. Police use of "brain decoders" portends the very eradication of any notion of privacy whatsoever. And there have been still more instances of AI going rogue. The growing use of AI by cyber-criminals and jihadis is hardly more terrifying than its "legitimate" (sic) use by the techno-fascist establishment. Recent protests against the tech giants (such as that by Rise & Resist outside the Google headquarters in New York) are a good start. But in Episode 340 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg continues to make the case for an abolitionist position on Artificial Intelligence—and practical resistance to digital hegemony in everyday life.

Amnesty International on July 29 called on Shell PLC to answer for decades of pollution in the Niger Delta following release of a report detailing how oil pollution has damaged water, farmland, fisheries, health and livelihoods, while the company continued to profit and deny responsibility.

The report, titled "Lifting the Lid: Internal documents expose Shell’s negligent oil operations," examines company records that appear to confirm the long-standing complaints of residents of the Niger Delta. Amnesty reports that the documents also loan weight to concerns raised by the Nigerian army over neglectful conduct and "complicity" in oil theft that has led to spills. Amnesty is the first group to report on these disclosed documents following legal proceedings in the UK last summer.

The popular case against the data centers now proliferating vertiginously across the United States emphasizes the ecological imperative. As water resources shrink, forcing emergency restrictions on use across the western states, voracious water consumption by the industry is just one of the ways its advance portends imminent human extinction. Meanwhile, the industry slaps back in the courts against communities that would stand up against this advance. But Artificial Intelligence itself poses an existential threat, apart from the direct impacts of the computing power. Even respected voices in the industry warn of a high probability that AI will turn upon and destroy its creators. The bots themselves seem to be warning us of this through ominous messaging. Seeming instances of AI going unilateral have prompted a bipartisan AI Kill Switch bill in Congress. Finally, there is the systematic cultural destruction being wrought by AI—literally shredding humankind's legacy of literacy, to impose a reign of sheer error and idiocy. In Episode 339 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg continues to make the case for an abolitionist position on Artificial Intelligence.

New research from Meta's Oversight Board found commercial large language models (LLMs) from Anthropic, DeepSeek, Google, Meta, OpenAI and xAI are far less likely to criticize repressive leaders and governments. The research calls it "free speech infringements by proxy." Apps and material produced by these generative AI tools could actively reproduce restrictions, including on political criticism. It's unclear why these AI models are doing this—underscoring the need for companies to be transparent and build "human rights due diligence" into the process, before it’s too late. China, Thailand, Cambodia and Saudi Arabia topped the list of countries with the highest refusal rates when LLMs were prompted to create materials criticizing governments.