The Algorithm Age

The US Congress has passed President Donald Trump's huge tax breaks and spending cuts bill, bringing an end to days of debate and overnight voting in the Capitol. House Republicans propelled the $4.5 trillion (€3.8 trillion) One Big Beautiful Bill Act to final congressional passage on Thursday, overcoming multiple setbacks to approve Trump's signature second-term policy package before a 4 July deadline. The tight roll call, 218-214, came at a potentially high political cost, with two Republicans joining all Democrats opposed. GOP leaders worked overnight and the president himself leaned on a handful of sceptics to drop their opposition and send the bill to him to sign into law. Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York delayed voting by holding the floor for more than eight hours with a record-breaking speech against the bill. "We have a big job to finish," said House Speaker Mike Johnson. "With one big bea...

The Israeli government said Thursday that Donald Trump’s plan to relocate nearly two million Palestinians from Gaza is “still active,” despite widespread opposition from U.S. allies and warnings from rights groups that it would constitute a war crime. “President Trump has made clear that plan is most definitely still active,” Israeli government spokesperson David Mencer said in response to a question from The Independent about the plan’s status. “We think it's a good idea. The Prime Minister has praised the idea. It's certainly out-of-the-box thinking,” he added. The White House did not deny the plan was still a possibility when asked by The Independent. “President Trump has long advocated for creative solutions to improve the lives of Palestinians, including allowing them to resettle in a new, beautiful location while Gaza rebuilds,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said. The comments come ahead of a visit from Israeli Prime Minist...

The family of the Egyptian national who carried out the antisemitic attack in Boulder can be deported, a US federal judge ruled. On June 1, Mohamed Sabry Soliman threw Molotov cocktails at a pro-Israel demonstration in Boulder, Colorado, while yelling “Free Palestine.” One of the people wounded on the day, 82-year-old Karen Diamond , died of her injuries on June 25. Soliman now faces over 70 charges, including first-degree murder. Following his arrest, Soliman was found to be in the United States illegally on an expired visa, and his wife and five children are also illegal immigrants. On June 4, the District of Colorado issued a temporary restraining order preventing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from deporting the mother, Hayam El Gamal, and her five children, ages 4 to 18, from the United States. The case was then transferred to the Western District of Texas on June 18, where the court extended the order for an additional 14 da...

Irish rockers Fontaines D.C. invited a pro-Palestine group on stage at their festival slot at Roskilde, Denmark - one of the largest music festivals in Europe and the largest in the Nordic countries. The band brought out the activist group mid-performance to show their solidarity with the people of Gaza and led chants in both English and Arabic. Check out the footage below. This comes as both Kneecap and Bob Vylan are under investigation by the police for their pro-Palestine comments at Glastonbury 2025. Fontaines D.C. also praised British punk rap duo Bob Vylan for voicing their support for Palestine during their gig on the West Holts stage last weekend. Bob Vylan projected a message reading “Free Palestine – United Nations have called it a genocide – the BBC calls it a ‘conflict’” onto the screen behind them, and also led chants of both “free, free Palestine” and “death, death to the IDF” (Israel Defence Forces). Glastonbury organisers iss...

Irish rockers Fontaines D.C. invited a pro-Palestine group on stage at their festival slot at Roskilde, Denmark - one of the largest music festivals in Europe and the largest in the Nordic countries. The band brought out the activist group mid-performance to show their solidarity with the people of Gaza and led chants in both English and Arabic. Check out the footage below. This comes as both Kneecap and Bob Vylan are under investigation by the police for their pro-Palestine comments at Glastonbury 2025. Fontaines D.C. also praised British punk rap duo Bob Vylan for voicing their support for Palestine during their gig on the West Holts stage last weekend. Bob Vylan projected a message reading “Free Palestine – United Nations have called it a genocide – the BBC calls it a ‘conflict’” onto the screen behind them, and also led chants of both “free, free Palestine” and “death, death to the IDF” (Israel Defence Forces). Glastonbury organisers iss...

A decade ago, Donald Trump descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower in New York City and ignited a political movement that has reshaped American politics . In a memorable turn of phrase, Trump promised supporters of his 2016 presidential campaign that “we are going to make our country great again.” Since then, the Make America Great Again movement has dominated the U.S. political conversation, reshaped the Republican Party and become a lucrative brand adorning hats, T-shirts and bumper stickers. When asked what MAGA means to him, Trump, in a 2017 interview with The Washington Post said, “To me, it meant jobs. It meant industry, and meant military strength. It meant taking care of our veterans. It meant so much.” But Democratic leaders have a different interpretation of the slogan. Former President Bill Clinton in 2016 said of MAGA: “That message where ‘I’ll give you America great again’ is if you’re a white Southerner, you know exactly what it means, d...

On June 15th, Donald Trump declared war on blue cities. ”[W]e must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America's largest Cities, [which are] are the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State, robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens,” Trump posted to Truth Social, riffing on the interlocking conspiracy theories that define his second term. The next day, at the G7 summit, a reporter asked Trump about the post. Why was he singling out Democratic cities? Trump falsely claimed that Joe Biden let in 21 million migrants of whom “vast numbers” were “murderers, killers, and people from gangs.” Canadian prime minister Mark Carney’s mouth fell. His eyes darted back and forth, as if he were scanning the back of the room for a rescue party. Trump continued. Most of those people are in Democrat-run cities, he claimed, “and they think ...

Political and news cycles often work in a certain and predictable way. Issues flare like bushfires, then rage for weeks or even months, until they are finally extinguished by action or fade by being overtaken by the next big thing. On two very different fronts this week, we’re reminded how these cycles work. During the last term, the opposition constantly hammered the government over its handling of the former immigration detainees released after the High Court found they couldn’t be held indefinitely. These included people who had committed murder, child sex offences and violent assaults. On Sunday, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke admitted in a television interview that the legislation the government passed to re-detain some of these people was, in effect, impossible to use. Burke’s comments attracted only limited attention. The other reminder of an old story came when the Federal Court ordered a militant Muslim preacher to remove inflammatory lectures from the internet...

Sinn Féin called on the Lord Mayor of Belfast, Tracy Kelly, to explain the decision to remove a portrait of President Michael D Higgins from Belfast City Hall. Following a social media post by Ms Kelly, Sinn Féin councillors were quick to notice that a portrait of Mr Higgins had been removed from a reception parlour in the building. Sinn Féin has now called on Ms Kelly to explain the decision to remove the portrait. The portrait had been placed in the reception room by Sinn Féin’s Ryan Murphy when he was lord mayor. The picture was put up after Mr Murphy received a portrait of King Charles and decided to place the two side by side. This was then followed by a formal event to mark the occasion. The portrait’s disappearance prompted Mr Murphy to question its whereabouts in a council meeting on Tuesday. Belfast City Council confirmed that the portrait, despite no longer being on display, is being safely stored at City Hall, ‘at the requ...

Fox News commentator Jason Chaffetz tossed a stunning accusation at Zohran Mamdani on Wednesday, claiming the New York City mayoral candidate “just wants to eradicate Jews” and “doesn’t believe in them.” The inflammatory assertion by Chaffetz – a former Republican congressman from Utah– comes as conservatives and centrist Democrats have widely smeared Mamdani as “antisemitic” – largely over his “refusal to condemn” the pro-Palestinian slogan “globalize the intifada.” While saying he doesn’t use the phrase or endorse it , Mamdani has added that his role as “the mayor is not to police language” while arguing that the term can mean different things to different people. He’s also vowed to tackle the “crisis of antisemitism” in the city, pushing for a significant increase in funding for anti-hate crime prevention. During an interview with The Bulwark, for instance, he said that while he sympathized with those who feel “intifada” is associated with violence against Isra...

Whitehouse, in an exclusive interview with Global South World, warned that African youth, particularly English-speaking job seekers, are being increasingly targeted by traffickers linked to scam compounds. He revealed that his long-standing engagement with Cambodia began over a decade ago through his collaboration with exiled opposition leader Sam Rainsy. “I helped him to write his English-language autobiography, which was published in 2013,” Whitehouse said. “Sam Rainsy is a former finance minister of Cambodia in the 1990s." Whitehouse, now a freelance journalist with a special focus on Southeast Asia, believes Cambodia’s cybercrime industry represents a new phase of long-standing state corruption. “Back in the 1990s, corruption took the form primarily of illegal logging,” he says. “These days, it’s more about cyber scams being more profitable and far less labour-intensive, which, it's fair to say, make money much faster, in much larger quantities,” he noted. ...

Kanye West can no longer visit his wife Bianca Censori 's home country of Australia. Officials from Down Under revoked the controversial rapper's valid visa as a result of West's frequent antisemitic and offensive remarks — specifically ones made in connection to his new song "Heil Hitler." Kanye West Has Australian Visa Revoked During a recent appearance on ABC's Afternoon Briefing , Immigration Minister Tony Burke revealed West is blocked from entering the country in an effort to prevent the promotion of hate across the nation. "He’s made a lot of offensive comments that my officials looked at again once he released [that] song ," Burke explained. While West's visa wasn't specifically obtained for concert purposes, "officials still looked at the law and said if you’re going to have a song and promote that sort of Nazism, we don’t need that in Australia," the minister noted. The...

Prince Harry is reportedly planning to invite his estranged father , King Charles, and brother, Prince William, to the 2027 Invictus Games, scheduled to be held in Birmingham. The sporting event is expected to bring the Duke of Sussex back to his home country and help him reconcile with his rifted family, should everything go as planned. However, royal experts believe that Harry has a lot of "bad air" to clear to be able to mend his strained relationship with his family, but winning William back is still plausible. Open the Youtube video Harry and William reportedly had a brief exchange during their grandmother, Queen Elizabeth’s, funeral in 2022. The Duke’s many prior explosive interviews with his wife, Meghan Markle, a Netflix documentary, and his tell-all memoir, Spare, further fractured his relationship with the Prince of Wales. Amid their ongoing feud, the question has arisen whether Charles and William would attend the games, held for injured servicemen...

As the first digital native generation, Gen Z is grappling with exposure to global instability in a way that no other generation has. "We were raised with war bleeding through our screens ... we've seen more armed drones, missiles and mutilated children before 9 a.m. than any generation before us," said 25-year-old neuroscience and AI researcher Amogh Mehrotra. Geopolitical turmoil has rocked the world in recent years, from the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, to the ongoing Israel-Hamas war , as well as the conflict between Israel and Iran during which nuclear tensions were heightened. Gen Z is also struggling with inflation , increasing housing prices , climate change and mass corporate layoffs — and they're seeing all of it play out right in front of their eyes. This has created a profound sense of uncertainty for many in the generation as they try to build their future. "Many of us feel like we're inheriting broken systems, ...

Milan Kundera opens his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting with a scene from the winter of 1948. Klement Gottwald, leader of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, is giving a speech to the masses from a palace balcony, surrounded by fellow party members. Comrade Vladimir Clementis thoughtfully places his fur hat on Gottwald’s bare head; the hat then features in an iconic photograph. Four years later, Clementis is found guilty of being a bourgeois nationalist and hanged. His ashes are strewn on a Prague street. The propaganda section of the party removes him from written history and erases him from the photograph. “Nothing remains of Clementis,” writes Kundera, “but the fur hat on Gottwald’s head.” Review: Memory Lane: The Perfectly Imperfect Ways We Remember – Ciara Greene & Gillian Murphy (Princeton University Press) Efforts to enforce political forgetting are often associated with totalitarian regimes. The state endeavours to control not only its citi...

The decision by three Republican senators to vote "no" on the megabill on its way back to the House before Donald Trump can sign it set off a mass outpouring of anger Tuesday afternoon on his Truth Social platform. Moments after the bill passed with Vice President JDVance's tie-breaker vote, GOP Sens. Thom Tillis (NC), Susan Collins (ME) and Rand Paul (KY) became enemies of the state in the eyes of the MAGA faithful, with one Trump fan calling them "insurrectionists." With a flood of complaints that the three are "Republicans in name only," or RINOs, commenter Monk lumped in Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) , who later admitted she would like to see the bill fail as it is written once it is returned to the House. Want more breaking political news? Click for the latest headlines at Raw Story. "Now, primary Collins, Murkowski and Rand Paul!. America is sick of these RINO’s ," he wrote. Rugmakr added, "Yes indeed, ...

Glastonbury Festival may be the best festival in the world for music, but it's always politically-charged, and over the years has become known as a place for people to express themselves and engage in healthy debate when it comes to current affairs too. However, the 2025 festival has caused a stir in particular, not least because it's fallen at a time when there's a lot more conflict in the world, particularly in the Middle East, where the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, and the Israel-Iran war are dividing people. What's more, a lot of artists used their performances at the Worthy Farm site to call for peace, or even express their own support publicly for Palestine , which has been near-destroyed as a result of fighting. Bob Vylan became one of the biggest talking points of the weekend, when front man, Bobby Vylan (real name Pascal Robinson-Foster), led chants of "Death, death to the IDF" (Israel Defence Forces) among the crowd. The festival...