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Haiti at the World Cup is more than an underdog tale – it is the story of global migration

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IwPost
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Haiti at the World Cup is more than an underdog tale – it is the story of global migration

When Haiti’s soccer team lines up against Scotland on June 13, 2026, its players will be representing the Caribbean nation at a World Cup for the first time since 1974. They will also embody the complexities and possibilities of Haiti and its diaspora.

Of the 26 players selected for the squad, only 10 were born in Haiti. And just one, Woodensky Pierre, plays for a Haitian club. Twelve were born in France of Haitian parents, one in Canada, one in Switzerland and two in the United States.

The team is both a symbol of national pride and a condensation of battles Haitians have long fought for dignity and self-determination. Soccer commentator Nico Cantor captured this powerfully when he effused about the deep meaning of Haiti’s qualification for the World Cup on Nov. 18, 2025, exactly 222 years after revolutionary leader Jean‑Jacques Dessalines fought a famous battle against the French on the way to independence. “Their national team has given Haiti something to be proud of,” Cantor said. “It is historic for many reasons.”

Imagined communities and 11 named players

During the World Cup, individual actions can catapult a player to the status of national icon or never-forgotten villain. But we also see teams either connect and pull together or fragment and fall apart. It can become a powerful metaphor for the fate of nations themselves, resonating with a broader human experience.

How does this dynamic shift when a team, like Haiti, consists of players whose personal stories are ones of migration to another country, but who have chosen to represent the nations of their parents in international competition?

Haiti is not alone. Since 2004, FIFA has allowed players who have played for the national team of one country to switch to another if they do so before their 21st birthday. In 2020, the rules were further loosened so that players can change in some contexts after that age.

A man beats a drum surrounded by pther people

Haitian fans in Port-au-Prince celebrate the nation’s qualification for the 2026 FIFA World Cup on Nov. 18, 2025. Clarens Siffroy/AFP via Getty Images

Haitians at the World Cup

The broader history of Haitians at the World Cup has long been shaped by diasporic movement. At the 1950 World Cup, when a scrappy U.S. team composed mostly of immigrants famously defeated England 1-0, it was a Haitian man, Joe Gaetjens, who scored the crucial goal.

A black and white photo shows a group of men in soccer jerseys.

The USA team that beat England, including Joe Gaetjens, third from right in front row. EMPICS Sport/EMPICS via Getty Images

Decades later, Jozy Altidore, a child of Haitian immigrants, played in every game for the U.S. during its 2010 World Cup run.

Until now, Haiti’s national teams have appeared in only two World Cups. Most recently, the country’s team qualified for the 2023 Women’s World Cup, overcoming many obstacles in the process. Like the men’s team in this year’s competition, the women could not train or play games at home in Haiti. But playing for Haiti helped their star player, Melchie Durmonay, begin a professional career in France, where she plays for the leading team, Olympique de Lyon, and is considered one of the best players in global women’s soccer.

The men’s team has previously competed only in the 1974 tournament. On that occasion a team made up of players who had all been born in Haiti shocked an Italy team famed for its impregnable defense. Early in the second half, Haiti’s Emmanuel Sanon broke away to catch a masterful pass downfield, dribbled expertly around an Italian defender and powered the ball into the goal.

A group of men in white and orange jerseys stand on a football pitch.

Emmanuel Sanon (20) scores one of his – and Haiti’s – only two World Cup goals, on June 15, 1974. Mirror Syndication International/Mirrorpix via Getty Images

It remains the most celebrated goal in Haitian football. And although Haiti lost that game 3-1, Sanon became a national hero. He went on to a professional career in Florida in the 1980s and later managed the Haitian national team.

When he died in Orlando in 2008, he was buried and received a state funeral in Haiti. A soccer park is named after him in Miami’s Little Haiti in recognition of his place in the country’s history.

A large mural shows people's faces.

A mural depicts Haitian soccer player Emmanuel Sanon alongside revolutionary leaders Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and Jean-Jacques Dessalines in the Bel Air neighborhood of Port-au-Prince. Laura Wagner, CC BY-SA

A diaspora on the pitch

The life histories brought together for the 2026 tournament capture the broader story of Haitian migration, but they also illustrate the different kinds of opportunities young athletes have in different countries.

Some of Haiti’s players, like Hannes Delcroix, have had access to the most elite and well-resourced structures in global soccer. He was born in the Artibonite Valley in Haiti but as a child moved with his parents to Belgium. There, he trained at the youth academy of the Belgium professional team Anderlecht and also played on Belgium’s international youth teams. He now plays professionally in Switzerland.

A man in blue kit controls a football.

Haiti’s Hannes Delcroix on the ball during a friendly match against Tunisia on March 28, 2026. Vaughn Ridley/Getty Images

But it is France’s soccer infrastructure that has in many ways most deeply shaped the trajectories of Haiti’s team. The Haitian diaspora in France is much smaller than in the U.S. – it is estimated at around 100,000 – but its children have had access to one of the most successful systems for soccer training in the world.

Facing many social and economic barriers, children of immigrants, many of whom live in the housing projects in the suburbs of Paris and other French cities, often see an athletic career as their best chance for success. And the country invests heavily in sporting infrastructure with high level of state investment at the local and national level. As a result, immigrant communities in France have become some of the most remarkable generators of soccer talent in the world. Two of the standouts of the French national team – Ousmane Dembele and Kylian Mbappé – are products of the French soccer system. and both are sons of African immigrants. Meanwhile, 75 players born in France will be playing on non-French national teams.

Paths to the World Cup

Haiti’s talisman and top scorer, Duckens Nazon, was born in a Parisian suburb and played with a series of French professional teams before being recruited to the English team Wolverhampton Wanderers in 2017. His stint there was brief, and he has since moved a few times, playing professionally in Iran for Estaghlal this past year and having to make a harrowing escape from the war there in order to be able to play in the World Cup.

The strong representation of Franco-Haitian players, and the relatively small number of those born in the U.S., speaks volumes about the difference in the infrastructure and structure of opportunity around soccer in the two countries.

The U.S. is home to the largest Haitian diaspora in the world, with a population of approximately 1.1 million registered in the 2021 census. Actual numbers – both then and now – are likely larger. Yet only two players born in the U.S. are on Haiti’s World Cup squad: Derrick Etienne Jr., born in Richmond, Virginia, and Duke Lacroix, born in New Jersey.

In both cases, the players were able to find their way to the pathways for professional sport that exist in the U.S. – notably elite universities – that are not available to many other children of Haitian immigrants.

Frantzdy Pierrot, one of the team’s stars, is part of a more recent history of migration from Haiti to the U.S.

He was born in Cap Haïtien in 1995 but migrated to Melrose, Massachusetts, as a child. After high school there, he played at Northeastern University and then Coastal Carolina University before embarking on a professional career that has taken him to England, France, Israel and Turkey. On May 26, 2026, the governor of Massachusetts celebrated his achievements by declaring that day Frantzdy Pierrot Day in the state.

A man sits ion front of a bag of balls.

A shopkeeper sells footballs in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on April 14, 2026. Clarens Siffroy/AFP via Getty Images

A global Haiti

Whatever happens on the pitch for Haiti this tournament, their games are going to be an occasion for unity and celebration.

Haiti team’s fans are legendary for their passion. One of the most intense victory celebrations I have witnessed took place outside a stadium in Harrison, New Jersey, in June 2019 when Haiti defeated Costa Rica in a Gold Cup group match. The parking lot filled up for many hours afterward, with Rara music and dancing.

Sadly, a visa ban against Haiti means that few Haitians will be able to travel from their country to the U.S. to watch their team play.

But on June 13, Haiti itself will be at a standstill during the games, and across the diaspora – in Boston, New York, Houston, Montreal and Paris, but also in the Bahamas, Brazil, Chile and other parts of Latin America – crowds will gather to be together in pride.

Many others, me included, will join in supporting Haiti out of solidarity, taken by this story of possibility. And if, like Sanon in 1974, one of Haiti’s new generation of players breaks through and scores a goal, the celebration will be truly global.

The 2026 Honda Prelude review: Didn’t expect such a head-turner

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The 2026 Honda Prelude review: Didn’t expect such a head-turner

You can tell Honda was trying to manage expectations when it emailed me to stress that “the Prelude is not a sports car.” And I can understand why. On paper, the specs make the sleek coupe—technically a three-door hatch—seem underwhelming. Especially if you start comparing it to alternatives.

A Mazda MX-5 or Subaru BRZ weighs hundreds of pounds less, and the Subaru packs more power than the Prelude’s 200 hp (149 kW). A Volkswagen Golf GTI weighs about the same as the Prelude at 3,261 lbs (1,479 kg), but it delivers 20 percent more power and offers rear seats that actually accommodate adults. But after a week with the bright blue Prelude, it’s hard to care about the specs. This might be one of the best cars we’ll drive all year.

Then again, looking back across the previous five generations, the Prelude was never really a sports car. It has always been a technology showcase for Honda, introducing features like fuel injection, four-wheel steering, variable valve timing, and active torque transfer. For the sixth-generation Prelude, the headline feature is Honda’s S+ shift, which adds some sporty character to the OEM’s four-cylinder hybrid.

A honda prelude in profile

Technically, a three-door fastback not a two-door coupe.

Jonathan Gitlin

Technically, a three-door fastback not a two-door coupe. Jonathan Gitlin

A blue Honda prelude

Note the air vent behind the front wheel well.

Jonathan Gitlin

Note the air vent behind the front wheel well. Jonathan Gitlin

There’s something quite Porsche-like about the rear.

Jonathan Gitlin

There’s something quite Porsche-like about the rear. Jonathan Gitlin

Fuel sipper

Most of the time, the front wheels are driven by the Prelude’s 181 hp (135 kW), 232 lb-ft (315 Nm) electric traction motor, which is powered by either the 1 kWh battery for a pure EV drive or the 2.0 L four-cylinder Atkinson cycle engine via a second electric motor/generator unit that converts the engine’s output into electrical energy for use by the traction motor. But like the Chevrolet Volt and some other hybrids, the gasoline engine can directly drive the front wheels at highway speeds, where it’s more efficient.

And efficiency is the name of the game, resulting in a combined 44 mpg (5.3 L/100 km). On a full tank, that means 466 miles (750 km) between fueling stops—talk about a proper grand tourer. And if you leave the drive mode set to Comfort and never touch the paddles behind the steering wheel or the big round S+ button on the center console, the new Prelude might just be a slightly less efficient two-door Toyota Prius lookalike. (At least head-on—I still don’t know how Honda’s designers got away without a cease and desist from their colleagues at Toyota for using a near-identical front.)

In Comfort mode, the ride is soft, the powertrain is quiet, and the engine cuts out whenever possible. Toggle into GT, and the Prelude’s adaptive dampers stiffen up a little, the steering gets weightier, and if you engage S+—which mimics an eight-speed gearbox by changing throttle and regenerative braking maps—the shifts become a little jerkier to provide the driver some feedback.

Sport takes this further; the engine remains running to feed energy into the battery or motors at a moment’s notice, and in S+, the shifts become more deliberately violent (although only a little—we’re not talking sequential crash box or anything), and the powertrain is at its (still not obnoxious) loudest.

A blue Honda Prelude

It might not be an all-out sports car, but it’s still engaging to drive.

Credit: Jonathan Gitlin

It might not be an all-out sports car, but it’s still engaging to drive. Credit: Jonathan Gitlin

I found GT to be the car’s sweet spot. The throttle response is good—better than a turbocharged non-hybrid, perhaps not quite as sharp as the sportiest EVs. The S+ mode’s party trick of replicating a paddle-shift transmission works well on twisty roads, providing an extra layer of driver engagement. Most of the time, though, I left S+ unengaged and simply used the steering wheel paddles to adjust the amount of lift-off regenerative braking, which can be as little as 0.2 g for coasting or as much as 0.2 G, which is less than you’d find in most battery EVs but is still strong enough to replicate the effect of engine braking.

Type-R goodies

There’s more to the drive experience than just an efficient but involving powertrain. The front and rear tracks have been stretched like the Civic Type-R, which donates its front dual-axis and rear multilink suspension to the Prelude, as well as its adaptive dampers, which have been recalibrated for a more comfortable ride. (The stiffest setting in the Prelude is slightly softer than the softest setting in the Type-R.)

Consequently, there’s plenty of grip, especially on the ($1,200) optional summer tires fitted to our test Prelude. The hybrid powertrain encourages a driving style that maintains momentum rather than using a point and squirt approach, and there’s so much front grip that you can corner quicker than you expect, with nary a squeal or noise from the tires as you carry your speed through the apex. And while the curb weight is a good deal more than a Miata or BRZ, compared to the usual diet of crossovers and EVs, the Prelude feels remarkably lithe and nimble.

If you’re an introvert, though, this might not be the car for you, especially in the optional ($455) Boost Blue Pearl you see here. I’m not sure what I last drove that garnered as much attention as the Prelude, but the styling appears to be a hit, generating questions from other drivers in traffic and from bystanders whenever I parked. People like this shape, it seems. Things are pretty good on the inside, too, at least from the front.

Honda Prelude interior

The Prelude interior uses a lot from the Civic, but that’s not a bad thing. And yes, there’s CarPlay and Android Auto.

Honda

The Prelude interior uses a lot from the Civic, but that’s not a bad thing. And yes, there’s CarPlay and Android Auto. Honda

Honda prelude front seats

The sporty front seats.

Honda

The sporty front seats. Honda

Honda prelude dash

The dash reminds you what you’re sitting in.

Honda

The dash reminds you what you’re sitting in. Honda

Honda prelude with the hatch open

The back seats fold flat for more storage.

Honda

The back seats fold flat for more storage. Honda

There’s a sportier steering wheel and sporty seats, but the rest of the cockpit borrows from the Civic. That’s no hardship—far from it, as there are discrete buttons and dials for all the controls. The smallish infotainment system is the only touchscreen you’ll find, and you never need to use it to adjust the temperature, change the volume, or handle any of the other functions that some automakers have frustratingly relegated to screens or capacitive panels. I’d prefer the infotainment screen to be slightly angled toward the driver, but that’s a minor quibble at this point.

The back seats are more occasional—think of them like the ones in the back of a Porsche 911, there for small children, small pets, more luggage, or emergencies. But the rear hatch provides plenty of room for the relatively shallow 15.1 cubic feet (427 L).

I’d buy one

I wasn’t expecting to be as smitten with the Prelude as I was. It’s not quite the last word in handling that an MX-5 or BRZ is, and a Golf GTI is both more powerful and more practical. But none of those cars can get anywhere near the Prelude’s efficiency, while the coupe gives up little in terms of driver engagement.

Throw in those looks and a $42,000 MSRP that includes tons of equipment as standard, and it’s quite the proposition. In fact, the new Prelude would be at the top of my list if I were looking for a new car. The car won’t be very common, though—Honda plans to sell only about 4,000 a year.

The road to AI supremacy runs beyond chips

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IwPost
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The road to AI supremacy runs beyond chips

It’s clear that very soon, maybe even later this year, we’ll be producing more chips than we can turn on — except for China.

Elon Musk, at World economic forum 2026

When Musk made that remark, his core argument was that the biggest bottleneck to AI advancement is not computing hardware but a shortage of electrical power.

For the last few years, the global conversation about artificial intelligence has revolved around one issue: semiconductors. Policymakers across the world have discussed silicon supremacy in their planning documents, as though the future of the AI industry would depend solely on it. NVIDIA became the first chip company to reach $5 trillion valuation. It has now become the gold standard of the industry.

But, nowadays, there seems to be another challenge in front of AI companies. The launch of DeepSeek in 2025 has changed the assumption that was becoming conventional wisdom.

Today, nations, companies and investors are realizing that they have less need to stockpile GPUs, battle for chip supply and chase the next hardware breakthrough. DeepSeek shows that algorithmic efficiency can partially compensate for hardware constraints through optimizations.

Unlike the other AI models that use the entire model for every query, Deep Seek activates only the relevant parts, improving performance per unit of compute.

Whenever an AI model responds to a query, generates a word, answer, image, or video, it performs billions of calculations. But those calculations run on electricity. For example, one ChatGPT query used 10 times as many resources as a Google search query. Generating an AI image requires as much power as charging your smartphone.

Now multiply by hundreds of millions of queries every day, and the math will be terrifying. So, the biggest constraint in the AI industry today is not computing but power. As AI systems grow larger and more capable, electricity supply is emerging as a critical constraint, and the pressure is already showing in the United States.

Washington focused on semiconductors and Beijing on grid

In the US, data centers will account for 38% of the growth in electricity demand between 2024 and 2030, though just 6% in China, according to Bloomberg NEF projections. Data centers will command almost 7% of total US power demand by 2030, compared with 2% in China.  

By 2035, US data center power demand is projected to reach 106 gigawatts. To put that in perspective, the United States operates the largest nuclear fleet on the planet. But its total output is 97 gigawatts, which still wouldn’t be enough to meet the demands. A data centre can be built in as little as 18 months, while bringing a new power supply takes three times longer. In 2024, the US built 888 miles of transmission lines, when it needs about 5000 miles every year.

In  March 2025 CSIS reported that electricity supply had become the biggest bottleneck of US companies. This can be confirmed from the fact that AI data centers are driving up electricity costs in the US. In data center-heavy states like Virginia, power prices have risen by as much as 267% over the past five years. According to IEA predications, the global data-center electricity demand could rise from current estimates of 415 terawatt hours in 2024 to approx. 945 TWh by 2030, with AI being the single largest driver of this growth.

In 2024, China generated over 10,000 TWh of electricity, more than double any other country on the earth. In the next five years, China could add more than 3.4 terawatts of new generating capacity, vastly exceeding expected additions in the United States.  This is equally important because AI deployment ultimately depends on access to reliable and affordable electricity. So, today, the AI race has moved from computational efficiency to energy abundance.

AI race will have a clean energy advantage

Today, in the West, government and energy companies are still focused on protecting traditional industries like oil and natural gas. China meanwhile has invested heavily in new technology such as solar panels, batteries and wind power not to reduce pollution but as industries to create job, drive innovation, and strengthen the economy. In short, Western leaders viewed solar panels, batteries, and wind turbines as climate tools; the Chinese, as industrial tools.

Electricity generation in China vs United States vs Europe

Today, China possesses approximately 430 gigawatts of hydropower, 550-600 GW of Wind Power, and 850-900 GW of Solar Power, apart from 1,150 GW of coal-fired generation. These clean energy assets provide China with a stable energy foundation capable of supporting any industrial expansion, electrification, or AI infrastructure challenge.

The future of AI race will not by determined by the fastest chips or the best algorithms but the one who has better power capacity to run those models. China has recognized this way before the rest of the world. Over the past two decades, the country has invested massively in clean energy and cemented its status as the world’s undisputed clean energy superpower, spending more on renewables than the rest of the world combined.

But the United States has extraordinary strengths: top universities, deep capital markets, an innovation culture, global dominance in the semiconductor industry, entrepreneurial dynamism, and the topmost AI-influential companies in the world. As the landscape evolves, AI is no longer remain a software competition but an infrastructure competition. In infrastructure, expertise and scale matter.

The upcoming decade will reveal whether the decisive factor in the AI race will be silicon or electricity.  In case AI becomes a competition over electrical power, then the most important geopolitical story of the next decade may or may not be happening in Silicon Valley.

Graham Platner Wins in Maine, Turning Anti-Establishment Fight on Susan Collins

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Noah Hurowitz
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Graham Platner Wins in Maine, Turning Anti-Establishment Fight on Susan Collins


Political newcomer Graham Platner won a bruising primary fight for the state’s Democratic Senate nomination Tuesday night, when voters easily picked him to take on Republican Susan Collins in November despite damage from stories delving into his past.

Plainspoken populism won the oyster farmer and Marine Corps veteran support among fed-up Mainers, who nominated him in a landslide that The Associated Press called with just 8 percent of the vote in.

“Over the last nine months I have seen Mainers come together behind a vision to take back our power from corporations and billionaires,” Platner said in his acceptance speech Tuesday. “I love every single one of you. Everyone who has shown up at a town hall, who has knocked on a door, who cast their vote — not for me but for a vision of a life in Maine that you can afford; a life of dignity and a government that actually serves its people.”

Platner’s appeal seemed unshaken amid months of

negative press stemming from his inflammatory comments on Reddit and an ill-advised tattoo resembling a Nazi symbol. But a recent series of damaging stories in national media, including revelations in the Wall Street Journal about extramarital sexting and allegations in the New York Times of abusive behavior in past relationships, have given some voters and political observers pause. Others say that in Maine, a fiercely independent state where residents nurse a healthy suspicion of influence “from away,” Platner supporters have dismissed those stories as meddling from an establishment fearful of a political maverick.

“From what I can tell, I don’t think the Times piece moved the needle much,” said Shay Stewart-Bouley, a longtime Maine resident who has written both critically and supportively of Platner on her blog, Black Girl in Maine. “I heard some women say it made them uneasy, but I haven’t heard anyone say it changed how they’re going to vote.”

In other cases, the coverage appears to have cemented Platner’s status as an outsider to an establishment embodied by Collins, who has represented Maine in the Senate since 1997. Like many incumbents nationwide, the Republican senator will have to run amid a shrinking job market and rising costs, points that Platner has seized on throughout his campaign. And Collins’s association with the establishment could prove a major liability, even among onetime supporters of President Donald Trump, according to Charles Pray, a former state senator and veteran figure in Maine Democratic politics.

“Part of Trump’s rise was a total frustration with incumbents and people in power, and a lot of people who were Trump supporters who hoped he was going to address rising grocery prices and stuff now see him saying that affordability is not an issue,” said Pray. “Well, affordability is a big issue in Maine, and I think that hurts Collins.”

Platner faced a nominal challenge in Tuesday’s primary from Maine Gov. Janet Mills, who suspended her campaign in April but remained on the ballot, and from David Costello, a former Democratic nominee in the 2024 Senate race who was little more than an afterthought in the latest contest.

Just days before the primary, the Times reported disturbing allegations about Platner, including that an ex-girlfriend accused him of drunkenly locking her in a room during a fight and physically restraining her at times. (Platner has acknowledged the relationship with the accuser, a longtime Republican operative in Washington, but denies he engaged in violent behavior.)

Pray said that among people he’s spoken with, the allegations, while concerning, are undercut by Collins’s support for the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh despite the sexual assault accusations against him, and by her support of Trump despite the many accusations against him and his consistently hostile behavior toward women interviewers.

“I think people aren’t buying the double standard. She confirmed Kavanaugh, she supports Trump despite his behavior,” Pray said, pointing to the president’s recent outburst on NBC News. “I spoke to three women, including Republicans, who were very upset by that and who said ‘Susan just goes along with that.’”

To Platner’s most ardent supporters, the revelations look like meddling by an establishment that never wanted him to be the candidate, said Andy O’Brien, a former state senator who writes about politics in the state and supports Platner. (O’Brien works for the AFL-CIO of Maine, which has endorsed Platner, but did not speak to The Intercept on behalf of his employer).

“So many people know Graham, and they listen to what he says, they don’t listen to all the crap coming from Washington and New York and California,” said O’Brien. “They like Graham because he speaks to them, and they believe him and trust him. They know he had a messy personal life. I think that there’s a lot of grace that they’re showing him, partly because of his post-traumatic stress from combat and also because there’s this sense that Trump has already lowered the bar so much.”

Mostly, however, Mainers are weary of the national attention the primary brought to their state — with little hope in sight of a let-up, Stewart-Bouley said.

“The general mood is people are really tired of this primary,” she said before Platner’s Tuesday night victory. “But if Platner wins, I suspect we’re not going to be out of the woods.”

In his remarks Tuesday, Platner acknowledged errors in his past and thanked the people of Maine for putting their trust in him despite them.

“Redemption is not just some simple or easy destination. It’s a journey. I’ve made mistakes in my life. Mistakes that I regret, that I live with and that I continue to learn from. And I’m still far from perfect. But every day I wake up and I try to be a little bit better and a little bit kinder than I was before,” Platner said. “And if you give me the chance, I will be a senator for the people who cannot afford to buy a senator.”

Update: June 9, 2026, 9:39 p.m. ET
This story has been updated with news of Platner’s victory in the Maine primary.

Acid Attack on Female Doctor Exposes Workplace Security Lapses in Pakistan

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IwPost
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Acid Attack on Female Doctor Exposes Workplace Security Lapses in Pakistan


Haji Ismat, Dr. Nasir’s uncle, told TML the attack against his niece has sent “a wave of fear through working women across the country who have pursued higher education and professional careers.”  

[ISLAMABAD] Pakistan’s city of Quetta has been shaken by an attack on a female doctor while she was on duty on Saturday, June 5 at Civil Hospital, prompting outrage over workplace safety and violence against women in public institutions. Dr. Mahnoor Nasir, 29, was injured when a hospital employee allegedly threw acid on her in the ward before fleeing the scene, police and hospital sources said.   

After initial treatment in Quetta, she was airlifted to Karachi’s Aga Khan University Hospital for specialized care, where hospital sources said she sustained burns to about 13% of her body, including injuries to her face, abdomen, thighs, and both hands. The hospital reported that her eyesight remains intact, although both her eyes were affected.  

Balochistan Young Doctors Association (YDA) president, Dr. Abdul Hayee Baloch, told The Media Line that the attack caused severe damage to the doctor’s face, while her neck and head were also injured. He strongly criticized the government and the health department, saying that despite official claims, adequate treatment could not be provided at the government hospital, which led to her transfer to a private medical facility.   

A medical technician, Abdul Razzaq Khilji, rushed to Dr. Nasir’s aid during the attack, using his jacket to shield her, and suffered burns in the process. Balochistan Chief Minister Sarfraz Bugti announced that he would be given a prestigious civil award, praised his actions as an example of courage and service, called him a “precious asset to society,” and said that all his medical expenses would be covered.  

The suspect, identified by police as Humayun Shah, a lift operator at the hospital, was later killed in an exchange of fire with police during the ensuing manhunt. Key questions remain unanswered, including how he was able to bring acid into a government medical facility.  

Haji Ismat, Nasir’s uncle, who is accompanying her at the hospital, told The Media Line that doctors are encouraged by her progress. He said that his niece had always dreamed of becoming a doctor and that she had inspired several younger members of her family to pursue higher and professional education.  

Mahnoor turned out to be a trailblazer

“Mahnoor turned out to be a trailblazer,” he said, noting that she was often a source of support for patients from their village and surrounding areas who visited Civil Hospital for treatment.  

 “On the surface, the attack targeted Mahnoor, but in reality, it has sent a wave of fear through working women across the country who have pursued higher education and professional careers,” he noted.  

The attack has prompted strong condemnation from doctors and rights groups. The YDA announced a boycott of government hospital services except for emergencies, and UN Women Pakistan, the resident office of the United Nations agency for gender equality and women’s empowerment, strongly condemned the acid attack, calling it one of the most devastating forms of gender-based violence, saying there could be no justification for such a brutal act.  

In a statement, UN Women Pakistan said the incident serves as a stark reminder that ending violence against women and girls requires collective action, accountability, and unwavering commitment from all sectors of society. The agency also expressed solidarity with Nasir, her family, colleagues, and women healthcare professionals across the country.  

Women’s rights activists and social media users have renewed concerns over the easy and unchecked availability of corrosive acid in local markets, including on the black market.   

Pakistan’s legislative framework has completely failed to deter gender-based chemical violence, women’s rights activist Riffat Ayesha told The Media Line. She emphasized that despite a decade of legal reforms, corrosive acids remain extremely easy to obtain and are widely sold in informal markets under the thin pretext of being domestic drain cleaners or industrial agents.  

Ayesha forcefully condemned the total absence of a state-mandated tracking system, demanding to know who is buying these lethal substances and for what purpose. Until the state implements strict buyer verification, she warned, the unregulated sale of these chemicals will continue to cause profound physical harm and lifelong psychological terror on women across the country.  

Yasir Bashir, a Rawalpindi-based senior law consultant and member of the Lahore High Court Bar Association, told The Media Line that Pakistan’s legal system treats acid attacks as among the most serious violent crimes, combining provisions of the Pakistan Penal Code with a dedicated special law introduced in 2011.  

“Under this special legislation, causing hurt through corrosive substances such as acid carries a minimum sentence of 14 years’ imprisonment, which may extend to life imprisonment, along with a mandatory fine,” he explained.  

He noted that if an acid attack results in death, the case is prosecuted as murder under Section 302, which can lead to either the death penalty or life imprisonment. Courts may order offenders to pay compensation covering victims’ medical treatment and rehabilitation costs.  

Overall, he said, Pakistan’s legal framework classifies acid attacks as aggravated offenses involving intentional disfigurement and severe physical harm, reflecting their long-term physical and psychological impact on victims.  

Quetta-based political analyst Hazar Khan Baloch described the acid attack on a female doctor at a government hospital as highly alarming and possibly the first of its kind. He told The Media Line that the case took a troubling turn when the suspect was later killed in a police encounter.  

Baloch commented that the sequence of events has raised more questions than answers, especially about the motive behind the attack and why the suspect was eliminated so quickly, possibly before a full investigation could determine key facts such as whether there were accomplices or institutional lapses.  

He said the incident reflects a disturbing mix of gender-based violence, workplace insecurity, and concerns over law enforcement practices, adding that while such “swift justice” may offer immediate retribution, it risks undermining due process and deeper accountability.  

    

 

 

Racist comments targeting politicians tripled since Meta relaxed its rules

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Racist comments targeting politicians tripled since Meta relaxed its rules

Last year, Meta radically overhauled the rules around what content it would allow on its platforms. The company claimed that its own efforts policing speech had gone too far and that it would relax the rules around what speech was allowed. “We have been over-enforcing our rules, limiting legitimate political debate and censoring too much trivial content and subjecting too many people to frustrating enforcement actions,” Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, wrote in a blog post at the time.

Over a year later, new research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) shows the immediate impact of these changes.

The researchers analyzed about 8 million Facebook comments and found that abusive and racist comments targeting both Republican and Democrat lawmakers tripled in the six months after the new rules were put in place. Some categories of abusive comments documented by the researchers saw even sharper rises, with violent threats and hate speech quadrupling during the same period.

The report cites specific examples of gendered and racist abuse directed at lawmakers like US representatives Jasmine Crockette of Texas and Byron Daniels of Florida. These comments were not taken down by Meta.

The CCDH researchers also found that threats against President Trump more than doubled in the six months after Meta overhauled its rules. Many of the comments, which included direct threats to his life, could have been classified as felony offenses, the researchers say.

To assess the impact of these rule changes, CCDH’s researchers chose 100 members of the House of Representatives made up of the 50 Republicans and 50 Democrats with the most followers on Facebook. Then the researchers scraped nearly 8 million comments on Facebook posts made by those lawmakers in the six months before and after Meta’s policy changes.

The researchers used an AI system trained to identify comments in the dataset that were likely to violate Meta’s current policies in three areas: violence and incitement, hateful conduct, or bullying and harassment.

Comments that violated Meta’s policies around violent threats quadrupled, from 1,800 in the six months before the changes to 7,600 in the six months after. Hate speech comments also quadrupled, from 6,900 to 30,000. Comments that broke Meta’s rules on bullying and harassment doubled, from 15,700 to 39,900.

“We regularly issue public reports tracking violating content on our platforms, and the prevalence of hateful conduct did not increase throughout 2025,” a Meta spokesperson tells WIRED, adding that the company could not address the report’s claims directly without seeing the research in its entirety. WIRED did provide a list of the abusive comments cited in the report, but Meta did not comment on these. Hours before the report was published, many of the examples were deleted from Facebook.

“When companies reduce oversight in areas like violence, hate, and harassment, it should not be any surprise to see those harms increase,” Senator John Curtis, a Republican from Utah and a member of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, said in a statement to CCDH.

The data collected by CCDH researchers is echoed in Meta’s own transparency reports from 2025, which show how the company cut its proactive content moderation enforcement by roughly half in the months following its policy changes. “The surge in abuse and the collapse in enforcement track one another almost exactly,” the report’s authors write.

While Meta claimed its decision to relax rules around abusive content was driven by free speech principles, experts say that extremist content like the comments covered in this report are the type of content that has been shown to be the most engaging on social media platforms.

“Threats and abuse perform well, as do the responses to the threats and abuse,” says Nina Jankowicz, the CEO of the American Sunlight Project who briefly led the Disinformation Governance Board under President Joe Biden. “They keep users scrolling and keep eyeballs on ads. By divesting from content moderation, platforms are amplifying abusive content, saving on the ‘expense’ of keeping their platform safe, and falling into political lockstep with an administration that claims content moderation is censorship.”

The rising threats against lawmakers have real-world implications. The Capitol Police cited increased threats to politicians in March when seeking a budget increase. Former US congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who was the lawmaker in the report who faced the most abusive comments, referenced threats to her life as one of the reasons she stepped away from public life.

“We’ve seen a horrifying trend of political violence, from the latest attack on the president to the murder of Charlie Kirk to the assassination of Melissa Hortman and her husband,” Imran Ahmed, the CEO of Center for Countering Digital Hate, tells WIRED. “Lawmakers are canceling town halls; they’re moving them off online. Election officials are leaving the job. Representatives are saying in public the fear of being targeted shapes how they vote. I don’t see how publishing, amplifying, and failing to enforce your own rules against this kind of harassment, threats, and identity-based hate can in any way be portrayed as a moral act. I think it takes incredible levels of duplicity to claim that.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Park Ranger Dies in Horror Fall While Patrolling America’s Tallest Mountain

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Park Ranger Dies in Horror Fall While Patrolling America’s Tallest Mountain


A National Park ranger has died in a tragic climbing accident after falling into a crevasse while patrolling the highest peak in North America.

Robin Pendery, 33, was working on a climbing patrol on Mount McKinley in Alaska on Thursday, June 4, when the deadly fall happened near the mountain’s 14,000-foot camp, according to the National Park Service.

The accident unfolded around 2 p.m. local time in one of the most dangerous and unforgiving mountaineering environments in the world. Other National Park Service personnel rushed to help immediately, but Pendery could not be saved.

The National Park Service said Pendery was a seasonal mountaineering ranger who had been helping protect climbers and assist with rescue operations on the massive Alaska peak.

“We are heartbroken by the loss of a member of our Denali family,” Denali National Park and Preserve Superintendent Brooke Merrell said in a statement.

“Our mountaineering rangers dedicate themselves to serving visitors and helping others in one of the most challenging environments in the world,” Merrell continued. “Today, we mourn the loss of a valued colleague, friend and teammate. Our thoughts are with Robin’s family and loved ones.”

Pendery, who was from Enumclaw, Washington, joined the Mount McKinley mountaineering staff in 2024. Her job placed her in the middle of a brutal landscape where altitude, ice, weather and hidden crevasses can turn deadly in an instant.

Mount McKinley, formerly known as Denali, rises 20,310 feet above the Alaska Range. It is the tallest mountain in North America and one of the most feared climbs on the continent.

One of the mountain’s biggest dangers is its glacier terrain. Crevasses, which are deep cracks in glacier ice, can be hidden beneath snow bridges and difficult to spot, even for experienced climbers.

Pendery was no beginner. According to her profile with Alpine Ascents International, she had more than a decade of mountain experience and had worked as a guide, avalanche forecaster and ski patrol member in the Pacific Northwest since 2015.

She was also a full-time emergency room nurse, but her passion for the mountains kept pulling her back to the ice, snow and high-altitude world she loved. She had climbed major peaks including Mount Rainier, Mount Hood and Mount Baker.

Her death has devastated the tight-knit climbing and rescue community.

“We are devastated to report the loss of one of our climbing rangers, Robin Pendery,” ranger Chrissie Oken said, according to Denali Rescue Volunteers.

The group also shared its heartbreak online, saying the community was sending love to Pendery’s family, friends and fellow rangers.

A close friend, Bailey Disher, told The New York Times that she last spoke with Pendery in April, when the ranger called to wish her a happy birthday. During that conversation, they talked about the dangers that came with Pendery’s work.

“She knew that there were a lot of risks associated with this level of mountaineering in this level of guiding,” Disher said.

For those who knew Pendery, that awareness makes the loss even more painful. She understood the danger, but she also understood the calling.

She spent her life helping people survive in places where one wrong step could be fatal.

Now, the climbing world is mourning a ranger, nurse, guide and friend who died doing the dangerous work she loved.

The National Park Service said an investigation into the deadly fall is ongoing.

US and Iran’s exchange of strikes shows how far diplomacy has changed

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US and Iran’s exchange of strikes shows how far diplomacy has changed

The US military launched strikes against Iran on June 9 in response to the downing of a US Army helicopter near the Strait of Hormuz a day earlier. These strikes, which the US military called “a proportional response to unjustified Iranian aggression”, came after Donald Trump claimed he was in the “final throes of what will be a very, very good deal” to end the war.

Iran swiftly carried out retaliatory attacks of its own. The powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps branch of Iran’s armed forces says it has struck US bases in Bahrain and Jordan. And it has warned of “even more severe attacks” if the US repeats its strikes.

This episode took place days after Israel and Iran had briefly returned to direct conflict. Triggered by Israeli operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon, where a ceasefire was supposedly in effect, both sides launched various rounds of tit-for-tat strikes before announcing they would halt hostilities.

At first glance, these incidents appear contradictory. Diplomacy is supposed to be the alternative to war and ceasefires are supposed to reduce violence. Yet with the US, Israel and Iran once again exchanging attacks, and as military operations continue in Lebanon despite ceasefire arrangements, diplomacy and conflict increasingly seem to be unfolding simultaneously.

Smoke rises following an Israeli strike in southern Lebanon.

Smoke rises following an Israeli strike in southern Lebanon on June 7. Atef Safadi / EPA

For decades, policymakers assumed that war and diplomacy were distinct phases of international politics. States negotiated until talks broke down, and fighting followed. Eventually, battlefield realities or international pressure pushed adversaries back to the negotiating table. Diplomacy then functioned as an exit ramp from conflict.

The aftermath of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war exemplified this model. Sustained diplomatic efforts following the conflict culminated in the 1978 Camp David accords, which laid the groundwork for a definitive peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. This treaty was signed the following year and remains in effect to this day.

However, this model is becoming difficult to recognise, with the Middle East nowadays characterised by a different dynamic. Negotiations between warring parties continue during military confrontations, ceasefires coexist with airstrikes and mediators shuttle between capitals even as threats escalate.

The problem is not that diplomacy is failing. Instead, it is that diplomacy is no longer serving its traditional purpose. Rather than ending conflicts, diplomacy is helping to manage them – a distinction that matters because a conflict that is managed is not necessarily a conflict that is resolved.

Managing conflict

The latest escalations between Israel and Iran, and now Iran and the US, illustrate this dilemma. None of these parties appear to want a full-scale regional war, as the costs would be enormous and the consequences unpredictable. Yet each of them is unwilling to abandon what they see as vital security interests.

Israel views Hezbollah’s military capabilities as a major threat and therefore has a strong incentive to weaken the group. Iran, on the other hand, sees defending Hezbollah as critical to its security because the group serves as a key deterrent against Israel and extends Tehran’s regional influence. And the US struck Iran in an attempt to uphold deterrence and signal that attacks on US personnel and assets would carry consequences.

The result of this is a cycle of calibrated escalation. Military force is used not to secure decisive victory but to signal resolve to adversaries, reassure allies and domestic audiences, and persuade opposing leaders that the costs of further escalation outweigh the potential benefits. Diplomacy, meanwhile, works not to eliminate the underlying dispute but to prevent escalation from spiralling beyond control.

This creates a dangerous equilibrium. When diplomacy functions primarily as a mechanism for crisis management, leaders face less pressure to make the difficult compromises that lasting peace requires. Negotiations can continue indefinitely while violence persists, ceasefires become pauses rather than settlements and conflict becomes chronic.

Iranians walk past a billboard featuring late Iranian supreme leaders, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on a street in Tehran.

Iranians walk past a billboard featuring late Iranian supreme leaders, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on a street in Tehran. Abedin Taherkenareh / EPA

The old distinction between war and peace is becoming blurred in the Middle East. Rival powers do not move neatly from diplomacy to conflict and back again. Instead, they are operating permanently in the space between the two. This should concern policymakers.

Much of contemporary diplomacy remains based on assumptions that no longer fully apply. Negotiations are often treated as evidence of deescalation, while ceasefires are assumed to signal progress towards peace. Yet neither necessarily tells us much about whether a conflict is actually moving closer to resolution.

The latest exchanges between the US and Iran, as well as Iran and Israel, therefore raise a troubling possibility. The greatest danger may not be that the Middle East slides back into a wider war. It may be that it settles into a condition of permanent confrontation in which violence periodically erupts, diplomacy periodically intervenes and neither fundamentally changes the underlying reality.

For decades, the central challenge of international politics has been how to move from war to peace. The challenge emerging today is different, with negotiators grappling with the much more difficult task of ending a conflict when war and peace are happening at the same time.

Seat the rich! World Cup ticket inflation reflects widening gap between haves and have-nots

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Seat the rich! World Cup ticket inflation reflects widening gap between haves and have-nots

In 1994, the last time U.S. stadiums hosted the World Cup, an average ticket cost US$58. The most expensive ticket for the final could be grabbed for $475.

Adjusted for inflation, that would be $131 and $1,069, respectively, in today’s prices. Fast forward 22 years and things have become a lot pricier.

In the tournament due to begin on June 11, 2026, at the Azteca Stadium in Mexico, the average ticket prices have been in the region of $1,300. The cheaper tickets for the final are going for a whopping $10,000, and it is even more for the better seats.

That represents an inflation-adjusted increase in average ticket prices of about 1,000% between the two times the U.S. has hosted or co-hosted the event. As a benchmark for comparison, over that period, median household incomes in the U.S., adjusted for inflation, have risen by only 32%.

But is ticket pricing the real problem with the World Cup? As a soccer economist and co-host of the Soccernomics podcast, it is a question I have long thought about. And economic analysis can bring some clarity as to what brought about such eye-watering ticket prices, whether they are justifiable and why many think them unfair.

To start things off, let’s entertain a thought experiment. The three host nations of the World Cup – Canada, Mexico and the United States – are home to around 200,000 ultra-high net worth individuals, those sitting on fortunes in excess of $30 million. If that elite group contained 82,500 soccer fans prepared to pay $300,000 for a ticket to fill out the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey for the final, it would represent a payday for FIFA of close to $25 billion. And that isn’t a fanciful price — tickets for the final have listed for far higher.

Now if FIFA vowed that all that money would go to good causes – say, eradicating malaria or ensuring that underprivileged kids had access to state-of-the-art soccer equipment and programs – would anyone really gripe that it came at the cost of making tickets affordable for all?

The problem is FIFA is not vowing any such thing. FIFA President Gianni Infantino has stated that all money generated “goes back into the game all over.” But given the governing bodies’ reputation for shadowy financial doings, there are reasons to think much of the money will never be properly accounted for.

The key point is this: It’s not really the high ticket prices in themselves that are the problem; it’s the context in which they are being sold.

The devil in the dynamic pricing

That context involves at least three elements that critics have found particularly offensive.

First is the same thing that is bane of gig-going music fans and frequent fliers alike: dynamic pricing.

The economic term for such a policy is “price discrimination.” It amounts to charging people according to their willingness to pay rather than the cost of supplying the commodity or service.

Dynamic pricing is simply an algorithm created to achieve that by exploiting market power. Although not illegal, the announcement of investigations by the New York and New Jersey attorneys general suggest that FIFA might have some legal problems down the road.

A phone screen shows some dollar figures.

Dynamic pricing has pushed the price tag of some tickets for the final to more than $2 million. Maximilian Haupt/picture alliance via Getty Images

Second, the whiff of corruption around FIFA never goes away.

The 2015 prosecutions of high-ranking soccer officials revealed the extent of corrupt practices relating to the sale of broadcast rights. A recent statement by prominent figures in the world of soccer administration suggested that since then, things have gotten worse.

When it comes to ticket revenues, where is all the money going? Most of it goes back, in one way or another, to the national soccer associations that make up FIFA.

How they use it depends on their probity. Ideally, the money goes to invest into grass roots development — but in many cases, there seems little to show for FIFA’s largesse. Notorious figures such as Jack Warner from Trinidad and Tobago and Chuck Blazer from the U.S. — known as “Mr. 10%” due to the cut he took for doing business with him – are just the most egregious examples.

FIFA stands accused of doing little or nothing to investigate where the money it hands out eventually ends up. I believe a little sunlight would be a great disinfectant.

Fans hold their nose … up to a point

The third issue, which is related to corruption, concerns the identity of the host nations.

Russia hosted in 2018 despite having invaded the sovereign territory of another FIFA member four years before. Qatar in 2022 was allowed to host despite evidence of human rights abuses. Now, we have the bizarre spectacle in which a World Cup is being co-hosted by a country with a leader who has threatened to annex a fellow host country and started a war against one of the participating nations.

There is a long history of supporters looking past the political realities in order to enjoy the soccer, but there are limits for fans. World Cups don’t just boost the coffers of FIFA; they provide a diplomatic and economic fillip for the host nations – something many see as “sportswashing” when the said hosts have checkered reputations.

So fans have genuine reasons to resent the way in which FIFA organizes the World Cup both politically and commercially.

But in an ideal world, should ticket prices be cheap? Economists often have a smug answer to this: The price should be set at what the market will bear. The World Cup is popular, tickets are scarce, and so, of course they should be expensive.

In my view, that is a little too simplistic. The fundamental economic proposition is that prices should reflect the additional cost of supplying the service, or “marginal cost” in the economic jargon. And in this case, the marginal cost of each ticket is small – there are not even any very substantial overheads to cover, which often justify a higher price.

The fact that marginal cost pricing would lead to reselling, creating windfall profits for anyone lucky enough to get a rationed ticket, does not alter the principle. Rather, it just demonstrates that there is a problem.

Global soccer’s affordability crisis

FIFA’s apparent answer to the problem of rationing is allowing for a system that lets only the richest people have access.

If rich people were rich because they work hard, and poor people were poor because they didn’t, then maybe this would all seem fair. But most people don’t think that’s how the world really works. If there is to be rationing, most people would probably prefer that committed fans, with no interest in reselling, were rewarded with low-cost tickets.

Put simply, the typical fan is experiencing an affordability crisis when it comes to ticket prices at this World Cup — the tickets they could afford in 1994 may now be unattainable, or at least would put a major stress on their household budget.

But this reflects a broader social problem. The dissatisfaction with World Cup ticket pricing reflects a general discomfort with income distribution in the modern world. Income inequality has far bigger consequences for most people – in terms of their life prospects and life expectancy – than whether they can squeeze into a stadium to watch a World Cup game.

The gap between the wealthy elites that can afford anything they want and the struggling middle for whom more and more of life’s opportunities are becoming out of reach is one of the primary economic problems of our age. To me, World Cup ticket prices are a striking illustration of how deep this reality has become.

The AI threat we should actually be talking about

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The AI threat we should actually be talking about

Artificial intelligence leaders like Anthropic and OpenAI are racing toward blockbuster IPOs that could value them at over US$1 trillion, driven by the rapid progress of their systems.

Against this backdrop, some are arguing that the world should at least have the option to slow down or temporarily pause frontier AI development. The idea is simple: give society and safety research time to catch up with the pace of the technology.

One of the biggest concerns is what researchers call “recursive self-improvement,” the idea that AI systems might eventually improve themselves without human help. As models become more capable and AI agents begin operating more independently, there is a belief that they could eventually outpace human oversight, becoming able to outthink, outmaneuver and outcompete human decision-making across various domains.

But this focus is misplaced. The most serious risk from artificial intelligence is not an imminent loss of control to super-intelligent systems, but a slower and more immediate shift: the concentration of informational power in a small number of companies and states, and the fragmentation of shared reality through highly personalized AI systems.

AI systems today are already highly effective at identifying patterns in large volumes of human-generated data. In many cases, they can surface correlations or insights that were previously overlooked, even if those insights were, in principle, discoverable by humans. This capability can accelerate research and improve decision-making, particularly in fields where complexity or scale makes human analysis difficult.

However, this is different from the kind of creativity that drives major conceptual breakthroughs. Human innovation is not only a product of pattern recognition, but of lived experience, curiosity and the ability to connect ideas across domains that are not obviously related. People explore the world through work, hobbies, conversation and trial and error, building intuition that cannot be fully reduced to data alone.

Some of the most important innovations emerge from this kind of synthesis. Steve Jobs, for example, famously drew connections between phones, cameras, music players and computers to envision the smartphone as a unified device. That kind of insight depends not just on information, but on perspective shaped by connecting the dots through lived experience.

Another source of innovation comes from feedback loops. Products and technologies improve as users interact with them, revealing flaws, limits and unexpected uses. While each change is often small, these incremental improvements build up over time into major advances.

As AI systems are deployed more widely across industries, these feedback loops are likely to speed up, producing more data on performance and limitations and enabling faster refinement.

This dynamic has important geopolitical implications. As China scholar Philip Fei-Ling Wang and other researchers have noted, countries like China that can deploy AI systems at scale may gain a significant strategic advantage. Large economies with strong state capacity may be especially well positioned to integrate these systems rapidly across sectors, turning deployment speed into a source of power.

However, the risks go beyond capability alone. They also involve perception. As AI becomes embedded in everyday decision-making, there is a growing tendency to treat its outputs as objective or authoritative, even though they remain probabilistic and context-dependent. Over time, this could weaken the public’s ability to critically evaluate reasoning and the assumptions behind conclusions.

More concerning is the possibility that either the systems themselves or the data they rely on could be deliberately influenced or compromised by foreign actors. Even subtle manipulation could introduce distortions that favor certain narratives, policies or interpretations over others.

Unlike traditional media, which sends the same message to everyone, AI systems can produce different answers for different people even when they ask the same question. The result is not always obvious manipulation, but something more subtle: each person can end up in a personalized “information world,” where they see a slightly different version of reality shaped by hidden algorithmic choices.

The answer is not to slow artificial intelligence, but to prevent its control from becoming too concentrated and opaque. That requires fostering real competition among AI systems so that no single group of companies dominates how information is produced and interpreted.

It also requires greater transparency, along with training in schools, universities and workplaces on how these systems are built and deployed, especially as they become embedded in search, work, education and decision-making. Without that understanding, it will become increasingly difficult to distinguish between genuine knowledge and statistically-patterned output.

Finally, according to Bruce Hogan of the Oxford Internet Institute, in a recent interview, we will need better tools to detect and verify AI-generated content as these systems grow more capable of producing convincing, deceptive material.

The debate over AI is often presented as a choice between runaway superintelligence and strict limits. But the more immediate issue is structural: whether shared reality stays stable, transparent and accountable as information is increasingly produced by a small number of powerful systems.

Derek Levine’s commentaries on technology, education and US-China relations have appeared in The Hill, National Review, The Diplomat, RealClear Media and Asia Times. He is the author of “China’s Path to Dominance: Preparing for Confrontation with the United States”, which can be purchased on Amazon here.

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