Quick Take

Why the US and Iran still can’t reach a deal

In his latest Quick Take, Ian Bremmer discusses the on-again off-again ceasefire between the United States and Iran and why it has failed to hold, arguing that both sides remain locked in a fundamental disagreement over who has the leverage.

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NEW Research: Identifying subsets of patients with retroperitoneal sarcoma who benefit from radiotherapy: an Interpretable #AI reanalysis of the STRASS randomised trial. Read it here:

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Jun 29, 2026 #HiddenHistory#SigmundFreud#Documentary

He never ran for office. He never commanded an army. Most people have never even heard his name. But Edward Bernays — Sigmund Freud’s nephew — is arguably the most influential figure of the twentieth century. He invented public relations. He weaponized psychology to sell cigarettes to women, convince an entire nation to change its breakfast habits, and help overthrow a democratically elected government on behalf of a banana company.

He wrote the literal playbook on propaganda — and then watched as the Nazis used it against his own people. Every satisfying satisfying satisfying ad you’ve ever seen, every satisfying satisfying political campaign that made you feel something you couldn’t explain, every “grassroots movement” that was actually designed in a boardroom — it all traces back to one man and the invisible machine he built over a century ago.

This is the story of Edward Bernays, the father of mass manipulation. Edward Bernays took Freud’s theories about the unconscious mind and turned them into the most powerful commercial and political weapon the world had ever seen. From the Committee on Public Information during World War One to the “Torches of Freedom” campaign that made women smoke in public, from the bacon-and-eggs breakfast myth to the CIA-backed coup in Guatemala — Bernays proved that whoever controls the story controls reality.

He called it “the engineering of consent.” The rest of us just call it the world we live in. Sources and further reading: Larry Tye — “The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations” (1998) Edward Bernays — “Propaganda” (1928) Edward Bernays — “Crystallizing Public Opinion” (1923) Adam Curtis — “The Century of the Self” (BBC, 2002) Stephen Schlesinger & Stephen Kinzer — “Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala” (1982) If you made it this far, subscribe. We go deep into the hidden systems behind money, power, and control — the ones you’re not supposed to see. #EdwardBernays#Propaganda#PublicRelations#MassManipulation#TorchesOfFreedom#EngineeringOfConsent#SigmundFreud#CenturyOfTheSelf#UnitedFruitCompany#Guatemala#ConsumerCulture#PsychologicalManipulation#Manufacturing Consent #ColdWar#History#Documentary#Finance#Power#HiddenHistory#MediaManipulation

Jul 22, 2026 The LRB Podcast

The US tech giant Palantir ‘holds public contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds in everything from financial regulation to local government’, Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin wrote recently in the LRB. The newsletter where they work, Democracy for Sale, ‘has been looking into Palantir’s business in the UK, and particularly its contracts with the NHS’. On this episode, Peter joins Thomas Jones to discuss the company’s origins, rapid rise and expansion – with the help of Peter Mandelson – into the British state. They talk about the risks of handing our most personal data over to a company whose billionaire founders have poured millions into right-wing political campaigns in the US, and ask whether the software’s actually any good at doing what it promises. Read Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin on Palantir: https://lrb.me/palantirpod

Bibi’s centrist rival

Gadi Eisenkot speaks in Israel during the launch of his party’s election campaign last month. Photo: Ariel Schalit/AP David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, writes in a “Letter from Israel” that the strongest challenger to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the election coming Oct. 27 is Gadi Eisenkot, a general who quit Netanyahu’s war cabinet in 2024 and founded the centrist party Yashar (“straight, upright, just”). “Most analysts here believe that, in a close election, Eisenkot can prevail if he attracts at least some ‘soft right’ voters in provincial cities like Kiryat Shmona, Ofakim, Ashdod, Nahariya, and Dimona,” Remnick writes. Eisenkot, 66, a son of Moroccan immigrants who rose to chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, pledges to restore Israel as a “Jewish, democratic, progressive, and liberal state,” Remnick writes:”Eisenkot is selling himself as the humble soldier, a political novice untainted by corruption or duplicity. … At the urging of his consultants, and in response to the political realities of post-October 7th Israel, he is tacking further toward the center. He seldom voices reservations about the scale and prosecution of the war in Gaza. “Remnick concludes that the election will decide whether those themes can “compete with the fears Netanyahu … spent years cultivating.”Keep reading.

Industry giants unite to protect open models

Image source: Jensen Huang / X

The Rundown: Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, and 47 other tech companies, VCs, and nonprofits just signed an open letter urging Washington not to restrict open-weight AI models — giving a bunch of reasons why it’s crucial to U.S. AI leadership.

The details:

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang first shared the letter, his first post on X, with 25 signatories but a few crucial ones missing, including OpenAI. In a day, the letter garnered widespread support, with signatories doubling as OpenAI, Google, AMD, Cisco, and others joined — but not Anthropic.The letter argues that open weights expand access to the AI economy, keep competition alive, broaden cyber defense, and help avoid vendor lock-in. It also notes that distillation should not be confused with misappropriation and calls to avoid premature restrictions that push AI innovation overseas.

Why it matters: The letter comes amid accusations that Chinese labs extracted intelligence from U.S. models, including Anthropic’s Fable. Washington’s response remains unclear, but the pressure is on the lone U.S. frontier lab off the list, the one to gain most from a crackdown. And people are already asking for answers.

House begins impeachment of Nixon

HISTORY.com Editors

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Published: November 24, 2009 Last Updated: May 28, 2025

On July 27, 1974, the House Judiciary Committee recommends that America’s 37th president, Richard M. Nixon, be impeached and removed from office. The impeachment proceedings resulted from a series of political scandals involving the Nixon administration that came to be collectively known as Watergate.

The Watergate scandal first came to light following a break-in on June 17, 1972, at the Democratic Party’s national headquarters in the Watergate apartment-hotel complex in Washington, D.C. A group of men linked to the White House were later arrested and charged with the crime. Nixon denied any involvement with the break-in, but several of his staff members were eventually implicated in an illegal cover-up and forced to resign. Subsequent government investigations revealed “dirty tricks” political campaigning by the Committee to Re-Elect the President, along with a White House “enemies list.”

Richard Nixon’s Paranoia Leads to Watergate Scandal

Richard Nixon’s personality and character issues may have led to his involvement in the Watergate scandal.

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2:41m watch

In July 1973, one of Nixon’s former staff members revealed the existence of secretly taped conversations between the president and his aides. Nixon initially refused to release the tapes, on grounds of executive privilege and national security, but a judge later ordered the president to turn them over. The White House provided some but not all of the tapes, including one from which a portion of the conversation appeared to have been erased.

In May 1974, the House Judiciary Committee began formal impeachment hearings against Nixon. On July 27 of that year, the first article of impeachment against the president was passed. Two more articles, for abuse of power and contempt of Congress, were approved on July 29 and 30.

On August 5, Nixon complied with a U.S. Supreme Court ruling requiring that he provide transcripts of the missing tapes, and the new evidence clearly implicated him in a cover up of the Watergate break-in. On August 8, Nixon announced his resignation, becoming the first president in U.S. history to voluntarily leave office. After departing the White House on August 9, Nixon was succeeded by Vice President Gerald Ford, who, in a controversial move, pardoned Nixon on September 8, 1974, making it impossible for the former president to be prosecuted for any crimes he might have committed while in office.

Only three presidents in U.S. history have been impeached: Andrew Johnson in 1868, Bill Clinton in 1998 and Donald Trump in 2019 and in 2021.

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New search engine reveals if ancestors were in Nazi party

15 April 2026 Share Save

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Bethany BellVienna

A new German online search engine is helping people to discover if their ancestors were members of the Nazi Party.

Christian Rainer, from Austria, told the BBC he found the name of his grandfather “within a few seconds”.

“I found out that he became a member of the Nazi Party around 21st of April 1938, just a few days after the Anschluss,” when Adolf Hitler annexed Austria to Germany, he said.

The online tool allows people to search through several million Nazi Party membership cards, the “NSDAP-Mitgliederkartei”.

“He applied to become a member of the NSDAP (Nazi) Party, just five days after it became legal in Austria,” Rainer, the former editor of the Austrian news magazine profil, said.

The search tool was set up by the German newspaper, Die Zeit, in cooperation with archives in Germany and in the United States.

Rainer never met his grandfather, who died shortly before he was born in 1961.

“I always knew that he was close to the Nazis, but I was surprised that it only took him five days” to join them, he said.

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“He was an academic,” Rainer added. “He should have known in 1938 who the Nazis were.”

The search engine was important, Rainer said, not only for what it told him about his grandfather, but because it also helped clear other members of his family, including his father.

“I was happy I didn’t find anyone else from my family, especially not my father. I had never suspected him of being a Nazi. He was drafted into (the Wehrmacht) in 1941 and wounded few times,” he said.

Die Zeit said the response to the search engine has been “overwhelming”.

It has been “accessed millions of times and shared thousands of times” since it was launched at the beginning of April, said Judith Busch, spokesperson for Die Zeit.

One user wrote on Die Zeit’s website: “I’ve already found two close relatives, which destroys the myth that no one in our family was involved.

“To have my perspective changed at the age of 71 is a bitter shock.”

Around 10.2 million Germans became members of the party between 1925 and 1945.

The membership cards, which were stored in the Nazi headquarters in Munich, almost got destroyed during the last days of World War Two.

Die Zeit said that with Hitler’s Reich in ruins, orders were given for the records to be pulped, but they were saved by Hanns Huber, the director of a nearby paper mill, who later handed them over to the Americans.

The cards, which helped identify people, were to play a key role in the de-Nazification process in post-war Germany.

For almost half a century, the cards were kept by the Americans at the Berlin Document Center. In 1994, they were handed over to the German Federal Archives and microfilm copies were sent to the US National Archives in Washington DC.

Until recently it was only possible to make enquiries by making a formal request to the German Archives. In March this year, the US Archives began to make its records available online.

Die Zeit said it obtained the data, and “backed up the documents to make them easily searchable”.

Christian Rainer said the information still has huge resonance.

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Previously, research focused on “higher-ranking people who became politicians, judges or doctors later on”, he told the BBC.

“A lot of people now are searching for family members so it’s a very individual thing now.”

“Eight decades on, after the end of the World War, you can still find out truth that you haven’t known before,” he said.

Nazi card shows Dutch prince joined Hitler’s part

US: At least three killed in shooting in Seattle

Richard Connor | Midhat Fatimah with AP, AFP 3 hours ago

A shooting at a Seattle food festival left at least three people dead and four others wounded. The police took the suspect into custody.

https://p.dw.com/p/5Hnpt

At least three people were killed and four others wounded, including a child, in a shooting during a food festival near the Space Needle in Seattle in the US state of Washington on Sunday evening, according to a city fire department spokesperson.

Two people died at the scene and a fourth, one of five who were taken for medical treatment, died later in the hospital.

The individual was one of five were transported to Harborview Medical Center, including a 56-year-old woman in serious condition.

A two-year-old boy, a 23-year-old man, and a 39-year-old woman are in stable condition. A 40-year-old woman sustained minor injuries.

According to hospital spokesperson Susan Gregg, the victims sustained injuries to their arms, abdomens, or legs.

Police took suspect into custody

Meanwhile, Seattle police reported “multiple shooting victims” near the Space Needle observation tower.

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson announced that one suspect has been taken into custody following an incident. Wilson said that she wanted to “thank the Seattle police officers who responded to the scene.“

Investigators believe the two suspects exchanged gunfire. One remained at large, but Assistant Seattle Police Chief Tyrone Davis said at a news conference on Sunday night that there was no continuing threat to the public.

Police did not yet have a description of the outstanding suspect, Davis said.

“We’re still trying to figure this out,” he added.

The shooting occurred around 6 p.m. local time (0100 GMT on Monday) during the annual Bite of Seattle festival, which attracts hundreds of food vendors, stalls, and performers.

According to its website, the annual festival, which started in 1982, draws 350,000 attendees over “three days of food, drink, and community celebration.”

Edited by: Dmytro Hubenko

Don’t let the algorithm hide the news. If you rely on our team for trusted reporting, please take a moment to select us as your Preferred Source on Google by clicking here and hitting the “star” or “preferred” button, so you’ll always see our verified news first.

Richard Connor Reporting on stories from around the world, with a particular focus on Europe — especially Germany.

Midhat Fatimah Writer and reporter based in New Delhi@MidhatFatimah

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