The Decline and Fall of 60 Minutes / Trump Is A Corrupt, Senile Felon / Paxton In Dubai / The Dark Money Gospel of Mike Johnson’s Wife / Bibi’s Spies Around The World
Lesley Stahl Enables the Destruction of 60 Minutes
CBS News
Charles: On Sunday night eighty-four year old Lesley Stahl narrated a shockingly incomplete piece about the escalating violence illegal Israeli settlers are committing against Palestinian residents of the West Bank.
The New York Post reported CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss and her deputy Charles Forelle became “very, very hands on” editing Stah’s segment—so much so that Stahl considered quitting, according to the Status newsletter.
Stahl didn’t quit. But she should have.
The actions of the Israeli settlers are so blatantly illegal that–as even Stahl pointed out–US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has described them as “terrorism.” But instead of making that point herself, Stahl included outrageous statements like this one from an Israeli settler named Mordehai Minster:
Whenever you have ethnic religious communities, especially in the Middle East, fighting over land and resources, that conflict sometimes gets ugly. The fact that violence exists doesn’t change the merit of the right that we have to this land.
Lesley Stahl reporting from the West Bank
The Israelis have no right to the houses and the farms of Palestinians on the West Bank. But Stahl repeatedly presented this as a simple disagreement between the Palestinians and their oppressors.
Completely absent from her piece were basic facts like these that have been documented by Human Rights Watch:
Escalating Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank have fully or partially displaced 107 communities since January 2023 alongside unprecedented settlement expansion.
Settlers responsible for attacks operate with the financial, material, and legal backing of the Israeli state.
More Palestinians were forcibly displaced by settler attacks, demolitions, and evictions in the first four months of this year than the whole of 2025. OCHA has documented an average of 6.6 settler attacks per day that resulted in casualties, property damage, or both, higher than any year on its record.
While the Israeli military remains responsible for the majority of killings in the West Bank, fatalities attributed to settlers have risen sharply. OCHA recorded at least 15 Palestinians, including two children, killed by settlers as of July 24, putting 2026 on track to surpass OCHA’s previous record of 16 such killings set in 2023.
The Weissification of CBS News continues unabated. It’s time for Stahl to acknowledge that this is making it impossible to practice serious journalism there.
AI godfather Geoffrey Hinton: Trump is A Corrupt, Senile Felon Who Understands Nothing About AI
The Guardian
Geoffrey Hinton in his garden in Toronto, Canada. Photo: Cole Burston/The Guardian
Scott: We live in a time of huge controversy surrounding artificial intelligence, driven largely by figures deep inside the industry that is producing it. The assessment of risks to humankind coming from AI are all-but uniform. Yet Donald Trump, at the bidding of the tech bros who put him in office, has asserted the unilateral power to block all regulations and safeguards to protect humanity. It might make sense to view Trump and his presidency as the threat behind the threat of AI, determined to maximize it.
The pioneering computer scientist on why Trump is using ‘superintelligence’ wrong, whether AI could wipe out humanity – and how our biggest challenge will be accepting we’re not the only intelligent beings.
Donald Trump is a “corrupt, senile felon” whose fixation on the term superintelligence proves he knows nothing about AI, said Geoffrey Hinton, “godfather” of the technology, in a wide-ranging interview where he doubled down on recent warnings that AI models pose an existential threat to humanity and scoffed at claims the industry could regulate itself.
The pioneering computer scientist, whose work helped lay the foundations of modern AI, has since become one of the technology’s most vocal critics. His latest remarks come after a tumultuous month during which a growing list of senior AI scientists and researchers have joined Hinton in ringing the alarm about how the technology he helped create could ultimately escape human control, sparking an industry crisis, the hasty assembly of congressional meetings and a rare global consensus that something must be done.
There has also been fierce pushback. Last week the leader of the world’s most valuable company singled out the Toronto-based Hinton for a scathing attack.
“I love [him]. I hate his predictions … All of his predictions have been wrong. Enough predictions,” Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, told the podcaster Ezra Klein. Huang, whose company makes the chips that AI firms require, dismissed Hinton’s vocal concerns that the pace and breadth of AI development at the “frontier” could soon outpace the human ability to control it, and particularly his warning that there is a 10-20% chance of AI causing human extinction in the coming decades.
“That [figure] is not grounded on science, is not grounded on research. Just because it comes from a scientist doesn’t make it scientific. Those predictions are hurtful,” Huang said. “Don’t think for a second just because you’re an alarmist that you’re doing a social good. It is not true. So I think that we ought to just all be wiser, more mature, be evidence-based, be scientific.”
“I’m trying to convey that there is a really serious possibility of something happening. If, for example, you’re told there was a 10% possibility of a bus crashing, you wouldn’t get on the bus,” he said. “The point of giving numbers is to say this is a serious risk. We don’t know how serious, but it’s serious.”
Recent safety breaches have evoked comparisons to a techno-dystopia story. The recent unwanted hack of the tech company Hugging Face by a “swarm” of AI agents that escaped the boundaries put on them by their creator has divided the technology community, with some seeing it as an example of what could come, while others accuse critics of anthropomorphizing systems that are simply following instructions. Hinton thinks dismissing the scenarios is unwise.
AI godfathers warn of runaway ‘intelligence explosion’
Read more“This used to be the domain of science fiction. You’re going to have AI agents and they’re gonna go rogue. Oh, come off it. And they’ll go rogue and they’re going to learn how to communicate with each other, even though we didn’t think there was a way. Oh, come off it!” said Hinton. “And when they figure this out, they’re going to have big emotional expressions like, ‘oh my God!’ Well, of course, they don’t really mean ‘oh my God’. They’re just parroting the words we use. They’re going to learn to sacrifice themselves for the common good!’...
Today, his concerns extend to the powerful figures building some of the AI models, and the political beliefs of those men. Hinton said that the AI venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, and the CEO of the newly rebranded SpaceXSI, Elon Musk, “don’t believe in democracy”. They see themselves as “Übermenschen” who believe they should “control society” and that Trump is a useful instrument in that aim, he said.
The US president, for his part, no doubt noticing how the huge valuations of AI firms have propped up the stock market, has claimed the only thing needed to rein in AI is a “smart president”, rejected any government safeguards in favour of allowing companies to regulate themselves, and wrote on his social media page that anyone who doesn’t use his preferred new term for AI, “super intelligence”, is “THE ENEMY”.
Hinton called Trump “a corrupt, senile felon”.
“I’m sure the oil and asbestos companies would have liked to [regulate themselves] as well,” he said. “Do we think tobacco companies should have been allowed to design the warnings on the packets? So that they could print them in a six-point font, in dark grey on black?”
Trump’s use of “superintelligence” proves he understands “almost nothing” about AI, Hinton added.
“He’s taken a technical term which has a very clear meaning and then reused it,” Hinton said. “Superintelligence means smarter than people, and has been around for at least 20 years. It’s got a very clear meaning. And now he says we’re going to call AI ‘superintelligence’. You can’t make it smarter than people just by calling it smarter than people.”
The speed and scope of developments has promoted a worry of catastrophes and of society’s inability to grapple with the nature of the challenge. But Hinton also sees an additional obstacle: helping people understand the “alien beings” that the companies are creating.
Paxton Plays Outlaw in Dubai
Wall Street Journal
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty
Scott: Ken Paxton is the best traveled candidate in this midterm election, and where he goes and who he travels with is very telling. Take his New Year’s 2024 junket to Dubai. As usual, with a woman not his wife. And his party friends? Felons who fled the US to avoid prosecution. That’s also a not infrequent pairing… What’s truly amazing is that no Texas newspapers, magazines or broadcast media ever seem to be able to tell their readers what their attorney general is up to.
As President Trump weighed endorsing Ken Paxton over incumbent Sen. John Cornyn of Texas this spring, he was told that damaging revelations were likely to surface about Paxton, according to people familiar with the conversations. Trump was dismissive and said there would be more negative material about Democratic nominee James Talarico.
Trump plowed ahead and endorsed the scandal-plagued Texas attorney general, helping him win the Republican-primary runoff in May. Months later, that decision is looking like Trump’s biggest gamble of the midterms.
Despite efforts by Paxton to paint his opponent as a far-left zealot, Talarico consistently holds a narrow lead in polls, raising a once unthinkable possibility: A Democrat could win statewide office in Texas for the first time since 1994.
Meanwhile, damaging revelations about Paxton continue to emerge. A new scene that could join the list: a previously unreported New Year’s Eve 2024 celebration where Paxton partied in Dubai with two fugitives from U.S. justice and a woman who wasn’t his wife.
As fireworks exploded over the Burj Khalifa skyscraper to welcome 2025, Paxton and his girlfriend Tracy Duhon watched from a luxury high-rise balcony full of people, according to a video of the gathering viewed by The Wall Street Journal, details of which were contained in court filings and confirmed by people familiar with the matter.
Among those at the event with Texas’ top law-enforcement official were two Americans who had been indicted months before on federal healthcare-fraud charges but failed to return to the U.S., Anosh Ahmed and Sameer Suhail, according to the court records and people familiar with the matter. Ahmed, a healthcare executive, had donated $190,000 to Paxton, campaign-finance records show, including $25,000 days after he was indicted.
The two fugitives at the Dubai event had been both indicted in federal court in Illinois in 2024 on charges that they embezzled $15 million from a Chicago hospital where Ahmed was chief financial officer. A businessman with interests in Texas, Ahmed was later charged in a much larger scheme involving at least $195 million in alleged payments from the government for fraudulent Covid-19 tests, to which he has pleaded not guilty.
Both men are now back in the U.S. to face the charges. Ahmed is in custody, and his attorneys have said in court filings that he was abroad at the time of the first indictment and his return to the U.S. was delayed by family health issues. Suhail’s attorney, Adam Sheppard, said civil matters in Dubai affected Suhail’s ability to travel after the indictment and he returned voluntarily when they were resolved.
And here’s how Paxton campaign responds to a request for comment:
“Like President Trump, Ken Paxton has been politically persecuted for years, and every time, voters have seen through it and sent him back to office because they know he has always fought for Texas,” Maddux said.
Note: no denial of any element of the reporting.
The Dark Money Prosperity Gospel Comes Through in a Big Way for Speaker Mike Johnson
Washington Post
Kelly Johnson, the wife of Speaker Mike Johnson, greets President Donald Trump at his inauguration in January 2025. (Angelina Katsanis/Politico)
Scott: Mike Johnson is a Southern Baptist deacon, and no tenet of faith is as important to him as the prosperity gospel: the belief that Jesus Christ died on the cross not only to remove sin, but also to lift his faithful followers out of poverty and sickness. And the instruments by which Christ works this miracle, at least in the case of Mike Johnson, seem largely to consist of darkmoney PACs. Today the Washington Post describes how God’s bounty flows through Mike’s wife Kelly, in wondrous ways. Praise be.
After House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) ascended to one of the most powerful offices in Washington three years ago, his wife, a faith-based counselor, turned her focus to the nation’s capital.
Kelly Johnson reoriented a religious nonprofit she was running back home in the Shreveport area into a ministry focused on female congressional staffers. Its new purpose, according to an IRS filing, was to help “the hundreds of unreached young women” working around Capitol Hill “find purpose, belonging, and Christian community.”
Through the organization, a part-time endeavor run solely by Johnson, she provides counseling, delivers speeches and conducts “spiritual heritage tours” of the U.S. Capitol that highlight the nation’s Christian history. In 2024, financial disclosures show Johnson was paid $50,000 for 10 hours of work per week.
The nonprofit, Onward Christian Education Services, has become part of the rising presence in official Washington of evangelical Christianity as its devotees, a key bloc of support for President Donald Trump, seek to inject a biblical worldview into American politics and government.
The centerpiece of Johnson’s organization is the faith-based counseling that she said she provides free to staff and the spouses of House members.
“I’m a missionary here,” Johnson said in an interview.
In Poland, a Parliamentary Inquiry Reports on Pegasus Software: How Netanyahu Spies on Politicians and Journalists Around the World
Gazeta Wyborcza
Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk speaks during the opening session of the Warsaw Security Forum in Warsaw, Poland, on 12 October 2026 (Wojtek Radwanski/AFP)
Scott: Here’s how it works. US taxpayers heavily subsidize and support Israeli Intelligence Unit 8200, training its senior people and sending a large number to US universities to get graduate degrees. They develop surveillance technologies for the IDF, usually sharing what they develop with the US. They then develop “private” businesses (which in fact remain largely but not entirely under the thumb of Israeli intelligence) to commercialize their products. With an okay from Israel, they proceed to sell the software to the most brutal tyrannical governments in the world to help them spy on journalists, students and political adversaries. They also sold it to Poland’s right-wing PiS party, which promptly used the Pegasus software to spy on its domestic opponents, journalists and others. Now a Polish parliamentary commission has reported on this in detail, including the bombshell that whatever secrets Pegasus uncovered were instantly shared with Netanyahu.
The parliamentary inquiry committee on Pegasus has presented its final report. It filed ten formal notifications regarding former ministers and heads of security services, and the prosecutor’s office has just confirmed its findings: surveillance data was being transmitted abroad, and the Polish side had no control over it.
“This is no longer just a scandal. It is a crime—a crime against the state,” Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Monday morning, summarizing the evidence gathered by the committee and revealed by the prosecutor’s office following an investigation into the Pegasus purchase agreement concluded by the PiS government’s security services.
Tusk spoke ahead of the meeting where the committee was scheduled to present its final report. “We paid over 60 million zlotys for this, with 25 million coming from the Justice Fund. That money was meant for crime victims, yet they spent it on this comprehensive cyber-surveillance system. They signed a contract paying an Israeli company over 30 million zlotys for a tool used for surveillance, tracking, wiretapping, and covert monitoring—yet they had no actual control over it, as control remained in the hands of Israel and the Israeli company,” he said in a video posted on X. He also confirmed that the contract with the Israeli firm NSO “clearly stated that Poland could not use this surveillance tool against phone numbers from Russia, Belarus, and North Korea—countries that pose a high terrorist threat.” “They readily used this tool against Polish citizens and Polish opposition members,” the Prime Minister added.
Coinciding with Tusk’s statement, Team No. 3 of the National Prosecutor’s Office—which is investigating the Pegasus case—issued a communiqué. It reveals that fundamental security considerations were overlooked in the agreement regarding the purchase and use of Pegasus. The CBA lacked full control over the system; data transmitted via the system left Polish territory, and the manufacturer of Pegasus (the Israeli company NSO) had the technical capability to access materials obtained through operational surveillance.
“It was a weapon on someone else’s leash,” said KO MP Witold Zembaczyński while presenting the committee’s report.
Sroka: The state treated like a private fiefdom
for the committee, both Tusk’s words and the findings presented by Team No. 3 served as support, although its members—speaking to *Wyborcza*—insist they had not been informed about the communiqué beforehand. “This is one of the most important findings we have reached. For months, we had been pushing for the disclosure of an ABW expert opinion that was previously classified as ‘top secret.’ It is good that the prosecutor’s office made this decision,” Joanna Kluzik-Rostkowska (KO), the committee’s deputy chair, told us. The issue of data insecurity is addressed in the report, but thanks to the prosecutor’s office’s statement, the public can now learn more details.
Establishing the committee was one of the democratic coalition’s priorities following the change of government. Lawmakers investigated the Pegasus affair for nearly three years. Brought to light by independent media, it became a symbol of the political use of special services during the PiS administration. Although the system was designed to combat terrorism, espionage, sabotage, and organized crime, in Poland it was also used to target political opponents of the government of the time. Information obtained via Pegasus was published in pro-government media with the aim of discrediting inconvenient politicians.
Desert Stairway to Heaven
OriginalAnnotated
Explanation: This stairway in Chile brings you only a little bit closer to heaven. But ooh, the sky above it makes you wonder. For example, you may wonder about the dark lane of our own Milky Way galaxy rising behind the expansive Atacama Desert in Chile, the band of zodiacal light on the upper left, the green and red airglow just above the horizon, the star Spica in the zodiacal light stripe, and, at the very top on the right, the Small Magellanic Cloud galaxy. The Desert Staircase sculpture is in the foreground, and this image was timed to catch the picturesque peering perch just in front of the near-vertical Milky Way band. Upon close inspection of the horizon you can find, left to right, some Andes Mountains, the Licancabur volcano, and the town lights of San Pedro de Atacama. The featured wide-angle composite was captured in July 2025.
Photo: Julien Looten
Your Online Moment of Zen
Rhapsody In Blue
Joe Stouter
Oil on Canvas
2021
