On the latest "Stress Test": Is this really Trump's closing message? With the midterms less than a week away, the closing stretch of the campaign is full of bad omens for MAGA abroad and peak weirdness at home. In Serbia and Brazil, Trump allies suffered stinging and surprising defeats driven in part by energized voter turnout. An anti-corruption youth movement spearheaded the surge in Serbia, while Brazil saw a dramatic comeback for President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who defeated staunch Trump ally Flávio Bolsonaro. "Both of the losing candidates, Bolsonaro in Brazil and Vučić in Serbia, wrapped themselves around Donald Trump," co-host David Corn says on this episode of . "So we see in Serbia and Hungary authoritarian figures who try to emulate and ride the Trump wave being tossed out of office. And in [South America], where we've seen a right-wing tide they beat it back" in Brazil. There's a growing sense that voters worldwide are fed up with government grift. As David puts it: "Corruption seems to be the point of the spear." Meanwhile, the Israeli election--where the final results are still uncertain--also was something of a referendum on Trump, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attempting to retain power by promoting his close ties to Trump. Back home, former President Barack Obama and Trump were each on the campaign trail in closing sprints. Obama is getting spicy, hitting Trump on his tacky taste and alleged corruption. Trump, meanwhile, has been obsessively commenting on physical anatomy--specifically "asses"--in one of the stranger closing arguments in modern American political history. "This has to be, like, the definition of being off message," co-host Garrison Hayes observes. Trump's fixation on rear-ends extended to rapper Nicki Minaj, who appeared at a rally, where Trump asked her to stand and extolled her derriere, fueling the silly rumor she might be named press secretary after the brief tenure of Katie "Half a Scaramucci" Zacharia."It For Garrison, the gambit is all-too familiar: "Here we are in the closing moments of this midterm election, and the way that the Trump administration has decided to utilize a Black person in order to, I imagine, appeal to Black voters is offensive.

Follow this section to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Follow this tag to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW?

Artificial intelligence (AI) firm Anthropic has revealed details of its business ahead of its plans to sell shares to the public in what will likely be the largest stock market debut in history. The company behind AI chatbot Claude revealed losses of more than $80.7bn (£60.5bn) in the first half of the year. It said it generated revenue of $16.3bn over the same period. The number of shares to be released and their price range is yet to be determined. Anthropic's valuation when it goes public has been expected to exceed that of SpaceX, which this summer was the biggest-ever stock listing at an initial valuation of about $1.8 trillion.

Follow this section to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Follow this tag to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW?

In his award-winning essay, young British science writer Adrian Dredge wrote about the potential pitfalls of AI and policing. The essay won the 2026 Young Science Writer Award, external, chosen each year by the Association of British Science Writers. Here is an edited version of the entry. The growing use of AI in policing risks increasing discrimination against minority groups, researchers have warned. Studies suggest that predictions of future crime hotspots may be based on biased data, which can magnify existing prejudice and create a dangerous feedback loop.

Image caption, About 160 million people are eligible to vote in Brazil's general election today Polls have closed in Brazil's general election, after voters queued in long lines for a tight first round of the presidential race. After casting his ballot, 80-year-old left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva warned that the choice was between democracy and barbarism. His challenger, right-winger Flávio Bolsonaro, 45, said he wanted to free the Brazilian people. The result is forecast to be close. BBC Brazil's poll aggregator shows that the gap between Lula and Bolsonaro is only two points.

Kleber Mendonça Filho wants his films to reclaim lost history. For Kleber Mendonça Filho, filmmaking is an act of both provocation and preservation. Mendonça was born in 1968, in the early years of a ruthless military dictatorship--a time when cinema, like much else, was harshly constrained. His mother, Joselice Jucá, was a historian who studied Brazil's abolitionist movement, and she taught him that filling gaps in the cultural memory was a way to expose concealed truths. His relationship with film is inextricably linked with his home town, Recife--a port city where attractive beaches and high-rise developments coexist with sprawling favelas and rampant crime. In his youth, Mendonça was fascinated by the city's grand cinema palaces. He carried a Super 8 camera to the tops of marquees and shot dizzying images; he spent hours in projection booths, learning the mechanics of how films reached the screen. Over time, Mendonça watched those theatres fall into decline, an experience that he likened to being aboard a ship as it wrecked. But even as Recife lost its allure, he made the city a fixture of his films--a way of vindicating its place in history. His first narrative feature, "Neighboring Sounds," takes place on a street where he lived as a child, a setting that he spent years documenting. Later, he made "Pictures of Ghosts," a documentary about Recife told largely through its cinemas.

In today's digital age, images have emerged as powerful tools for politicians to engage with their voters on social media platforms. Visual content possesses a unique emotional appeal that often leads to increased user engagement. However, research on visual communication remains relatively limited, particularly in the Global South. This study aims to bridge this gap by employing a combination of computational methods and qualitative approach to investigate the visual communication strategies employed in a dataset of 11,263 Instagram posts by 19 Brazilian presidential candidates in 2018 and 2022 national elections. Through two studies, we observed consistent patterns across these candidates on their use of visual political communication. Notably, we identify a prevalence of celebratory and positively toned images. They also exhibit a strong sense of personalization, portraying candidates connected with their voters on a more emotional level. We note a substantial presence of screenshots from news websites and other social media platforms. Furthermore, text-edited images with portrayals emerge as a prominent feature. In light of these results, we engage in a discussion regarding the implications for the broader field of visual political communication. This article serves as a testament to the pivotal role that Instagram has played in shaping the narrative of two fiercely polarized Brazilian elections, casting a revealing light on the ever-evolving dynamics of visual political communication in the digital age. Finally, we propose avenues for future research in the realm of visual political communication. Introduction In the ever-evolving arena of election campaigns, candidates rely heavily on the media as their megaphone to amplify their messages to the masses. Over the years, the landscape of political communication has undergone a profound transformation. This transformation has been driven by the rise of online social media platforms, which have emerged as indispensable tools for candidates in their quest to gauge public sentiment and rally support from the electorate (Boulianne & Olof Larsson, 2023; Farkas & Bene, 2021). The significance of this transformation has been further accentuated by the global ascent of populist leaders, spanning diverse nations, who have wholeheartedly embraced social media as their primary mode of communication (Bernardi & Costa, 2020; Novoselova, 2020).

Every other day, my WhatsApp bursts with messages from friends in Brazil and abroad expressing equal parts of excitement and apprehension as Sunday's Brazilian presidential elections approach. On Wednesday, my best friend who lives in the country's capital, Brasília, texted to say she was scared of wearing red clothes to go vote this weekend because red is the color associated with the Worker's Party of former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula, the current front-runner, has a real, if slim, chance to beat far-right incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro in the first round by getting more than 50 percent of valid votes. "The mood is terrible," she wrote, later adding that in the last 48 hours, four instances of political violence had been recorded across the country. My friend's worries are justified.

Among the goals of information operations are to change the overall information environment vis-\'a-vis specific actors. For example, "trolling campaigns" seek to undermine the credibility of specific public figures, leading others to distrust them and intimidating these figures into silence. To accomplish these aims, information operations frequently make use of "trolls" -- malicious online actors who target verbal abuse at these figures. In Brazil, in particular, allies of Brazil's current president have been accused of operating a "hate cabinet" -- a trolling operation that targets journalists who have alleged corruption by this politician and other members of his regime. Leading approaches to detecting harmful speech, such as Google's Perspective API, seek to identify specific messages with harmful content. While this approach is helpful in identifying content to downrank, flag, or remove, it is known to be brittle, and may miss attempts to introduce more subtle biases into the discourse. Here, we aim to develop a measure that might be used to assess how targeted information operations seek to change the overall valence, or appraisal, of specific actors. Preliminary results suggest known campaigns target female journalists more so than male journalists, and that these campaigns may leave detectable traces in overall Twitter discourse.