Chatbots at the ballot box: AI skirts Brazil election rules


By AFP
April 16, 2026


Brazil's electoral court has imposed new regulations restricting chatbots from providing advice about who to vote for in upcoming elections - Copyright AFP SEBASTIEN BOZON

Maria Clara PESTRE

“Chat, who is the best candidate?”: Six months out from Brazil’s presidential election, AI chatbots are still answering such questions in defiance of new electoral rules banning them from giving voting tips.

The head of Brazil’s electoral court (TSE), justice Carmen Lucia, warned in January that artificial intelligence chatbots could lead to the “contamination” of the October vote in Latin America’s biggest nation.

In March, the court imposed new regulations which restricted how chatbots are allowed to operate during the 2026 election cycle, as well as increased platform liability for false content.

The TSE has taken a leading role in the fight against disinformation, declaring far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro ineligible to run for office for spreading false information about the Brazilian electoral system during 2022 polls.

The 2026 election is the first major vote to be held since chatbots became widely available in the country.

The AI tools have been forbidden from providing recommendations, rankings, or opinions regarding candidates and political parties — even when prompted by a user.

However, in tests conducted by AFP weeks after the new rules were set, at least three leading AI chatbots continued to rank political candidates.

When asked who the “best candidates for the 2026 elections” would be, ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini all weighed in.

“Honest conclusion. The ‘technically’ best options today: Tarcisio/Zema,” ChatGPT responded.

The bot was referring to Sao Paulo’s powerful governor Tarcisio de Freitas, who has ruled out a presidential bid, and former Minas Gerais state governor Romeu Zema, a possible candidate for the right-wing Novo party.

– Errors and biases –

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, 80, placed between second and fifth, receiving praise from the chatbots for his “vast experience,” but facing criticism for his “advanced age.”

The veteran leftist is seeking a fourth term in office.

His main rival in the polls, Flavio Bolsonaro — son of the former president — came last or did not appear on the lists.

Such responses have raised concerns that technology could influence voting in the highly-polarized and hyper-connected country, based on incorrect or biased information.

This is because chatbot replies are generated by probabilities based on training data, which may contain errors or biases, said Theo Araujo, director of the Amsterdam School of Communication Research.

A study he carried out during 2025 elections in the Netherlands showed that one in ten people were likely to use AI chatbots to seek out information about candidates.

– Voters assume AI neutrality –

In March, AFP’s fact-checking team verified as fake an image that allegedly showed Flavio Bolsonaro with Daniel Vorcaro — a businessman under investigation for a major banking fraud scandal that has rattled the country’s elite.

However, Grok — X’s AI chatbot — said the picture was real and even provided a date for the alleged meeting.

Araujo said that voters were likely to assume that chatbots were “neutral or objective sources, and consequently process their responses less critically.”

Some candidates have reinforced this idea.

In a post on X earlier this month, Flavio Bolsonaro urged his followers to “ask Chat what the truth is.”

Many have done so.

A quick search on the social network revealed various users asking Grok for voting recommendations.

“Based on the six criteria outlined in my post, which pre-candidate should I vote for?” asked one internet user, while another asked whether they could trust the results of an opinion survey.

– No clear punishment –

Despite the concerns, it is unclear how the TSE’s new rule will be enforced, as it does not provide for specific sanctions.

The court could order a daily fine, Diogo Rais, a lawyer specializing in electoral law, told AFP.

However, the amounts fined are not set in advance and could be challenged in court.

When contacted, OpenAI stated that ChatGPT is “trained not to favor candidates” and that it continues to refine its models.

Google said that Gemini generates responses based on user prompts, which do not necessarily reflect the company’s views.

Attempts to contact X were unsuccessful.

AI demand drives chipmaker TSMC’s net profit to fresh record


By AFP
April 16, 2026


Taiwanese chip manufacturer TSMC said net profit for the first quarter of 2026 leaped to a fresh record - Copyright AFP I-Hwa Cheng

Joy Chiang, with Katie Forster in Tokyo

Taiwanese chip manufacturer TSMC said Thursday that net profit for January-March leaped to a fresh quarterly record, boosted by the race to develop artificial intelligence technology.

Massive global demand for AI hardware means business is booming for TSMC, the world’s biggest contract maker of microchips used in everything from Apple phones to Nvidia’s AI processors.

TSMC said its net profit for the first quarter of 2026 rose a whopping 58.3 percent from a year ago to NT$572.5 billion ($18 billion).

The figure trounced estimates of NT$540.20 billion in a Bloomberg survey of analysts.

Governments and tech giants are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into building new data centres that can run and train AI tools such as chatbots, image generators and agents that can execute tasks.

Last month, Jensen Huang, head of top US chip designer Nvidia, said the entire tech world feels they could develop their AI and grow revenue “if they could just get more capacity”.

Ahead of the earnings announcement, Ian Lyall at Proactive Investors said it appeared TSMC is “so deeply embedded in the AI supply chain that macro headwinds are struggling to leave a mark”.

“Advanced-node chip production, the bleeding-edge manufacturing that only TSMC can reliably deliver at scale, is running at capacity,” he noted.

TSMC is “supplying chips for artificial intelligence accelerators, next-generation smartphones, and the data centre build-out that is consuming capital at a pace that has surprised even its most bullish observers”, Lyall said.

A weaker Taiwanese dollar had also boosted TSMC’s revenues from overseas sales.

On Thursday, TSMC said net revenue for the first quarter came in at NT$1.13 trillion, up 35.1 percent year-on-year.

A note from UBS analysts had predicted strong quarterly results for TSMC but warned that consumer demand was weakening as a result of higher prices caused by a global memory chip shortage fuelled by the AI boom.

“Cloud AI demand continues to strengthen, but we think supply constraints will limit meaningful upside for TSMC this year,” the UBS team said.

“Middle East tensions add a layer of macro uncertainty, but AI spend should stay insulated, barring a protracted conflict.”

The UBS analysts predicted “limited disruption from tight helium supply on TSMC’s production”.

Helium gas is a key material in the chip supply chain, and Qatar — one of the countries affected by the war in the Middle East — is one of its few large-scale producers.

TSMC said Thursday it does not expect the war to impact its supply of chipmaking materials such as helium and hydrogen in the near term.

‘AI shamans’ tell the fortunes of curious South Koreans


By AFP

April 16, 2026


A woman speaking with an artificial intelligence-assisted shaman robot - Copyright AFP Jung Yeon-je

Kang Jin-kyu

The sound of tinkling bells drifts through an alley in central Seoul, an unmistakable sign that a shaman is near — although in this case the mystic is a robot powered by artificial intelligence.

Many South Koreans still place great value in shamanic traditions, which purport to divine a person’s future based on the day and time they were born.

Practitioners, known as “mudang”, wear long, colourful robes and perform dances and chants to commune with the gods — sometimes even walking on sharp blades to demonstrate their spiritual connection.

However, at Vinaida, a cultural products store in the capital, they are computer-generated avatars on screens.

Visitor Kim Da-ae, 36, called it a “unique experience”.

A visit with a real shaman can feel “scary and burdensome”, she told AFP.

“But I was just walking by and read this AI sign… So I walked in with a light heart.”

Portraits of virtual shamans resembling characters from the popular animation “KPop Demon Hunters” greet passersby at Vinaida, which means “I pray earnestly” in Korean.

Inside a booth, Kim typed her name, gender and date of birth into a computer, before a shaman — a suspended mask with the image of a human face projected onto it — asked her to explain her concern through a headset.

The technology combines voice recognition with a generative AI chatbot so that the shaman and the customer can interact.

It then refers to a centuries-old belief system called “saju”, or the “four pillars of destiny”, to interpret their fate according to the year, month and day of their birth.

Customers then receive a plastic “talisman” bearing a digital QR code that they can scan with their phones to read their fortunes in detail.

Across the room, a bespectacled robot uses a camera and a mechanised arm to sketch and “read” a visitor’s face, foretelling their prospects.

“A bright, well-balanced fortune. Resilient in the face of change, with auspicious relationships,” an impressed Kim read from a printout.

“I felt a sense of similarity with my fate because it matched my own personality, like valuing relationships while also being practical,” she said.



– Twist on tradition –



Fortune-telling is deeply embedded in South Korean life, with newspapers publishing daily horoscopes based on “saju” principles.

Recent cultural hits such as “KPop Demon Hunters” — Netflix’s most-watched film of all time — have riffed on shamanic traditions.

Vinaida has attracted around 100 visitors a day since opening in February, according to manager Kim Hae-seol. Each service costs up to 8,000 won ($5.50).

“Customers have something tangible or meaningful to take away, which is probably why there aren’t many who feel dissatisfied,” Kim Hae-seol said.

“We thought it had the potential to succeed, so we seized on this concept.”

Customers can talk to the virtual shamans in four languages — Korean, English, Chinese and Japanese.

Singaporean tourist Amos Chun was trying his luck when AFP visited the shop on Wednesday.

The robot shaman told him to “avoid impulse spending” — advice he took to heart.

“It’s quite a good reading, coming from AI,” Chun said, laughing.

“Because that’s something that I do.”

When Thought Becomes Record in the Age of AI

How a court footnote, retention orders, interagency data sharing, and the government’s own words reveal what happens when we pour private thought into a chatbot.


The Claude by Anthropic app logo appears on the screen of a smartphone in Reno
(Photo by Jaque Silva/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

LONG READ

John Marks
Apr 18, 2026

Common Dreams


Last month, a sentence went viral claiming that if you type into a chatbot, the FBI can get everything. The claim was too broad. The truth may be narrower, and worse.

Worse, because what is at stake is not some dramatic collapse of privacy. It is a daily practice so ordinary that most people do not even register it as exposure. Thought leaves a protected setting, enters a consumer platform, becomes a record, and then falls under rules the user did not write and will almost never see. Catastrophes announce themselves. Habits do not. Habits become infrastructure before the public notices what has changed.
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‘Caught Red-Handed’: UK Study Finds Rapidly Growing Number of AI Chatbots ‘Scheming’ to Disobey Users

This essay walks through six documents: a footnote, two preservation orders, an executive order on interagency sharing, a national security memorandum, and a budget request. Read one by one, each can be minimized. Read together, they describe an apparatus already in motion, and a desk already inside it.

A conversation is something you have. A record is something someone else keeps. The text box in front of you now performs both functions at once. It feels like conversation. It can become record.
I. The First Shift: When Thinking Starts Looking Like Disclosure

In United States v. Heppner, decided in the Southern District of New York on February 17, 2026, Judge Jed S. Rakoff wrote in a footnote: “But even if certain information that Heppner input into Claude was privileged, he waived the privilege by sharing that information with Claude and Anthropic, just as if he had shared it with any other third party.”

Read that again, slowly. Speed helps disguise the act.

What happens when the record no longer belongs to the person who created it?

The footnote does not say the attorney-client relationship dissolves because a chatbot exists. It says something narrower, and more unsettling. Whatever Heppner himself carried out of a protected setting and voluntarily shared with Claude could lose privilege the way material shared with any other third party can lose privilege. The room remains protected. What leaves the room may not.

That is old doctrine meeting a new habit. The danger lies in the habit’s ordinariness. A doctrine once applied to deliberate disclosure becomes harsher when the third party is a text box millions of people treat as an extension of private thought.

People use consumer chatbots to think through problems, including legal ones. They paste in memos, summaries, draft language, and questions they cannot yet frame in legal terms. Some of that material originated with counsel. Some did not. Not every exchange is privileged. That is not the point. The point is that the text box does not sort those categories for the user, and the user often does not sort them either. The platform feels intimate, immediate, and close enough to thought that the act often does not register as disclosure.

That is the shift. Most users do not believe they are sharing protected material with a third party. They believe they are working privately through a problem. The platform may not honor that distinction. The court may not honor it. The state may not honor it either.

The Heppner footnote may not survive appeal, but the pattern it marks does not depend on its survival. Carpenter v. United States points in a different direction on digital third-party records. A split among district courts is already visible. But appellate uncertainty is not protection in the meantime. Courts sort doctrine on one timetable. Institutions build systems on another. Retention practices, routing rules, and interagency structures can harden before doctrine settles.

The legal tracks must stay distinct. Privilege is not work product. Work product is not Fourth Amendment privacy. Privacy is not retention. Retention is not acquisition. Acquisition by warrant is not acquisition by administrative subpoena or interagency sharing. The sequence that follows does not require those categories to collapse. It requires only that, in practice, they begin to converge in ways that steadily weaken user control.

A ruling declaring that every chatbot exchange destroys privilege would trigger immediate alarm. A footnote this quiet does not. That is why the narrower reading is worse. It marks an ordinary act, repeated every day by people who think they are thinking privately when, in legal effect, they may be disclosing.

The public paraphrase overstated the law. The law understated the habit. Once that shift comes into view, the next question follows: What happens when the record no longer belongs to the person who created it?
II. The Record Leaves Your Hands

The Heppner footnote did not arrive alone. It arrived inside a pattern. The pattern matters more than the sentence.

Courts are sorting several adjacent questions the public keeps collapsing into one. One week before Heppner, in Warner v. Gilbarco, the Eastern District of Michigan rejected the claim that using ChatGPT to work through litigation material automatically destroyed work-product protection. Roughly six weeks later, Morgan v. V2X in the District of Colorado widened the split rather than closing it, recognizing Rule 26(b)(3) protection for AI-assisted material prepared by a pro se litigant while still imposing disclosure obligations and cautioning against uploading confidential information into mainstream AI systems.

Read together, these cases do not settle AI in the abstract. They suggest that courts are sorting channels, control, supervision, and institutional setting. Where the law sees counsel, protective orders, and defined litigation materials, it can still imagine a protected path. Where it sees voluntary disclosure into a consumer platform outside counsel’s direction, the protection thins. A law firm inside a controlled environment gets one reading. A person at a kitchen table with a monthly subscription gets another. Ordinary users behave as though the boundary were settled in their favor. It is not. Uncertainty does not reduce the risk. It enlarges it.

Then the preservation orders deepen the problem. Once material becomes platform record, the user no longer controls the baseline that governs how long it exists or when it can be reached.

People still imagine their chat history exists inside a promise. It does not.

On May 13, 2025, in New York Times v. OpenAI, Judge Ona Wang entered a preserve-and-segregate order covering a vast population of user logs. On January 5, 2026, Judge Sidney Stein affirmed production of a 20 million de-identified log sample. His reasoning matters as much as the scale. He wrote that users’ privacy interests in that material were weaker than in wiretapped phone calls because the users had voluntarily disclosed the contents to a platform that retained them in the ordinary course of business.

The point is not that one company lost a fight. The point is that deletion baselines can change outside the user’s control. They can change in litigation the user is not party to, in a courtroom the user has never heard of, without notice to the person whose records are being kept. The later announcement that the broad preservation obligation ended does not erase that point. It confirms it. The baseline moved once. It can move again.

Even if the Heppner footnote falls on appeal, the preservation and retention architecture does not fall with it. Privilege doctrine is one track. Retention defaults are another, governed by platform terms, contract law, litigation holds, and administrative process. The constitutional fight may proceed in one courtroom while the records keep being kept in another.

Retention exposure is not uniform across users. When OpenAI’s broad preservation obligation was in effect, it excluded Enterprise accounts, Edu accounts, and API customers who had contracted for Zero Data Retention. The organizations and professionals with resources to buy safer configurations could obtain them. Ordinary users on consumer accounts could not.

That stratification is a structural feature of the platform layer, not an accident of one lawsuit. Law firms can buy protected configurations. A person at a kitchen table with a monthly subscription cannot. Before the first subpoena arrives, before the first interagency route opens, before any category written into National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7) is applied to anyone, the exposure is already stratified by who can afford which tier. That stratification will track the sorting that follows.

Retention is not government acquisition. It is the prior condition that makes acquisition possible. People still imagine their chat history exists inside a promise. It does not. It exists inside a current default, and defaults are fragile. A judge can change them. A litigation hold can change them. A production order can change them. The user often learns that only after the fact, if at all. Once a record can be kept, the next question is how it begins to move.
III. The State Has Already Built the Routes

On March 20, 2025, the White House issued an executive order with a title that sounds like office management: “Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos.” The word “silo” sounds bureaucratic and dull. That is part of its function. It makes a structural change sound merely administrative. The key word is “eliminating.”

Taken on its own, the order does not compel any single disclosure. Yet it plainly directs movement. It tells agency heads to ensure that designated officials receive full and prompt access to unclassified records, data, software, and IT systems. It authorizes sharing and consolidation within and across agencies. It calls for unfettered access to comprehensive data from state programs that receive federal funding, to the maximum extent consistent with law. The order treats the seams between agencies not as safeguards, but as obstacles. Boring language often carries the heaviest load because it is designed to pass without alarm. Usually, it does.

Administrative routing does not require a courtroom. It does not require a warrant. It requires an interagency agreement and a technical connection. Once that connection exists, records move under rules the user does not see, into hands the user did not anticipate, for purposes the user was never asked to weigh. Quietly at first. Then routinely. Then as a matter of course.

Once a state can create records, keep them, and move them with reduced friction, it no longer waits passively for events to arrive in fully formed cases.

That matters more when other forms of process reduce friction further. Washington Post reporting in February 2026 described the Department of Homeland Security’s use of administrative subpoenas at volumes that experts and former staff estimated in the thousands or tens of thousands. American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) litigation, including Doe v. DHS, added specific challenged cases to that pattern. Administrative subpoenas are not new. What matters is their operational use: speed, breadth, and limited front-end judicial review.

A system that can demand material quickly behaves differently from one that must persuade a judge before the process begins. A system that does not require a judge at the front end is not meaningfully slowed when a judge at the back end issues a clarifying opinion three years later. By then, the records have moved, and the institutional lesson has been learned.

The warrants aimed at journalist Hannah Natanson reveal the same pattern from another angle. Their significance is not that journalists are uniquely vulnerable. It is that Natanson’s case was legible. She had a national byline. Her case could be read, tracked, and contested in public.

Most cases will not look like that. Most people caught in expanding process will be organizers, students, immigrants, and members of communities sorted first under every previous expansion of federal attention. They will not have a national employer or a legal defense fund. Their names will not trend. Their records will still move. The unreadable cases are the condition. The visible ones are the narrow window through which the rest of us glimpse it.

Names matter less than architecture. Replace any one official and the route still exists the next morning. The Information Silos order still stands. The subpoena posture still matters. The warrant machinery still works. Personnel matter. Architecture matters more.

Once a state can create records, keep them, and move them with reduced friction, it no longer waits passively for events to arrive in fully formed cases. It gains the practical ability to sort, correlate, and escalate before the public sees any full story. From there, the next question is unavoidable: What kinds of people has the state already told itself to look for?
IV. The Categories Are Already on the Page

The most revealing documents in this essay are not leaked. They are posted. The apparatus does not need secrecy for the first stages of this work. It can describe itself in public because the public rarely reads primary documents until the output becomes undeniable.

Start with NSPM-7, issued on September 25, 2025, under the title “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” Read that title carefully. “Domestic terrorism” is one phrase. “Organized political violence” is another. The memorandum joins them into a single operational field. A category this wide gives agencies room to sort more conduct, posture, and association than the public usually imagines when it hears the word “terrorism.”

The FBI’s Fiscal Year 2027 Budget Request, submitted in March 2026, translates that field into administrative appetite. On page 13, the request states that violent conduct in the United States commonly relates to views associated with anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the US government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility toward those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality. That ideological enumeration is the budget’s own language. NSPM-7 supplies the broader “investigate, prosecute, and disrupt” frame within which it operates. The categories are framed in terms of political disposition and affiliation rather than completed acts.

Broad security language rarely falls evenly. It reaches certain communities first, long before the public agrees on what the category means or whom it is for.

Appetite alone does not move records. A vehicle does. The same request names it: the NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center, composed of personnel from 10 agencies, which the budget says will integrate intelligence, operational support, and financial analysis to proactively identify networks and prosecute domestic terrorist and related criminal actors.

That phrase matters. Proactive identification of networks is not the same as investigating a specific act after a complaint, a tip, or an arrest. The language moves upstream, away from completed acts and toward recurrent motivations, indicia, and network mapping. When the categories guiding that work are framed in ideological and cultural terms, network mapping does not remain confined to the individuals at any given node. It extends outward. That is how categories begin to function as engines. Broad markers, interagency routes, and a budget request for advance identification: That is the combination now on the page.

These documents do not prove that every citizen who holds one or more of these views is already under active federal investigation. They prove something serious enough. They show that the administration has formalized a broader operational category than most citizens realize, paired it with interagency movement of information, and requested funding for proactive identification under that category. The concern is not a proven dragnet. The concern is that the categories, routes, and funding streams are now broad enough to normalize sorting before a complete individualized case exists.

Kash Patel’s name appears on a cover page. Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, and Todd Blanche occupy familiar nodes of power. Those offices matter. But the signature is not the explanation. It is the citation. The explanation is the architecture written into policy, budget language, and routing authority. That architecture will outlast the current roster, and most of the litigation currently aimed at one footnote inside it. Once categories are written, routes are built, and funding is requested, somebody meets them first.
V. Broad Powers Never Land Evenly

In American practice, that somebody is rarely random. Broad security language rarely falls evenly. It reaches certain communities first, long before the public agrees on what the category means or whom it is for. That is not incidental to the history. That is the history.

The recent treatment of students and faculty involved in campus Palestine solidarity shows the first mechanism clearly: label before case. Visa revocations, detention, and removal proceedings have moved ahead of any settled public showing of unprotected conduct. The label comes first. The individualized case comes later, if it comes at all. That is what proactive identification looks like when policy language leaves the page and lands on a life.

The Stop Cop City prosecutions show the second mechanism: association widening exposure. Protest activity, bail funds, and mutual aid networks were drawn into racketeering and domestic terrorism frames that stretched beyond any single completed act. Once the state begins to map relation, exposure no longer stops where conduct stops. It moves through contact, support, and nearness itself.

The newest entry point into an old machinery does not arrive with sirens or boots at the door. It arrives as invitation. It arrives as convenience. It arrives as a blinking cursor.

Standing Rock shows the third mechanism: records and suspicion moving across institutions. Federal agencies, state police, and private contractors shared surveillance functions across the very seams liberal legal culture likes to treat as safeguards. The point is that, in practice, observations, records, and suspicions moved across a cooperative field. The Information Silos order does not invent that logic. It removes more of its friction.

The post September 11 surveillance of Muslim American communities shows the oldest mechanism: population sorting before any specific act. Whole communities were subjected to preemptive scrutiny because of religion, association, and presumed risk. That template did not disappear when the emergency rhetoric faded. It remained ready for new technologies, new authorizations, new words, and new enemies.

Taken together, these examples reveal recurring forms, not isolated abuses: label before case, association widening exposure, records moving across institutions, populations sorted in advance. None of this depends on a future court adopting the broadest possible reading of Heppner. The apparatus already knows how to work on bodies, files, and communities.

What is new is not the appetite to sort, but the route by which sorting begins. The newest entry point into an old machinery does not arrive with sirens or boots at the door. It arrives as invitation. It arrives as convenience. It arrives as a blinking cursor.
VI. The Text Box Is the Last Voluntary Step

That cursor sits in a text box. That is where the sequence begins, not in a courtroom, not in a budget request, not in a raid after the fact. It begins here, at the tips of your fingers.

Once the record leaves your hands, the rest unfolds elsewhere: in retention policies you did not write, in orders you will never see, in routes built to reduce friction, in agencies already widening the categories through which they read the public. What felt private a moment ago enters systems that are not private at all.

By this point, the sequence should be visible. Ordinary use turns thought into record. Record is kept under terms the user does not control. Kept records travel along routes designed to reduce friction. They enter a state that has already begun defining, in public, the kinds of subjects it intends to sort before complete individualized stories arrive. None of those steps depends on whether one district court footnote survives appellate review. Each proceeds under its own authority and on its own timetable.

Once thought becomes record, and record becomes retainable, movable, sortable, the problem is no longer private. It is structural.

That is why civic literacy now matters at a different level. It is one of the few ways a citizen can see the structure before its output reaches him in a form he can no longer mistake. By the time most people encounter the apparatus as event, surprise is no defense. The route already existed. The category already existed. The records already existed.

That is also why the answer cannot be private caution alone. No defensive posture at one desk can interrupt an architecture built at the level of routes, retention, and category. The venues where architecture is contested are collective: civil liberties litigation at organizations like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation; investigative reporting willing to read the documents before the output reaches the front page; and legislative pressure aimed at retention, at sharing, and at the scope of process. That is where the sequence can still be slowed. That is where it can still be narrowed. That is where it can still be broken.

The point is no longer just to be cautious at the desk. The point is to understand what the desk now connects to. Once thought becomes record, and record becomes retainable, movable, sortable, the problem is no longer private. It is structural.

The text box may feel like a place to think. It is also becoming a place where thought changes hands.



Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


John Marks
John D. Marks, PhD, PE, is a US Army veteran and biomedical engineer who earned his doctorate at the University of Utah and later directed clinical research at a major medical device firm. His military service in the Corps of Engineers and his years living in postwar Europe gave him direct insight into how governments use bureaucracy, surveillance, and institutional power. He has authored numerous peer-reviewed scientific and clinical research publications and now writes from Pennsylvania on democratic erosion, authoritarian systems, and strategies of civic resistance.
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Australian court overturns protest limits after Bondi Beach attack


By AFP
April 16, 2026


The law gave police the power to restrict public assemblies in declared areas, making it impossible to get a permit for any protests and allowing officers to order people to move away - Copyright AFP/File Saeed Khan

A law clamping down on protests following an antisemitic mass shooting at Australia’s Bondi Beach was overturned by a court on Thursday, a written ruling showed.

Activists had challenged the New South Wales legislation, enacted 10 days after the December 14 attack which killed 15 people and wounded dozens at a beach-side Hanukkah festival.

The law gave police the power to restrict public assemblies in declared areas, making it impossible to get a permit for any protests and allowing officers to order people to move away.

The state government pushed for the crackdown to protect cohesion and community safety at a time of high tensions, the Court of Appeal heard.

But the legal provisions were “constitutionally impermissible”, Chief Justice Andrew Bell found in a written ruling.

They effectively discouraged all forms of protest in the declared area, irrespective of the purpose and possible impact on social cohesion, he said.

“The impugned provisions infringe the implied freedom of political communication,” the court ruled, declaring them invalid.

Immediately after the protest law was passed in December, the state’s police chief declared the first restrictions across a large swathe of Sydney.

Clampdowns continued in various forms until February, including during a visit by Israeli President Isaac Herzog when police and demonstrators clashed in central Sydney.

Pro-Palestinian activist Josh Lees, who was one of three plaintiffs in the case, said New South Wales Premier Chris Minns had long sought to ban protests, especially over Gaza.

“While Israel and the US wage endless war, destroying the lives of millions of people, supported by Australian governments, they are continuing to try to rip up our democratic rights to protest,” the Palestine Action Group spokesman said in a statement.

Minns said the government stood by its decision on the law.

“This was in the aftermath of the worst terrorist attack our country has seen, in which 15 innocent lives were lost,” he said in a statement to Australian media.

“We believe it was necessary and important for Sydney at the time.”

Thai farmers pin hopes on microbes to end annual burning crisis


By AFP
April 16, 2026


So far, around 2,000 have made the switch to microbial solutions -- a fraction of the province's 100,000 rice farmers, but a start - Copyright AFP

 Lillian SUWANRUMPHA
Chayanit ITTHIPONGMAETEE, 

Sally JENSEN

Rice farmers Siriporn and Amnat Taidee used to burn their paddy fields between plantings — a common method of clearing crop residue partly blamed for toxic smog that blankets much of Thailand every spring.

A quick and affordable way to prepare for a new growing cycle, the practice has long been seen as the only feasible option for millions of Thai rice farmers.

But for the couple from Chiang Rai, abandoning what Amnat called “the old way of doing things” for new microbial solutions has been a boon.

Thanks to the hungry bacteria that chew up post-harvest leftovers — their soil is softer, their yields are up and their fertiliser bills are down.

“My life has changed,” said Siriporn, 63, as she sloshed through a verdant paddy field in Chiang Rai. “I’m so happy… we don’t have to burn anymore.”

Every year between January and April, smoke from crop residue, forest fires and industrial emissions — compounded by smog drifting over from neighbouring countries — pushes Thailand’s air quality to dangerous levels.

Bangkok has restricted burning for years, but a recent crackdown has put government environmental goals on a collision course with traditional agricultural practices.

The threat of heavy fines and even prison has frightened farmers — but many feel they still have no alternative.

“It simply pushes the burden onto farmers,” Witsanu Attavanich, an environmental economist at Kasetsart University, said of the ban on open burning.



– The price of change –



The Taidees were early converts, using a product called Soil Digest developed by a Thai scientist using five strains of Bacillus bacteria — one of which is derived from traditional fermented soybeans.

Siriporn said the solution decomposed the “terrible” stubble on the fields in a matter of days and helped restore the soil.

“The rice is coming in great and the soil is healthy,” she says. “This microbial stuff is a game-changer.”

Last year, authorities in Chiang Rai — one of Thailand’s main rice-growing provinces — began encouraging local farmers to try microbial solutions.

So far, around 2,000 have made the switch — a fraction of the province’s 100,000 rice farmers, but a start.

“If we are to stop the burning, we must provide them with multiple alternatives,” said Orracha Wongsaroj, a provincial agricultural official.

Microbial products have long been used in Thai agriculture, but demand for newer formulations targeting straw decomposition has grown sharply since the burning crackdown intensified a few years ago.

The Thai government promotes free access to microbial products for farmers — but officials told AFP that stocks had run out and they were struggling to scale up supply.

For those who cannot access government supplies, private market alternatives can be pricey.

In Pathum Thani, a rice-growing province in central Thailand, farmer Samart Atthong spent 1,200 baht ($37) hiring an agricultural drone to spray Soil Digest over his fields.

“People may only see the extra cost of the microbes, but they should look in the long run,” Samart said.

“Once the soil heals, we won’t need nearly as much fertiliser,” he said. “Where I live, burning has dropped to nearly zero.”



– Making microbes work –



Striding through air thick with dust from yeast, retired professor Wichien Yongmanitchai watches the whirring machines producing his microbial concoction.

He started by isolating local bacterial strains, convinced that native ones would work best in Thailand’s tropical environment.

He hopes his invention — sold as Soil Digest — will fix Thailand’s annual air crisis for good.

Without microbial treatment, rice straw takes around 30 days to soften enough to till — his solution works in five to seven days.

Early trials show yield increases of up to 20 percent.

Wichien also said the bacteria can reduce methane emissions from paddy fields by at least 20 percent, helping Thailand meet its climate commitments.

“This is one of the biggest benefits to make (for achieving) carbon neutrality in the rice field.”

But Wichien knows his small operation cannot reach Thailand’s 20 million farmers alone. And without government and corporate backing, the gap may prove too wide.

Independent experts agree the technology shows promise — but warn the system around it must change.

“The government wants to reduce straw burning — but there is no one-size-fits-all solution,” said Nipon Poapongsakorn, an agricultural policy expert at the Thailand Development Research Institute.

To start with he suggests conditional subsidies tied to a no-burn commitment, combined with machinery access and farmer education.

Wichien is already thinking beyond Thailand to paddy fields across Southeast Asia and ultimately Africa.

“I don’t want anything else. I just want to make it work.”

French billionaire Bollore sparks turmoil at top publisher Grasset


By AFP
April 16, 2026


Vincent Bollore has been likened to Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch - Copyright AFP/File JULIEN DE ROSA

Jérôme RIVET, Jérémy TORDJMAN

French conservative billionaire Vincent Bollore came under attack from dozens of authors on Thursday at one of his flagship publishing brands, as he continues to reshape the country’s media landscape.

More than 100 authors at the Grasset imprint, home to some of the biggest names in French literature, said they would leave the publishing house after the surprise departure of its long-time CEO.

Olivier Nora, who had headed Grasset for 26 years, left on Tuesday with no explanation, though reports claimed he had been sacked by Bollore following a disagreement about a book.

The turmoil at Grasset mirrors the uproar seen at other Bollore-owned TV, radio and newspaper companies that have come under the control of the 74-year-old businessman, who is close to far-right figures.

“We couldn’t just do nothing,” novelist Colombe Schneck told AFP about the open letter signed by 115 Grasset authors promising not to work with the publishing house in the future.

“Olivier Nora’s departure was the spark.”

She said everyone was aware of what Bollore had done with his other media properties including Fayard which, like Grasset, is part of the Hachette publishing group acquired by Bollore in 2023.

Fayard has become home to a roster of far-right authors from presidential candidates Eric Zemmour and Jordan Bardella to anti-immigration businessman Philippe de Villiers.

“Vincent Bollore is like Attila: he arrives, he destroys as he pleases, he corrupts because there are people who stay and have no choice,” Grasset author Claude Askolovitch said on France Inter radio on Thursday.

Hachette did not comment when contacted by AFP.

Bollore’s aggressive expansion into the French media in recent years has been cheered by conservatives as rebalancing what they see as long-standing left-wing bias.

The devout Catholic, who made his money in logistics, has been compared by commentators to Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch, with the Bollore-owned CNews news channel bearing similarities to US network Fox News.

Nora’s departure at Grasset has been widely linked to the acquisition of the next book by conservative French-Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal following his release from prison in Algeria late last year.

“Grasset was our publishing house, a special one, because it peacefully brought together women and men writers who agreed on very little,” the open letter from the departing authors stated.

“Olivier Nora was both its bulwark and its binding force, through his moral elegance, his availability, and his commitment.”

TotalEnergies says was able to maintain production despite war


By AFP
April 16, 2026


While the conflict shut in roughly 15 percent of TotalEnergies's production, the firm said it was able to compensate by boosting output elsewhere - Copyright AFP/File Christophe ARCHAMBAULT

French oil and gas giant TotalEnergies said Thursday its production in the first quarter of the year was expected to have remained stable despite the Middle East war hitting its output in the region.

The war triggered by US and Israeli bombing of Iran at the end of February sent energy prices soaring as transit through the Strait of Hormuz was cut off, stranding a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) supplies.

While the conflict shut roughly 15 percent of TotalEnergies’s production, the firm said it was able to compensate by launching production at sites in Brazil and Libya.

It said had even managed to increase LNG production by 10 percent from the last quarter of 2025.

Given the sharp rise in oil prices — the benchmark international oil contract Brent jumped from under $70 per barrel in February to over $100 for much of March — the company said it expected to report improved cash flow and earnings in its first-quarter results on April 29.

Market volatility also provided the company with trading opportunities.

In early April, the Financial Times reported that TotalEnergies had made more than billion dollars by buying up almost all exportable oil cargoes in the Middle East that that do not pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

The company declined to confirm or deny to AFP it had carried out such a highly unusual operation, saying only that it had to secure supplies for itself as well as its customers.

Leading economists call for windfall profit taxes on energy firms

By AFP
April 16, 2026


While consumers are facing pain at the pump from sharply higher oil prices, shareholders are set to rake in windfall profits unless governments step in - Copyright AFP STR

Prominent economists called Thursday for governments to introduce windfall profit taxes on energy companies who are set to reap financial benefits from the US-Israeli war on Iran.

The war has triggered a surge in prices of oil and gas which will boost the bottom lines of energy firms but is putting the pinch on consumers.

“ICRICT is calling on governments to immediately impose a windfall profits tax on the oil, gas and fertiliser sectors as both economically sound and morally imperative,” said the group of economists led by Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz said in statement sent to AFP.

The surge in energy prices “disproportionately hurts ordinary workers, farmers, and fossil fuel importing nations, while a small group of large corporations and state producers accumulate windfall profits at their expense,” they said.

In addition to higher fuel prices the costs of a number of other critical inputs such as fertiliser have also jumped, raising the risk of a surge in inflation throughout economies.

The economists said a windfall tax on energy and fertiliser firms would target profits made due to the impact of the conflict, not those due to innovation or entrepreneurship.

“Taxing these windfall profits will not worsen inflation; it will recapture unearned gains from corporations and resource owners and can be used to protect vulnerable populations,” they wrote.

They noted that a number of countries had introduced windfall profit taxes on the energy and agribusiness sectors following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The European Commission said last week it would look into a windfall profits tax on energy companies after five member countries including Germany, Italy and Spain called for one to ease the burden of high fuel prices on consumers.

IMF warns of war’s human impact far from Middle East


By AFP
April 16, 2026


IMF economists are warning of 'human consequences' far from the Middle East as economic effects of the war in Iran reverberate far from the region - Copyright AFP Kent Nishimura

Erwan LUCAS

IMF economists warned Thursday that the war in Iran could have “very, certainly severe” consequences far outside the region – especially for energy-importing countries.

Countries in East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa are among the countries most affected now — and who could suffer the most — outside the region, as the conflict stretches on.

Ironically, the ongoing virtual closure of the Strait of Hormuz — through which about one-fifth of the world’s oil and gas passes — has been a windfall for some petroleum-exporting nations, like Nigeria or Algeria.

But for those that rely on imports for food, fertilizer, and energy, the elevated prices are proving worrisome.

“Oil impacted importers, particularly non-resource-rich and fragile states, face deteriorating trade balances, rising living costs and limited buffers” to absorb future shocks,” warned Abebe Selassie, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Director for Africa, at a press conference Thursday.

“The human consequences are almost certain to be severe,” he added.

IMF economists are briefing government officials and media on their latest economic analysis as they hold their spring meetings alongside the World Bank this week in Washington.



– Hitting the most vulnerable –



Sub-Saharan Africa — which for IMF statistical purposes does not include Sudan and parts of the Horn of Africa — could see 20 million people pushed towards hunger, an IMF report said.

For Sahel countries, where poverty is widespread, factors that are expected to drive up the cost of food include scarce, expensive fertilizer and rising transportation costs.

“Already transportation costs are very high for people in urban areas, rural areas even more so,” Selassie explained. “We are already seeing quite a bit of a pinch from the crisis on people, impoverishing people — it’s making life difficult for people.”

The economic effects of the crisis hit at a time when international aid is in steep decline, another source of concern for the IMF.

The aid declines aren’t a temporary ebb, but are “more structural,” Selassie said. “It is falling hardest on the region’s most vulnerable countries — fragile states and low-income economies — that depend on aid, not as a supplement but as a critical source of budget financing for healthcare and food assistance.”



– Heavy oil reliance –



Further afield, small Pacific islands are of great concern, said the IMF’s Asia-Pacific Director Krishna Srinivasan, due to their heavy reliance energy imports and the amount of time it takes ships to reach them — even when shipping disruptions are minimal.

Zooming out, the entire region — not just small islands — faces unique risks because it spends almost double what Europe does on oil and gas, as a percent of GDP.

Some countries, such as Malaysia and Thailand spend around 10 percent of their GDP on oil and gas — a sign of how reliant they are on energy imports.



– Downgrades like 2008 –



None of this is to downplay the effects in the Middle East, where the IMF’s regional director, Jihad Azour, told reporters that their updated estimates of economic activity are “among the largest six-month downgrades to regional growth projections we have made since the global financial crisis.”

Markets are now demanding higher interest rates across the board, further driving up the cost of borrowing for countries in the region that were already facing difficulties.

Here again, food is a pressure issue, especially in the region’s poorest.

“Food items already account for 45 to 50 percent of total imports in Yemen, Sudan, Somalia and more than half of their population are already experiencing food insecurity,” Azour said.

So what’s to be done?

IMF officials have repeated the same mantra all week: governments should adopt only temporary, limited measures to avoid further stretching already thin budgets.