Ukraine Lawmakers Back Bill Weakening Anti-Corruption Agencies
Lawmakers voted 263 in favor of the bill in the 450-seat legislature in Kyiv Tuesday, part of a raft of amendments to criminal procedure that moved through Ukraine's legislature.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Bloomberg
20 minutes ago
- Bloomberg
Zelenskiy Moves to Rein In Ukraine's Anti-Corruption Agencies
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy approved legislation to strip the nation's anti-corruption agencies of their independence, potentially hamstringing efforts to tackle high-level graft and shore up the rule of law. Zelenskiy signed a bill backed earlier by Ukrainian lawmakers on Tuesday, dismissing protests by the opposition and anti-graft groups and allies that such a move would set back the war-battered nation's efforts to fight corruption.
The Hill
an hour ago
- The Hill
Massie vows Trump's threats to primary him will ‘backfire tremendously'
Rep. Thomas Massie's (R-Ky.) vowed that President Trump's threats to primary him will 'backfire tremendously' and ultimately lead to Republicans losing their House majority in the 2026 midterms. 'Well, they've spent $1.8 billion against me so far in my congressional district. I think it has had very little effect, but they are trying to beat up on me to keep everyone else in line here and I think it is not working. I think what's gonna happen, this will be a referendum on whether the executive branch controls the legislative branch,' Massie said during a Tuesday interview with NBC News. 'I am going to prevail. What they are going to find out is it will embolden members of Congress here to go with their heart, with their minds, with their constituents and not just toe the party line,' Massie told NBC' Sahil Kapur. Trump's political operation has launched a targeted campaign seeking to oust Massie, who has regularly criticized the administration and refused to support its legislative agenda. Kapur asked Massie if he thought the president's effort 'will backfire in the next two years.' 'I think it's gonna backfire tremendously,' Massie said. 'Number one, I think they are wasting millions of dollars against me and they are going to lose the majority because of that, but number two, I think it will embolden Republicans who are right now quietly agreeing with me, but saying 'I am afraid of winning my primary, let's see if you can win yours Massie.'' Trump called the Kentucky lawmaker the 'worst Republican Congressman, and an almost guaranteed NO VOTE each and every time, is an Embarrassment to Kentucky' the president said in a Monday night post on Truth Social, linking to an anti-Massie ad released by pro-Trump PAC MAGA Kentucky. 'He's lazy, slow moving, and totally disingenuous – A real loser! Never has anything positive to add. Looking for someone good to run against this guy, someone I can Endorse and vigorously campaign for,' Massie was one of two House Republicans who voted against the president's 'big, beautiful bill' and has previously denounced the U.S. military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities on June 21, earning him rebukes from Trump and his allies. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) stopped short on Tuesday from endorsing Massie, saying 'bless his heart' when asked about his push for a bipartisan measure calling for the release of files related to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender and late, disgraced financier. 'Some people seem to enjoy trying to inflict political pain on their own teammates. I'm not going to address anybody individually, but I'll tell you that some here are much more frustrated than others,' Johnson said during a press conference on Tuesday. 'One in particular just gives me lots of consternation. I don't understand. I don't understand Thomas Massie's motivation, I really don't,' the House speaker added. 'I don't know how his mind works, I don't know what he's thinking.'
Forbes
an hour ago
- Forbes
Neutrality Is A Myth: Generative AI And The Politics Of Everything
Artificial intelligence (AI), once discussed chiefly as a technological innovation, now sits at the center of a societal reckoning over truth, power, and the future of democratic discourse. President Donald Trump's impending executive order—reported in the last few days by news outlets as conditioning government contracts on whether firms' AI systems are 'politically neutral'—captures how generative AI has become not just a commercial or technological concern, but a flashpoint for ideological and epistemic struggle. The order comes in the wake of controversies involving Google's Gemini and Meta's chatbot, which generated images of racially diverse Nazis and Black depictions of America's Founding Fathers. These outputs were framed by their developers as counterweights to historical exclusion, yet were widely denounced as historical fabrications, viewed by critics as examples of 'woke' technology supplanting accuracy with ideology. Executive order written under torn paper. AI's , Bridges, and the Politics of Design The anxiety surrounding AI deepened when Elon Musk's Grok chatbot spiraled into an antisemitic meltdown, producing hateful screeds and referring to itself as 'MechaHitler' before Musk's company intervened. The episode demonstrated how generative systems, even when tightly supervised, can produce destabilizing and harmful content—not merely reflecting the biases of their creators, but amplifying extremes unpredictably. Such incidents destabilize public trust in AI systems and, by extension, the institutions deploying them. These dynamics underscore a broader truth articulated by Langdon Winner in his now decades old seminal essay, Do Artifacts Have Politics? Winner contended that technologies are never neutral; they embody the social values, choices, and power structures of those who design them. His most enduring illustration was Robert Moses's low-hanging parkway bridges on Long Island, allegedly built to prevent buses—and therefore lower-income passengers—from accessing public parks. Critics at the time dismissed Winner's argument as over-deterministic and accused him of reading intent where circumstantial evidence sufficed. Yet whether or not Moses's motives were as deliberate as Winner alleged, the broader point has endured: infrastructure, from bridges to algorithms, channels social outcomes. Generative AI, often marketed as a neutral informational tool, is in reality a deeply value-laden system. Its training datasets, inclusionary adjustments, and 'safety filters' reflect countless normative decisions—about whose histories matter, what harms to mitigate, and which risks are acceptable. Generative AI apps icons —ChatGPT, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Claude, and Perplexity — are seen on a ... More Google Pixel smartphone. The Algorithmic Newsfeed and AI Persuasion The power of such systems is magnified by shifts in how Americans consume information. Most now rely primarily on digital platforms—social media feeds, streaming video, and algorithmically curated aggregators—for news . Television and traditional news sites remain significant, but algorithmic feeds have eclipsed them. These digital ecosystems privilege engagement over deliberation, elevating sensational or tribal content over balanced reporting. When generative AI begins writing headlines, summarizing events, and curating feeds, it becomes another layer of mediation—one whose authority derives from fluency and speed, not necessarily accuracy. Recent empirical research suggests this influence is far from benign. A University of Zurich study found that generative AI can meaningfully sway online deliberations, with AI-authored posts shifting sentiment in forums like Reddit even when participants were unaware of their origin. This dynamic threatens deliberative democracy by eroding what is referred to as 'public reason'—the ideal of discourse grounded in rational argumentation and mutual recognition rather than manipulation. When AI-generated content becomes indistinguishable from authentic human contribution, the public sphere risks devolving into what philosopher Harry Frankfurt described as a marketplace of 'bullshit,' where the concern is neither truth nor falsehood, but the sheer pursuit of persuasion and virality. In this photo illustration, the American social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion ... More website, Reddit, logo is seen displayed on an Android mobile device with a figure in the background. (Photo Illustration by Miguel Candela/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images) AI, Memory, and Manufactured Truths The dangers are not confined to subtle persuasion. A June 2025 Nature study demonstrated that large language models systematically hallucinate or skew statistical information, particularly when questions require nuanced reasoning. A separate MIT investigation confirmed that even debiased models perpetuate stereotypical associations, subtly reinforcing societal hierarchies. UNESCO has warned that generative AI threatens Holocaust memory by enabling doctored or fabricated historical materials to circulate as fact. And reporting by The New York Times has detailed how AI-driven bots, microtargeted ads, and deepfakes are already reshaping electoral landscapes, creating an environment where voters cannot easily discern human-authored narratives from synthetic ones. The Word 'History' is crossed out on a blackboard with the words 'Re-Writing History' chalk writing ... More underneath. This is for a learning about Re-Writing History Concept. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Consensus, AI and the Weaponization of Knowledge These technological developments intersect with a cultural trajectory that I have described, several years ago, as the 'death of the second opinion,' as public and digital discourse increasingly favors frictionless consensus over contested deliberation. Platforms reward virality, not complexity; generative AI, with its capacity to produce seamless, confident prose, reinforces this tendency by smoothing over ambiguities and suppressing dissenting voices. The space for pluralism—the messy, contradictory engagement that sustains democratic culture—is contracting. Even legacy broadcasters, which once offered starkly divergent perspectives, reflect this homogenization. News networks, despite their ideological differences, now tailor much of their content for algorithmic optimization: short-form videos, emotionally charged headlines, and personality-driven narratives designed to thrive on social feeds. AI-driven tools, which draft summaries and even produce full story packages, exacerbate this shift by standardizing the cadence and texture of news, eroding the distinctiveness of editorial voices. Simultaneously, institutions once regarded as neutral have become sites of contestation. In 2024, a U.S. prosecutor reportedly threatened legal action against Wikipedia over alleged partisan bias, raising alarms about state intrusion into crowd-sourced knowledge. Around the same time, a coordinated campaign on X, branded 'WikiBias2024,' accused Wikipedia of systemic ideological slant. These conflicts reflect a broader epistemic insecurity: as AI, social media, and legacy institutions all mediate public understanding, every node in the information ecosystem becomes suspect, politicized, and weaponized. Computer screen showing the website for free online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. (Photo by Mike Kemp/In ... More Pictures Ltd./Corbis via Getty Images) AI and the Mirage of Neutrality President Trump's proposed executive order must be understood within this fraught landscape. According to early reports, the initiative will require AI vendors seeking federal contracts to undergo 'neutrality audits,' produce 'certifications of political impartiality,' and submit to recurring oversight. While these measures echo prior federal interventions into private technology—such as the Justice Department's demands that Apple unlock the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone—the implications here are arguably broader. Whereas Apple's dispute centered on specific criminal evidence, the neutrality mandate would deputize federal agencies as arbiters of political balance in a dynamic and interpretive domain. The risk is not merely bureaucratic overreach, but the entrenchment of a preferred ideological baseline under the guise of balance. Any audit mechanism, after all, must be designed according to someone's conception of neutrality, and thus risks ossifying bias while purporting to erase it. The US Department of Justice (DOJ) headquarters building on January 20, 2024, in Washington, DC. ... More (Photo by J.) The impulse to demand neutrality, while understandable, may itself be symptomatic of what Freud described in Civilization and Its Discontents as the longing for an 'oceanic feeling'—a sensation of boundless connection and security, often tied to religious or existential comfort. In the context of AI, many seem to hope for a similarly oceanic anchor: a technology that can transcend human divisions and deliver a singular, stabilizing truth. Yet such expectations are illusory. Generative AI is not a conduit to universal reality; it is a mirror, refracting the biases, aspirations, and conflicts of its human architects. Recognizing this does not mean resigning ourselves to epistemic chaos. It means abandoning the myth of neutrality and designing governance around transparency, contestability, and pluralism. AI systems should disclose their data provenance, flag when diversity or safety adjustments influence outputs, and remain auditable by independent bodies for factual and normative integrity. More importantly, they should be structured to preserve friction: surfacing dissenting framings, offering uncurated outputs alongside polished summaries, and ensuring that a 'second opinion' remains visible in digital spaces. Democracy cannot survive on curated consensus or algorithmic fluency alone. It cannot endure if truth itself becomes a casualty of convenience, reduced to whichever narrative is most seamless or viral. The stakes are not abstract: as UNESCO has warned, when the integrity of pivotal histories is compromised, the very notion of shared truth—and the moral lessons it imparts—begins to erode. Democracy does not thrive on sanitized agreement but on tension: the clash of perspectives, the contest over competing narratives, and the collective pursuit of facts, however uncomfortable. As generative AI becomes the primary lens through which most people access knowledge—often distilled to prompts like, 'Grok, did this really happen? I don't think it did, but explain the controversy around this issue using only sources in a specific language'—the challenge is not whether these systems can feign neutrality. It is whether we can design them to actively safeguard truth, ensuring that pluralism, contestation, and the arduous work of deliberation remain immovable foundations for both history and democracy.
