Sameera Khan

"Everything we write will be used against us or against those we love These are the terms, take them or leave them." ~ Adrienne Rich

On the subject of foreign trips, we had found a startling pattern in the prime minister's travels scroll.in/article/107345…

The artist behind this painting, Criselda Vasquez, painted this portrait of her parents in 2017. The man in this painting, her father, was recently taken by ICE. He has lived in the United States for forty years. This loss has made it hard for the family to support themselves. If you want to support them, you can go to their GoFundMe here: gofund.me/456d8a193

Zohran Mamdani has turned blocks in front of 50 NYC public schools into car-free ‘Soccer Streets’ where children can play in celebration of the upcoming World Cup.

Breaking News: The Justice Dept. is planning to drop charges against India’s richest man, Gautam Adani, after a lawyer for the billionaire made an unusual investment offer. nyti.ms/42DVKvU

From the team that brought you “Why is Snow White Latina?,” “Why are there Black people in ‘The Rings of Power’?,” and “Star Wars has gone woke” comes the latest online onslaught against the diverse cast of “The Odyssey.” These culture warriors have been led to battle by their own personal Agamemnon, Elon Musk. Read the full story now: variety.com/2026/film/opin…

Yesterday marks 163rd birth anniversary of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. I missed it yesterday to address how much I liked his work of art and literature. In this sketch, my mini, her dad and cheerful Rahmat making their appearance with their creator himself!

New: Babies who don’t get the vitamin K shot are 81 times more likely to develop severe bleeding. In many cases, oxygen can’t reach their brains and blood pools around their skulls. Yet driven by misinformation, more parents are refusing the injection. propub.li/42PRfyl

Bloomberg News has won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Illustrated Reporting and Commentary for “trAPPed,” a graphic novel depicting the psychological ordeal of a woman in India held under “digital arrest” for eight days, subjected to 24/7 surveillance in a widespread and ruinous scam. bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-… 🎨: Anand RK

Who actually shapes AI policy in the U.S.? We mapped 1,812 entities: 745 people, 918 organizations, 2,925 relationships. Frontier Labs, AI Safety orgs, Think Tanks, Government, VCs, and more. mapping-ai.org

“Leaving Neverland” director Dan Reed says the public can’t see Michael Jackson as a pedophile because he has “metastasized into something much bigger than who he actually was": "He’s become part of the collective imagination, and the collective imagination can never include the fact that he’s a pedophile. It’s just not possible. You can’t say, God, that guy liked to have sex with children, but isn’t his music great? That’s not a narrative people can hold in their minds." variety.com/2026/film/feat…

The best thing my students ever gave me. One semester I thought they were just *really* focused on taking notes. Turns out they were compiling a book of all the slightly unhinged things I'd said. It's 152 pages long.

This is one of the people they hired to be an immigration judge; a person who will have to decide on gender-based violence cases.

once again begging the media to use the term “child sex abuse material (CSAM)” and not “child pornography” there is no such thing as “child pornography” and the use of that language trivializes the sexual abuse and exploitation of children

Orcas have brain structures you don't have. Neurobiologist Lori Marino's MRI work on killer whales identified a fourth cortical segment called the paralimbic lobe. It sits next to the limbic system and handles emotion and social awareness. It doesn't exist in humans or in any land mammal. In orcas, it's so elaborated it erupts into the cortex. Their cortical limbic lobe, the region handling self-awareness and social processing, is exceptionally developed. Their brain weighs roughly 12 pounds, four times the mass of yours. They have spindle cells, the same neurons that let humans reason about other minds. When an orca surfaces and locks eyes with you, it's running a social assessment with neural hardware specialized for exactly that. It knows you're a separate being. It knows you're watching it back. It's evaluating you. Here's what should recontextualize the clip. In all of recorded history, wild orcas have killed zero humans. Zero documented fatalities. One surfer was bitten off California in 1972, and the orca released him the moment it realized he wasn't a sea lion. A 12-year-old was bumped in Alaska in 2005. The orca approached, touched him, turned back. Orcas hunt great white sharks. They coordinate wave attacks that sweep seals off ice floes. They take down moose swimming between islands. They have every capability to kill you. They have never chosen to. Marino's explanation: the orca neocortex is developed enough to instantly distinguish a human from prey. Other researchers point to orca culture, the traditions passed through pods across generations, in which humans simply aren't food. That look is recognition and restraint. From a mind built for social cognition at a scale your brain can't reach.

Can we just take a second to really take this in? How on earth has it come to this? Where a man can performatively ‘admit’ to sex with a child on an international platform but then couch it as some form of reflection or responsible accountability exercise - whilst deliberately leaning on our terrible, useless, outdated sexual offences act and age of consent? This man was 30 years old, and at the height of his fame - when he made an active choice to have sex with a child. I would use much stronger language here but he’s deliberately leaning on our consent laws, that a 16 year old child can technically consent to sex - meaning that he could technically have ‘consensual sex’ with a school age child. His admission and his disgusting performative ‘progressive’ ‘reflection’ that he is ‘exploitative’ makes my effin skin crawl. If this is not a predator in full swing, I do not know what is. This man is admitting to sex with children and no one is going to do a thing about it. Absolutely atrocious. Our laws need urgently updating to ensure no adult can ever have technically consensual sex with a child. No adult should ever want that; and no child should ever be exposed to it. End.

1/5 HRW calls on Kuwaiti authorities to immediately and unconditionally release American-Kuwaiti journalist, Ahmed Shihab-Eldin. His detention is emblematic of the tightening space for free expression in Kuwait and the use of vaguely worded national security charges to silence journalists.

My friend & former colleague Ahmed Shihab-Eldin has been detained for 6 weeks in Kuwait over social media posts. The Committee to Protect Journalists is rightly calling for his release. Journalism is not a crime. Free Ahmed! cpj.org/2026/04/cpj-ca…

Ahmed Shihab-Eldin's detention in Kuwait has occupied our Top Story slot for much of the week, and it will remain there through the weekend to raise awareness of his incarceration as a call for his release.

Award-winning Kuwaiti-American journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin has been in Kuwaiti detention since March 3 for simply sharing publicly available, verified footage. Journalism is not a crime. Join us in calling to #FreeAhmed cpj.movements.mov/pet/kuwait-rel…

Fox host complains about low teen pregnancy rates: "The problem is teens and young adults. From ages 15-19, the fertility rate is down 7%"