Tag: Seth Cline

Happy Friday folks, Seth Cline here. Before we dive into the news, a quick programming note: Decision Points is off Monday for MLK Day, but we’ll be back in your inbox Tuesday. Now onto this week’s stories.

On Monday, Olivier perused the news around North America, where governments are concerned with technology, especially artificial intelligence.

In Canada, officials are considering taking action against Grok, Elon Musk’s increasingly malicious AI engine. That’s because it’s lately being used to “digitally undress people (mostly women), putting them in tiny bikinis and striking sexual poses.”

Stateside, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul wants to ban AI-generated images of candidates from political ads, and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed a bill restricting cellphones in classrooms, joining 36 other states who have already done so.

The news cycle being what it is, one might have forgotten that the U.S. just plunged Venezuela’s capital into darkness, snatched its president and threw him in a Brooklyn jail. So Olivier on Tuesday checked in on Venezuela for us. It’s not pretty.

Bands of government-backed militia known as colectivos are reportedly setting up roadblocks and searching cars there for signs of U.S. ties or support, and the risks of “wrongful detention” and “arbitrary enforcement of local laws” remain high. That’s according to a U.S. travel advisory issued Saturday telling Americans to “leave the country immediately.”

That advisory came just a day after President Donald Trump invited oil company executives to “rebuild Venezuela’s rotting energy infrastructure” and said the U.S. would guarantee their physical and financial security. Needless to say, the situation is volatile.

Midweek, Olivier turned to Americans’ political leanings. A new Gallup poll found 28% of Americans identify as “liberal” – the highest share since the polling firm started keeping track in 1992.

And a record share of Americans are identifying as independent – 45% – a plurality of whom lean Democratic. This newfound independent streak is especially present in Gen Z, 56% of whom self-identify as political independents. That’s not only higher than older age cohorts today, it’s higher than young people in the past: Just 47% of millennials and 40% of Gen Xers identified as independent when they were the same age as Gen Z today.

Yesterday Olivier turned to an unstable, oil-rich nation Trump has threatened with military action: not Venezuela this time, but Iran.

There, Iranians have taken to the streets in numbers not seen since its Islamic Revolution in 1979, and the government has responded by shutting off the internet and killing protesters – as many as 20,000, by one estimate. Trump threatened to intervene, but has since backed off.

There’s a lot riding on what happens next, beyond the lives of 90 million Iranian citizens. Iran’s nuclear stockpile and its massive oil output and reserves are also at stake, as is the balance of power in the Middle East, where Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthi fighters operate as Iran’s proxies. So the world will be watching.