Activists gathered outside the OpenAI offices on Monday during climate week in New York City

On Monday evening, protesters gathered outside the unmarked Manhattan offices of OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, holding signs calling to “Eat the rich, save the planet”. Over the next two days, groups also picketed outside the offices of fellow tech giants Google and Amazon; other protesters, including clergy, were arrested while disrupting a closed-door AI health summit in the city. Tonight, protesters will target a Brooklyn gas power plant that was set to close – until it was purchased to power AI datacenters.

The protests come on the heels of an Anthropic employee quitting his job with a warning that intensified an already-growing AI panic: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

Prime minister will ‘highlight Israel’s achievements’ as he heads towards his toughest re-election challenge

When he takes the stage at the UN on Thursday, Benjamin Netanyahu will deliver a familiar message of defiance even as protests and international condemnation leave the Israeli leader in growing isolation.

Netanyahu is facing his toughest re-election challenge in a political career spanning decades with three ongoing conflicts in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran, and a growing campaign of violence by Israeli settlers in the West Bank.

Anti-ICE protests break out in push for transparency as unnamed man is in serious but stable condition at hospital

A US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer shot and wounded a man on Sunday afternoon in Texas’s capital of Austin, local authorities said, and anti-ICE protesters quickly gathered at the scene.

The unnamed man was in serious but stable condition at a hospital after being shot once in the torso on the city’s north side, Austin’s police chief, Lisa Davis, said at a news conference with the mayor and other city officials.

English singer outlines his position after US stadium owners refuse to let rapper perform after political speech

• Macklemore dropped from Ed Sheeran’s US tour after ‘free Palestine’ speech

Singer Ed Sheeran has responded to the backlash over the removal of Macklemore from his North American Loop tour, following the rapper’s “Free Palestine” speech on stage at MetLife stadium in New Jersey.

In a two-minute speech on 4 September, the Grammy-winning artist told the audience he wanted the people of Gaza and “the occupied West Bank” to know “we have not forgotten about them”, prompting owners of subsequent stadium tour venues – including Robert Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots and a prominent supporter of and donor to Israel – to object to Macklemore’s appearance on the tour.

In this month’s newsletter: communities are reshaping how empire is remembered in public life. Plus, holding royalty to account in Jamaica and repairing centuries of harm in California

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Hello and welcome to the Cotton Capital newsletter. I’m Nadine White and this month we’re asking: after the toppling, what comes next?

Britain spent much of 2020 arguing about what should come down. Statues of enslavers and colonial figures were toppled, defaced or quietly removed. Edward Colston ended up in Bristol harbour. Robert Milligan was taken down outside London’s Museum of Docklands, while campaigners renewed calls for Cecil Rhodes to come off his plinth at Oriel College, Oxford. But six years on, one of the most persistent battles is still playing out.

How slavery reparations could help make yearning to return to Africa a reality | Natricia Duncan

British corporation continued trafficking of enslaved Africans to Guyana 40 years after abolition | Chris Osuh

Trafficked on the last US slave ship, Cudjo Lewis never returned home to Benin. But his descendant has | Adria Walker

Moringa lattes and tigernut kebabs: the Ghanaians ‘taking back the power’ of their food | Kaamil Ahmed

Sydney’s sugar rush: how the colony’s most powerful profited from Australia’s slave trade | Paul Daley

Beto Coral held up banners in Florida warning fellow Colombians to not vote for Abelardo de la Espriella

In the week before Colombia’s presidential election, Beto Coral, a well-known activist living in the United States, travelled to Florida to persuade fellow Colombians not to vote for the far-right candidate Abelardo de la Espriella.

Coral held banners outside polling stations in Miami warning that the millionaire lawyer, whose candidacy was endorsed by Donald Trump, would “help deport all of you”.

A movement with safety, dignity and equality at its heart may now be blamed for the rightwing backlash. But within it were principles worth carrying forwards

Every once in a while, the discourse gods send a tablet down to the people, announcing that a previous era is dead and a new age is upon us. Recently, it was the “vibe shift” – a post-pandemic change in culture that encompassed everything from fashion to politics. The vibe shift consolidated with Donald Trump’s second election, a harbinger of the end of fragility and of movements for racial and gender equality – a rejection of the long 2010s with their hashtags and pink pussy hats and women’s marches and protests. The vibe shift has recently been followed by a calling of time on what has come to be known as “Woke 1.0” – a term that represents what is now seen as a culture of hysterical overreach triggered by the momentary breakthrough of movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. “Woke 1 was crazy,” said Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez this month, quoting a New York City councilman. And there we have it, time to walk back some things said and done in the giddy heat of those moments. It was crazy!

This rush to the future away from what some perceive to be an embarrassing past groups together various disparate phenomena. But I’m afraid it’s not that simple. Woke 1.0 (or “peak wokeness” – I wish the gods would use less trivialising ways to refer to roiling social tides, but there we are) was about politics and culture and also about the behaviours and trends it triggered. It was about concrete problems: policing of minority communities, the right of women not to be sexually harassed or violated, the systemic racism and sexism that damaged both. And it was about reforming the cultural structures that created and perpetuated those systems; asking university curricula to expand and diversify intellectual sources, recognising the long shadow of glorified imperial histories, and updating institutions – from the media to the academy – in order to enfranchise change. None of this is “crazy”.

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Wynd Kaufman, 69, chained and locked the front doors of OpenAI’s headquarters last year with members of StopAI

An activist who blocked the entrance to one of the world’s biggest AI companies is believed to have become the first person jailed for protesting against artificial intelligence as supporters dub her the “Rosa Parks of AI risk”.

Wynd Kaufman, 69, surrendered herself on Friday to authorities in San Francisco. She was found guilty by a jury for her role in an action last year that saw members of the group StopAI chain and lock the front doors of OpenAI’s headquarters in protest against the pursuit of artificial superintelligence.

The FBI from the 1950s to the 1970s tried to infiltrate and discredit leftist organizations. Trump seems to be repeating that sordid practice

It is bad enough that the Trump administration blocked a federal criminal investigation when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent killed Renee Good as she was turning her car away from him in Minneapolis the past January. Just before the shooting, Good and her partner had been observing and protesting against ICE officers.

Instead, it turns out the administration has been investigating progressive and even mainstream groups that have been involved in protests against Donald Trump’s sweeping deportations, according to newly released government documents.

The fatal shootings of two men, both killed in their vehicles by ICE agents, have rekindled anger over the US’s militarized deportation push

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, was driving to work with his brother and two other passengers in Houston, Texas, when immigration agents began tailing his car. They pulled him over and fired a fatal shot through the open passenger-side window.

Six days later in Biddeford, Maine, Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, 26, was driving around his neighborhood when agents stopped him at an intersection – right outside the laundromat where he’d often go with his three-year-old daughter – and shot him dead.

Hundreds of masked members of the white supremacist organization marched and chanted in the US capital

Hundreds of masked men carrying banners, including the Confederate flag, marched through Washington DC on the Fourth of July, the 250th anniversary of the US’s inception.

The group appeared to be led by Thomas Rousseau, founder of the neo-fascist, white supremacist organization Patriot Front. Members of the group wore white masks and gathered in front of DC’s Union Station. They later marched towards Capitol Hill, WTOP reported.

Activists accused of being part of antifa get long prison terms in case seen as test of Trump’s crackdown on dissent

A group of Texas protesters convicted of terrorism charges received unusually harsh sentences of at least 50 years in prison on Tuesday in a closely watched case that was widely seen as a test case of the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on dissent.

After a three-week jury trial, the nine activists were all found guilty of a slew of criminal charges in March, stemming from a Fourth of July protest at an immigrant detention facility in Alvarado, Texas, south of Fort Worth. The demonstrators arrived late at night with a plan to set off fireworks as part of a noise demonstration to show solidarity with those detained inside. A few of the protesters spontaneously broke off from the main group and vandalized cars in the parking lot, a guard shack, slashed the tires on a government van and broke a security camera. When a police officer arrived on the scene and drew his weapon, one of the activists fired an AR-15 from the woods, hitting the officer in the shoulder. The officer survived.

A Newark detention center has been at the forefront of anti-ICE protests – and now counterprotests

Protests continued on Saturday in front of the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey, as a hunger and labor strike inside reached its ninth day, with detained immigrants demanding improved conditions and medical care.

On Saturday morning, a small group of rightwing counterprotesters in Trump hats began demonstrating outside the facility waving signs and chanting slogans in support of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The protesters supporting the detained immigrants and the counterprotesters supporting ICE yelled at each other across barricades set up by state police.

Organizers rally outside Delaney Hall, facing violent clashes with agents, as over 300 detainees are on hunger strike

• Chaos breaks out at New Jersey immigration detention center – in pictures

Wednesday marked the sixth day that more than 300 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees were on a hunger and labor strike at Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey. Meanwhile, the mood amid the dozens of organizers and community members rallying outside the facility was tense but energized with support.

Masked protesters circulated, handing out water bottles, personal protective equipment and oranges. A few attenders who travel across the country to ICE protests wherever they occur – such as a man with a karaoke machine in a giraffe costume – trolled the ICE agents, successfully getting a giggle out of one of the few agents with his face exposed. Passing tractor-trailers on the busy industrial road punctuated protest chants with long, extended honking in solidarity.

My activist group is about 80% women. Where did all the men go – and how can we get them back?

In Donald Trump’s first term, my Brooklyn-based activist group had the peculiar dynamic of being started by two men while being composed of about 65% women. Since November 2024, our group has doubled in size, and the gender imbalance has tipped even further: we are now about 80% women.

Almost 18 months into Trump’s second term, it is abundantly clear that the appetite for anti-Trump, pro-democracy activism has not dimmed at all. And yet, there is a substantial portion of the populace that, in my experience as an activist, seems to have lost its fervor for the fight.

Police forcibly broke up protest outside hospital where federal immigration agents took detainee for evaluation

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New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, and other local officials on Monday condemned Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after federal officers dragged a man out of a hospital building where he had been taken following an arrest, prompting a crowd of protesters to gather outside, where they clashed with police.

The incident over the weekend has also drawn scrutiny from critics questioning the New York police department’s response at the scene, in relation to New York City’s sanctuary laws, which bar local police from assisting federal immigration authorities in civil immigration enforcement.

Walkouts, marches and other gatherings planned for ‘May Day Strong’ demonstrations across the country

Thousands are expected to join an economic blackout for International Workers’ Day , as part of 3,500 “May Day Strong” events across the country today. Organizers are calling for “no school, no work, no shopping” with walkouts, marches, block parties and other gatherings planned into the evening.

On the east coast, protests were already under way by the early morning. In Manhattan, a group of Amazon workers, Teamsters and local politicians marched from the New York public library’s main branch to Amazon’s nearby corporate offices to demand the corporation cut its contracts with ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In the nation’s capital, protesters with the organization Free DC shut down intersections across the city, holding handmade banners reading “Workers over billionaires” and “Healthcare not warfare”.

A timely exhibit at NYU celebrates the anti-fascist folk artist – despite the university’s recent suppression of campus protests

Bea Esteves Mendez knew as much about Woody Guthrie as most people her age – which is to say, she knew This Land is Your Land – when one of her professors put on a recording of All You Fascists last semester. It’s an upbeat folk anthem written at the height of the second world war that connects the forces of oppression abroad with those, like Jim Crow, that festered at home. “Well I’m a gonna tell you fascists, you may be surprised, people in this world are getting organized,” Guthrie sings, shouts, whoops and whistles in his distinctive Oklahoma twang. “You’re bound to lose. You fascists bound to lose.”

“It was our first time really sitting down to listen to a Woody Guthrie song, and we were like, ‘Wow,’” said Mendez, 19, a sophomore at New York University. “‘This could have been written today.’”

People won’t join us just because we’re right. They’ll join if we make them feel like they belong

“Settle your quarrels, come together, and understand the reality of our situation. Understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying that could be saved, that generations more will live poor, butchered lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.”

George Jackson wrote these prophetic words more than 50 years ago. At that time, he and his comrades were enduring unimaginable violence inside California’s prisons – a microcosm of the fascism already alive in the United States.

Show up, even when it’s uncomfortable.

Talk to people whose politics aren’t perfect.

Work with those still in process because they, too, have revolutionary potential.

Refuse to turn on the people closest to us and focus on the real enemy.

In prison, I witnessed the gap in accountability between the poor and the elite. A banker’s message to Epstein is racist and reductive

Here is an email that should bring shame to Jes Staley:

you want to know why we are not São Paolo, watch the TV adds on the Superbowl. Its all about hip blacks in hip cars with white women.

The group that should be in the streets, has been bought off. By Jay Z