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Free Thought Daily
All recent Free Thought Daily posts in one clean reading list.
Science and Technology
The UN AI governance era began in earnest today. In Geneva, the UN’s Global Dialogue on AI Governance opened with member states debating a question that has outgrown every national parliament: who, if anyone, steers this technology? The timing is apt, because the past week has read like a montage of governments discovering their leverage. […]
Bangladesh
Eight Bangladeshis have been killed at the Indian border in the first five months of this year, by gunfire or torture, according to rights group Ain o Salish Kendra. Thirty-four were killed last year. Behind each number: a body carried back across a paddy field, a family that will never see justice. These deaths were […]
News
The Strait of Hormuz closure was supposed to be ending. Ships are cautiously returning to the world’s most important waterway — but the cargo that feeds the planet is not moving with them. Iran effectively blocked the strait on 28 February, after the United States and Israel launched their air war: the Revolutionary Guard warned […]
Ex-Muslim Voices
Iran’s secular generation appears nowhere in this week’s funeral broadcasts, and that is precisely the point of the broadcasts. State television shows the Grand Mosalla full, the chants thunderous, the grief for Ayatollah Khamenei apparently universal — around 15 million participants expected across Tehran, Qom and Mashhad, by the government’s own health ministry. Spectacles of […]
Atheism
Religious decline in America was, for two decades, the closest thing social science had to a law of nature. As the country celebrates its 250th birthday with prayers and presidential invocations, the numbers underneath tell a more complicated story — in both directions. First, the scale of what happened. In 2007, 78 percent of American […]
Opinion
Iran after Khamenei is being pulled by two crowds, and the world’s next decade depends on which one its invisible new leader chooses to hear. The first crowd is in the streets. Millions are mourning Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in ceremonies running through 9 July, and by the second day the chants at Tehran’s Grand Mosalla […]
Humanism
The Venezuela earthquake crisis keeps producing numbers the mind refuses to hold. Officially, 2,954 people are dead and more than 16,000 injured. The figure that matters more came from the UN’s emergency relief chief, Tom Fletcher: over 50,000 people remain missing. Two shocks struck on 24 June — a magnitude-7.2 quake followed, 39 seconds later, […]
Cryptocurrency
The Bitcoin price recovery has a number to beat, and it is close enough to touch. Over the holiday weekend, Bitcoin climbed above $63,000 for the first time in two weeks, extending a rebound that carried it from below $60,000 in just five trading sessions. After the bleakest June since the post-FTX winter — a […]
News
The America 250th anniversary arrived with heat, storms and a question the fireworks could not answer: what, exactly, is this country celebrating together? The weather set the tone. Severe storms forced a roughly two-hour evacuation of the National Mall in Washington before the main event could proceed, while a brutal heatwave scorched celebrations across the […]
Culture
The Taylor Swift wedding was never going to be a private affair, and on Friday night it wasn’t even a private spectacle. When the world’s biggest pop star married Travis Kelce at Madison Square Garden, the Empire State Building glowed blue in their honour and billboards across Midtown flashed “JUST&T MARRIED” to the street. New […]
Science and Technology
LongCat-2.0 is the kind of announcement that sounds technical and lands geopolitical. On 30 June, Chinese delivery giant Meituan open-sourced a 1.6-trillion-parameter AI model — and the detail that matters is not the size. It is that the entire thing, from training to inference, ran on Chinese chips. For years, Washington’s strategy for containing China’s […]
International
The Khamenei funeral filled Tehran’s Grand Mosalla with grief, heat and fury this weekend. The one person conspicuously missing may matter more than the millions who came. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who ruled Iran for over three decades and whose death followed the February US-Israeli strikes, is being mourned in ceremonies running from 4 to 9 […]
Bangladesh
The Dhaka earthquake risk stopped being an abstraction this month. Twice in eleven days, the ground under the capital moved — and the second time, it moved close. A shallow magnitude-5.7 earthquake struck with its epicentre at Madhabdi, roughly 13 kilometres from Agargaon. Residents poured into the streets and stayed there, afraid of aftershocks. For […]
Culture
Mexico’s World Cup curse died at home, in the rain, in front of the people who had inherited it like a family debt. On Tuesday night at the Estadio Azteca, Mexico beat Ecuador 2-0 in the round of 32 — the country’s first World Cup knockout victory in forty years. Julián Quiñones scored in the […]
Ex-Muslim Voices
The apostasy death penalty is not a relic of history. In 2026, eleven countries still allow the state to execute a person for leaving their religion — and this year, human rights organisations once again stood before the UN Human Rights Council asking the world to do something about it. Let that sink in. Not […]
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