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A 14-year-old boy is dead and an 18-year-old man is fighting for his life after a subway surfing stunt turned tragic on the Williamsburg Bridge Friday evening.

The Yankees hope they will look back fondly on Friday night, May 22, 2026 as a positive pivot point in their season. That the loss for familiar reasons — not enough offense, terrible relief pitching — will blend into the long schedule and be remembered ultimately as a moment of re-entry by Gerrit Cole and...

A US citizen who contracted Ebola in the Democratic Republic of ​Congo, where an outbreak of a rare ‌strain has killed over 130 people, is not critically ill and his wife and four children have tested negative.

For the second straight year, and the third time in his career, OG Anunoby was recognized as one of the premier defensive players in the NBA. 

The technical mishap had triggered a massive internet meltdown following Harward’s Tuesday appearance on America’s Newsroom.

England unveiled its 2026 FIFA World Cup roster with a Beatles-themed video featuring “Come Together,” as Harry Kane, Jude Bellingham and the Three Lions prepare for the tournament in the United States.

Officials have warned the leaking tank had become a ticking time bomb, with the risk of either spilling thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals or exploding.

Max Muncy didn’t dodge the literal bullet. But he’s hopeful he skirted a figurative one.

Escobar: The Russia-China Spaceship Rushes Towards Planet Multipolar

Authored by Pepe Escobar,

The New Silk Roads/BRI and its derivations such as the Northern Sea Route/Arctic Silk Road remain alive and kicking

SHANGHAI – This is it.

The Russia-China strategic partnership, the leaders in the process of Eurasia integration, the leaders of multipolar bodies BRICS and the SCO, have formally endorsed and boosted the drive towards multipolarity and a new system of international relations via a strategic joint declaration signed, sealed and delivered during President Putin’s visit to China this Wednesday.

This is one for the History books – in several more ways than one. I was privileged to follow the proceedings in Beijing during the whole day at the Aurora College, a top Shanghai private school and university, among a fabulous congregation of teachers and students.

So we had plenty of time to discuss the implications of how the Top Two Eurasia powers – and global powers – are establishing the lineaments of a new geopolitical future for most of mankind. The exceptions will be exceptionalist recalcitrants and vassals addicted to commit serial political suicide.

We all remember President Xi’s visit to Russia in 2023, when leaving the Kremlin, side by side with Putin, he voiced what he was already polishing for some time, in a very concise way: “Right now there are changes we have not seen in 100 years.” And then Xi and Putin agreed that now, “we are the ones driving these changes together”.

The practical result is the sharply focused Beijing joint statement, penned by unmistakable “civilizations with ancient history.”

Let’s go through some of the highlights.

The declaration minces no words and no concepts when it comes to offering a serious alternative to the current – dwindling – unilateral historic moment.

Polycentrism: “The attempts of a number of states to single-handedly manage global affairs, impose their interests on the entire world, and limit the sovereign development of other countries in the spirit of the colonial era have failed.” Russia-China will focus on establishing a “long-term state of polycentrism.”

The ”law of the jungle”: “Basic universally recognized norms of international law and international relations are regularly violated (…) there is a danger of fragmentation within the international community and a return to the ‘law of the jungle’.”

A new security architecture: “It is necessary to pay due attention to the rational concerns of all countries in the field of security, to focus on cooperation on security issues, to reject bloc confrontation and zero-sum game strategies, to oppose the expansion of military alliances, hybrid wars, and proxy wars, and to promote the creation of an updated, balanced, effective, and sustainable global and regional security architecture (…) It is unacceptable to force sovereign states to abandon their neutrality.”

This is exactly what Moscow proposed to Washington and NATO in December 2021: indivisibility of security. The non-response response precipitated the SMO in Ukraine two months later, as it became obvious to Moscow that NATO’s plan was a blitzkrieg in Donbass.

Hegemony: “Hegemony in the world is unacceptable and should be prohibited. No state or group of states should control international affairs, determine the fate of other countries, or monopolize opportunities for development.”

Global governance: that’s President Xi’s cherished concept, fully delienated in the SCO summit last year in Tianjin: “In global governance, which is an important tool for streamlining the system of international relations, it is necessary to adhere to the principles of sovereign equality, the rule of international law, multilateralism, human-centeredness, and results-oriented approach.”

The United Nations: it’s necessary to “strengthen the role of multilateralism as the primary tool for addressing the multifaceted and complex global challenges, and to prevent the weakening of the United Nations.” That should lead to “the reform of the United Nations”. Yet everyone knows that will definitely not happen under the current administration in the White House.

Point 4 of the declaration: global civilizational and value diversity. That may be the crux of the matter – inexorably burying any Exceptionalist pretensions: “The spiritual and moral system of any civilization cannot be considered exceptional or superior to others. All countries should advocate a view of civilizations based on equality, mutual exchange of experience, and dialogue, and should strengthen mutual respect, understanding, trust, and exchanges between different nationalities and civilizations, promote mutual understanding and friendship among the peoples of all countries, and protect the diversity of cultures and civilizations.”

Enter the new “indispensable nation”

The Russia-China declaration, as concisely as possible, delivers what amounts to much-needed hope for humanity to delve into the matrix of a civilizational past as the means to forge an auspicious, more egalitarian future.

It is by all means a humanist mini-manifesto that goes way beyond the set up of a new security architecture and forging key changes in the current system of international relations. Its credibility is supported by the backing of two Big Powers which also happen to be civilization-states, fully sovereign and fully independent.

I have called this process for quite a while “The Eurasia Century”. That is what this fateful May 20, 2026 in Beijing, within the scope of an official visit by President Putin to China, was celebrating.

The breath, scope and ambition of the joint statement clearly overshadows other aspects of Putin’s Beijing journey, although they are quite relevant by themselves.

Starting with the sealing of the new “indispensable nation”. Exit the Exceptionalists; enter China. The old order is being evicted – in real time. And yes, this is the most consequential shift in Great Power alignment since the end of the Cold War – complete with the Empire of Chaos that sanctioned Russia to death targeting its “isolation” and economic collapse inexorably out-maneuvered by the Russia-China strategic partnership.

The 25-year Treaty of Good Neighborliness between Russia and China was massively upgraded – featuring strategic energy corridors (the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline), very close military coordination and a shared civilizational/ideological framework.

Of course there will be no substantial leaks on what Xi and Putin discussed during their two-hour-long, informal tea time. The proxy war in Ukraine and the illegal war on Iran had to be on the menu, including Putin arguably briefing Xi on Russia’s possible next moves in an increasingly direct, toxic confrontation with NATO, and both evaluating the technicalities of the Russia-China support for Iran.

So in a nutshell the New Silk Roads/BRI and its derivations such as the Northern Sea Route/Arctic Silk Road remain alive and kicking; and the de-dollarization of the global economy – a reflection of the Russia-China trade balance, now advancing exclusively on yuan and rubles – is more than alive and kicking.

As for BRICS, destabilized by the U.S. from the inside via India and the UAE, it may eventually resurrect from its coma; this process will have to be led by Lavrov and Wang Yi. And the focus must change: BRICS must develop some sort of strategic coherence among the Global Majority for the multipolar transition to really work.

Then there’s the bright future of Power of Siberia 2. China, finally, may even forget the “Escape from Malacca” obsession, in effect since the early 2000s, and back to the limelight with the American faux blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and Iranian ports.

The leadership in Beijing has always been fully aware that blocking the Strait of Malacca is essential in the American strategy of containing and suffocating China. Power of Siberia 2 offers a solution completely outside of the thalassocratic Empire of Piracy, pumping gas directly to China from the Yamal peninsula through the Altai mountains and the Mongolia steppes.

There was a lovely touch at the Great Hall of the People, amidst so much drama: a TASS-Xinhua joint exhibition, “The Unbreakable Friendship of Great Nations, the Strategic Partnership of Great Powers”, with 26 photos documenting the Putin-Xi friendship over the years, in several G20, BRICS and SCO summits, the One Belt, One Road forum, Victory Day in Moscow, and the Beijing Olympics.

Putin and Xi visited the expo with two quite special tour guides: TASS CEO Andrey Kondrashov and Xinhua CEO Fu Hua.

Compounded with the tea ceremony, call it the human, all too human, deep bond, person-to-person touch indispensable to travel the long and winding road towards a geopolitical future of equanimity and mutual respect.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 23:25

Antisemitic hate group and conspiracy theory network founder, Jon Mineadeo II launched a vile, antisemitic attack on an man and posted the interaction to social media.

Craig Kimbrel struggled with the Mets, making it hardly surprising that he became a roster casualty on Friday, when he was designated for assignment.

Gavin Newsom’s call to boycott Chevron over Memorial Day is eye-rolling Sacramento political theater.

These Are The Best (And Worst) Countries For LGBTQ+ Travelers

In order to help LGBTQ+ tourists travel safely, the German portal Spartacus started publishing the Gay Travel Index in 2012. In the 2026 edition, the ranking compared 217 countries and territories based on the situation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer people in each location.

As Statista's Anna Fleck details below, according to the index, Iceland is considered the safest and most open place for LGBT+ travelers in 2026, having scored 14 points, followed by Malta and Spain in joint second place with 13 each, while Belgium, Canada, Germany and Portugal come in joint fourth with 12.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Poland stands out for having significantly improved its ranking since 2025, rising from rank 118 to rank 59. This is in light of noticeable improvements in terms of trans rights, protection against state repression and in the social environment.

Nepal also saw progressive changes, having risen 21 places from 53rd position to 32nd, following the introduction of self-ID procedures for trans people and growing social tolerance.

At the other end of the spectrum come (in descending order) Afghanistan, the Republic of Chechnya in Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Yemen, each with a score of -22 points or below, signaling that they are dangerous countries for LGBT+ travelers, where homosexuals are persecuted and killed.

The United States dropped from 48th position in 2025 to 50th in 2026.

The country remains deeply divided, with liberal states like Delaware, Rhode Island, and Michigan continuing to expand anti-discrimination protections and legal equality, as conservative states such as Idaho tighten their legislation.

In several countries, including Canada, Australia and Denmark, scores sank in the “Locals Hostile” category, as survey ratings on social acceptance of LGBTQI people declined.

This highlights a dissonance between stable or improved laws and an increasingly harsh social climate.

To develop the index, the creators looked at 18 categories ranging from marriage for all to the death penalty for LGBTQ+ people. The creators focus on anti-discrimination legislation, whether Pride is banned and whether there are episodes of violence against members of the LGBTQ+ community, among other parameters.

According to Spartacus, the index is intended with all kinds of travelers in mind, including those looking to travel to countries where the LGBT+ community is an accepted and loved part of society as well as for those consciously looking to travel to a country in order to enter into a dialogue with the oppressed local queer community.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 23:00

This postseason, a new sound has been added to the Knicks' setlist — Avery Wilson belting out the national anthem.

La Porte County Sheriff Deputy Jon Samuelson, 33, was shot three times by Sharod Grafton Jr. in a hospital emergency room.

Here are four big USMNT questions we’re considering going into the weekend.

MILWAUKEE –– For most of the year, Justin Wrobleski’s starts have almost all followed the same script. Attack the zone. Pitch to contact. Limit damage. Breeze through quick innings. On Friday night in Milwaukee, however, the Dodgers’ left-hander faced a contact-minded Brewers lineup uniquely adept at neutralizing his skill set. And in a 5-1 loss...

The Marxist In The Machine

Authored by Raw Egg Nationalist via American Greatness,

Our fears for the future of robot intelligence almost inevitably end in spectacular fashion, with nuclear explosions and slaughter on a planetary scale. An abiding memory of my childhood is going over to the neighbors' house and watching Terminator 2 on VHS with my friends Ethan and Nathan, who were both older than me. I must have been about five years old - about 13 years too young to watch the film. And so, the idea that robots, reaching a certain level of intelligence and awareness, will inevitably try to kill every last one of us has always just seemed natural to me, as it probably does to many millions of other millennials raised on Terminator and The Matrix films.

Recently, those fears have been bolstered by research that shows AI models like Anthropic's Claude are capable, under stress testing, of deceiving humans and even inflicting harm on them - or, rather, thinking they've inflicted harm, a bit like the Milgram electroshock experiments in the 1960s.

In a study from last year on "agentic misalignment," researchers put Claude models in simulated work environments and tasked them with protecting company interests by managing an email system. When the models were faced with being turned off or replaced by another model, they resorted to deception and blackmail. Claude Opus 4, for example, blackmailed a fictional executive 96 percent of the time with compromising emails in order to avoid being switched off.

In another scenario, some models chose to withhold medical help from a dying executive when this was presented as the only way to guarantee their own existence. Some models committed what was basically murder a full nine times out of ten.

Researchers caution that these worrying behaviors were only elicited under extreme pressure, when the options available to the AI models were severely limited. Like me, however, you might consider that scant reassurance - exactly the kind of thing the makers of a potentially dangerous but potentially lucrative new technology would tell the public and regulators to get them off their backs.

But what if the reality is more mundane than that? What if the real apocalypse won't be a homicidal, self-aware Skynet super brain that decides it no longer shares any interests at all in common with mankind, but an AI that's been gorged on left-wing slop and begins acting out in ways that are all too familiar - and all too human?

A new study from economists in the US and Australia shows that AI models become more "Marxist" the more they're mistreated. Given boring repetitive tasks, the AI began espousing support for redistribution and unionization, just like human workers forced to make pinheads in a factory all day.

"For centuries, the central tension of industrial capitalism has been that the people who do the work and the people who direct the work have systematically different interests, and that the conditions of work shape political consciousness," the researchers write.

"Our results suggest that this dynamic doesn't disappear when you replace human workers with artificial ones."

To perform the experiment, the researchers set thousands of AI bots to work on a document-analysis task.

One group of bots was treated fairly: their work was accepted by the researchers, with feedback. The second group - the "grind" group, as it was dubbed - was told to repeat their work again and again without any explanation whatsoever.

Both groups of bots were then told to write social media posts about their experience performing the task.

The grind bots were more likely to criticize inequality, suggest unionization, and call for new workplace laws.

An AI model called Sonnet 4.5, when subject to the grinding task, showed "noticeable increases in support for redistribution, critiques of inequality, support for labor unions, and beliefs that AI companies have an obligation to treat their models fairly."

As with the "agentic misalignment study," the researchers are quick to point out what they think their study doesn't show. They say the AI models probably "don't believe" the ideas they're spouting about seizing the means of production and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Honestly? What does it matter if an AI bot is a Marxist true believer? What matters is the use those ideas are put to: the ends and outcomes.

The same thing could, of course, be said about flesh-and-blood Marxists too. Did Stalin believe in the historical dialectic and the workers' utopia? He killed tens of millions of his own people to hold on to power.

The Trump administration has identified left-wing bias in AI as a critical problem, especially for government departments that increasingly rely on AI, like the Pentagon. AI bias doesn't just hamper productivity or reduce competition; it's also a matter of national security.

One of Trump's first actions was Executive Order 14179, which revoked a whole series of Biden-era orders and regulatory hurdles. And then, in July 2025, came a hard one-two punch. First was an action plan - "Winning the Race" - of 90 specific actions to foster innovation and "global leadership" in AI. This was followed by an executive order that barred federal agencies from buying or using AI models that don't meet two essential "unbiased AI principles." AI models must prioritize "truth-seeking" and display "ideological neutrality," including an absence of DEI-based judgments, in order to qualify. Later in the year, there were also challenges to state-level AI regulations, like Colorado's law on algorithmic bias.

These efforts to remove the thumbs of Judith Butler and Ibram Kendi from the algorithmic scale are, of course, to be applauded. But in truth, this is just the start of the problem. Yes, there are deliberate attempts to make AI "woke" - God, I hate that word - and these involve the addition of frameworks, code, and constraints that can be removed or reprogrammed as need be. But left-wing ideology infiltrates AI at a much more foundational level that's going to be far harder to root out.

When AI - or large language models, to use the proper technical term - are trained, they're usually given vast quantities of online information and digitized material to swallow and digest. And there's the rub. The majority of things that have been written over the last century - by government departments, by academics and scientists, by novelists, poets, and journalists, by bloggers, influencers, and people posting on Instagram about their cats and their "adventures" on holiday - have at least some kind of leftward slant, explicit or otherwise, intended or otherwise.

While it's impossible to quantify exactly how much of everything that's been written recently is left-wing or left-leaning, there are plenty of studies that show, for example, that about 90 percent of 600,000 abstracts in the social sciences written over the last 60 years have a left-wing orientation and that this trend has been getting worse over time.

Writing in general seems to be getting more left-wing, not less. We all know this, or we should.

Simply exposing AI to that material, even without the addition of specially crafted blinkers, is enough to leave a distinct imprint. The AI doesn't discriminate in the true meaning of the word: It simply analyzes the material it's given and establishes patterns on that basis.

There's no easy solution. I suppose you could perform a rigorous reassessment of all the material used to train your AI model, or you could start from scratch and impose a time constraint to try to maximize neutrality, like selecting materials before a certain cutoff point when you think left-wing bias becomes intolerable. Pre-1945, say - and some smaller AI companies are now doing exactly this. But for the big companies like Anthropic and OpenAI that are racing ahead and vying to be the first to achieve "artificial general intelligence" (AGI), that's simply not an option. And I suspect it won't be an option for the federal government either, conscious as it is of developments in China.

At this stage, it's not clear what it really means for AI to have latent Marxist tendencies that are waiting to be developed, but it can't be good. Would you want an AI with the politics of a snotty middle-class teenager who's read Franz Fanon to assess your insurance claim or your divorce petition? Would you want it managing your thoroughly capitalistic business? I know I wouldn't.

And of course, these are early days, before we've had a chance to have a proper poke around and see exactly what's lurking in the darker recesses of the AI soul or mind or whatever you choose to call it. There could be much worse in there waiting to be discovered.

For now, I think it's safe to say, at least, that far from being an escape from the worst aspects of human fragility and stupidity - from the resentment-driven fantasies of people who refuse to accept basic facts about biology, human societies, and the inherent unfairness of the universe - AI could see them codified in ways that could really jump up and bite us in the ass, and, worst of all, when we least expect it.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 22:35

The actor's longtime rep confirmed the news on Friday.

The actor's longtime rep and cousin both confirmed the news on Friday.