"We all have fathers, don’t we?” John F. Kennedy once quipped after being told disparaging information about Martin Luther King Jr.’s father.

True enough, but not all of us have family members connected to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Mike Rogers hammered Abdul El-Sayed in last week’s Michigan Senate debate over the Democratic candidate’s family ties to the terror group, and Meet the Press host Kristen Welker followed up in a subsequent interview with the Democratic candidate, asking if it was true.

“No,” El-Sayed twice insisted. As the Washington Free Beacon reports, that is not accurate. At least, not according to El-Sayed’s half sister, who proudly noted their mother’s radicalism.

“My family has long been MB,” Eman Abdelhadi, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago who would go on to celebrate the October 7 massacre, wrote of the Muslim Brotherhood in the summer of 2012. “I have had family jailed for being a part of it,” she added a year later. “Praying for all my family that supports the #MB in Egypt. Lie low, stay safe.”

(Abdelhadi’s 2012 post coincided with the accession of Mohamed Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood ally, to Egypt’s presidency after the 2011 Arab Spring ousted Hosni Mubarak. That November, El-Sayed himself signed an open letter affirming his support for Morsi and calling on the new regime to “purge the media and police.”)

Their mother, Fatten Elkomy, also worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency — an organization the U.S. Treasury accused of supporting outfits like Hamas and al-Qaeda in 2004. “An exhibit list filed in court referenced Elkomy more than a dozen times,” CBS News reported of the Justice Department’s 2007 indictment of the organization, “documenting participation in wire transfers and recorded phone calls between 1999 and 2002, as well as an IARA-USA transfer request form for over $24,000 to its Iraq office.”

This isn’t the only family connection to an extremist group. The candidate’s father-in-law, Tayeb Jukaku, a prolific contributor to a pro-El-Sayed super PAC, has similar ties. The Beacon revealed in July that Jukaku has served on the Islamic Society of North America’s founding committee for nearly 20 years. ISNA was cited by federal prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in the famous 2007 prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, in which its founders were convicted of funneling $12 million to Hamas. Jukaku also served as president of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Michigan chapter in the second half of the aughts, when the group, too, was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land case.

In the last decade, CAIR sued the federal government twice in its effort to get El-Sayed’s sister-in-law, Mariam Jukaku, removed from the Department of Homeland Security’s terrorism watchlist. Neither suit succeeded, and the federal government will not explain why she was on that list or even whether she remains on it today.

Even if we discount all of this as simply unfortunate family relations, El-Sayed has similar political associations. From the radical activist Linda Sarsour to the noxious streamer Hasan Piker to allies of the antisemitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, El-Sayed has cultivated relationships with agitators whose hatred of Israel and its allies is matched only by their affinity for Islamist street action.

Those who notice the many disquieting relationships in El-Sayed’s background are often accused of racism, bigotry, and general anti-Muslim bias. Indeed, that is how the candidate himself deflects when he is charged, as he frequently and understandably is, with displaying a suspect level of sympathy for terrorists and their causes.

Among other things, he pointedly declined to celebrate the death of the blood-soaked Iranian despot Ayatollah Ali Khamenei because there were “a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad,” and says he wants to zero out all U.S. support for Israel and redirect those funds to UNRWA, a U.N. agency that admits a number of its employees participated in the October 7 slaughter.

This demonstrates, by the way, that his policy preferences have really nothing to do with keeping “our money here.”

Voters can perhaps forgive a few embarrassing family ties. They should not, however, extend any charity to a candidate who lies on their behalf and who apparently does so only to obscure his own similarly suspect sympathies.

As senator, El-Sayed could serve on committees that would give him access to sensitive national security information. Given his litany of troubling associations, his family ties to radical Islamist organizations, and his own statements, he should not be put in a position that requires such trust.

On Guta’s first day at The New York Times, she walked into the newsroom and took a selfie. “I was just so excited,” she told me. “It was my dream job.”

That was 2016.

This caricature of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump was published in The New York Times. (Screenshot)

By 2019, that excitement had started to fade. In April of that year, the Times published a cartoon depicting Israel’s prime minister as a guide dog wearing a Star of David collar, led on a leash by the U.S. president, who was donning a kippah. The Times later acknowledged the image “included antisemitic tropes,” and its editorial board called it “appalling.” The following month, publisher A.G. Sulzberger wrote to the entire company that the Times was “updating our unconscious bias training to ensure it includes a direct focus on antisemitism.” In Guta’s 10 years at the paper she said the training was never implemented to her knowledge, despite her raising it five or six separate times.

And the bias didn’t stop, she said.

Days after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, the Times rehired a freelance video journalist who’d been dropped the year before over social media posts praising Adolf Hitler—posts that Guta’s own supervisor admitted, on tape, “don’t in any way meet our standards,” according to her testimony in the lawsuit filed by shareholders last month. In January 2024, a summary line for a video set to be published described hostages in Gaza as “believed to be” held captive. It wasn’t until Guta asked her desk’s Slack channel whether that hedge was really necessary that it was removed. A month later, there was a video citing journalist casualty figures from the Committee to Protect Journalists that failed to disclose how many of the dead were identified combatants—information Guta had flagged before publication, according to the suit.

At first, she assumed the missteps were an oversight. “And if I just brought my concerns to the attention of the right people, that this would get corrected,” said Guta, who flagged incidents at least 15 separate times between 2019 and her departure in March 2026. “But that’s not at all what happened.”

“Eventually, I concluded that it must be intentional,” Guta said. “It couldn’t just be coincidence or a few bad apples or just incompetence.”

Guta told me she decided to leave her job and eventually speak out once it became clear that she could not fix her employer from within.

“My grandmother was a Holocaust survivor, and then an early refusenik in the Soviet Union. And I’ve read her KGB file. While she lived in the Soviet Union, her job was to be a copy editor for the mouthpiece of the Communist Party—their newspaper, Pravda, which means truth—and she had no choice but to spend her working hours producing propaganda,” Guta said. “But in 2026, in the United States, thank God, I have a choice.”

Bias isn’t new to the Times. Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the paper’s publisher from 1935 to 1961, shaped the Times’ coverage of the Holocaust around a single, overriding anxiety: that the paper, and Sulzberger himself, would be seen as too Jewish—and in turn, less prestigious—if it gave too much ink to the atrocities of the Holocaust.

Bylines from Jewish reporters were altered to obscure their names—Abraham became “A.” Reporter Irving Spiegel, who had covered Jewish affairs from Jerusalem for years, was repeatedly targeted for removal by Sulzberger, who wrote in 1958: “I can’t rid myself of the idea that I hate to see a so-called ‘Jewish expert.’ ” Of roughly 24,000 front-page stories the Times ran during the war, only 26 addressed the Holocaust. The paper’s first article on the Nazi extermination campaign, on June 27, 1942, describing it as “probably the biggest mass slaughter in history,” ran on page five. Sulzberger defended himself from critics, stating that “True, the Times is against political Zionism—but think of the enormous amount of space it devotes to Zionist activities, faithfully reporting the news without any embellishments.”

Since Guta’s departure, the Times track record has not improved.

Last month, the paper published three separate errors on its war coverage within the span of two days. It described Sharif Labad, killed in a drone strike, as “a Civil Defense rescue service worker,” without noting that Israeli authorities had identified him as a Hamas Nukhba fighter who took part in the October 7 attack. It remains uncorrected. The same day, a photo caption misstated the size of a bomb the U.S. is supplying to Israel as 40,000 pounds when the actual weapon weighs 2,000. And the Times was forced to issue an editors’ note after a piece on NAZA, a documentary about Gaza, stated that Israelis “still largely view themselves as the victims of Oct. 7,” language the company called an “editing error” that had “inadvertently suggested” the deaths of 1,200 people and the capture of 250 hostages were a matter of perception rather than fact.

Until now, the public could only speculate how the most prestigious newsroom in the world could produce such biased reporting. We saw only the stories, the photos, the social media posts. This lawsuit and Guta’s account allege in detail what the Times’ meetings and internal communications sounded like, how they chose headlines, how they hired journalists, and how they treated dissenting colleagues. The suit demands the paper of record not merely rest on its laurels but prove its trustworthiness to its readers.

A spokesman for The New York Times told The Free Press that the suit “has no merit” and is an attempt “to level false allegations and chill journalism protected by the First Amendment.”

“This former employee had a limited role at the company and has misrepresented how complaints were handled and how our journalism and internal feedback processes work,” the spokesman added. “Her complaints were handled with respect, even when they were not found to have merit. Independent journalism is one of our bedrock principles, and we do not let the personal views of our employees impact our coverage.”

But Guta said she watched a pattern repeat for years: A story would run with a claim about Israel that didn’t hold up. The correction, if it came at all, arrived days later, treating the error as an isolated incident rather than a symptom of a newsroom with a systemic problem.

On November 7, 2023, Guta met with Mike Abrams, the deputy editor of Trust at the Times—a desk dedicated to journalistic transparency—after telling him she was feeling “very hurt, and alone.” During their meeting, Guta presented a 26-slide deck that The Free Press reviewed, including screenshots of internal Slack messages. In one exchange, a colleague sent an article saying Israel does not have confirmation that Hamas beheaded babies, and wrote to the group, “A common IDF playbook: Spread the word, and then retract when it’s too late.” Another Slack exchange shows colleagues debating whether to rely on a civilian in Gaza who said that Hamas was shooting people trying to evacuate, or on a “Hamas politician” who denied it to a Times reporter. On the last slide, Guta wrote that “I want some acknowledgment that there is something wrong. I want someone other than me to be paying attention to this,” and “I want our journalism to look different than opinion.”

A month later, on December 12, 2023, she attended a newsroom all-hands meeting, of which The Free Press obtained a recording. Joe Kahn, the executive editor of the Times, opened by acknowledging that staff were hearing from colleagues, friends, and family “that there’s some aspect of what The New York Times is doing that’s wrong . . . or of some assumption of institutional bias or incompetence in this story,” according to the suit. A moderator read aloud a written question submitted by a colleague at the science desk asking why the Times was being perceived as “so anti-Israel.” According to the recording of the meeting, Kahn said: “Part of it is just understanding that, y’know, we’re never going to satisfy everybody on a story like this,” adding that “it’s a divisive topic and people don’t want us to be independent.”

Guta said that the Times’ leadership’s rebuttal to criticism, especially when it comes to Israel, is always the same. They say: “We get criticism from both sides, so we must be doing something right,” Guta told me. That response, she said, “is a key part of understanding their arrogance. They use that as cover for abdicating their responsibility. It reflects the volume of the public’s reaction rather than the reporting’s accuracy or its adherence to standards of independence.”

Guta also alleges a double standard as to when, and to whom, certain guidelines apply.

The Times maintains written rules specifically barring staff from public political expression about the war. In June 2020, the Standards department instructed the newsroom to avoid participating in social media advocacy and protests, or donating to advocacy groups around news events or controversies they are covering, Guta said. On November 2, 2023, Standards leadership reiterated to the entire newsroom via email: “We should not sign petitions or join organized protests related to the [Israel-Gaza] conflict. These guidelines cover all our journalists, not just those involved in the coverage.” Then, a June 2024 policy warned that “if our journalists are perceived as biased, or if they engage in editorializing on social media, that can undercut the credibility of the entire newsroom,” and that violations “will be noted on performance reviews.”

In March 2024, Guta filed a complaint in EthicsPoint, the Times’ confidential reporting system, about Matthew Cassel, a freelancer hired to cover Israel who has called himself a “critic of Zionism” and previously contributed to the publication The Electronic Intifada. She argued that Cassel’s public activism violated the company’s own written standards barring staff from political advocacy connected to stories they cover. The complaint was closed two days later. Cassel kept working for the paper through December 2025.

Guta also discovered that Bora Erden, a graphics editor assigned to the war, was running a public GoFundMe campaign for Gaza. She found that before October 7, Erden had signed several open letters describing Israel as a “settler colony” and an “apartheid state.” Uncertain whether that crossed a line, she emailed the Standards editor assigned to her desk, Aisha Khan, and asked if it was permissible for a newsroom employee to publicly fundraise for one side of a conflict they were assigned to cover. In her emailed response to Guta, Khan’s answer was unambiguous: “No, that would not be okay.” So Guta filed a complaint, which received no follow-up as far as Guta was aware. In June 2024, after sitting in a meeting where Erden’s work was praised and an expanded role for him was discussed, Guta raised the subject a second time—this time with Erden’s editor, Mark Scheffler. Scheffler thanked her for letting him know, according to Guta’s affidavit.

Still, Guta played by the rules. On January 9, 2024, she asked Khan whether she could privately attend—without posting about it—an event marking 100 days since the October 7 hostages were taken. Guta was told to avoid it, and her manager was copied.

According to the lawsuit, it is the only instance in five years in which she saw the Times’ conduct rules actually enforced.

On August 1, 2024, Guta’s supervisor, Solana Pyne, and Chante Williams, an HR representative, called her into a meeting. According to the lawsuit, Pyne told Guta that “it’s not your job to be the ombudsman of The New York Times”—a position, notably, the paper eliminated in 2017—and that colleagues were “reluctant to work with” her because of her “point of view.” Guta’s affidavit adds that Pyne, in separate meetings, called her complaints “bad for morale” and too frequent, and said Guta herself was “the one who was biased” on the story.

Pyne also told her that every concern she raised had been looked into, “and we haven’t found issues with bias,” according to Guta’s affidavit. Guta told them that “I often feel just like a loud Jew that nobody wants to hear.”

Eventually, Guta said, she was removed from most meetings with her team. When she asked for an explanation, she was told they had “changed the format” of meetings, yet she said she was often the only team member removed.

Guta told me she frequently wondered whether it would be best to just quit. After October 7, she sent a message to the head of her department saying there was a clear anti-Israel bias on the desk, and that she needed some time off. She even cleaned her desk out, “knowing that it was just a matter of time.” By October 8, she said, “I already knew what my colleagues felt and how they were going to cover it. And I could see the coverage in the first 24 hours, and I could see the conversations that my colleagues—my venerated Pulitzer Prize–winning colleagues—were having on Slack.”

But ultimately, Guta decided to stay. She thought she could do more good from the inside by providing a different point of view.

The Free Press reviewed a recording of a meeting held on September 17, 2024, to discuss the formation of a Jewish employee resource group (ERG), which publisher A.G. Sulzberger attended. Toward the end of the meeting, Guta brought up internal safety and social media guidelines. She spoke of colleagues who felt uneasy coming to the office, and having to work with people who had posted anti-Israel or antisemitic content, and asked “Can we feel protected and safe at work because there’s some kind of, yeah, guidelines?”

Sulzberger (who previously answered a question in the meeting by preambling with “I say this as a Jew, I say this as someone who worked on a kibbutz”) responded to Guta that “I think there’s probably five people in this country who fit more squarely into antisemitic conspiracy theories than I do, honestly. And, you know, I get the Nazi hate mail. You know, I get death threats. I get, I’d say I get death threats from the Jewish community sometimes, right? You know, folks who feel, you know, like institutions fail to show up how they want us to show up, you know, the other direction, right?” Sulzberger added later that “I really am aware, you know, as a journalist, as a leader, but also as a Jewish person, of the feeling that the Jewish community is held to a different standard, right? You know, when it comes to being recognized as a people, being recognized it’s a vulnerable people.”

Guta also tried to create a Slack channel for Jewish colleagues to keep in touch and voice concerns. Before October 7, she created a “Jews-of-NYT” Slack channel, which she said several colleagues didn’t want to join “because they were afraid of putting their names on a list of Jews.” They encouraged her to use a more subtle name, like “Jewish Culture at NYT.”

On March 14, 2024, Guta posted in the Slack channel: “Friends, it’s a tough time to be Jewish. If you see antisemitism amongst your colleagues, please reach out to me. My cell phone is listed in my Slack bio. Sending love!” She said she was encouraged to edit or remove the post by her superiors, who reasoned that people should go to HR if they had issues with antisemitism. “I had seen what going to HR does for people. So I thought that people should have someone else to talk to who was experiencing these issues,” Guta said.

Now that the lawsuit has been filed, Guta said she feels like she’s “walking on air.”

“I decided that I would be better off working on projects I could be proud of. The prestige of working at the Times lost any value it once held. I saw behind the curtain and the illusion broke for me.”

The title is bold, but it's really just focused on overdiagnosis in private schools, and it claims that a lot of what's driving the rise in test accommodation is due to private schools having looser requirements when choosing to accommodate students.

The hardest part of my job is when I have to tell parents that their children are completely fine.

I’m a neuropsychologist in New York City with more than a decade of experience specializing in neuropsychological evaluations and therapy for kids with learning and attention deficit disorders.

But in recent years, I’ve noticed a marked shift in my private practice. Rather than dreading a diagnosis signaling their kid has a learning disability, my clients have come to expect and hope for one.

A diagnosis of ADHD, for example, can open the door to a range of accommodations in school, including extra time for testing, which can help students rise to the top of their classes and eventually score higher on college entrance exams. Often, all it takes is a neuropsychological evaluation, which can cost upward of $10,000 and is rarely covered by insurance.

These days, it’s rare that I hear of neuropsychologists who don’t recommend students get extra time. I don’t think it’s out of corruption or ill intent—I think providers genuinely want to help reduce students’ stress and anxiety, and see extra time on tests as a way to help. Plus, it’s hard to get clients if you gain a reputation for being tough. I know for a fact my practice has suffered because I take a more conservative approach.

But I think it’s time we start calling this phenomenon what it really is: gaming the system. And the result is that accommodations have become so common, especially in private schools, that time constraints on tests have become meaningless. The significance of diagnostic labels, like a hyperactivity disorder, has been watered down. And in the end, the kids who actually need the extra help, or legitimately have a disability, are the ones getting harmed.

Let me tell you about a recent client of mine, who I’ll call Nate. He’s a 10th grader at an elite private school in New York City, and his parents weren’t shy about why they brought him to me.

They believed their son had testing anxiety, and they wanted a formal recommendation for testing accommodations.

Nate’s teachers had already been giving him extra time on tests at school. But that arrangement was informal, and it wouldn’t work for the upcoming ACT or SAT, which require students to show proof of a diagnosis and a documented history of receiving accommodations. That’s where I was supposed to come in.

But the problem was that Nate’s neuropsychological test results came back as normal: He had a totally typical cognitive profile and perfectly adequate grades. I didn’t think he needed extended time, and I said so.

His parents, unsurprisingly, pushed back. They pointed out that all of Nate’s friends had testing accommodations, and said it was common at the school for students to complete only half the test in class, go home, look up answers, and finish the following day in the school’s testing center.

That’s otherwise known as cheating. But Nate’s parents didn’t seem bothered by that—they wanted their son to have the same leg up as his classmates, and feared his anxiety would worsen if he didn’t.

I stood my ground and his parents had the school call me and try to convince me I was wrong. The learning specialist at the high school explained that Nate’s teachers had noticed that he performed better on tests when he was given more time (unsurprising: All kids perform better with extra time). The school just needed a clinical recommendation to grant Nate a formal accommodation. I once again refused.

I’m not surprised Nate’s parents pushed so hard. In today’s culture, parents view anything below excellence as a failure. That’s why they come to me looking for a clinical explanation for why their children are not at the top of their classes, or are not reading Shakespeare in the third grade. It’s easier to medicalize their child’s shortcomings and blame their averageness on a disability that is unfairly holding their child back.

But rather than blaming the parents, we should question why private schools have been allowed to set up a system that is so easy to game in the first place. Private schools like Nate’s operate entirely outside the legal framework that governs public schools.

Public schools are required by federal law to provide every student with a free and appropriate education in the least restrictive possible environment. If a student has a disability, that means public schools must provide appropriate accommodations to ensure they have equal access to educational opportunities. These accommodations can come in many forms, including specialized instruction or testing accommodations. Since the system is highly regulated, public schools have to justify why these kids deserve the accommodations they’ve been offered. And that includes providing proof of a student’s diagnosed disability and how it impacts their education. Schools must document their determinations, notify families of their rights, and provide due process when families disagree. The process can be gamed—and it is—but there are structures in place that constrain how far the gaming can go.

Private schools have no such guardrails. They can pick and choose whether they want to provide accommodations, and to whom. Private schools in the United States aren’t required to report the number of their students who receive testing accommodations, but data from the United Kingdom shows that students at private schools receive testing accommodations at rates roughly 50 percent higher than their state school peers.

You have to ask, though, what message we are sending to our kids when we tell them that they are broken, rather than encouraging them to face life’s challenges; to fail and get back up? Life is full of times when we fall short. We should teach kids to learn how to navigate through those challenges rather than rely on a diagnosis as an excuse.

As clinicians, we swear to do no harm. It is our obligation to our clients and to the field overall to protect the integrity of our work and protect vulnerable kids everywhere. Accommodations are a civil rights protection, designed to ensure that students with disabilities do not face discrimination. They shouldn’t be used as a tool to get ahead. When they become something you can purchase, the students who lose are the ones who were never in a position to buy them in the first place.

Mohsin Naqvi, the interior minister regarded as one of Pakistan’s most powerful civilian figures, did not mince his words when he addressed businesspeople and politicians gathered in Islamabad in late July. 

Referring to the so-called cockroach protests that gripped India this year, Naqvi told his stunned audience that the system that Pakistanis live under “has collapsed”, that its economy was broken, and that its young people were becoming restive.

“If these cockroaches come together, they can flip everything upside down,” he warned. “We have to meet their desires, and that is just one thing: that we get them jobs and opportunities on the basis of merit.”

Such a blunt warning, coming from an army-backed government that likes to boast of how it rescued Pakistan from near default, shows how the country’s leaders fear the potential fallout from a demographic crisis that is the opposite of the one confronting mature economies.

Rather than struggling to find enough workers to support growing numbers of elderly people, Pakistan cannot create sufficient jobs or prosperity for its young. At least 1mn more youths reach working age each year than there are formal jobs to go around.

The country’s population could hit nearly 400mn by 2050, according to official forecasts. Yet it spends proportionately less on health and education than other lower-middle-income states.

Many young Pakistanis end up emigrating, but officials fear those who remain will increasingly channel their frustration into online protests, violence or other forms of insurrection that might weaken the government’s grip on power.

From Gujrat to Karachi, the FT spoke to seven young Pakistanis from across the country’s ethnic mosaic about how they are trying to cope with rising living costs, a lack of decent jobs, overstretched public services and increasing repression.

Youth uprisings have already toppled governments in Nepal and Bangladesh. Last week, thousands of mostly young people took to the streets in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province to demand the release of Imran Khan, the former prime minister who was arrested and imprisoned in 2023.

Adeel Malik, an associate professor of development economics at the University of Oxford, says economic strains combined with changing voting patterns and a frustrated middle class threaten “a coming crisis of governability in Pakistan”.

The country’s leaders know that they need to scale up investment in education, healthcare and job creation. Pakistan’s fertility rate has remained steady at 3.6 for two decades, according to US non-profit the Population Council, after a long period of decline.

In his speech, Naqvi advocated carving out new provinces, a politically sensitive proposal. Other officials say improved livelihoods will come with better access to finance; Adnan Pasha Siddiqui, an adviser to Pakistan’s finance minister, says the government’s ability to implement structural policy reforms, such as more affordable loans for SMEs and farmers, will determine “whether Pakistan reaps a demographic dividend or faces a demographic disaster”.

The country is struggling with high public debt and double-digit inflation that has reduced real wages. Businesses complain of spiralling costs and suffocating red tape, while banks are reluctant to lend to the small firms that employ most of the country’s workforce.

“Pakistan’s population dynamics are a manageable challenge . . . but only if the wider economic problems can be addressed,” says Tobias Haque, lead economist for the World Bank in Pakistan.

“A more efficient, productive and less distorted economy . . . would be able to convert a growing population into more production, faster growth and higher revenues to support services.”

Teaching against the odds

Rida Memon

Class dismissed, teacher Rida Memon steps out of her sweltering classroom and immediately consults her own instructor: her phone. 

The 30-year-old opens Rumi, a WhatsApp-based coaching tool built by educational technology non-profit Taleemabad, and beams that it has already graded her lesson at 69 per cent, a personal record. It praises her lesson for student participation, but prods her to pause longer while pupils work out their answers. 

“I love that it tells me when I’ve done well,” Memon says. “I am the most excited in my eight years as a teacher.” 

Using Rumi, Memon will craft her next lesson plan in the recreational room of Government Girls’ High School in the southern city of Hyderabad — and hope her score will top the day’s leaderboard. She is one of about two dozen teachers to pilot the tool in Sindh, where authorities hope that AI-powered teacher coaching will improve learning in a province with some of the country’s poorest educational outcomes. 

77% - Proportion of Pakistani children who cannot read an age-appropriate text by the age of 10, limiting their future earnings and economic contribution

In Sindh and Balochistan, the literacy rate for women and girls above the age of 10 has declined slightly since 2022, according to official statistics. Teaching quality is just one part of the problem. 

Most schools in Sindh lack access to electricity. Many also fail to provide clean drinking water or basic toilet facilities for students. The federal and provincial governments have limited resources to invest further: total spending on education nationwide fell by Rs289bn ($1.04bn) to Rs962bn ($3.5bn) between 2023 and 2025, according to official statistics, with 90 per cent of the budget swallowed by teacher salaries and pensions.

There is a critical shortage of schools. Even if it brings its annual population growth number down to 2 per cent, Pakistan would still need to build at least 55,000 new primary schools by 2040, according to the Population Council.

At Government Boys’ Elementary Lower School in Sukhia Goth, in Karachi’s northern outskirts, 350 boys and girls cram into two modest schoolhouses in a tight courtyard, separated by a peepal tree and a heap of pungent garbage. 

They have been without electricity for eight months after thieves stole the metal hooks the school used to siphon power from the city’s main supply. A separate burglary removed all of the school’s fans plus the coolers that teachers used to provide students with chilled water bottles.

“I think 30 per cent of these students will drop out before grade 10,” laments Naveed Khan, the school’s administrator. Some 25mn children in Pakistan do not attend school, the second highest number in the world.

The young mother

Farzana Musa Khan

Farzana Musa Khan, a 20-year-old mother of three, calms her 10-month-old daughter Amina with a Pashto melody while a nurse checks the circumference of the baby’s upper arm. 

Eleven centimetres, the clinician at the Jannat Gul Hospital in north-east Karachi notes — a sign of acute malnutrition.

Rising prices have forced many families to cut back on even basic staples such as rice and wheat. The percentage of households facing “moderate or severe” food insecurity reached 24 per cent in 2025, up from 16 per cent in 2019.

Khan says her doctor told her to eat more fruit, vegetables and meat while she was pregnant, but her husband, who makes only Rs600 ($2.16) per day doing odd jobs, “said it would be too expensive”.

“We can barely afford to have goat meat every third day.” 

56 - Number of children, out of every 1,000, who die before their fifth birthday. According to UN data for 2024, even Taliban-controlled Afghanistan has a lower rate.

Mazhar Iqbal, a physician and nutrition specialist with Unicef in Pakistan, says that in addition to killing infants, malnutrition can stunt the development of children who survive, resulting in “poorer cognitive development, lower learning outcomes, reduced productivity and lower economic potential”. Prioritising nutrition during early childhood “is an investment in the quality of the future workforce”, he adds. 

In July, the Benazir Income Support Programme, Pakistan’s federal safety net and cash transfer programme, announced that it would expand a nutrition and health services initiative that provides participants with a food supplement and conditional cash grant during the first 1,000 days of a child’s life. 

A health worker teaching mothers about infant nutrition in Karachi. The percentage of Pakistani households facing ‘moderate or severe’ food insecurity reached 24 per cent in 2025 © Asim Hafeez/FT

Mothers registering their children at Jannat Gul Hospital. Pakistan’s federal safety net includes an initiative providing food supplements and cash grants in the first 1,000 days of a child’s life © Asim Hafeez/FT

Khan, who does not work and never attended school, tries to feed Amina a packet of ready-to-use therapeutic food, a calorie-dense paste to treat malnutrition in early life. She does not intend to send her daughter to school, either.

“It’s not in our culture,” she says. “I am not empowered to say so. Her father will not send her. She will study the Koran.”

The struggling farmer

Nanak Ram

Strolling through a grove of banana and mango trees outside Tando Allahyar, a city in southern Pakistan, 28-year-old Nanak Ram says he will miss the peace of the village. 

He helps his father manage seven acres of banana trees, along with another 40 acres of mango trees that they have rented from a nearby landlord using an expensive Rs6.5mn loan from a commission agent. Ram’s father is already counting which livestock, furniture and family heirlooms he will auction off to repay it.

36.2% - Rural residents who lived in poverty in 2025, according to government figures. The rate is a 13-year high

But unrest on Pakistan’s western borders has shut trade routes to Afghanistan and Iran, while bad weather and a rare disease devastated their crops this year. The family has still not fully recovered losses from flooding in 2022, while diesel and seed prices have risen sharply. 

Agriculture employs some 40 per cent of Pakistan’s workforce, but stagnant yields, rising input costs and volatile crop prices limit its potential to enrich smallholder farmers.

Outside government jobs and toiling on the land, there are few ways to earn a sustainable living in Pakistan’s rural areas. So Ram, who has an electrical engineering degree, is joining the exodus of thousands of people each month from inland regions. He plans to move to Karachi and plead for a job that will boost his family’s dwindling finances and ensure he can feed his wife and child.

“I’m not getting any calls back,” he says. 

The tech freelancer

Muhammad Furqan

Two years ago, Muhammad Furqan left his hometown of Tando Ādam, in central Sindh, for a dilapidated co-working space outside Karachi’s airport, where he sleeps on a mat. 

The 21-year-old and his cousin Salman use ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI tools to “automate” Urdu-language YouTube videos recreating scenes from Islamic and Pakistani history. It nets him up to $600 in a single month — quadruple the starting wage for a government employee, and paid in hard currency. 

Freelancers like Furqan, doing back-office or tech work as well as content, brought $1.16bn into Pakistan in the year to June, State Bank of Pakistan figures show, even though entry-level hiring at major software companies is down 25 per cent since 2024, according to IT industry lobby group P@SHA.

70% - Share of Pakistani households with internet access, according to government data. The proportion has more than doubled since 2019

Furqan hopes to expand into English- and Spanish-language content, despite not speaking either, and put his investments towards opening a software house to hire other young people from his community.

Back home, his father’s Rs35,000 ($126) monthly salary as a local engineer was not enough to feed his household of six in Tando Ādam, where there are only five hours of electricity each day. Furqan was making Rs500 per week at a general store.

“There is no opportunity at all in my village,” he says, though he still returns there for school and to bring his family gifts from Karachi. “I want to bring my whole family here.” 

The would-be émigré

Abdul Samad

After a nine-hour bus ride, Abdul Samad, 28, has finally arrived at Peer Nazir and Sons Manpower Services in Gujrat, one of dozens of institutions in the eastern city that help Pakistanis secure visas and employment abroad. 

Despite a bachelor’s degree in commerce, he earns only the provincial minimum wage of Rs40,000 ($144) a month at a call centre in the central city of Layyah. Most of his salary goes towards paying off a Rs2mn loan he took out in 2024, at 25 per cent interest, to fund a failed restaurant venture. 

Diners enjoyed his birianis and chow mein, he says, but inflation ate away at their purchasing power and he struggled to pay spiralling utility bills. Abdul Samad has now set his sights on joining the hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis working abroad. “There isn’t a secure future here,” he says, seated at one of the counters. “Everything is so expensive now.”

Abdul Samad’s mother pawned her wedding jewellery to help raise the Rs1.5mn he is spending on visa paperwork. That sum is barely enough to get him a visa to Saudi Arabia. “I want to get to Europe somehow,” he says. 

763,526 - Number of Pakistanis who registered for work abroad in 2025 (Bureau of Emigration figures). Many took construction and services jobs in the Gulf states

The government’s Bureau of Emigration and Overseas Employment has reported that more than 700,000 Pakistanis left the country through legal channels last year. Most are low-skilled labourers bound for construction and services jobs in the Gulf, but last year’s total included around 18,000 highly educated professionals, such as doctors and engineers. 

Field Marshal Asim Munir, the country’s de facto leader, has celebrated the exodus as a “brain gain” that will raise the country’s profile and deliver a steady supply of dollars — Pakistanis residing abroad sent $41.6bn back home in the year to June, according to the central bank.

But others worry that the country is overly reliant on remittances, particularly from the Gulf, and risks permanently losing its most talented workers. 

Abdul Samad also cites the “suffocating” political atmosphere as a reason to leave. “There is no freedom of speech,” he says. “I used to make political jokes on Twitter and Instagram. I stopped. I don’t want to go to prison.” 

The aspiring entrepreneur

Khazeena Islam

On the sixth floor of a tenement in Karachi’s middle-class Garden East neighbourhood, 19-year-old Khazeena Islam leans over a trestle frame to attach a shimmering constellation of beadwork to a bridal ensemble. 

Her father taught her the delicate art of embroidery as a child. Now she splits her day between early mornings studying for her degree at a nearby college and long hours of painstaking needlework at home.

In a country where less than a quarter of adult women work, the 19-year-old dreams of opening a boutique in the city, where she can hire employees and keep most of the earnings for herself. A single handmade bridal lehenga can cost hundreds of thousands of rupees, but the artisans see little of that. A recent piece she and her mother worked on sold for Rs200,000, she says, but the bridal shop paid them only Rs8,000 for it. 

24% - Female labour force participation rate in 2025, according to International Labour Organization estimates. Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka all have higher rates

Even in progressive cities like Karachi, women face familial pressures to get married and have children, high levels of violence and unsuitable housing and transport. The unemployment rate for women with college degrees is 34 per cent, according to UN Women.

Islam has secured a Rs50,000 loan from HBL Microfinance to purchase a new frame and advertise on social media. But prices for metalwork and beads have tripled in three years, and the earnings of bridal shops have not kept pace.

Islam at work. A bridal lehenga can cost hundreds of thousands of rupees, but the makers see little of it © Asim Hafeez/FT

A piece of embroidery in progress. Even in progressive cities like Karachi, women face familial pressures to get married, high levels of violence and unsuitable housing © Asim Hafeez/FT

Bringing women into the workforce would be a net benefit for the economy, says Hadia Majid, chair of the department of economics at Lahore University of Management Sciences. “But only if we create jobs women can actually take up, and only if we reduce the substantial burden of reproductive work on them.” 

Islam wants to get married and have children, but insists that this will not damp her professional aspirations. “I will keep working after I get married,” she says. “I won’t marry someone who doesn’t let me.” 

The activists

Fozia Baloch

In late April, Fozia Baloch says police officers from Karachi’s counterterrorism department stormed into her home near Hawke’s Bay Beach and kidnapped her 38-year-old brother, Dad Shah.

Baloch, a 26-year-old student and activist, and her family have heard nothing about his whereabouts from either central or provincial governments since, she adds, describing his disappearance as an attempt “to make sure I shut up and stay quiet”. Human rights groups say there have been thousands of similar cases.

The Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC), a women-led movement of which Baloch is a member, has launched mass marches to protest against alleged disappearances and extrajudicial killings in the western province of Balochistan. Many of its leaders are in jail on terrorism charges. “I am a human rights defender and an activist. That’s why they want to emotionally blackmail me,” Baloch says. 

Balochistan, which covers an area the size of Germany, is at the centre of both Pakistan’s natural resource extraction ambitions and its insurgencies.

1,792 - Number of civilians and members of security forces killed in Pakistan so far this year, according to South Asia Terrorism Portal, the vast majority in the western provinces

Baloch, a student at the University of Karachi, says fellow Baloch students across the country want to protest peacefully but increasingly see violence as inevitable because “the state is only willing to talk to people through the language of the gun”. 

“Even in your own homes, they can barge in, arrest you, terrorise women, young children, you don’t feel safe anywhere,” Baloch says of the security forces. “At the same time, they’re not letting us work. We can barely get an education. There is terrible healthcare. There is little drinking water. The people come out to protest for these basic rights, but the state won’t let us.” 

Sindh police did not respond to a request for comment. The Pakistan military has said militants such as the Balochistan Liberation Army and Pakistani Taliban fighters are backed by India and operate out of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. New Delhi and Kabul both deny any involvement in terrorism.

Baloch says the overwhelming majority of Baloch activists and students, including the BYC, reject violence. But she adds that a minority “have become so disappointed with the system that, despite being enrolled in PhD and master’s programmes, they believe it has so failed that they must go to the mountains [to join the militants]”.

Cracking down, not lifting up

Pakistan’s leaders are already acting to prevent simmering frustration among the country’s young people turning into anything that threatens their grip on power.

Police and intelligence services have rounded up thousands of political workers loyal to Khan, the imprisoned former prime minister, and members of civil society. 

In January, 33-year-old human rights lawyer Imaan Mazari and her husband, who have represented BYC leaders, were sentenced to up to 17 years in prison for posts that criticised the military’s counter-insurgency tactics. 

New laws and pressure behind the scenes have silenced criticism of the military in print, television and social media. But state repression has not eradicated the desire for change or the willingness to protest.

“This generation came of age during a brief moment of democracy,” says Azeema Cheema, director of research and strategy for Verso Consulting. “They aren’t used to endless propaganda about how great the regime and the leader is,” she adds. “They are being robbed of their political agency, and that is fuelling anger throughout the country.” 

Waseem Khan Tanoli, the 25-year-old head of the Imran Khan-aligned Insaf Students Federation at the University of the Punjab, has already been arrested twice for his political activities. But he will be on the streets of Lahore again when Khan’s party makes the call.

“No one’s voice is being listened to anywhere,” he says. “There is no solution other than to come out on to the streets. We need to decide our own future.” 

A reporter asked Donald Trump on Tuesday if he was prepared to cut Ukraine off in retaliation for its long-range attacks on Russia’s energy infrastructure. “No, we haven’t,” he insisted. “We help them.”

If that is still the case, the president increasingly resents it. The White House is actively considering another pause on intelligence sharing with Kyiv, according to Semafor’s Shelby Talcott. “Trump is pretty pissed off,” one unnamed administration official said. “He could order it.”

If CBS News’ reporting is accurate, he already has.

“The U.S. may have intentionally withheld early warnings this week of Russian strikes on Ukraine,” the outlet’s Wednesday report read. For two consecutive days, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that his country “received no advance warning from our partners” ahead of Russia’s ballistic missile barrages on Kyiv and other Ukrainian population centers. Ukrainian officials told CBS that they did not believe Trump, accusing “the U.S. instead of ‘playing’ with the system” that helps Ukraine preserve civilian life.

In a related development, Ukrainian forces suddenly lost access to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet provider this week. “Kyiv relies on the satellite internet network, known as Starshield, which is paid for by the Pentagon,” the New York Times reported. “That led Ukrainian officials and analysts to surmise that the restrictions had come from Washington, as President Trump is locked in his latest feud with Ukraine’s leadership.”

That’s a reasonable guess. Throttling Ukraine’s access to Starlink would severely hinder its ability to launch the medium- and long-range strikes targeting Russia’s oil facilities and refineries, which are only the Trump administration’s latest source of frustration with Zelensky’s government. Moreover, the pattern we’re witnessing fits with previous episodes in which Musk’s internet provider’s performance mirrored the Trump administration’s mercurial outlook toward Ukraine.

The Financial Times’ Ukraine-based reporter Christopher Miller described the crushing sense of betrayal overcoming Ukrainians today amid the indications that the United States has once again turned its back on them and their cause of national survival:

The mood in Ukraine is grim today. There's frustration and outrage here in Kyiv towards the Trump administration over what Ukraine's government, the troops and society believe is a deliberate attempt on the part of Washington to force Ukraine to capitulate to Russia – by… https://t.co/CTe9TssEeY
— Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) October 14, 2026

Americans and the Trump administration deserve to be confronted with the moral atrocity in which they are increasingly complicit.

The Ukrainian people are the victims of this war, not its perpetrators. That simple historical fact eludes some in this administration, so it must be restated again and again. Posterity’s record must also reflect our understanding that Ukraine’s aggressive neighbor is attempting to swallow it up because it sought to join the community of liberal Western nations. It looked to the United States and Europe when it sought greater integration with the European Union. And that, not some illusory promise of future NATO expansion, was the reason why Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine for the second time.

Throughout its war of conquest, Russia has been responsible for atrocities the likes of which the world had not seen for over 70 years. Russian forces indiscriminately bomb Ukraine’s cities, not because of Moscow’s lack of precision munitions but as a tactic. Its soldiers have massacred Ukrainian civilians. They deploy rape as a weapon of war. They separate children from their families with the aim of brainwashing them into fighting against the country of their birth. Moscow engages in ethnic cleansing both in Ukraine’s captive territories and inside the Russian Federation (Russia’s minorities are disproportionately represented among the dead on Ukraine’s battlefields), and it has set out to eradicate Ukraine’s culture and language.

Russia does all this and more not just because Putin has some special contempt for Ukraine, although he certainly does. The conquest of Ukraine was designed to set the stage for acts of war against the West.

We’ve seen plenty of those recently as Russia’s well-laid plans have come a cropper. Russia has sent drone swarms deep into Poland to test NATO’s response. It is behind potentially catastrophic terrorist plots targeting civilian aircraft in Germany. It executes airstrikes on the passenger trains that carry Western dignitaries in and out of Ukraine. According to the Justice Department, Moscow set out to recruit Americans on American soil to conduct acts of sabotage and assassinations on the Kremlin’s behalf. And according to some reports, Russia is preparing to mount attacks on NATO countries either via the sea or overland with the aim of confronting the alliance with an existential crisis — one that might break the alliance if it failed to respond with the requisite vigor.

Putin’s Kremlin isn’t just Ukraine’s enemy. It’s America’s enemy. To accuse the Trump administration of turning on Ukraine only because high gasoline prices have angered American voters would be too charitable. This White House’s hostility toward the Ukrainian people and their chosen representatives extends well beyond that. Whatever it is that drives the Trump administration’s animosity toward Ukraine, that hostility represents a grotesque moral failing. It isn’t just strategically incomprehensible; it betrays America’s values and traditions.

With just 19 days to go before the midterm elections, Republican partisans aren’t going to want to hear that. But they should reserve some of their resentment for the administration that has led honest observers to merely acknowledge the evidence of their own eyes. We’ve seen the Trump administration fall out with Zelensky only to revise that opinion when its outreach to Putin yields nothing. We may see that again. But the public’s patience with the administration’s manic-depressive relationship with Ukraine should be exhausted by now.

While the world is focused on helping Ukraine fight its war of survival, the Trump administration is at war with itself.

In which the author argues that a specific kind of over-regulation hits Indian factories where it hurts the most, and no amount of industrial policy and subsidies will fix it.

TIRANA, Oct 15 (Reuters) - Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama on Thursday rejected calls to resign as thousands of student-led protesters smashed windows ​and fought running battles with riot police firing water cannon and tear gas in the capital.

Protesters voiced anger about perceived corruption, the cost ‌and quality of education and a deal to sell off parts of its pristine southern coastline to a luxury resort development backed by US President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner.

They demanded Rama's resignation, saying no one had listened to their concerns during a summer of largely peaceful protests over the development.

In a written statement to Reuters, Rama rejected calls to quit.

"My responsibility is to listen, ​address legitimate concerns and keep Albania moving forward. The alternative would be a betrayal of the Albanians who gave me a strong mandate to complete ​negotiations on European Union membership," he said.

RAMA CONDEMNS ATTACKS ON PUBLIC PROPERTY

A student who gave her name as Kiara said the ⁠cost of living, poor job prospects, and alleged corruption were the main issues.

"Our prime minister is the meaning of the word corruption. You can only find work ​in your field if you know a guy who knows a guy," she said, her face covered by a mask, like many on the streets on Thursday.

The protests, now in ​their third day, mark the biggest challenge yet to Rama, who won a fourth term last year, with EU membership at the centre of his campaign. Parliament cancelled its session as the violence erupted again nearby.

Rama, whose government denies corruption, said he would be ready to discuss the rising cost of education, but added: "Attacking institutions, destroying public property and threatening public safety have nothing ​to do with the legitimate demands of students."

Tirana's streets were littered with burned out garbage bins, shattered bus stops and broken traffic lights.

Wafts of tear gas drifted across ​the centre. Protesters hurled stones at police, who used water cannon to push protesters back. In the central Skanderbeg Square, police hit fleeing protesters with batons as tourists looked on.

PROTESTER SAYS ‌THEY ARE ⁠NOT BEING HEARD

"This government is corrupted, led and governed by a corrupt prime minister," protester Lulzim Tanushi, a lawyer, said. "Since Rama came to power he has abused and ruined people's lives and that is why people are showing their anger — when they were not heard before."

The protests follow months of mostly peaceful demonstrations sparked by the plans to build the resort, which has faced legal challenges.

Villagers told Reuters in July that their land was wrongfully sold for development. Reuters later reported that the man who sold the ​land was wanted by prosecutors for drug ​trafficking, charges his lawyer denied.

Reuters found ⁠no evidence of wrongdoing by Kushner, who is not directly involved in the villagers' dispute.

AIMING FOR EU ENTRY AS SOON AS 2028

Albania's image has been tarnished over the years by corruption scandals and political analysts say the country is a hub for ​gangs seeking to launder money from drugs and weapons trafficking, complicating its efforts to join the EU.

Along with Montenegro, Albania ​is currently leading the ⁠accession process among Balkan countries and is aiming for entry as early as 2028.

"Corruption must be confronted and, as the EU itself has recently reaffirmed, Albania is tackling it as never before," Rama said to Reuters.

"Perhaps some forces, at home and abroad, do not want Albania to succeed as a forerunner for EU membership. But I will not allow violence ⁠to derail ​Albania's European future."

A European Union mission to Albania in a statement on X said: "Constructive dialogue is the ​only way forward."

The unrest is part of a wave of student activism in Europe. In France, high school students have staged weeks of protests and school blockades demanding more teachers and better facilities, arguing ​that deteriorating school buildings and overcrowded classrooms are undermining education.

Id love to get into discussion with many of you guys. Id enjoy it and finally have a clearer pic on many things instead of the echo chamber i encounter from time to time.