⚡️ Mayor Zohran Mamdani's NYPD is poised to sign a three-year, $750,500 no-bid contract with Israeli surveillance firm Cognyte for FalcoNet, an AI-driven device that mimics a cell tower to track phones and can be mounted on police cars and drones or hidden in a backpack, the New York Daily News reported. Cognyte won a tender to sell intercept spyware to Myanmar's state telecom weeks before the 2021 military coup, Reuters previously reported. Meta banned the firm the same year, saying its customers used fake accounts to target journalists and politicians in Kenya, Mexico and Indonesia. The firm is part of an Israeli surveillance industry that grew big as a result of the military's monitoring of Palestinians, whose phone calls Israel's Unit 8200 has intercepted and stored by the millions, including to carry out genocide in Gaza and enforce a brutal illegal occupation in Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Benjamin Moser, author of Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History, told Rashid Khalidi that his 80-year-old mother, who had all but called him a Hamas member, apologized after reading his book: “I’m ashamed I ever said I was a Zionist.” His book traces Jewish opposition to Zionism over the past century and challenges their exclusion in discussions over Palestine. “No, you don’t get to set the rules anymore. We’re setting the rules now,” Moser said. Khalidi added that he had never seen so many people change their views so rapidly, noting that major publishers are now embracing books on Palestine that would have been virtually unpublishable just three or four years ago.