It began, as so many viral firestorms do these days, with a single post on X, a shaky video, and a gut-wrenching accusation that seemed designed to stop a rising political career in its tracks. On October 20, 2026, a now-suspended account shared two face-to-camera videos in which a Black man identified himself as Zyon Lewis, a former middle school student of Democratic U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico. In the clips, the man claimed that Talarico, his language arts teacher at Jeremiah Rhodes Middle School in San Antonio, had sexually assaulted him in 2012, allegedly kissing him and forcing him…

On a bright morning in Jinhua, a city in eastern China’s Zhejiang province, a group of Somali civil servants file into a lecture hall at Zhejiang Normal University. They have travelled thousands of miles from Mogadishu, leaving behind a country where media work is not simply a profession but a daily negotiation with political pressure, security threats and public distrust. These 27 officials—directors, heads of government media departments, and other personnel from Somalia’s Ministry of Information, Culture and Tourism—are not attending a ceremonial exchange. They have come for a 21-day training programme, and their schedule is packed with seminars on…