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(Keyboard fixed, at least for now, so let’s get on with it.)

Trump has threatened blanket tariffs on multiple nations, including most of Europe, Canada and Mexico. This is an effective threat. The Bank of Canada estimated the effect of such tariffs on Canada at six percent of GDP, and I’ve seen an estimate for Germany of about one percent of GDP, after previous losses due to anti-Russia sanction effects on energy costs.

The “privacy-first” company surprised its user base when CEO Andy Yen lauded Trump on social media.

The post Proton Mail Says It’s “Politically Neutral” While Praising Republican Party appeared first on The Intercept.

And not in a good way This oligarch cover of “All Over the World” won’t be spawning flash mobs. At least not the dancing kind. Anne Applebaum writes in The Atlantic: During an American election, a rich man can hand out $1 million checks to prospective voters. Companies and people can use secretly funded “dark money” nonprofits to donate unlimited money, anonymously, to super PACs, which can then spend it on advertising campaigns. Pod­casters, partisans, or anyone, really, can tell outrageous, incendiary lies about a candidate. They can boost those falsehoods through targeted online advertising. No special courts or election rules can stop the disinformation from spreading before voters see it. The court of public opinion, which over the past decade has seen and heard everything, no longer cares. U.S. elections are now a political Las Vegas: Anything goes. That is not how it works in other countries, Applebaum explains. Campaign spending in European countries is limited by law, and such barricades against the influence of Big Money exist elsewhere.

“Getting management to take your side” is the almost inevitable strategy, the natural default, for people who disdain the work of persuasion.

On January 10th, one day before the 23rd anniversary of its opening, a much-anticipated hearing was set to take place at the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility on the island of Cuba. After nearly 17 years of pretrial litigation, the prosecution of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the “mastermind” of the devastating attacks of September 11, 2001, seemed poised to achieve its ever-elusive goal of bringing his case to a conclusion.  After three years of negotiations, the Pentagon had finally arranged a plea deal in the most significant case at Guantánamo. Along with two others accused of conspiring in the attacks of 9/11, KSM had agreed to plead guilty in exchange for the government replacing the death penalty with a life sentence. After... Read more

Source: The Forever Charade appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

With strategic seizures in Syria and plans for further annexation, Israel’s expansionist aspirations are no longer a secret.

The post ‘Conspiracy Theory’ is Now Fact: Greater Israel Has Arrived appeared first on MintPress News.

Have you ever time-traveled? I didn’t think I had until that day in the freezer aisle at Horizon Market, staring at an ice cream flavor that seemed like a practical joke: Jeni’s Cosmic Bloom. It sounded like an overpriced candle. The carton teased: “Citric like a mandarin, refreshing like a kiwi, punchy like passion fruit.” That told me absolutely nothing. But the color—a dreamy pastel orange—made my inner child hope, could it be?

I dropped my usual raspberry sorbet and gambled on this pastel-orange mystery. Back home, I tore off the lid, scooped up a perfectly creamy ball, and popped it in my mouth.

Indistinguishable citrus. It had that same syrupy, borderline-fluorescent smell I hadn’t experienced since the early 2000s, a tangy, wildly unnatural orange, radioactive creamsicle. Cosmic Bloom was not trying to pretend it was made of real fruit—something the future ruined with its obsession over real ingredients. It was something else, something familiar.

The second I had a second bite, my kitchen vanished.

Gone.

More headlines we’re sure to see Donald Trump is already making America “great again” … for lowlifes. This first gentleman’s demise predates Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons, but he might have received one if he’d still been in jail. Plus, if he’d owned a GMC Denali, it would now be a McKinley, January 4: A man who fired an assault rifle inside a Washington, D.C., restaurant in December 2016 while claiming to investigate the “pizzagate” hoax died this week after being fatally shot by police during a traffic stop in Kannapolis, North Carolina. On the night of Jan. 4, Edgar Welch was a passenger in a 2001 GMC Yukon that was stopped by officers, Kannapolis police said Thursday in a news statement. The traffic stop was conducted after officers linked the vehicle to Welch, who was wanted at the time on an outstanding arrest warrant, police said. When officers recognized Welch and moved to arrest him, he produced a handgun from his jacket and pointed it at one of the officers, police said, and after refusing commands to drop the gun, two officers opened fire on him.

Part Two of a five part special investigation by Dan Evans and Tom Latchem into a missing person’s case with dark criminal undertones

Prioritising growth over all other considerations will only widen economic inequality and deepen already cavernous social crises, argues Neal Lawson

Following in the footsteps of Apple TV’s star-studded non-Severance critically acclaimed shows that no one has ever heard of because they never advertise them, like Disclaimer, Presumed Innocent, and For All Mankind, Rememory has been described by Apple’s Tim Cook as “our greatest achievement yet.” With the second season likely to pick up a whole host of Emmys to add to the streamer’s growing collection, here’s everything you need to know about television’s newest era-defining show.

Rememory is set in the early 2010s, centering on a seemingly normal group of suburban Americans who wake up one day to find themselves haunted by memories of lives that don’t seem to be theirs. With their every waking moment occupied by fragments of someone or something not from their consciousness, the so-called “re-rememberers” try to ground themselves in their strange new reality.

According to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, his government is looking at ‘every conceivable way’ to prevent me and at least 300 other people from receiving compensation for wrongful arrest and imprisonment in the 1970s. This issue of compensation arises from the decision by the British Supreme Court in May 2020 that the Interim Custody […]

DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company, this week changed the global AI landscape, not to mention caused $1 trillion losses in the New York stock exchange and the NASDAC. In the process, it demonstrated the difference between cloud capital, which drives technofeudalism onward and upward, and AI-services, which were always a bubble waiting to […]

The post Cloud Capital vs AI: What DeepSeek means for technofeudalism & the New Cold War appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.

For many government employees, merely owning cryptocurrency is off-limits. Not for Trump, who created a “very grifty” meme coin.

The post Trump Appointees Can’t Own Crypto. That Rule Doesn’t Apply to Trump Himself. appeared first on The Intercept.

We used an electric-shock dilemma to test the strength of people’s moral principles when faced with real-world complexities

- by Dries Bostyn

Read at Psyche

To lump or to split? Deciding whether an animal is a species or subspecies profoundly influences our conservation priorities

- by Richard Smyth

Read at Aeon

Keir Starmer has sought a closer relationship with the Murdoch-owned newspaper, under his leadership

My keyboard appears to have a short and is spamming keys making typing anything long near impossible. So, probably nothing more till tomorrow when I should have it replaced. Hope all are well and having a less frustrating day than I am.

Mario Fehr, the Swiss security official who ordered the arrest of Ali Abunimah, is a rabidly pro-Zionist politician who falsely branded the Palestinian American journalist as “an Islamist Jew-hater.” In the past, Fehr has taken pride in banning Palestine solidarity demonstrations. The Swiss official who ordered the arrest of renowned Palestinian-American journalist Ali Abunimah justified doing so on the false and defamatory basis that Abunimah is “an Islamist Jew-hater.” Mario Fehr, the head of Zurich’s Department of Security, made the […]

The post Swiss official who jailed journalist Ali Abunimah is fanatical pro-Israel activist first appeared on The Grayzone.

The post Swiss official who jailed journalist Ali Abunimah is fanatical pro-Israel activist appeared first on The Grayzone.

He’s obviously nuts. I can’t even imagine what that’s all about. But get a load of this. Trump has apparently frozen all federal grants and loans, domestically and internationally—hitting the pause button on what may potentially amount to hundreds of billions of dollars of money appropriated by Congress for a dizzying array of specific, pre-ordained purposes. From constitutional lawyer Steve Vladek tonight. I’m sharing the whole thing because I suspect you may need a thorough explainer. I know I did: The move was announced in a cryptic and thinly reasoned two-page memo that went out over the signature of Matthew J. Vaeth, the acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. And the consequences are potentially cataclysmic—for virtually all foreign aid (including the distribution of HIV drugs in poor countries); for medical and other scientific research in the United States; for tons of different pools of support for educational institutions; and for virtually every other entity that receives federal financial assistance.

The DOJ is now going to be MAGA or else: The Justice Department is firing more than a dozen key officials who worked on Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team prosecuting President Donald Trump, after Acting Attorney General James McHenry said they could not be trusted in “faithfully implementing the president’s agenda,” Fox News Digital has learned.  McHenry has transmitted a letter to each official notifying them of their termination, a Justice Department official exclusively told Fox News Digital. It is unclear how many officials received that letter. The names of the individuals were not immediately released.  “Today, Acting Attorney General James McHenry terminated the employment of a number of DOJ officials who played a significant role in prosecuting President Trump,” a DOJ official told Fox News Digital. “In light of their actions, the Acting Attorney General does not trust these officials to assist in faithfully implementing the President’s agenda.”  These are all non-partisan, career prosecutors who were assigned the job. They are not people who are supposed to be enacting anyone’s agenda.