The junta denounced the “condescending attitude” of an American delegation that tried to save a quarter-billion-dollar U.S. base in Niger.
The post U.S.-Trained Niger Junta Kicks Out U.S. Troops, Drone Base appeared first on The Intercept.
Reading
We need much more than the “Gaza Pose”. We’ve seen the furrowed brows and sorrowful looks. We’ve heard the regretful tones, the exhortations, the warnings, the carefully studied words. Often that’s all there’s been: words and more words. So the question for Anthony Albanese and his Minister for Steely Gazes, Penny Wong, is this. Have Continue reading »
There is nothing in recent memory that matches the scale of the atrocities being inflicted on the civilians of Gaza, who appear to be being punished for their very existence. Every report and image coming out of this tiny but densely populated piece of land brings despair, horror and incredulity, with the question “How can Continue reading »
What has changed since 2003? Nothing, except for the worse. Australian governments continue to accept the US enemies as their own, and shoot whoever the sheriff says. All but two of the missing Iraq War Cabinet papers have now been released to the long-suffering public. But those of us who remember the Howard government’s secretive, Continue reading »
The Department of Home Affairs (DHA) this week published full year data on onshore asylum seekers in 2022-23 compared to 2022-21. The data highlights a post-pandemic high of 18,738 asylum applications in 2022-23 compared to 10,564 in 2021-22. That is still well below the record set under Peter Dutton of almost 28,000 asylum applications in Continue reading »
The American economy is strong, Australia’s economy has slowed to a standstill, and Xi Jinping is proving to be a dry economic rationalist rather than a warm indulgent socialist. Read on for this week’s global economic and financial review. USA, Europe, and Japan American economy is strong, and its inflation is accelerating. Yet its share Continue reading »
On the ground reporting by Western media of the Russia-Ukraine conflict has been weak. Most have a pro-Ukrainian bias and prefer to operate from hotels in Kiev or further west. Interviews from the trenches seem partly staged and rely on interpreters, though VICE News Tonight has good Russian-speakers who in the past have done some Continue reading »
The US considers TikTok a national security threat. It wants to ban TikTok or transfer its ownership to an American company. In doing so, it is displaying the very behaviour that that it ascribes to China and of which it does not approve. This is clearly reflected in the statement of the US ambassador to Continue reading »
Last night she released a ridiculous order requiring the prosecution that may end up getting her removed from the case. Joyce Vance wrote about it in her newsletter: Late in the day, Judge Cannon gave an order in the Mar-a-Lago case that has a lot of people shaking their heads. In an order that consisted of two pages and three footnotes, the Judge gave both sides until April 2 to “file proposed jury instructions limited to the essential elements of the offenses charged in Counts 1 through 32.” The trial is scheduled for May, and the Judge still has key motions to consider. This is a short deadline for a Judge who has been comfortable keeping far more pressing matters on a back burner. Although the order is only two pages, it’s perplexing. I read it several times, trying to figure out what it means. It turns out it’s two pages of crazy stemming from the Judge’s apparent inability to tell Trump no when it comes to his argument that he turned the nation’s secrets into his personal records by designating them as such under the Presidential Records Act.
Somebody woke up on the wrong side of the bed… That sounds like a very stable genius, just the kind of person you want in the most powerful job in the world. He doesn’t want to sell his assets, probably because they’re already mortgaged to the hilt. Sad! And here we thought he had so much cash… “I didn’t even need the loan you can see the kind of cash I have. I have a lot of cash, I have a lot of everything” #TrumpIsBroke https://t.co/Uh7E2Jlpkj pic.twitter.com/D98ag0YL7L — The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) March 19, 2024
Insurrectionist-in-Chief to hire money-launderer? “Trump is not being fair to the new generation of crooks, the new generation of fraudsters, the new generation of traitors.” – Van Jones on CNN When former Trump campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, drew federal charges seven years ago this week writes Steve Benen, Donald Trump pretended to barely know him. Before leaving office, however, Trump pardoned him. Now it seems Trump is considering rehiring him. Let’s review (via American Bar Association, March 2019): Manafort had accepted a plea deal in the case in September 2018, admitting to money laundering, tax fraud and illegal foreign lobbying connected to his years working for Ukrainian politicians. Manafort also admitted lying to investigators and under oath before a grand jury about his contact with a Russian associate during the 2016 campaign, breaking the plea agreement. Last week, he was sentenced in Virginia to 47 months in prison for financial fraud convictions.
Miko Peled sheds light on the sinister propaganda tactics used by Israel's military to sanitize their crimes and portray themselves as benevolent figures.
The post The Dark Reality Behind Israel’s Military PR Campaign: Genocide in Disguise appeared first on MintPress News.
It’s been almost two months since the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to stop killing Gazans and destroying their means of subsistence. So let’s look back and ask (1) how Israel has responded to its “orders,” and (2) how hard the Biden administration has pushed Israel to abide by those orders. Spoiler alert: the short answers are (1) not well and (2) not very. The American government has provided most of the armaments and targeting technologies being used to kill Gazans by the thousands while turning many of the rest of them into refugees by destroying their homes, offices, schools, and hospitals. Nor did the Biden administration threaten to withdraw that support when Israel blocked shipments of crucial food... Read more
. Although Blackburn on the whole gives a succinct and correct picture of Keynes’s view on probability, I think it’s necessary to somewhat qualify in what way and to what extent Keynes “lost” the debate with Frank Ramsey. In economics, it’s an indubitable fact that few mainstream neoclassical economists work within the Keynesian paradigm. All […]
Biden allies pledge over $1 billion Lefty social media is having a field day. Once upon a time, Republicans and their Mighty Wurlitzer ran messaging circles around Democrats. They own the media outlets. Republicans have revanchist billionaire oligarchs funding them. Hand it to the GOP, they are better than Democrats at finding a message and staying on it, repeating it, drilling it into people’s head until it sticks. Donald “91 Counts” Trump is still doing that with his stolen election fiction. His Freak chorus sings it for him from coast to coast. Except off-key. Lately, Republicans can’t seem to turn around without stepping on a rake. When Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) rhetorically asked a press conference, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” she stepped on a big one. Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) echoed it in her Stepfordesque response to Joe Biden’s the State of the Union address 10 days ago. The Bulwark reacted to Stefanik with “AFKM?” and statistics. “At this point in 2020, a few hundred Americans were dying every day from COVID.
As the editor of a content mill that generates great articles every 4.2 seconds, like “Five Hacks for Your Roku” and “Seven Hacks for Your Roku,” I feel the need to take a stand against the rise of AI articles and the threat they pose to my team of human writers, who we treat like robots.
Sure, our articles maintain a rigid SEO template that creatively resembles the kitchen at a poorly run Quiznos, and granted, all our story ideas are gleaned from better-written magazine articles from seven months ago (that we’re totally not plagiarizing), but imagine if AI wrote those articles? So much would be lost.
We employ actual human writers, from teenagers who happen to have a computer and know how to mash 1,200 unreadable words in twenty minutes, to aging writers desperately grasping at the last branch in a failing industry and can’t make the 1,200 words that fast and will be let go. What would happen to them if we simply plugged terms into an AI article program? Self-worth, perhaps, yet at what cost? (None to us, obviously, since we pay in Slack chat emojis and no exposure.)
The Post Office scandal, which saw hundreds of subpostmasters wrongly convicted of fraud, is one of the UK’s biggest miscarriages of justice. Thanks largely to the ITV drama, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, parliamentarians are finally taking action and passing legislation that will quash the convictions of post office workers who were prosecuted during […]
- by Peter Mumford
- by Patricia Olsen