mr.brown_financier (4343 followers)

미국 1등 휘낭시에 !!!
26년 7월 3~5일 서울 t.o.ch 커피 팝업 !!🚀🚀
financiers
at select cafe ⬇️

I won a Pulitzer for explaining the Great Depression. The AI spending boom terrifies me | Fortune

Will the AI investment boom mimic that of the railroads? Until recently, most investors took comfort in the fact that, unlike the 19th-century railroads, much of the AI capital investment boom was being financed out of the massive profits earned by big tech companies such as Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon. The expectation was that startup AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic—which have comparatively modest revenues—would have no problem raising capital through IPOs or from deep-pocketed sovereign wealth funds of the Middle East. Easy access to capital was thought to preclude the sort of boom-bust cycle that characterized the railroad era. … By the beginning of 1873, Cooke had managed to raise only $14 million of the $100 million he had promised, with less than a third of the planned track having been laid. Finding it increasingly difficult to persuade the public to buy Northern Pacific bonds, and unwilling to abandon the project, he began—as a last resort—to pump funds from his own bank into the railroad to bridge its financing needs. Using money from depositors who had the right to withdraw their funds on demand to finance long-term, illiquid investments with an uncertain and distant payoff was a highly risky strategy—and one with echoes of what is currently creating turmoil among private credit funds today. … …in the last six months two things have changed dramatically over the last twelve months. … First, estimates of what companies are willing to spend on AI infrastructure keep being revised upward. As in so many preceding booms, even though tech companies may be aware that collectively they are overinvesting, each individual company—believing that the rewards for being one of the winners are enormous—has a powerful incentive to go for broke. Competitive pressures are therefore forcing even the giant hyper-scalers to seek alternative sources of outside capital in the form of debt to supplement their internal funds. More and more data centers are being financed by companies issuing debt, tapping private credit funds, or through special purpose vehicles backed by securitized debt and mortgage bonds. … Second, in much the same way as the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 dramatically changed conditions on international capital markets, the war in the Middle East has upended the world’s equity and credit markets. Fears that European economies will be squeezed by rising inflation and slowing growth have caused the risk premium on long-term interest rates around the world to spike. Meanwhile the supply of capital from the Middle East is likely to slow, creating a global liquidity squeeze.

Premium (47 followers)

出遅れ気性難 おボルテとお弐寺がしたい

baekhyn (18 followers)

did you know that i love baekhyun

A Gay Palestinian Fled to Israel’s “Safe Haven.” Israel Tried to Exploit Him for Intelligence.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8647530 cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/53372 Kareem’s father was furious when he heard the rumors circulating in Ramallah about the sexuality of his 22-year-old son. “My dad aimed his gun towards me,” Kareem recalled, “and said that if he ever finds out that I’m gay, he would ‘rest a bullet between my eyes.’” Kareem, whose name has been changed to protect his safety, had lived in the close-knit West Bank city for years, but he’d long known he would one day need to leave. It was March 2024, and the Tel Aviv Court for Administrative Affairs had recently ruled that LGBTQ+ Palestinians can petition for asylum in Israel — upending years of precedent that considered them ineligible. The following month, Kareem crossed into Israel, a country that has occupied the West Bank for more than twice as long as he’d been alive. Supporters of Israel have long pointed to the “only democracy in the Middle East” as a purported safe haven for the LGBTQ+ community. While detractors say the argument amounts to “pinkwashing,” the use of LGBTQ+ inclusion to distract from moral and legal violations in other spheres, the Israeli government has doubled down on the concept, invoking it often to distract from violations of international law. In a speech before the United States Congress on July 24, 2024, for example, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu mocked protesters holding “Gays for Gaza” signs, saying they “might as well hold up signs saying ‘Chickens for KFC.’” As Netanyahu spoke, Kareem was living legally in Israel, believing his status secure while an administrative storm was brewing behind the scenes. Palestinians like Kareem might be safer by virtue of the distance from their families, but the bureaucratic process of seeking asylum imposes its own dangers. In interviews with The Intercept, Kareem and multiple advocates and lawyers for Palestinian asylum-seekers described how Israeli authorities put asylum-seekers through permit revocations, instability, and, in many cases, coerce them into sharing information with Israel’s internal intelligence agency. Kareem felt this pressure, he told The Intercept. At a processing facility at Sha’ar Ephraim, a crossing point in the separation wall west of Tulkarm in the northern West Bank, Kareem recalled, Israeli authorities repeatedly pressed him for information on friends and family still living in the West Bank, anything that might be of use. The implication was a quid pro quo: intelligence in exchange for an easier permit approval process. “When you are in such a fragile situation, you cannot be in the territories [the West Bank], and you don’t have status in Israel, the security bodies like the police … use this weakness and they try to get information or get someone’s cooperation from those people,” Kareem’s attorney, Tamir Blank, told The Intercept. “They promise them that they will not deport them or put them in jail.” Kareem didn’t have the kind of information necessary to secure such a process. He found himself, like so many Palestinian asylum-seekers in Israel, in a series of cascading double binds. After they flee, they find themselves trapped: Leaving the West Bank for Israel carries with it the stigma, true or not, of having collaborated with Israeli authorities, making it even more difficult to return, and leaving nowhere else to go. Home to about 30,000 Palestinians, Ramallah is small and insular, but it contains a space for queer Palestinians to hold conversations that aren’t always possible elsewhere in the West Bank. A loose network of activists hosts weekly community meetings that range from knitting circles to conversations dissecting the Eurocentricity of LGBTQ+ identity terminology in Arabic. During Ramadan this year, as rockets flew overhead during the Israel–U.S. war on Iran, they hosted a queer iftar in the city. Kareem was active with the group for a year before rumors made their way to his parents. They had long suspected “there was something off with me,” Kareem recalled. It also did not help that the family, as is typical of Ramallah’s upper class, is conservative and politically involved. His father works for the Palestinian Authority, just as his father before him, who was involved with the Palestine Liberation Organization before the 1993 Oslo Accords. The family home in Al-Bireh is an old stone building, “colder inside in the winter than it is outside,” according to Kareem, and adorned with a classic Palestinian metal gate. Aside from occasional Israeli military raids, Al-Bireh feels like the only true bubble inside of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. There are upscale cafes, flower shops, and a concerted effort by all who live there to pretend they enjoy more freedom than they do. Despite the idyllic atmosphere, there are only a handful of checkpoints by which to exit the city, all manned by Israeli soldiers. [ Related With World’s Eyes on Iran, Israel Locks Down the West Bank](https://theintercept.com/2026/03/10/israel-iran-war-west-bank-lockdown/) Kareem worked in his cousin’s welding shop in the Jalazone refugee camp, where, as he would later recount to Israeli authorities, he faced years of abuse — both sexual and physical — from his cousins, who taunted him for his feminine presentation. After Kareem’s father confronted him, he recalled, “My father was sending my cousins after me to stalk my friends and me.” At first, Kareem thought he should flee to a different city in the West Bank, possibly Bethlehem. Israel had stopped issuing permits for most West Bank Palestinians after October 7, citing “security concerns,” and Kareem worried that his family’s associations with the Palestinian Authority would count against him. But the West Bank is small, so small that without checkpoints blocking the way, one could drive from Jenin at the top of the West Bank to Hebron at the bottom in about an hour and a half. As the crow flies, it is only 22 kilometers from Ramallah to Bethlehem. Families know each other, and word spreads fast. So Kareem tried to fashion a life for himself in Israel. Not only would his family follow him to Israel after he fled, but so too would Israel’s occupation. His life would turn into a series of military court hearings and attempts to solicit intelligence from him by Shin Bet, Israeli domestic intelligence, with the specter of returning home meaning likely death. Israeli forces patrol during a raid on Al-Bireh in the West Bank on Oct. 7, 2025. Photo: Rimawi Issam/Anadolu via Getty Images Kareem secured a welfare permit by April 2024 with the help of pro bono lawyers from HIAS, a Jewish humanitarian organization that provides legal support to asylum-seekers in Israel, including a small number of Palestinians fleeing persecution. He spent months sleeping on benches and couch surfing before finally moving into an emergency LGBTQ+ youth shelter in Tel Aviv called HaGag HaVarod (“The Pink Roof” in Hebrew), where he went from never having met an Israeli who wasn’t holding a rifle to living together in shared housing. “I was so confused. They had just given me the permit, so why would they take it away?” In October 2024, just six months after leaving the West Bank, Kareem woke up to an alert on his phone that his permit to stay in Israel had been invalidated. His lawyers advised him to leave the shelter immediately. It was operated under the Israeli Ministry of Welfare, putting him at risk of deportation without a permit. “I was so confused. They had just given me the permit, so why would they take it away?” Kareem recounted. His family appeared to have worked to sabotage his legal status through multiple channels. In June, they had filed a report with Israeli social services claiming Kareem was a Hamas member planning to attack civilians. When a security flag appeared in his file, triggering the revocation of his welfare permit, his lawyers raised the possibility in court that it too had been planted by his family to engineer his deportation. The Intercept attempted to reach Kareem’s father for comment but was unable to get in touch. “I had a security block on my application,” Kareem said. “There was no way to get it back without petitioning the military commander for reconsideration.” Nimrod Avigal, deputy director of HIAS Israel, has been tracking LGBTQ+ Palestinian asylum claims for more than a decade. He worked on Kareem’s case at the outset. “Everything became much more difficult after October 7,” he said. “Many more people were refused because of security issues, mostly related to a family member.” Back in his hometown, rumors were circulating that Kareem was collaborating with Israeli authorities, according to testimony submitted to the Jerusalem District Court, a justification not only for his family to track him down, but also for others to help them. His family began posting notices in Facebook groups offering a cash reward for any information leading to his whereabouts, declaring him a “missing person.” One such post appeared in a public Jerusalem Facebook group with more than 450,000 members. His phone was flooded with calls, 60 to 80 a day, mostly from unknown numbers. Eventually, as Kareem recounted to The Intercept, he threw his phone into the Mediterranean Sea in the hopes it would solve the problem. It did not. The family hired men in Ramallah to track Kareem down on the other side of the separation wall. “They said that they were hired by my family to look for me and bring me back ‘after I tarnished the family’s reputation,’” Kareem recalled, “and that they need to ‘wash their honor as soon as possible.’” A childhood friend now living in Spain sent Kareem a voice memo with a warning: “Your family has placed a bounty of 35,000 shekels on your head. It is absolutely clear that this will not end well and that your family is truly determined to catch you.” The only thing standing between Kareem and deportation back to the West Bank was his welfare permit, and now it was gone. In a court filing, Kareem’s attorney wrote that his family members wished “to obtain information about his whereabouts and bring him to the territories, dead or alive, in order to settle accounts with him, that is, to ensure he does not remain alive.” Israel contended in court that Palestinians in Kareem’s position were motivated not by genuine fear but by a desire to “enjoy the more liberal lifestyle in Israel, rather than facing an actual threat,” language drawn from a 2013 Israeli Inter-Ministerial Committee report on Palestinians claiming persecution based on sexual orientation. Israel contended that queer Palestinians were motivated by a desire to “enjoy the more liberal lifestyle in Israel, rather than facing an actual threat.” In response to a request for comment from The Intercept, COGAT, the Israeli military body that oversees civilian affairs in the occupied territories, said that permits of this kind are granted “first and foremost for the purpose of saving lives, and allow the applicant to remain in Israel until a permanent solution is found in a receiving country.” As Kareem’s lawyers and other human rights organizations in Israel have long argued, rather than being welcomed, gay Palestinians are frequently subject to blackmail by Israeli authorities, who pressure them to provide intelligence in exchange for protection, turning their vulnerability into a tool of coercion. In the 10 Years Tamir Blank has been working with Palestinians from the West Bank filing asylum claims in Israel, he has accepted that many of his clients will either willingly choose to collaborate with Israeli intelligence or be coerced into it. Many asylum-seekers feel pressured to offer intelligence to Israeli authorities in the hope that it might help them obtain a humanitarian stay permit, which entitles them to the right to work. (Even that is a relatively recent development: The permits only began allowing legal employment in 2022, after extensive litigation, before which Palestinians were often forced into grey industries like the sex trade.) In one case, a transgender Palestinian woman named Zehava who fled the West Bank in 2021 died by suicide after Israeli authorities revoked her permit. [ Related Israel Revoked Palestinians’ Work Permits — Then Launched a Deadly Crackdown on Laborers](https://theintercept.com/2025/12/04/israel-palestinians-work-permits-laborers/) “The Israeli policy is to minimize the presence of Palestinians within its borders, in the West Bank and within the 48 borders,” referring to Israel’s pre-1967 territory, said Anat Matar, an Israeli academic and head of the Israeli Committee for Palestinian Prisoners. Israeli authorities deter Palestinians from fleeing to Israel with bureaucratic hurdles, she told The Intercept, as they seek to maintain a Jewish demographic majority. Blank’s clients are often so desperate to hold onto their status, feeling pressured to offer intelligence is “not something that is unique,” he said. The authorities “use every weakness they can.” Kareem, however, was out of luck. He had no such intelligence to offer, as is often the case with LGBTQ+ Palestinians forced to flee. According to Blank, the very fact of their social exclusion means they are rarely privy to intelligence of value to Israeli authorities, regardless of who their family members might be. Because he was born in the West Bank and holds a Palestinian Authority-issued ID, Kareem is unable to ever obtain residency or citizenship in Israel. Doing so, Israeli authorities fear, would set a precedent for a broader right of return for Palestinians displaced in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. The original welfare permit Israel issued required Kareem to pursue resettlement in a third country; there was no path for him to remain in Israel. Reut Ahdut, of the Aguda Israel, which until 2025 ran a program offering assistance to LGBTQ+ Palestinians fleeing the West Bank, said permits that used to be relatively stable are now often granted for only one to three months, with applicants required to regularly provide evidence that they are at risk across all Palestinian Authority territories, including the West Bank. Despite the 2024 ruling, Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority maintains that Palestinians are not subject to the United Nations Refugee Convention and therefore that it is not obligated to provide them asylum on the grounds that UNRWA, the U.N. agency mandated to provide assistance to Palestinian refugees, bears that responsibility instead. After banning UNRWA from operating on its territory in 2025, Israel demolished UNRWA’s East Jerusalem headquarters in January. After a court battle at the Jerusalem District Court, Kareem’s permit was reinstated in December 2024, and he has since been able to renew it with the permission of the military commander. In its ruling, the court acknowledged that the security intelligence used to revoke his permit may have been “based on false allegations that his family has made against him, in order to bring about his deportation.” For now, Kareem has no path out of Israel — his life suspended, renewed six months at a time. At one point, Kareem hoped he could be resettled to Canada through the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees resettlement program, but amid rising anti-immigrant sentiment even in Canada, that option has vanished. His time living in the shelter is over. With the help of the Tel Aviv Municipality, Kareem has moved into transitional housing in the Tel Aviv area. He keeps his lightheartedness, switching seamlessly from referencing TikToks he found hilarious, to drama at work, to decrying how life as a Palestinian in Israel has become all but impossible since October 7th. With the Port of Jaffa to the left and the Tel Aviv skyline looming off to the right, Kareem stared out at the Mediterranean, reflecting on the past year. “I hate the sea, I really do, and I am supposed to say at least I got to see it because of my permit. But really what I miss is my home, the West Bank,” Kareem said. “That is where I am from, but for now, the sea will do.” The post A Gay Palestinian Fled to Israel’s “Safe Haven.” Israel Tried to Exploit Him for Intelligence. appeared first on The Intercept. From The Intercept via This RSS Feed.

PremiumQuarter (120 followers)

Premium Medical Circle ist die Plattform für Health, Wellbeing und Lifestyle. Premium Quarterly ist unser vierteljährlich erscheinendes Magazin für Menschen, die aktiv, kulturinteressiert und neugierig auf spannende Entwicklungen in der Welt der Medizin sind. Das Themenspektrum von Premium Quarterly reicht von Porträts über Reportagen und Interviews mit Experten und Persönlichkeiten aus der Medizin bis zu Geschichten aus der Forschung, Reise- und Wellness-Reportagen und Berichten über neueste Behandlungsmethoden in der modernen Medizin und Psychologie

Folgen, um Beiträge aus dem offiziellen Premium Medical Circle Flipboard-Profil zu sehen.

A Gay Palestinian Fled to Israel’s “Safe Haven.” Israel Tried to Exploit Him for Intelligence.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/53372 Kareem’s father was furious when he heard the rumors circulating in Ramallah about the sexuality of his 22-year-old son. “My dad aimed his gun towards me,” Kareem recalled, “and said that if he ever finds out that I’m gay, he would ‘rest a bullet between my eyes.’” Kareem, whose name has been changed to protect his safety, had lived in the close-knit West Bank city for years, but he’d long known he would one day need to leave. It was March 2024, and the Tel Aviv Court for Administrative Affairs had recently ruled that LGBTQ+ Palestinians can petition for asylum in Israel — upending years of precedent that considered them ineligible. The following month, Kareem crossed into Israel, a country that has occupied the West Bank for more than twice as long as he’d been alive. Supporters of Israel have long pointed to the “only democracy in the Middle East” as a purported safe haven for the LGBTQ+ community. While detractors say the argument amounts to “pinkwashing,” the use of LGBTQ+ inclusion to distract from moral and legal violations in other spheres, the Israeli government has doubled down on the concept, invoking it often to distract from violations of international law. In a speech before the United States Congress on July 24, 2024, for example, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu mocked protesters holding “Gays for Gaza” signs, saying they “might as well hold up signs saying ‘Chickens for KFC.’” As Netanyahu spoke, Kareem was living legally in Israel, believing his status secure while an administrative storm was brewing behind the scenes. Palestinians like Kareem might be safer by virtue of the distance from their families, but the bureaucratic process of seeking asylum imposes its own dangers. In interviews with The Intercept, Kareem and multiple advocates and lawyers for Palestinian asylum-seekers described how Israeli authorities put asylum-seekers through permit revocations, instability, and, in many cases, coerce them into sharing information with Israel’s internal intelligence agency. Kareem felt this pressure, he told The Intercept. At a processing facility at Sha’ar Ephraim, a crossing point in the separation wall west of Tulkarm in the northern West Bank, Kareem recalled, Israeli authorities repeatedly pressed him for information on friends and family still living in the West Bank, anything that might be of use. The implication was a quid pro quo: intelligence in exchange for an easier permit approval process. “When you are in such a fragile situation, you cannot be in the territories [the West Bank], and you don’t have status in Israel, the security bodies like the police … use this weakness and they try to get information or get someone’s cooperation from those people,” Kareem’s attorney, Tamir Blank, told The Intercept. “They promise them that they will not deport them or put them in jail.” Kareem didn’t have the kind of information necessary to secure such a process. He found himself, like so many Palestinian asylum-seekers in Israel, in a series of cascading double binds. After they flee, they find themselves trapped: Leaving the West Bank for Israel carries with it the stigma, true or not, of having collaborated with Israeli authorities, making it even more difficult to return, and leaving nowhere else to go. Home to about 30,000 Palestinians, Ramallah is small and insular, but it contains a space for queer Palestinians to hold conversations that aren’t always possible elsewhere in the West Bank. A loose network of activists hosts weekly community meetings that range from knitting circles to conversations dissecting the Eurocentricity of LGBTQ+ identity terminology in Arabic. During Ramadan this year, as rockets flew overhead during the Israel–U.S. war on Iran, they hosted a queer iftar in the city. Kareem was active with the group for a year before rumors made their way to his parents. They had long suspected “there was something off with me,” Kareem recalled. It also did not help that the family, as is typical of Ramallah’s upper class, is conservative and politically involved. His father works for the Palestinian Authority, just as his father before him, who was involved with the Palestine Liberation Organization before the 1993 Oslo Accords. The family home in Al-Bireh is an old stone building, “colder inside in the winter than it is outside,” according to Kareem, and adorned with a classic Palestinian metal gate. Aside from occasional Israeli military raids, Al-Bireh feels like the only true bubble inside of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. There are upscale cafes, flower shops, and a concerted effort by all who live there to pretend they enjoy more freedom than they do. Despite the idyllic atmosphere, there are only a handful of checkpoints by which to exit the city, all manned by Israeli soldiers. [ Related With World’s Eyes on Iran, Israel Locks Down the West Bank](https://theintercept.com/2026/03/10/israel-iran-war-west-bank-lockdown/) Kareem worked in his cousin’s welding shop in the Jalazone refugee camp, where, as he would later recount to Israeli authorities, he faced years of abuse — both sexual and physical — from his cousins, who taunted him for his feminine presentation. After Kareem’s father confronted him, he recalled, “My father was sending my cousins after me to stalk my friends and me.” At first, Kareem thought he should flee to a different city in the West Bank, possibly Bethlehem. Israel had stopped issuing permits for most West Bank Palestinians after October 7, citing “security concerns,” and Kareem worried that his family’s associations with the Palestinian Authority would count against him. But the West Bank is small, so small that without checkpoints blocking the way, one could drive from Jenin at the top of the West Bank to Hebron at the bottom in about an hour and a half. As the crow flies, it is only 22 kilometers from Ramallah to Bethlehem. Families know each other, and word spreads fast. So Kareem tried to fashion a life for himself in Israel. Not only would his family follow him to Israel after he fled, but so too would Israel’s occupation. His life would turn into a series of military court hearings and attempts to solicit intelligence from him by Shin Bet, Israeli domestic intelligence, with the specter of returning home meaning likely death. Israeli forces patrol during a raid on Al-Bireh in the West Bank on Oct. 7, 2025. Photo: Rimawi Issam/Anadolu via Getty Images Kareem secured a welfare permit by April 2024 with the help of pro bono lawyers from HIAS, a Jewish humanitarian organization that provides legal support to asylum-seekers in Israel, including a small number of Palestinians fleeing persecution. He spent months sleeping on benches and couch surfing before finally moving into an emergency LGBTQ+ youth shelter in Tel Aviv called HaGag HaVarod (“The Pink Roof” in Hebrew), where he went from never having met an Israeli who wasn’t holding a rifle to living together in shared housing. “I was so confused. They had just given me the permit, so why would they take it away?” In October 2024, just six months after leaving the West Bank, Kareem woke up to an alert on his phone that his permit to stay in Israel had been invalidated. His lawyers advised him to leave the shelter immediately. It was operated under the Israeli Ministry of Welfare, putting him at risk of deportation without a permit. “I was so confused. They had just given me the permit, so why would they take it away?” Kareem recounted. His family appeared to have worked to sabotage his legal status through multiple channels. In June, they had filed a report with Israeli social services claiming Kareem was a Hamas member planning to attack civilians. When a security flag appeared in his file, triggering the revocation of his welfare permit, his lawyers raised the possibility in court that it too had been planted by his family to engineer his deportation. The Intercept attempted to reach Kareem’s father for comment but was unable to get in touch. “I had a security block on my application,” Kareem said. “There was no way to get it back without petitioning the military commander for reconsideration.” Nimrod Avigal, deputy director of HIAS Israel, has been tracking LGBTQ+ Palestinian asylum claims for more than a decade. He worked on Kareem’s case at the outset. “Everything became much more difficult after October 7,” he said. “Many more people were refused because of security issues, mostly related to a family member.” Back in his hometown, rumors were circulating that Kareem was collaborating with Israeli authorities, according to testimony submitted to the Jerusalem District Court, a justification not only for his family to track him down, but also for others to help them. His family began posting notices in Facebook groups offering a cash reward for any information leading to his whereabouts, declaring him a “missing person.” One such post appeared in a public Jerusalem Facebook group with more than 450,000 members. His phone was flooded with calls, 60 to 80 a day, mostly from unknown numbers. Eventually, as Kareem recounted to The Intercept, he threw his phone into the Mediterranean Sea in the hopes it would solve the problem. It did not. The family hired men in Ramallah to track Kareem down on the other side of the separation wall. “They said that they were hired by my family to look for me and bring me back ‘after I tarnished the family’s reputation,’” Kareem recalled, “and that they need to ‘wash their honor as soon as possible.’” A childhood friend now living in Spain sent Kareem a voice memo with a warning: “Your family has placed a bounty of 35,000 shekels on your head. It is absolutely clear that this will not end well and that your family is truly determined to catch you.” The only thing standing between Kareem and deportation back to the West Bank was his welfare permit, and now it was gone. In a court filing, Kareem’s attorney wrote that his family members wished “to obtain information about his whereabouts and bring him to the territories, dead or alive, in order to settle accounts with him, that is, to ensure he does not remain alive.” Israel contended in court that Palestinians in Kareem’s position were motivated not by genuine fear but by a desire to “enjoy the more liberal lifestyle in Israel, rather than facing an actual threat,” language drawn from a 2013 Israeli Inter-Ministerial Committee report on Palestinians claiming persecution based on sexual orientation. Israel contended that queer Palestinians were motivated by a desire to “enjoy the more liberal lifestyle in Israel, rather than facing an actual threat.” In response to a request for comment from The Intercept, COGAT, the Israeli military body that oversees civilian affairs in the occupied territories, said that permits of this kind are granted “first and foremost for the purpose of saving lives, and allow the applicant to remain in Israel until a permanent solution is found in a receiving country.” As Kareem’s lawyers and other human rights organizations in Israel have long argued, rather than being welcomed, gay Palestinians are frequently subject to blackmail by Israeli authorities, who pressure them to provide intelligence in exchange for protection, turning their vulnerability into a tool of coercion. In the 10 Years Tamir Blank has been working with Palestinians from the West Bank filing asylum claims in Israel, he has accepted that many of his clients will either willingly choose to collaborate with Israeli intelligence or be coerced into it. Many asylum-seekers feel pressured to offer intelligence to Israeli authorities in the hope that it might help them obtain a humanitarian stay permit, which entitles them to the right to work. (Even that is a relatively recent development: The permits only began allowing legal employment in 2022, after extensive litigation, before which Palestinians were often forced into grey industries like the sex trade.) In one case, a transgender Palestinian woman named Zehava who fled the West Bank in 2021 died by suicide after Israeli authorities revoked her permit. [ Related Israel Revoked Palestinians’ Work Permits — Then Launched a Deadly Crackdown on Laborers](https://theintercept.com/2025/12/04/israel-palestinians-work-permits-laborers/) “The Israeli policy is to minimize the presence of Palestinians within its borders, in the West Bank and within the 48 borders,” referring to Israel’s pre-1967 territory, said Anat Matar, an Israeli academic and head of the Israeli Committee for Palestinian Prisoners. Israeli authorities deter Palestinians from fleeing to Israel with bureaucratic hurdles, she told The Intercept, as they seek to maintain a Jewish demographic majority. Blank’s clients are often so desperate to hold onto their status, feeling pressured to offer intelligence is “not something that is unique,” he said. The authorities “use every weakness they can.” Kareem, however, was out of luck. He had no such intelligence to offer, as is often the case with LGBTQ+ Palestinians forced to flee. According to Blank, the very fact of their social exclusion means they are rarely privy to intelligence of value to Israeli authorities, regardless of who their family members might be. Because he was born in the West Bank and holds a Palestinian Authority-issued ID, Kareem is unable to ever obtain residency or citizenship in Israel. Doing so, Israeli authorities fear, would set a precedent for a broader right of return for Palestinians displaced in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. The original welfare permit Israel issued required Kareem to pursue resettlement in a third country; there was no path for him to remain in Israel. Reut Ahdut, of the Aguda Israel, which until 2025 ran a program offering assistance to LGBTQ+ Palestinians fleeing the West Bank, said permits that used to be relatively stable are now often granted for only one to three months, with applicants required to regularly provide evidence that they are at risk across all Palestinian Authority territories, including the West Bank. Despite the 2024 ruling, Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority maintains that Palestinians are not subject to the United Nations Refugee Convention and therefore that it is not obligated to provide them asylum on the grounds that UNRWA, the U.N. agency mandated to provide assistance to Palestinian refugees, bears that responsibility instead. After banning UNRWA from operating on its territory in 2025, Israel demolished UNRWA’s East Jerusalem headquarters in January. After a court battle at the Jerusalem District Court, Kareem’s permit was reinstated in December 2024, and he has since been able to renew it with the permission of the military commander. In its ruling, the court acknowledged that the security intelligence used to revoke his permit may have been “based on false allegations that his family has made against him, in order to bring about his deportation.” For now, Kareem has no path out of Israel — his life suspended, renewed six months at a time. At one point, Kareem hoped he could be resettled to Canada through the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees resettlement program, but amid rising anti-immigrant sentiment even in Canada, that option has vanished. His time living in the shelter is over. With the help of the Tel Aviv Municipality, Kareem has moved into transitional housing in the Tel Aviv area. He keeps his lightheartedness, switching seamlessly from referencing TikToks he found hilarious, to drama at work, to decrying how life as a Palestinian in Israel has become all but impossible since October 7th. With the Port of Jaffa to the left and the Tel Aviv skyline looming off to the right, Kareem stared out at the Mediterranean, reflecting on the past year. “I hate the sea, I really do, and I am supposed to say at least I got to see it because of my permit. But really what I miss is my home, the West Bank,” Kareem said. “That is where I am from, but for now, the sea will do.” The post A Gay Palestinian Fled to Israel’s “Safe Haven.” Israel Tried to Exploit Him for Intelligence. appeared first on The Intercept. From The Intercept via This RSS Feed.

nvsr (101 followers)

Finding friends on the fediverse 😊
ごめん日本語が下手くそ！
About me/私について: ♂️ 🇳🇱 🚴‍♂️ 📷 🍳 🌅 :opensourceparrot:

A Gay Palestinian Fled to Israel’s “Safe Haven.” Israel Tried to Exploit Him for Intelligence.

Kareem’s father was furious when he heard the rumors circulating in Ramallah about the sexuality of his 22-year-old son. “My dad aimed his gun towards me,” Kareem recalled, “and said that if he ever finds out that I’m gay, he would ‘rest a bullet between my eyes.’” Kareem, whose name has been changed to protect his safety, had lived in the close-knit West Bank city for years, but he’d long known he would one day need to leave. It was March 2024, and the Tel Aviv Court for Administrative Affairs had recently ruled that LGBTQ+ Palestinians can petition for asylum in Israel — upending years of precedent that considered them ineligible. The following month, Kareem crossed into Israel, a country that has occupied the West Bank for more than twice as long as he’d been alive. Supporters of Israel have long pointed to the “only democracy in the Middle East” as a purported safe haven for the LGBTQ+ community. While detractors say the argument amounts to “pinkwashing,” the use of LGBTQ+ inclusion to distract from moral and legal violations in other spheres, the Israeli government has doubled down on the concept, invoking it often to distract from violations of international law. In a speech before the United States Congress on July 24, 2024, for example, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu mocked protesters holding “Gays for Gaza” signs, saying they “might as well hold up signs saying ‘Chickens for KFC.’” As Netanyahu spoke, Kareem was living legally in Israel, believing his status secure while an administrative storm was brewing behind the scenes. Palestinians like Kareem might be safer by virtue of the distance from their families, but the bureaucratic process of seeking asylum imposes its own dangers. In interviews with The Intercept, Kareem and multiple advocates and lawyers for Palestinian asylum-seekers described how Israeli authorities put asylum-seekers through permit revocations, instability, and, in many cases, coerce them into sharing information with Israel’s internal intelligence agency. Kareem felt this pressure, he told The Intercept. At a processing facility at Sha’ar Ephraim, a crossing point in the separation wall west of Tulkarm in the northern West Bank, Kareem recalled, Israeli authorities repeatedly pressed him for information on friends and family still living in the West Bank, anything that might be of use. The implication was a quid pro quo: intelligence in exchange for an easier permit approval process. “When you are in such a fragile situation, you cannot be in the territories [the West Bank], and you don’t have status in Israel, the security bodies like the police … use this weakness and they try to get information or get someone’s cooperation from those people,” Kareem’s attorney, Tamir Blank, told The Intercept. “They promise them that they will not deport them or put them in jail.” Kareem didn’t have the kind of information necessary to secure such a process. He found himself, like so many Palestinian asylum-seekers in Israel, in a series of cascading double binds. After they flee, they find themselves trapped: Leaving the West Bank for Israel carries with it the stigma, true or not, of having collaborated with Israeli authorities, making it even more difficult to return, and leaving nowhere else to go. Home to about 30,000 Palestinians, Ramallah is small and insular, but it contains a space for queer Palestinians to hold conversations that aren’t always possible elsewhere in the West Bank. A loose network of activists hosts weekly community meetings that range from knitting circles to conversations dissecting the Eurocentricity of LGBTQ+ identity terminology in Arabic. During Ramadan this year, as rockets flew overhead during the Israel–U.S. war on Iran, they hosted a queer iftar in the city. Kareem was active with the group for a year before rumors made their way to his parents. They had long suspected “there was something off with me,” Kareem recalled. It also did not help that the family, as is typical of Ramallah’s upper class, is conservative and politically involved. His father works for the Palestinian Authority, just as his father before him, who was involved with the Palestine Liberation Organization before the 1993 Oslo Accords. The family home in Al-Bireh is an old stone building, “colder inside in the winter than it is outside,” according to Kareem, and adorned with a classic Palestinian metal gate. Aside from occasional Israeli military raids, Al-Bireh feels like the only true bubble inside of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. There are upscale cafes, flower shops, and a concerted effort by all who live there to pretend they enjoy more freedom than they do. Despite the idyllic atmosphere, there are only a handful of checkpoints by which to exit the city, all manned by Israeli soldiers. [ Related With World’s Eyes on Iran, Israel Locks Down the West Bank](https://theintercept.com/2026/03/10/israel-iran-war-west-bank-lockdown/) Kareem worked in his cousin’s welding shop in the Jalazone refugee camp, where, as he would later recount to Israeli authorities, he faced years of abuse — both sexual and physical — from his cousins, who taunted him for his feminine presentation. After Kareem’s father confronted him, he recalled, “My father was sending my cousins after me to stalk my friends and me.” At first, Kareem thought he should flee to a different city in the West Bank, possibly Bethlehem. Israel had stopped issuing permits for most West Bank Palestinians after October 7, citing “security concerns,” and Kareem worried that his family’s associations with the Palestinian Authority would count against him. But the West Bank is small, so small that without checkpoints blocking the way, one could drive from Jenin at the top of the West Bank to Hebron at the bottom in about an hour and a half. As the crow flies, it is only 22 kilometers from Ramallah to Bethlehem. Families know each other, and word spreads fast. So Kareem tried to fashion a life for himself in Israel. Not only would his family follow him to Israel after he fled, but so too would Israel’s occupation. His life would turn into a series of military court hearings and attempts to solicit intelligence from him by Shin Bet, Israeli domestic intelligence, with the specter of returning home meaning likely death. Israeli forces patrol during a raid on Al-Bireh in the West Bank on Oct. 7, 2025. Photo: Rimawi Issam/Anadolu via Getty Images Kareem secured a welfare permit by April 2024 with the help of pro bono lawyers from HIAS, a Jewish humanitarian organization that provides legal support to asylum-seekers in Israel, including a small number of Palestinians fleeing persecution. He spent months sleeping on benches and couch surfing before finally moving into an emergency LGBTQ+ youth shelter in Tel Aviv called HaGag HaVarod (“The Pink Roof” in Hebrew), where he went from never having met an Israeli who wasn’t holding a rifle to living together in shared housing. “I was so confused. They had just given me the permit, so why would they take it away?” In October 2024, just six months after leaving the West Bank, Kareem woke up to an alert on his phone that his permit to stay in Israel had been invalidated. His lawyers advised him to leave the shelter immediately. It was operated under the Israeli Ministry of Welfare, putting him at risk of deportation without a permit. “I was so confused. They had just given me the permit, so why would they take it away?” Kareem recounted. His family appeared to have worked to sabotage his legal status through multiple channels. In June, they had filed a report with Israeli social services claiming Kareem was a Hamas member planning to attack civilians. When a security flag appeared in his file, triggering the revocation of his welfare permit, his lawyers raised the possibility in court that it too had been planted by his family to engineer his deportation. The Intercept attempted to reach Kareem’s father for comment but was unable to get in touch. “I had a security block on my application,” Kareem said. “There was no way to get it back without petitioning the military commander for reconsideration.” Nimrod Avigal, deputy director of HIAS Israel, has been tracking LGBTQ+ Palestinian asylum claims for more than a decade. He worked on Kareem’s case at the outset. “Everything became much more difficult after October 7,” he said. “Many more people were refused because of security issues, mostly related to a family member.” Back in his hometown, rumors were circulating that Kareem was collaborating with Israeli authorities, according to testimony submitted to the Jerusalem District Court, a justification not only for his family to track him down, but also for others to help them. His family began posting notices in Facebook groups offering a cash reward for any information leading to his whereabouts, declaring him a “missing person.” One such post appeared in a public Jerusalem Facebook group with more than 450,000 members. His phone was flooded with calls, 60 to 80 a day, mostly from unknown numbers. Eventually, as Kareem recounted to The Intercept, he threw his phone into the Mediterranean Sea in the hopes it would solve the problem. It did not. The family hired men in Ramallah to track Kareem down on the other side of the separation wall. “They said that they were hired by my family to look for me and bring me back ‘after I tarnished the family’s reputation,’” Kareem recalled, “and that they need to ‘wash their honor as soon as possible.’” A childhood friend now living in Spain sent Kareem a voice memo with a warning: “Your family has placed a bounty of 35,000 shekels on your head. It is absolutely clear that this will not end well and that your family is truly determined to catch you.” The only thing standing between Kareem and deportation back to the West Bank was his welfare permit, and now it was gone. In a court filing, Kareem’s attorney wrote that his family members wished “to obtain information about his whereabouts and bring him to the territories, dead or alive, in order to settle accounts with him, that is, to ensure he does not remain alive.” Israel contended in court that Palestinians in Kareem’s position were motivated not by genuine fear but by a desire to “enjoy the more liberal lifestyle in Israel, rather than facing an actual threat,” language drawn from a 2013 Israeli Inter-Ministerial Committee report on Palestinians claiming persecution based on sexual orientation. Israel contended that queer Palestinians were motivated by a desire to “enjoy the more liberal lifestyle in Israel, rather than facing an actual threat.” In response to a request for comment from The Intercept, COGAT, the Israeli military body that oversees civilian affairs in the occupied territories, said that permits of this kind are granted “first and foremost for the purpose of saving lives, and allow the applicant to remain in Israel until a permanent solution is found in a receiving country.” As Kareem’s lawyers and other human rights organizations in Israel have long argued, rather than being welcomed, gay Palestinians are frequently subject to blackmail by Israeli authorities, who pressure them to provide intelligence in exchange for protection, turning their vulnerability into a tool of coercion. In the 10 Years Tamir Blank has been working with Palestinians from the West Bank filing asylum claims in Israel, he has accepted that many of his clients will either willingly choose to collaborate with Israeli intelligence or be coerced into it. Many asylum-seekers feel pressured to offer intelligence to Israeli authorities in the hope that it might help them obtain a humanitarian stay permit, which entitles them to the right to work. (Even that is a relatively recent development: The permits only began allowing legal employment in 2022, after extensive litigation, before which Palestinians were often forced into grey industries like the sex trade.) In one case, a transgender Palestinian woman named Zehava who fled the West Bank in 2021 died by suicide after Israeli authorities revoked her permit. [ Related Israel Revoked Palestinians’ Work Permits — Then Launched a Deadly Crackdown on Laborers](https://theintercept.com/2025/12/04/israel-palestinians-work-permits-laborers/) “The Israeli policy is to minimize the presence of Palestinians within its borders, in the West Bank and within the 48 borders,” referring to Israel’s pre-1967 territory, said Anat Matar, an Israeli academic and head of the Israeli Committee for Palestinian Prisoners. Israeli authorities deter Palestinians from fleeing to Israel with bureaucratic hurdles, she told The Intercept, as they seek to maintain a Jewish demographic majority. Blank’s clients are often so desperate to hold onto their status, feeling pressured to offer intelligence is “not something that is unique,” he said. The authorities “use every weakness they can.” Kareem, however, was out of luck. He had no such intelligence to offer, as is often the case with LGBTQ+ Palestinians forced to flee. According to Blank, the very fact of their social exclusion means they are rarely privy to intelligence of value to Israeli authorities, regardless of who their family members might be. Because he was born in the West Bank and holds a Palestinian Authority-issued ID, Kareem is unable to ever obtain residency or citizenship in Israel. Doing so, Israeli authorities fear, would set a precedent for a broader right of return for Palestinians displaced in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. The original welfare permit Israel issued required Kareem to pursue resettlement in a third country; there was no path for him to remain in Israel. Reut Ahdut, of the Aguda Israel, which until 2025 ran a program offering assistance to LGBTQ+ Palestinians fleeing the West Bank, said permits that used to be relatively stable are now often granted for only one to three months, with applicants required to regularly provide evidence that they are at risk across all Palestinian Authority territories, including the West Bank. Despite the 2024 ruling, Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority maintains that Palestinians are not subject to the United Nations Refugee Convention and therefore that it is not obligated to provide them asylum on the grounds that UNRWA, the U.N. agency mandated to provide assistance to Palestinian refugees, bears that responsibility instead. After banning UNRWA from operating on its territory in 2025, Israel demolished UNRWA’s East Jerusalem headquarters in January. After a court battle at the Jerusalem District Court, Kareem’s permit was reinstated in December 2024, and he has since been able to renew it with the permission of the military commander. In its ruling, the court acknowledged that the security intelligence used to revoke his permit may have been “based on false allegations that his family has made against him, in order to bring about his deportation.” For now, Kareem has no path out of Israel — his life suspended, renewed six months at a time. At one point, Kareem hoped he could be resettled to Canada through the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees resettlement program, but amid rising anti-immigrant sentiment even in Canada, that option has vanished. His time living in the shelter is over. With the help of the Tel Aviv Municipality, Kareem has moved into transitional housing in the Tel Aviv area. He keeps his lightheartedness, switching seamlessly from referencing TikToks he found hilarious, to drama at work, to decrying how life as a Palestinian in Israel has become all but impossible since October 7th. With the Port of Jaffa to the left and the Tel Aviv skyline looming off to the right, Kareem stared out at the Mediterranean, reflecting on the past year. “I hate the sea, I really do, and I am supposed to say at least I got to see it because of my permit. But really what I miss is my home, the West Bank,” Kareem said. “That is where I am from, but for now, the sea will do.” The post A Gay Palestinian Fled to Israel’s “Safe Haven.” Israel Tried to Exploit Him for Intelligence. appeared first on The Intercept. From The Intercept via This RSS Feed.

The top 16 cars sold in China last May were EVs.

CCP worked HARD to get Tesla up and running in China before their own EVs got good. Also I believe western things are still seen as more premium there even though Tesla is shit.

Moderators Delete Reddit Thread as Doctors Torch Dead UnitedHealthcare CEO

Reddit post from Mountain_Fig_9253: Thank you for choosing United Healthcare for your healthcare needs. After a careful review of the claim submitted for emergency services on December 4, 2024, we regret to inform you that your request for coverage has been denied. Our denial is based on the following findings: Lack of Prior Authorization: Our records indicate that you failed to obtain prior authorization before seeking care for the gunshot wound to your chest. While we acknowledge the emergent nature of the situation, our policy requires that all non-preventative services, including “unexpected chest injuries,” be pre-approved through our 24/7 Prior Authorization Hotline. Unfortunately, our hotline received no such call during your ambulance transport or at any point before your admission to the emergency room. Failure to Prove Medical Necessity: The submitted documentation does not sufficiently demonstrate that treatment for a penetrating chest wound meets the definition of “medically necessary.” Our guidelines specify that life-threatening conditions must be substantiated with a second opinion from a network provider, preferably before care is rendered. Alternative Options Not Explored: Based on our retrospective analysis, alternative, more cost-effective treatment options—such as a virtual telehealth consult or at-home first aid—were not attempted prior to your emergency room visit. We understand that you were actively “bleeding out,” but this does not exempt you from exploring lower-cost care pathways. Out-of-Network Care: The emergency room where you received treatment is not within our network. While City General is geographically closer to the location of your shooting, our network partner, DiscountCare Clinic, is only 25 miles away and equipped with staplers and gauze for such injuries. Next Steps: You may file an appeal within 30 days i you believe this decision is incorrect. Appeals must include: « A notarized letter from the attending physician, explaining why you thought you were entitled to not bleed to death while waiting for approval. « Evidence that your injuries were, in fact, serious enough to merit immediate attention, such as photos, videos, or live reenactments. We encourage you to familarize yourself with your plan benefits and utilize in-network providers for future incidents. Please do not hesitate to reach out to our customer support team if you have questions about this Sincerely and in good health, United Healthcare P.S. Remember: Preventative care is the best care! If you’d lie, we can help you schedule your annual physical or connect you to a mindfulness seminar to prevent future traumatic injuries. Thank you for your recent appeal regarding the denial of coverage for your emergency room visit on December 5, 2024. We have carefully reviewed the additional information you provided, including the attending physician’s notes, photographic evidence of your gunshot wound, and the security footage of the event. After a thorough re-evaluation of your case, we regret to inform you that the original denial decision has been upheld. Our reasons for this decision are outlined below: Insufficient Documentation Supporting Medical Necessity: While we acknowledge the physician’s statement that your “life was in immediate danger,” we remain unconvinced that the treatment you received in the emergency room was the only appropriate course of action. Specifically, we find the decision to intubate and transfuse blood unnecessarily aggressive when other cost-effective options, such as applying firm pressure to the wound with a clean cloth, could have been attempted first. Failure to Contact Prior Authorization Hotline: Your appeal asserts that you were “unable to call” due to being “unconscious” after sustaining the gunshot wound. While we empathize with your condition, we remind you that our Prior Authorization Hotline is available 24/7 and can be contacted by a friend, family member, or even a concerned bystander. The failure to delegate this responsibility during your medical emergency further substantiates our denial. Out-of-Network Services: As stated previously, City General Emergency Department is not part of our network. While we understand that DiscountCare Clinic is 25 miles away and does not operate ambulances, the choice to seek care at a non-network facility remains inconsistent with your plan’s cost-saving guidelines. Our analysis indicates that driving oneself, despite injury, or calling a rideshare service might have provided a viable and more affordable alternative. Policy Exclusions on Firearm-Related Injuries: Your plan explicitly excludes coverage for injuries resulting from “unapproved use of firearms.” As no evidence was provided to confirm the shooting was accidental or unavoidable, we are unable to overturn this aspect of the denial. Next Steps: This decision is final. You may choose to escalate your appeal to the Independent Medical Review Board (IMRB) at your own expense. If the IMRB overturns our decision, you may be eligible for partial reimbursement minus a $5,000 “Claim Reconsideration Fee.” We encourage you to consult our Member Handbook to better understand your plan benefits and avoid similar misunderstandings in the future. Should you find your current coverage unsatisfactory, we invite you to explore our new UNH UltraBasic plan, which offers even fewer benefits at an even lower premium. Sincerely and in good health, United Healthcare P.S. Please note: Our appeals process is designed to promote proactive healthcare decision-making. While this unfortunate incident did not meet policy requirements, we commend your efforts to stay alive and wish you a speedy recovery.

[2026-06-01] Daily Trust – How General Rabe, wife were ambushed, abducted in Katsina

Fresh details have emerged on how bandits abducted a former Director of Defence Information of the Nigerian Army, Major General Rabe Abubakar Batsari (rtd), and his wife in Katsina State on Saturday. The retired major general was reportedly travelling to Katsina on Saturday alongside his wife, Hajiya Amina Abubakar, and their driver, Abdullahi Sa’idu, when their vehicle was ambushed along the Marabar Musawa–Kafinsoli road in Matazu Local Government Area. The attack occurred near Zakin Baure village, where witnesses said armed men, believed to be bandits, suddenly emerged from hiding, blocked the road and opened fire on the vehicle, forcing it to a halt before abducting the retired officer and his wife into a nearby forest. SPONSOR AD Sources familiar with the incident told Daily Trust that the driver was shot in the hand during the attack but was later spared by the gunmen. Primaries: Candidates’ fate uncertain as party headquarters set to announce results How ram dealers suffered losses in Abuja “They shot him in the hand and abandoned him, but took the General and his wife away. He was bleeding seriously but managed to get help and has since been treated,” a source close to the family said. Security operatives later recovered the victims’ vehicle and moved it to the Matazu Divisional Police Headquarters as investigations and rescue operations intensified. A witness, who requested anonymity due to security concerns, said the attack appeared to be a well-planned ambush. “The gunmen blocked the road and waited for vehicles. Everything happened very fast. They were many and heavily armed. People around could not intervene because of fear,” he said. Another source said the armed men first stormed a phone-charging centre in the village, where they carted away several mobile phones and power banks. “They also seized a motorcycle belonging to one of the villagers. After that, they moved to the road, where they encountered a red vehicle and opened fire on it,” the source said. The incident attracted widespread attention after villagers shared photographs of the abandoned red Peugeot vehicle on social media with a caption seeking information about its owner. “Who knows the owner of this car? The occupants were just abducted by bandits along the Matazu road,” the post read. As the post gained traction online, a retired military officer reportedly identified the occupants as Major General Batsari (rtd) and his wife, sparking widespread concern. However, sources in the Matazu area, where the incident occurred, believe the attackers may not have known that one of their captives was a retired senior military officer. Residents said the retired officer may have embarked on the trip because Batsari had recently experienced a relative improvement in security compared to some other parts of the state that have long been affected by banditry. Many indigenes of the area were said to have travelled to and from Batsari safely during the ongoing Sallah festivities. Meanwhile, the Katsina State Police Command has confirmed the attack and abduction but did not identify the victims as the retired army General and his wife. In a statement issued by the Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO), DSP Abubakar Sadiq Aliyu, the command said the incident occurred at about 11:00 am on Saturday when armed bandits intercepted a red Peugeot 406 saloon car travelling along the Karaduwa–Matazu road. The statement identified the occupants as Abdullahi Sa’id, the driver, who sustained a gunshot wound to his right arm, Abdullahi Batsari and Amina Abdullahi. However, the police did not clarify whether the individuals named in the statement were the same persons widely reported to be the retired General and his wife. According to the police, the Commissioner of Police in Katsina State, CP Ali Umar Fage, visited the scene shortly after the incident and directed the immediate deployment of additional personnel and operational assets to strengthen ongoing search-and-rescue efforts. The command said security operatives were intensifying efforts to rescue the abducted victims unharmed and bring the perpetrators to justice. It added that further updates would be provided as investigations and rescue operations continue. Local government authorities confirmed the incident and expressed concern over the growing insecurity along major and rural roads in the area. A senior official of Matazu Local Government told Daily Trust that consultations had been intensified among security agencies, traditional rulers and community leaders to address the situation. Suspected mastermind Sources within the area have claimed that the retired army General and his wife were allegedly abducted by associates of a bandit leader known as Muhammadu Fulani, who has reportedly been terrorising communities around the Kuki and Sayaya axis. A source in the area said the kidnappers were targeting a high-profile individual from whom they could demand a substantial ransom. However, another source told our correspondent that there are growing doubts about any direct connection between the abduction and the camp of Fulani. The source said Muhammadu Fulani has not been significantly active in the area in recent months following a major security operation conducted in May this year. During the operation, joint security forces reportedly killed five bandits and rescued 32 kidnapped victims in coordinated raids targeting the bandit leader’s camp. The source noted that the operation weakened the group’s activities and contributed to the relative peace that communities around the Batsari axis have enjoyed in recent weeks. He further explained that Muhammadu Fulani is known for carrying out large-scale attacks that are usually designed to attract attention and instill fear among residents. “From our experience in this area, this operation does not appear to be one spearheaded by Muhammadu Fulani. We know him as a notorious and boastful operator who likes to make his presence known whenever he strikes. “His attacks are usually devastating and leave communities in fear and sorrow. This particular incident does not look like his handiwork or that of his loyal fighters,” the source said. Another resident of Sayaya village also expressed similar doubts, revealing that available information suggests the abductors may not have known the true identity of their victims at the time of the attack. According to the resident, the manner in which the operation was carried out suggests that the kidnappers could belong to a different criminal gang operating in the area rather than Muhammadu Fulani’s network. “From what we gathered, the abductors were not even aware that they had intercepted and abducted a retired senior military officer. They appeared to be operating like opportunistic criminals rather than members of a well-known bandit group,” the resident said. He added that the attackers were fewer in number than the large contingents usually associated with Muhammadu Fulani’s operations. “They operated more like petty criminals. They were not as many as the fighters who usually accompany Muhammadu Fulani’s men whenever they launch attacks. The red vehicle was the only car hence it became the only target at the scene. “Of course, it is possible that criminal groups may change their tactics over time, but from what we know, this operation does not resemble that of the Muhammadu Fulani we are familiar with, who is known to be extremely deadly and ruthless,” the resident said. A reminder to Gen. Tsiga’s abduction The latest abduction marks the second known attack involving a retired military general in Katsina State since the kidnapping of retired Brigadier General Maharazu Tsiga in 2025. Tsiga, a former Director-General of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), spent 56 days in captivity after he and nine other residents were abducted by bandits. Residents said Tsiga and four others were taken from Tsiga town, while another victim, his two wives, children, and relatives were kidnapped from the nearby Gidan Biye community. Speaking after his release, Tsiga recounted the harsh conditions in captivity, saying the hostages were fed only once a day and regularly encountered snakes and scorpions in the forest. “A day before I left, we suddenly saw hyenas roaming around the mountain where we were being held, searching for food. We feared they were after us,” he said. Tsiga also revealed that the kidnappers used prominent captives as human shields during aerial bombardments by the Nigerian Air Force, believing the military would avoid striking locations where hostages were present. He said the bandits targeted him because they assumed retired military officers and government officials had access to large sums of money. “They believed people in uniform always keep government funds. That was why they tried to force their way into my house and eventually used explosives when they could not gain access,” he said. 16 people killed in recent attack Katsina State has remained one of the epicentres of banditry in the North-West despite sustained military operations and several community-based peace initiatives aimed at ending the violence. Last Friday, bandits attacked Kiliya village in Dutsinma Local Government Area, killing at least 16 people. The assault occurred shortly after residents had concluded Juma’at prayers and gathered to celebrate the Eid-el-Kabir festivities. A resident, who requested anonymity, said he was among villagers relaxing after prayers when armed men stormed the community on motorcycles, causing panic and confusion. He said he narrowly escaped by taking shelter in a nearby house. “After the Friday prayers, we were sitting together when I called a boy selling local drinks and bought a bowl from him. Suddenly, the bandits arrived. The boy and I ran into a house and hid,” he said. “While inside, we heard screams and gunshots everywhere. When the shooting stopped and we came out, we found about 16 lifeless bodies, including some of my uncles and cousins.” The attack reportedly sparked a mass exodus from the village, with more than 400 residents fleeing to neighbouring Bagagadi and Radda communities in search of safety. Several people are still unaccounted for, raising concerns that the casualty figure could increase. Residents also said some victims may have been attacked while working on their farms, as several bodies were reportedly recovered from farmlands surrounding the village. Katsina’s most dangerous roads Findings by Daily Trust indicate that some of the most dangerous roads in Katsina State due to persistent banditry include the Marabar Musawa–Matazu–Kafin Soli–Charanchi road, Katsina–Dutsinma road, Kankara–Marabar Kankara road, Funtua–Tsafe–Gusau road, and the Jibia–Sokoto highway. Other notorious routes are Marabar Sheme–Kankara, Marabar Kankara–Kankara–Dutsinma, and the Katsina–Kankia–Gidan Mutum Daya–Dayi–Malumfashi road. Further findings revealed that motorists have largely abandoned the Marabar Musawa–Matazu–Kafin Soli–Charanchi road because of frequent bandit attacks. The road has effectively become a haven for criminals who take advantage of the dense vegetation and surrounding forests to carry out attacks. The route is a major alternative road linking Katsina with Kaduna, Funtua, Malumfashi and even parts of Kano State, including Gwarzo Local Government Area. A resident of Musawa town, Malam Yusuf Alasan, told Daily Trust that motorists had avoided the road for nearly three years. “Only on rare occasions do you see vehicles using this road. I was surprised to hear that a retired soldier was kidnapped on the road. “You can drive for 40 minutes without encountering another vehicle. That shows how deserted the road has become. I believe the retired military officer who was recently abducted there was unaware of the security situation,” he said. He said bandits exploit the bushy terrain and operate at any time of the day or night. “Not long ago, bandits passed through this town with a kidnapped victim. They were riding three motorcycles, carrying three people on each bike. The victim’s head was covered with a black cloth and his hands were tied. All of them were armed with rifles,” he said. Daily Trust observed that many travellers from Abuja and Kaduna now prefer entering Katsina through Kano, while some take the longer Daura route to avoid dangerous stretches. The Katsina–Dutsinma–Marabar Kankara road remains particularly risky between Dutsinma and Yargoje, while the Katsina–Kankia–Gidan Mutum Daya–Dayi–Malumfashi road is considered most dangerous between Kankia and Dayi. The Kankara–Ruwan Godiya–Faskari road has also been virtually taken over by bandits. The route, which is the shortest link between Kankara and Faskari and forms part of the corridor to Tsafe and Gusau, is about 15 to 20 kilometres long. Because of the insecurity, motorists now take the longer Kankara–Funtua–Faskari route, which stretches beyond 50 kilometres. Another notorious route is the Yantumaki–Dutsinma road, which commercial drivers have nicknamed “Ka bi ta da addu’a”—meaning “travel it with prayers.” Many road users describe it as a death trap. Similarly, the Kankara–Mabai–Ruwan Godiya–Faskari road has been largely abandoned by motorists. Daily Trust observed that only heavily armed security personnel now ply the route. The Jibia–Sokoto highway, a federal road linking Katsina and Sokoto states, has also become notorious for bandit attacks. Although it is the shortest route between Jibia and Sokoto, persistent attacks have forced many drivers to avoid it for years. Residents said numerous passengers have either been kidnapped or killed during encounters with bandits along the road. The Marabar Sheme–Kankara road, another key route linking Kankara to Tsafe and Gusau, has also been abandoned. Motorists travelling to Gusau through Kankara now pass through Funtua instead, adding about an hour to their journey. For many residents and travellers, these roads have become symbols of the deepening security crisis confronting Katsina State and the wider North-West region. Food production threatened in Katsina – Residents The latest abduction has further heightened fear among residents, many of whom say insecurity has continued to disrupt farming activities, movement and local commerce in several parts of Katsina State. Community leaders said repeated attacks and abductions along the Marabar Musawa–Kafinsoli axis and other rural roads have forced many farmers to abandon their farmlands, worsening food insecurity and economic hardship. A community leader in Matazu, Malam Ibrahim Yusuf, said residents are increasingly afraid to travel. “Our people are living in fear. Farmers can no longer go to their farms freely, and travellers are always worried about being attacked. Each new abduction deepens the trauma and uncertainty in our communities,” he said. Members of community-based organisations in Matazu and Batsari Local Government Areas described the incident as a reflection of the broader security crisis facing the state. Speaking to Daily Trust, Musa Lawal, a member of one of the organisations, urged both the federal and state governments to intensify efforts against banditry. “The abduction of a retired Major General clearly shows that no one is immune. We need decisive action, improved intelligence gathering and sustained military operations to dismantle these criminal networks,” he said. Another community activist, Aisha Bello Sani, said the impact of insecurity on local economies had become severe. Daily Trust gathered that levies have been placed on communities that wish to farm, with the gunmen insisting that huge sums be paid by farmers before accessing their farmlands. “Many markets are no longer active, businesses are closing, and agricultural production has dropped because people are afraid to move around. Security is directly linked to economic survival,” she said. Family members of the retired General in Kaduna and Batsari LGA in Katsina appealed to security agencies to intensify rescue efforts and ensure the safe return of the victims. “We are praying for their safe return. General Batsari served this country with dedication and honour. We appeal to the authorities to do everything possible to rescue him and his wife unharmed,” a family member said. ‘Politics fuelling insecurity’ A Katsina-based security analyst and former military intelligence officer, Abubakar Ibrahim, said the recent surge in killings and abductions may be connected to political developments ahead of the next election cycle. He said there appears to be a recurring pattern in which incidents of kidnapping and violent attacks increase as elections draw closer. “There is a clear pattern. Each time the country approaches an election period, incidents of kidnapping and violent attacks begin to escalate. This gives room to believe that insecurity is being manipulated for political purposes,” he said. Abubakar expressed concern that insecurity has continued despite ongoing military operations across Katsina and neighbouring states, arguing that the challenge extends beyond the battlefield. “The military has been active, no doubt, but the major problem is the absence of strong political will to confront insecurity decisively. Without firm commitment from political leaders, military efforts alone cannot end the crisis,” he said. He also cautioned leaders of vigilante groups and the Katsina State Community Security Watch Corps (C-Watch) against actions that could provoke reprisals from armed groups, citing the recent violence in Kiliya village, Kuki ward of Dutsinma Local Government Area. “What happened in Kiliya is a painful reminder. Vigilantes and C-Watch officials must be properly guided and warned against any action that could trigger retaliation from bandits because it is always innocent villagers who suffer the consequences,” he said. Abubakar called for stronger coordination among security agencies, community watch groups and political authorities, stressing that only a united, intelligence-driven approach can reverse the worsening security situation. “There must be synergy and clear coordination. Without collective resolve and cooperation, we will continue to witness a repeat of these tragic incidents,” he added. From Ibrahim Musa Giginyu, Abdullahi Yamadi (Katsina) & Yusha’u A. Ibrahim (Bauchi) UPDATE NEWS: Nigerians can now invest ₦2.5 million on premium domains and profit about ₦17-₦25 million. All earnings paid in US Dollars. Rather than wonder, click here to find out how it works.

Youtube has started to artificially slow down video load times if you use Firefox

I dont believe this will have the desired affect Google thinks it will. I, personally, will never buy Premium or switch to Chrome without an AD block. If anything, I will just download via linux or just not watch Youtube anymore.

Youtube send a Letter to Grayjay Creator

YouTube legal wants Futo to release apis and user data to them as they believe Grayjay is violating their terms. Grayjay doesn’t store user data nor is it using their APIs so the terms don’t apply Futo will not be removing Grayjay and won’t be complying with a request that cannot be fulfilled. Other details: YouTube Premium’s download feature still requires an Internet connection to access content downloaded. Louis makes the point of being tired of paying for products and services that end up giving you less and less, which is part of the reason why Grayjay was created Content creators shouldn’t fear of being banned by an temperamental AI that could cripple their livelihood without an explanation which Grayjay attempts to solve as viewers can still access their content on Rumble, Twitch and other platforms if they get banned on Youtube. Good on Louis for sticking to his guns.

Bulletins and International News Discussion from April 20th to April 26th, 2026 - Countering the Blockade of the Blockade With Two More Blockades?

Anyone following following AI reporting by Ed Zitron? The industry looks really bad. $65 billion max in total revenue across the entirety of AI when Western tech media really wants you to believe the entire world economy revolves around AI now. The entire industry — including OpenAI and Anthropic’s theoretical revenues of $13.1 billion and $4.5 billion — hit around $65 billion last year, and that includes the revenues from providing compute generated by neoclouds like CoreWeave and hyperscalers like Microsoft. For reference Lenovo, the company behind the Thinkpad laptops, has $80 billion in revenue.. Except Lenovo actually makes money. There’s this image from Western media anywhere where the entire world economy would collapse if the AI bubble bursts, or at minimum would cause a DotCom or 2008 style crash but it wouldn’t be anywhere near that big. Nobody would notice if Lenovo disappeared overnight. The more I read from Ed Zitron the more that the AI craze looks like the NFT bubble. Front page of Ed Zitron’s reporting: https://wheresyoured.at/

Youtube stopped working for me today when using uBlock Origin in Firefox or Vivaldi with anti-ad enabled.

Ad blockers assert your belief in the web browser as user agent, not server agent We know you’re using an ad blocker. How dare you. Alphabet’s cross-subsidy, and the political value of controlling the Overton window, allows Youtube to remain publicly accessible. You can get double-penetrated with Youtube Premium, first on the subscription fee then on the usage analytics.

Black Voters May Be Abandoning the Dems—But They'll Never Be Republicans

This article was written by Jeff Charles. A podcaster and political contributor who has appeared on fox News and Newsmax. He’s also anti sensible gun control, transphobic and believes being trans is just ignoring biology, believes that schools should ban books that have “ideology” in them (anything queer), thinks kids are being indoctrinated just because it occasionally comes up that there are different ways of being a person, says he’s an anarchist but will say libertarian sometimes to avoid “making people think he’s crazy” but just doing that shows that he doesn’t actually understand what anarchism is (or how crazy some libertarians are), and also talks about how the left wants Americans to be dependent on the state (all social programs). He’s also on point for some things, specifically things that most libertarians ascribe to, like fuck cops and anti drug war. But like most libertarians, he only believes in his “do whatever you want and leave me alone” mentality when it lines up with his personal beliefs. I don’t disagree that there are black voters who are frustrated with the dems, but this is not a very good article and is written by an ass who has to push the idea so he can continue to be brought onto Fox News and Newsmax to talk about it and so his site gets new subscribers. Subscribers that have to pay 50 bucks a year for his premium content. Which I’m honestly surprised doesn’t cost more. He’s also partnered with Doni Anthony who has his own site/substack, which when you’re on the landing page, the second article is, well, it requires subscribing and I’m not gonna do that. But it’s about a bill called the Inclusive Democracy Act of 2023 which is about restoring voting rights to people with criminal records/felonies who have done their time, the article is about the “hidden” reason the democrats support the bill, which is a far right conspiracy that average voters would never vote for a democrat so they have to make new voters to be able to win. It’s all baseless conspiracy stuff and is the same thought process for the “illegal immigrants voting” conspiracy. The point is that an article is only as reliable as the author is, and this author is just crap.

Dude is against open source cuz "it mathematically leads to monopoly" while working for Microsoft.

He’s playing into that absurd liberal “If you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product” false dichotomy. Here’s a hot tip for anyone who still believes that mantra: there’s absolutely no reason why you won’t become the product while you’re also paying for the service. In fact, due to the nature of capitalism, the companies which manage to sell your data or to manipulate you and which manage to get you to pay for it simultaneously are going to be the most successful over time (all things being equal for argument’s sake.) You think that if you’re paying you’re not going to be manipulated, like it’s some sort of social contract in the era of digital media? Lol. The entire conventional PR industry prior to the advent of computers has been predicated upon both manipulating you and getting you to pay for it. But you only need to look at any Google paid services (e.g. YouTube premium) or Roblox or anything similar to see people both paying for it and getting manipulated and being harvested for data to illustrate that his claim is entirely bogus. This guy talks like a guru. And I mean that in the most derogatory way possible.

nina.apsr (394 followers)

curhat sini aja, gak berisik

U.S. and Iran draft deal, pending Trump approval; Netanyahu orders IDF to take 70% of Gaza; Kenya refuses to be “dumping ground” for Ebola

U.S. and Iran near preliminary MOU to extend ceasefire 60 days and open permanent peace talks, reports say. Oman tells Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent it has “no plans” to participate in Hormuz toll plan. Trump team quietly developing indirect financing mechanisms for future payment to Iran. U.S. oil stockpiles fall for fifth straight week. Israeli officials privately urge Trump to abandon Iran talks, assassinate lead negotiator, report says. Israeli strikes kill 31 across Lebanon on Thursday. Israeli forces push north of Litani River. UNICEF: 11 children killed or injured by Israel daily in Lebanon. Lebanese and Israeli military officials to hold U.S.-brokered security talks. Israeli attacks kill at least 14 Palestinians in northern Gaza on Thursday. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu orders IDF to expand control to 70% of Gaza. UN report documents Israeli rape, sexual abuse of Palestinians. Israel approves major settlement expansion plan in Jordan Valley. AIPAC routes millions to Michigan Senate candidate Haley Stevens through third-party processor. DOJ sues Massachusetts over refusal to issue undercover license plates to ICE. Supreme Court rules 5-4 for Black Mississippi death row inmate. Sen. Susan Collins responds to campaign rival Graham Platner after Platner says she sent him to “die in Iraq.” RSF kills at least 30 civilians in North Kordofan attack. Guatemala agrees to joint U.S. military strikes on its soil. At least 52 killed in clashes between rival FARC factions. U.S. designates Brazil’s two largest criminal gangs “terrorist organizations.” Mexico’s lower house approves constitutional amendment allowing elections to be nullified over foreign interference. Kenyan court suspends U.S. Ebola quarantine facility. Russian drone crashes into Romanian apartment building. FROM DROP SITE: Tyre is Now the Epicenter of Israel’s Assault on Lebanon Hungry Palestinians in Gaza Protest World Central Kitchen Scaling Back Amid Rising Food Costs and Israeli Blockade Drop Site is now live on WhatsApp. Get our latest reporting, podcasts, and breaking news, delivered directly. Join the channel here. This is Drop Site Daily, our free daily news recap. We send it Monday through Friday. Today’s edition is being sent to more than 750,000 subscribers. Help us grow that number by forwarding and recommending this newsletter. Subscribe now 🛒 Get your “Drop [Site] News/Not Bombs” Hoodie here: Get Your Hoodie U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a Cabinet meeting in the White House on May 27, 2026 in Washington, D.C. Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images. Subscribe now Iran and Ceasefire U.S. and Iran near preliminary MOU to extend ceasefire 60 days and open permanent peace talks, reports say: U.S. and Iranian negotiators have drafted a preliminary memorandum of understanding to extend their ceasefire for 60 days and begin negotiations toward permanently ending the war, U.S. officials told Al Jazeera on Thursday—though the framework still requires President Donald Trump’s final approval. The deal, also reported by Axios, entails unrestricted vessel traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and a staged U.S. lifting of its naval blockade on Iranian ports. Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency denied the deal was finalized, with a source close to the negotiations saying “any narrative from Western sources about the finalisation of the matter is not valid” until Iran formally notifies its Pakistani mediator. An Iranian official confirmed separately to Drop Site’s Jeremy Scahill that Tehran had agreed to what mediators said was final draft language of a memorandum of understanding. However, a “deep distrust” of Trump is preventing any official announcement. According to the official, Iran is unable to rule out further U.S.-Israeli strikes. “Some voices on the Iranian side are concerned that President Trump may reconsider his position at the last moment,” the official said, adding that Iran would not consider Trump’s decision final until U.S. “financial markets close at the end of the week.” Iran also warned Trump would likely mischaracterize the privately agreed terms to promote his “victor” narrative. On Friday morning, Trump said he would be convening a meeting in the Situation Room, reiterating his demands in a post on Truth Social. Iran must “agree that they will never have a Nuclear Weapon or Bomb,” he posted, while also calling for the Strait of Hormuz to be “immediately open, no tolls” to unrestricted shipping, and for any remaining naval mines to be removed or detonated. He said ships affected by what he described as a “our amazing and unprecedented Naval Blockade” could now “start the process of ‘heading home’.” Trump also said enriched nuclear material buried underground after earlier U.S. strikes would be “unearthed by the United States…in close coordination and conjunction with the Islamic Republic of Iran, plus the International Atomic Energy Agency, and DESTROYED,” and added that “no money will be exchanged, until further notice.” Iran’s parliament speaker and chief negotiator in indirect talks with the United States, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, issued a warning on X on Friday as negotiations continue: “We do not obtain concessions through negotiations. We obtain them with our missiles,” adding that “we have no trust in guarantees or promises, only in actions.” Ghalibaf also said, “We will not take any step before the other side acts first,” and concluded that “the winner of any agreement is the one better prepared for war the next day.” Oman tells Bessent it has “no plans” to participate in Hormuz toll plan: U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Thursday that the Omani ambassador had assured him the country has “no plans” to participate in any effort to impose fees on ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz. The exchange comes a day after Trump warned that “Oman will behave just like everybody else, or we’ll have to blow them up.” Bessent said he warned the ambassador of possible sanctions. Iran has recently denied that it plans to charge tolls, describing its fee framework instead as pilotage and navigation service fees comparable to systems used by Turkey, Australia, and Canada, intended in part to offset war damages. Trump team quietly developing indirect financing mechanisms for future payment to Iran: With President Donald Trump unwilling to authorize any arrangement that could be framed as a direct cash payment to Iran, his team has been quietly developing alternative financing mechanisms, three anonymous U.S. officials told the New York Times. Gulf Arab states have been lobbied to underwrite Iran’s postwar reconstruction through a $300 billion investment fund, while a separate mechanism under discussion would unfreeze Iranian assets held by Qatar, which would then purchase medicines and feedstock for direct transfer to Iran—both steps requiring U.S. approval. U.S. oil stockpiles fall for fifth straight week: U.S. commercial crude inventories fell 3.3 million barrels to 441.7 million barrels—about 2% below the five-year seasonal average—for a fifth consecutive week, the Energy Information Administration reported Thursday. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve also dropped by 9.1 million barrels to a total of 365.1 million barrels. Separately on Thursday, Exxon Mobil Senior Vice President Neil Chapman warned that a price spike is “two weeks or three weeks” away, saying inventories are approaching “unheard of” lows and that physical Brent crude could spike to $150–$160 per barrel; Brent futures closed under $94 Thursday as markets held out hope for a U.S.-Iran deal. Israeli officials privately urge Trump to abandon Iran talks, assassinate lead negotiator, report says: Israeli officials are privately pressing the Trump administration to scrap nuclear negotiations with Iran, assassinate parliament speaker and lead negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, and launch a fresh round of strikes on Iranian oil infrastructure, according to reporting from Capital & Empire’s Aída Chávez. Israeli officials reportedly believe renewed attacks could trigger economic collapse and the regime change Israel sought at the outset of the war. Read Chávez’s full piece here. Lebanon Casualty count: At least 3,355 people have been killed, and 10,095 wounded in Israeli attacks on Lebanon since March 2, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry. Israeli strikes and forced displacement orders across southern Lebanon: Israeli strikes killed at least six people in southern Lebanon on Friday, according to the National News Agency, including four in an airstrike at the Abbasiyah junction and one in an attack on Deir Qanoun al-Nahr. A municipal police officer in the town of Aaba was killed in a drone strike on his hometown. Rescue teams recovered the bodies of two victims after searching through the rubble of a house struck by Israeli aircraft in Tyre Dibba. The Israeli military issued forced displacement orders Friday ordering residents of Ansariya, Al-Kharayeb, Shabriha, Sarafand, Adloun, and Baisariya to immediately evacuate north of the Zahrani River, claiming it was “compelled to act forcefully” against Hezbollah in the area. Israeli strikes kill 31 across Lebanon on Thursday: At least 31 people were killed and 68 wounded Thursday in Israeli attacks across Lebanon, according to the country’s Health Ministry. Israeli forces push north of Litani River: The Israeli military crossed the Litani River from the Zawtar and Yuhmur areas on Thursday, deepening the assault on Lebanese territory, according to Press TV correspondent Hadi Hoteit, in an attempt to advance on the Arnon hill and the historic Beaufort Castle area. The move has been questioned by Israeli analysts and former generals, who say that moving into the area puts the army at risk of entering a “kill zone,” where Hezbollah has a strategic advantage—and as Hezbollah has recently achieved what Hoteit called a “micro-air superiority” with its effective use of FPV drones. UNICEF: 11 children killed or injured by Israel daily in Lebanon: 11 children have been killed or injured every 24 hours over the past week in Lebanon despite a nominal ceasefire, UNICEF said via L’Orient Today. UNICEF described the toll as “staggering,” with spokesperson Ricardo Pires stating on Friday that 15 children were killed and 62 injured in the past seven days, citing figures from the Lebanese Ministry of Health, adding that “the vast majority of these children were impacted by airstrikes in south Lebanon.” At least seven children were killed and 30 injured on Thursday, according to the Ministry. Lebanese and Israeli military officials to hold U.S.-brokered security talks: Lebanese and Israeli military officials are set to hold their first security talks on Friday in Washington, D.C., amid Israel’s ongoing military assault in southern Lebanon, according to the Associated Press. Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said “nothing can justify” Israel’s continued “assaults” on southern Lebanon, calling for an immediate ceasefire and full Israeli withdrawal. Meanwhile, Hezbollah’s parliamentary bloc criticized the talks, saying Lebanon’s authorities were “compromising both sovereignty and rights” and “actively working to obstruct” opportunities linked to regional negotiations involving its ally Iran. Israel escalates assault on Tyre: At least 15 Israeli airstrikes hit the Lebanese city of Tyre overnight Wednesday into Thursday, killing at least three people and wounding 17 others in a direct strike on a residential block near the El-Buss Palestinian refugee camp—one of the hardest nights since the start of the war, according to local civil defense official Moussa Shaalan. The assault has triggered another wave of mass displacement from Tyre, a UNESCO World Heritage city of around 160,000, where tens of thousands had remained or returned after earlier waves of bombardment; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday that Israel would “intensify our strikes” and instructed the military to “step on the gas even more.” Read Lylla Younes’ latest for Drop Site here. Palestine Israeli attacks on Friday: Three Palestinians were killed and several injured early Friday after Israeli drones targeted a police checkpoint in the Al-Mawasi area of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, according to WAFA. More civilians were wounded in the Al-Qarara Mawasi area after strikes led to fires igniting in tents sheltering displaced families. Five people were injured when an Israeli strike hit Al-Yarmouk Street in Gaza City, causing a fire inside a residential building. Israeli attacks kill at least 14 Palestinians in northern Gaza on Thursday: Israeli strikes killed at least 14 Palestinians on Thursday across northern Gaza, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Among the attacks, an Israeli drone strike killed at least one person and wounded several others after targeting a group of civilians in Gaza City’s Al-Zaytoun neighborhood, Shehab News reported. Civilians were forced to evacuate areas around Al-Aqsa Hospital in central Deir al-Balah on Thursday. Israeli strikes hit the area’s recently emptied homes and burned tents sheltering displaced families, destroying entire residential blocks, according to Eyad Amawi of the Gaza Relief Committee. In Al-Shati refugee camp west of Gaza City, residents returned to devastation after Thursday evening strikes. Drop Site contributor Abdel Qader Sabbah sent footage of the scene from Al-Shati, available here. One resident told Sabbah that he received a phone call from an Israeli officer ordering the evacuation of an area of roughly 300 meters. The officer claimed a military target was present. “I told him there is no military target. Everyone here is civilian,” the resident said. Netanyahu orders IDF to expand control to 70% of Gaza: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday he has directed the Israeli military to seize 70% of the Gaza Strip, up from the roughly 60% Israel currently controls which goes beyond the agreed upon “Yellow Line” in the ceasefire agreement. “At this point, we are fully in control of 60%of the territory of the Gaza Strip… and my directive is to get to… 70%,” Netanyahu said in an interview at a conference in the occupied West Bank, while an audience member cheered in the background, urging him to take 100% of the Strip. “Wait, let’s go in order. First 70%. Let’s start with that,” he responded. Hamas warns ceasefire faces “risk of collapse”: In a statement Thursday condemning an Israeli airstrike on an apartment in central Gaza City on Wednesday that killed 10 people, including five children and two women, Hamas warned that the recent escalation of hostilities signals Israel’s attempt “to return to the brutal war of extermination that lasted for two full years on Gaza.” Hamas called on the U.S. and ceasefire guarantor countries to condemn Israel’s violations and take “serious and urgent steps” to enforce the agreement. UN report documents Israeli rape, sexual abuse of Palestinians: A new United Nations report submitted by Secretary-General António Guterres—documenting the sexual abuse of Palestinians in Israeli detention—has added Israeli forces to a list of parties accused of conflict-related sexual violence, according to Haaretz. The report names the Israel Defense Forces, Israel Prison Service, and a border police counterterrorism unit, and documents 31 victims since 2023 from the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank, including men, women, and children. It says the reported abuses included “rape, including with objects, gang rape,” as well as “physical violence to the genitals, instances of targeted shooting of the genitals.” The U.N. cited what it described as a “systematic lack of accountability,” adding that its findings should be viewed as “indicative rather than comprehensive” as Israel continues to deny investigators access and detainees continue to face “explicit threats” from Israeli forces aimed at preventing them from reporting abuse. Israeli forces shut down Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron: Israeli forces on Friday closed the Ibrahimi Mosque to worshippers in Hebron, the occupied West Bank “until further notice,” according to WAFA. The acting director of the sanctuary, Hammam Abu Morkhia, described the move as a “blatant violation” of the mosque’s sanctity. The Palestinian Ministry of Awqaf and Religious Affairs condemned the closure, warning it reflects attempts to alter the religious and historical status quo in Hebron. Israel approves major settlement expansion plan in Jordan Valley: Israeli authorities have approved a large-scale settlement expansion plan in the Jordan Valley, according to the Palestinian Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission. The commission said the plan targets the Misawa settlement built on Palestinian land in the Al-Far’a Valley area of Jericho and includes 517 new housing units across about 1,692 dunams, along with infrastructure, roads, and public facilities intended to expand the settlement into a fully integrated complex. France refers Israeli abuse of Gaza flotilla detainees to prosecutor: France has referred the treatment of its nationals detained by Israel last week as a part of the Global Sumud Flotilla to the public prosecutor, Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot announced Friday, citing a consular report documenting sexual violence, exposure to cold, beatings, and repeated humiliation of French citizens. The Global Sumud Flotilla was seized by Israeli forces in international waters during an attempt to deliver aid to Gaza; activists report widespread abuse, with at least 15 cases of sexual assaults, including rape. Gaza civilians protest WCK meal cuts as Iran war drives up food costs: World Central Kitchen, the largest provider of hot meals in Gaza, halved its daily distribution from roughly one million meals to 500,000 this month, citing financial pressures driven by the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. The move leaves thousands of Palestinian kitchen workers suddenly unemployed, sparking protests. “We truly have nothing. Where are we supposed to work? How are we supposed to feed our children? I sit waiting at the community kitchens from 8 in the morning. This is the result,” one man said at a demonstration. Read the latest from Abdel Qader Sabbah and Sharif Abdel Kouddous for Drop Site here. U.S. News By Julian Andreone, with Ryan Grim. Have a tip on Capitol Hill? Email Andreone at [email protected]. AIPAC routes millions to Rep. Haley Stevens through third-party processor: AIPAC has shifted how it funds the Senate primary campaign of Michigan Rep. Haley Stevens, according to a new investigation by the Detroit News. The group is now routing donor money through a third-party processor called Democracy Engine to prevent AIPAC’s name from appearing prominently in campaign filings. A separate pro-Israel super PAC also launched a $5.3 million ad blitz backing Stevens, giving her a financial advantage over progressive challengers Mallory McMorrow and Abdul El-Sayed. DOJ sues Massachusetts over refusal to issue undercover license plates to ICE: The Justice Department sued Massachusetts Thursday over the state’s refusal to issue confidential license plates to federal immigration agents, arguing the policy discriminates against ICE and CBP in violation of the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause—one of four such lawsuits filed Wednesday and Thursday against Massachusetts, Maine, Washington, and Oregon. Governor Maura Healey rejected the suit as another “specious complaint against political enemies,” arguing that confidential plates are reserved for criminal law enforcement and that ICE’s civil enforcement work does not qualify. Supreme Court rules 5-4 for Black Mississippi death row inmate: The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Terry Pitchford, a Black death row inmate from Mississippi who argued racial bias tainted the jury that convicted him of capital murder, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh writing for a 5-4 majority. Pitchford’s trial featured 11 white and one Black juror, and was prosecuted by Doug Evans—a now-retired prosecutor with a documented history of dismissing Black jurors. The ruling entitles Pitchford to a new trial in state court. Collins responds to Platner regarding the Iraq War: MaineSenator Susan Collins answered a claim made by her senatorial opponent, Graham Platner, in a New York Times interview that she sent him to “die in Iraq” by voting for that war. “That was Platner’s decision to serve,” she told a reporter. “He was not drafted.” Platner responded later on Thursday by saying that Collins, “all these years later,” had decided “to blame those of us who, in our late teens and early 20s, signed up to serve our country.” Trump-appointed acting U.S. attorney dropped gun charge against Israeli linked to illegal Nevada biolab: An acting U.S. attorney, appointed by Trump, dropped a federal gun charge against Ori Solomon, an Israeli immigrant arrested during an investigation into a suspected illegal biolab in Nevada, citing the “interests of justice” with no public explanation. The property contained refrigerators filled with unidentified vials and shared similarities with a California lab, which reportedly had samples labeled with diseases including HIV, malaria, and Ebola. Hundreds protest Jerusalem real estate expo in Manhattan: Hundreds of demonstrators rallied outside the Hilton Midtown in Manhattan Thursday evening to protest the Jerusalem Comes to NYC real estate expo, which was attended by Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion and marketed properties in Jerusalem, with organizers accusing sponsors of facilitating Palestinian displacement and promoting settlement expansion. Protesters also opposed a parallel aliyah fair sponsored by Nefesh B’Nefesh, a settler recruitment event encouraging immigration to Israel. Trump admin moves to vacate enforcement order against Winklevoss twins’ Gemini crypto exchange: The Commodity Futures Trading Commission asked a New York federal judge Wednesday to vacate a January 2025 consent order against Gemini Trust, calling the original complaint one that “should not have been filed.” The cryptocurrency exchange was founded by Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, who donated to Trump’s 2024 campaign. The order included a $5 million penalty and an injunction barring Gemini from making false statements to the agency, stemming from misrepresentations made in 2017 about a Bitcoin futures contract. Former CFTC Chair Tim Massad called the move “very unusual.” Other International News RSF kills at least 30 civilians in North Kordofan attack: Rapid Support Forces attacked several villages near Bara in North Kordofan state on Thursday, killing at least 30 civilians, according to Sudan Tribune. Approximately 20 RSF combat vehicles struck the Al-Murra, Um Saadoun al-Sharif, and Al-Radha areas. Bara, the second-largest city in North Kordofan, is currently under RSF control after changing hands multiple times during the conflict; the Sudanese Armed Forces continue to hold El Obeid, the state capital. Burhan denies consultations in UAE: Sudanese Sovereignty Council Chairman General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan flatly denied Thursday that any consultations had taken place in Bahrain, calling a recent Middle East Eye report alleging he had signaled readiness to open dialogue with the UAE “completely untrue.” Guatemala agrees to joint U.S. military strikes on its soil: Guatemala agreed to allow joint U.S. airstrikes and military operations inside its borders targeting alleged drug trafficking groups, with President Bernardo Arévalo signing off on the arrangement in a call with War Secretary Pete Hegseth last week, the New York Times reported on Thursday. The Guatemalan government later denied that report, calling it inaccurate but confirming it had sought a different arrangement. It released a May 28 letter from Defense Minister Henry Saenz to Hegseth stating his country’s “desire” to “lead, with US assistance, active military operations” against U.S.-designated drug trafficking organizations, “in accordance with existing bilateral agreements and arrangements.” Subsequent reporting from El País claimed that the plans were geared toward a media spectacle, with one source telling the Spanish paper, “What they offered us was to select one or two places to carry out bombings and televise it all.” At least 52 killed in clashes between rival FARC factions: At least 52 guerrilla fighters were killed in clashes between two rival FARC dissident factions vying for control of a cocaine production region in Colombia, according to a statement Thursday by one of the groups involved—the most violent such fighting in recent months. The clashes pitted a faction known as Iván Mordisco against Calarca Córdoba; though the latter group is currently in peace talks with President Gustavo Petro while Iván Mordisco remains in conflict with authorities after Petro suspended a bilateral ceasefire with the faction in 2024. U.S. designates Brazil’s two largest criminal gangs “terrorist organizations”: Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Thursday that the Trump administration will designate Brazil’s Primeiro Comando da Capital and Comando Vermelho as Foreign Terrorist Organizations effective June 5. A foreign affairs adviser to the country’s president, Lula da Silva, welcomed international cooperation on money laundering and arms trafficking but warned that any “pretext for intervention” in Brazilian sovereignty would be “unacceptable.” His opponent, the right-wing candidate Flavio Bolsonaro, said he personally petitioned for the designations during meetings with U.S. officials in Washington this week. Mexico’s lower house approves constitutional amendment allowing elections to be nullified over foreign interference: Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies approved a constitutional amendment Thursday, 307 to 128, that would add foreign interference—defined as illicit financing, disinformation campaigns, digital manipulation, and pressure from foreign governments or media—as grounds for nullifying an election. President Claudia Sheinbaum cited repeated electoral interference from Washington throughout the region. The measure still requires Senate approval and is unlikely to affect the next federal elections in June 2027. Kenyan court suspends U.S. Ebola quarantine facility: A Kenyan High Court judge suspended a planned U.S. Ebola quarantine facility on Friday, hours before it was set to open, after a human rights group filed a legal challenge arguing the secretive arrangement raised “grave constitutional concerns.” The facility—a 50-bed isolation unit at Laikipia Air Base, about 200 kilometers from Nairobi—intended to quarantine U.S. nationals arriving from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and was established to avoid repatriating exposed Americans to U.S. soil, a policy which drew criticism from U.S. doctors and Kenyan health workers alike. Kenya’s doctors’ union issued a 48-hour strike alert Thursday, warning Kenya should not become a “dumping ground” for Ebola cases. Russian drone crashes into Romanian apartment building, injuring two: A Russian drone reportedly headed toward Ukraine crashed into a residential building in the Romanian city of Galati overnight Friday, injuring two people and triggering a fire that forced evacuations, in what Romania’s Foreign Ministry called a serious violation of international law. The country’s president, Nicusor Dan, said Romania would not accept Russia’s war “being transferred to its citizens.” NATO, of which Romania is a part, also condemned Russia’s “reckless behaviour” in response to the crash. If you want to continue getting this newsletter, you don’t have to do anything. But if this is too much—we do try to be mindful of your inbox—you can unsubscribe from this newsletter while continuing to get the rest of our reporting. Just go into your account here at this link, scroll down, and toggle the button next to “Drop Site Daily“ to the off setting. It looks like this: Subscribe now Leave a comment From Drop Site News via This RSS Feed.

ennasty (370 followers)

lover of the world
🪷 guided by beauty, soul and energy

Oreshnik Post-Strike Analysis

Firstly, it has come to be known that while Kiev was hammered with an assortment of ballistic and cruise missiles, not to mention drones, the Oreshnik did not actually strike Kiev itself, but rather the neighboring Bila Tserkva airbase not far away from the capital city. This was stated by several sources, both Ukrainian and Russian. FighterBomber believes the Oreshnik cannot be used on Kiev because it’s not exactly a precision weapon. We’ve analyzed the possibilities before and arrived at the likelihood that the Oreshnik submunitions are not independently maneuverable themselves, but are rather aimed kinetically by their “bus” in outerspace like most nuclear MIRV warheads. This means they are unlikely to achieve true precision on the order of 5-10 meters CEP like Iskanders, Kalibrs, etc. Granted, that’s not to say the Oreshnik wouldn’t destroy the target it was pointed at—it’s simply that it would likely destroy quite a few things around that target also. And in a major population center like Kiev, that’s not quite tenable. The [Iranian Khorramshahr-4 IRBM] groupings of the submunitions appear much more widely dispersed, which appears to indicate the Oreshnik is quite a bit more accurate. A prominent Iranian analyst believes the reason for this is that the Khorramshahr needs to eject its submunitions much earlier in order to prevent US THAAD systems from targeting the entire bus which carries them. This causes them to disperse more widely during re-entry, making them less accurate. Since Russia doesn’t have to contend with true exo-atmospheric ballistic missile defense in Ukraine, it can dial in the submunition release much closer to the ground, making it more precise—at least according to this theory, which is plausible. It’s like shotgun buckshot or birdshot: the closer you fire, the tighter the grouping of pellets. Another interesting aspect was the announcement by Ukraine that Russia began to strike Kiev’s water supply facilities. […] If true, it would represent another small milestone in a potential “gloves-off” shift of strategies from the Kremlin. For those that read the premium piece yesterday and recall my theory that Zelensky and his gang likely provokes such Russian attacks—Oreshnik and all—on purpose because it suits the political agenda to paint Russia as an aggressive force hellbent on destroying civilian cities. Medvedev earlier appeared to share that opinion almost verbatim in his own post.

larseijssen (62 followers)

Lars Eijssen, maar dan Premium.
📍Amsterdam

“We will give our chest to your bullets, but will not cede an inch of our land”: farmers resist city expansion in southern India

Farmers in the south Indian state of Karnataka have been protesting for over a year in defense of their land. On May 10, day 426 of their protest against the notified acquisition of fertile, irrigated land in Ramanagara district to expand Bangalore city, farmers occupied the Byramangala roundabout. Cutting off all four connecting roads with bullock carts and tractors, over 3,000 farmers protested in this roundabout. Scores of cows and bulls they brought along chewed on the cattle feed in this critical node on a state highway, whose occupation disconnected the neighboring industrial areas of Bidadi and Harohalli.​ What had been a sit-in demonstration under a tent on a square outside a temple at the roundabout, which rarely affected vehicular movement, escalated into this blockade after the state cabinet’s approval of the acquisition of 7,481 acres across nine villages on April 30. The preliminary notification, issued by the state government last year, on March 13, 2025, had eyed over 9,600 acres across 26 villages under the two Gram Panchayats (village councils) of Byramangala and Kanchugaranahalli.​ However, the cabinet approval of only 7,481 acres does not indicate that the government is giving up on the remaining 2,000-odd acres it had initially sought, cautioned T. Yashavantha, general secretary of the state farmers union, Karnataka Prantha Raitha Sangha (KPRS).​ It is rather a ploy to seize the remaining 2,000-odd acres without providing any compensation on the grounds that it is government land, he warned. Although cultivated by farmers for over half a century, the slow movement of the bureaucratic machinery has effectively stalled the process of transferring the land’s ownership, especially to the smaller peasants, who lack the social and economic capital to see it through. But even the majority of farmers, officially owning their land and eligible for compensation, refuse to hand over their acres. The government is “dreaming when they talk about turning our villages into Greater Bangalore. They should wake up. We will not surrender our farms,” Ramaiah, president of the committee elected by the farmers from the affected villages to resist the acquisition, told the sit-in demonstration on April 25, only days before the cabinet approval. “What can they do about it? Open fire?” he challenged the state. “We will give our chest to your bullets, but will not cede an inch of our land,” he declared, drawing cheers from the protesters. The government insists that this land is needed to create a second business district to decongest Bangalore. “Did we ask them to congest Bangalore?” Ramaiah demands to know. “If they want to decongest Bangalore, let them build industries and create jobs in the arid regions in Karnataka’s north, so people from there won’t have to migrate to Bangalore in search of jobs,” said Ramaiah, speaking to Peoples Dispatch, before his address to the demonstration. AI vs farmers? While the state government’s touting of this project as India’s first AI-powered “work-live-play” themed city might hold a certain charm for a section of educated, upwardly mobile urban elite in Bangalore, “Will AI produce food?” Ramaiah asks. “We do.” The 72-year-old patriarch owns three acres of his ancestral land on which he is now raising his second generation, growing millets, vegetables, and feed for cows, cultivated on his farm. “My son is also a farmer. The young never had any other livelihood opportunities here,” he said, adding that there are a total of 20,000 people in 4,000 farm-owning households, whose livelihoods are at stake in this resistance to land acquisition.​ The government has announced a compensation of 2-2.5 crore rupees (200,000-250,000 US dollars) per acre– a potentially attractive offer for large landlords. “But there are hardly any here,” added Ramaiah. “More than 85% of us are small farmers and subsistence peasants. A family of two to three brothers and their wives and children make a living on anything between half to four acres.” The compensation amount, divided between them, does little to mitigate the loss of land on which they count to sustain the generations to come. The smaller the land-holding, the more untenable monetary compensation becomes. A cool enclave in a heating country ​ Nagesh Kumar, a 45-year-old farmer who offered his pillion seat to tour the affected villages on his 100 cc, owns barely 1.75 acres, on which a family of six makes a living. “But we lack nothing,” he said, riding through the narrow, uneven, unpaved trail through the fields, towered over by timber and coconut trees, many cared for and nurtured over generations. Beneath them blossom arcanuts, mangoes, sapotas, and myriad other fruits on trees shading the ground sprawling with vegetables like babycorn, pumpkins, and cucumbers, growing alongside dense patches of napier grass for cows, and mulberry for silk worms. The temperature dropping as we rode deeper into the farmlands was unmistakable, arriving from the city, historically known for its moderate climate, but scorching at the time at nearly 40 degrees centigrade as the country reeled under unprecedented temperatures. “Can you believe you are only 30-odd kilometers from Bangalore?” Kumar asked, comparing the climate here with Malnad – the cool, rain-soaked slopes of the Western Ghats hill-range along India’s western coast. ​ The Malnad is a reference multiple farmers here make, taking pride in asserting that the trees they have nurtured over generations guard this cool enclave, despite the heat and smoke emitted by the two industrial areas on either side. “Even if the government raises the compensation to 10 crore per acre, we will never allow them to destroy all this to lay more concrete,” Kumar declared, as he halted the motorcycle at the house of Thayamma. “You must fight, not commit suicide” The middle-aged dairy farmer had gathered a delegation of women farmers at her home to meet D. Raveendran, joint secretary of the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS). The national farmers’ organization had played a leading role in the historic, country-wide farmers’ struggle that forced the central government to withdraw its pro-corporate farm laws in 2021. Accompanied by Yashwantha and Bharat Raj, the joint secretary of KPRS, which is affiliated with the AIKS, Raveendran had arrived early in the day. He had surveyed the lands and met farmers in over 10 of the notified villages before stopping over at Thayamma’s house. Heaping curses on the state government and its deputy chief minister, D K Shivkumar, who has fashioned the Greater Bangalore Township as his pet project, Thayamma declared,”I will consume poison if my land is taken.” Two farmers had already attempted suicide in protest last year.​ “You must fight, not commit suicide,” Raveendran told her, waving his fist. “We are,” she yelled back, recounting the multiple marches by the women in these villages. “We have marched with torches, we have marched with brooms, we marched with onake”, a heavy, long-handled wooden pestle used for grinding in traditional kitchens. “If need be, we will also turn them into weapons to fight the state with. But we will have nothing to live for if we lose our land,” she insisted. “Why should we give up the land that has fed us for generations, and will feed many more to come,” interjected another younger, softer-speaking woman farmer. “Well, the government is offering 2.5 crores per acre,” provoked Bharat Raj.​ “If the government is suffering from poverty, let them ask us farmers for help. We will help them through our union. But we have not asked the government for any money. We are not poor. This land has been yielding plenty for us,” she retorted calmly. “Blessed by the Suvarnamukhi River flowing on one side, and the Vrishabhavathi River, on the other, even those with just half an acre of land are able to prosper here,” maintains Ramaiah. Owning only 0.375 acres, 45 year old Manjunath is reputed in the villages as one of the most productive farmers. Photo: Pavan Kulkarni A case in point is Manjunath, whose father had left him less than half an acre of land when he passed away in 2000. “My mother was long gone. I was orphaned at the age of 19 when my father died. I was still a wayward young boy back then,” he recalled. Now, at the age of 45, he is hailed in the surrounding villages as a highly productive farmer owning one of the smallest parcels of land in the two gram panchayats. “They want to turn a skilled farmer like me into a bathroom cleaner” The gate to his house opens onto his courtyard, in whose corner is a thermocol box with two holes on the sides for air circulation, and two fans on the inside of the lid, probably extracted from old CPUs. A light bulb glows between them, heating the box with a bowl of water and fertilized eggs, marked with a sketch pen on one side to allow for even flipping every day. “Hens often lay many more eggs than they can warm to hatch. Many of them are wasted unless sold in time [to processing units]. So we place some of them in this box for warmth. When they hatch, we leave them with the hens, and they raise them,” he explained. Along the perimeter of his courtyard is a fenced patch of land where about 50 country chickens run around under the shade of a makeshift roof of dried coconut leaves tied to the stems of arecanut, papaya, and other fruit trees. “I recently sold 200 grown chickens I raised as chicks. I am raising these now,” he said. The alpha among them is one white-feathered rooster with a red crown, standing as tall as a short adult’s thigh. On one side of the fence are five young goats, chewing cud. Further up this fenced land is a pond he has dug out, barely 20 feet in diameter, and six to seven feet deep. Manjunath breeds many species of small fish here. “We use most for household consumption, but still earn about two lakh a year by selling the surplus,” he added.​ Along the perimeter of the pond are several trees, blossoming with exotics like dragon fruit, the relatively rare water caltrop, the native custard apples, and jumbo Java plum, a premium variety of Indian blackberry. Pointing to another tree dense with a small but potent local variety of lemons, he said, “These cost 15 rupees each. But I give them away as gifts to all my guests.” Across a muddy walkway along the line of fruit trees is another patch of land with a bundle of four sugar cane plants on one corner, with napier greening the rest. The harvested grass is laid out before the six cows in a shed adjoining his house. One of them is pregnant. Three others are calves, still growing, chewing on the napier he grows. A couple of them are heifers his wife was milking at the time. His son has just finished his post-secondary vocational training at an Industrial Training Institute (ITI), while his daughter is set to enroll in an engineering degree, all paid for from the revenue he generates from this tiny parcel of land. “It took me almost three decades to build all this. And now the government wants to destroy it all,” he cussed. The compensation offered by the government for his 0.375 acre, “will not even suffice to build a house in Bangalore. I will have to lease a house and make a living by cleaning their bathrooms. They want to turn a skilled farmer like me into a bathroom cleaner.” The landless An even worse prospect awaits the landless families. “About 30% of the households in the two gram panchayats own no land,” said a dairy farmer, residing a few houses beside that of Nagesh Kumar, also named Nagesh. “In this village of Chikka Byramangala, only 10 of the 40 households own land.” Nagesh explains why landless farmers are also on the frontline, resisting land acquisition. Photo: Pavan Kulkarni Renting an acre for 20,000 rupees a year, he grows napier grass to feed the five cows in the shed adjoining his small house. His wife and a daughter, schooling in 9th grade, also depend on the revenue he thus generates. “The government has fixed compensation rates per acre. But I don’t own a cent. Will they also fix a compensation rate for our lives? I know no other trade. I had no schooling. Dairy farming is all I know,” he added, explaining his anxiety about losing his only livelihood. “So we landless farmers” are also on the frontline of resistance. “As soon as I finish the morning’s labor in the fields, I sit at the protest site till evening,” coming back only in time to bring fresh fodder for the cows. “I often miss my meals, but always ensure that the cows are well-fed.” The owners from whom landless farmers like Nagesh rent farm plots are not absentee landlords, who take a share in the crop. Most of them are also small farmers, renting out land they own in excess of what is cultivable by their own family labor. Kumar has also rented out a small patch of land to 46-year-old Santosh. In his native village, near the semi-arid town of Kolar, about 70 km northwest of Bangalore, Santosh spent 10-12 lakh rupees, drilling deeper and deeper to find water to irrigate his ancestral land. None was to be found as the groundwater level had sunk deeper than he could drill. After losing all his investment in search of water, he migrated with his wife and two children to greener pastures. Growing tomatoes on the small patch he has rented from Kumar, he supplements his income from sericulture on the three acres he has rented from another farmer.​ The Ramanagara district, where these villages are located, is Karnataka’s largest silk producer, with a substantial portion of it generated from the two gram panchayats, marked for acquisition.​ Chewing on mulberry leaves, thousands of white, fattened silkworms wave and crawl over the stalks onto fresh handfuls of sprigs laid out on wooden trays, shelved over one another from floor to roof in a shed owned by Thimmayya. Among top 10% of India’s earners The 70-odd-year-old is a successful sericulturalist we ran into while riding through his five-acre farm. Outside his shed where the larvae grow, beyond the courtyard where calves feed on napier, is a yet-to-be-painted and windowed, recently built house with a portico, on whose pillars lean about 300 bamboo mountages, stacked against one another in columns. Inside each of these bamboo boards is a spiraling channel in which the worms, matured in his shed, have spun themselves into cocoons. Thimmayya explains how silk is produced. Photo: Pavan Kulkarni “In about four more days, they will be ready to be sold in the market,” either in Ramanagara, or in the town of Sidlaghatta, about 115 km north in the Chikkaballapur district, or in Kollegala, over 100 km south, depending on where the best price can be found. Even with the recent drop in price, Thimmayya expects to earn between Rs.700-800 per kilo. For the 300 kilos he estimates the cocoons to add up to, he will earn over two lakh rupees, even at the lower end of the price range. And this is the revenue from only one batch of cocoons. Soon after they are extracted from the mountage for sale, they will be replaced, after necessary disinfecting, with worms that have already matured in his shed. The shed itself will be replenished with more larvae and fresh leaves. In a year, he said, there are about six cycles of production, which will fetch him an annual revenue of over 12 lakh. He could not instantly estimate the cost of production of sericulture in particular, because family labor time often overlaps with a number of other products on his farm, including milk, coconuts, and arecanuts.​ But even 54-year-old Kaantaraju, who owns only 1.5 acres, in addition to the half acre he has rented, is placed comfortably in the country’s top 10% income group. Throughout the year, he grows a variety of micro-nutrient-rich green leaves – many unheard of by the younger urban population. 54-year-old Kaantaraju explains why he won’t cede land even if the compensation amount is doubled. Photo: Pavan Kulkarni From these greens alone, he earns a profit of 20-25 thousand rupees per month, on average. The milk production from the three cows his household has raised fetches his family another Rs. 20,000. Without even including his revenues from sericulture, the sum total already places his household earning at about double the average earnings of the economic top 10%, estimated to be Rs. 20,380 per month, by the central government’s 2023-24 Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS). Protecting the next generation against the traps of fast money Accepting instant money in crores in the form of compensation for giving up this land, he argues, will not only amount to a selfish act of choosing to spend the rest of his own life in luxury against the interests of his future generations but will also lead his two children, still studying, astray. “You are a journalist. You must have read about what the youngsters from villages do when they suddenly have money from the sale of land,” he insinuated. “But, if I instead pass on this land, generations to come can make a livelihood.” “​Even if the compensation amount is doubled,” Kaantaraju insists that he will never hand over his land – an assertion Thimmayya also reiterates. “Even if there is no rain for five years, we can still continue agriculture here. We need nothing from the government. All we ask is that they leave us alone,” Thimmayya said, clasping his palms in prayer. A wavering farmer, joining the resistance “Well, uncle, this statement of yours will be shared across all the villages,” Kumar intervened, warning, “All villages will hold you to account.” “So be it,” Thimmayya answered. “I will answer whoever comes questioning at my door,” he added, possibly referring to real estate agents he might have already entertained. Thimmayya was among the small group of farmers who had sought higher compensation, instead of outrightly resisting the government’s acquisition attempt. “Because many did not believe we could resist the government when they issued the preliminary notification. We were not unionized at the time,” Kumar recalled, as we rode to his house for evening refreshments. Although a closely knit community, like most villages are, organizing resistance in the face of the government machinery and its coercive powers was not a task they had prepared for, he added, sipping on the coffee his wife had served us. His eldest son, stepping into college years – “a topper in his class”, as Kumar says with some pride – was covering for him at his shop during his summer vacation. The younger son, in his mid-teens, ran along to pluck guavas from his farm behind the house and served them to us in the tiny living room, whose walls are coated with green slaked lime, and the roof is low – a false wooden ceiling, serving as a store room below the thatched roof.​ 45-year-old Nagesh Kumar explains how the movement grew out of a small group of determined farmers. Photo: Pavan Kulkarni “So initially, a group of about 40,” including at least one farmer from each of the 26 villages marked by the state government for acquisition, got together to discuss how to resist the acquisition, Kumar recalled, adding that veterans of farmer struggles like Yashwanth helped them organize. “Now, with one call, we can mobilize at least 3,000 farmers,” which has inspired confidence even in wavering farmers like Thimmayya to join the struggle, he said, with a certain pride about being among the early-resisting 40. His assertion about the mobilization capacity bore out in evidence just over two weeks later, when the farmers occupied the Byramangala roundabout on May 10​. “You are not alone” “We occupied the square for over 30 hours,” said Yashwantha. Then, on the evening of May 11, the deputy commissioner (DC) of Ramanagara District, “through the police surrounding us, sent us an invitation for negotiations at his office,” which has been the site of multiple confrontations before, leading to criminal cases against many of the farmers interviewed. Yashwantha led a delegation of about 15 farmers into the DC’s office. By the end of the negotiations, the DC wrote a letter to the chief secretary of the state government, explaining the intensity of the farmers’ opposition. He also reiterated their demands in the letter, calling for the cancellation of this land acquisition.​ In turn, he requested the farmers to end their agitations. While clearing the blockade of the state highway, the farmers, however, continue their sit-in demonstration at the protest site they have held for days and nights, digging in for a protracted struggle, likely to escalate with every advance by the state government towards the acquisition.​ On the other side, capital – both Indian and global – has also dug in around them, fielding the state government to soldier in their trenches. But “you are not alone”, AIKS leader Raveendran had reassured the local farmers in his address to the sit-in demonstration after his visit to the affected farmlands on April 25.​ “The KPRS will mobilize thousands and thousands of farmers from all over Karnataka to join your struggle. They will march with you in strength to Vidhan Sabha”, the state legislature in Bangalore. Should this march fail to stop the acquisition, Raveendran promised, “the AIKS will also mobilize farmers from other states in India and take this struggle to the parliament.” The post “We will give our chest to your bullets, but will not cede an inch of our land”: farmers resist city expansion in southern India appeared first on Peoples Dispatch. From Peoples Dispatch via This RSS Feed.

jualbelilaptopbekasjogja.id (74 followers)

Yang punya laptop PC rusak daripada nganggur mending dijadiin duit
siap jemput area jogja jateng
menerima borongan kantor sekolah dll
wa 081298735733

AI Is Too Expensive

AI is, as it stands, not economically viable for anybody involved other than the construction firms, NVIDIA, and the surrounding hardware companies benefitting from the irrational exuberance of a data center buildout that doesn’t appear to be happening at the speed we believed. Every AI startup loses millions or billions of dollars a year, and nobody appears to have worked out a way to stop hemorrhaging cash. Hyperscalers have invested over $800 billion in the last three years, with plans to add another $700 billion or so in 2026 and another $1 trillion in 2027, meaning that they need to make at least three trillion dollars in AI specific revenue just to break even, and $6 trillion or more for AI to be anything other than a wash. I went into detail about this (albeit at a lower, pre-2026/2027 capex number) in a premium piece last year. To give you some context, Microsoft made $281 billion, Meta $200 billion, Amazon $716 billion, and Google $402.8 billion in revenue in their most-recent fiscal years for every single product combined, for a total of $1.599 trillion. None of them will talk about their actual AI revenues. Yes, yes, I know Microsoft said that it had $37 billion in AI revenue run rate ($3.08 billion a month or so) and Amazon had $15 billion, or around $1.25 billion a month, but both of these are snapshots of single months that are meant to make it sound like they’re going to make that much in a year but in the end, you don’t actually know anything about how much money they’ve made from AI.

milagros_de_miau (148 followers)

Milagros de Miau's big book of grievances.

facts don't care about your feelings, redcaps

They believe in it only because it allows them to make more money by increasing premiums due to “increased risk” of whatever, or deny claims due to “acts of god”. If there was profit in denial, then that’s what they would do. Thats why fossil fuel industries try so hard to hide the impact they are making.

China’s Rental Market Flooded with Listings as Rents Continue to Slide - Caixin Global

It’s a little funny that Chinese media even does the “But at what cost” thing. Here’s the problem: in China, local governments are the landlords! With nearly 30% of the local government budget revenues relying on land premium (and in some cities like Guangzhou, a key manufacturing hub that is now experiencing slowed export from Trump’s tariffs, this proportion is 40+%), the plunging property prices are significantly curbing a key income source of the local governments. Somebody has got to keep the subways, rails, infrastructure, public utilities running, you know. To understand how we got to this debacle, we need to understand a little bit about China’s economic history since the reform and opening up era. A major feature since the reform era is the highly decentralized economy of China, as many reformers believed that the central planning bureaucracy under Mao was too inefficient and led to devastating output like during the Great Leap Forward. The central government grants a very large autonomy to the local governments to drive local development, and in turn, it controls the behavior of the local governments and sets national priorities through promotion of local officials. The main KPI for promotions is GDP numbers. It is no coincidence that Chinese officials are obsessed with raising the GDP numbers by any means necessary. Initially, local governments only had to pay a fixed amount of fiscal tax to the central government. This wasn’t so much a problem when most of the provinces were still poor at the start of the reform era. However, soon, by the 1980s, the coastal Southeastern cities like Shenzhen and Guangzhou were able to take advantage of their export capacities to grow very lucrative light industries and allowed them to grow a disproportionate of wealth compared to the rest of the country. Because they only had to pay a fixed amount of fiscal tax, the local governments of these coastal cities were left with a large amount of profit and soon, these cities had grown so rich that they even exempted corporate income taxes altogether. Businesses flocked to the Southeastern provinces to take advantage of the business-friendly environment and relaxed taxation. By 1993, the central government received only 20% of the national tax revenues, but was still responsible for financing large scale investments and operating the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) across the country. Meanwhile, local governments were able to pocket the rest of the wealth, but mostly concentrated in the wealthy coastal regions. The attempt to wrestle back financial control came during the 1994 Tax Sharing Reform, with two significant changes to the taxation rules: A much higher proportion of value-added tax (the most important form of tax revenues in China) would be levied by the central government, and is then redistributed back down to the local/municipal levels. (Nearly 75% goes to the central government, while only 25% are retained by the local governments) More importantly, the local governments are now responsible for financing the investments as well as operational budgets of the SOEs under their jurisdiction. Such a radical change would have far-reaching consequences. The first provinces to panick were the Three Northeastern Provinces (Heilongjing, Jilin and Liaoning), where China’s heavy industry SOEs were concentrated. Because of the huge amount of investment and budget required to run heavy industries, the local governments now suddenly tasked with financing their own budget turned to an even more radical act: privatization. As private capital took over China’s state-owned heavy industries, the “reform” resulted in mass layoffs and the ensuing economic crisis in 1994-1996, the first large scale unemployment never seen under Mao. It is estimated that between 1996-2002, more than 60 million workers in China were laid off during the privatization wave, a trend that would not be reversed until China joined the WTO in 2001 and turned itself into the famous “world factory”. But perhaps more consequential is the fact that the 1994 Tax Sharing Reform forced the local governments to look for non-tax revenues to obtain a stream of income to keep the municipalities running. And where could a local government obtain lucrative non-tax income? That’s right - by selling and leasing land. And how do you raise the land price? By driving heavy investment in property market. When Zhu Rongji officially ended the welfare housing (distributed based on seniority, rank and job responsibilities) in 1998, the age of private property market has finally taken off in China. In 2007, the subprime mortgage loan crisis hit Wall Street and kickstarted a global financial crisis with tens of millions of unemployment worldwide. The sudden slump from the American consumer market caused severe drop in tax revenues for both the central and local governments (remember, the value-added tax is the most important form of tax revenue in China). Many local governments took the signal from the central government to turn towards infrastructure investment (the infamous “4 trillion yuan stimulus”) to go all in on property market to use the land revenue to make up for the loss of income. Initially, local governments were not allowed to issue municipal bonds directly, so they turned to establishing shadow banks (LGFVs) to borrow massively from financial institutions and various unofficial sources to finance the property market development (these are known as “hidden debt” since they are off the book). Tons and tons of new housing projects were built and high speed rails connecting cities across the country. The resulting hidden debt grew so massively that by 2015, even the central government had panicked and issued a stern warning to the local governments, the famous “you’re now responsible for fetching your own kids” (i.e. the central government is tired of cleaning up your mess from reckless borrowing). Hoping that the local governments would turn more fiscally responsible, they are now given the authority to issue their own municipal bonds instead of borrowing through the shadow banks in the form of “hidden debt”. Surprisingly, or perhaps not so surprisingly, the local governments became even more reckless in their borrowing and it became a competition to drive up GDP by issuing more and more debt to invest in more and more infrastructure. Many local officials made the career promotion of their lifetime during this period, as their GDP numbers shot through the roof through reckless expansion. The property market peaked in 2021, and with the implosion of Evergrande in 2021-2023, many local governments are now running into budgetary issues since they have been relying so much on land premium to keep their provinces and cities running. It is no coincidence that the Chinese government is throwing a lot of money into slowing the free fall of the property prices (an inevitability at this point, just how much you can cushion the fall). This is because mass mortgage defaults can risk triggering a crisis in the financial sector and the local governments that rely on the land prices to stay up, and in turn, the manufacturing and tech industries that rely on the local governments subsidies to survive! This is how wealth is repeatedly being funneled to the top to prevent a larger economic crisis from happening. A scale of the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis in the US is unlikely to happen in China, because the costs are being socialized through the vast amount of the national wealth. As such, despite the amazing economic development in China over the past two decades, this has not been translated into wage growth and increase in purchasing power for your average Chinese worker. Hence, deflation sets in as their home prices fall, and people become even more cautious with spending.

Who’s Spending in Your Congressional Election? We Tracked the Front Groups Fueling the 2026 Midterms.

The bitter Michigan Senate primary was heating up earlier this month when a mystery group bought $5 million in TV ads boosting the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s preferred candidate in the Democratic race, Haley Stevens. The group had an anodyne name — the Center for Democratic Priorities — and no track record in Michigan politics. It was incorporated in Delaware seven months ago under a shroud of secrecy. Online sleuths soon discovered, however, that whoever was behind the group had used the same consulting firm employed by a super PAC affiliated with AIPACs to buy the ads. Suspicions fell on the pro-Israel lobbying shop or its super PAC affiliate, which has repeatedly created so-called “pop-up” super PACs to influence elections elsewhere. AIPAC issued a denial that it was funding the ads. Thanks to Federal Election Commission rules, voters may not know the true source of the ad campaign for months. With the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision 16 years ago, special interest groups began using a raft of loopholes to pour money into elections without disclosing who was doing the spending. Super PACs can take in unlimited donations and spend unlimited amounts — as long as they do not coordinate directly with candidates. Now, big money forces in politics are growing ever more sophisticated about exploiting legal loopholes to obscure their identity. Today, groups are setting up pop-up affiliates, gaming disclosure deadlines, and using party-specific conduits — akin to a sub-political action committee — to help deflect attention away from the origins of their cash. “All their spending on election ads immediately before a primary or general election is anonymous to voters — particularly when they use names that have no meaning.” “All their spending on election ads immediately before a primary or general election is anonymous to voters — particularly when they use names that have no meaning and have no indication of the broader groups they are tied to,” said Shanna Ports, senior legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center and a former attorney in the Federal Election Commission’s enforcement division. “They are very damaging to transparency for that reason.” In the 2026 election cycle, front groups are proliferating, with cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence industries getting in on AIPAC’s game. Groups aligned with the two tech industries have split their operations into Democratic- and Republican-aligned affiliates. The benefit can be twofold: obscuring the ultimate source of the donations, while also attracting from the large pool of partisan funders who want to give donations solely to one party. [ Related New “Dark Money” Documentary Shines Light Into the Shadows Cast by the Super-Rich](https://theintercept.com/2018/10/01/new-dark-money-documentary-shines-light-into-the-shadows-cast-by-the-super-rich/) The “pop-up” super PACs and party-affiliate PACs are not always “dark money” — a loosely defined term that generally refers to political operations that don’t disclose their donors’ identities. Nevertheless, the way they are set up can make it much more difficult for voters to follow the lavish campaign spending. Campaign finance experts say the trend is poised to continue unless Congress and the FEC decide to act. Until then, here is a guide to who is funding the groups, what they are called and how they work. Pop-Up Politics AIPAC used a complicated web of political committees to influence the Illinois primary elections in March. Whether or not it is using the same tactics in Michigan — the group did not respond to a request for comment — observers expect it to continue to hide its campaign spending in the months to come, as primary candidates battle over AIPAC’s influence. Graphic: The Intercept AIPAC itself is a tax-exempt nonprofit, which prohibits direct engagement with electoral politics. But the group is publicly affiliated with a traditional political action committee that can take donations of up to $5,000 per year; AIPAC PAC can donate directly to candidate campaigns. AIPAC’s supporters can also give to United Democracy Project, a so-called “super PAC.” United Democracy Project is openly affiliated with AIPAC, an increasingly toxic brand among Democrats. As AIPAC weighed involvement in the recent Illinois primaries, three new “pop-up” super PACs took advantage of campaign finance reporting loopholes to hide their donors’ identities. The groups — Elect Chicago Women, Affordable Chicago Now, and Chicago Progressive Partnership — were created so late in the campaign that they were only required to disclose their donors after voting in the primary was over. The groups were created so late in the campaign that they were only required to disclose their donors after voting in the primary was over. The groups’ donors were finally revealed after the election. They included two wealthy Chicago political donors: Michael Sacks, the CEO of an asset management firm, and Anthony “Tony” Davis, the co-founder of a private equity firm. Before those groups filed official campaign finance reports, journalists had built a circumstantial case linking them to AIPAC through the use of campaign vendors linked to the pro-Israel lobby group. Eventually, the hard truth emerged. FEC reports filed after the election revealed that Elect Chicago Women and Affordable Chicago Now got funds from United Democracy Project. Then Elect Chicago Women turned around and handed $1 million to the third group, Chicago Progressive Partnership. [ Related AIPAC Is Flooding Illinois With Cash. Pro-Palestine Groups Are Backing Kat Abughazaleh.](https://theintercept.com/2026/02/12/aipac-illinois-kat-abughazaleh-congress-pal-pac/) That complicated two-step helped Chicago Progressive Partnership conceal its donors as it was running ads that many observers said were misleading. In Illinois’s 9th Congressional District, the group attempted to boost one pro-Palestinian candidate in an apparent attempt to harm another, the influencer Kat Abughazaleh. Abughazaleh ultimately lost. In the same congressional race, Elect Chicago Women spent money to support state Sen. Laura Fine and oppose progressive Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, who won. In other races, it was easier for voters to track how AIPAC-aligned groups were spending their money. In some of the contests, the pop-up super PACs never popped up. Instead, United Democracy Project spent directly. In Michigan, the new group Center for Democratic Priorities has yet to file any registration documents with the FEC. If it is classifying itself as a super PAC, it will not have to file disclosures revealing its donors until July 15, according to Ports. Gambling on Races With AI and crypto becoming increasingly ubiquitous, Washington is trying to sort out the regulations that could have huge impacts on these industries. In turn, crypto and AI businesses are making huge investments in electoral politics. So far, however, crypto and AI have taken a different approach to influencing elections than AIPAC. Rather than using “pop-up” super PACs, they have divided their influence operations into Republican and Democratic affiliates. The biggest crypto super PAC is called Fairshake. The group is funded by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, as well as two crypto companies the firm has invested in, Coinbase and Ripple Labs. Graphic: The Intercept The venture capital firm’s co-founder Marc Andreessen rose to fame in the 1990s for co-founding the web browser Netscape. More recently he has become notable as one of Donald Trump’s biggest defenders in the tech world and a frequent visitor to Trump’s Florida estate Mar-a-Lago. Fairshake spends money on Republican primaries through its GOP affiliate, Defend American Jobs, and Democratic races through an outfit called Protect Progress. Fairshake has portrayed itself as an equal-opportunity shop, but the group’s extraordinary spending in favor of Republican candidate Bernie Moreno in 2024, when he ousted former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in Ohio, opened it up to accusations of partisanship. [ Related Crypto Critic Maxine Waters’s New Primary Foe Got Over Two-Thirds of Money From Crypto](https://theintercept.com/2026/04/18/maxine-waters-crypto-primary/) Brown is now running to return to the Senate against JD Vance’s Republican replacement, Jon Husted. His rhetoric this time around has been notably more muted when it comes to crypto. Fairshake’s split personality allows donors to pick a single-party affiliate for its campaign giving. Democratic megadonor and angel investor Ron Conway donated to Protect Progress in 2024, for instance, only to announce later that year that he was breaking from the network over its support of Moreno. The model of using party-specific affiliates may be less deceptive than “pop-up” super PACs, Ports said, but it is still misleading. “They know that a Republican voter doesn’t want to hear from a super PAC that supports Democratic candidates. [Republican voters] are not going to trust that messaging as much, or vice versa,” she said. “They are dividing this money up to try to present their message as persuasively as possible to their target audiences.” Fairshake’s spending on Republicans has not gone far enough for some figures in the fractious crypto world. The Winklevoss twins — the brothers behind a top Coinbase competitor, a cryptocurrency exchange called Gemini, which is distinct from Google’s AI assistant — have given millions’ worth of bitcoin to the Digital Freedom Fund PAC, which is explicitly opposed to the Democratic Party. The Digital Freedom Fund has also drawn donations from crypto exchange Kraken, another Coinbase competitor. So far the PAC has not spent heavily on political campaigns, but that could change as the midterm election season heats up. Yet another crypto political action committee, The Fellowship PAC, is chaired by an executive at the domestic affiliate of the international stablecoin company Tether, which has recently begun mounting a push into the U.S. market. The company is backed by $10 million in donations from Cantor Fitzgerald, the bank that holds the U.S. Treasury notes backing Tether’s stablecoins. Former Cantor Fitzgerald chief Howard Lutnick serves as Trump’s commerce secretary. The PAC has endorsed only Republican candidates thus far. Artificial Interference Two of the artificial intelligence industry’s biggest players are backing rival political influence operations. OpenAI and Anthropic have picked their fighters in a battle over how much of a role the government should play in regulating AI. On one side, OpenAI President Greg Brockman and his wife have donated to Leading the Future, a super PAC that aims to be an umbrella organization for the industry along the lines of Fairshake. Graphic: The Intercept Perplexity AI and Andreessen Horowitz — which was an early investor in OpenAI — have also given money to the umbrella super PAC. Leading the Future has a Democratic affiliate, Think Big, as well as a Republican arm, American Mission. Conway, the Democratic megadonor, has given only to Think Big, while Joe Lonsdale, the voluble right-wing venture capitalist, has given to American Mission. If that structure sounds eerily similar to Fairshake, that is no accident. One of Leading the Future’s shot-callers is Josh Vlasto, a political operative who once worked for two powerful New York Democrats: former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. OpenAI has generally favored a more relaxed approach to AI regulation. One of its top competitors, Anthropic, has staked out a position — at least rhetorically — in favor of stricter rules. To pursue that aim, Anthropic recently created a traditional corporate political action committee, AnthroPAC, that can donate directly to politicians. The $380 billion company has also made a major donation to a political nonprofit called Public First Action. That group sits at the heart of a network of affiliated super PACs: the bipartisan Public First PAC, the Democratic-aligned Jobs and Democracy PAC, and the Defending Our Values PAC for Republican causes. The Republican and Democratic affiliates are led respectively by former Reps. Chris Stewart, R-Utah, and Brad Carson, D-Okla. Public First Action has donated to all three super PACs. In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson called the three PACs “aligned” but said they all operate independently and that Anthropic does not play a role in directing any of the groups’ political spending. “Public First Action did not establish Jobs and Democracy PAC, Public First PAC, or Defending Our Values PAC, all of which are independent from Public First Action and were established separately,” said the spokesperson, Anthony Rivera-Rodriguez. In a recent North Carolina primary, Public First Action’s Democratic affiliate spent $1.6 million boosting incumbent Rep. Valerie Foushee over her opponent Nida Allam, a Durham County commissioner who has supported a moratorium on AI data center construction. Allam told The Intercept that she believes the Anthropic-backed super PAC network has split its spending arms into Democratic and Republican affiliates to blunt attacks like those that have dogged United Democracy Project. AIPAC’s super PAC has long faced criticism in Democratic primaries for drawing donations from Trump-supporting billionaires. Anthropic and its backers “are trying to confuse folks to say, ‘we’re not the same,’ so that their spending is not on the same FEC reports,” she said. Anthropic voluntarily disclosed its donation to Public First Action. But since the group is set up as a nonprofit rather than a campaign committee, voters may never know who Public First Action’s other donors are. And the group does not intend to disclose them, Rivera-Rodriguez said. “We’d welcome a broader conversation about transparency in political spending, starting with the hundreds of millions Big Tech companies are spending to prevent any regulation of AI whatsoever,” he said. “That said, Public First Action, Jobs and Democracy PAC, Public First PAC, and Defending Our Values PAC make all public disclosures required by law either to the FEC or the IRS, and those filings are publicly available online. Additionally, all advertisements by those groups include the required disclaimers identifying who is paying for the advertisement.” Allam is convinced that spending from AIPAC and the Anthropic-backed groups helped tip her race. She claimed 48.2 percent of the vote compared to Foushee’s 49.2 percent. “For the incumbent to not receive more than 50 percent of her district’s support, that shows you that working families want change, they want something different,” she said. “We can build a progressive grassroots movement without being aligned with the same people who gave us Trump and MAGA Republicans.” The post Who’s Spending in Your Congressional Election? We Tracked the Front Groups Fueling the 2026 Midterms. appeared first on The Intercept. From The Intercept via This RSS Feed.

premium (17 followers)

光沢(こうたく)アオイと申します。
以後、お見知り置きを。

光沢アオイのトリセツ
・お嬢様口調
・絡み苦手、話しかけるのは稀

よろしくお願いいたします！

kaffeebar (32 followers)

Brewing at the speed of chaos

beli (9 followers)

contact me on my google chat [email protected]
Text my cell +1 323-400-6810
My snap: ramoney_007

kirin (21 followers)

Lizzie | she/they | 22

Resident vampire egirl

Turns out this is my priv

Alt of @[email protected]

lispm (10 followers)

Lihat kiriman asli pada platform media sosial terkait.

fuck (37 followers)

🕖 UTC -0700 🏴‍☠️🌲 ᛝᛝ 🅰️☪️🅰️🅱️ ∴
post-leftist, deep ecologist, accelerationist doomer.
user of #slackware and inferno operating systems
enemy of systemd, object oriented languages

EkstraKartofel (8 followers)

Lihat kiriman asli pada platform media sosial terkait.

BloggerPujianto (6 followers)

https://sites.google.com/view/beli-view-murah/ Pentingnya Beli Views YouTube untuk meningkatkan eksistensi channel, membangun kepercayaan audiens baru, dan mendukung strategi promosi video yang lebih efektif

GrowUpGreener (9 followers)

Campaigning for regular contact with Nature for ALL children. Embedding nature into everyday lives of the next generation for the benefit of people & the planet.

stereopticon (2 followers)

Lihat kiriman asli pada platform media sosial terkait.

markusde (25 followers)

Mutuals only account

This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.

Beli (2 followers)

Lihat kiriman asli pada platform media sosial terkait.

excluidospremium (3 followers)

Lihat kiriman asli pada platform media sosial terkait.

santivopremium (3 followers)

Fique pronto para o mercado de trabalho!

wpfreepremium (2 followers)

Lihat kiriman asli pada platform media sosial terkait.

Beli (1 followers)

Lihat kiriman asli pada platform media sosial terkait.

index (1 followers)

Financial Horse was founded with a simple goal – To provide high quality financial commentary, to empower investors.

index (1 followers)

Covering the latest premium experience news and insights from sports and entertainment venues worldwide.

gozadera (2 followers)

@elmero

nivel_cero (1 followers)

Vive una experiencia de rol inmersiva con estilo de latino y ambiente urbano

premiumsoc (1 followers)

Premium Sports & Orthopedic specializes in providing instant relief to sports and age related orthopedic injuries, as well as, healthcare and wellness treatments for pain, physical fitness and vitality.

index (1 followers)

Stock market research and education using the Stage Analysis trading system

index (1 followers)

A newsletter about helping businesses reach revenue goals through analytics and optimization.

index (1 followers)

Thoughts, stories and ideas.

wpthemescape (1 followers)

Web design shouldn’t complicated, If you’re looking for good professional wordpress themes to build the website you need- wpthemescape has you covered. Offering fully customization templates. Their themes are for everyone- bloggers, designers, ecommerce business, health and fitness and more. Wpthemescape also offers many plugins to help add finishing touches on your website. https://www.wpthemescape.com/

index (1 followers)

Premium Ghost Theme based on the Bento Grid design pattern.

sam (1 followers)

Subscribers-only account. To subscribe, follow me and wait for a DM with instructions.

premiumflights (0 followers)

Lihat kiriman asli pada platform media sosial terkait.

beli (0 followers)

Twitter was never my cup
Of tea, time will tell about this one!

iarvis (0 followers)

i just tweet about my dog now