How Silicon Valley is stealing our future

How Silicon Valley is stealing our future

Linda Kinstler writes: These days, the leading tech companies are not primarily fighting one another for market share or talent or computing power. The bigger battle is over who can claim to know the future. In August, Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, published a manifesto titled “The Future Is for Everyone,” in which he argued that artificial intelligence will bring about “an abundance of personal agency” and other riches — but only if Meta is in charge. “If our beliefs…

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New analysis sees ‘rapidly increasing’ odds the AI bubble is about to burst

New analysis sees ‘rapidly increasing’ odds the AI bubble is about to burst

Futurism reports: Whether you use AI in your personal life or not, there is no longer any escaping the grasp of the industry’s tendrils. There are multiple trillions of dollars now resting on AI’s success, much of it bound up in speculative debt. As everybody knows, debt is only an issue if you can’t pay it off — and as top AI labs fail to bring in enough revenue to cover skyrocketing costs, alarms are blaring that the entire global…

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A leaderless revolution has swept Serbia. The world should be watching

A leaderless revolution has swept Serbia. The world should be watching

Aleksandar Matković writes: More than a decade ago, the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told an interviewer in Belgrade that Serbia was “a country where the future happens first”. The phrase circulated widely on Serbian social media in the weeks before Sunday’s election, but in a way that could not have seemed possible 10 years ago. Who would then have imagined that Serbia today could be at the forefront of global democratic change? The images from Belgrade on Sunday night –…

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Most Americans prioritize respecting different values over sharing values

Most Americans prioritize respecting different values over sharing values

Gallup reports: Nearly eight in 10 U.S. adults (79%) say it is more important for people to respect different values, while 19% say it is more important for people to share the same values. Majorities of all major demographic and partisan groups think that respecting differing values should be prioritized, though this view is slightly stronger among Democrats (84%) and independents (81%) than Republicans (72%). This preference for respecting different values is consistent with Americans’ expectations of public leaders. In…

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A 28-year-old DOGE operative, Jeremy Lewin, gutted USAID. HR had no record of him working there

A 28-year-old DOGE operative, Jeremy Lewin, gutted USAID. HR had no record of him working there

Wired reports: On March 18, 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio handed the reins of the US Agency for International Development to Jeremy Lewin, a 28-year-old graduate of Harvard Law School, former investment banker, and affiliate of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. At the time, Lewin’s appointment drew criticism because of his lack of experience in government, diplomacy, or foreign assistance. But for career staff inside the agency, the issues surrounding Lewin’s new role were much more alarming…

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Yet another defeated Bolsonaro flees from Brazil to the United States

Yet another defeated Bolsonaro flees from Brazil to the United States

Mother Jones reports: In December 2022, two days before the end of his tenure and after losing his reelection bid, Brazilian far-right President Jair Bolsonaro flew to the United States. Skipping the traditional transfer of power ceremony at President-Elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s inauguration, Bolsonaro settled in Florida and eventually enjoyed a retiree’s lifestyle at the home of an MMA fighter in Kissimmee. Meanwhile, his supporters back home emulated the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, ransacking federal…

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Smithsonian scientists create most detailed simulation yet of the early universe

Smithsonian scientists create most detailed simulation yet of the early universe

Smithsonian: The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and Nancy Roman Space Telescope are revealing the universe’s earliest chapters in extraordinary detail. To help astronomers understand what they are seeing, researchers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian have developed “Lumina,” one of the largest and most detailed simulations ever created of the early universe. Published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the new model recreates how ordinary matter, dark matter and radiation interacted during the universe’s…

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New details of rape allegation against Trump revealed in House Democrats’ Epstein report

New details of rape allegation against Trump revealed in House Democrats’ Epstein report

Time reports: A woman who had accused President Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her in 1993 described it to congressional staff as rape and said the interaction left her bleeding and bruised, according to a report released Monday by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee examining Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Beatrice Keul, a model and former Miss Switzerland, alleged to Judiciary Committee staff that she was raped by Trump in a Plaza Hotel suite in Manhattan when she was…

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How Trump is profiting from the war in Iran

How Trump is profiting from the war in Iran

CBS reports: As President Trump boasts about how much money the U.S. oil and gas industry is making from the war with Iran, the president’s personal holdings in oil and gas are now worth between $22.5 million and $81.6 million, compared with $12.6 million to $46 million at the end of 2025, according to a new report by Democrats on the Congressional Joint Economic Committee. The stocks the president holds have increased in value by an average of 43% since…

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Israelis risk nuclear annihilation if they don’t re-elect him, Netanyahu warns

Israelis risk nuclear annihilation if they don’t re-elect him, Netanyahu warns

The Guardian reports: Benjamin Netanyahu has resorted to increasingly alarmist rhetoric and reportedly put pressure on Israel’s military to take action against Iran as his far-right coalition narrowly trails in the polls ahead of Tuesday’s close-run elections. The Israeli prime minister posted an AI-generated image of a nuclear mushroom cloud destroying Tel Aviv, telling Israeli voters to choose him or risk nuclear annihilation. “Anyone who cares about their own physical existence, that of their family, and their loved ones should…

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How fan accounts for Taylor Swift et al helped Lula to a historic victory and defeat for Trump

How fan accounts for Taylor Swift et al helped Lula to a historic victory and defeat for Trump

Variety reports: In an unprecedented online wave, the day after Lula came second in the first round [of voting in Brazil’s presidential election], fan accounts for major artists such as Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Lady Gaga, Katseye, Demi Lovato, Harry Styles, Katy Perry and Selena Gomez ignited a movement, offering their massive platforms to amplify the current president’s campaign and help boost their access to young audiences. The quickly spreading movement began with a Billie Eilish fan account, with the…

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Serbia’s election shows new vulnerability for nationalist populists

Serbia’s election shows new vulnerability for nationalist populists

The New York Times reports: When voters in Hungary rejected their seemingly invincible populist leader Viktor Orban in April, Andrej Borovac, a young designer in neighboring Serbia, was ecstatic, but he was downbeat about his own country’s populist strongman suffering the same fate. “That can never happen here,” he recalled thinking. Aleksandar Vucic, Serbia’s dominant political figure since 2012, looked immovable, given his grip — established over more than a decade in power — on security forces, nearly all major…

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Who’s paying whom? The circular money machine behind the AI boom (or bubble)

Who’s paying whom? The circular money machine behind the AI boom (or bubble)

Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, centre, speaking at the White House. OpenAI president Greg Brockman is on the right. AP By Ruipeng Liu, Deakin University and Sagarika Mishra, Deakin University Imagine a company that sells you equipment, invests money in your business, and then rents back what you build with it. It’s your supplier, your investor and your customer all at once. That’s known as circular financing. Many artificial intelligence (AI) companies, including Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Nvidia, have adopted…

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What cooperatives for an anticapitalist peace look like

What cooperatives for an anticapitalist peace look like

Azize Aslan writes: When I was seven years old, my family was forced to flee escalating violence. We left Bakur – a Kurdish region in what is currently southeastern Turkey – for a city further west, where we worked in Turkish fields, living in a tent until we could save up to rent a house on the city margins, in a neighbourhood with no electricity or road access. Those are some of my earliest memories of everyday violence against people…

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