ICE has been dumping protester photos into a Palantir database

ICE has been dumping protester photos into a Palantir database

Wired reports: An explosive and newly partially unsealed court filing alleges that the US Department of Homeland Security built up dossiers on ICE observers—including their photos, license plate numbers, and other information—and stored them in a system called the Investigative Case Management database, which was built by Palantir. Palantir did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for DHS calls the case “meritless” and says that “the underlying lawsuit is based on the lie that there is a…

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Amazon’s $1 billion plan to combat data center backlash draws more backlash

Amazon’s $1 billion plan to combat data center backlash draws more backlash

Ars Technica reports: On Friday, Amazon committed to donating more than $1 billion over the next five years to communities neighboring data centers. In a press release, Amazon Web Services’ CEO Matt Garman said that communities would decide how to prioritize funds across “education, job training, energy affordability, water, and energy preservation, and local priorities.” Laying out other community commitments, Amazon also promised to ensure data centers wouldn’t increase power bills or wipe out local water supplies. Regarding the latter,…

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Palantir AI is making a mess of nurses’ schedules. They say it’s a safety issue

Palantir AI is making a mess of nurses’ schedules. They say it’s a safety issue

Wired reports: Over the past four months, Amber Retzloff, a critical care nurse in Florida, requested to work 50 specific 12-hour shifts. But over half the time, she says her hospital’s Palantir-powered scheduling software assigned her to different shifts, often putting her on back-to-back-to-back days and leaving her mentally drained. Retzloff doesn’t expect to always get the slots she wants, but by her count the tool does a far worse job honoring her preferences than managers did when they assigned…

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Is there anything FBI Director Kash Patel won’t do for Trump before the midterms?

Is there anything FBI Director Kash Patel won’t do for Trump before the midterms?

Sarah Fitzpatrick writes: Earlier this year, FBI Director Kash Patel vowed before God, Fox Nation, and Donald Trump that he would punish the “deep state” for its manifold transgressions, especially the (actually nonexistent) conspiracy to steal the 2020 election. “I’ve been with the president nearly since day one on this,” he said in an interview with Maria Bartiromo. “I can announce on your show that we’ve got all the information we need. We’re working with our prosecutors at the Department…

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Why ‘NAZA’ terrifies Israel’s liberal elite

Why ‘NAZA’ terrifies Israel’s liberal elite

Sebastian Ben Daniel (John Brown) writes: For decades, the liberal camp in Israel has cultivated a convenient and effective defense mechanism. When faced with uncomfortable moral questions about Israel’s actions, responsibility could usually be assigned to the political fringes. The culprits were always the “bad apples”: hilltop youth, far-right ministers, a rogue infantry unit, settlers nobody in north Tel Aviv would invite to dinner. This division of labor was remarkably convenient. The right committed the crimes; the liberals supplied the…

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National Science Foundation diverted $1.4 billion in funds mandated by Congress

National Science Foundation diverted $1.4 billion in funds mandated by Congress

The New York Times reports: The National Science Foundation, one of the biggest sources of federal research funding, withheld $1.4 billion that Congress had intended for research over the course of the past year, according to internal data reviewed by The New York Times. The extraordinary move — holding back about one-fifth of the N.S.F.’s primary research budget — is the latest sign of how the Trump administration is finding creative ways to work around Congress. Lawmakers from both parties…

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‘Explosion of melt rates’: 20% of Swiss glaciers lost in five years

‘Explosion of melt rates’: 20% of Swiss glaciers lost in five years

The Guardian reports: Switzerland has lost almost one-fifth of its ice in just five years, research has found, in a dramatic reshaping of the Alpine country whose big white glaciers have been reduced to moonlike rock deserts, scientists say. Swiss glaciers shrank by 5.5% in the first eight months of 2026, according to an annual monitoring report, after a summer of scorching heatwaves that followed a winter with little snow. The reduction in ice volume falls just shy of the…

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How Jared Kushner has profited from the Gaza genocide

How Jared Kushner has profited from the Gaza genocide

CNN reports: At the same time Jared Kushner has acted as a key negotiator in the war in Gaza, his private equity company, Affinity Partners, has held the largest stake in an Israeli firm backing businesses involved in Israel’s military campaigns, a CNN investigation has found. Kushner has skirted deeper scrutiny of this potential conflict of interest by acting as a volunteer envoy, rather than accepting a government job that would require him to disclose his finances. In the process,…

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Hegseth puts the future of warfare in the hands of major MAGA donors

Hegseth puts the future of warfare in the hands of major MAGA donors

The Guardian reports: By installing the tech billionaires Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey to advisory roles in a Pentagon project about the future of warfare, the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, bestowed extraordinary influence on two of Maga’s most significant campaign donors – and both men own companies that benefit from federal defense contracting. The new project, which Hegseth dubbed “Project Meridian” in an event in Quantico, Virginia, on Wednesday, will be led by Pentagon official Emil Michael, a former Uber…

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Competitive authoritarianism in America

Competitive authoritarianism in America

Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way write: When we began writing about competitive authoritarianism a quarter-century ago, we never imagined applying the concept to the United States. Our initial study of 35 post–Cold War competitive authoritarian regimes centered overwhelmingly on postcommunist and lower- and middle-income countries with weak states and weak civil societies. But in the early twenty-first century, a set of “new” competitive authoritarian regimes emerged in countries with more established democratic institutions, such as Hungary, India, Poland, Turkey,…

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Renee Good’s family sues U.S. government and immigration officials over her killing in Minneapolis

Renee Good’s family sues U.S. government and immigration officials over her killing in Minneapolis

The Associated Press reports: Renee Good’s family sued the U.S. government and the architects of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown on Thursday, saying “the time is absolutely now for accountability” after her killing in January by a federal agent in Minneapolis. Good’s partner, Becca Good, and brother, Brent Ganger, accused the government and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who shot into her SUV and killed her, Jonathan Ross, of unjustified and excessive use of force. The Jan. 7 shooting,…

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Oil jumps 4% on reports China halts fuel exports, 10,000 more U.S. troops head to Middle East

Oil jumps 4% on reports China halts fuel exports, 10,000 more U.S. troops head to Middle East

Reuters reports: Oil prices ‌jumped on Thursday and settled up more than $4 a barrel, after a report said the US was sending more troops and carriers to the Middle East and China suspended oil products exports, stoking fears that global fuel shortages could worsen. The new front-month December Brent crude futures contract settled at $102.31 a barrel, up 4.37% or $4.28. US West Texas Intermediate crude futures finished at $92.87 a barrel, up 2.71%, or $2.45. A Wall Street…

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A CERN for AI

A CERN for AI

Elliot Jones, Senior Researcher, Ada Lovelace Institute, writes: Efforts such as the UK’s AI Safety Summit, and the follow-up AI Seoul Summit, have aimed to start an international discussion around AI safety and have led to the creation of national AI safety institutes in the UK, the US, Japan and Canada. There is a shared ambition to create an international AI safety network, and these institutes have begun to sign bilateral cooperation agreements. However, there is not currently a single,…

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Why real intelligence is something more than optimisation

Why real intelligence is something more than optimisation

Sasha Mudd writes: A few months ago, I sat in a packed university auditorium listening to a celebrated computer scientist explain the brilliance of large language models (LLMs). These systems optimise, he said. And they improve at optimisation on the basis of past experience. He paused. That, he said with a smile, is intelligence. The audience nodded along approvingly. Meanwhile, a philosophical alarm bell began sounding in my head. Not because the speaker’s claim was implausible. On the contrary, as…

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