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FBI is a ‘rudderless ship’ under Kash Patel — he and Bongino are focused on social media, report says

FBI is a ‘rudderless ship’ under Kash Patel — he and Bongino are focused on social media, report says

The New York Post reports: FBI Director Kash Patel is facing withering criticism from an alliance of active-duty and retired agents and analysts, days after the White House denied media reports that the president is about to fire him. A troubling new report card on the first six months of Patel’s leadership concludes he is “in over his head” and his deputy, Dan Bongino, is “something of a clown,” according to the alliance, which in two previous reports warned about…

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Flock uses overseas gig workers to build its surveillance AI

Flock uses overseas gig workers to build its surveillance AI

Wired and 404 Media report: Flock, the automatic license plate reader and AI-powered camera company, uses overseas workers from Upwork to train its machine learning algorithms, with training material telling workers how to review and categorize footage including images people and vehicles in the United States, according to material reviewed by 404 Media that was accidentally exposed by the company. The findings bring up questions about who exactly has access to footage collected by Flock surveillance cameras and where people…

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Haunted by history, Japanese Americans fight against Trump’s immigration crackdown

Haunted by history, Japanese Americans fight against Trump’s immigration crackdown

The New York Times reports: From the passenger seat of a sky blue Prius, Amy Oba craned her neck to get a look at the federal detention center, a hulking tower surrounded by a black chain-link fence and laced with barbed wire. On a recent evening, she was on patrol, part of a group of Japanese Americans who are keeping a watchful eye on the actions of immigration agents in Los Angeles. “I definitely think about my family when we…

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Costco sues Trump administration, seeking refund of tariffs

Costco sues Trump administration, seeking refund of tariffs

NBC News reports: Costco Wholesale has sued the Trump administration, asking the Court of International Trade to consider all tariffs collected under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act unlawful. The company said in a filing Friday that it is seeking a “full refund” of all duties under the act paid as a result of President Donald Trump’s executive order that imposed what he called “reciprocal” tariffs. “Because IEEPA does not clearly authorize the President to set tariffs … the Challenged…

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China’s JUNO observatory shows promise in solving neutrino mysteries

China’s JUNO observatory shows promise in solving neutrino mysteries

Scientific American reports: Trillions of neutrinos whiz through our bodies every day, pulsing from the sun, outer space and deep beneath Earth. Yet these elusive subatomic particles have proven difficult to study. That could soon change, however. Buried 700 meters beneath the rolling hills of southern China, an enormous neutrino observatory called JUNO has released its first results after a mere 59 days of operation. And so far, they are very promising, physicists say. “The physics result is already world-leading…

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The Kremlin pitched the White House on peace through business. Trump and his cronies are on board

The Kremlin pitched the White House on peace through business. Trump and his cronies are on board

The Wall Street Journal reports: Three powerful businessmen—two Americans and a Russian—hunched over a laptop in Miami Beach last month, ostensibly to draw up a plan to end Russia’s long and deadly war with Ukraine. But the full scope of their project went much further, according to people familiar with the talks. They were privately charting a path to bring Russia’s $2 trillion economy in from the cold—with American businesses first in line to beat European competitors to the dividends….

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Trump plans to pardon an ex-president who flooded America with cocaine

Trump plans to pardon an ex-president who flooded America with cocaine

The New York Times reports: He once boasted that he would “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses.” He accepted a $1 million bribe from El Chapo to allow cocaine shipments to pass through Honduras. A man was killed in prison to protect him. At the federal trial of Juan Orlando Hernández in New York, testimony and evidence showed how the former president maintained Honduras as a bastion of the global drug trade. He orchestrated a vast trafficking conspiracy that…

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Trump frees executive who defrauded thousands of investors, just days into seven-year prison sentence

Trump frees executive who defrauded thousands of investors, just days into seven-year prison sentence

The New York Times reports: President Trump has set free a private equity executive who had served less than two weeks of a seven-year sentence for his role in what prosecutors described as a $1.6 billion scheme that defrauded thousands of victims. David Gentile, 59, a onetime resident of Nassau County, N.Y., had reported to prison on Nov. 14, and was released on Wednesday, according to Bureau of Prisons records and a White House official who was not authorized to…

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Inside the White House, David Sacks represents the ‘technocratic oligarchy’

Inside the White House, David Sacks represents the ‘technocratic oligarchy’

The New York Times reports: In July, David Sacks, one of the Trump administration’s top technology officials, beamed as he strode onstage at a neoclassical auditorium just blocks from the White House. He had convened top government officials and Silicon Valley executives for a forum on the booming business of artificial intelligence. The guest of honor was President Trump, who unveiled an “A.I. Action Plan” that was drafted in part by Mr. Sacks, a longtime venture capitalist. In a nearly…

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The Trump kleptocracy

The Trump kleptocracy

Tom Burgis writes: A crusading prosecutor in the Balkans comes under pressure to drop a big case. Vietnamese villagers learn they are to be evicted. A convicted crypto kingpin in the Gulf receives a pardon. All have one thing in common: they appear to be connected to the Trump family’s campaign to amass riches around the world. Since Donald Trump’s re-election a year ago, warnings that his use of presidential power to advance personal interests is corroding American democracy have…

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‘The precedent is Flint’: How Oregon’s data center boom is supercharging a water crisis

‘The precedent is Flint’: How Oregon’s data center boom is supercharging a water crisis

Rolling Stone reports: In the spring of 2022, Jim Doherty kept having the same conversation with folks at the only grocery store in Boardman, his eastern Oregon hometown, or at the grain depot where he picked up food for his four ranch dogs. Healthy adults that these people knew were coming down with unexplained medical conditions, including diseases and cancers that usually afflicted the elderly. “It was kinda grim,” Doherty says. Sixty years old, broad-chested, with a salt-and-pepper goatee, Doherty…

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Colleges are preparing to self destruct by inserting AI into the educational process

Colleges are preparing to self destruct by inserting AI into the educational process

Michael Clune writes: After three years of doing essentially nothing to address the rise of generative AI, colleges are now scrambling to do too much. Over the summer, Ohio State University, where I teach, announced a new initiative promising to “embed AI education into the core of every undergraduate curriculum, equipping students with the ability to not only use AI tools, but to understand, question and innovate with them—no matter their major.” Similar initiatives are being rolled out at other…

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Without any authority to do so, Trump declares Venezuelan airspace closed

Without any authority to do so, Trump declares Venezuelan airspace closed

The New York Times reports: President Trump warned airlines and pilots on Saturday that the airspace near Venezuela was closed, ratcheting up what his administration has characterized as a war against drug cartels. In a post on social media to “all Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers,” the president wrote that the airspace above and surrounding Venezuela should be considered “CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY.” Mr. Trump did not go into further detail in his post, but it came after…

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Under Hegseth’s direction, Special Operations Forces apparently committed murder

Under Hegseth’s direction, Special Operations Forces apparently committed murder

Jack Goldsmith, former head of the Office of Legal Counsel, writes: [T]here can be no conceivable legal justification for what the Washington Post reported earlier today: That U.S. Special Operations Forces killed the survivors of a first strike on a drug boat off the coast of Trinidad who, in the Post’s words, “were clinging to the smoldering wreck.” Section 5.4.7 of the DOD Law of War Manual says: Prohibition Against Declaring That No Quarter Be Given. It is forbidden to…

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