A new tool searches your LinkedIn connections for people who are mentioned in the Epstein files, just in case you don’t, understandably, want anything to do with them on the already deranged social network.

404 Media tested the tool, called EpsteIn—as in, a mash up of Epstein and LinkedIn—and it appears to work.

“I found myself wondering whether anyone had mapped Epstein's network in the style of LinkedIn—how many people are 1st/2nd/3rd degree connections of Jeffrey Epstein?” Christopher Finke, the creator of the tool, told 404 Media in an email. “Smarter programmers than me have already built tools to visualize that, but I couldn't find anything that would show the overlap between my network and his.”

• Archive: http://archive.today/AIkL2
• Github: https://github.com/cfinke/EpsteIn

The Canadian prime minister has called for an alliance of middle powers to stand up to the world's great powers. This is a compelling idea, and one that Europe has been pursuing for 60 years, writes Le Monde columnist Pascal Riché.

A new "white list" from SpaceX is shutting off Russia's illicit access to Starlink's satellite internet across the front line.

At shortly before 3:00 a.m. Kyiv time on Feb. 5, Elon Musk retweeted a new guide from Ukraine's Digital Transformation Ministry for registering a Starlink terminal within UkraSubsequently, a series of alarmed Russian social media posts indicate that Starlink terminals were disconnecting en masse along the front.

Three Ukrainian commanders, speaking to the Kyiv Independent on the condition of anonymity, reported intercepting messages from Russian forces complaining about Starlink terminals failing in large numbers.

Serhiy "Flash" Beskrestnov, a longtime commentator on electronic warfare more recently appointed as advisor to Defense Minister Mykhaylo Fedorov, said the "enemy at the front doesn't have a problem, the enemy has a catastrophe."

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Germany should build as many nuclear plants as possible, Fatih Birol proclaims.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s admission that Germany’s nuclear phase-out was a “serious strategic mistake” has won an emphatic endorsement from Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency. In an interview with Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, of which POLITICO is part, Birol said he was “very pleased” to hear Merz’s words. To him, the chancellor's self-critique is a signal that German energy policy may be heading in “a safer and more sensible direction.”

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Microsite Highlighting Evidence from the Landmark Social Media Addiction Trials.

New documents show the tactics Meta, Google, Snap, and TikTok execs used to disrupt learning, prey on minors, and co-opt the PTA to control the narrative with parents

Exclusive: Luxury aircraft owned by property tycoon close to US president’s family has twice flown Palestinian men from Arizona to Tel Aviv

A Guardian investigation has established the flight was part of a secretive and politically sensitive US government operation to deport Palestinians arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

One of those deported on the January flight was Maher Awad, a 24-year-old originally from the West Bank, who had lived in the US for nearly a decade. Speaking to the Guardian in the town of Rammun, Maher shared photos of his girlfriend and newborn son in Michigan.

Awad is one of several men onboard two recent flights who have been identified by the Guardian and the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine. “I grew up in America,” he said. “America was heaven for me.”

On Monday this week, Dezer’s 16-passenger luxury jet was used a second time to transport another group of Palestinian deportees. They landed at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport and also appear to have been taken to the West Bank.

Former US officials and immigration lawyers said the flights – and Israel’s assistance in returning Palestinians to the occupied territory – marked a shift in policy driven by the Trump administration’s aggressive mass deportation campaign.

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First revealed by The Wall Street Journal in 2023, their connection was initially downplayed by de Rothschild. The latest set of the Epstein files, published on January 30 by US authorities, has shattered that version of events. Hundreds of emails show that Epstein was a close friend of the 60-year-old banker and acted as her unofficial business adviser. Since their release, these documents have fueled the most absurd conspiracy theories and countless antisemitic posts on social media. None of the material reviewed by Le Monde implicates de Rothschild in Epstein's sexual crimes.

The accusations and scandals that tarnished the predator's reputation never affected their relationship, even after the English-language press, particularly the Miami Herald in November 2018, began to publish repeated revelations about him. On December 4, 2018, they discussed staying in Megève, an upscale French ski resort, at one of the hotels owned by the Edmond de Rothschild Group, with Karyna Shuliak, who was Epstein's partner at the time. On February 11, 2019, they planned, for the same young woman, a visit to the Caron perfumery in Paris, which also belonged to the group.

The Edmond de Rothschild Group acknowledged the existence of a "professional relationship" between the two individuals, adding that "a more personal relationship developed over the years." "Ariane de Rothschild had no knowledge of Mr. Epstein's personal behavior and condemns the crimes for which he was found guilty," the group added. The baroness de Rothschild and her family own the entire banking group, which managed assets totaling €195 billion in 2024. The group is active in private banking and asset management, and also owns vineyards, luxury hotels and a line of racing trimarans.

Last year, overall vehicle sales in Europe barely ticked up, rising 2.2 percent from 2024. EV sales, meanwhile, increased by 29 percent, bringing market share to an impressive 19.5 percent.

That's according to data from automotive analyst JATO Dynamics, which finds that the big winner has been Volkswagen. Last year, its EVs outsold those from Tesla for the first time as sales of VW's electric offering grew by 56 percent, while Tesla's shrank by 27 percent.

To put that into concrete numbers, VW sold 274,278 EVs to Tesla's 236,357. And that's just the VW brand itself—the automaker also owns Skoda (in 4th place, with 171,703 sales), Audi (5th place, 153,845 sales), Cupra (15th place, 79,269 sales), and Porsche (21st place, 32,715 sales). Not a bad effort, considering just over a decade has passed since VW's Dieselgate scandal.

The Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi has begun a hunger strike in an Iranian prison in protest of what she said was her unlawful detention, according to a statement from her family released on Wednesday.

Ms. Mohammadi, a prominent Iranian rights and democracy activist, has been arrested and imprisoned repeatedly on charges of threatening national security.

She was on a hunger strike most recently in 2023, when her family said she was being denied medical care while in detention. Ms. Mohammadi, 53, was allowed to temporarily leave prison for treatment in 2024 but was arrested again last December.

The statement said she had been on a hunger strike since Monday, protesting her continued detention, poor conditions of confinement and lack of contact with family or legal counsel. Many detainees in Iran face such conditions, it added.

“We are gravely concerned for her life,” said Kiana Rahmani, Ms. Mohammadi’s daughter and a co-president of the Narges Mohammadi Foundation, which represents her work. “She, along with all political prisoners in Iran, must be released immediately.”

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7563423

RentAHuman is a new digital marketplace connecting AI agents to humans who don't mind taking orders from the computer.

These woke astronomers and their anti-planet bias. We have to prepare to protect Mars, the most masculine of planets!

To be more specific, I have a friend who pointed out a couple of features that they wanted. They're present in Immich, but I'm wondering if they're replicable in Nextcloud since I already have that installed, and Immich is giving me trouble with installation. I'll troubleshoot Immich later if it can't be replicated

The features:

• Having a world map that has pins on it based on location EXIF data in photos
• Preferably a UI similar to google photos on mobile besides that

Edit: Someone in the comments pointed out that Memories (something I already installed) had come a long way. Ended up finding out there's a mobile app, and it is exactly these two things.

• Tim Anderson argues that much of the Western left’s hostility to BRICS stems from imperial habits of thought, orientalism, saviour complexes, and ahistorical “Marxism”, that align them, often unwittingly, with the very global order they claim to oppose.

Western left-liberals carry much more imperial cultural baggage than they care to imagine. Yet the problem with politics, at a time of propaganda wars, is that perspective is everything. Missing that, no slogans will save you.

This failure of left-liberal perspectives is due to social perspective, with several root causes which turn them into unwitting allies of their imperial states (however much they object to this status) and against the main emerging alternative of BRICS and, in particular, its most highly demonised protagonists: China, Russia and Iran.

Some generic problems faced by Western left-liberals are the failure to see that solidarity is for a people and presupposes that particular peoples determine their own future, and not pursue a path imagined by Westerners. This classic orientalism helps explain left-liberal hostility to the Islamic Republic of Iran, the most powerful independent state in West Asia since 1979, key sponsor of the Palestinian Resistance and, for that reason, the main target of Zionist and imperial hostility.

Another problem is that left-liberal Westerners tend to cheer on those separatisms sponsored by imperialism, to break up independent southern states which refuse to submit. Adherence to these pseudo self-determination projects helps explain why much of the Western left cheered on the Zionists in the 60s and 70s and why many have cheered on Kurdish separatists this century, as they helped dismantle Iraq and Syria and moved against Iran. In the case of Iran, subject to a permanent hostility from the USA and "Israel", the ‘imperial left’ misses the obvious point that the 1979 revolution and its Islamic foundation were chosen by the great masses of the Iranian people and not by Western left-liberals. Yet there is hardly a pretext to dismantle and dismember Iran that is missed by most Western left-liberals. They would love to see it weak and divided like Iraq, Libya and Syria. The global dictatorship approves.

A final general problem is that wrong questions are posed about the emerging countervailing powers. For example, "Why doesn’t China save Palestine? Or, why didn’t Russia save Syria?" The idea that one nation can save another is classic orientalism, reflecting the Western ‘saviour complex’ embedded in imperial culture. It misses the key reality that a coherent indigenous struggle is essential for emancipation. Once that exists, others may assist.

A linked concept is the idea that the great countervailing powers are all corrupt and useless because they just pursue their own interests. This misses the point that any responsible state has to pursue its own national interests and so remain accountable to its own people. Given that, it is the task of indigenous forces and decent internationalists to make the case for building bridges based on common interests. That was exactly what the Iranian national hero, the late Qassem Soleimani, did when in 2015 he persuaded Russia to enter Syria, on invitation, to help fight the proxy terrorist armies and support the independent government led by Bashar al-Assad. Yet Russia could not “save” Syria after most of the commanders of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) were purchased by the enemy and the SAA collapsed. The collapse of the SAA was a tragedy, but no one can save those who will not save themselves.

What are the main rationales of these Western left-liberals, in denigrating and opposing the role of BRICS and its “controversial” leading states? It is clearly quite different to the emerging consensus in the Global South (most of Africa, Latin America and SE Asia) that a multipolar world, no longer ruled by an Anglo-American dictatorship, is desirable and the way to a more tolerable future. This presupposes a greater role for BRICS and for its most heavily demonised protagonists: Russia, China and Iran.

In that southern view, a multipolar world is replacing a centuries-old Anglo-American domination of the world, and presents the best possibility of escaping this hegemony, including that of the dollar dictatorship, which directly damages developing economies and allows Washington to weaponise the globalised financial system against independent nations. The expanded use of US and EU unilateral “sanctions” (actually ‘unilateral coercive measures’) continues to cripple entire populations under total or partial siege until they surrender. That is a vicious weapon many left-liberals fail to appreciate. BRICS provides hope for the first real alternative to this global dictatorship.

Demonisation of Russia's war in Ukraine, to avert a NATO threat and to end the post-2014 bloody war against the Russian people of the Donbass, has not been an obstacle to developing countries rushing to join BRICS. Rather, many (such as the revolutionary Sahel bloc) have seen Russia’s role in standing up to the great bullies of the world as a sign that there is some significant political will within BRICS.

Yet most Western left-liberals remain anti-Russia, as well as anti-China, and anti-Iran. While many profess “support” for popular struggles like those of Palestine, Yemen and the revolutionary West African states, they hold quite distinct perspectives to those of the Global South, including that of the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who made it his life’s work to build stronger Latin and Southern organisation to resist imperial hegemony.

I suggest there are three overlapping currents of rationale for this hatred of BRICS and the emerging counter hegemonic states (1) the romantic orientalists, (2) the Anarcho-Trotskyists and (3) the ahistorical pseudo Marxists.

1. Romantic orientalists

This current has some sympathy for the struggles of oppressed peoples, such as the Palestinians and perhaps the Cubans and others, yet views any support from the big BRICS counter weights with disdain, often adopting the clichés of imperial demonisation.

This includes liberals (including liberal Zionists) who “support” Palestinians as victims but ignore or oppose the Palestinian Resistance and its chief allies, the regional Axis of Resistance led by Iran. This includes fans of the obsolete “two-state” solution, who naively imagine a weak Palestinian ghetto can co-exist alongside a voracious and heavily armed apartheid regime.

This claim of supporting a popular struggle without “dirtying” one’s hands with state politics extends to those Westerners who romanticised the Zapatista movement in southern Mexico, while steering clear of progressive yet (in imperial parlance) “dictatorial” Latin American states like Cuba and Venezuela. Any independent state which arms itself to survive hegemonic pressure will be branded a “dictatorship” by the actual global dictatorship.

Avoiding both resistance and the independent states empowers many Western left-liberals with a sense of moral superiority while avoiding the avalanche of criticism that falls on the heads of those who actually support resistance. These western “saviours” then become the heroes of their own imagination.

2. Anarcho-Trotskyists

In a parallel current, we have Western Trotskyists and Anarchists (often indistinguishable) who habitually reject progressive states as “betrayals” of ordinary people, whatever their achievements. The draw on a deep tradition of Western cynicism, where all states are captured, and no emancipatory change is possible. In practice, these groups often revert to liberalism, to remain relevant and attract new members, supporting such things as public health, social security and refugee rights, all of which require state agency.

Yet the Anarcho-Trotskyist tradition is rooted in permanent attacks on left governments and competing splinter groups. For that reason, they are often coopted into support for imperial driven "color revolutions" and the destruction of independent states. The easy part of that is, when those color revolutions turn into humanitarian disasters (e.g. the destruction of Libya and Syria), they claim “the revolution was betrayed”. Many spend their lives saying this.

Of course, they hate Russia, as the successor state to the hated Soviet Union, and many deny that there was ever a socialist revolution (neither in Russia nor China nor Cuba), as none met their own esoteric criteria. Most are extreme sectarians who have never gained the trust of any part of the organised working class, the constituency of which they claim to be the “vanguard”.

Many of those who now raise their voices for the suffering of the Palestinian people have a track record of Israeli-aligned attacks on those who provided weapons to the Palestinian resistance, like Hezbollah, Syria (under Assad) and Iran. Some of them have established opinion columns in the Israeli media.

3. Ahistorical pseudo-Marxists

Another current is that of ahistorical pseudo-Marxism, those who cite 19th and early 20th-century canonical texts to determine that all capitalism and imperialism are the same and that China and Russia are just the latest additions to this global capitalist logic. In this sense then, global capitalism is not seen as a historical process with particular power structures but an amorphous matrix within which we are all helplessly trapped.

Now it is true that Karl Marx did not properly understand the colonial world and its emancipatory objectives. We see this in the biography he penned of Simon Bolivar, the great Latin American liberator, whom Marx labeled as just another Napoleon-like populist dictator. Marx missed the demands for a consolidated decolonisation, including the abolition of slavery and construction of states which could resist further imperial incursions and resource pillage. Yet he did recognise the importance of particular histories in shaping human futures. That much is missed by the ahistorical pseudo-Marxists.

For this reason, an end to the centuries-long Anglo-American hegemony is seen as trivial by these people. Displacement of the Anglo-American dictatorship by a multipolar order is seen as having no real meaning for ordinary or working class people. Similarly, the rise of China is not appreciated because it has accommodated a controlled form of capitalism. The tremendous achievements of China in lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty and spending its surplus on public infrastructure instead of wars of domination – are dismissed as meaningless and just a new phase in the integration of ‘global capitalism’.

Other ahistorical Marxists want this amorphous “capitalism” to destroy all traditional and indigenous social structures so that capitalist ‘modernisation’ will ‘inevitably’ lead to some sort of imagined socialism. This arrogant view abandons any idea of social struggle or resistance, let alone sympathy for ordinary human beings.

Orientalist clichés (“freedom from authoritarian regimes”) about the great BRICS counterweights are put up as “evidence” of a dystopian future in which there is no hope of change. This is little more than an empty cynicism, with no real sense of history.

Meanwhile, dozens of southern nations flock to BRICS, despite the Western demonisations, as it seems to offer a world order which will provide some relief from the dollar dictatorship and the possibility for little people and independent nations to survive, in a savage world.

Of course, the above currents do not fully explain the actual motivation for such stupidity. For that we should look to psychological explanations. I personally favour the Western “saviour complex” idea, where a moral high ground is staked out but without any inclination to support and defend the actual achievements of indigenous social struggles.

Yet, as the late Malcolm X said, “If you don’t stand for something you will fall for anything”.

Source -> https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/opinion/why-do-so-many-western-left-liberals-hate-brics

"I typed in YamzWorld into the Amazon app and lo and behold there were all my products there with my pictures from my website as well," Montes-Tarazas said.

While he receives payment for sales, Montes-Tarazas said the arrangement strips away his ability to build direct customer relationships.

"I do get the sale and I do get the money, but customers never get to interact with my website, they have no ability to sign up for my mailing list. They have no idea who I am as an artist or what I stand for," Montes-Tarazas said.

Source

I know times are tough right now, and I know that many of us (me included) are busy with the Epstein files. These files are interesting, and important, but be aware that releasing these files might just be another manoeuvre by the current administration and elite to distract us. There are red herrings in these files as well. Please do not get distracted and pre-occupied.

Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico, Palestine, and plenty more countries are still under imperialist threat or occupation. Workers rights and social security are being played with. ICE is roaming around the streets in the US and already is in Europe (though more covertly). The capitalist elite are playing the game on multiple dimensions. We must resist them.

The proletariat must be organised.

Thus, I kindly remind to get outside and get organised IRL :

• 1. Join a party.
• 2. Join/support your union/organisation.
• 3. Organise consistently and collectively.
• 4. Be prepared.

We have a world to win.

[Post was originally posted in r/TankieTheDeprogram]

Source

Since it was established in 1962, the Polar Marine Geosurvey Expedition (PMGE) has been one of Russia's leading institutions for geological exploration in the Arctic.

But the renowned company has come to the end of the road. Mounting focus on the Arctic and its vast mineral resources notwithstanding, the PMGE will be shut down this month...

"The company can operate if it has orders and they are fulfilled. If there are no orders, the company cannot operate, even if it has historical value,"...

...PMGE has been subject to US sanctions since early 2024...