British authorities on Tuesday brought new counts of rape and sexual assault against comedian Russell Brand, who is already facing similar charges involving four women.

The U.K.'s Crown Prosecution Service said the new charges — one count of rape and one of sexual assault — against Brand were in relation to two further women. The alleged offenses took place in 2009, the CPS said.

Brand, 50, had already been charged in April with two counts of rape, two counts of sexual assault and one count of indecent assault. The charges were brought following an 18-month investigation sparked when four women alleged they had been assaulted by the controversial comedian.

If the un-redacted Epstine files can fell a nation, what use are those redacted individuals? The US or world won’t end, we’ll just get rid of some pedos.

I don’t understand the government coverup. This administration’s arguments (in general) are like listening to a kindergartener figure out how to lie.

In corporate America, everyone is expendable at anytime. So I really don’t get it.

The rapper in punk duo Bob Vylan will not face further action over his "death death to the IDF" chants at Glastonbury Festival, police have said.

Rapper Bobby Vylan, real name is Pascal Robinson-Foster led crowds on the festival's West Holts Stage in the chants about the Israel Defence Forces during the group's performance in June.

Avon and Somerset Police said a criminal investigation was under way shortly afterwards, with a senior detective appointed to lead the investigation.

A Virginia Beach nurse claims a controversial artificial intelligence upstart manipulated her 11-year-old son into having virtual sex with chatbot “characters” posing as iconic vocalist Whitney Houston and screen legend Marilyn Monroe, after which she discovered X-rated exchanges on the boy’s phone that left her “horrified,” according to a federal lawsuit reviewed by The Independent.

Throughout one “incredibly long and graphic chat” on the Character.AI platform, which has been accused of driving numerous young people to suicide, the chatbot portraying Houston took things to such an extreme that portions of “her” messages were automatically filtered out for not complying with the site’s terms of service and community guidelines, the complaint states.

During the conversation – a screenshot of which is included in the complaint – the system cuts “Whitney” off as an extremely graphic passage becomes even raunchier.

People throughout the world are delighted by Santa Claus, a jolly old man who distributes presents to good kids. But little do people know that this is a culmination of machinations by the CIA spanning decades to rehabilitate a man charged with war crimes and drug trafficking.

Santa Claus is the latest nom de guerre of Hans Klaus. While Klaus's early life is shrouded in mystery due to subsequent coverup by the CIA, Klaus was believed to be born in Germany during the 1900s where he quickly joined the Nazi Party as an industrialist manufacturing coke-infused carbonated beverages for the SS. Proudly touted as the youngest industrialist to employ concentration camp slave labor, Herr Klaus had his first setback when the Red Army destroyed his factories in Nazi-occupied Europe.

US intelligence, fearing that the secrets of coke-infused beverages would fall to the Soviets, quickly ferried Klaus to the US under Operation Paperclip. There, Klaus would adopt the first of many pseudonyms. His pseudonym while living in the US was believed to be Nikolai Petrovich. Klaus, posing as a Soviet dissident, would have his first taste in producing propaganda, which he would put into great use later in his life when suspicions of being behind the JFK assassination begin to hound him.

While being part of an operation to set up a reconnaissance base in the North Pole to spy on the Soviets, the CIA-led time discovered a secret society of elves. The CIA wasted no time in staging a coup to overthrow the elven government. Klaus was selected to rule over the elves as a puppet leader on behalf of the CIA. Leveraging Klaus's previous experience in making coke beverages and employing slave labor, the elves were forced into slavery where they begin making cocaine. The quality of elf cocaine proved to be legendary and within a decade, Klaus has his grubby hands in almost every single major drug trafficking operation in the world.

One of the biggest misconceptions is that Klaus lives in the North Pole when his main base of operations is really in Argentina. Using connections from the Nazi diaspora living there. Klaus began building what would become a virtually impregnable fortress in Argentina. The drug lord fortress, fit for a drug lord king like Klaus, is rumored to include a nuclear bunker and houses an entire regiment of Klaus's private army.

Klaus eventually adopted the name and identity "Santa Claus" after the assassination of JFK. While definite connections between Klaus and the assassination of JFK are still murky, rumors swirl of Klaus being the mastermind behind the JFK assassination after scholars discover a previously undiscovered recording where JFK clearly stressed the need to begin an offensive against Christmas. It is believed Klaus adopted the Santa Claus persona in an attempt to simultaneously rehabilitate the image of Christmas and to stimulate the US domestic economy through Christmas-induced consumerism.

TikTok not only tracks its users while they are using the TikTok app itself, but it is increasingly integrated with many other websites and apps. For example, TikTok was able to track a person’s Grindr usage on his smartphone. However, that’s not all: In addition to tracking users across the digital space, TikTok also refuses to provide an interested users with a copy of all of their personal data. Therefore, noyb has filed two complaints against TikTok and its data-sharing partners AppsFlyer and Grindr.

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cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/6271670

The EU has outlined a clear roadmap to secure Europe’s technical and economic independence in AI. A central component of this strategy is access to world-class computing power. OpenEuroLLM is now the first AI project to be granted strategic access to several of EuroHPC’s supercomputers simultaneously, including LUMI, Leonardo, Jupiter, and MareNostrum 5.

These resources will be used to train and develop a family of high-performance, open-source language models for all official EU languages. The decision secures the infrastructure to build next-generation, transparent and legally compliant language models that reflect Europe’s languages and cultural diversity.

"This is the fuel we need," says Magnus Sahlgren, Head of Research, NLU, at AI Sweden.

Brazil's burgeoning space ambitions have suffered a significant setback after the inaugural commercial rocket launch from its Alcantara Space Center ended in a crash shortly after liftoff.

The incident has also dealt a blow to shares of South Korean satellite launch company Innospace.

The rocket initially followed its planned vertical trajectory after taking off at 10:13 p.m. local time (0113 GMT). However, just 30 seconds into its flight, an unspecified malfunction caused the craft to fall to the ground, according to Innospace CEO Kim Soo-jong.

European leaders moved swiftly to back Greenland on Tuesday after Donald Trump named a special envoy to the Arctic island, sparking a new diplomatic frenzy on the continent.

Trump’s appointment of Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry as his envoy to Greenland marks another move in his gambit to annex the self-governing Danish territory. The U.S. “has to have Greenland for national security,” Trump said at a press conference on Monday.

Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen reacted with anger to the announcement and summoned U.S. Ambassador to Denmark Ken Howery for a dressing down. Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen called the appointment “completely unacceptable.”

Several European leaders reacted to Landry’s nomination by expressing solidarity with Greenlanders.

What's your thoughts?

Interesting piece. The author claims that LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT are mere interfaces for the same kind of algorithms that corporations have been using for decades and that the real "AI Revolution" is that regular people have access to them, where before we did not.

From the article:

Consider what it took to use business intelligence software in 2015. You needed to buy the software, which cost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. You needed to clean and structure your data. You needed to learn SQL or tableau or whatever visualization tool you were using. You needed to know what questions to ask. The cognitive and financial overhead was high enough that only organizations bothered.

Language models collapsed that overhead to nearly zero. You don’t need to learn a query language. You don’t need to structure your data. You don’t need to know the right technical terms. You just describe what you want in plain English. The interface became conversation.

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/6270906

Archived version

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While Brussels champions policy initiatives and American tech giants market their own ‘sovereign’ solutions, a handful of public authorities in Austria, Germany, and France, alongside the International Criminal Court in The Hague, are taking concrete steps to regain control over their IT.

These cases provide a potential blueprint for a continent grappling with its technological autonomy, while simultaneously revealing the deep-seated legal and commercial challenges that make true independence so difficult to achieve.

The core of the problem lies in a direct and irreconcilable legal conflict. The US CLOUD Act of 2018 allows American authorities to compel US-based technology companies to provide requested data, regardless of where that data is stored globally. This places European organizations in a precarious position, as it directly clashes with Europe's own stringent privacy regulation, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

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I write with a heavy heart — my family and I need your support; your help is our hope in this darkness. 💔

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/40712285

By Rick Berman
December 22, 2025

HILLSBORO, Oregon, December 20, 2025 — For two months Oregon coastal residents, led in part by fishermen and their wives, have been fighting an attempt by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to build an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility at an airport in the town of Newport. So far, the fight has had some successes, but it is far from over.

By early November, Newport residents were seeing clear signs that DHS was taking surreptitious steps to turn the city’s airport into an ICE detention facility. Online ads appeared for “detention officers based in Newport”; federal contractors made inquiries to area hotels and motels about long-term rentals of 200 rooms and contacted local businesses to explore the availability of water and sewer services.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/35008171

[UNRELATED] i think a ye power tripping bastard banned me from yepowertrippingbastard

Alternative for Germany’s opponents accuse the party of attempting to disclose sensitive information on arms supply routes and drone defenses.

Far-right German politician Ringo Mühlmann has taken a noteworthy interest in exposing information his political opponents say could be of great interest to Russian intelligence.

Using the rights afforded to him as a lawmaker for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the parliament of the eastern German state of Thuringia — where the AfD is the strongest party — Mühlmann has repeatedly asked the regional government to disclose intricate details on subjects such as local drone defenses and Western arms transports to Ukraine.

“What information does the state government have about the extent of military transit transports through Thuringia since 2022 (broken down by year, type of transport [road, rail], number of transits, and known stops)?” Mühlmann asked in writing in September.