cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/43813508

Feb. 20, 2026

After nearly three months, the largest anti-immigrant operation in U.S. history has officially “ended” — beaten back by a massive, sustained, and well-organized resistance involving hundreds of thousands throughout the state of Minnesota and across the country.

At its peak, the surge involved 3,000 federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Border Patrol — a 2,000% increase over the normal deployment in the state, and more than twice the size of the combined police forces in the Twin Cities metropolitan area, which includes Minneapolis and St. Paul.

These agents have functioned as a hostile paramilitary force to carry out “retribution” against Minnesota and the immigrant communities that U.S. president Donald Trump calls “garbage” and “animals” who have “destroyed Minnesota.”

So, apparently someone got raided and arrested for buying literal trash, the GN video explains the rest of it.

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/59905524

Power accrues not only to those who produce energy but to those who build, finance, integrate, and expand energy systems. By that definition, China, not the United States, is most successfully practicing a policy of energy dominance.

summary:

An international early warning system blocked a shipment of chemicals used to make fentanyl that could have produced up to 1.6 billion potentially lethal doses, the UN narcotics control body said on Thursday.

“These agencies will continue to work on increased cooperation and communication to prevent such incidents in the future.”

Now THAT is how you turn a lose into a win on your performance review!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/43811651

Feb. 27, 2026

China is delivering “offensive” weapons as well as additional “defensive” arms to Iran, with the US on the cusp of launching an attack on the Islamic Republic, three officials familiar with the matter told Middle East Eye.

One Arab official familiar with the deliveries described the offensive weapons as “small” systems. Another regional intelligence official said Beijing had sent loitering munitions, or Kamikaze drones, to the Islamic Republic.

A second Arab official who spoke with MEE confirmed the deliveries of “offensive” weapons as well as the air-defence systems.

Paywalled version

https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/why-some-australians-are-spending-35-000-a-year-on-food-delivery-apps-20260226-p5o5pr

Reddit forums are awash with people seeking help for their self-prescribed online food delivery addictions.

“It’s getting exhausting having to fight my mind every day to not buy something to eat. It feels like an intrusive thought – boom, I can’t stop thinking about ordering food for the rest of the day. Even if I eat something at home,” says one user.

“It’s been to the point where I would order two to three times a day,” another user wrote. “$50 orders each, for weeks on end.”

is this a wide spread thing ? or a beat up ?

is it this, or house prices causing cost of living concerns ? (sarcasm)

Declaring where I am at , I have never ordered online here in Australia. Way to lazy and they seem expensive. I have occasionally when OS.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.ca/c/canada/p/557705/trump-is-spoiling-for-a-fight-over-canadian-potash-the-fertilizer-that-feeds-america-is-key

First few paragraphs:

In December 2025, United States president Donald Trump struck a deal that—uncharacteristically for such a spectacle-driven politician—barely registered among the general public.

The agreement committed the Belarusian government to releasing 123 political prisoners, a significant concession from one of Europe’s most entrenched authoritarian regimes. In return, Washington agreed to lift sanctions on Belarus’s potash exports—sanctions it escalated after the country’s rigged 2020 election and later expanded, in 2022, when Belarus allowed Russia to use its territory to invade Ukraine.

Why potash? Blame Canada. The United States can live without many imports. It can’t farm at scale without our potash. In 2024, the US imported about 12 million tonnes of the fertilizer from Canada, all of it dug from Saskatchewan, where it enters the US tariff-free under the Canada–United States–Mexico Agreement (CUSMA). Cut that supply, and American agriculture could grind to a halt.

As CUSMA heads into renegotiation this summer, the mood in Washington appears confrontational. Reopening Belarusian exports would give the US access to one of the few alternative global reserves—and, with it, leverage in an area where it currently has little.

I called up Matt Simpson, chief executive officer of Brazil Potash, a Brazilian company attempting to mine and produce potash fertilizer in the Amazon basin in a bid to supply more of that country’s demand. He explained why Canada has long been the backbone of the US potash supply, how reliance on Belarus introduces serious geopolitical and pricing vulnerabilities, and what this means for global food security if trade tensions escalate.

Potash is an interesting commodity. It rarely gets talked about in public but seems just as geopolitically important as oil or microchips.

I've got an idea so bad that it just might work...

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/43810526

Actions by the president and the Pentagon appeared to drive a wedge between Washington and the tech industry, whose leaders and workers spoke out for the start-up.

Feb. 27, 2026

https://archive.ph/hwHbe

Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, said in a memo to employees this week that “we have long believed that A.I. should not be used for mass surveillance or autonomous lethal weapons.”

More than 100 employees at Google signed a petition calling on the tech giant to “refuse to comply” with the Pentagon on some uses of artificial intelligence in military operations.

And employees at Amazon, Google and Microsoft urged their leaders in a separate open letter on Thursday to “hold the line” against the Pentagon.

Silicon Valley has rallied behind the A.I. start-up Anthropic, which has been embroiled in a dispute with President Trump and the Pentagon over how its technology may be used for military purposes. Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, has said he does not want the company’s A.I. to be used to surveil Americans or in autonomous weapons, saying this could “undermine, rather than defend, democratic values.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/43810526

Actions by the president and the Pentagon appeared to drive a wedge between Washington and the tech industry, whose leaders and workers spoke out for the start-up.

Feb. 27, 2026

https://archive.ph/hwHbe

Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, said in a memo to employees this week that “we have long believed that A.I. should not be used for mass surveillance or autonomous lethal weapons.”

More than 100 employees at Google signed a petition calling on the tech giant to “refuse to comply” with the Pentagon on some uses of artificial intelligence in military operations.

And employees at Amazon, Google and Microsoft urged their leaders in a separate open letter on Thursday to “hold the line” against the Pentagon.

Silicon Valley has rallied behind the A.I. start-up Anthropic, which has been embroiled in a dispute with President Trump and the Pentagon over how its technology may be used for military purposes. Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, has said he does not want the company’s A.I. to be used to surveil Americans or in autonomous weapons, saying this could “undermine, rather than defend, democratic values.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/43650511

Tehran’s ICBMs cannot currently reach the US, experts say, and White House has claimed its nuclear programme has been destroyed

Donald Trump’s likely casus belli for an attack on Iran – which would be the largest US intervention since the Iraq war – is fraught with contradictions, and his top advisers have been left to cover for him as the White House makes the case for intervention.

In his State of the Union address this week, Trump alleged that Iran posed a direct threat to the US and that the country was “working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America”. But that claim has not been backed up with evidence by the White House or the Pentagon, and US intelligence reports from just last year say that it would take Iran 10 years to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile that could reach the US.

A public US defense intelligence agency assessment from 2025 says that Iran could use its space-launch vehicles to “develop a militarily-viable ICBM by 2035 should Tehran decide to pursue the capability”. But that threat to the US homeland, as laid out in the document, pales in comparison to the ones already presented by Russia and China, as well as other hostile states like North Korea.

MBFC
Archive

Yogurt up, fellas

US President Donald Trump told his UAE counterpart, Mohammed bin Zayed, that Saudi Arabia asked him to impose sanctions on the emirates over their support for Sudan's paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), The New York Times reported on Friday.

The report says that Trump delivered the message to Mohammed bin Zayed in a November phone call, after Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman visited the White House.

Middle East Eye was the first to reveal the Saudi crown prince’s plan to lobby Trump against the UAE for its support of the RSF, whose month-long siege of el-Fasher in Darfur was described by a United Nations panel last week as bearing the “hallmarks of genocide”.