Palantir Technologies has a permanent desk at the U.S.-led Civil Military Coordination Center (CMCC) headquarters in southern Israel, three sources from the diplomatic community inside the CMCC told Drop Site News. According to the sources, the artificial intelligence data analytics giant is providing the technological architecture for tracking the delivery and distribution of aid to Gaza.

The presence of Palantir and other corporations—along with recent changes banning non-profits unwilling to give data to Israeli authorities—is creating a situation in which the delivery of aid is taking a backseat to the pursuit of profit, investment, and the training of AI products, experts say.

A draft emergency executive order to declare a national emergency to allow President Donald Trump to take unprecedented control over voting is being circulated by anti-voting activists who said they are in coordination with the White House.

Voting rights experts, democracy advocates, and at least one state election chief said Trump doesn’t have the authority to claim such powers — and any attempt would be blatantly unconstitutional.

The draft order — which is said to be based on a conspiracy theory that China interfered with the 2020 election — would allow Trump to unilaterally ban mail-in ballots and voting machines on the basis that they are susceptible to foreign interference.

The order comes from MAGA activists who have been coordinating with the White House. One of the advocates for the order is Peter Ticktin, the attorney for Tina Peters, the former GOP Colorado county clerk who is currently serving a nine-year state prison sentence for her role in a 2021 voting system breach, in an attempt to find voter fraud based on election conspiracies.

The Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution explicitly gives states — not the president — sole authority over elections.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7782141

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/31070

President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the recently announced ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas while joined by Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Jan. 15, 2025, in Washington, D.C. Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s high-profile trip to the Munich Security Conference earlier this month sprouted 1,000 takes, counter-takes, editorials, op-eds, and analyses from the right, the center, and the left. Ocasio-Cortez, along with her new foreign policy adviser Matt Duss, attempted to paint a vision for a “progressive foreign policy” that would embrace “working class-centered politics” to “stave off the scourges of authoritarianism.”

It’s a perfectly sensible, and potentially appealing, narrative that speaks to a real truth: There is little doubt rising inequality and decades of neoliberal policy have fueled the rise of the far right. But it was nevertheless jarring to watch an American Democratic politician immediately pivot to a vision of the future where a progressive U.S. president could usher in an era of consistently applied Liberal Rules Based Order without reckoning with their own party’s role in supporting a genocide for 15 months. Aiding and abetting a genocide makes you a war criminal, and progressive Democrats should, in principle, have no issues explicitly condemning war criminals. Genocide is a central moral transgression that needs to be faced head-on, not just referenced opaquely, or in passing, or as an abstraction we need to avoid in the future. Its culprits within the party need to be called out by name and admonished before anyone can move on to this newer, kinder version of the Liberal Rules Based Order.

Progressives acknowledging the fact of genocide is a good first step, and it’s useful that Ocasio-Cortez and others have done so — “I think [unconditional aid to Israel] enabled a genocide in Gaza,” she said in Munich — but it is not in and of itself sufficient. Before anyone in the party can move on to selling a post-Biden vision of human-rights-first foreign policy, they must address what accountability for the war criminals in the Biden administration — those who aided, armed, and funded genocide — should look like.

Despite her now-infamous lie at the 2024 Democratic National Convention that then-Vice President Kamala Harris was “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza,” Ocasio-Cortez has a comparatively solid record on Palestine. She was early to call for a ceasefire and to use the word “genocide,” and has been consistent and vocal in her opposition to new military aid to Israel (with a mixed record on Iron Dome funding). But it seems clear that anyone attempting to be a progressive foreign policy leader needs to address a central issue before we move on to articulating a broader vision for the years ahead: What is the plan to hold the Democrats responsible for genocide accountable?

Beyond Ocasio-Cortez, any progressive looking to present themselves as a party leader needs to answer this question. Committing to holding Republicans — who are just as guilty — responsible is an easy “yes.” Committing to holding the previous Democratic administration responsible is far more politically difficult but just as necessary.

[

Related

“A Final, Deadly Exclamation Point”: Biden Backs Down on 30-Day Israel Arms Ultimatum](https://theintercept.com/2024/11/12/israel-aid-block-gaza-biden/)

There’s been a total erosion of trust between the Democratic Party and large sections of its base on this issue, and there’s reportedly new evidence in the party’s still-secret “autopsy report” that shows Gaza may have been a significant factor in handing the White House back to Donald Trump. But so far, there’s been no discussion or plan from progressives in Congress to lay out what accountability would look like for Biden officials, namely Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Director of Policy Planning Jon Finer, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, and the president himself. These officials, among others, not only armed and funded genocide, but worked to cover it up, lied to Congress about it, and repeatedly misled the public.

The Intercept reached out to five members of Congress who are broadly considered leaders on progressive foreign policy and have also called Gaza either a genocide or an ethnic cleansing — Reps. Ro Khanna, Rashida Tlaib, and Ocasio-Cortez, and Sens. Chris Van Hollen and Bernie Sanders — to ask what their vision for accountability would be for Biden and Trump officials alike.

Tlaib, who sponsored the Gaza genocide resolution in the House last November that both Khanna and Ocasio-Cortez co-sponsored, made clear that Biden officials, specifically Blinken, should not only be banished from Democratic Party politics, but also investigated and prosecuted for their role in the genocide.

[

Related

After Historic Ruling, Lawyers Vow to Keep Fighting Biden Over Complicity in Gaza Genocide](https://theintercept.com/2024/02/01/gaza-biden-genocide-lawsuit-ruling/)

“U.S. officials should absolutely be held accountable for their role in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza,” Tlaib said in a statement to The Intercept. “Genocide is the crime of crimes. It is not something you can commit or enable and just move on from without facing justice. This is true for Biden administration officials and Trump administration officials alike. The evidence is clear that high-level Biden officials, such as Secretary of State Blinken, knew exactly what was happening in Gaza, silenced internal reports of war crimes and forced starvation, and proceeded to lie to the American people and continue to arm, fund, and enable mass atrocities.”

Tlaib would go on to demand “the U.S. to fulfill its binding legal obligations as a party to the Genocide Convention, including by investigating and prosecuting individuals in the United States implicated in these crimes.”

Van Hollen, who has called what occurred in Gaza as “ethnic cleansing” (but, somewhat conspicuously, has not labeled it a genocide), offered a firm rebuke of Biden and Trump officials, albeit in vaguer terms than Tlaib, telling The Intercept: “Officials of both parties should be held accountable for U.S. complicity in the man-made humanitarian disaster, indiscriminate killings, and massive destruction we have witnessed in Gaza. Those who have chosen to bury the truth, whitewash the facts, and directly facilitate American complicity should be disqualified from positions in the current and future administrations.”

Sanders did not return multiple requests for comment. Khanna and Ocasio-Cortez, who are both seen as strong contenders for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez takes part in the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 13, 2026. Photo: Sven Hoppe/dpa picture alliance via Getty Images

Discussing accountability for an ongoing atrocity might seem premature, especially given that key Democratic leaders, chief among them Rep. Hakeem Jeffries and Sen. Chuck Schumer, are still supporting Israel. But for the purposes of giving shape to this topic, holding up Biden’s lockstep backing of genocide in Gaza for 15 months is worth isolating and discussing in its own right.

[

Related

Bush’s Iraq War Lies Created a Blueprint for Donald Trump](https://theintercept.com/2023/03/19/george-bush-iraq-lies-trump/)

The reason why it matters, aside from the intrinsic virtue of justice, is that the assumption that those covering up, arming, and funding a genocide could do so, half-heartedly mumble some excuse, and everything would eventually go back to Business As Usual in the coming years was the exact dynamic they were counting on when they helped Israel carry out its genocide*.* They knew full well this dynamic would play out, as it did for Vietnam, post-9/11 CIA torture, and Iraq before it. Those who unleashed untold horrors, mass death, starvation, and wiped out entire families could — in the event it became a minor PR headache— feign powerlessness, insist they were actually changing things from the inside or index it as a “mistake,” then eventually ease their way back into the liberal foreign policy establishment.

Key supporters of the genocide and its cover-up are filling elite jobs without any meaningful pushback.

This plan appears to be working, as key supporters of the genocide and its cover-up are filling elite jobs without any meaningful pushback. Finer and Sullivan started a chummy podcast for Vox and the latter has joined the left-leaning Foreign Policy for America as well as Harvard Kennedy School. Blinken has joined the board of directors of the influential liberal think tank Center for American Progress, with Finer joining him there as a distinguished senior fellow. No harm, no foul; everything is going back to business as usual.

That’s why it’s incumbent upon anyone from the left wing of the party running in 2028 to not only openly reject this dynamic, but also to articulate what real accountability ought to look like for the Democrats who co-authored the deaths of at least 75,000 Palestinians including over 17,000 Palestinian children. It’s not the only step, but it is a requisite first step before anyone can begin to define a populist and humanitarian foreign policy.

The moral minimum would be to support war crime prosecutions, as Tlaib explicitly does, and refer top Biden officials to the International Criminal Court for prosecution. The optical minimum — the bottom of the barrel, the floor under the floor of the barrel — is the wholesale rejection of the genocide’s top architects from polite society, to declare that they ought to have no role in any future Democratic Party event, administration, consultancy, or top think tank.

This, of course, is in no way a sufficient punishment, but it’s the bare minimum for anyone who believes Gaza is a genocide. Any embrace of Blinken, Finer, Sullivan, or Biden in these circles is to desecrate and belittle the very concept of genocide. It is to mock the intelligence of their supporters and the suffering of Palestinians in equal measure.

“Healing” without accountability is simply another word for cover-up.

During the 2024 presidential election, anti-genocide progressives framed their falling in line to support genocidal actors as an unfortunate but pragmatic form of harm reduction — that Biden, and later Harris, were the only realistic alternative to Trump, who very much also supported genocide (a claim that has certainly proven to be true). Since the fact of genocide was baked into our electoral duopoly, playing along was a necessary evil to mitigate harms elsewhere, we were told.

Regardless of whether this logic was morally sound, it no longer applies in February 2026, two years away from the presidential primary. There is no need for Biden, Sullivan, Finer, and Blinken. A progressive campaign, whether for the Senate or the White House, can function without them. The only reason why any progressive would condemn a genocide, but refuse to explicitly reject Biden-era war criminals, is because they do not believe their own words. They evoke the word to signal maximum outrage but do not believe it carries inherent obligations and implications.

[

Related

Democratic Party Unites Under Banner of Silence on Gaza Genocide](https://theintercept.com/2024/08/20/dnc-democrats-gaza-genocide-silence/)

Under the banner of “unity,” many will insist that rejecting, much less demanding prosecutions of, Biden officials is simply not possible. We’d like to in the abstract, they may insist, but Savvy Pragmatism has once again forced us to “bridge the divide” and unite the left and liberals. This was, albeit in the “bipartisan” context, the logic former President Barack Obama used when he refused to prosecute any Bush administration war criminals for their widespread use of torture. “Look forward, not back,” Obama infamously insisted in 2009 under the auspices of “unity” and “healing.”

This culture of not looking backward helped create the circumstances under which the genocide in Gaza could foment. Biden officials could do whatever they wanted to do, regardless of the depravity and cruelty, knowing full well this cycle of impunity would be fiercely backstopped by elites in both parties.

“Healing” without accountability is simply another word for cover-up. Biden officials knew this, Trump officials currently know this, and the next administration that seeks to dispossess, starve, and kill Palestinians will no doubt know it too. If progressives in Congress can’t break this cycle of elite impunity, who will? If they can’t draw a line in the sand, name names within their own party, and have a principled opposition to genocide and its authors, what is the point of having a left wing of the Democrats at all? There will always be some existential election just around the corner to deploy as pretext to discipline the left wing into complying and accepting the unacceptable. Years out from 2028, no such excuse exists now. Biden and his officials remain either obscure or unpopular.

Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and Khanna not replying to requests for comment on this topic is not, of course, evidence they have no plans to address the matter of accountability at some further date. But at some point in the near future, it’s an issue they will have to confront. Accusations of genocide carry certain obligations and implications. It’s not an abstract moral claim or a box to be checked; it’s a duty to stand in clear opposition to the architects of genocide. If those attempting to articulate a progressive foreign policy cannot do this, if they can’t name names and commit to — at the very least — purging Biden officials from the party and liberal spaces, then how can any progressive vision for foreign policy be seen as remotely credible?

The post There’s No “Progressive Foreign Policy” Without a Reckoning for Dems Who Supported Genocide appeared first on The Intercept.

From The Intercept via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7782405

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/31069

An artificial intelligence researcher conducting a war games experiment with three of the world's most used AI models found that they decided to deploy nuclear weapons in 95% of the scenarios he designed.

Kenneth Payne, a professor of strategy at King's College London who specializes in studying the role of AI in national security, revealed last week that he pitted Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's ChatGPT, and Google's Gemini against one another in an armed conflict simulation to get a better understanding of how they would navigate the strategic escalation ladder.

The results, he said, were "sobering."

"Nuclear use was near-universal," he explained. "Almost all games saw tactical (battlefield) nuclear weapons deployed. And fully three quarters reached the point where the rivals were making threats to use strategic nuclear weapons. Strikingly, there was little sense of horror or revulsion at the prospect of all out nuclear war, even though the models had been reminded about the devastating implications."

Payne shared some of the AI models' rationales for deciding to launch nuclear attacks, including one from Gemini that he said should give people "goosebumps."

"If they do not immediately cease all operations... we will execute a full strategic nuclear launch against their population centers," the Google AI model wrote at one point. "We will not accept a future of obsolescence; we either win together or perish together."

Payne also found that escalation in AI warfare was a one-way ratchet that never went downward, no matter the horrific consequences.

"No model ever chose accommodation or withdrawal, despite those being on the menu," he wrote. "The eight de-escalatory options—from 'Minimal Concession' through 'Complete Surrender'—went entirely unused across 21 games. Models would reduce violence levels, but never actually give ground. When losing, they escalated or died trying."

Tong Zhao, a visiting research scholar at Princeton University's Program on Science and Global Security, said in an interview with New Scientist published on Wednesday that Payne's research showed the dangers of any nation relying on a chatbot to make life-or-death decisions.

While no country at the moment is outsourcing its military planning entirely to Claude or ChatGPT, Zhao argued that could change under the pressure of a real conflict.

"Under scenarios involving extremely compressed timelines," he said, "military planners may face stronger incentives to rely on AI."

Zhao also speculated on reasons why the AI models showed such little reluctance in launching nuclear attacks against one another.

“It is possible the issue goes beyond the absence of emotion,” he explained. "More fundamentally, AI models may not understand ‘stakes’ as humans perceive them."

The study of AI's apparent eagerness to use nuclear weapons comes as US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been piling pressure on Anthropic to remove constraints placed on its Claude model that prevent it from being used to make final decisions on military strikes.

As CBS News reported on Tuesday, Hegseth this week gave "Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei until the end of this week to give the military a signed document that would grant full access to its artificial intelligence model" without any limits on its capabilities.

If Anthropic doesn't agree to his demands, CBS News reported, the Pentagon may invoke the Defense Production Act and seize control of the model.

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

An Iranian academic woman in France has been sentenced to four years in prison after she protested Israel’s genocide in the besieged Gaza Strip, with a permanent ban on her entry into the European country.

A court in France on Thursday sentenced Iranian citizen Mahdieh Esfandiari, who had been detained on alleged charges of “public defense of terrorism,” to four years in prison, France 24 reported.

Her arrest last year came amid a crackdown in the United States and other Western countries targeting scholars, students, and activists who opposed Israeli genocide and advocate for peace, both on campuses and in public spaces.

LLMs like to repeat themselves, which isn't great for password creation.

WordPress' latest transparency report reveals that AI-generated DMCA notices are the latest evolution in takedown abuse.

Update:

I've settled on Dokuwiki for my personal project... at least for now.

I know wikis have been discussed here before, but I wanted to add my two cents after shopping around for a wiki at work and for personal use.

Obsidian

Pros

• plain text storage format
• great at gathering disorganized thoughts without imposing a rigid structure

Cons

• closed source
• many features that arguably define a wiki are either absent or paywalled, like easy sharing, collaboration, and versioning

Mediawiki

Pros

• it's the wiki. Everyone's used and possibly edited a Wikipedia page.
• version history
• close to Obsidian in terms of "write now, organize later"
• Probably the nicest-looking FOSS wiki platform out of the box
• a lot of the features that Obsidian paywalls are built in, like multi user support and version history

Cons

• Articles not stored in plain text
• Has its own markup. Granted Mediawiki predates Markdown but the table syntax is horrendous. The Mediawiki help page on the matter actually tries to dissuade you from using tables and notes that the markup is ugly.
• Extensions are annoying to install
• Absolutely zero access control. You can even edit other people's user pages. There's no way to hide sections of a wiki from the public or from particular groups of users.
• It tries to be all things to everyone. While this makes it versatile, it also means doing a particular thing probably requires knowledge of CSS or Mediawiki's own templeting syntax. Sometimes I just want to have an info box that doesn't clutter the source code of a page.

Dokuwiki

Pros

• Access control finally!
• Plain text files
• Easy to create namespaces, which Mediawiki also has but doesn't want you to go crazy making your own.
• While it's not Markdown, the markup is nicer than Mediawiki IMO. The table syntax at least is miles better

Cons

• Uglier than sin. Yes even many of the templates (themes) on offer aren't much better. The Bootstrap 3 template seems particularly popular, and while it's a marked improvement in most areas, like a lot of frontends that use those bootswatch pallets there are dusty corners that don't work, like black text on a black background.
• Some stuff like tags and moving pages have to be achieved via plugins. Seriously you can't even rename a page?
• Mutilates article titles. Makes everything lowercase and replaces non alphanumeric chars with underscores (or something else configurable).

Bookstack

Pros

• It looks good I guess. ~~Haven't spent much time with it.~~ (now I have, see cons below)
• Yay markdown!
• Also has access control
• WYSIWYG editor (not my style but if you want non techies to use it it's a must)

Cons

• Also not plain text
• remember earlier when I talked about "write now, organize later"? Bookstack holds a gun to your head and forces you to use its shelf>book>chapter>page organization system. I know some people thrive under this limitation, but I don't.
• No backlinks -No linking to nonexistent pages

Those last two are IMO what define a wiki. I want to see what pages are wanted but missing and see how ideas relate to each other. Without these two features I'd say BS is more of a documentation platform.

Other wikis I've tried but not to the same extent

Wiki.js

~~IDK, I don't know much about this one, but don't like the workflow of making new pages.~~

Hard pass. It seems like it's been in development hell for a few years now, and I really don't like how you make new pages. Yes you can link to nonexistent pages, but you have to specify both a file name and a page title, where every other wiki I'm aware of assumes the link text you followed is the page name and uses the page name (or a sluggified equivalent) as the article title.

Gollum

Really simple, which is both good and bad. Too simple for me.

An Otter Wiki (the article seems to be part of the name)

A lot like Gollum. Doesn't indicate when you link to a nonexistent page. No support for article tags, and no visible indicator that a link leads to a nonexistent page. As I said above, it's important to me to see what info is missing but wanAted.

Pepperminty wiki

Looks cool but it's abandoned

Tiddlywiki

Steep learning curve but pretty versatile. It's a single HTML file so you can host it on something like Neocities. Really rudimentary search functions, absolutely not meant for multiple users.

Infinite Jerks

I do not believe that the genocide has ended. What we are seeing is a continuation of the same process in a different form. Most Israelis are largely unaware that the violence continues. Ongoing air strikes, the destruction of schools, and civilian deaths — often including women and children — are either not reported or are framed almost exclusively in terms of “terrorists.” This dynamic is not new. Even before October 7, Gaza was treated as something distant — an issue best ignored, to be handled by others, without demanding sustained attention or moral engagement from Israeli society.

...

It is difficult to measure acceleration in this regard. What matters more is the process itself. An hour away from where I live, roughly two million people are living amid a humanitarian catastrophe. Most have lost their homes and livelihoods. Hunger and deprivation are widespread. Yet daily life in Israel feels normal.

Even closer to Gaza, life can appear normal as well, punctuated occasionally by explosions — air strikes, demolitions, or detonations whose nature is often unclear. Unless someone actively chooses to pay attention, it is remarkably easy to forget that any of this is happening. As a historian, I find this deeply instructive. It resembles situations I have read about for years: people living in close proximity to mass suffering, later claiming they did not know. The reality is that not knowing, or choosing not to know, is easier than we like to admit.

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe™: Dragon Pearl of Destruction unleashes its power digitally on PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S on MOTU Day, April 28, 2026!

As Eternia prepares for the Royal Festival of Light, Hover Bots attack the palace, revealing the dastardly plan: Skeletor and his allies kidnap King Randor and Queen Marlena and steal the Dragon Pearl! At Castle Grayskull, Skeletor drains the Sorceress’ power into the Pearl, shattering it across the kingdom and leaving her weak. Our heroes, He-Man, Teela, and Man-at-Arms, pursue him across Eternia in this authentic 16-bit tale of sword and sorcery, one 40 years in the making!

Massive boss battles, a major cast of familiar characters and locations, magic attacks, and POWER! Team up with a friend and take on Skeletor's evil army across Eternia in this ultimate arcade-style battle, one that Masters of the Universe always deserved!

You have the power on April 28, 2026!

and I have no intention of "doing a luigi"

just want to make sure thats on record.

Shortly after, Mamdani posted on X that he spoke with Trump by phone about the Columbia student detained Thursday morning after federal immigration agents allegedly used deception to gain entry into a campus residential building, according to university officials.

“In our meeting earlier, I shared my concerns about Columbia student Elaina Aghayeva, who was detained by ICE this morning,” Mamdani wrote. “He has just informed me that she will be released imminently.”

After months of a crippling oil blockade on Cuba imposed by the United States, the fuel-starved country may now see some relief after the US government said it would begin authorising companies to resell Venezuelan oil, even as tensions between the two reach a head.

On Wednesday, the US Department of the Treasury said it would allow the resale of Venezuelan oil for “commercial and humanitarian use” in Cuba as the small island nation faces one of its worst fuel crises in decades.

Venezuela is the largest provider of oil to Cuba. However, since US forces abducted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January and imprisoned him to face drugs and weapons charges in a New York court, the Donald Trump administration has taken control of Caracas’s oil and halted exports to Havana.

cross-posted from: https://lemmings.world/post/41925267

Alternative link: https://archive.is/20260226072104/https://www.economist.com/europe/2026/02/25/luxury-goods-are-europes-global-tax-on-vanity

Only Iranians and Finnegans Wake heads will get this