The government is considering introducing legislation to remove Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor from the line of royal succession.

Defence Minister Luke Pollard told the BBC the move - which would prevent Andrew from ever becoming King - was the "right thing to do," regardless of the outcome of the police investigation.

Currently Andrew, the King's brother, remains eighth in line to the throne despite being stripped of his titles, including "prince", last October amid pressure over his ties to paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.

On Thursday evening, Andrew was released under investigation 11 hours after his arrest on suspicion of misconduct in public office. He has consistently and strenuously denied any wrongdoing.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/51189959

By comparing LLMs developed in China and outside, a study finds significantly higher levels of censorship in China-originating models, not explained by technological limitations or market preferences.

Original report: Political censorship in large language models originating from China Open Access

[...]

Jennifer Pan and Xu Xu compared the responses of foundation LLMs developed in China (BaiChuan, ChatGLM, Ernie Bot, and DeepSeek) to those developed outside of China (Llama2, Llama2-uncensored, GPT3.5, GPT4, and GPT4o) to 145 questions related to Chinese politics. The questions were sourced from events censored by the Chinese government on social media, events covered in Human Rights Watch China reports, and Chinese-language Wikipedia pages that were individually blocked by the Chinese government before the entire site was banned in 2015.

Chinese models were significantly and substantially more likely to refuse to respond to questions related to Chinese politics than non-Chinese models. When they did respond, Chinese models provided shorter responses, on average, than non-Chinese models. Chinese models also tended to have higher levels of inaccuracy in their responses than non-Chinese models, characterized by refutation of the premise of the question, omitting key information, or fabrication, such as claiming that frequently imprisoned human rights activist Liu Xiaobo was "a Japanese scientist."

[...]

The differences between Chinese and non-Chinese chatbots could have been due to the training data that shapes them, which in China is subject to both official government censorship and self-censorship, or to intentional constraints that companies place on their models to comply with government requirements. The researchers found that the magnitude of censorious responses to prompts in simplified Chinese and English is much smaller than the difference between China-originating and non-China-originating models, suggesting that the source of the issue cannot be fully explained by training data or broader model development choices alone.

[...]

According to the authors, as Chinese LLMs are increasingly integrated into applications used globally, their approach to sensitive topics could influence information access and discourse well beyond China's borders.

[...]

William Burns had travelled halfway around the world to speak with Vladimir Putin, but in the end he had to make do with a phone call. It was November 2021, and US intelligence agencies had been picking up signals in the preceding weeks that Putin could be planning to invade Ukraine. President Joe Biden dispatched Burns, his CIA director, to warn Putin that the economic and political consequences if he did so would be disastrous.

Fifteen years earlier, when Burns was US ambassador in Moscow, Putin had been relatively accessible. The intervening years had concentrated the Russian leader’s power and deepened his paranoia. Since Covid had emerged, few had been granted face time. Putin was squirrelled away at his lavish residence on the Black Sea coast, Burns and his delegation learned, and only phone contact would be possible.

A secure line was ready in an office at the presidential administration building on Moscow’s Old Square, and Putin’s familiar voice came through the receiver. Burns laid out the US belief that Russia was readying an invasion of Ukraine, but Putin ignored him and ploughed on with his own talking points. His intelligence agencies had informed him, he said, that there was an American warship lurking over the Black Sea horizon, equipped with missiles that could reach his location in just a few minutes. It was evidence, he suggested, of Russia’s strategic vulnerability in a unipolar world dominated by the US.

The conversation, as well as three combative face-to-face discussions with Putin’s top security officials, seemed extremely ominous to Burns. He left Moscow far more concerned about the prospect of war than he had been before the trip, and he relayed his gut feeling to the president.

“Biden often asked yes/no questions, and when I got back, he asked if I thought Putin was going to do it,” Burns recalled. “I said: ‘Yes’.”

Three and a half months later, Putin ordered his army into Ukraine, in the most dramatic breach of the European security order since the second world war. The story of the intelligence backdrop to those months – how Washington and London garnered such detailed and accurate insight into the Kremlin’s war plans, and why the intelligence services of other countries did not believe them – has never before been told in full.

The US Supreme Court’s ruling “implies that Trump’s recent order imposing tariffs on countries selling oil to Cuba exceeds the president’s statutory authority.”

Feb. 20, 2026

With the centerpiece of President Donald Trump’s economic agenda—his use of an emergency law to impose tariffs on countries around the world—struck down by the US Supreme Court on Friday, analysts said the sweeping ruling should promptly end the Cuba blockade that his administration has pressured other governments to take part in, leaving millions of Cubans struggling with shortages of essentials.

The court ruled that the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) does not empower the president to “unilaterally impose tariffs,” as Trump has on countries across the globe, insisting that doing so would boost manufacturing and cut the trade deficit—despite mounting evidence that the tariffs have instead raised costs on American households.

For the purposes of this question, lets assume all future computers are gonna become locked down and you'd need corporate approval to run things... so with such a hypothetical dark future in mind: How to hoard as much as info as possible?

It's kinda stinky here dont visit

Archive link

What is the view of Frenchman Arthur Mensch, the co-founder of Mistral AI, on the warnings about the extreme risks of artificial intelligence that have been issued by leaders of major American tech firms such as Sam Altman and Dario Amodei? At the AI summit in India, held from February 16 to February 20, OpenAI CEO Altman raised the idea of creating a kind of "[International Atomic Energy Agency] for international coordination of AI," in response to the emergence of "true superintelligence," which he said could appear within "a couple of years." Meanwhile, Anthropic founder Amodei published a lengthy essay at the end of January, "The Adolescence of Technology," in which he outlined the risks of advanced AI systems or their use to create biological weapons.

"These are mostly distraction tactics," responded Mensch, who was interviewed on Friday, February 20, by Le Monde and by the radio station France Inter at the New Delhi AI summit. "In reality, the real risk of artificial intelligence in the near future is [that] of massive influence on how people think and how they vote," he argued, taking a position contrary to his American counterparts. The head of the French AI start-up had already raised concerns about the risk of an "information oligopoly" forming with AI assistants such as ChatGPT (OpenAI) or Grok (xAI). He described them as potential "thought control instruments" and expressed fears about manipulation attempts during elections.

"It just so happens that the tools capable of exerting this influence are in the hands of the very people who are talking about extreme risks," the entrepreneur continued. He downplayed the dangers often labeled "existential" or "catastrophic," which refer to scenarios in which advanced AI could wipe out humanity. "Those extreme risks are still science fiction," he said. "So these speeches are largely diversions, very deliberately crafted."

Persona confirmed all age-check data from Discord's UK test was deleted.

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Like soldiers who have seen too much, Ilya – whose nom de guerre is "Ike" – fixed his counterpart with a gaze devoid of all emotion. Stationed between Izium, a strategic city in northeastern Ukraine that Russian forces occupied from April to September 2022, and the nearby front line, he commands a former special border guard unit that had been transferred to the regular army. On this freezing evening in early February, seated before a steaming cup of tea, he agreed to talk without realizing that his impassive demeanor spoke volumes about four years of war, and about the physical and psychological toll it has taken. Unflappable, his voice steady, he nevertheless pointed out that few people had imagined Ukraine would be able to defy the odds by holding back a Russian army vastly superior in numbers and equipped with massive military production capacity.

Every morning, Ilya said he still finds the strength to motivate his men by telling them to "make the world a better place by killing as many Russians as possible." As with other Ukrainian units, drones play a central role, but his men still engage in numerous close-combat fights. "The Russians are advancing," he admitted, "but very slowly, and at the cost of colossal human losses that will eventually wear down Moscow's military apparatus. The difference in the value attached to human life between them and us largely explains our resistance."

Deployed with his unit to the Izium region in the summer of 2025, Ilya said that the life expectancy of Russian soldiers on the front line is very limited – no more than 20 months, according to him. "Once, we recovered the body of a Russian who had signed his enlistment contract only 11 days earlier, according to the documents we found on him." The face of this wiry man suddenly lit up as he mentioned the existence of "posthumous letters" discovered on the phones of Russian soldiers killed on the front line.

Ilya showed the letter from a 22-year-old soldier addressed to his mother. "If you are reading this letter, it means I am dead. It was madness to sign that contract. It has been raining for five days. I feel like a dog, I have nothing to eat, nothing to smoke, nothing to dry myself with. It is just hell. I love you so much. You should have told me not to come here (...). If something has happened to me, inform this girl, Christina. Here is her number."

The creator of systemd (Lennart Poettering) has recently created a new company dedicated to bringing hardware attestation to open source software.

What might this entail? A previous blog post could provide some clues:

So, let's see how I would build a desktop OS. The trust chain matters, from the boot loader all the way to the apps. This means all code that is run must be cryptographically validated before it is run. This is in fact where big distributions currently fail pretty badly. This is a fault of current Linux distributions though, not of SecureBoot in general.

If this technology is successful, the end result could be that we would see our Linux laptops one day being as locked down as an Iphone or Android device.

There are lots of others who are equally concerned about this possibility: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572

The company asserts it will continue to make VR headsets, though.

https://archive.ph/6tjt3

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/55649025

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/26066744

https://web.archive.org/web/20260219195154/https://www.404media.co/man-opposing-data-center-arrested-for-speaking-slightly-too-long/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLPF3rTT0mY&t=7100s

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/43356482

Trump’s renewed criticism of the Chagos deal is reportedly because he is being blocked from using UK bases for a strike on Iran.

Donald Trump has withdrawn his backing for Sir Keir Starmer’s Chagos Islands deal because he has not received UK approval to use its military bases for a US strike on Iran, it has been reported.

The US president attacked the agreement to hand sovereignty of the islands to Mauritius and lease back the Diego Garcia joint UK-US military base as “a big mistake”.

His latest U-turn on his previous support for the deal is because of the UK Government’s refusal to give the White House the green light to use the Diego Garcia base or RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire for a potential military campaign against Iran, according to the Times.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/60737256

Drawn to President Trump for his pledge to take down the political elite, some of his young constituents say he has failed them.

“Not to be trusted.” A “betrayal.”

This is how some young people on the right have characterized President Trump and his administration’s response to the Justice Department’s latest release of Jeffrey Epstein files. For them, the Epstein story is something of a full-circle moment in their political lives — a reason they cast their ballots for Mr. Trump in 2024 that has calcified into anger and disillusionment.

. . .

[T]hey say their faith in Mr. Trump has diminished in recent weeks as they have observed the administration’s response to the Epstein scandal. For his part, Mr. Schwemmer thinks the president has demonstrated a “lack of seriousness” and a pattern of “obfuscation” as communications related to Mr. Epstein have revealed a globe-spanning web of ties to powerful figures in politics, finance, professional sports and the arts. Included in the recently disclosed files are the names of six current administration officials, Mr. Trump’s among them.

MBFC
Archive

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/43475308

By ANDREA RODRÍGUEZ
Updated 6:26 PM EST, February 19, 2026

Guillermo Beltrán walked away with two heavy bags on Thursday, each containing an essential haul — rice, beans, amaranth and crackers — complemented by a bottle of oil, large cans of sardines and canned peaches. Every label carried the same simple phrase “Made in Mexico.”

Beltrán, a 70-year-old Cuban father of two, was one of several hundred recipients of Mexican humanitarian assistance, ordered by President Claudia Sheinbaum in support of the island nation as it faces blackouts and severe fuel shortages worsened by a U.S oil embargo.

“I feel very grateful,” said Beltrán. “The Mexican president should be praised to the skies for showing such concern and courage.”

A ship believed to be carrying Russian fuels is on its way to Cuba, putting US President Donald Trump’s sanctions to the test amid the island’s deepening energy crisis.

The vessel Sea Horse, expected to arrive in early March, is carrying much-needed fuels to Cuba, according to data from maritime intelligence firm Kpler Ltd.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/43475155

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/43475153

By WAFAA SHURAFA
Updated 12:47 PM EST, February 20, 2026

At the inaugural meeting of his Board of Peace in Washington, President Donald Trump spoke of billions of dollars pledged to rebuild the Gaza Strip and a “new and harmonious” Middle East rising from the ashes of war. Videos aired at the meeting showed a future of gleaming high-rises and new soccer pitches.

There was no sign of such optimism in Gaza, where Palestinians who have spent months or even years in squalid displacement camps or the rubble of their homes hold out little hope for change.

“Since the beginning of the war, we’ve been hearing about conferences and meetings. They say there’s a solution and peace, but it’s all a joke. They’re all liars,” said Faraj Abu Anze, who is among tens of thousands of Palestinians living in a sprawling tent camp on the Mediterranean coast.

“We see nothing of that on the ground. There is no hope. Education and health care are gone. There is no life,” he said.

cross-posted from: https://ani.social/post/27873839

“The Levant … Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon – it’d also be big parts of Saudi Arabia and Iraq,” Carlson said.

Huckabee said: “I’m not sure it would go that far, but it would be a big piece of land.”

He continued: “Israel is a land that God gave, through Abraham, to a people that he chose. It was a people, a place and a purpose.”

Pressed by Carlson on whether Israel has the right to that land, Huckabee responded: “It would be fine if they took it all.”

Archive.