[Mace Windu gets killed by Xi who's Palpatine]

Or is it just my home? My wife's phone, my phone, the TV....

I can watch videos posted here, but I can't scroll through any other videos.

The East African country is making use of cheap hydropower and Chinese electric vehicles to ditch the internal combustion engine.

Shorter version: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/OnXBDts8nbs

Europe Correspondent Saskia Dekkers Spoke With Gerald Knaus, Architect of 2016 Turkey Deal who Warns of Failure in Europe’s Migration Pact, he says it could trigger the ultra right to demand an ICE-like force

Russian attacks and Ukrainian civilian deaths rose as President Trump’s peace talks dragged on during his first year back in the White House.

President Trump repeatedly promised during his campaign that he would end the war in Ukraine in one day.

But by most measures, the war has grown worse for Ukrainians since Mr. Trump returned to the White House, not better. More civilians were killed and injured in 2025 than in the previous year. More missiles and drones are hitting city centers. Russia captured more territory in its slow-moving advances in 2025 than in any year since 2022, when it launched its full-scale invasion. Moscow has practically destroyed Ukraine’s power grid during the country’s harshest winter in more than a decade.

. . .

After taking office in January 2025, Mr. Trump tossed out the American playbook for the war. He made overtures to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, the aggressor in the conflict and an avowed opponent of the West, while distancing the United States from Ukraine. U.S. aid to Ukraine fell by 99 percent in 2025 compared with the year before, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German research center. Mr. Trump stopped giving American weapons to Kyiv, unless it or its Western allies paid for them.

MBFC
Archive

We’ve been covering Australia’s monumentally stupid social media ban for kids under 16 since before it went into effect. We noted how dumb the whole premise was, how the rollout was an immediate mess, how a gambling ad agency helped push the whole thing, and how two massive studies involving 125,000 kids found the entire “social media is inherently harmful” narrative doesn’t hold up.

But theory and data are one thing. Now we’re getting real-world stories of actual kids being harmed by a law that was supposedly designed to protect them. And wouldn’t you know it, the harm is falling hardest on the kids who were already most vulnerable. Just like many people predicted.

If you thought this was a good idea you are part of the harm against these kids, wake the fuck up and use your brain, this is a moral panic, you are hardly different than villagers yelling for a witch to be burned at the stake and you should feel ashamed of your stupidity.

Do better fediverse and if you are one of those people who casually waxes lyrical about denying kids access to the tools you use everyday because you honestly believe letting young people on social media is equivalent to giving them physically addictive drugs and that this place should have young people restricted from it because it is fundamentally unhealthy, please leave. You bring this place down and you undermine any sense of optimism about digital communities that motivates the rest of us to be here.

“The current research does not support the usefulness of banning kids from social media. Research studies do not suggest there is a correlation between time spent on social media and youth mental health. Further, reducing social media time does not improve mental health. This ban is likely to be a waste of time and resources. Further, it prevents opportunities to teach kids how to use social media responsibly. Like most moral panics, these kinds of efforts do harm in distracting us from real sources of youth mental health problems, mainly families in distress and failing schools. We have to remember we’ve been through this all before many times from video games, to rock and roll, books to the radio. These panics over media and technology never do anything to help kids.”

...

“Perhaps because of that balance and because many other factors are known to have a much larger impact on childhood, current evidence suggests very small effects at a population level when it comes to associations between social media/smartphone use on wellbeing e.g., McCrae et al., 2017; Vahedi & Zannella, 2021; Yoon et al.,2019). Note that not all the above reviews involve children. Also, that these are all reporting associations, not cause and effect.

“When it comes to the general use of social media and smartphones, the effects on mood or wellbeing are so small ‘that they require implausibly large behavioral changes to produce even minor mood shifts.’ (Winbush et al., 2025; p6)

https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-comments-on-evidence-on-benefits-and-harms-of-social-media-and-social-media-bans-on-young-people/

https://news.ucsb.edu/2025/022293/brain-science-social-media-and-modern-moral-panic

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jan/14/social-media-time-does-not-increase-teenagers-mental-health-problems-study

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2026/01/26/social-media-age-bans-toxic-business-model/

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2026-01-23-expert-comment-under-16-social-media-ban-right-course

https://www.aap.org/en/patient-care/media-and-children/center-of-excellence-on-social-media-and-youth-mental-health/the-good-and-bad-of-social-media-what-research-tells-us/?srsltid=AfmBOoojcZwZjG9eD7lPvXtLXnzx9iLkcNaJ0r5jbUdJZsW-ntK8HmpM

https://www.businessinsider.com/kids-parenting-social-media-bans-meta-2026-2

https://cacbrevard.org/should-teens-be-banned-from-social-media/

https://publications.ieu.asn.au/ie-220/article1/help-or-harm?cookies=true

https://medium.com/@pradeenmania123/banning-social-media-for-teens-is-dangerous-and-doomed-to-fail-7e4946f08561

https://theconversation.com/i-research-the-harm-that-can-come-to-teenagers-on-social-media-i-dont-support-a-ban-273835

https://www.humanrights.unsw.edu.au/students/blogs/australia-social-media-ban-under-16s

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2026-01-27/a-social-media-ban-for-under-16s-would-be-popular-but-would-it-be-smart

https://www.jezebel.com/social-media-bans-teens-europe-uk-spain-greece-elon-musk-traitor-x-ai-chatbots-twitter

https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/social-media-regulation-is-being-shaped-by-fear-not-evidence

Well said.

Article Talk

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For President Joe Biden, see (Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.)

Brandonization (pronounced/ bran-don-i-zation) is a pejorative term used to describe the rapidly decreasing cognitive facilities of presidents. Made popular by the apparent sundowning of Joe Biden, now seen in current president Donald J. Trump.

What in the dystopian hell?! 350-square-foot tiny homes...

"You can rent the homes out, cover your mortgage, and get income each month," he notes. "Those homes can be leased out for a minimum of $1,300 a month."

Mata says investors rushed in from all over the country, especially from California.

The winner of the Goncourt, as the prize is called, is likely to enter the pantheon of world literature, joining a lineage of writers that includes Marcel Proust and Simone de Beauvoir. The prize is also a financial boon for authors. As the biggest award in French literature, the Goncourt means a prime spot in storefronts, foreign rights, prestige. By one estimate, winning the Goncourt means nearly €1m of sales in the weeks that follow.

In November 2024, the Académie Goncourt gave the prize to a novel by Kamel Daoud, a celebrated Algerian writer living in France. His victory came at a tense moment for France and its former colony. The relationship, never an easy one, had been strained by the Algerian state’s increasing political repression of its people and French involvement in the dispute between Algeria and Morocco over Western Sahara. (France has sided with Morocco, which claims sovereignty over the territory; Algeria has supported independence movements there.)

Houris, which was not published in Algeria, tells the story of the war through a 26-year-old woman, Fajr or Aube (Dawn), who, as a child, survived a massacre at Had Chekala, a village where a real massacre took place in January 1998. In the novel, terrorists killed Aube’s family and cut her throat with a knife. The attack gave her a large scar across her neck: her “smile”, as she calls it. To breathe, Aube has undergone a tracheostomy, a procedure through which the neck is opened to access the windpipe. She wears a cannula, which she sometimes hides with a scarf. “I always choose a rare and expensive fabric,” she says. But the injuries from the attack mean that, two decades on, her voice is barely audible. For her, the scar is a sign of a history that many want to forget. “I am the true trace, the most solid of signs of everything we lived through for 10 years in Algeria,” she says.

Eleven days after the Goncourt ceremony, a woman appeared on an Algerian news show. She wore a blue-and-white-striped shirt; her long hair was tied into a bun. This left her neck visible, and attached to it, some breathing apparatus with a cannula. She introduced herself as Saâda Arbane, 30. Daoud, she claimed, had stolen her personal details to make his bestseller. “It’s my personal life, it’s my story. I’m the only one who should determine how it should be made public.” For 25 years, she said, “I’ve hidden my story, I’ve hidden my face. I don’t want people pointing at me.” But, Arbane said, she had confided in her psychiatrist. “I had no filter, no taboos. I told her everything.” Her psychiatrist was Kamel Daoud’s wife.

Self-driving cars are often marketed as safer than human drivers, but new data suggests that may not always be the case.

Citing data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), Electrek reports that Tesla disclosed five new crashes involving its robotaxi fleet in Austin. The new data raises concerns about how safe Tesla’s systems really are compared to the average driver.

The incidents included a collision with a fixed object at 17 miles per hour, a crash with a bus while the Tesla vehicle was stopped, a crash with a truck at four miles per hour, and two cases where Tesla vehicles backed into fixed objects at low speeds.

The co-director of the Oscar-winning No Other Land has said his home and family have come under renewed attack, almost a year after the documentary on Israeli settler and army violence in the West Bank received an Academy Award.

Hamdan Ballal said a group of settlers who had conducted a long-running campaign of harassment against Palestinian villagers came on Sunday to his home in Susya, in the Masafer Yatta area on the southern edge of the West Bank.

Ballal, one of the documentary’s four directors, said that since an Israeli court order two weeks before had banned non-residents from the area – in a rare legal victory for Palestinian villagers – he had called the police. Two soldiers had come instead, accompanied by a local settler leader.

“The army came first and immediately raided our house, attacking everyone inside,” Ballal said, standing outside his small concrete home, set halfway up a rocky hillside.

Data privacy and AI services have not been the greatest of bedfellows. Studies have shown that employees regularly leak company secrets via assistants, and on-device AI services are a focus of vendors amid concerns about exactly what is being sent to the cloud.

The thought of confidential data being sent to an unknown location in the cloud to generate a helpful summary has clearly worried lawmakers, which is why there is a blanket ban. However, the issue has less relevance if the process occurs on the device itself.

Child sexual abuse in the UK is soaring, police have said, with 1,000 paedophile suspects being arrested each month and the number of children being rescued from harm rising by 50% in the last five years.

The National Crime Agency said the growth in offending across the UK was driven by technology and linked to the radicalisation of offenders in online forums, encouraging people to view images of child sexual abuse by reassuring them it was normal.

Most contact with children happened on mainstream social media platforms, with algorithms pushing paedophilic material to people who have shown a previous interest in it.

The significant increase in every measure “really worries us”, said Rob Jones, the NCA’s director general of operations.

Leads about people interested in sexually abusing children had risen tenfold in a decade, he said, with 1,200 children a month being safeguarded.

The race to get artificial intelligence to market has raised the risk of a Hindenburg-style disaster that shatters global confidence in the technology, a leading researcher has warned.

Michael Wooldridge, a professor of AI at Oxford University, said the danger arose from the immense commercial pressures that technology firms were under to release new AI tools, with companies desperate to win customers before the products’ capabilities and potential flaws are fully understood.

The surge in AI chatbots with guardrails that are easily bypassed showed how commercial incentives were prioritised over more cautious development and safety testing, he said.

“It’s the classic technology scenario,” he said. “You’ve got a technology that’s very, very promising, but not as rigorously tested as you would like it to be, and the commercial pressure behind it is unbearable.”

Wooldridge, who will deliver the Royal Society’s Michael Faraday prize lecture on Wednesday evening, titled “This is not the AI we were promised”, said a Hindenburg moment was “very plausible” as companies rushed to deploy more advanced AI tools.