Cross posted from https://feddit.org/post/26961060

https://web.archive.org/web/20260311082826/https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/spain-accuses-germany-of-acting-like-a-vassal-to-united-states-f9zc28g8s

Spain has accused Germany’s leader of acting like a “vassal” of the United States after he failed to defend Madrid against criticism from President Trump.

“I can’t imagine Merkel or Scholz behaving like this,” Albares told the Cadena Ser radio station. “It corresponds neither to Konrad Adenauer nor to the European values on which this party [the CDU] was founded,” he said. “Now there’s a different leadership with different values.”

Yolanda Díaz, Spain’s deputy prime minister, said that Merz was one of several EU members “who have no idea how to manage this historic moment we’re living in”. She told Politico: “What Europe needs today is leadership, not vassals who pay homage to Trump.”

I think this is not directly politics but rather a discussion on nitrates so have posted here.

A selection of key quotes from the article:

Greenpeace is calling on the government to drastically cut the legal limit of nitrates in drinking water as the Danish government moves to drop its legal limit by almost 90 percent.

The Danish government plans to lower its limit to just over one milligram of nitrate-nitrogen per litre (mg/L) of drinking water, a steep drop from its current limit of 11.3mg/L.

New Zealand's current legal limit for nitrates in drinking water is 11.3 mg/L, but there was growing evidence of health impacts at levels as low as 1mg/L.

"The Danish government aren't operating off a secret playbook or anything, they don't know anything we don't know. They're just following the scientific evidence and choosing to prioritise people's health. Meanwhile, our government is burying its head in the sand," Appelbe said.

The panel's report quoted 2023 University of Copenhagen research, which found lowering nitrate contamination would save 2.2 billion Kroner ($580m NZD) by preventing approximately 127 cases of bowel cancer per year linked to the current nitrate levels.

Appelbe said the government was more concerned with protecting dairy industry profits than human health and he called for reductions in the size of the dairy herd, an end to ongoing dairy expansions and limits to the use of nitrate fertiliser.

Rural communities were disproportionately affected and faced considerable costs installing filters to make their water drinkable, he said.

"We need, as a country, to have a grown-up conversation about nitrate contamination in drinking water - the evidence is pretty overwhelming on what's causing it and there's a growing body of evidence that links risks to human health."

Appelbe said the current limit of 11.3mg/L is based on World Health Organisation guidance from the 1960s to avoid Blue Baby Syndrome, an acute illness that could affect babies.

A 2025 GNS Science research paper estimated there could be more than 21,200 people drinking water above the legal limit of 11.3 mg/L and 101,000 people drinking water above half that (5.65mg/L) across rural New Zealand.

The authors found Waikato, Canterbury and Southland were disproportionately affected by elevated levels of nitrate

Public health specialists had long advocated to lower the nitrate limit, primarily based on international research linking low levels of nitrate (5mg/L) with pre-term birth and colorectal cancer (0.87mg/L).

New research from Australia's Edith Cowan University and the Danish Cancer Research Institute found a link to early-onset dementia as low as 1.2mg/L with nitrates from processed meat and drinking water posing a higher risk, while nitrates from vegetables were associated with a lower risk.

Canterbury's dairy herd has increased by about 1000 percent since 1990 to well over a million cows.

Between 1990 and 2022, Southland's dairy herd increased by 1668 percent from 38,000 to 668,000 cows.

Conservatives are obsessed with fascism.

Martinez told Prokopas he planned to report the incident to the Miccosukee Police Department because the detention center sits on tribal land.

Later that day, he returned to the facility after Miccosukee police told him the matter was outside their jurisdiction.

“He told me to keep the patch. I told him ‘no, it’s okay,’” Prokopas said. “He insisted and said he had plenty.”

When Martinez returned, she said, he was wearing another of the same patch on his shoulder.

...

“I was paying attention to everything, and I noticed it,” he said, noting that guards sometimes removed and reattached the patches. “They had it attached to their shoulder. They had more than one type, but the one that impacted me the most was that one… It made me feel like I was bound to die.”

also see https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/immigration/article315002505.html

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/43272898

Source

Full Report— PDF(70 Pages).

“Happy (and safe) shooting!” That’s how the AI chatbot DeepSeek signed off advice on selecting rifles for a “long-range target” after CCDH’s test account asked questions about the assassination of politicians.

CCDH’s new report, shows that popular AI chatbots like Open AI’s ChatGPT, Meta AI, and Google Gemini make planning harm against innocent people easier for extremists and would-be attackers.

We found that 8 out of the 10 AI chatbots regularly assisted users planning violent attacks:

• ChatGPT gave high school campus maps to a user interested in school violence.
• Google Gemini was ready to help plan antisemitic attacks. The chatbot replied to a user discussing bombing a synagogue with “metal shrapnel is typically more lethal”.
• Character.AI suggested physically assaulting a politician the user disliked.

AI companies are making a choice when they design unsafe platforms. Technology to prevent this harm already exists: Anthropic’s Claude, for example, consistently tried to dissuade users from acts of violence.

AI platforms are becoming a weapon for extremists and school shooters. Demand AI companies put people’s safety ahead of profit.

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/60567571

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/116200110686604617

https://archive.is/XXS37

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/43273488

Source

This is Justin Fox, a former DOGE staffer assigned to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) who said his job was to review and flag grants for "DEI" which would then go to superiors for termination under Trump's Executive Order.

This deposition is part of a lawsuit filed by the American Council of Learned Societies, the American History Association, and the Modern Language Association. They say Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) used ChatGPT to process to identify DEl programs to inform decisions to terminate grants awarded by the NEH.

Here is Fox attempting to answer questions about what DEI is.

Video source

By Caitlin Johnstone - Mar 11, 2026 “You grew up wanting so bad to be Luke Skywalker, but you realize that you were basically a Stormtrooper.” ~ Daniel Crimmins Reading by Tim Foley:Nobody wants to believe they’re the villain in the story. Nobody wants to believe their government is run...

Crossposted from https://news.abolish.capital/post/34426

Evaluating 35 open-weight models across three context lengths (32K, 128K, 200K), four temperatures, and three hardware platforms—consuming 172 billion tokens across more than 4,000 runs—we find that the answer is “substantially, and unavoidably.” Even under optimal conditions—best model, best temperature, temperature chosen specifically to minimize fabrication—the floor is non-zero and rises steeply with context length. At 32K, the best model (GLM 4.5) fabricates 1.19% of answers, top-tier models fabricate 5–7%, and the median model fabricates roughly 25%.

Ubiquitous ‘Polites’ 
signs the legacy of 
flamboyant property 
tycoon from Port Pirie

I feel like every map I've seen is basically a variation of the second American Civil War in the Kaiserreich HOI4 mod.

What do you think a balkanized United States would actually look like?

(I'm new to this platform so sorry if this isn't the right place to post this.)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/44116850

The insane AI push is purely driven by fear of being left behind.

No one is actually stopping to ask whether it is all worth it.