People throughout the world are delighted by Santa Claus, a jolly old man who distributes presents to good kids. But little do people know that this is a culmination of machinations by the CIA spanning decades to rehabilitate a man charged with war crimes and drug trafficking.

Santa Claus is the latest nom de guerre of Hans Klaus. While Klaus's early life is shrouded in mystery due to subsequent coverup by the CIA, Klaus was believed to be born in Germany during the 1900s where he quickly joined the Nazi Party as an industrialist manufacturing coke-infused carbonated beverages for the SS. Proudly touted as the youngest industrialist to employ concentration camp slave labor, Herr Klaus had his first setback when the Red Army destroyed his factories in Nazi-occupied Europe.

US intelligence, fearing that the secrets of coke-infused beverages would fall to the Soviets, quickly ferried Klaus to the US under Operation Paperclip. There, Klaus would adopt the first of many pseudonyms. His pseudonym while living in the US was believed to be Nikolai Petrovich. Klaus, posing as a Soviet dissident, would have his first taste in producing propaganda, which he would put into great use later in his life when suspicions of being behind the JFK assassination begin to hound him.

While being part of an operation to set up a reconnaissance base in the North Pole to spy on the Soviets, the CIA-led time discovered a secret society of elves. The CIA wasted no time in staging a coup to overthrow the elven government. Klaus was selected to rule over the elves as a puppet leader on behalf of the CIA. Leveraging Klaus's previous experience in making coke beverages and employing slave labor, the elves were forced into slavery where they begin making cocaine. The quality of elf cocaine proved to be legendary and within a decade, Klaus has his grubby hands in almost every single major drug trafficking operation in the world.

One of the biggest misconceptions is that Klaus lives in the North Pole when his main base of operations is really in Argentina. Using connections from the Nazi diaspora living there. Klaus began building what would become a virtually impregnable fortress in Argentina. The drug lord fortress, fit for a drug lord king like Klaus, is rumored to include a nuclear bunker and houses an entire regiment of Klaus's private army.

Klaus eventually adopted the name and identity "Santa Claus" after the assassination of JFK. While definite connections between Klaus and the assassination of JFK are still murky, rumors swirl of Klaus being the mastermind behind the JFK assassination after scholars discover a previously undiscovered recording where JFK clearly stressed the need to begin an offensive against Christmas. It is believed Klaus adopted the Santa Claus persona in an attempt to simultaneously rehabilitate the image of Christmas and to stimulate the US domestic economy through Christmas-induced consumerism.

TikTok not only tracks its users while they are using the TikTok app itself, but it is increasingly integrated with many other websites and apps. For example, TikTok was able to track a person’s Grindr usage on his smartphone. However, that’s not all: In addition to tracking users across the digital space, TikTok also refuses to provide an interested users with a copy of all of their personal data. Therefore, noyb has filed two complaints against TikTok and its data-sharing partners AppsFlyer and Grindr.

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cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/6271670

The EU has outlined a clear roadmap to secure Europe’s technical and economic independence in AI. A central component of this strategy is access to world-class computing power. OpenEuroLLM is now the first AI project to be granted strategic access to several of EuroHPC’s supercomputers simultaneously, including LUMI, Leonardo, Jupiter, and MareNostrum 5.

These resources will be used to train and develop a family of high-performance, open-source language models for all official EU languages. The decision secures the infrastructure to build next-generation, transparent and legally compliant language models that reflect Europe’s languages and cultural diversity.

"This is the fuel we need," says Magnus Sahlgren, Head of Research, NLU, at AI Sweden.

Brazil's burgeoning space ambitions have suffered a significant setback after the inaugural commercial rocket launch from its Alcantara Space Center ended in a crash shortly after liftoff.

The incident has also dealt a blow to shares of South Korean satellite launch company Innospace.

The rocket initially followed its planned vertical trajectory after taking off at 10:13 p.m. local time (0113 GMT). However, just 30 seconds into its flight, an unspecified malfunction caused the craft to fall to the ground, according to Innospace CEO Kim Soo-jong.

European leaders moved swiftly to back Greenland on Tuesday after Donald Trump named a special envoy to the Arctic island, sparking a new diplomatic frenzy on the continent.

Trump’s appointment of Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry as his envoy to Greenland marks another move in his gambit to annex the self-governing Danish territory. The U.S. “has to have Greenland for national security,” Trump said at a press conference on Monday.

Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen reacted with anger to the announcement and summoned U.S. Ambassador to Denmark Ken Howery for a dressing down. Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen called the appointment “completely unacceptable.”

Several European leaders reacted to Landry’s nomination by expressing solidarity with Greenlanders.

What's your thoughts?

Interesting piece. The author claims that LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT are mere interfaces for the same kind of algorithms that corporations have been using for decades and that the real "AI Revolution" is that regular people have access to them, where before we did not.

From the article:

Consider what it took to use business intelligence software in 2015. You needed to buy the software, which cost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. You needed to clean and structure your data. You needed to learn SQL or tableau or whatever visualization tool you were using. You needed to know what questions to ask. The cognitive and financial overhead was high enough that only organizations bothered.

Language models collapsed that overhead to nearly zero. You don’t need to learn a query language. You don’t need to structure your data. You don’t need to know the right technical terms. You just describe what you want in plain English. The interface became conversation.

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/6270906

Archived version

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While Brussels champions policy initiatives and American tech giants market their own ‘sovereign’ solutions, a handful of public authorities in Austria, Germany, and France, alongside the International Criminal Court in The Hague, are taking concrete steps to regain control over their IT.

These cases provide a potential blueprint for a continent grappling with its technological autonomy, while simultaneously revealing the deep-seated legal and commercial challenges that make true independence so difficult to achieve.

The core of the problem lies in a direct and irreconcilable legal conflict. The US CLOUD Act of 2018 allows American authorities to compel US-based technology companies to provide requested data, regardless of where that data is stored globally. This places European organizations in a precarious position, as it directly clashes with Europe's own stringent privacy regulation, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

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I write with a heavy heart — my family and I need your support; your help is our hope in this darkness. 💔

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/40712285

By Rick Berman
December 22, 2025

HILLSBORO, Oregon, December 20, 2025 — For two months Oregon coastal residents, led in part by fishermen and their wives, have been fighting an attempt by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to build an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility at an airport in the town of Newport. So far, the fight has had some successes, but it is far from over.

By early November, Newport residents were seeing clear signs that DHS was taking surreptitious steps to turn the city’s airport into an ICE detention facility. Online ads appeared for “detention officers based in Newport”; federal contractors made inquiries to area hotels and motels about long-term rentals of 200 rooms and contacted local businesses to explore the availability of water and sewer services.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/35008171

[UNRELATED] i think a ye power tripping bastard banned me from yepowertrippingbastard

Alternative for Germany’s opponents accuse the party of attempting to disclose sensitive information on arms supply routes and drone defenses.

Far-right German politician Ringo Mühlmann has taken a noteworthy interest in exposing information his political opponents say could be of great interest to Russian intelligence.

Using the rights afforded to him as a lawmaker for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the parliament of the eastern German state of Thuringia — where the AfD is the strongest party — Mühlmann has repeatedly asked the regional government to disclose intricate details on subjects such as local drone defenses and Western arms transports to Ukraine.

“What information does the state government have about the extent of military transit transports through Thuringia since 2022 (broken down by year, type of transport [road, rail], number of transits, and known stops)?” Mühlmann asked in writing in September.

so i yes, espeak exists and still sounds terrible even worse than picoTTS (last update 4 yrs ago?). so what else is there? i look at mimic3 and it says they are dead and one should go for piper here: https://github.com/MycroftAI/mimic3 the link to piper followed I get: https://github.com/rhasspy/piper "This repository was archived by the owner on Oct 6, 2025. It is now read-only. "

ok, so coqui? https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS no update in over 12 months..how bad can it be? https://coqui.ai/ ...great it is a page for gambling now.

so, what are you using? gTTS is not offline.

There are people who argue that Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine is not motivated by fears or imperial ambitions, but by other countries’ disrespect. Russia once commanded authority as one of the world’s two superpowers, but it has since forfeited that status. It knows it has lost the respect of other countries (Barack Obama famously dismissed Russia as just a “regional power”), and the Ukraine war is its way of winning it back.

What is perhaps surprising is that Donald Trump’s turn against Europe has similar motivations. Putin knows his aggressive revanchism won’t win Russia any love among countries whose respect he craves. But if he can’t be loved, he hopes at least to be feared. If you are in a social order that regards you as inferior, you have every incentive to turn spoiler.

So, too, Trump wants to disrupt a social order that regards him and his worldview with contempt. The US president and his officials get respect from dictators and kings (although perhaps not from the ones whose respect they most want – Putin and Xi Jinping), but they know that the leaders of many other democratic countries look down their noses at them.

Now it is America that wants to act as spoiler, smashing the existing hierarchy of respect to replace it with a world where Trump will get unqualified obeisance. Europe, with its emphasis on the rule of law and multilateralism, is the strongest remaining example of an entire system of prestige and values that the Trump administration wants to destroy.

I'm using CloudFlare to hide my home IP and to reduce traffic from clankers. However, I'm using the free tier, so how am I the product? What am I sacrificing? Is there another way to do the above without selling my digital soul?

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/44164675

• South Africans who went to Russia ended up in Ukraine
• They say they were recruited under false pretenses
• Conditions for them in Ukraine are harsh, they say
• They describe a lack of food and medical care

South African father-of-three Dubandlela was overcome with pride when his 20-year-old son signed up in July to receive elite training as a VIP bodyguard in Russia.

Five months later, Dubandlela is in despair. His son had fallen for an alleged recruitment scam in which he and at least 16 other South African men say they were conscripted by an unspecified mercenary group and sent to join Russian forces in Ukraine.

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The scam that Dubandlela said ensnared his son came to light on November 6, when South Africa said it had received distress calls from 17 men aged between 20 and 39 who said they were trapped in Donbas.

An investigation into the scam by an elite police unit known as "Hawks" focused on the alleged involvement of one of former President Jacob Zuma's daughters, Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla.

Zuma-Sambudla later resigned as lawmaker in the Umkhonto weSizwe opposition party led by her father. She has denied knowing of the scam. Zuma-Sambudla did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Her lawyer, Dali Mpofu, declined to comment.

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It is not just South Africans who unwittingly ended up in Ukraine's war. Kenya said on Nov. 12 over 200 of its citizens were fighting for Russia in Ukraine, and that recruiting agencies were still actively working to lure more Kenyans into the conflict. Authorities in Botswana have said two men were duped into joining the war under false promises of jobs.

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Ukraine's foreign minister said last month that more than 1,400 citizens from three dozen African countries were fighting alongside Russian forces in Ukraine. Russia does not provide details of non-Russians fighting in Ukraine.

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While all eyes are on the four-month-long US military campaign against Venezuela, the White House has been quietly striking security agreements with other countries to deploy US troops across Latin America and the Caribbean.

As Donald Trump announced a blockade on oil tankers under sanctions and ordered the seizure of vessels amid airstrikes that have killed more than 100 people in the Caribbean and the Pacific, the US secured military deals with Paraguay, Ecuador, Peru and Trinidad and Tobago in the past week alone.

The agreements – ranging from airport access, as in Trinidad and Tobago, to the temporary deployment of US troops for joint operations against “narco-terrorists” in Paraguay – are being signed under the banner of a so-called “war on drugs”, the same rationale Washington has used to justify its offensive against Venezuela, although White House officials and Trump himself has said that the goals also include seizing the country’s vast energy reserves and bringing down the dictator Nicolás Maduro.

Although Washington has long maintained similar agreements in the region, the scale and timing of the new deals are seen by analysts as a further escalation amid what would be an unprecedented US invasion of a South American country.

A former Tory councillor has appeared in court charged with drugging and raping his former wife over a period of 13 years.

Philip Young, 49, and five other men have been accused of more than 60 rapes and sexual offences against Joanne Young, 48. She can be named as the alleged victim because she has waived her right to anonymity, which would otherwise apply in such cases.

Young, who was described by police as white British, appeared at Swindon magistrates court on Tuesday charged with 56 offences, including multiple counts of rape and administering a substance with intent to stupefy his former spouse.

He is also accused of voyeurism, possession of indecent images of children and possession of extreme images.