Press photographers were reportedly barred from Pentagon press briefings after Pete Hegseth‘s staff became irked over unflattering photos of the defense secretary. The office of the notoriously vain Cabinet member — a former Fox News host who had a hair and makeup studio built in the Pentagon shortly after being confirmed — should probably have more important things on his mind, chiefly the war in Iran, and, perhaps, the elementary school there that the United States appears to have bombed.

According to a Wednesday report from The Washington Post, press pool photographers were banned from briefings on March 4 and March 10 after taking and publishing what sources described as “unflattering” images of Hegseth. The Post noted that the White House had declined to comment on the decision to exclude the photographers. The White House took exception, with Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly sharing an email reply to the publication with an off-topic quip over the newspaper’s recent layoff of more than 300 journalists, but no actual response to the Post’s question about the concern over Hegseth’s image.

The National Press Club responded on Wednesday, with President Mark Schoeff Jr. writing that the Pentagon’s decision “is deeply troubling and runs counter to the fundamental principles of transparency in a democratic society,” adding that “when the government decides which images the public is allowed to see, transparency is replaced by control.” PEN America also responded, calling the decision to bar photographers a “petty act of retaliation.”

Trump is now caught in the oldest trap of modern warfare – believing a swift, surgical military operation will yield quick, enduring political results. The Soviets did it in Afghanistan; the US in Iraq in 2003; Putin did it in Ukraine, and is still fighting. Whatever force a military fails or succeeds in applying at the start, the people it is attacking have greater commitment to defending their lands and homes.

The White House may have rushed into this, seizing the opportunity for a decapitation strike, provided by Israeli intelligence. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has very different objectives regionally, and a long US involvement against Tehran suits his desire for an Iran in rolling collapse that is no longer a threat. But the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on February 28 has caused as many problems as it has solved.

China has approved a sweeping new law which claims to help promote "ethnic unity" - but critics say it will further erode the rights of minority groups.

On paper, it aims to promote integration among the 56 officially recognised ethnic groups, dominated by the Han Chinese, through education and housing. But critics say it cuts people off from their language and culture.

It mandates that all children should be taught Mandarin before kindergarten and up until the end of high school. Previously students could study most of the curriculum in their native language such as Tibetan, Uyghur or Mongolian.

" ...
What exactly is AMI building? The short answer is world models, a category of AI system that LeCun has been arguing for, and working on, for years. The longer answer requires understanding why he thinks the industry has taken a wrong turn.

Large language models learn by predicting which word comes next in a sequence. They have been trained on vast quantities of human-generated text, and the results have been remarkable, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini have demonstrated an ability to generate fluent, plausible language across an enormous range of subjects. But LeCun has spent years arguing, loudly and repeatedly, that this approach has fundamental limits.

His alternative is JEPA: the Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture, a framework he first proposed in 2022. Rather than predicting the future state of the world in pixel-perfect or word-by-word detail, the approach that makes generative AI both powerful and prone to hallucination, JEPA learns abstract representations of how the world works, ignoring unpredictable surface detail. The idea is to build systems that understand physical reality the way humans and animals do: not through language, but through embodied experience."

Countries already walloped by a breakdown of the international trading order, war in Ukraine and chaotic U.S. policymaking are facing potentially lasting economic damage.

Bombs are exploding in Iran and the Middle East, but the fallout is rattling households and businesses in neighborhoods all over the globe.

In Kansas, home buyers saw 30-year mortgage rates edge above 6 percent this week. In Western India, families mourning the death of a loved one discovered that gas-fired crematories had been temporarily closed.

In Hanoi, Vietnam, gas station owners posted “sold out” signs. In Kenya, tea growers and traders worried their exports to Iran would rot on the dock. And across the United States, Canada, Europe, Britain and Mexico, farmers blanched at the surge in fertilizer costs.

The widening war in Iran has delivered a stunning punch to a worldwide economy that has already been walloped by a breakdown of the international trading order, war in Ukraine and President Trump’s chaotic policymaking.

MBFC

Edit: archive.today is broken again. Replaced the original link with a gift link.

Rep. Finke, an openly transgender lawmaker, next raised a point that her critics have since tried to distort: age-verification laws like the Minnesota bill are already being used to block young LGBTQ+ people from exercising their First Amendment rights to access information that may be educational, affirming, or life-saving. Referencing the Supreme Court case Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, she noted that state attorneys general have been “almost jubilant” about the ability to use these laws to restrict queer youth from accessing content. “We know that ‘prurient interest’ could be for many people, the very existence of transgender kids,” she added, referring to the malleable legal standard that would govern what content must be age-gated under the law.

But despite years’ worth of evidence to back her up, Finke has faced a wave of attacks from countless media outlets and religious advocacy groups for her statements. Rep. Finke’s testimony was repeatedly mischaracterized as not having young people’s best interests in mind, when really she was accurately describing the lived reality of LGBTQ+ youth and advocating in support of their access to vital resources and community.

In fact, this backlash proves her point. Beyond attempting to silence queer voices and to scare other legislators from speaking up against these laws, it reveals how age-verification mandates are part of a larger effort to give the government much greater control of what young people are allowed to say, read, or see online.

Nearly 80 percent of the children documented to have been snatched by Russia have not been returned to Ukraine, a U.N. report finds.

Russia committed crimes against humanity by deporting Ukrainian children, a United Nations inquiry said Thursday — with President Vladimir Putin’s involvement in the policy “visible from the outset.”

In its latest report, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine said the deportation and forcible transfer of children by Russian authorities, as well as enforced disappearances, represented crimes against humanity.

“Based on new evidence, the Commission has now concluded that the Russian authorities committed crimes against humanity,” Commission chair Erik Møse told the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva.

The determination marks a legal escalation. Earlier investigations had documented the removal of Ukrainian children from their homes but stopped short of classifying the practice as a crime against humanity — one of the most serious charges under international law.

MBFC
Archive

Speculations about coups and rebellions in Russia have been constant throughout the full-scale war. All of them, except one, were wishful thinking.

The latest rumor shared by British tabloids suggests that recent internet outages in Moscow were triggered by fears of an "imminent" coup by figures close to Sergei Shoigu, a senior security official and former defense minister.

The claim originates with the VChK-OGPU channel, known for sharing stories it says are leaked from Russian security services. The channel itself acknowledges it is merely a "conspiracy theory" from an undisclosed source.

Russia experts speaking to the Kyiv Independent have flatly dismissed the rumors.

MBFC
Archive

It's been a stereotype for at least the last 50 years. Why has this never changed? Why has organized labor not had a substantial effect for such an essential part of the workforce?

This got a chuckle out of me.