Author: nick
The Financial Times reported Thursday that the White House has accused China of conducting what it calls “industrial-scale” theft of American artificial intelligence technology. Michael Kratsios, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, wrote in a memo seen by the FT that “foreign entities, principally based in China, are engaged in deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to distil U.S. frontier AI systems,” referring to a process whereby AI scientists extract the capabilities of an existing model to create a new one. The administration will also pursue measures “to hold foreign actors accountable,” Kratsios wrote, according to the…
Minerva, Roman goddess guardian of civilization, modeled after Athena, Greek goddess of intelligence, freedom, civilization and protector of Athens. By Elihu Vedder, American painter, 1836–1923. Mosaic, Thomas Jefferson Building, Library of Congress, 1897. Public Domain. Prologue: Trump and the Pope The US-Israeli war against Iran / Persia did more than rain bombs on Iran, Lebanon and throughout the Middle East. It brought to light the theocratic proclivities of Trump and his Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth. Ignoring the separation of church and state, Trump almost made himself a new Jesus. This infuriated Pope Leo XIV who said such behavior was…
In a Thursday morning Truth Social post, President Donald Trump said he has ordered the U.S. Navy to “shoot and kill” any boat “that is putting mines in the waters of the Strait of Hormuz.” The White House on Wednesday denied reports from Axios that Trump has a three-to-five-day deadline for Iran to accept a deal. “The president has not set a firm deadline to receive an Iranian proposal, unlike some of the reporting we’ve seen today,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. Leavitt said that Trump “is satisfied with the naval blockade.” Iran’s speaker of parliament, Mohammad Bagher…
Summary Under President Donald Trump’s second term: Job growth slowed, with a total of 369,000 jobs created as of March. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.3%. Inflation worsened a bit, and gasoline prices increased after U.S.-Israeli airstrikes on Iran. Average weekly earnings of private-sector workers, adjusted for inflation, rose 1.0%. The economy grew 2.1% in 2025. Consumer sentiment has now hit a record low. The number of apprehensions at the U.S. border with Mexico decreased about 92%, and refugee admissions dropped by the same percentage. The percentage of the population lacking health insurance held steady in the first six…
Over the last week, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been defending his proposed budget for FY 2027 on Capitol Hill. Most lawmakers aren’t happy. The budget seeks to cut HHS’ spending by 12.5 percent, or $15.8 billion, from FY 2026 levels. The largest named programmatic reduction is for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which would see a $5 billion cut in spending (though its budget would still be roughly $41 billion), reducing the number of institutes and centers from 27 to 22. The proposed budget also calls for the elimination of the Low…
The Department of Justice should investigate MCI-Framingham, where trans-identified male inmates threaten the safety of incarcerated women. Source link
On a bright Tehran spring day, Sanaei Ghaznavi street, with its mix of shops selling groceries and household goods alongside fast food and flowers, seems like an everyday place. Source link
Caitlin Johnstone Substack Nothing about this dystopia feels natural. We all sense it deep in our marrow. We all know something has gone terribly wrong. If you lived in an alternate reality without wars or poverty, where everyone had enough and governments did what’s in the interests of the people and the ecosystem, it would never occur to you that there was anything odd about it. It would feel completely normal. Things would be more or less how you’d expect them to be. You can’t say the same about the present status quo. The whole thing instinctively scans as…
Image by Yaopey Yong. When he’s on full blast, Donald Trump (not so long ago the “drill, baby, drill” candidate for president) is distinctly a furnace. And he seems intent on turning this planet, our only world, into a version of the same. But here’s the strange thing, when it comes to almost anything — from Iran to suddenly firing two key women, Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem, in his government (but certainly not the no-less-chaotic men) — there’s no minute, it seems, when he’s not flipping himself on his head and then spinning or stumbling or catapulting off in a…
When Raji Khabbaz and I were running Silver Arrow Investment Management, whenever we were trying to figure out why something happened, he was unsatisfied the explanation that people are sometimes stupid and institutions are often stupid. Source link