technocrit

An AI avatar made to look and sound like the likeness of a man who was killed in a road rage incident addressed the court and the man who killed him: “To Gabriel Horcasitas, the man who shot me, it is a shame we encountered each other that day in those circumstances,” the AI avatar of Christopher Pelkey said. “In another life we probably could have been friends. I believe in forgiveness and a God who forgives. I still do.”

It was the first time the AI avatar of a victim—in this case, a dead man—has ever addressed a court, and it raises many questions about the use of this type of technology in future court proceedings.

Filmmakers behind a new documentary on the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli forces say they have uncovered the identity of the soldier who pulled the trigger.

Who Killed Shireen?, a 40-minute investigative documentary released on Thursday by Washington, DC-based media company Zeteo, identifies the killer as a 20-year-old Israeli soldier who was on his first combat tour in the occupied West Bank and lifts the lid on attempts by the United States to avoid holding ally Israel accountable for the murder.

Israel has launched one of its most intense aerial assaults on southern Lebanon since a truce halted last year’s war with Hezbollah, according to Lebanese officials and the Israeli military.

Air strikes on Thursday targeted several locations across the Nabatieh region, around 12km (7 miles) from the Israeli border. At least one person was killed and eight others injured, Lebanon’s Health Ministry said. Thick plumes of smoke rose from the bombed hilltops as residents fled the affected areas.

The Israeli army said its warplanes struck a “Hezbollah infrastructure site”, but gave no further details. The claim could not be independently verified.

On Wednesday afternoon, two Israeli airstrikes slammed into Thai Restaurant—the last restaurant still open in Gaza City—turning a once bustling gathering place into a panorama of death. A third, near simultaneous, airstrike hit a nearby crowded market on al-Wahda street, sending body parts everywhere.

At least thirty-three Palestinians were killed and nearly ninety wounded in the three airstrikes, according to the health ministry, though the actual death toll is likely higher. Many of the dead and wounded were customers enjoying a hot drink in the restaurant, or people in the market trying to find food during a full-spectrum siege that has suffocated Gaza for over two months.

The US Postal Service (USPS) Board of Governors is preparing to name David Steiner, a current member of FedEx’s Board of Directors, as the next Postmaster General (PMG), according to a report in the Washington Post. The selection is reportedly being made at the behest of Donald Trump.

The move signals a massive escalation of attacks on the post office, especially its privatization, which both Trump and Elon Musk, head of the “Department of Government Efficiency,” (DOGE) support. But privatization would be the culmination of decades of bipartisan attacks, beginning with its demotion from a cabinet level department to an independent, self-funding agency under President Richard Nixon.

The situation urgently requires organized resistance by postal workers and their allies in the working class. As the USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee explained in a statement in March: “This requires new organizations, rank-and-file committees, to mobilize ourselves independently of Trump’s collaborators in the Democrats and the union tops. We must safeguard our own initiative and begin organizing now rather than waiting for ‘permission’ from the top which will never come.”

A scheduled concert in New York City by singer Kehlani was canceled on Monday under pressure from the administration of Mayor Eric Adams. Though the administration expressed “security concerns” about the concert, the real reason for the cancellation is Kehlani’s outspoken opposition to the US-facilitated genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza.

This flagrant act of censorship is the second time that a scheduled concert by the singer has been canceled in the past several weeks. It is part of an ongoing, antidemocratic campaign to suppress any criticism of Israel and of its backer the United States.

Israel's far-right Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich said Tuesday that a victory for Israel in Gaza would mean the Palestinian territory being "entirely destroyed" before its inhabitants depart for other countries.

"Gaza will be entirely destroyed, civilians will be sent to... the south to a humanitarian zone without Hamas or terrorism, and from there they will start to leave in great numbers to third countries," the firebrand top official said at a conference on Jewish settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Israel's plan to seize control of the Gaza Strip has sparked renewed fears, but for many of the territory's residents, the most immediate existential threat remains the specter of famine amid a months-long Israeli blockade on all goods entering the enclave, which is home to more than 2 million people.

The plan to expand military operations, approved by Israel's security cabinet late Sunday night, includes holding territories in the besieged Gaza Strip and moving the population south "for their protection," according to Israeli officials.

But Gaza residents told the AFP news agency that they did not expect the new offensive would make any significant changes to the already dire humanitarian situation in the small coastal territory.

Cars <---> Fascism

Harvard has fashioned itself as a free-speech warrior on the national stage for refusing to negotiate with the Trump administration on its sweeping demands for the university to drop its diversity, equity and inclusion measures and punish student protesters.

However, inside Harvard’s campus walls, we have seen President Alan Garber oversee a systematic erasure of teaching, research and scholarship about Palestine, at a time when more than 51,000 Palestinians have been killed, and hundreds of thousands more have been forcefully displaced and are facing starvation under a relentless Israeli siege. Long before Harvard evaded a hostile takeover from our billionaire president, it capitulated to the demands of its billionaire donors in matters of student discipline, campus speech and academic freedom.

To please its right-wing donors, Harvard adopted a one-sided conceptualisation of campus safety, in which speaking up against Israeli state violence towards Palestinians is considered threatening. As a result, university administrators rush to address anti-Semitism on campus, as they should, but they also censor and eliminate speech and scholarship which is critical of Israel in the name of fighting antisemitism. Meanwhile, anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab racism, and Islamophobia are less than an afterthought. University administrators remain silent as students, faculty and staff experience doxxing, harassment and death threats for speaking up about Palestinian human rights. They have shared international students’ information with the Department of Homeland Security, as students on nearby campuses have been abducted by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, detained and deported for objecting to Israel’s international law violations.

Beyond turning a blind eye to intimidation and abuse, the university’s leaders also routinely take action to erase Palestinian speech, scholarship, advocacy and views.

Israel’s far-right government has approved a “plan” to carve up and ethnically cleanse Gaza, analysts told Al Jazeera.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the plan, couching it in claims that its goal is to dismantle Hamas and retrieve the 24 or so living captives taken from Israel on October 7, 2023.

Researchers say Israel’s worst wildfires were exacerbated by non-native tree species that Israel has been planting for decades to cover dispossessed Palestinian villages with forests.

President Trump's dream 2026 budget would gut the US govt's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, aka CISA, by $491 million - about 17 percent – and accuses the organization of abandoning its core mission in favor of policing online speech.

The proposed cuts – which are largely symbolic at this stage as they need to be approved by Congress – are framed as a purge of the so-called "censorship industrial complex," a term the White House uses to describe CISA's work countering misinformation.