technocrit

On May 3, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for human rights in Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, called for the prosecution of leading European Union officials for complicity in the war crimes committed by Israel.

In a series of interviews and reports, Albanese accused in particular the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Kaja Kalla. Albanese condemned the EU leaders for aiding and abetting gross violations of international law through their unconditional support for Israel. “The fact that the two highest figures of the EU continue business-as-usual engagements with Israel is beyond deplorable,” Albanese stated. “Immunity cannot equate with impunity. They will have to be judged before history does.”

In an interview with The Intercept Albanese reiterated: “I’m not someone who says, ‘History will judge them’—they will have to be judged before then.”

Police bodycam footage shows Newark Mayor Ras Baraka being arrested outside a detention centre in New Jersey, during a protest about US immigration. Officials claim he trespassed, but Baraka and witnesses say he complied with orders.

"When a model is deployed for purposes such as analysis or research — the types of uses that are critical to international competitiveness — the outputs are unlikely to substitute for expressive works used in training," the office said. "But making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries."...

"Unlike cases where copying computer programs to access their functional elements was necessary to create new, interoperable works, using images or sound recordings to train a model that generates similar expressive outputs does not merely remove a technical barrier to productive competition," the office said. "In such cases, unless the original work itself is being targeted for comment or parody, it is hard to see the use as transformative."

A day after the office released the report, President Donald Trump fired its director, Shira Perlmutter, a spokesperson told Business Insider.

In February, US President Donald Trump declared that “The US will take over the Gaza Strip” and “level out” the remaining buildings and transfer the Palestinian population to “other countries.” At the time, both US and international media dismissed Trump’s plan as an “outlandish” scheme with no prospect of realization.

The Israeli government approached Trump’s plan with deadly seriousness. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised Trump’s “bold vision” for an ethnically cleansed Gaza. “We’re working on it,” Trump said during a meeting in Washington last month.

On Monday, the Netanyahu government effectively announced the beginning of the final stage of ethnic cleansing in Gaza. The plan includes a full military occupation of the entire Gaza Strip and the mass internment of the population in concentration camps under armed guard, as a prelude to forced marches through the desert or deportation by sea.

These concentration camps will be staffed by private US security contractors, with the Israel Defense Forces overseeing the distribution of starvation rations. According to a report this week by Reuters, the United States and Israel are actively discussing the formation of a “transitional government” headed by a US official to administer Gaza.

Echoing the “final solution,” the Nazi term for the genocide of Europe’s Jews, Netanyahu declared, “It’s time to launch the concluding moves.” The next day, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich explained the meaning of the Israeli government’s plan:

Within a year, ... Gaza will be entirely destroyed, civilians will be sent to ... the south to a humanitarian zone ... and from there they will start to leave in great numbers to third countries.

The mechanism for the forcible displacement of the Palestinian people will be mass starvation. As National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir made clear, “No electricity, and no other aid should be allowed—neither by the [Israeli military] nor by civil society.”

On March 2, Israel imposed a total blockade on all food, water and electricity entering the Gaza Strip. As a result, the majority of Gaza’s community kitchens have been forced to shut down due to a lack of supplies, and cases of acute malnutrition have surged by more than 80 percent. Harrowing images have circulated of emaciated, starving children—victims of a famine that is entirely man-made.

I’ve recently had conversations with a number of people who, it turned out, were completely unaware that before the October 7th attack on Israel, Gazans had tried huge non-violent demonstrations for almost two years.

Every week, thousands of unarmed men, women and children in Gaza’s open air prison had gathered in a nonviolent, Gandhian march to end the Israeli blockade that was strangling them and to return to their stolen homes and villages.

And every week Israeli snipers had shot dozens of them, killing and maiming unarmed people of all ages – men, women, children, medics, journalists. On the first day alone, atleast fifteen people were killed and 750 others were shot. (See detailed reports here. and videos below.)

Yet, US news reports mentioned these so infrequently, if at all, that many Americans have no idea that these massive weekly demonstrations even took place.

One of the most blatant and egregious examples is PBS.

PBS’s Frontline program had actually co-produced a documentary with the BBC about the Great March. While this still contained considerable pro-Israel spin, It showed a level of Israeli violence that most Americans never see.

At the last minute, PBS suddenly canceled the broadcast.

The reason given was that it was simply postponed because of a more important breaking news story.

However, the allegedly timely news story that preempted the Gaza documentary consisted of a minimal, widely known update to a news story that had been on the website for 2 months. PBS told callers the film would be broadcast at some unnamed time in the future.

The next story from PBS was that the film was supposedly not a PBS documentary, even though it had been announced as such in numerous places. Moreover, this fraudulent excuse had not even been mentioned when the film was preempted. The upshot was that PBS now announced it would never show it.

Had this film not been blocked, quite likely vastly more Americans would have seen Palestinians’ courageous attempt to use nonviolence, would have seen Israeli soldiers shooting unarmed demonstraters in cold blood, and more Americans would have demanded that their government stop supporting Israel… And then, perhaps, the desperate October 7th breakout would not have occurred.

Francis warned the Group of Seven industrialised nations last year that AI must remain human-centric, so that decisions about when to use weapons or even less-lethal tools would not fall to machines.

(not much AI-related info in the article TBH)

The event throws into question the perceived heightened accuracy of betting markets like Poymarket over conventional polls.

https://archive.is/Qc8RH

Dozens of community kitchens in Gaza were forced to shut down on Thursday due to lack of food, amidst Israel’s ongoing blockade aimed at starving the Palestinian population and annexing their land.

... Columbia University administrators called in the New York Police Department (NYPD) on Wednesday evening to violently suppress and shut down a pro-Palestinian student occupation of the campus’ Butler Library. Approximately 78 protesters were arrested just over a year after the police-state crackdown at Columbia last April, when the NYPD swarmed the campus to arrest over 100 students and break up the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment.”

On Wednesday afternoon, a group of around 100 anti-genocide student protesters took over Butler’s main reading room and renamed it the “Basel Al-Araj Popular University,” after the Palestinian activist and writer killed by Israeli forces in 2017.

The students’ demands include Columbia’s financial divestment from Zionist organizations, an academic boycott of complicit institutions, cops and ICE off campus and amnesty for all university members unfairly targeted and disciplined for pro-Palestinian actions.

Columbia’s Public Safety officers immediately responded and violently barred protesters from leaving unless they showed identification, which created a prolonged standoff...

...The subject of Trump family corruption is an inexhaustible one. His first term was notorious for the use of his “branded” properties, various Trump hotels and resorts, as conduits for corporations and foreign governments to funnel cash into the family coffers. Behind the scenes, far greater sums were raked in through the overseas operations of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, with more than a billion dollars “invested” by Saudi monarchs and Gulf sheiks alone.

However, Trump’s reelection last November and his return to the White House on January 20 have been accompanied by an even greater orgy of money-grubbing. By some estimates, the Trump family wealth has doubled since the election. His social media company Truth Social, despite negligible advertising and customer base, has seen its stock price soar. The president has made significant cash from the sale of branded items, ranging from replicas of his fascist executive orders to bibles, golf clubs and guitars. Trump has also raked in $500 million in contributions to various political action committees to fund future campaigns, although the Constitution bars him from seeking a third term in the White House.

But nothing compares to the vast fortune accumulated through the Trump family’s plunge into the cryptocurrency market, with the launching of World Liberty Financial, a venture that is 60 percent owned by the Trumps. It is overseen by sons Don Jr. and Eric and co-managed by Zach Witkoff, the son of Trump’s top Middle East envoy, billionaire Steve Witkoff. World Liberty has partnered with an array of companies whose financial flimflam is supposedly “regulated” by federal agencies now controlled by Trump himself.

There was little to no interest in World Liberty before the election, but after Trump’s victory, the value of its cryptocurrency, known as $WLFI, soared to a nominal $1.1 billion. Estimates reported by Fortune and Forbes magazines place the Trump family’s total crypto fortune at between $2.9 billion and $6.2 billion...