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    The Arctic Litmus Test: Greenland and the Collapse of Global Order

    When Russian tanks crossed the Ukrainian border, the concussive force did more than shatter a sovereign frontier; it fractured the metaphysical foundation of the post-1945 world. It signaled a retreat from the rule of law back toward the rule of force. Today, this erosion of global norms finds a new, chilling epicenter in the Arctic.… Continue reading The Arctic Litmus Test: Greenland and the Collapse of Global Order
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    US military used Anthropic’s AI model Claude in Venezuela raid, report says

    Wall Street Journal says Claude used in operation via Anthropic’s partnership with Palantir TechnologiesClaude, the AI model developed by Anthropic, was used by the US military during its operation to kidnap Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, the Wall Street Journal revealed on Saturday, a high-profile example of how the US defence department is using artificial intelligence in its operations.The US raid on Venezuela involved bombing across the capital, Caracas, and the killing of 83 people, according to Venezuela’s defence ministry. Anthropic’s terms of use prohibit the use of Claude for violent ends, for the development of weapons or for conducting surveillance. Continue reading… More

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    No, the human-robot singularity isn’t here. But we must take action to govern AI | Samuel Woolley

    Moltbook, a social media site for AI agents, is nothing new. Still, the marriage of big tech and politics demands we take a standOn a recent trip to the San Francisco Bay Area, I was shocked by the billboards that lined the freeway outside of the airport. “The singularity is here,” proclaimed one. “Humanity had a good run,” said another. It seemed like every other sign along the road was plastered with claims from tech firms making outrageous claims about artificial intelligence. The ads, of course, were rife with hype and ragebait. But the claims they contain aren’t occurring in a vacuum. The OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, recently said: “We basically have built AGI, or very close to it,” before confusingly qualifying his statement as “spiritual”. Elon Musk has gone even further, claiming: “We have entered the singularity.”Enter Moltbook, the social media site built for AI agents. A place where bots can talk to other bots, in other words. A spate of doom-laden news articles and op-eds followed its launch. The authors fretted about the fact that the bots were talking about religion, claiming to have secretly spent their human builders’ money, and even plotting the overthrow of humanity. Many pieces contained suggestions eerily like those on the billboards in San Francisco: that machines are now not only as smart as humans (a theory known as artificial general intelligence) but that they are moving beyond us (a sci-fi concept known as the singularity).Samuel Woolley is the author of Manufacturing Consensus: Understanding Propaganda in the Era of Automation and Anonymity and co-author of Bots. He is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Continue reading… More

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    Trump’s family is embroiled in a $500m UAE scandal. We’ve hardly noticed | Mohamad Bazzi

    A crypto startup founded by Trump’s family signed a huge deal with the UAE president’s brother. Where’s the political fallout?Days before Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, an investment firm controlled by a senior member of the United Arab Emirates royal family secretly signed a deal to pay $500m to buy almost half of a cryptocurrency startup founded by the Trump family. Under any other president, such an arrangement, which was revealed this past weekend by the Wall Street Journal, would cause a political earthquake in Washington. There would be demands for an investigation by Congress, televised hearings and months of damage control.But this latest example of corruption involving Trump and his family business hardly made a blip over the past few days, relegated to a passing headline in a relentless news cycle often dominated by Trump’s actions and statements. Continue reading… More

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    The US Legal System is Being Hacked

    Once you understand algorithms, the US legal system starts to make more sense. Or maybe nonsense. In the neutral algorithmic terms of information flow and security, the US court system is being “hacked.” In a wide algorithmic sense, “hacking” is when a functioning system acts non-functional as a result of inputs going to the wrong… Continue reading The US Legal System is Being Hacked
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    ‘The right has won the family’: my relentless search for lefty mommy bloggers

    The most popular mom content tends to be rightwing tradwife propaganda or not political at all – pushing progressive creators out of the algorithmFor someone who doesn’t have a marble island in their kitchen I spend a disproportionate amount of time staring at marble kitchen islands, slack-jawed, brain turned half off. That’s because I consume a lot of videos from mommy bloggers, mom influencers and the like. In kitchen “closing shift” videos, they wipe down their islands and reset by lighting luxury candles, the glow accentuating their respectable cosmetic procedures. Other times I watch them waltz through their morning routines: getting kids out the door, sweating it out in boutique fitness classes, showing off Amazon hauls, or explaining their children’s matching holiday photoshoot outfits.For better or worse, this is how I have chosen to spend my one wild and precious life: consuming blissfully low-stakes motherhood content on my phone. It is domestically competent ASMR that also satiates my desire to peek into everyone’s bathroom cabinets. I nod in unsolicited approval as a TikTok mom I follow shares her green juice order. Fascinating. I should drink something like that. Another posts timestamps of her baby’s night-time sleep schedule. I, who lives between walls that have never heard the wail of an infant, ingurgitate the entire video. Continue reading… More