Rare video shows elusive deep-sea squid cradling her gigantic, translucent eggs

yeah I bet you wish to restore Zenobia

Yes

Eliot Higgins and his 28,000 forensic foot soldiers at Bellingcat have kept a miraculous nose for truth—and a sharp sense of its limits—in Gaza, Ukraine, and everywhere else atrocities hide online.

https://www.mintpressnews.com/tag/bellingcat/

https://thegrayzone.com/?amp=1&s=Bellingcat

an elderly lady passed by and hissed abuse at them: “Found another victim have you? Scum, why aren’t you at the front yourselves?” These insults are frequent

China’s leaders are “bizarrely unwilling” to use more government spending to support consumer demand instead of production, according to Nobel laureate in economics Paul Krugman.

“The fact that we seem to have a complete lack of realism on the part of the Chinese is a threat to all of us,”

Krugman echoed criticism by U.S. economic officials including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen that China can’t simply export its way out of trouble. The comments come amid renewed concern in the U.S. and Europe over what is viewed as Chinese overproduction and the dumping of heavily subsidized products overseas

China’s whole economic model is not sustainable because of “vastly inadequate” domestic spending and a lack of investment opportunities, he added. Beijing should be supporting demand not more production, he said.

If the billboards in Ivanovo are to be believed, Russia’s really going places.

“Record harvest!”

“More than 2000km of roads repaired in Ivanovo Region!”

“Change for the Better!”

In this town, a four-hour drive from Moscow, a giant banner glorifying Russia’s invasion of Ukraine covers the entire wall of an old cinema. With pictures of soldiers and a slogan:

“To Victory!”

These posters depict a country marching towards economic and military success.

yes

But there is one place in Ivanovo that paints a very different picture of today’s Russia.

The sign above it reads The George Orwell Library.

Inside, the tiny library offers a selection of books on dystopian worlds and the dangers of totalitarianism.

“The situation now in Russia is similar to Nineteen Eighty-Four,” librarian Alexandra Karaseva tells me.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party manipulates people’s perception of reality, so that citizens of Oceania believe that "war is peace" and "ignorance is strength".

Russia today has a similar feel about it. From morning until night, the state media here claims that Russia’s war in Ukraine is not an invasion, but a defensive operation; that Russian soldiers are not occupiers, but liberators; that the West is waging war on Russia, when, in reality, it was the Kremlin that ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“That’s like Nineteen Eighty-Four.

It was a local businessman, Dmitry Silin, who opened the library two years ago.

“Most of my generation had no experience of grassroots democracy,” recalls Alexandra, who is 68. “We helped destroy the Soviet Union but failed to build democracy.

Perhaps if my generation had read Ninety Eighty-Four, it would have acted differently.”

Eighteen-year-old Dmitry Shestopalov has read Ninety Eighty-Four. Now he volunteers at the library

Alexandra Karaseva is the first to admit that the library has few visitors.

By contrast, I find a large crowd in the centre of Ivanovo. It’s not Big Brother people have stopped to listen to. It’s a Big Band.

In bright sunshine an orchestra is playing classic Soviet melodies and people start dancing to the music. Chatting to the crowd I realise that some Russians are more than willing to believe what the billboards are telling them, that Russia’s on the up.

“I’m happy with the direction Russia’s heading in,” pensioner Vladimir tells me. “We’re becoming more independent. Less reliant on the West.”

What a lib, can't believe I am recruiting this guy into my revolution

To demand that universities take an institutional stand on issues of the day is to misunderstand their role.

By Eliot A. Cohen

This year, the protests have taken an uglier turn, as encampments have sprouted up. The demonstrators—most of them students, many not, often masked—are calling for divestment by their universities from companies based in or doing business with Israel. Some of the protesters see this goal as an interim step toward the destruction of the state of Israel.

Incredibly cowardly opening paragraph

Ctrl+f "genocide" 0/0 results hmmmmm

Karp, who’s known as a provocateur, aggressively condoned violence, often peering into the audience with hungry eyes, palpably desperate for claps, boos or shock.

He began by saying that the US has to “scare our adversaries to death” in war. Referring to Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel, he said: “If what happened to them happened to us, there’d be a hole in the ground somewhere.”

Members of the audience laughed when he mocked fresh graduates of Columbia University, which had some of the earliest encampment protests in the country. He said they’d have a hard time on the job market and described their views as a “pagan religion infecting our universities” and “an infection inside of our society”

“The peace activists are war activists,” Karp insisted. “We are the peace activists.”

A huge aspect of war in a democracy, Karp went on to argue, is leaders successfully selling that war domestically.

Cohen urged the room to see the 7 October attack as a “big warning” about tech in military settings. Although Israel had invested “very heavily” in defense and surveillance technology, it had failed to stop the attack, Cohen noted. “We do need to have a little bit of humility.”

This didn’t seem to be a common view. The prevailing attitude of the conference was when systems fail, it just means you need newer technology, and more of it.

said hi to the person next to me, a man who appeared to be in his late 50s.

“Have you seen Oppenheimer?” he asked.

I thought he was going to talk about the hubris of people who build weapons of war. Instead, he told me he works in nuclear weapons research at Los Alamos laboratory

“I just thought of something,” he said abruptly, laughing. “I am the new Oppenheimer!”

Oh you "just thought" of that did you?

only other journalist covering the conference was my friend Jack Poulson, who said I should join him at a panel discussion about ethics and human rights.

starting the Q&A. Jack stood up at the first opportunity. He talked about the “provocative remarks” made throughout the conference about “exporting AI into places like Gaza”. Voice shaking, he mentioned Karp “unabashedly supporting” the ongoing killings in Gaza, and said Karp’s comments about “winning the debate” were clearly a euphemism for crushing dissent. A couple of audience members laughed quietly as Jack asked: could the panel respond to any of this?

The moderator decided to let everybody else ask their questions and let the panelists choose which to answer. Unsurprisingly, no one directly answered Jack’s question.

Later, as I entered the main conference hall, I found myself right behind a group of kids with tiny backpacks. They appeared to be in first or second grade. I asked a teacher, a blond woman with glasses, if there was an exhibit for kids. She said no, but one of them had a dad working at the event.

A slim man with dark hair approached the kids. He had a Special Competitive Studies Project pin on his suit. Beaming, he took a picture with them. About 30 minutes later, I found him taking the kids on a tour. He was squatting down to their height and pointing at something in a booth for a military vendor. I couldn’t hear what he was saying.

a panel in Palantir’s booth titled Civilian Harm Mitigation. It was led by two “privacy and civil liberties engineers” – a young man and woman who spoke exclusively in monotone.

ableism?

on an interactive map, a targeted landmass lit up with bright blue blobs. These blobs, she said, were civilian areas like hospitals and schools. The civilian locations could also be described in text, she said, but it can take a long time to read. So, Gaia uses a large language model (something like ChatGPT) to sift through this information and simplify it.