In a withering address to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, has wiped the floor with misogynistic Israeli representatives and called out UN member states to their faces for enabling and participating in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Speaking from Cape Town after delivering the Nelson Mandela Lecture in Johannesburg, Albanese reminded UN delegates of South African apartheid and compared it to Israel’s crimes in Gaza. And, she called out the culture of intimidation that Israel uses to try to intimidate critics into silence.

Albanese persists despite smears from Israel

Albanese is a relentless and formidable advocate for Palestine who in the spring saw off desperate Israeli attempts to oust her from her Special Rapporteur post. And, she has accused UK PM Keir Starmer directly of collaborating in Israel’s genocide whilst remaining undeterred by the Trump regime’s punitive sanctions on her for her criticism of Israel – which prevented her travelling to New York in person to deliver her report. As she connected online with gathered delegates she made it clear:

constitute an assault on the UN itself — its independence, its integrity, its very soul.,

Israel scraping through barrel-bottoms in their rants at the UN is nothing new, but it might have been a new low when Israel’s representative accused Albanese of “witchcraft” – and was promptly rinsed by Albanese’s intelligent and principled response:

If I had the power to make spells I’d use it to stop your crimes once and for all.

thecanary.co/wp-content/upload…

Small wonder the genociders are so desperate to silence her.

The White House has fired six members of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, the independent federal agency that advises the president and Congress on design plans for monuments, memorials, coins and federal buildings. The seven member commission is made up of experts in architecture, art, urban and landscape design. Since its creation in 1910, the commission has reviewed plans for everything from Arlington National Cemetery to Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

The commissioners would have advised President Trump on his anticipated White House ballroom and his plans for a monument similar to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, which he says will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. In an email to NPR, architect Bruce Redman Becker, one of the commissioners who was fired, wrote that "Neither project has been submitted for review yet."

When oil and gas are pumped from the ground, they come up with briny fluid called “produced water,” many times saltier than the sea and laden with chemicals, including some that cause cancer. Most of this toxic water is shot back underground using what are known as injection wells.

Wastewater injection had been happening in Oklahoma for 80 years, but something was driving the growing number of purges. Ray and his colleagues in the oil division set out to find the cause. As they scoured well records and years of data, they zeroed in on a significant clue: The purges were occurring near wells where companies were injecting oil field wastewater at excessively high pressure, high enough to crack rock deep underground and allow the waste to travel uncontrolled for miles.

Toxic Wastewater From Oil Fields Keeps Pouring Out of the Ground. Oklahoma Regulators Failed to Stop It.

Salt water laced with cancer-causing chemicals, a byproduct of oil and gas drilling, is spewing from old wells. Experts warn of a pollution crisis spreading underground and threatening Oklahoma’s drinking water.

^{Peter.DiCampo@propublica.org (ProPublica)}

The U.S. is set to be in the fairly unusual position of having only a single aircraft carrier deployed and none in the waters off both Europe and the Middle East. The change is especially stark after the U.S. joined Israeli strikes on Iran in June and has engaged in some of the most intense combat operations since World War II against Yemen’s Houthi rebels in the Red Sea.

Aircraft carriers, with their thousands of sailors and dozens of warplanes, have long been recognized as one of the ultimate signifiers of U.S. military might and the nation’s foreign policy priorities. There have been five carrier deployments to the Middle East since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, including two carriers in the region at multiple points this year and last.

https://apnews.com/article/aircraft-carriers-trump-venezuela-middle-east-a458b9c4f1a5690e19d7c532dd6b7fd7

The widow of a beloved Utah fashion designer who was fatally shot during a June “No Kings” protest in Salt Lake City demanded Wednesday that someone be held accountable for her husband’s death after more than four months without any charges filed in the case.

Arthur Folasa Ah Loo, known as Afa, died June 15 when a man who was part of a volunteer peacekeeping team for the protest fired three rounds at a man who allegedly brandished a rifle at demonstrators. One round injured the rifleman, who did not fire any shots, and another struck Ah Loo, a protester who later died at the hospital.

The sign Ah Loo was holding that day read, “The world is watching,” said his wife, Laura Ah Loo.

“Afa always stood for those who needed justice the most,” Laura Ah Loo said during a Wednesday press conference. “And now I stand for him, on his behalf, for his sake and for all of us. The world is watching.”

https://apnews.com/article/no-kings-protest-shooting-salt-lake-city-45a04fb74a09dfaa7140ce395cf7246c

U.S. lawmakers have tried four times since September last year to close what they called a glaring loophole: China is getting around export bans on the sale of powerful American AI chips by renting them through U.S. cloud services instead.

But the proposals prompted a flurry of activity from more than 100 lobbyists from tech companies and their trade associations trying to weigh in, according to disclosure reports.

The result: All four times, the proposal failed, including just last month.

Under the cloud services loophole, Chinese companies barred from accessing cutting-edge chips can use Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services overseas instead to train their AI models. Microsoft and AWS also both advertise the capacity to store video surveillance footage on their cloud services for Chinese customers.

https://apnews.com/article/chinese-surveillance-silicon-valley-trump-administration-congress-21c5f961b1fd22f9a9e563ebe64e5582

Is f2movies truly gone this time?

It's been down for the last couple of days.

From the maybe-we-should-have-done-that-to-start dept:

The chatbot company Character.AI will ban users 18 and under from conversing with its virtual companions beginning in late November after months of legal scrutiny.

The announced change comes after the company, which enables its users to create characters with which they can have open-ended conversations, faced tough questions over how these AI companions can affect teen and general mental health, including a lawsuit over a child’s suicide and a proposed bill that would ban minors from conversing with AI companions.

“We’re making these changes to our under-18 platform in light of the evolving landscape around AI and teens,” the company wrote in its announcement. “We have seen recent news reports raising questions, and have received questions from regulators, about the content teens may encounter when chatting with AI and about how open-ended AI chat in general might affect teens, even when content controls work perfectly.”

Character.AI bans users under 18 after being sued over child’s suicide

Move comes as lawmakers move to bar minors from using AI companions and require companies to verify users’ age

^{Johana Bhuiyan (The Guardian)}

Welp, first reminder of the day that we're all just meaningless pawns getting in the way of absolute power by shouting things like "Laws! Ethics!"

When Google and Amazon negotiated a major $1.2bn cloud-computing deal in 2021, their customer – the Israeli government – had an unusual demand: agree to use a secret code as part of an arrangement that would become known as the “winking mechanism”.

The demand, which would require Google and Amazon to effectively sidestep legal obligations in countries around the world, was born out of Israel’s concerns that data it moves into the global corporations’ cloud platforms could end up in the hands of foreign law enforcement authorities.

Like other big tech companies, Google and Amazon’s cloud businesses routinely comply with requests from police, prosecutors and security services to hand over customer data to assist investigations.

This process is often cloaked in secrecy. The companies are frequently gagged from alerting the affected customer their information has been turned over. This is either because the law enforcement agency has the power to demand this or a court has ordered them to stay silent.

Revealed: Israel demanded Google and Amazon use secret ‘wink’ to sidestep legal orders

The tech giants agreed to extraordinary terms to clinch a lucrative contract with the Israeli government, documents show

^{Harry Davies (The Guardian)}