The Common Crawl Foundation is little known outside of Silicon Valley. For more than a decade, the nonprofit has been scraping billions of webpages to build a massive archive of the internet. This database—large enough to be measured in petabytes—is made freely available for research. In recent years, however, this archive has been put to a controversial purpose: AI companies including OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Nvidia, Meta, and Amazon have used it to train large language models. In the process, my reporting has found, Common Crawl has opened a back door for AI companies to train their models with paywalled articles from major news websites. And the foundation appears to be lying to publishers about this—as well as masking the actual contents of its archives.
Common Crawl has not said much publicly about its support of LLM development. Since the early 2010s, researchers have used Common Crawl’s collections for a variety of purposes: to build machine-translation systems, to track unconventional uses of medicines by analyzing discussions in online forums, and to study book banning in various countries, among other things. In a 2012 interview, Gil Elbaz, the founder of Common Crawl, said of its archive that “we just have to make sure that people use it in the right way. Fair use says you can do certain things with the world’s data, and as long as people honor that and respect the copyright of this data, then everything’s great.”
Common Crawl’s website states that it scrapes the internet for “freely available content” without “going behind any ‘paywalls.’” Yet the organization has taken articles from major news websites that people normally have to pay for—allowing AI companies to train their LLMs on high-quality journalism for free. Meanwhile, Common Crawl’s executive director, Rich Skrenta, has publicly made the case that AI models should be able to access anything on the internet. “The robots are people too,” he told me, and should therefore be allowed to “read the books” for free. Multiple news publishers have requested that Common Crawl remove their articles to prevent exactly this use. Common Crawl says it complies with these requests. But my research shows that it does not.
Since its founding, Facebook has described itself as a kind of public service that fosters relationships. In 2005, not long after the site’s launch, its co-founder Mark Zuckerberg described the network as an “icebreaker” that would help you make friends. Facebook has since become Meta, with more grandiose ambitions, but its current mission statement is broadly similar: “Build the future of human connection and the technology that makes it possible.”
More than 3 billion people use Meta products such as Facebook and Instagram every day, and more still use rival platforms that likewise promise connection and community. But a new era of deeper, better human fellowship has yet to arrive. Just ask Zuckerberg himself. “There’s a stat that I always think is crazy,” he said in April, during an interview with the podcaster Dwarkesh Patel. “The average American, I think, has fewer than three friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more; I think it’s like 15 friends or something, right?”
Zuckerberg was wrong about the details—the majority of American adults say they have at least three close friends, according to recent surveys—but he was getting at something real. There’s no question that we are becoming less and less social. People have sunk into their phones, enticed into endless, mindless “engagement” on social media. Over the past 15 years, face-to-face socialization has declined precipitously. The 921 friends I’ve accumulated on Facebook, I’ve always known, are not really friends at all; now the man who put this little scorecard in my life was essentially agreeing.
Zuckerberg, however, was not admitting a failure. He was pointing toward a new opportunity. In Marc Andreessen’s influential 2023 treatise, “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” the venture capitalist wrote, “We believe that there is no material problem—whether created by nature or by technology—that cannot be solved with more technology.” In this same spirit, Zuckerberg began to suggest the idea that AI chatbots could fill in some of the socialization that people are missing.
Maine voters rejected a GOP voter suppression bill, protecting absentee voting rights—a development cheered by Democratic US Senate candidate Graham Platner, who campaigned against it.
"This victory belongs to the thousands of volunteers, many of them with our campaign, who left it all on the field to save absentee voting in Maine," said the US Senate candidate.
The faux “party of free speech” strikes again. For years, the MAGA GOP has insisted that it is the true “party of free” speech even as all evidence suggests this administration is the most censorial and the most dismissive of the First Amendment in modern history. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over again we see the Trump administration engaging in blatant and obvious speech suppression.
The faux “party of free speech” strikes again. For years, the MAGA GOP has insisted that it is the true “party of free” speech even as all evidence suggests this administration is the most censoria…
i don't usually, but i did just now cough up a lengthier comment with a nugget of inside perspective.
i rarely see nordic perspectives written out in english speaking spaces (only american, english, sometimes australian) so i thought to make this post pointing to it. i would look forward to any motivation that others wanting to know more brings to my writing and compiling nordic sources - alot of misrepresentation of our politics abroad
Large fossil fuel and cement companies are responsible for the vast majority of the emissions that science shows are driving changes in the earth’s climate.
Obama said ‘the future looks a little bit brighter’ while the House speaker lied about New York mayor-elect’s policies
Left-leaning Americans awoke to a rare recent moment of political celebration with Democratic victories in several elections across the country, led by the election of Zohran Mamdani as the next mayor of New York, while Republicans breathlessly predicted the end of the country.
“The future looks a little bit brighter,” Barack Obama wrote on X about Democratic victories on Tuesday. “It’s a reminder that when we come together around strong, forward-looking leaders who care about the issues that matter, we can win.”
A Spanish-language immersion daycare in a leafy residential neighborhood on the North Side of Chicago was raided by federal immigration agents on Wednesday and a teacher was taken away, panicking school administrators and parents of infants, toddlers and pre-kindergarten children at the center, a staff worker at the daycare told Reuters.
Footage obtained by local WGN-TV showed two men, one in a balaclava, dragging a woman out of the colorfully decorated front doors of Rayito de Sol daycare center as she screamed. The men wore vests that said "Police" but no other agency markings were visible.
But, but, but ... that's my ball. You can't play with my ball!
Republicans in California on Wednesday filed a federal lawsuit challenging a high-stakes redistricting measure that could help flip up to five congressional seats for Democrats.
The suit, filed by David Tangipa, a Republican assembly member, 18 California voters and the state Republican party in the US district court for the central district of California, argues that the new maps are unconstitutional because they were drawn to increase the voting power of a particular racial group. It asks the court to block the new maps from taking effect, at least temporarily.
The measure, Proposition 50, was approved by voters on Tuesday evening, in a decisive victory for Democrats. The plan temporarily gives the power to draw congressional districts to the California legislature, allowing it to adopt maps that will help Democrats pick up five seats in the US House of Representatives.
Obviously, if you represent the people, you can't let them vote on anything themselves.
Good thing we’re inviting all those AI datacenters into our communities that cool themselves with drinking water. Maybe we can get Nestle to come in and bottle what’s left to sell back to us for huge profit margins. And if that doesn’t work, there’s always the “hydrogen economy” where we can use our scarce electrical power to split clean drinking water into hydrogen and oxygen so we can burn it to power our cars.
Even were global warming not an issue, we're draining American aquifers at an alarming rate, especially out West. (I know other countries have the same issue, but I only know America.) Aquifers take 100s of years to fill, at best, thousands is probably more accurate.
Been in NW Florida for the last 20 years. The past several summers have seen us dry up, yes, in Florida. This past spring was the first rainy season in recent memory. Once we got to late summer, I saw water levels dropping everywhere. I'm outside a good deal, I watch these sorts of things. No one else seems to notice. 🙁
Desalinization isn't going to cut it. Even if we come up with miracle tech, we're left with literal mountains of salt to contain and we'll be fucking up our watery breadbasket.
We can't move people around fast enough to dodge this. There's simply too many damned humans. I laugh when people comment, "There's enough for everyone if it wasn't for the capitalists stealing it all!" No. There's not enough for 8B+ souls, not enough of anything. World poverty is taking a nosedive. Those people are more and more educated and well off. They want stuff. They really want water.
This is like the Dust Bowl all over again, except planet-wide. Regional fixes aren't going to turn it around as we did in the American midwest. Fat Americans missing a meal will riot. We'll really riot when there's no tap water.
"White House press briefings engage the American people on important issues affecting their daily lives — in recent months, war, the economy, and healthcare, and in recent years, a global pandemic," U.S. District Judge Amir Ali wrote in issuing a preliminary injunction on Tuesday. "The exclusion of deaf Americans from that programming, in addition to likely violating the Rehabilitation Act, is clear and present harm that the court cannot meaningfully remedy after the fact."
The White House stopped using live ASL interpreters at briefings and other public events when President Trump began his second term in January.
The National Association of the Deaf (NAD) and two deaf men filed the lawsuit against Trump and Leavitt in May. The suit also names White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, along with the offices for president and vice president. It alleges the White House's failure to provide ASL violates Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. The law prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in programs conducted by the federal government. The suit also claims the White House is in violation of the First and Fifth Amendments, which protect free speech and provide for due process, respectively.
Flock Safety—the surveillance company behind the country’s largest network of automated license plate readers (ALPRs)—currently faces attacks on multiple fronts seeking to tear down the invasive and error-prone cameras across the US.
This week, two lawm
Flock Safety—the surveillance company behind the country’s largest network of automated license plate readers (ALPRs)—currently faces attacks on multiple fronts seeking to tear down the invasive and error-prone cameras across the US.
This week, two lawmakers, Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), called for a federal investigation, alleging that Flock has been “negligently handling Americans’ personal data” by failing to use cybersecurity best practices. The month prior, Wyden wrote a letter to Flock CEO Garrett Langley, alleging that Flock’s security failures mean that “abuse of Flock cameras is inevitable” and that they threaten to expose billions of people’s harvested data should a catastrophic breach occur.
“In my view, local elected officials can best protect their constituents from the inevitable abuses of Flock cameras by removing Flock from their communities,” Wyden wrote.
Customs and Border Patrol agent Gregory Lairmore told the jury the snack "exploded all over him" and he "could smell the onions and mustard" on his uniform.
Neither side disputes that Sean Dunn, 37, did in fact lob obscenities and a deli-style sandwich at officers deployed by President Donald Trump to patrol the nation's capital in August. But Mr Dunn's lawyer argues it was not a criminal act.
The incident was captured on video and went viral, making Mr Dunn a symbol of opposition in Washington DC to Trump.
Government prosecutors initially tried to secure felony charges against Mr Dunn, but a grand jury declined to indict him. Prosecutors have instead charged him with a lower-level misdemeanour assault.
Customs and Border Patrol agent Gregory Lairmore told the jury the snack "exploded all over him" and he "could smell the onions and mustard" on his uniform.
Neither side disputes that Sean Dunn, 37, did in fact lob obscenities and a deli-style sandwich at officers deployed by President Donald Trump to patrol the nation's capital in August. But Mr Dunn's lawyer argues it was not a criminal act.
The incident was captured on video and went viral, making Mr Dunn a symbol of opposition in Washington DC to Trump.
Government prosecutors initially tried to secure felony charges against Mr Dunn, but a grand jury declined to indict him. Prosecutors have instead charged him with a lower-level misdemeanour assault.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
Roland Emmerich steht für Spektakel. Für Kino, das kracht, brennt, zittert, für Explosionen, die zu großen Erzählungen wurden. Doch bevor der Regisseur zum „Master of Disaster“ wurde, schuf er ein fast intellektuelles und stilles Debüt. Sein Studentenfilm von 1984 wird nun in der ARD wiederholt. Das ist exakt der eine Film, den ich mir aus Anlass von Emmerichs 70. Geburtstag gewünscht habe. Herzlichen Glückwunsch, Herr Emmerich! (ARD, Wh.)
During the past month, we've been working rapidly on adding features to lemmy-ui. We also finished up the last major backend changes. This means we can soon go to the beta phase for 1.0, which will focus on testing, bug fixing and helping Lemmy clients to start updating for the new API. After that will be the release candidate phase when version 1.0 will be live tested on lemmy.ml.
You can see the changes in action on the test server voyager.lemmy.ml (which was recently wiped). Registration is open, you are welcome to try things out. To stay up to date with our progress look at the lemmy-ui 1.0 and lemmy 1.0 milestone issues.
An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and Nutomic work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. The only available option are user donations.
To keep it viable donations need to reach a minimum of 5000€ per month, resulting in a modest salary of 2500€ per developer. If that goal is reached we can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.
Hi folks, As someone who’s been trying to move away from Google Maps, one thing I really struggled with was the lack of user reviews for places, which is a problem in all major OSM-based apps that I’ve tried: Organic Maps / CoMaps, and OsmAnd.
lib.reviews seems to be just a five-star rating and a text box. We desperately need an open source review platform, but it needs to be simple, just a like/dislike, a question and answer tips box, ands taggable categories like foursquare had.
I really miss foursquare, and am convinced google and yelp killed it. I could go to any city in the western hemisphere, filter by vegetarian/vegan friendly, and always get incredible recommendations. Google and yelp by comparison are entirely gamed.
Andrew Cuomo, an elderly has-been, the lesser son of a greater sire, who as governor literally conspired with Republicans to hand them control of the New York state Senate for half a decade; who resigned from office in disgrace after he was credibly accused of 13 instances of sexual harassment; and whose campaign quite obviously had no purpose other than satisfying his own lust for accumulating personal power, along with that of his billionaire donors.
As the campaign progressed and Mamdani’s victory became ever more likely, Cuomo descended into vindictive gutter racism. He did not disagree with a right-wing radio host who said that Mamdani would be “cheering” another 9/11, suggested that Mamdani would have Muslim women “completely covered up,” and that he “doesn’t understand New York culture” because he’s a “citizen of Uganda.”
Cuomo happily took Donald Trump’s endorsement and went on Fox News to tout it. His closing campaign message, as The Nation’s Jeet Heer pointed out on Bluesky, smacked of Vidkun Quisling—implicitly threatening New Yorkers with a Trumpian occupation if they voted for anyone but Cuomo.
It was disgusting stuff. But it also was palpably desperate, and coming from one of the worst candidates imaginable...
...
What we see, I think, are a bunch of rich guys who have been comically out of touch with normal people for many decades, and more recently have blowtorched their brains into a smoking pile of ash on Elon Musk’s Twitter/X and in various group chats. It’s why they got so worked up about Mamdani in the first place—the New York City mayoralty is not some omnipotent office, and there are a dozen ways to hem it in at the state and local level if they so wished. What these oligarchs spent to stop Mamdani feels like less on an annual basis than he wants them to pay for a better future for all New Yorkers, a joke Mamdani himself has made.
In any case, his slight tax increase on rich people, free buses, and city-run grocery stores are pretty far from a communist revolution. But that’s not how it appears to rich people, surrounded on all sides by yes-men and toadies, who spend several hours a day marinating in an online Nazi sewer.
It’s encouraging on many levels: New York City didn’t submit to a campaign of flagrant bigotry from disgraced two-time loser Andrew Cuomo, and Americans, particularly young ones, can still be politically inspired by a good candidate with a good messa…
From the desert of Phoenix in the United States to the humid streets of Quezon City in the Philippines, mayors are facing the same new reality: Heat is here to stay, and it is impacting every element of city life. That’s why we — along with more than 30 other mayors from C40 Cities, a global network of nearly 100 of the world’s biggest cities tackling the climate emergency — are joining forces to protect our people today and prepare our communities for a hotter tomorrow. Through the new C40 Cool Cities Accelerator, we’ll work together to speed up bold and inclusive climate action that meets the urgency of this growing threat.
This paper comes up with a really clever architectural solution to LLM hallucinations, especially for complex, technical topics. The core idea is that all our knowledge, from textbooks to wikis, is "radically compressed". It gives you the conclusions but hides all the step-by-step reasoning that justifies them. They call it a vast, unrecorded network of derivations the "intellectual dark matter" of knowledge. LLMs being trained on this compressed, conclusion-oriented data is one reason why they fail so often. When you ask them to explain something deeply, they just confidently hallucinate plausible-sounding "dark matter".
The solution the paper demonstrates is to use a massive pipeline to "decompress" all of the steps and make the answer verifiable. It starts with a "Socrates agent" that uses a curriculum of about 200 university courses to automatically generate around 3 million first-principles questions. Then comes the clever part, which is basically a CI/CD pipeline for knowledge. To stop hallucinations, they run every single question through multiple different LLMs. If these models don't independently arrive at the exact same verifiable endpoint, like a final number or formula, the entire question-and-answer pair is thrown in the trash. This rigorous cross-model consensus filters out the junk and leaves them with a clean and verified dataset of Long Chains-of-Thought (LCoTs).
The first benefit of having such a clean knowledge base is a "Brainstorm Search Engine" that performs "inverse knowledge search". Instead of just searching for a definition, you input a concept and the engine retrieves all the diverse, verified derivational chains that lead to that concept. This allows you to explore a concept's origins and see all the non-trivial, cross-disciplinary connections that are normally hidden. The second and biggest benefit is the "Plato" synthesizer, which is how they solve hallucinations. Instead of just generating an article from scratch, it first queries the Brainstorm engine to retrieve all the relevant, pre-verified LCoT "reasoning scaffolds". Its only job is then to narrate and synthesize those verified chains into a coherent article.
The results are pretty impressive. The articles generated this way have significantly higher knowledge-point density and, most importantly, substantially lower factual error rates, reducing hallucinations by about 50% compared to a baseline LLM. They used this framework to automatically generate "SciencePedia," an encyclopedia with an initial 200,000 entries, solving the "cold start" problem that plagues human-curated wikis. The whole "verify-then-synthesize" architecture feels like it could pave the way for AI systems that are able to produce verifiable results and are therefore trustworthy.
The Trump administration's recent efforts to target left-wing groups started with attacks on the Palestine movement, following the strategy established by pro-Israel organizations that worked for decades to pave the way for such repression.
In September, Trump issued an executive order claiming to designate “Antifa” as a “domestic terrorist organization” and a presidential memorandum (NSPM-7) that targets charities and advocacy groups over alleged national security concerns.
These efforts were seemingly driven by the assassination of right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk, which the Trump administration has continually blamed on the left despite a complete lack of evidence.
“The last message that Charlie sent me … was that we needed to have an organized strategy to go after the left-wing organizations that are promoting violence in this country,” declared White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller shortly after Kirk’s killing. “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks.”
While Kirk’s death provided the spark for Trump’s recent moves, the administration’s war on the left effectively began with its targeting of Palestine advocates.
Almost immediately upon arriving in the White House, the Trump team revoked visas, snatched people off the streets, detained legal citizens, and launched a McCarthyite campaign against university administrations for allowing anti-Israel sentiment to foment on their campuses.
“We ought to get them all out of the country,” declared Trump, referring to students who protested the genocide. “They’re troublemakers. They’re agitators. They don’t love our country. We ought to get them the hell out.”
The Trump administration’s recent efforts to target left-wing groups started with attacks on the Palestine movement, following the strategy established by pro-Israel organizations that worked for decades to pave the way for such repression.
Ommiao, oggi… solita noia, non c’è proprio niente da fare, non ho proprio via di scampo. Ommeglio: si potrebbe invero fare del gran gaming, come ideale tentativo di distrarsi dagli orrori, ma anche il gaming è divenuto ormai più difficile del dovuto. Cioè: una volta dentro, è sempre gaming, per fortuna, e c’è ben poco […]
problemi di gaming per la dimenticanza cosmica, e finisco così super perduta nel rotting senza più giocare (mi sono dimenticata di nuovo lo Switch a casa)
Ommiao, oggi… solita noia, non c’è proprio niente da fare, non ho proprio via di scampo. Ommeglio: si potrebbe invero fare del gran gaming, come ideale tentativo di distrarsi dagli orrori, ma anche il gaming è divenuto ormai più difficile del dovuto. Cioè: una volta dentro, è sempre gaming, per fortuna, e c’è ben poco se non niente che possa mai cambiare in peggio; ma, sulla soglia, tra il prima ed il dopo per così dire, si verificano inevitabilmente problemi e rotture, e io davvero non. 🙀
Una cosa strana che mi sta infatti succedendo — che con oggi è accaduta credo un totale di sole 2 volte, un numero ancora vagamente accettabile, e solo per questo non mi è ancora venuto da piangere… se dovesse ricapitarmi, credo che le lacrime inizierebbero finalmente ad uscire — è che mi sto dimenticando il Nintendo Switch a casa quando vado all’università. O meglio, perché il diavolo è sempre, e malamente, nei dettagli: quando mi ricordo di mettere la console in zaino, alla fine, nei momenti morti non mi capita sempre di volerci giocare; magari faccio gaming sul telefono, o tutte altre cose… e invece, se un giorno deve venirmi in autobus un istante di voglia di giocarci, mi deve venire proprio uno di quei rari giorni (pensate che combinazione!!!) in cui ho dimenticato di portarla. Insomma, la vecchiaia imperversa…a soli 21 anni… 😪
Ovviamente, il secondo caso è oggi, altrimenti non me ne starei lagnando (o forse si, ormai sono imprevedibile persino a me stessa). Ed è così tragico, perché uffi… e c’è traffico, e c’è assenza di persone che non mi odiano (ok, no, proprio oggi per fortuna questo non è capitato), e c’è tempo da spendere prima e dopo le ore di perdita di temp—ehm, cioè, di lezione… Se non ho voglia di programmare, e non ho particolarmente voglia di leggere, e non ho niente di particolare da poter e voler scrivere sul momento, non posso fare altro che il gaming, come attività importante. Il motivo per cui mi scordo lo Switch, però, è a suo modo molto buffo (‘nzomma); e sì, in parte è questione di skill issue, ma in altra parte è colpa di Nintendo merda (spoiler: l’ultimo punto). Questo perché: 🤭
Se la console non è al centro della scrivania, dove metto sempre tutte le cose da prendere quando esco, ed è invece nella dock (…nonostante questa sia giusto affianco), non mi risalta alla vista, e quindi mi sfugge di prenderla per metterla nello zaino.
Se non ci gioco né la sera prima, né la mattina stessa, è molto improbabile che io mi ricordi di posarla sopra la scrivania oppure direttamente nello zaino, quindi rimane in dock, e si presenta il problema di cui sopra.
Non posso semplicemente tenere lo Switch nello zaino finché non mi viene voglia di usarlo la sera a casa, perché la batteria di ‘sta console di merda si scarica in meno di 3 giorni se sta in standby, anche col WiFi spento e senza nessun gioco lasciato aperto — e non posso spegnerla quando non la uso, perché già di suo è palloso, e io in particolare dovrei poi ogni volta collegare PC o telefono via USB per avviare il CFW, che lasciamo stare…
E certo, stare senza console non significa stare assolutamente senza gaming, ma sul telefono ho perlopiù solo giochi puzzle, perché tutte le altre cose sono o scomode da giocare lì, o richiedono troppe risorse; delle eccezioni le ho, ma non sempre sono il passatempo più ideale, quando poi magari voglio giocare a Pokémon Brainrot Z-A, dai. Mentre invece, comunque sia, se devio da questa scelta binaria, qualcosa mi va in qualche modo sempre male… La consolina PocketGo che ho è così piccola che potrei quasi tenerla come portachiavi, ma a giocare lì sopra mi cieco, e allora non va bene, problemi di salute; Giocare sul PC portatile invece, a parte che non è fattibile in autobus, ma solo in posti statici, è un troiaio, perché con gli emulatori e le mappature nghhhh… (Giocando al MAME sul PC stamattina ho per sbaglio caricato uno stato quando invece volevo salvarlo; sono al mio fottuto limite.) 😵💫 Questa in foto sarei dunque io in questo momento (o beh, poco fa; o forse, al contrario, tra poco), con appunto la Swiss, se solo ce l’avessi appresso (anche se i miei joycon sono blu e rosso, non verde e rosa); e invece no. E i miei giochi saranno silly, si, ma io che resto senza lo sono 10 volte di più… Che poi, ok la volta scorsa che ero di fretta per scendere di casa, ma stamattina avevo così tanto tempo extra per prepararmi e tutto che, una volta scesa, ho dovuto persino farmi una passeggiata fino ad una fermata dell’autobus più lontana della mia solita, perché di stare ferma impalata mi secco… ma, di aver dimenticato la console me ne sono accorta ovviamente solo una volta sull’autobus.Fuck my stupid smemorated gamecel life, bla bla bla… Consigli su come posso fare per non dimenticarmi più la console, per favore??? 😶🌫️ #dimenticanza #forgot #gaming #memoria #NintendoSwitch #problemi
The PR company CMS Strategic that reportedly planted a false story in the [em]Times[/em] about [url=https://www.thecanary.co/?s=%22palestine+action%22]Palestine Action[/url] has a series of intimate connections to the shadowy pro-Israel lobby group We Bel
The PR company CMS Strategic that reportedly planted a false story in the Times about Palestine Action has a series of intimate connections to the shadowy pro-Israel lobby group We Believe in Israel (WBII). This is of course the same WBII that boasted its role in machinating the proscription of the group.
What’s more, vis-a-vis these WBII ties, the firm appears to have a wealth of links to the Labour Party and key figures in government.
As the Canary’s Alex/Rose Cocker detailed, the article in question had claimed – completely without basis – that the Home Office was investigating Palestine Action receiving funding from Iran.
However, repeated Home Office denials over the allegations had suggested for a while that something else was afoot.
Private Eyehad previously approached the Home Office over the Times article. However, according to the magazine, this was only for it to come back and say that it did not recognise the claim.
The Canary had also submitted a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to the Home Office. But once again, the Home Office confirmed that it had not supplied any information directly to the Times for the story.
At the time, there was a mainstream media frenzy from the usual suspects. GB News, the Daily Mail, the BBC, the Telegraph, and the Spectator all ran a series of stories trumpeting the potential Iran link. Declassified UKtraced them all back to the dubious claims in the Times article.
Now, Private Eye has revealed how:
CMS Strategic has acted as Elbit’s UK PR firm for some years. A witness known by the Eye heard Georgia Pickering, CMS’s managing director and owner, claiming credit for getting a story into newspapers about Palestine Action, the “direct action” group that damaged Elbit factories and other premises the group says are linked to the war in Gaza.
Source of the Times claims – long unclear
Since the Times published the article, multiple outlets have speculated over the source of the claims.
The Guardianhad highlighted how We Believe in Israel had tweeted just two days before the Times article calling Palestine Action a “shell front” and stating:
Behind Palestine Action’s theatre of resistance stands a darker puppeteer: the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
It’s well documented that the Zionist lobby group was chief among those lobbying for Palestine Action’s proscription. In June, just weeks ahead of Palestine Action’s ban, it published a report titled Palestine Action: A Case for Proscription under the Terrorism Act 2000. And notably, the Guardianpointed out how home secretary Yvette Cooper’s statement on the decision to proscribe Palestine Action was “similar” to the wording from this report. WBII even boasted it was thanks to its briefing that the government decided to proscribe Palestine Action.
What’s more, the Canary has identified how WBII’s current director, Catherine Perez-Shakdam, had in the year leading up to Palestine Action’s proscription, penned op-eds not only calling for the ban, but also insinuating a link to Iran. Notably, in November 2024, she wrote an article calling Palestine Action activists “Tehran’s ideological sentries” and arguing that:
To look at Palestine Action is to see not an “activist” group, but an ideological proxy for the Iranian regime, operating as Tehran’s enforcers in a country they otherwise could never reach.
The piece goes to great lengths to paint Palestine Action as “proxies of a foreign power”, describing them as:
foot soldiers whose purpose is to inject Tehran’s twisted worldview into the heart of Britain’s public discourse.
At points, the article implies Palestine Action tactics are “inspired” by the Iranian regime. In others, she goes further to almost imply they are active foreign agents, making baseless claims like:
Tehran, unable to influence Britain directly, deploys groups like Palestine Action to project its authoritarian ethos across borders.
Of course, opinion article that it is, for the Zionist Times of Israel no less, Perez-Shakdam was compelled to provide no evidence for her conspiracist diatribe.
We Believe in Israel: cropping up again, naturally
To date, the Canary has been unable to source evidence of Perez-Shakdam and the numerous organisations she heads lobbying the Home Office. However, the Home Office has obviously categorically denied any role in seeding the story anyway – at least directly.
Now, these facts take on new significance in light of Private Eye’s revelations.
This is because, if CMS Strategic really did plant the story in the Times, its worth emphasising some particular links to WBII – and their timing.
Of course, this was just months before the Labour government announced the proscription of Palestine Action. As the Canary’s Ed Sykes previously highlighted, We Believe in Israel is:
“a side-project” of BICOM – “Britain’s most active pro-Israeli lobbying organisation”. And its longstanding director was awful Labour right-winger and self-proclaimed “Zionist shitlord” Luke Akehurst (who isn’t Jewish, by the way).
And Lewis evidently has clear connections to the group, not least through her role with BICOM.
In July 2022, they penned an op-ed for Jewish News about their trip to Israel with:
the Labour Friends of Israel and the We Believe In Israel campaign group.
Then, in June 2024, they were out on the campaign trail for Akehurst. Akehurst only stepped down from his near 13-year stint as We Believe in Israel director that very same June.
What’s more, it appears CMS Strategic has made use of Lewis’s links with the parachute North Durham MP. In May, Labour First (where incidentally, Lewis also previously worked), hosted an event with chancellor Rachel Reeves.
In a LinkedIn post, Pickering posted chummy photos with the chancellor and thanked Akehurst for arranging for the company to support the event.
Labour links in abundance
What’s also apparent is that CMS Strategic has tangible inroads with this current Labour government as well.
Pickering is a Bracknell Labour Party councillor. Alongside this, she is also co-chair of Labour in Communications’ (LIC) defence and aerospace policy network group. The organisation describes its remit as:
Labour’s fastest-growing professional network of supporters working in the communications, media and public affairs industry.
In a LinkedIn post, Pickering put out a call to recruit new Labour Party members from the PR and defence sectors to the group. A group gathering together Labour members with defence lobbyist experience – nothing to see there of course.
Lewis, a Young Labour member, is also a Labour Party councillor, for Higham Hill. In 2023, they resigned their role as junior whip on the Waltham Forest council after posting a tweet stating that:
What Israel is doing is bad – killing thousands of innocent people, including children. But not evil. Hamas is evil.
Additionally, Lewis’s LinkedIn details a number of short-term gigs as an organiser for the party.
However, perhaps most significantly, as mentioned above, Lewis previously worked for Labour First. Journalist and author Paul Holden has described the group in his explosive new book as the “base camp for the Labour right’s overt fightback” against Corbyn and the party’s left-wing. By this, he was referring to the organisation’s very public efforts to oust Corbyn and his allies, namely by spearheading repeated coup attempts during his leadership.
And low and behold, Akehurst had his fingers in this pie too. He co-founded Labour First alongside former LFI vice-chair and MP John Spellar and Labour councillor Keith Dibble. Naturally, Akehurst is still a director.
CMS staff were also at the Labour Party’s 2025 conference arranging “1-1 discussions” for ministers, MPs, and “industry voices”.
So despite the company denying the claims from the Eye, it would be quite on-brand for Pickering to have boasted this – and for the company to be the actor behind the scenes.
As the Eye underscored, CMS has shilled for notorious Israel-linked arms corporation Elbit Systems. Of course, Palestine Action has long made the number one Israel arms manufacturer the main target of its direct action. The magazine also highlighted that in 2024 Palestine Action targeted CMS over its lobbying for the company.
Indeed, the PR firm is one of just two companies the arms producers has employed in recent years to lobby the UK government. CMS isn’t currently listed as its lobbyist.
However, CMS itself has maintained a murky menagerie of arms manufacturers amid its clientele. It was none other than CMS running media and comms for the UK’s largest arms fair Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI). In fact, Pickering was bragging about CMS delivering this for DSEI for the 10th time:
This was the same DSEI that exhibited arms giants that have armed and sustained Israel’s genocide. It included drone and F35 manufacturers Elbit, Rafael, Lockhead Martin, and BAE.
Times peddling propaganda for CMS Strategic? What’s new
The Canary approached CMS Strategic and the Times for comment. We asked the Times whether it had verified that the Home Office were purportedly “understood” to be investigating Palestine Action’s funding and links to Iran. In addition, we queried if CMS/Georgia Pickering were the source for its article. The outlet did not respond by the time of publication.
Meanwhile, CMS Strategic came back with an identical comment to what it told the Eye:
Any suggestion that CMS was involved with The Times article dated 23 June 2025 or discussed being involved with it are categorically untrue.
Ultimately, the Times in its top-quality due diligence journalism, published what appear to be outrageously fabricated claims. Those claims may have originated from a long-term lobbyist and PR outfit for major arms companies abetting Israel’s genocide.
There’s no definitive proof – at present – that WBII had a hand in this. However, these connections to CMS Strategic do raise significant questions nonetheless. As its swagger around Palestine Action’s proscription underscores – pumping out propaganda sure wouldn’t be out of character.
The Trump administration's recent efforts to target left-wing groups started with attacks on the Palestine movement, following the strategy established by pro-Israel organizations that worked for decades to pave the way for such repression.
Questa in foto sarei dunque io in questo momento (o beh, poco fa; o forse, al contrario, tra poco), con appunto la Swiss, se solo ce l’avessi appresso (anche se i miei joycon sono blu e rosso, non verde e rosa); e invece no. E i miei giochi saranno silly, si, ma io che resto senza lo sono 10 volte di più… Che poi, ok la volta scorsa che ero di fretta per scendere di casa, ma stamattina avevo così tanto tempo extra per prepararmi e tutto che, una volta scesa, ho dovuto persino farmi una passeggiata fino ad una fermata dell’autobus più lontana della mia solita, perché di stare ferma impalata mi secco… ma, di aver dimenticato la console me ne sono accorta ovviamente solo una volta sull’autobus. Fuck my stupid smemorated gamecel life, bla bla bla… Consigli su come posso fare per non dimenticarmi più la console, per favore??? 😶🌫️
thisisbutaname
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