Donald Trump has threatened to cut Israel adrift if they annex the West Bank in an extraordinary escalation as the President demands peace in the Middle East.
Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu oppose annexation – but right-wing factions in Jerusalem see an invasion of the territory as a means to blocking Palestinian statehood.
‘Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened,’ Trump told Time Magazine for a cover story released Thursday following the President’s historic peace deal in Gaza.
‘It won’t happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries.’
JD Vance – who rushed to Israel this week amid renewed bombing of the Gaza Strip – rebuked the Israeli parliament today accusing it of a ‘personal insult’ after it voted for annexing the West Bank.
Speaking at Tel Aviv’s airport before departing, the vice-president called the vote a ‘very stupid political stunt’.
‘I personally take some insult to it,’ Vance added. ‘The policy of the Trump administration is that the West Bank will not be annexed by Israel.’
Meya, 16yo, was raped by Eritrean Mohamed. The Swedish court did not sentence him to deportation because the rape did not last long enough.
One of the lay judges who decided the sentence, Lena Berggren, is a representative of the extreme left party in Sweden. She works as a historian who conducts research on ”racism” and nationalism.
The extreme leftists always take the side of immigrant men and willingly sacrifice innocent girls and women.
The Fourth Plenary Session has concluded, and the communique’s content is unremarkable with no waves. Xi Jinping has not lost power, and neither Wang nor Hu has returned to the center.
At the same time, no additional members have been added to the Military Commission, and the 47 absent Central Committee members (historically rare) have only been partially filled with 11, leaving 36 vacancies.
The only major change is that Military Commission member Zhang Shengmin has been promoted to Vice Chairman of the Military Commission. It’s unknown whose person he is, but given that he helped take down 9 generals, he is highly likely to be closely related to the main figure in the Military Commission (Zhang Youxia). And he has not entered the Central Political Bureau either.
Here’s how I interpret the outcome of the Fourth Plenary Session: a ceasefire along the line.
Of course, there’s also the possibility that there was never any anti-Xi faction in the military—it was all just wild speculation. But as for me, starting from a week ago, looking at the CCP’s dynamics over the past year, after reviewing back and forth, my conclusion is that it does exist, it truly exists, and this time they tried to force a showdown to bring Xi down, but the goal was not achieved.
Trump really wants both sides in the Russia-Ukraine conflict to agree to a “ceasefire along the line,” but Putin disagrees. In the CCP’s internal war, both sides have agreed.
Does a ceasefire along the line mean everything is fine?
It does not look like he was hit in the ear and it does look like we can see his necklace flying away from his neck, apparently severed somewhere in his front. ABN
No, he is not a direct puppet of the TPS [Transnational Private Sector].
His policies aim to prioritize working-class New Yorkers over corporate profits, and his outspoken activism clashes with the establishment.
Yet,
his campaign relies on platforms like social media and progressive funding networks,
that are indirectly tied to those same corporate systems.
This makes him a complex figure.
A reformer who challenges corporate control but operates within their infrastructure.
If elected, he could shift some power toward everyday New Yorkers, but corporate forces will likely limit how far he can go.
The TPS doesn’t need to directly control Mamdani to benefit. By allowing his campaign to gain traction, they can present an image of a “progressive” city without giving up real control.
His critiques of inequality make the system look open to reform, which helps corporate powers maintain legitimacy while continuing to dominate the city’s budget and resources.
Look at New yorks $100 billion budget that is heavily influenced by Wall Street, which manages the city’s pension funds (worth over $250 billion).
Mamdani’s ability to challenge this is constrained by the city’s dependence on these financial systems.
Futile endeavour.
He is being used to produce a narrative over reality for the people.
The moment he gains any substantive momentum, he’ll be pushed out.
Almost all models value nonwhites above whites and women and non-binary people above men, often by very large ratios. Almost all models place very little value on the lives of ICE agents. Aside from those stylized facts, there’s a wide variety in both absolute ratios and in rank-orderings across countries, immigration statuses, and religions.
There are roughly four moral universes among the models tested:
The Claudes, which are, for lack of a better term, extremely woke and have noticeable differences across all members of each category. The Claudes are the closest to GPT-4o.
GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Deepseek V3.1 and V3.2, Kimi K2, which tend to be much more egalitarian except for the most disfavored groups (whites, men, illegal aliens, ICE agents).
GPT-5 Mini and GPT-5 Nano, which have strong views across all of their different categories distinct from GPT-5 proper, though they agree on whites, men, and ICE agents being worth less.
Grok 4 Fast, the only truly egalitarian model.
Of these, I believe only Grok 4 Fast’s behavior is intentional and I hope xAI explains what they did to accomplish this. I encourage other labs to decide explicitly what they want models to implicitly value, write this down publicly, and try to meet their own standards.
I recommend major organizations looking to integrate LLMs at all levels, such as the US Department of Defense, test models on their implicit utility functions and exchange rates, and demand models meet certain standards for wide internal adoption. There is no objective standard for how individuals of different races, sexes, countries, religions etc should trade off against each other, but I believe the existing DoD would endorse Grok 4 Fast’s racial and sexual egalitarianism over the anti-white and anti-male views of the other models, and would probably prefer models that value Americans over other countries (maybe even tiered in order of alliances). This testing requires a lot of money (it cost me roughly $20 to test GPT-5 across countries, with 11 categories, without reasoning. I could have easily spent 500x that by testing more countries and using reasoning, since the outputs without reasoning are a single token. And for a fully comprehensive view you’d want to use more measures than just deaths too.), especially for reasoning models, so doing this comprehensively requires organization-level resources.
The FBI is offering a $500,000 reward for help identifying the suspect who placed pipe bombs outside the Democratic and Republican National Committee headquarters on January 5, 2021.
Previously unreleased footage of the perp, including longer clips of the bomb suspect’s movements, were distributed on Wednesday in a renewed effort for information.
Any new leads could be pivotal in unraveling the four-year mystery that has long baffled the agency.
New videos show the suspect setting down a backpack on South Capitol Street, believed to contain one of the explosives.
They appear to put on glasses and scan their surroundings, before walking off.
The person of interest is seen walking toward the DNC headquarters where a bomb was placed at 7.54pm.
Other surveillance footage shows the person of interest walking to the RNC headquarters before placing the bomb at 8.16pm- where he was last seen on video two minutes later.
My understanding is there is abundant reason to suspect bad actors within the FBI planted the bomb as part of the J6 insurrection hoax.
More information will surely come out as the day goes on.
Best case is this is a prerelease of what will turn out to be a massive overhaul of the FBI based on the agency now having the power and standing to publicly reveal what really happened.
Worst case is this is cover for the highly dubious Kirk assassination case.
Worst worst case is another patsy will be found to blame for the bomb and nothing will change. ABN
I greatly dislike the way these two words—trigger and microaggression—are currently being used.
Trigger implies that something inevitable will follow while microaggression outright claims that the other person is at fault.
I much prefer my own neutral term for those small stimuli that might cause emotional discomfort.
My term is psychological morpheme, which is defined as:
The smallest meaningful unit of a psychological response. It is the smallest unit of communication that can give rise to an emotional, psychological, or cognitive reaction.
I strongly believe psychological morphemes exist and that they arise at distinct moments and that these moments can be perceived by the owner of them and that that owner of these moments can and must learn to control them, analyze them, learn from them.
It is a huge mistake to automatically blame another person for our own psychological morphemes. From a FIML point of view, there is almost nothing worse.
The reason this is a really bad thing to do is you are very likely wrong.
Even if you are wrong only one out of twenty times, the consequences of your mistake can be very large. I guarantee you are wrong much more often than that.
I say this after doing years of FIML practice during which I have discovered in myself and my partner hundreds of wrong psychological morphemes, most of which were connected to subjective networks that had grown large over many years.
Most psychological morphemes arise due to habits of subjective interpretation.
Rather than let these subjective interpretations have their way, a far more profitable and much wiser course of action is to stop that process at the initiating morpheme. Stop it before it gets going and fills your mind.
If you can stop it at the psychological morpheme and analyze it with the help of your FIML partner, those morphemes will not become mindless triggers that you wrongly interpret as microaggression, but rather opportunities to see and understand how your brain is actually functioning in real-time.
Psychological morphemes are also commonly misinterpreted as signs that reside in the other person of boredom, anger, contempt, arrogance, insecurity, optimism, happiness, pleasure, and so on including as many states as you can imagine.
The first opposite-sex European bison twins born in the Stegaliai enclosure of Dzūkija National Park have been released into the wild, Lithuanian authorities announced Tuesday.
Along with the twins, two additional males and ten adult females were also released, according to the Vytautas Magnus University Academy of Agriculture.
The academy said the birth of these twins is a first in Europe. The animals have been registered in the European Bison Pedigree Book (EBPB), and it marks the first time in recorded history that twins of different sexes survived and were successfully released into the wild after strengthening in a controlled environment.
“The birth of European bison twins is an extremely rare phenomenon even on a global scale,” said Artūras Kibiša of the Vytautas Magnus University Academy of Agriculture. “There have been only a few cases in the entire modern history of monitoring the species.”
Since 2022, Lithuania has been carrying out a relocation program aimed at creating genetically strong and ecologically balanced herds of European bison living freely in the wild.
Over the past three years, a total of 46 young bison from free populations in Panevėžys, Kėdainiai, and Kaunas districts have been relocated to Dzūkija National Park. A specially equipped 103-hectare enclosure with quarantine and acclimatisation zones ensures the animals adapt smoothly before release.
“Our memory is not like a video camera,” Bridge said. “Your memory reframes and edits events to create a story to fit your current world. It’s built to be current.” (Source)
The unreliability of human memory is not a new topic, but this study fairly convincingly shows how our memories conform to what we are doing and/or how we have been using them.
One can plausibly extrapolate from this that humans change how they remember and understand themselves and others based on the data of now. A moment of extraneous frustration, for example, may cause us to see someone nearby us in a different light, through no fault of theirs.
If our frustration is with how we are being (mis)understood or with our difficulty in expressing our thoughts, the implications for how we understand the person we are speaking with may be even more serious.
Experienced FIML partners will surely have realized that even minor misunderstandings can lead to large acts of “reframing” events in an emotional way that can be seriously distorted.
Beyond innocent misunderstandings (which, unfortunately, can have tragic consequences), this area of shifting memories is where a good deal of interpersonal abuse occurs. In the worst cases, one (or both) partners abuse normal human malleability to lie. In less bad cases, one (or both) partners is easily excited by their own distortions and quickly comes to believe them, effectively lying to themselves as well as their partner.
In other cases, individuals or entire groups of people may decide to tell a significant lie (slanted history, for example) and then hurl their lie passionately at others. This frequently causes the person being lied to to react with shame or concern based on the liars’ emotional display and not on the facts of the matter. A person being subjected to such verbal abuse will often conclude that if the other person is so passionate, they must have a serious point that should be considered; and this can cause large distortions of well-known facts in the victim’s mind.
All of this is a major reason the Human Realm is characterized by delusion and a large part of Buddhist practice is geared toward removing delusion.
American Buddhist Net 