United States | News & Politics

Within hours on Friday, the Pentagon blacklisted one AI company for refusing to drop its safety commitments on surveillance and autonomous weapons, then turned around and praised a competitor for signing a deal that supposedly preserved those exact same commitments.

The Associated Press announced Monday that it's teaming with prediction market Kalshi to make U.S. election results available via the platform.

The machine that all but made the decision itself

Today, DDoSecrets published data about ICE contracts hacked from DHS's Office of Industry Partnership. The hacker group, Department of Peace, published a statement that included:

https://archive.is/GsZEm

Last week, the US Department of Agriculture proposed a strikingly cruel policy, even for this administration: speeding up the kill lines at America’s chicken, turkey, and pig slaughterhouses. The plan will make one of the country’s most dangerous jobs — working in a meat processing plant — even more unsafe, labor advocates argue.

[...]

Chicken slaughterhouses would be able to increase kill line speeds from 140 birds per minute to 175 — a 25 percent increase. Turkey slaughterhouses would be able to accelerate from 55 birds per minute to 60. Pig slaughterhouses currently have a maximum line speed limit of 1,106 pigs per hour, but under the new rule, there will be no speed limit.

[...]

The proposed rules are all but certain to increase injury rates for these workers, who already have some of the highest in the nation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (and which, according to numerous federal government sources, are likely severe underestimates).

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/34795641

• A nationwide analysis finds most U.S. national parks are highly vulnerable to climate change, with many facing risks of irreversible ecological transformation rather than gradual decline. Wildfire, drought, pests, and sea-level rise are converging to reshape landscapes the parks were created to preserve.
• Vulnerability is uneven: parks in the Midwest and eastern United States tend to face the greatest cumulative risk due to fragmented habitats, pollution, invasive species, and limited capacity for ecosystems to adapt. Many western parks appear more resilient but are exposed to multiple severe disturbances at once.
• Coastal parks are threatened by rising seas and storm surge, while inland forests face compound stresses that can trigger long-term shifts from forest to shrubland or grassland. Once such transitions occur, returning to previous ecological conditions may be impossible.
• As climate pressures intensify and policy responses weaken, park managers are shifting from preserving historical conditions to managing ongoing transformation. America’s parks may increasingly serve less as static sanctuaries and more as living records of how nature reorganizes under accelerating change.

The United States and Israel tend to avoid flying over Iranian airspace so as not to expose themselves to antiaircraft fire, because Iran’s capabilities have been bolstered by Russia since the June war. The US and Israel prefer to fire missiles from jets hovering in neighboring air spaces. The United States claims that the jets were shot down by friendly fire. Either way, two days into the war it appears the US has lost more air assets than they have since its war against Vietnam, fifty years ago. Iran has launched waves of ballistic missiles at Israel. While Israeli military censorship is effective at obscuring the damage caused by the strikes, there have been more reports of casualties than Tel Aviv claims.

The document numbers EFTA01211336–EFTA01211343 are in the published archive.

oh look, Sundowning Grandpa Bloodthirst made a boom-boom — only this time, it wasn’t in his pants.

I swear, every day it’s just one goddamned thing after another.

Texas Senator John Cornyn: “I don’t know what the— what’s, uh— we’re all— I’m learning like you are, as the news unfolds, exactly what's happening.”

oh geez. seriously, John? once again, Donny does whatever the fuck he wants, shits all over the Constitution, and launches an illegal and unprovoked war in the middle of the night, without consulting Congress — because fuck you, that’s why — and all Republicans can do is scratch their asses and go ‘well, I guess so.’

fucking cowards.

Cornyn doesn’t know shit, because this war is being prosecuted from a partitioned-off dining room in Donny’s Florida golf motel.

Christ on a corroded crumb cake, not this rinky-dink clownfuckishness again. this is the exact same ahem ‘secure location’ they used when they kidnapped Maduro from Venezuela. because god forbid Dear Leader interrupt his weekend golf plans for, y’know, a war.

imagine just for a moment that Joe Biden had launched ginormous airstrikes while hanging out at his Delaware beach house. Republicans would have shit a massive, collective brick. but when Dear Leader does it, nary a peep.

once again, perfectly normal stuff, am I right?

Donny’s Totally Awesome War Room™ sure looks secure as fuck, doesn’t it?

“excuse me, is the omelette bar? oops, sorry.”

Donny Demento looks totally in charge, doesn’t he?

pro Commander-in-Chief tip: when going to war, don’t forget to slather twice the usual load of makeup all over your decomposing face, because, y’know, gravitas.

Nevada’s ban on taking drugs to end a pregnancy after the 24th week makes it the only state left in the nation that explicitly criminalizes abortions, advocates say, and legislative efforts last year to change that fell flat.

Patience Rousseau was the only person ever charged and convicted under the law, according to Laura FitzSimmons, a Carson City-based lawyer who has represented her since 2020. FitzSimmons helped get Rousseau’s conviction vacated in 2021 for ineffective assistance of counsel.

Now Nevada will pay Rousseau $100,000 for her ordeal, a settlement approved without comment during last Tuesday’s meeting of the Board of Examiners — a panel consisting of the governor, the attorney general and the secretary of state.

The compensation marks the conclusion of an eight-year fight that upended Rousseau’s life and brought national attention to a Nevada law that abortion advocates describe as uniquely punitive toward women who want to end their pregnancy.

Comments

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/34758533

The paper is here

Thanks to gerrymandering, primaries are typically what decides who actually holds power. So make sure you can actually vote in them.

It looks like a user error with the Amazon Polly text-to-speech system is to blame.