x01 Archives

How to Stop China from Freeriding on American AI warontherocks.com
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The release of the Chinese open-weight AI model Kimi K3 has compressed a year’s worth of unresolved AI policy debate into a single news cycle. On July 21, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent threatened sanctions against Chinese labs found to have built their models on “theft,” reporting that the government is “finding watermarks of our U.S. large language models on many of the Chinese models.” The following day, White House science advisor Michael Kratsios clarified that the Chinese AI lab behind K3, Moonshot AI, had built a sophisticated platform to copy Anthropic’s Fable model while evading detection.

Industry has been vocal about its own views, with Nvidia’s Jensen Huang declaring that American companies should “absolutely” use Chinese models that outcompete American counterparts on price. In the Washington Post, investor Bill Gurley argued that treating open models as a danger to be licensed and contained runs afoul of the free-market principles that have long powered American innovation.

Blanche withdraws Trump fund plan in writing, ahead of AG confirmation vote www.bbc.co.uk
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Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche has formally withdrawn President Donald Trump’s plan for a fund that could have been used to compensate people prosecuted over the US Capitol riot by Trump’s supporters in 2021.

The move clears the way for Blanche to be confirmed by US senators to his job on a permanent basis.

Trump’s Republican Party previously lacked the votes for this to happen because a pair of senators were not sufficiently satisfied by verbal assurances from Blanche that the planned fund was dead.

In a post on X late on Sunday, external, Blanche said he had “met with committee members and Senators over the past several weeks and addressed any concerns or outstanding questions”.

New Jersey Democrat Josh Gottheimer warns DSA are using party as ‘vessel’ for communism | The Post Millennial thepostmillennial.com
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The New Jersey congressman warned that the Democratic Socialists of America are attempting to reshape his party while distancing himself from the movement’s platform.

Democratic Representative Josh Gottheimer has warned that members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are attempting to transform the Democratic Party into a vehicle for socialist and communist ideology, saying they “are not Democrats” and should form their own political party.

“I’m a very proud, common-sense Democrat, and I don’t think DSA members are Democrats. They’re socialists,” Gottheimer told Fox. “I’m all for them having their own party if they want one, but if they’re trying to take over our party, that’s unacceptable to me… They’re trying to use the Democratic Party as a vessel for their ideas. As you heard in some of these conventions, literally, they’re supporting the Communist Manifesto and Trotsky. They’re anti-American, they’re anti-cop, they don’t believe in borders.”

GOP Congressman Warns Liberal California Billionaire Is Sabotaging Republican Primary slaynews.com
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A clean-energy super PAC funded almost entirely by a major Democrat donor is pouring millions of dollars into Tennessee’s Republican primary in an effort to defeat Trump-backed Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN).

The Invest in Tomorrow Coalition has spent roughly $1 million opposing Ogles and supporting his challenger, former Tennessee Agriculture Commissioner Charlie Hatcher, before purchasing another $700,000 in advertising ahead of Thursday’s primary.

Federal Election Commission records show the group is bankrolled by Chris Larsen, the liberal California billionaire and chairman of cryptocurrency company Ripple.

Javier Milei Just Proposed a Great Idea. Every Government Should Follow His Lead. – PJ Media pjmedia.com
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Javier Milei has done great things for Argentina — and honestly, the entire region — and will continue to do so, but I have to admit that his latest proposal left me weak in the knees. He’s calling it the grillete fiscal or the “fiscal shackle,” and it’s part of a larger reform of the Central Bank’s charter that he’s sending to the country’s Congress, possibly for a mid-to-late-August vote.

South Korea focuses on drone mine counters, naval gunnery as attritable unmanned threats proliferate www.washingtontimes.com
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SEOUL, South Korea — As Ukraine and Iran battle larger, better-armed, high-tech adversaries using economical and attritable unmanned systems, armed forces around the world are taking on board the key lessons.

Take the South Korean navy, which is working up skillsets and technologies capable of countering these asymmetric threats.

The middle power’s navy conducted its first-ever mine-clearance drill combining a crewed vessel with multiple unmanned systems Monday, according to reports from the southeastern port city of Busan.

The trials involved both the South Korean navy and arms company Hanwha Systems, and included an artificial intelligence component. Assets engaged were a 730-ton minesweeper, aerial reconnaissance drones, two surface drones and underwater drones.

Uncertainty on Iranians’ minds as Trump fluctuates on war and talk | US-Israel war on Iran News www.aljazeera.com
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Tehran, Iran – For months now, US President Donald Trump has been making nearly daily proclamations about the war on Iran – from threats of extensive bombing to claims of renewed negotiations. But Faezeh, a financial firm employee in Iran’s capital, says she has long stopped paying attention.

“His words certainly impact our lives, but I try to escape this toxic environment of uncertainty by focusing on what I can control and protecting myself and my loved ones,” the 27-year-old told Al Jazeera.

She is not the only one to do so.

As the war approaches its six-month mark, a number of Iranians are opting against chasing the non-stop headlines in an effort to protect their mental health. This week, as the threat of large-scale US military action once again loomed large, the level of expectation and concern among Iranians appeared to be much lower than on April 7, when the US president warned that “a whole civilisation will die tonight”, only to announce a ceasefire shortly afterwards.

“The US used to have presidents who talked less and did more,” asserted Roham, a colleague of Faezeh at the financial company in central Tehran. “But now with the role of social media and other outlets in which Mr Trump is well-versed, he talks more and doesn’t have to do as much,” he told Al Jazeera.

US-Iran war, Why Saudi Arabia Is Urging Trump To Step Back From Iran War, US-saudi arabia relation, donald Trump-Mohammed bin Salman www.ndtv.com
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Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) has asked US President Donald Trump to avoid launching more attacks on Iran, according to US officials. The latest episode of US-Israeli strikes on Tehran has led to fresh challenges for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s major economic plan, Vision 2030.

During a phone call on Saturday, MBS expressed concern over Trump’s plan for possible strikes on Iranian targets. The American President is considering attacks on Iran’s energy facilities after Iran’s missile strike on a US military base in Jordan and disruptions to ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, according to Axios.

Abdullah bin Farah al-Shaya, a retired brigadier general, told Newsweek, “The Kingdom’s Vision 2030 is not merely an economic plan, but a comprehensive national project to build a diversified and sustainable economy and strengthen the Kingdom’s position as a global hub for investment, energy, logistics, tourism, and innovation.”

Two deadly flowers could inspire powerful new medicines www.sciencedaily.com
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Two plants capable of causing nerve damage and paralysis at extremely low doses may also contain compounds with valuable uses against pain, malaria, cancer, and agricultural pests. Researchers have now identified a way to reproduce part of this potent chemistry in a laboratory setting, creating a possible path toward more sustainable treatments based on natural products.

The work focused on wolfsbane and larkspur and brought together scientists from Michigan State University and the Czech Academy of Sciences. The findings were published in the journal Molecular Plant.

“These plants have been used in different forms of medicine throughout the world for thousands of years,” said MSU alum Garret Miller, co-first author of the paper and now an assistant professor of biotechnology at the University of Michigan-Flint.

“We know they interact with our bodies in so many ways, and understanding how to create them can help provide totally new routes of testing.”

Capitol One Claims It Debanked Trump Organization in 2021 over ‘Money Laundering’ Concerns, Not Political Bias www.breitbart.com
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Capital One has asked a judge to dismiss a lawsuit accusing it of debanking President Donald Trump’s company after the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol in Washington, DC, claiming it closed Trump Organization accounts following an anti-money-laundering review.

The bank submitted a court filing on Friday and said the internal review was conducted due to patterns that “are among the types of activity flagged by federal banking guidance,” Bloomberg reported Saturday.

“The filing does not give details about the transactions at issue or accuse Trump or his company of wrongdoing,” the outlet said. “The decision to close the accounts was made as part of a process involving the lender’s anti-money-laundering professionals ‘with decades of law enforcement experience,’ the bank said.”

Pennsylvania Voter Roll Purge Wipes Out Tens of Thousands Democrats in Just One Week gellerreport.com
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Pennsylvania just purged its voter rolls and Democrats lost TENS OF THOUSANDS of voters versus Republicans in ONE WEEK

🔵 DEMOCRATS: -54,178
🔴 NET GOP GAIN: +30,195

Last week, Dems led statewide by 56K voters…that D lead has been cut in more than HALF to 26K.

This comes after NJ got CAUGHT letting noncitizens onto the rolls.

Secure our elections at all costs and Republicans win!

We must pass the SAVE AMERICA Act.

UCLA Student Paper Says Misgendering is Too Harmful for Free Speech legalinsurrection.com
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Mind you, these exceptions only flow in one direction. Leftists will still be allowed to call conservatives Nazis.

Aspiring journalists still want First Amendment exceptions for hurt feelings

A month ago, The College Fix reported on Defending Education’s lawsuit against the University of California system for allegedly requiring the use of “preferred pronouns.”

The lawsuit asserted that a student “who uses ‘he’ or ‘him’ when referring to a biological male who identifies as a female will be punished for ‘misgendering’ that student.”

Defending Education Senior Legal Counsel Sarah Parshall Perry noted colleges certainly can act to prohibit true harassment — “targeted, severe, and pervasive conduct that interferes with a student’s education” — but can’t “weaponize vague harassment policies to regulate viewpoints on matters of public concern, such as biological sex and gender identity.”

Bishop Schneider: ‘Nothing more dangerous for religion’ than liturgical ‘interference’ www.lifesitenews.com
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Bishop Athanasius Schneider warned in a sermon this weekend that “nothing is more dangerous for a religion” than “interference with the liturgy.”

The auxiliary bishop of Astana, Kazakhstan, defended the importance of upholding the Church’s sacred tradition, including its traditional liturgy, during a visit to the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest in Limerick, Ireland.

He emphasized that it is a perpetual precept of the Catholic Church to remain faithful to its tradition, both “doctrinally and liturgically,” The Catholic Herald reported.

“True piety admits no other rule than that only those things which have been (faithfully) received from our fathers, those same are to be (faithfully) consigned to our children,” said Schneider.

Planned Parenthood shuts down three Michigan facilities after $5.6 million loss www.lifesitenews.com
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Three Planned Parenthood facilities will close in Michigan as the one-year, temporary defunding of abortion vendors took a toll on its profits.

Planned Parenthood of Michigan said that the closures were driven by “$5.6 million in uncompensated and undercompensated care.”

The three closed locations in Lansing, Warren, and Livonia did not commit abortions at their facilities, though they did refer for dangerous chemical abortion drugs. The closure of these facilities further shows that abortion is a moneymaker for Planned Parenthood while some other services are not.

While the one-year defunding of Planned Parenthood expired on July 4 of this year, the effects of it in just 365 days illustrate the importance of extending the cuts. Planned Parenthood also cited its exclusion from Title X “family planning” funds as a reason for its financial losses.

“For decades, federal family planning funding and reimbursement for patient care helped Planned Parenthood expand access across the state,” Paula Greear, CEO of Planned Parenthood of Michigan, stated in a news release.

Astronomers reveal the true size of the biggest known galaxy www.techexplorist.com
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When you look up at the night sky, the stars you see are part of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. But out there in the universe, galaxies come in all shapes and sizes, and some are truly enormous. A galaxy’s size is closely tied to how many stars it contains. One of them, IC 1101, has just been confirmed as the largest galaxy ever measured.

IC 1101 stretches an incredible 520,000 light-years across. To put that in perspective: In contrast to the Milky Way, which is about 100,000 light-years wide, IC 1101 is more than five times larger.

If you placed it where the Milky Way is, it would swallow up not just our galaxy but also many of our closest neighbors.

Scientists estimate that there are 3.4 trillion stars inside this galaxy, compared to a mere 200–400 billion in the Milky Way.

Rhine falls to record low levels as drought strains Europe’s rivers www.bbc.co.uk
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Renewed heatwave conditions are due to continue for at least another week, pushing temperatures above 40C in many central and southern European countries.

Germany’s Low Water Information System (NIWIS) said that 44% of the Rhine measuring stations and 78% of those on the Danube had recorded extremely low water levels at the end of July.

The Rhine – which starts in the Swiss Alps and empties in the North Sea – is one of Europe’s busiest waterways. Decreasing water levels have sparked concerns about the economic fallout of having to limit navigation and shipping.

On Friday, the navigable water depth at the chokepoint of Kaub near Koblenz hit the 2018 record low of 25cm, before recovering slightly on Monday.

Memo Reveals Blueprint For Investigation Into Covid Origins Paper thefederalist.com
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The Counterlawfare Institute obtained a previously undisclosed June 8, 2025, memo laying out a blueprint for the Department of Justice to investigate Anthony Fauci and the National Institutes of Health’s contributions toward the influential “Proximal Origin” scientific paper that argued the Covid-19 virus originated from nature, not a lab.

The memorandum was written by Michael Caputo, a former senior Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) official who later served as an adviser in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, and addressed to Ed Martin, then director of the Department of Justice’s Weaponization Working Group. It later emerged that Caputo was under secret federal surveillance at the time.

In the memo, Caputo encourages the DOJ to investigate whether federal officials misled U.S. intelligence and directed millions of taxpayer dollars to scientists who “falsely distracted the public from government misconduct that lead to massive illness and deaths worldwide.”

Japan, US confirm joint yen-buying intervention, signal more action www.channelnewsasia.com
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Japan has been struggling to curb a relentless drop in the yen that pushes up import prices and stokes broader inflation, hitting households’ wallets and Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s public approval ratings.

Tokyo’s solo intervention conducted between late April and early May caused only a brief yen rebound. The BOJ’s June rate hike to a 31-year high of 1 per cent also gave the struggling currency little lasting boost.

Friday’s joint intervention followed Tokyo’s solo intervention worth up to US$58.97 billion in New York markets a day earlier.

In a sign of further Japan-US coordination, Bessent said the United States would consider increasing in coming months the size of the Federal Reserve’s repurchase facility providing temporary dollar liquidity, calling the tool an “important backstop”.

Seven killed as drone hits packed Russian beach and tourists run for their lives www.mirror.co.uk
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Drone dive-bombs beach in southern Russia killing tourists

At least seven people have been killed, including three children, as a “downed” Ukrainian drone crashed and exploded onto sunbathers on a Russian beach.

Forty people were also injured, with 21 of them taken to hospital, as the unmanned device exploded in Arkhipo-Osipovka. The drone was seen dive-bombing onto tourists at the popular beach as temperatures reached 29C.

Beachgoers have claimed no warning sirens were heard before the incident as some sheltered under sun loungers.

Thousands of Admissions in Doubt at University in Mexico After AI is Used to Prevent Cheating legalinsurrection.com
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AI is probably going to be an ongoing issue in higher education for years to come.

A top Mexican university used AI to prevent exam cheating. Now thousands of admissions are in doubt

Daniel Fernando García Velázquez took the admissions exam for Mexico’s most famous university four times before finally getting the result that should have guaranteed him admission.

On his first three attempts, he had no option other than to travel the 400 km (250 miles) from his native Veracruz to Mexico City to take the test, because the prestigious National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) insisted it had to be taken in person.

On his fourth – and what should have been victorious – attempt this June, he traveled up anyway, even though this time, for the first time in the university’s history, it would be administered online.

This time, Velázquez aced the exam – scoring 94 out of 120 in what should have secured him a spot on the Communication and Journalism degree program offered at UNAM’s Aragón School of Higher Studies.

Politico Finally Admits Voter Registration Runs On Honor System thefederalist.com
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Politico has spent months telling Americans that Republican concerns about noncitizens in our elections were exaggerated. Yet now that New Jersey admitted more than 6,000 noncitizens ended up on its voter rolls (about 400 of whom voted) — Politico has discovered the problem was apparently an “open secret” all along.

New Jersey Democrat Gov. Mikie Sherrill recently announced that a “software error” in the state’s motor vehicle system “led to the registration of roughly 6,600 people who indicated they were not U.S. citizens between June 2023 and June 2024.” The noncitizens allegedly answered “no” when asked whether they were citizens, but the system registered them anyway. Of those registered, nearly 400 illegally cast a ballot, the governor’s office said.

Now that the reality of noncitizens both registering to vote and voting is too difficult for the corporate media to ignore, they have to cover it. Politico’s Matt Friedman reports that the announcement “exposed an open secret about New Jersey’s so-called motor voter law that officials and political operatives have known for years: There’s little to stop noncitizens from registering to vote if they want to, or even by mistake.”

MSNOW Frets Trump ‘Otherizing’ Illegal Alien Truckers, No Mention of Deaths www.newsbusters.org
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On Friday’s Money, Power, and Politics on MS NOW, fill-in host Ali Vitali fretted that President Donald Trump is “otherizing” illegal alien truck drivers while replacing them with veterans, but did not mention the problem of many such illegal aliens causing car crash deaths.

In contrast with Fox News, which has given substantial coverage to the issue of illegal aliens who are unable to pass driving tests being given commercial drivers licenses in blue states, and then going on to cause deadly car crashes, MS NOW has a history of barely mentioning such truckers.

Damian Paletta, the anti-Trump Washington Bureau Chief at The Wall Street Journal, told Vitali the Trump administration is trying to “do as much as they can to get their immigration agenda through” before the midterms, because if Democrats take over one house of Congress or both, “there might be huge roadblocks in the next year.”