technocrit

The bank remained vague about the actual nature of its relationship with the convicted sex trafficker. Newly released documents reveal that Epstein and de Rothschild’s personal relationship was much closer than the bank previously acknowledged. According to emails released by the U.S. House Oversight Committee on November 12, Epstein planned to see a Broadway play with de Rothschild in January 2014, and scheduled a private trip with her to Montreal that September.

A second set of documents—the leaked inbox of former Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak, hacked by Handala and uploaded by non-profit whistleblower Distributed Denial of Secrets—sheds light on Epstein’s efforts to leverage his personal friendship with de Rothschild to raise funds for the development of Israeli cyberweapons. After Barak’s retirement from government in 2013, he recruited Pavel Gurvich, a graduate of the Israel Defense Forces’ secretive Unit 81 technology unit, to source cyberweapons startups from the Israeli intelligence community. Gurvich did not respond to a request for comment.

Private communications between Barak and Gurvich show discussions about a wide range of cyberweapons concepts drawn from Israeli military research, inspired in part by the astonishing scope of U.S. global surveillance apparatus revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013. Epstein pushed forward a plan to finance Israeli “offensive cyber” startups with the hope of winning de Rothschild’s support.

Since October 2023, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) unleashed tens of thousands of bombs likely containing payloads of Polish-made TNT, resulting in the destruction of as much as 80 percent of Gaza’s buildings, including civilian infrastructure such as hospitals, schools, and refugee camps. “Based on information provided by the bomb’s U.S. manufacturer, General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems, the Polish company Nitro-Chem, and U.S. government databases, we can conclude that there is a high probability that a significant proportion of [Mk 84s] that Israel dropped on the Gaza Strip since October 2023 are filled with Polish-made TNT,” the report found.

Take out the trash.

US President Donald Trump welcomed Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to the White House Tuesday, defended the prince’s bloodstained rule when questioned by reporters about the grisly murder of Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, and then hosted a formal dinner in the prince’s honor, attended by billionaires, corporate executives and Republican politicians.

For four years, bin Salman was unable to visit Europe or North America due to outstanding legal issues stemming from the Khashoggi murder. A team of Saudi assassins, headed by Salman’s security chief, seized Khashoggi when he visited the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey to obtain documents for his marriage to his Turkish fiancée. The journalist was tortured, killed and his body dismembered and disposed of secretly.

During the course of the visit, Trump had an extraordinary exchange with a reporter that exposed the gangsterism and criminality of both governments. When ABC News reporter Mary Bruce raised two pointed questions—asking Trump about possible “incriminating evidence” in the Epstein files, and bin Salman about the Khashoggi murder and the Saudi government’s ties to the 9/11 terrorist attacks—Trump erupted in defense of both himself and the prince.

Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers has resigned from OpenAI’s board days after Congress released an extensive cache of emails with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, which included details of intimate affairs.

Summers is also a former president of Harvard University and a current professor. The university will open its own probe into Summers’s connections with Epstein, reports the student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson. The university newspaper also reported that Summers will step back from public commitments.

His departure comes a day after both the House and the Senate voted to release the Epstein files. Over the past few days, a House panel released years of email exchanges between Epstein and Summers, including one in which Summers asked for advice about pursuing a relationship with a woman he described as a mentee.

Gross domestic product (GDP) was never designed to be a measure of societal well-being. It tracks only market transactions, conflates costs and benefits, and ignores the distribution of income, the contributions of household labour and volunteer work, and social and environmental costs and benefits.

In the decades after the Second World War, GDP growth functioned as a reasonable proxy for well-being when rebuilding economies and increasing production and consumption were the main priorities. However, since about 1950, which some call the Anthropocene era, ecological limits, inequality and declining social cohesion have restricted further improvements in well-being...

Measuring and modelling what truly matters, not just market transactions, is now essential. Processes are under way to develop indicators that move beyond GDP. In May, the United Nations secretary-general António Guterres appointed a High-Level Expert Group to develop such measures, with a focus on balancing economic, social and environmental dimensions of well-being. This initiative builds on the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): target 19 of SDG17 commits governments to adopt beyond-GDP metrics by 2030.

At school, I wave goodbye to my son, but he doesn’t even look back, such is his hurry to get to the singing of the Soviet Anthem.

Donald Trump’s lethal attacks on boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific are a brutal escalation of the United States’ long-running “war on drugs,” a bipartisan war that has seen the US involved in torture and extrajudicial killing abroad since the 1970s.

It should be a matter of federal criminal investigation that between $100 and $400 billion has been lavished on weapons contractors for antiballistic missile schemes without producing a working program. Murphy, in The Hill, pointed to the self-defeating aspect of even continuing the program. “The very act of pursuing a missile defense system is already encouraging U.S. adversaries to expand their nuclear arsenals and develop additional technologies to circumvent missile defenses. So, counterintuitively, missile defense is making the world less safe.”

Continued funding of the needless, unworkable, gold-plated, and corrupt missile defense program amounts to larceny and theft. Rather than debating whether or not to give additional billions to the usual suspects, the Department of Justice should be assembling a grand jury.

Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman wants a defence deal that outshines Qatar’s, AI chips and AI-powered drones, and potentially, American nuclear weapons stationed in his country.

“You have arrived in hell. Here you will spend the rest of your lives.” With this declaration, the director of El Salvador’s CECOT greeted the hundreds of men dragged into the country’s maximum security torture camp.

The report documents an extensive, coordinated and deliberate series of incidents of physical, psychological, sexual abuses, deprivation and torture carried out with the express intent to subjugate and humiliate detainees.

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Greene, a member of the House of Representatives, has long been a reliable ally and fierce defender of Trump, even sporting a Make America Great Again (MAGA) baseball hat at President Joe Biden’s 2024 State of the Union address.

But in recent months, she has taken positions at odds with the White House and her fellow Republicans, including criticising them during the just-ended federal government shutdown, saying the Trump administration needed a plan to help people set to lose health insurance subsidies as part of planned cuts.

More notably, Greene has also become a vocal campaigner for transparency and the full release of files related to late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein – a recurrent scandal that continues to engulf President Trump.

Greene responded to Trump’s announcement on Friday with screenshots of a text message she sent the president about the Epstein case, claiming it “sent him over the edge”.

“It’s astonishing really how hard he’s fighting to stop the Epstein files from coming out that he actually goes to this level,” she wrote on X.

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