technocrit

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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Three Palestinian teenagers released in a recent prisoner exchange were abducted by Israeli soldiers while seeking aid and tortured in custody, a new report has revealed.

In interviews conducted by the NGO Defense for Children Palestine (DCIP), Mohammad Nael Khamis al-Zoghbi, 17, Faris Ibrahim Faris Abu Jabal, 16, and Mahmoud Hani Mohammad al-Majayda, 17, described how they were abducted by Israeli forces near aid distribution points and transferred to the notorious Sde Teiman detention camp in southern Israel.

They said they endured torture, beatings and starvation in Israeli custody. The trauma has left them unable to sleep, and they are plagued by night terrors and bed wetting.

One of the boys said he felt his detention had "stripped away his childhood".

Jabal, who was abducted along with his father while seeking aid near the Morag Corridor on 11 September, recalled being so badly beaten during his interrogation that his forehead “split open and required stitches”.

Epstein’s human trafficking organization depended entirely on the wealth management industry (WMI). It was how he obtained the capital to build it, and it was how he hid his activities from the authorities. And none of this was an abuse of the industry; it is precisely how the WMI is designed to work. Nor is it an abuse of the law, because both American and international law has been carefully designed to accomodate the WMI.

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But capitalism didn’t just provide seed funds for Epstein’s operation. It also provided a whole legal and financial apparatus that helped him find victims and disguise his transactions. An article in Deviant Behavior by sociologist Thomas Volscho observes that at first, “the predominant means for gaining access to potential victims involved Epstein using philanthropy to gain access to youth-serving institutions.”

In particular, Epstein seems to have leveraged immense wealth to buy influence in youth organizations that focused on financially at-risk children and then used the wealth disparity to control them. This was a natural step for Epstein, since wealth managers often work with charitable organizations for tax-avoidance purposes. As his conspiracy matured, Volscho writes, Epstein’s “sex trafficking enterprise was funded by Epstein’s tax shelter advisory business, where he primarily helped wealthy people avoid taxation on the sale and/or bequeathing of their assets and incomes.”

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So while Epstein likely used blackmail and other illegal schemes to avoid prosecution for his crimes, his primary strategy — offshore wealth management — was not just legal but a central feature of modern financial capitalism. If the Left wants to use the Epstein case to talk about elite impunity, that conversation has to begin with the strategies the rich use to hide their finances that are completely legal.

English rock group Oasis has always been a populist contradiction, rooted both in working-class culture and the individualism of post-Thatcherite Britain. But while other bands become more political, Oasis’s comeback tour offers only escapist nostalgia.

Palestinians from Gaza, recently released from Israeli detention, have given harrowing descriptions of sexual torture by their Israeli captors.

Victims described rapes by groups of soldiers, forced stripping, forced filming and sexual assaults and rapes using objects and dogs.

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights, which collected the testimonies in recent weeks, said they reflect a systematic policy as part of Israel’s genocide, rather than isolated incidents.

Thousands of Palestinians are still in detention camps and prisons to which international monitors, including the Red Cross, have no access.

PCHR warns that detainees face the risk of death and coerced confessions extracted through torture – especially as Israel is advancing plans to impose the death penalty on Palestinian detainees.

These detainees were arrested solely for being residents of the Gaza Strip, “as part of a policy of collective punishment designed to humiliate Palestinians and inflict maximum psychological and physical harm on them,” PCHR said.

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The egghells belonged to a long-extinct group of crocodiles known as mekosuchines, who lived in inland waters when Australia was part of Antarctica and South America.

Co-author Prof Michael Archer said "drop crocs" were a "bizarre idea" but some were "perhaps hunting like leopards - dropping out of trees on any unsuspecting thing they fancied for dinner".

On October 28, Rio de Janeiro’s police besieged the Penha favela for 15 hours, killing at least 121 people in the city’s worst massacre. Brazil’s right is hailing it as an anti-crime victory while overlooking their own links to violent gangs.

On both Left and Right, many like to take the Whitlam dismissal— as it became known — as a constitutional struggle between an old British-oriented establishment and a new, progressive Australia. But in retrospect, it’s hard to doubt that the 1975 dismissal was in fact a soft coup d’état, heavily influenced by US power and influence.

These various factors — ranging from economic interests to political maneuvering — help explain the strange paradox of countries scrambling to whitewash al-Sharaa and curry favor with a regime that was considered a terrorist entity just months ago. It is a fitting spectacle for the state of global politics in this Trumpian era.