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The great science fiction fear has always been of AI escaping human control and the machines taking over, as in The Matrix films. The story of Lavender suggests, on the contrary, that the real danger arises when the awesome data-crunching capacities of AI are put in the hands of human beings. Derek Sayer on Israel’s human targeting software and the banality of evil.
As the second anniversary of the Russia-Ukraine war nears, public support for the war has reached an all-time low. Nonetheless, NATO is escalating tensions along Russia’s border with a four-month military exercise involving 90,000 troops from 32 countries. For the Global North, it is not the Ukrainian people’s wellbeing that matters but the geostrategic necessity to ‘weaken’ Russia and China. In reality, there will be no military triumph in Ukraine, which is why the war must end and negotiations commenced.
People's World | Even as U.S. President Joe Biden declares Ukraine is a frontline democracy amidst its war with Russian invaders, Ukrainian unions would sharply differ with him.
People's World | C.J Atkins | Some traders at the New York and Tel Aviv Stock Exchanges (NYSE and TASE) apparently knew in advance that Hamas militants were about to launch their attack on Israel before Oct. 7th and that a war would follow.
Belgian transport workers have refused to load and unload weapons going to Israel. The boycott that began on Tuesday accompanied growing international pressure for a ceasefire.
A giant coalition of over 50 pan-Canadian labor, civil society, peace, and justice organizations have signed a joint statement demanding that the federal government led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau call for an immediate ceasefire of all hostilities in Gaza.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken pledged continued U.S. support to Israel Thursday even as its military devastated the Gaza Strip with air strikes and prepared for a possible ground invasion.
Michael Roberts | At the beginning of this year, I wrote a post on how the capitalist mode of production was in what some call a ‘polycrisis’, where various crises: economic (inflation and slump); environmental (climate and pandemic); and geopolitical (war and international divisions) had come together in the early 21st century. Polycrisis, the new buzzword among leftists, is in many ways similar to my own description of the contradictions of the Long Depression of the 2010s that have to come to a head in the 2020s.
On September 22, Parliamentarians gave a standing ovation to Yaroslav Hunka, a former member of the the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, the military wing of the Nazi Party, during Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to Ottawa. Before the end of the war, the unit was renamed the “First Ukrainian Division” in order to remove its association with the Waffen-SS.
China on Friday called for a comprehensive ceasefire and negotiations to end the war in Ukraine and issued a 12-point plan to achieve peace. China rolled out its plan at the United Nations and in the international press over the weekend.
On the centenary of Michael Collins' assassination (22 August 1922), Chris Bambery sifts through the mythology of a man who played a part in the Irish struggle for independence and then turned against it.
Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly is striking an unusually hawkish tone in her comments about the standoff. Is this the best path for Canada?
MATTHEW ALFORD presents here an article he wrote charting US and British military aggression across the globe – and tells the story of what happened to that article once it arrived in the inbox of editors at a respected liberal publication
Opening up of defence files from more than 50 years ago may also shed light on 1968 Air France crash
So we are being told that the United States launched an airstrike on Syria, a nation it invaded and is illegally occupying, because of attacks on “US locations” in Iraq, another nation the U.S. invaded and is illegally occupying. This attack is justified on the basis that the Iraqi fighters were “Iranian-linked”, a claim that is both entirely without evidence and irrelevant to the justification of deadly military force. And this is somehow being framed in mainstream news publications as a defensive operation.
In 2019, Erik Prince, the founder of the notorious mercenary firm Blackwater and a prominent Donald Trump supporter, aided a plot to move U.S.-made attack helicopters, weapons, and other military equipment from Jordan to a renegade commander fighting for control of war-torn Libya. A team of mercenaries planned to use the aircraft to help the commander, Khalifa Hifter, a U.S. citizen and former CIA asset, defeat Libya’s U.N.-recognized and U.S.-backed government. While the U.N. has alleged that Prince helped facilitate the mercenary effort, sources with knowledge of the chain of events, as well as documents obtained by The Intercept, reveal new details about the scheme as well as Prince’s yearslong campaign to support Hifter in his bid to take power in Libya.
Yesterday, the Biden administration took two long-overdue steps toward potentially ending the Saudi war on Yemen. But the president has to provide more clarity on what exactly his administration is willing to do to halt Saudi Arabia’s brutality and remove the boot from the neck of Yemenis.
“I got out of the Marines and within a few years, 15 of my buddies had killed themselves,” one veteran rifleman who served two tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq between 2003 and 2011 said to me recently. “One minute they belonged and the next, they were out, and they couldn’t fit in. They had nowhere to work, no one who related to them. And they had these PTSD symptoms that made them react in ways other Americans didn’t.”
The most recent denunciation from Syria confirms the support of Western powers to the alleged humanitarian organization of the White Helmets which is also a fraud of crude media manipulation.
The US Congress’ $900 billion Covid-19 relief bill was packaged with $1.4 trillion in omnibus spending that includes tens of billions for war, weapons, and regime change abroad, from anti-Russia and anti-China initiatives to $3.3 billion for Israel’s military.