A bunch of Silicon Valley tycoons think they’re going to build a utopia in northern California. We’ve heard this one before.
Shadowy Tech Goons Want to Build a New City in California. What Could Go Wrong?
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The Silicon Valley Elite Who Want to Build a City From Scratch
CHIUL, Guatemala − Life in Bartolo Báten’s village has been defined by corruption: A teacher who can’t get a job at the school until she pays a bribe. A water project that runs out of money before the pipes reached town. Sick residents who can’t afford the medicine that’s available elsewhere.
Insurgent candidate tells Guatemalans: Stay, don’t go to the U.S. This time, they’re listening. (archived)
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Seven Decades After Guatemala Coup, Bernardo Arévalo Sees a Dramatic Rise (Will Freeman, CFR)
Arévalo and Semilla are centrists—but in a country where politics habitually skews right, they are often described as center-left. “Semilla has a social democratic element, but its program is centrist, and it also has some center-right followers,” said Lucas Perelló, a political scientist who has spent time studying the party’s formation. Arévalo says he wants to gradually universalize existing social assistance programs to include a greater share of poor Guatemalans, reduce the cost of medicines and healthcare, and link isolated parts of the country through new infrastructure—doable tasks, given Guatemala’s exceptionally low share of debt as GDP, and necessary ones, given the country’s soaring poverty and malnutrition rates.
On security issues, another major concern for Guatemalans, Arévalo promises to increase state presence in crime hotspots, reclaim jails from gangs, and use intelligence-gathering to dismantle mafias. He says Bukele’s anti-gang strategy is not applicable to Guatemala. He is also critical of human rights abuses in Venezuela and Nicaragua and Putin’s war on Ukraine and has no stated plans to recognize China over Taiwan. Asked for a leader he admires, he named the ex-president, José Pepe Mujica, of Uruguay, where he was born during his father’s exile.
Argentina’s Milei Says He’d Reject ‘Assassin’ China, Leave Mercosur
Milei described his foreign policy proposals as a global “fight against socialists and statists,” and revealed that he would appoint Diana Mondino, a trusted economic adviser, to be his top diplomat. She’s a former Standard & Poor’s director for Argentina and is running for Congress.
Video via Emil Cosman
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Read More »In the wake of Donald Trump, everything on the border has officially changed, yet nothing has really changed. Nothing of note is happening, even as everything happens.
Biden Out-Trumps Trump at the Border
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Biden has maintained many of Trump’s sanctions against Cuba. He must fulfill his promise to reverse Trump’s actions.
Cuba Says Biden Applies Blockade Even More Aggressively Than His Predecessors
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has agreed to establish a center to protect critical undersea infrastructure such as pipelines citing risks of attack by Russia.
NATO to Build Center for Pipeline Protection
The Ukraine Content Aggregator is used to catch fake news and share data on it with foreign partners, the secretary of state says
US developed AI tool to battle Russian disinformation Blinken
H/T: Emil Cosman
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Secretary Antony J. Blinken at Freedom House 2023 Annual Awards Ceremony
The third thing I wanted to highlight. While we’re working to promote access to the internet for all, we’re also working to address threats to human rights that come with an open internet, including online harassment, abuse, disinformation.
Now, online abuse doesn’t, of course, target only human rights defenders. Instead, the internet and digital technologies are often used to amplify attacks on vulnerable groups – women, the LGBTQI community, marginalized ethnic or religious groups – and undermine our broader fight for human rights. So this year, we launched what is now at least a 12-country Global Partnership for Action on Gender-Based Online Harassment and Abuse. We’re encouraging private sector to become engaged with us as well.
We’re also working to address the massive challenge of online misinformation and disinformation – again, something familiar to everyone in this room. To cite one example, of course, Russia continues to push a steady, relentless stream of disinformation about its war of aggression against Ukraine, to lie about and cover up horrific abuses it’s committed, to try to justify committing others.
In response, the State Department has developed an AI-enabled online Ukraine Content Aggregator to collect verifiable Russian disinformation and then to share that with partners around the world. We’re promoting independent media and digital literacy. We’re working with partners in academia to reliably detect fake text generated by Russian chatbots.
Epstein’s Private Calendar Reveals Prominent Names, Including CIA Chief, Goldman’s Top Lawyer
Most of those people told the Journal they visited Epstein for reasons related to his wealth and connections. Several said they thought he had served his time and had rehabilitated himself. Mr. Botstein said he was trying to get Epstein to donate to his school. Mr. Chomsky said he and Epstein discussed political and academic topics.
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Mr. [Ehud] Barak also met Epstein in 2015 with Mr. Chomsky, now 94, a linguistics professor and political activist who has been critical of capitalism and U.S. foreign policy.
Mr. Chomsky said Epstein arranged the meeting with Mr. Barak for them to discuss “Israel’s policies with regard to Palestinian issues and the international arena.”
Mr. Barak said he often met with Epstein on trips to New York and was introduced to people such as Mr. Ramo and Mr. Chomsky to discuss geopolitics or other topics. “He often brought other interesting persons, from art or culture, law or science, finance, diplomacy or philanthropy,” Mr. Barak said.
Epstein arranged several meetings in 2015 and 2016 with Mr. Chomsky, while he was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
When asked about his relationship with Epstein, Mr. Chomsky replied in an email: “First response is that it is none of your business. Or anyone’s. Second is that I knew him and we met occasionally.”
In March 2015, Epstein scheduled a gathering with Mr. Chomsky and Harvard University professor Martin Nowak and other academics, according to the documents. Mr. Chomsky said they had several meetings at Mr. Nowak’s research institute to discuss neuroscience and other topics.
Two months later, Epstein planned to fly with Mr. Chomsky and his wife to have dinner with them and movie director Woody Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn, the documents show.
“If there was a flight, which I doubt, it would have been from Boston to New York, 30 minutes,” Mr. Chomsky said. “I’m unaware of the principle that requires that I inform you about an evening spent with a great artist.”
Epstein donated at least $850,000 to MIT between 2002 and 2017, and more than $9.1 million to Harvard from 1998 to 2008, the schools have said. In 2021, Harvard said it was sanctioning Mr. Nowak for violating university policies in his dealings with Epstein, and was shutting a research center he ran that Epstein had funded. MIT said it was inappropriate to accept Epstein’s gifts, and that it later donated $850,000 to nonprofits supporting survivors of sexual abuse.
In a 2020 interview with the “dunc tank” podcast, Mr. Chomsky said that people he considered worse than Epstein had donated to MIT. He didn’t mention any of his meetings with Epstein.
Mr. Chomsky told the Journal that at the time of his meetings “what was known about Jeffrey Epstein was that he had been convicted of a crime and had served his sentence. According to U.S. laws and norms, that yields a clean slate.”
MIT said lawyers investigating its ties to Epstein didn’t find that Mr. Chomsky met with Epstein on its campus or received funding from him. Harvard declined to comment beyond the report it published on its Epstein ties in 2020. Mr. Nowak has said he regretted his role in fostering a connection between Epstein and Harvard. He didn’t respond to requests for comment.
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[2017] Trump’s Budget Delivers Big Oil’s Wish: Reducing Strategic Petroleum Reserve
While most observers believe the budget will not pass through Congress in its current form, budgets depict an administration’s priorities and vision for the country. Some within the oil industry have lobbied for years to drain the SPR, created in the aftermath of the 1973 oil crisis.
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Exxon, as well as the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), have long lobbied for a drawdown of SPR‘s supply, according to lobbying disclosure records reviewed by DeSmog. They supported two key bills, proposed but never passed by Congress: H.R. 4136 in 2012 and S. 1231 in 2015.
H.R. 4136, lobbied for by Exxon, API, and IPAA**, says that the Strategic Petroleum Reserve can only be tapped if more federally owned public lands and waters were leased to the oil and gas industry. S. 1231, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve Modernization Act of 2015, called for a Department of Energy study of the SPR “to determine options available for [its] continued operation,” to be completed 180 days after the bill’s passage.
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“[T]he SPR is unnecessary in the first place. Private inventories and reserves are abundant, and open markets will respond more efficiently to supply shocks than federally controlled government stockpiles,” wrote Loris, who began his career as an associate for the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. “Congress should authorize the Department of Energy to sell the entire inventory, using the revenues solely for deficit reduction.”
The U.S. Army Cyber Command told defense contractors it planned to surveil global social media use to defend the “NATO brand,” according to a 2022 webinar recording reviewed by The Intercept.
Army Info War Division Wants Social Media Surveillance to Protect “NATO Brand” (archived)
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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