UnderpantsWeevil

It's not a topic people here care to discuss much, wary of feeding Russian propaganda.

But the latest National Police Service report recorded more than 600 assaults on recruitment officers to date and warned that the aggression has become "increasingly threatening".

The first big alert came in April when several recruiters were stabbed, one fatally. Then this month in Lviv, some 200 protesters surrounded officers attempting to detain a suspected draft dodger and smashed and overturned their car.

The riot made headlines as President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned violence against serving soldiers.

China, Russia and, to a lesser extent, Iran have sought to use state media outlets to turn the controversy over data centers in the United States into “a domestic fracture point,” according to a new analysis by Alethea, a threat intelligence company, which identified scores of articles and posts on social media this year.

These campaigns, whose impact on public opinion remains to be seen, have raised alarms in Washington, where A.I. is seen as a top issue heading into this year’s midterm elections.

The foreign efforts appear intended to stoke the debate over data centers that has united political figures across the political spectrum — from Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a progressive, to Stephen K. Bannon, the erstwhile adviser to President Trump.

“Foreign actors aren’t manufacturing American debates over the future of A.I., they are exploiting them,” said Jessica Brandt, a former official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence who tracked foreign influence efforts during the Biden administration.

The goal, she added, is to “deepen our divisions in order to dent our appeal and weaken us from within.”

Republicans and business lobbying groups have seized on the role of China, in particular, claiming that the country’s Communist Party wants to undercut American leadership in a field that the Chinese, too, hope to dominate. They argue that China’s propaganda is an effort to slow down American development.

https://archive.is/2026.07.18-105422/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/17/world/europe/ukraine-fedorov-defense-minister.html

Mr. Zelensky’s dismissal of Mr. Fedorov, 35, sidelined a potential political rival who had seized the spotlight. The timing of his ouster is awkward, just as drone warfare has helped tilt the scales in Ukraine’s favor. The move also indicates Mr. Zelensky’s misgivings about Mr. Fedorov’s vision of drones as nearly the entirety of the country’s future in fighting the war.

The firing of Mr. Fedorov came after he had blocked purchases of artillery ammunition in favor of drones. The commander of Ukraine’s military, Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, had insisted that the ammunition was still needed in the brutal trench fighting in the country’s east.

“The popularity of drones is the problem” that led to Mr. Fedorov’s ousting, said Mykola Davydiuk, a member of Parliament in the opposition Holos party.

Mr. Fedorov had become “a problem and a danger” for Mr. Zelensky, Mr. Davydiuk said, by championing a purely technological overhaul of Ukraine’s military that was widely popular but was opposed by the top general actually fighting the war.

Subtle as a heart attack

Sharma used to be president of Microsoft’s CoreAI product, and I guess she still is at heart. She’ll be joined by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and Stanford economics professor Charles I. Jones (who is, notably, on leave to work at Anthropic) . Other Federal Reserve task forces will center around communications, balance sheet policy, data, and inflation frameworks.

top row: John Edwards, Katie Hill, Roy Moore, Anthony Weiner, Eric Greitens

bottom row: Elliot Spitzer, Al Franken, Andrew Cuomo, Eric Swallwell, Mark Sanford, Tony Gonzalez, Beavis

sure are a lot of people in politics who can't keep their pants on

Up on the dam, almost everything that looks like a problem becomes an advantage.

The plant sits above the fog line, in thin, clear air that lets far more sunlight through.

The higher you go, the stronger and cleaner the sunlight becomes.

Cold actually helps, because solar panels work more efficiently when they are not baking in heat.

And then there is the snow, which acts like a giant mirror, bouncing extra light up onto the panels from below.

Scientists call it the albedo effect, and it can lift a mountain plant’s output well beyond anything possible in the valley.

A test site at a similar height recorded yearly output far above a typical Swiss plant.

Okay guys, one more thing, this summer when you're being inundated with all this American bicentennial Fourth Of July brouhaha, don't forget what you're celebrating, and that's the fact that a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic, white males didn't want to pay their taxes.