Lemdro.id

Photograph shows conservative activist handing slip to Darin McCann and Marlene Brady holding a similar paper

Controversy has engulfed Wyoming’s state legislature after a conservative activist was photographed handing checks to Republican lawmakers on the state house floor, in an incident that has highlighted intra-conservative divisions and the role of money in the Cowboy state’s politics.

The political storm started on 9 February, when Karlee Provenza, a Democratic lawmaker, took a photo showing Rebecca Bextel, a conservative activist and committeewoman for the Teton county Republican party, handing a check to Darin McCann, a Republican representative, on the legislative floor. Marlene Brady, another Republican representative, stands in the photo’s background, a similar piece of paper pinched between her fingers.

“You have a person from the richest county in the country coming down to Cheyenne to hand out checks on the house floor,” Provenza said. “I have never seen something so egregious.”

Their termination on Wednesday, confirmed by the BBC's media partner CBS News, was announced shortly after FBI director Kash Patel told Reuters that federal agents subpoenaed his phone records when he was a private citizen during the documents probe.

Susie Wiles, now White House chief of staff, also had her phone records subpoenaed when she was a private citizen as part of the investigation.

Patel did not offer any evidence of wrongdoing by the FBI staffers who were fired.

After Trump left the White House in 2021, Special Counsel Jack Smith led two federal investigations into now-President Trump. One case was focused on whether Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election results. The other involved classified documents Trump brought back to his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida and his efforts to obstruct the US Department of Justice from later retrieving them

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A new artificial intelligence (AI) agent could equip Europe to better defend itself against the barrage of Russian disinformation attacks.

Cipher is Canadian-developed AI software that has proven to accurately and quickly detect Russian disinformation targeting Canadian networks, on both the far right and the far left of the political spectrum.

Now that Cipher has passed the testing stage, the researchers are training the AI agent to distinguish those same narratives in the Russian language.

The researchers hope it can be rolled out in Europe for those at the forefront of efforts to combat Russian operations that sow distrust in Western democracies and institutions.

Marcus Kolga, who runs the foreign disinformation monitoring platform DisinfoWatch in Canada, tested Cipher to see how well it stood up to his 20 years of experience reporting on foreign interference.

"What would usually take, for an analysis piece, maybe half a day to a day, was really being crunched down to a few hours, and (it) was scarily accurate," says Kolga, who tested out Cipher in its early stages and still uses the AI agent to expedite his work.

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The tool uncovered persistent efforts to deliberately sway Canadian public opinion on Ukraine with the goal of eroding the support Kyiv receives from one of its staunchest allies.

Brian McQuinn, an associate professor in international studies at the University of Regina, is one of the project leads. He has been researching the role of social media in armed conflict.

McQuinn worked with Kolga on the 2023 report The Enemy of My Enemy, which detailed how Russia uses information operations to undermine Canadian support for Ukraine amid the Russian invasion.

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The Cipher project began three years ago under the AI safety research program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). McQuinn worked with project co-lead Matthew Taylor, an associate professor in computing science at the University of Alberta, who directed a five-person team of engineers in creating the sophisticated software.

Beyond mapping out where Russian disinformation is spreading online, with reports processed down to the last 24 hours, Cipher also shows trending themes.

This type of analysis provides experts with more detail on how Russian operations are shifting over any period of time.

"We are able to track and show on a day-to-day basis ... where are the Russian networks investing their limited resources (and) what themes they are targeting day in, day out, and how they are changing over the weeks and over the months," says McQuinn.

"It really shows you the extent to which they are responding to events almost in real time."

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Deceptive narratives are often disseminated by Russian state-controlled outlets such as RT and Sputnik, then amplified by social media influencers. From there, they spread across Canadian social networks, occasionally making their way into mainstream news coverage.

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The next challenge for the Cipher team is fine-tuning it to more accurately predict how Russian disinformation will spin the narrative around any expected events. Experts like Kolga can then get ahead of the attacks to suppress how far they could spread.

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Give your mum jokes!

The Department of Transportation is proposing bringing a network of bike lanes to Portage Park

https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/complete-streets-chicago/home/featured-projects-and-innovations/projects0/PortageParkNeighborhoodBikeNetwork.html

They are holding a community meeting to discuss the bike lane network at 6 p.m. March 5 at the Portage Park Senior Center, 4001 N. Long Avenue.

Attendees are encouraged to register here

Posting things online isn't enough. Pro-car people actually show up. We need supporters of bike lanes to also show up.

Canada is donating an additional $2 billion of military equipment, including more than 400 armoured vehicles, to Ukraine as the embattled Eastern European country's war with Russia rolls into its fifth year.

Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the assistance on Tuesday at the same time as Global Affairs Canada announced additional sanctions on individuals and companies that are helping fuel Moscow's war effort, including Russian firms that specialize in artificial intelligence, drone production and individual tankers that smuggle Russian oil to market.

The prime minister also announced a three-year extension of Operation Unifier, the Canadian military training mission that has — since 2015 — helped instruct an estimated 47,000 Ukrainian soldiers.

"We're in it for the long haul," Carney said on his way into cabinet Tuesday on Parliament Hill. "Russia is failing. The sooner they come to the table and actually participate in peace negotiations, the better it will be."

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Speaking to journalists following the meeting, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia has not achieved its objectives in his country and that the next trilateral meeting aimed at getting a ceasefire — involving negotiators from Ukraine, Russia and the U.S. — would happen within a week or 10 days.

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Carney, who also participated in the coalition meeting, echoed Zelenskyy's sentiment.

"Russia is failing to achieve all of its objectives, four years into this conflict, 12 years if you include its annexation — its illegal annexation — of Crimea," Carney said.

"Four years on, Russia is failing militarily, strategically and economically."

Part of the enhanced sanctions package, announced Tuesday, targeted 100 ships that are part of Russia's "shadow fleet" of tankers.

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A new report revealed that Israeli soldiers fired over 900 bullets at a convoy of Palestinian aid workers near Rafah in March 2025, killing 15 medics. Investigators say the evidence reveals the cover-up of a war crime.

with a side of joint

+2 to all stats in the presence of friend

cross-posted from: https://lemmus.org/post/20432276

California Attorney General Rob Bonta last night filed a request for a preliminary injunction in California’s existing case against Amazon for price fixing. Attorney General Bonta’s 2022 lawsuit alleged that the company stifled competition and caused increased prices across California through its anticompetitive policies in order to avoid competing on price with other retailers. New evidence paints a clearer and more shocking picture. The motion for a preliminary injunction comes after a robust discovery process where California uncovered evidence of countless interactions in which Amazon, vendors, and Amazon’s competitors agree to increase and fix the prices of products on other retail websites to bolster Amazon’s profits. Time and again, across years and product categories, Amazon has reached out to its vendors and instructed them to increase retail prices on competitors’ websites, threatening dire consequences if vendors do not comply. Vendors, bullied by Amazon’s overwhelming bargaining leverage and fearing punishment, comply — agreeing to raise prices on competitors’ websites (often with the awareness and cooperation of the competing retailer), or to remove products from competing websites altogether. Amazon’s goal is to insulate itself from price competition by preventing lower retail prices in the market at the expense of American consumers who are already struggling with a crisis of affordability.

I just updated to Firefox 148. Very happy to see the "AI kill switch" in the settings. One thing that bothers me, though, is the new "Do you want to see the weather for your location?". And even more bothering are the answer alternatives:

• "Not now"
• "Yes"

well how about adding a "No, never"?

Does anyone know which settings to modify to eliminate this weather stuff altogether? Cheers!

Edit: Searching for "weath" in about:config brings up a set of options, many of which can be set to false. But I'm happy if anyone here has extra tips or advice.

Go play for an Amerikkkan team if you support that fascist. You are no longer welcome.

The company compiled information from franchisees and guests on how to measure friendliness, resulting in the fast food chain training its AI system to recognize certain words and phrases, such as “welcome to Burger King,” “please,” and “thank you.” Managers can then ask the AI assistant how their location is performing on friendliness.