One of the Trump administration’s newest immigration judges said that some women are just a “warm, wet hole.”

Melissa Isaak, an Army veteran and reservist, was hired by the Justice Department on April 8 as a temporary immigration judge. She was permitted to begin hearing cases immediately, according to an announcement from the Executive Office for Immigration Review.

FranceFuites, le service public numérique qui assume enfin la transparence totale. Vos données, partout, tout le temps.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/46530007

April 26, 2026

In recent months, many people across Latin America and the Caribbean have suddenly found themselves without healthcare, as nearly a dozen countries acquiesce to pressure from the US to end medical agreements with the Cuban government.

The US claims that the programme amounts to “forced labour” for doctors, who have most of their salaries withheld by the Cuban government.

Cuba acknowledges the retention but denies any human rights violations, saying the allegation is merely a pretext for the White House’s efforts to economically strangle the island and force regime change, which include the now months-long blockade of oil shipments.

April 26, 2026

In recent months, many people across Latin America and the Caribbean have suddenly found themselves without healthcare, as nearly a dozen countries acquiesce to pressure from the US to end medical agreements with the Cuban government.

The US claims that the programme amounts to “forced labour” for doctors, who have most of their salaries withheld by the Cuban government.

Cuba acknowledges the retention but denies any human rights violations, saying the allegation is merely a pretext for the White House’s efforts to economically strangle the island and force regime change, which include the now months-long blockade of oil shipments.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/46530007

April 26, 2026

In recent months, many people across Latin America and the Caribbean have suddenly found themselves without healthcare, as nearly a dozen countries acquiesce to pressure from the US to end medical agreements with the Cuban government.

The US claims that the programme amounts to “forced labour” for doctors, who have most of their salaries withheld by the Cuban government.

Cuba acknowledges the retention but denies any human rights violations, saying the allegation is merely a pretext for the White House’s efforts to economically strangle the island and force regime change, which include the now months-long blockade of oil shipments.

What started as a piece of 3-4 oz veg tan ended up as a shiny black card wallet. Today, I wanted learn more about two new additions to the workbench and see if I could easily integrate them into the hobby.

The first thing I wanted to figure out was how to import the physical template for the card wallet into xTool's Creative Space project dashboard. The process was pretty simple overall. Trace a heavy line around the template on a piece of white paper, take a pic of it, import it into the software, and then use the software to draw out a vector cutter template. Boom! After that, I timed myself to see how long it would take to cut out 4. Cutting a large piece to hold all 4 and running the job took 7 minutes!

The second thing I wanted to try was the airbrushing. I went with black since it's hard to mess up and just wanted to get a feel for the device. It wasn't bad at all and the finish looked great after applying neetsfoot oil to deepen the color, punching and stitching it up by hand, adding resolene to seal it, and burnishing the sides with tokonol and paraffin.

Overall, it was a great day of tinkering and learning!

Honeybees pass their math test, upending an animal intelligence debate

Credit: Dr. Scarlett Howard/Monash University

We've run the numbers and the verdict is in: Honeybees do have the ability to process numerical information. New research led by Monash University has now addressed recent international debate over whether bees are truly assessing numbers or simply reacting to visual patterns.

The study highlights the necessity of designing cognitive experiments that align with an animal's specific sensory and biological constraints. When stimuli are evaluated from a bee's-eye view, the evidence for numerical cognition is strengthened rather than diminished.

The study, published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, re-examined previous critiques of bee intelligence by accounting for the honeybee's unique sensory and perceptual constraints. By evaluating experimental stimuli from a biologically relevant perspective, researchers demonstrated that previous criticisms, which suggested bees were merely sensitive to visual cues like spatial frequency, do not hold up.

Monash University Senior Lecturer Dr. Scarlett Howard, from the Monash School of Biological Sciences, said the findings underscore the importance of avoiding human-centric biases in animal research.

"We must put the animal's perspective first when assessing their cognition or we may under or overestimate their abilities," said Dr. Howard. "We see and experience the world quite differently from animals, so we must be careful of centering human perspectives and senses when studying animal intelligence."

The research team argues that to accurately assess cognitive abilities, experiments must be designed to match the natural sensory capacities of the subject species.

Dr. Mirko Zanon, from the Center for Mind Brain Sciences at the University of Trento and first author on the study, said that ignoring how an animal perceives the world risks leading scientists to the wrong conclusions.

"There has been a debate about whether bees are really 'counting' or just reacting to visual patterns. Our results show that this criticism doesn't hold when you consider the biology of the animal," said Dr. Zanon. "When we analyze the stimuli in a way that reflects how bees actually see the world, what remains is actual sensitivity to number."

Dr. Howard added, "It can be challenging to put ourselves in the mind of a bee to imagine how they see the world, but trying to see the world through an animal's eyes is an essential part of our work. The bees always surprise us with how they move through the world, interpret our questions, and make decisions."

These words are EXACTLY, like to the letter, what I think whenever I see the AI douches go on about how LLMs are "inevitable" and we'd better "adapt".

I can't think of any world-changing technology in literally all of human history that required people to be begged, cajoled, bribed, and/or forced into using it. Typically such technology, whether it's the plough, or eyeglasses, or the printing press, or the automobile or whatever had the opposite problem: the early tech was too labour-intensive to make or too costly or whatever to actually be able to get into the hands of everybody who was clamouring to use it.

But AI, the "unstoppable technology" has to be forced on people, often by threat, to the point that revenue from selling it it grossly under the costs of supplying it and people still aren't really using it, a few douchey nerds aside.

I think that's very sus.

Faint earth tremor caused by natural phenomena

The US has this problem too

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8330182

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/44825

military contractor Palantir is helping the IRS analyze dozens of different data sets on Americans to investigate a broad range of financial crimes, according to records shared with The Intercept.

Since 2018, the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation division has used Palantir’s Lead and Case Analytics platform to aggregate and analyze a sprawling list of sensitive federal databases and data sets.

Public records detailing Palantir’s IRS contract, obtained by the nonprofit watchdog group American Oversight and shared exclusively with The Intercept, reveal the immense volume of data plugged into the military contractor’s software. The LCA uses both Palantir’s Gotham and Foundry applications to facilitate “analysis of massive-scale data to find the needle in the hay stack,” the contract paperwork says.

Documents indicate the IRS has paid Palantir over $130 million for these services to date.

Palantir’s LCA is ostensibly directed toward cracking down on fraud, money laundering, and other financial crimes. According to a 2024 agency privacy impact assessment, IRS “Special agents and investigative analysts … utilize the platform to find, analyze, and visualize connections between disparate sets of data to generate leads, identify schemes, uncover tax fraud, and conduct money laundering and forfeiture investigative activities.”

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Trump Wants to Put You in a Massive, Secret Government Database](https://theintercept.com/2026/03/17/government-surveillance-centralized-database-privacy/)

The IRS use of the software, launched under Trump’s first term and expanded under Biden, is now in the hands of an IRS Criminal Investigations office that has drastically scaled back its pursuit of tax cheats and pivoted, under Trump’s direction, toward investigating “left-leaning groups,” the Wall Street Journal reported in October.

“The real concern is the consolidation of vast amounts of sensitive personal data into a single system with minimal transparency — especially one built and operated by a contractor like Palantir, whose business model is premised on integrating data and expanding surveillance capabilities,” American Oversight director Chioma Chukwu said in a statement to The Intercept. “Its platforms have been used in deeply troubling contexts, from immigration enforcement to predictive policing, with persistent concerns about overreach, bias, and weak oversight.”

Palantir did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the IRS.

“The real concern is the consolidation of vast amounts of sensitive personal data into a single system with minimal transparency — especially one built and operated by a contractor like Palantir.”

The contract documents reviewed by The Intercept reveal that these “disparate sets of data” are vast. Palantir’s LCA allows the IRS to quickly search and visualize “connections from millions of records with thousands of links” between databases maintained by the IRS and other federal agencies. According to the contract documents, this data includes individual tax form and tax returns as well as Affordable Care Act data, bank statements, and transactions, and “all available” data compiled by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

Its view apparently extends to cryptocurrencies including bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Ripple. “The application would sit on top of a singular repository of identified wallets from seized servers utilizing dark web data obtained from exchangers such as Coinbase,” the documents note.

The program places an emphasis on mapping social relationships between the targets of an investigation. That includes analyzing a “network of people and the relationships and communications between them,” such as “calls, texts, [and] emails events.” The use of “IP address analysis” within LCA allows the IRS to “Identify suspects more easily” and “Establish (new) relationships among actors.”

These investigative functions are continuously updated, the materials say, through ongoing close work between Palantir engineers and IRS personnel.

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Palantir Will No Longer Profit Off of New Yorkers’ Health Data](https://theintercept.com/2026/03/24/palantir-new-york-city-hospitals-contract/)

The intermingling of sensitive data on millions of Americans comes at a time of increased global skepticism and opposition toward Palantir, which, despite its military-intelligence origins, has a thriving business with civilian agencies like the IRS. The use of Palantir software at the U.K.’s National Health Service, for example, has created an ongoing political controversy across Britain, while a similar contract with the New York City public hospital network was recently canceled following public protest.

The contract is also active at a time when IRS Criminal Investigations has been coopted to aid in the broader Trump administration’s aggressive agenda. In July, ProPublica reported that the agency was working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to provide “on demand” data to accelerate deportations. Last year, the New York Times reported that Palantir, founded by Trump ally Peter Thiel, was central to an administration effort to increase data-sharing across federal agencies.

“The question isn’t just what it can do — it’s who it will be used against.”

The company’s right-wing politics and eagerness to facilitate U.S. and Israeli military aggression abroad, NSA global surveillance, and ICE deportations has also made many weary of its access to incredibly sensitive personal data. A recent post on the company’s Palantir’s X account summarizing a book by CEO Alex Karp triggered an immediate backlash from those unnerved by the manifesto’s fascistic bent. The bullet points extolled the virtue of arms manufacturing, argued the Axis powers were unfairly punished after World War II, called for a reinstatement of the draft, condemned cultural pluralism, and claimed that wealthy elites are unfairly persecuted.

“When the government can map relationships, track behavior, and generate investigative leads across data sets at this scale, the question isn’t just what it can do — it’s who it will be used against,” Chukwu said. “Entrusting that infrastructure to a company known for opaque, security-state deployments only heightens those risks.”

The post Palantir Is Helping Trump’s IRS Conduct “Massive-Scale” Data Mining appeared first on The Intercept.

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