pelespirit

Seattle Public Library intercepts Boston readers after Super Bowl bet

The Boston Public Library unwisely entered into a wager with the Seattle Public Library ahead of the big game Sunday. The stakes: Loser hosts a list of books curated by the winner, directed at the losing region's readers.

The FBI has formally notified Minnesota's state criminal investigation agency that it will not be providing any evidence or information connected to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent's fatal shooting of Alex Pretti, according to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA).

In response to the FBI's refusal to share evidence in Pretti's case, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty posted on X: "The HCAO and BCA remain committed to investigating the Pretti, Good, and Sosa-Celis shootings here in Minneapolis."

BCA is asking for anyone with information about the shooting of Alex Pretti, Renee Good, or Julio Sosa-Celis to come forward and contact them at 651-793-7000.

Lawmakers and the White House offered no signs of compromise Sunday in their battle over oversight of federal immigration officers that has led to a pause in funding for the Department of Homeland Security.

A partial government shutdown began Saturday after congressional Democrats and President Donald Trump’s team failed to reach a deal on legislation to fund the department through September. Democrats are demanding changes to how immigration operations are conducted after the fatal shootings of U.S. citizens Alex Pretti and Renee Good by federal officers in Minneapolis last month.

Congress is on recess until Feb. 23, and both sides appear dug into their positions. The impasse affects agencies such as the Transportation Security Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, U.S. Coast Guard, the Secret Service, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Tribal nations are quickly issuing new tribal citizenship cards to their members, especially to those who live away from the tribe’s lands. It is important to note the majority of Indigenous Americans now live away from their traditional areas, many in urban centers.

But just issuing the cards is proving to be not enough, as the Miles case shows. Tribal leaders are now also taking actions to ban ICE from entering tribal property. As independent sovereign nations, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly given the tribes the right to govern various aspects of tribal life, including jurisdictional matters.

Several other tribes are following suit; plus, notifying ICE their agents must have a search warrant signed by a judge to enter any tribal property.

The Trump administration complied last week with a judge who ordered the unfreezing the project’s federal funding. And on Monday, Trump carved out an offramp for himself to still maintain some control on the project.

“Please let this statement represent the fact that, under no circumstances, will the Federal Government be responsible for ANY COST OVERRUNS – NOT ONE DOLLAR!” Trump wrote, in a confusing message that suggested measures would be put in place to stop that happening.

Buck’s body made antibodies against several types of the virus after drinking the beer and he suffered no ill effects, he and his brother Andrew Buck reported December 17 at the data sharing platform Zenodo.org, along with colleagues from NIH and Vilnius University in Lithuania. Andrew and other family members have also consumed the beer with no ill effects, he says. The Buck brothers posted a method for making vaccine beer December 17 at Zenodo.org. Chris Buck announced both publications in his blog Viruses Must Die on the online publishing platform Substack, but neither has been peer-reviewed by other scientists.

A second ethics committee at the NIH objected to Buck posting the manuscripts to the preprint server bioRxiv.org because of the self-experiment. Buck wrote a rebuttal to the committee’s comments but was loathe to wait for its blessing before sharing the data. “The bureaucracy is inhibiting the science, and that’s unacceptable to me,” he says. “One week of people dying from not knowing about this is not trivial.”

None of the big AI labs are your friends so don’t get too excited, but the Pentagon is, according to an anonymously sourced Axios story, threatening to quit using Anthropic AI tools because of the company’s “insistence on maintaining some limitations on how the military uses its models.”

The Pentagon source who spoke to Axios apparently said that of all the AI companies it deals with, Anthropic is the most “ideological.”

Keep in mind that Anthropic created Claude and Claude Code, and an unsettling pattern has begun where it releases a tweak for its vibe-coding systems, and Wall Street obediently sells stock in whatever kind of business its latest tools are trying to replace. This is a company that clearly wants to conquer the world, so it might not be a good idea to take any comfort in the many stories about how the people who work there are kinda uncomfortable with what conquering the world entails.

Donald Trump’s most unbridled critics at this weekend’s Munich Security Conference have not been Europeans but Americans – and not just Democrats.

A few Republicans, out of earshot of the US president’s favoured Fox News, have had the courage to challenge Trump’s diet of tariffs and unpredictability.

The criticism ends what little remained of the tradition that the US delegation to the conference limits criticism of the commander in chief abroad.

The United States military killed three more people on Friday in their 39th boat attack in six months, according to a tracker maintained by the New York Times. All told, the strikes by US forces have killed at least 133 people in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean.

President Donald Trump’s administration has maintained, often without evidence, that they are targeting the boats as an anti-drug smuggling measure. Though, even if people on these boats were confirmed to be transporting drugs, a broad array of legal specialists have held that the “strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings” because the military “cannot deliberately target civilians who do not pose an imminent threat of violence, even if they are suspected of engaging in criminal acts,” the Times reported on Saturday.

An 11-second video of the Friday strike, posted by US Southern Command, shows what appears to be a missile hitting a boat in open waters, with a caption claiming without further evidence that the three people killed were “narco-terrorists.”

Democrats had made a number of demands to restrain the government's immigration crackdown in exchange for their support of the funding measure but could not reach an agreement with the GOP.

After the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by immigration officers last month in Minneapolis, Democrats wanted a "masks off, body cameras on" policy for federal agents, new use-of-force standards, better identification of DHS officers and a requirement for judicial warrants before entering private property. They also pushed for an end to detaining people without verifying they aren't U.S. citizens first and to conducting searches based on a person's race, language, accent or job.

Without funding, some DHS functions will cease, although the impact may not be more widely felt unless the shutdown continues well beyond the Presidents Day holiday weekend. DHS' website says that during a funding lapse, the department "may only continue 'exempt' activities such as law enforcement and maritime protection."

There are honey cured meats and sugar seems to do the same thing as salt. I don't think I've seen anyone say sugar pickles. Anyone know? Yes, I googled it.

I couldn't find the exact pic, but I found the video

https://www.nbcnews.com/now/video/rep-jayapal-demands-bondi-apologize-to-epstein-survivors-in-hearing-room-257515077820