TIK TOK ON THE CLOCK
The winds of Washington are blowing icy cold for TikTok. A federal appeals court panel handed down a ruling that could send the app packing or at least force it into a kind of corporate divorce...
The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has declared the law threatening TikTok’s existence to be totally constitutional, leaving the platform to fight for its digital life. In short, TikTok has until mid-January to break ties with its Beijing-based parent, ByteDance, or risk an outright ban in the United States.
TikTok responded with the following statement:
“The Supreme Court has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech, and we expect they will do just that on this important constitutional issue. Unfortunately, the TikTok ban was conceived and pushed through based upon inaccurate, flawed and hypothetical information, resulting in outright censorship of the American people. The TikTok ban, unless stopped, will silence the voices of over 170 million Americans here in the US and around the world on January 19th, 2025”.
TikTok played the First Amendment card, arguing that banning the platform would stomp on Americans’ free speech rights. But the court wasn’t having it, throwing in a little verbal aikido about protecting actual freedom.
“The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States,” the court wrote, presumably while straightening its tie in a metaphorical mirror. “Here the Government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States.”
Christina Maas Reclaim The Net
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said he was appointing former PayPal (PYPL.O), Chief Operating Officer David Sacks as his "White House A.I. & Crypto Czar", another step towards overhauling U.S. policy.
"He will work on a legal framework so the Crypto industry has the clarity it has been asking for, and can thrive in the U.S.", Trump said in a post on his social-media site Truth Social, without saying whether "czar" was an official title.
The crypto czar and other officials in Trump's incoming administration such as the chairs of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission are expected to reshape U.S. policy on digital currency along with a newly created crypto advisory council.
Trump's tech backers generally want to see minimal regulation around artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, saying Washington would throttle growing innovative sectors with excessive rules.
Reuters
The assets of billionaires around the world more than doubled over the past decade. Between 2015-24, the total wealth of billionaires increased by 121%, from $6.3 trillion to $14 trillion. Meanwhile, the MSCI AC World Index of global equities, which measures the performance of more than 3,000 stocks from both developed and emerging markets, rose by 73%.
The planet's total gross domestic product is about $105.4 trillion, with a population of just over 8 billion, underscoring the extreme concentration of wealth among the very richest people. The number of billionaires rose from 1,757 to 2,682 over the past decade, while the wealthiest people in the world boasted significant gains over just the past year. Billionaires' wealth jumped by about 17% in 2024, with the accumulation of wealth among the richest people in the U.S. offsetting a decline in China.
U.S. billionaires amassed wealth gains that were 27.6% higher than the previous year, accumulating a total of $5.8 trillion—more than 40% of international billionaire wealth. The tax cuts pushed through by President-elect Donald Trump and the Republican Party in 2017 are still in effect in the U.S. Tax policy analysts have found that the law was skewed to the rich, with households in the top 1% of incomes expecting to receive an average tax cut of more than $60,000 in 2025 compared to an average tax cut of less than $500 for people in the bottom 60%.
The top 12 U.S. billionaires now control $2 trillion. The wealth of the four richest people in the U.S.—Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—has hit $1 trillion.
JULIA CONLEY Common Dreams
"The oligarchic dozen is richer than ever, and they are endowed with extreme material power that can be used to pursue narrow political interests at the expense of democratic majorities", according to the author of a new analysis from Inequality.org, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).
The $2 trillion number is also twice the amount of wealth that the top 12 US billionaires held in 2020, according to researchers at IPS, a progressive organization.The full list of 12 billionaires includes Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, Steve Ballmer, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jim Walton, Rob Walton, and Jensen Huang.
"This is an unsettling new milestone for wealth concentration in the United States. The oligarchic dozen is richer than ever", wrote the author of the analysis, Omar Ocampo, a researcher at IPS.
New to the "oligarchic dozen" is Jensen Huang, the co-founder and CEO of the tech company Nvidia. Nvidia, which became the most valuable publicly traded company this year, has seen its profits jump thanks to the world's ravenous appetite for the artificial intelligence chips that the firm produces. According to the analysis, Huang's personal wealth "has skyrocketed from $4.7 billion in 2020 to $122.4 billion—a mind-boggling 2,504 percent increase—over the last four years."
Each of the billionaires on the list "owns or is a controlling shareholder of a business that is investing billions of dollars in artificial intelligence", according to Ocampo, which raises concerns about their respective carbon footprints. Fueling AI is energy intensive, and AI data centers in the U.S. are largely powered by fossil fuels, meaning their proliferation poses a threat to the environment and a transition to a green economy.
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who respectively own X and The Washington Post, "have both purchased large media platforms, which has granted them the ability to set the terms of public debate with the hopes of influencing public opinion in their favor."
Musk specifically has established himself as a major power broker within the GOP. The billionaire spent hundreds of millions helping to re-elect Donald Trump and is now poised to play a major role in the president-elect's administration, helping oversee a new advisory committee tasked with slashing government spending.
Trump had tapped an "unprecedented" total of seven reported billionaires for key positions in his administration, according to a separate piece of analysis by Inequality.org.
"We see the effects of this growing concentration of wealth and economic inequality everywhere—plutocratic influence on our politics, wealth transfers from the bottom to the top, and the acceleration of climate breakdown", Ocampo wrote.
ELOISE GOLDSMITH Common Dreams
The report, ‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza, documents how, during its military offensive launched in the wake of the deadly Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on 7 October 2023, Israel has unleashed hell and destruction on Palestinians in Gaza brazenly, continuously and with total impunity.
“Amnesty International’s report demonstrates that Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza. These acts include killings, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction. Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them”, said Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International, “our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now".
“States that continue to transfer arms to Israel at this time must know they are at risk of becoming complicit in genocide. All states with influence over Israel, particularly key arms suppliers like the USA and Germany, but also other EU member states, the UK and others, must act now to bring Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza to an immediate end”.
Amnesty
Syrian rebels pressed their lightning advance. Since the rebels' sweep into Aleppo a week ago, government defences have crumbled across the country at dizzying speed as insurgents seized a string of major cities and rose up in places where the rebellion had long seemed over.
Besides capturing Aleppo in the north, Hama in the centre and Deir al-Zor in the east, rebels said they have taken southern Quneitra, Deraa and Suweida and advanced to within 50 km (30 miles) of the capital. Government defences were focused on Homs, with state television and Syrian military sources reporting massive air strikes on rebel positions and a wave of reinforcements arriving to dig in around the city.
Meanwhile the rebels extended their control to almost the entire southwest and said they had captured Sanamayn on the main highway from Damascus to Jordan. The Syrian military said it was repositioning, without acknowledging territorial losses. The pace of events has stunned Arab capitals and raised fears of a fresh wave of regional instability, with Qatar saying it threatened Syria's territorial integrity.
Syria's civil war, which erupted in 2011 as an uprising against Assad's rule, dragged in big outside powers, created space for jihadist militants to plot attacks around the world and sent millions of refugees into neighbouring states. The Syrian military is in a difficult situation, unable to halt rebel gains and forced into retreat.
Suleiman Al-Khalidi Timour Azhari Reuteurs
The swift gains by the fighting group Hayat Tahrir ash-Sham, also known as HTS, began with attacks against government forces in northwestern Syria. “HTS is putting a huge military effort into these advances,” says Wassim Nasr, a senior researcher who specializes in jihadist groups in the Middle East and North Africa at the Soufan Center, a global risk and security consultancy. “They are using their best equipped units and advanced drone capabilities to retake ghost villages lost by the rebels years ago, after the push by Shia militias affiliated with Iran”.
Millions have been displaced in years of fighting across Syria, with many fleeing to Turkey or to relatively stable rebel-controlled areas. Many abandoned their hometowns, which were occupied by government militias and Iranian proxies, like Hezbollah. But with Israel having eviscerated Hezbollah’s leadership, only a shell remained to hold off the rebels. “Kids who grew up as displaced refugees are now returning home as fighters,” Nasr tells Rolling Stone.
Without immediate intervention from its foreign backers, the Syrian government could fall to a coalition of anti-regime rebels, led by a hardline Sunni militant. That militant’s name is Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, and he is called a terrorist by the United States and others. But experts, including those who have met him, paint a more complex portrait: that of a ruthlessly pragmatic, astute politician who has renounced “global jihad” — but who has every intention of uniting Syria under his interpretation of sharia law.
“We are in an absolutely pivotal moment. This is a global turning point”, says Jennifer Cafarella, the director of research initiatives at the Institute for the Study of War, and an expert in the Syrian conflict. “Assad’s power is once more crumbling. Something will fill that void, and at the moment it looks like HTS”. HTS has been designated a terror group by the United States since 2018, as it has its origins in the same jihadist group once aligned with Al Qaeda that became the Islamic State.
MAC WILLIAM BISHOP Rolling Stone
A truly seismic change in the Middle East appears to be happening very fast. At its heart is a devil’s bargain – Turkey and the Gulf States accept the annihilation of the Palestinian nation and creation of a Greater Israel, in return for the annihilation of the Shia minorities of Syria and Lebanon and the imposition of Salafism across the Eastern Arab world.
This also spells the end for Lebanon and Syria’s Christian communities, as witness the tearing down of all Christmas decorations, the smashing of all alcohol and the forced imposition of the veil on women in Aleppo now.
The Syrian government’s Syrian Arab Army has simply evaporated in Aleppo and Hama. The Russians now have either to massively reinforce their Syrian bases with ground troops or to evacuate them. Faced with the exigencies of Ukraine, they may do the latter, and it is reported that the Russian navy has already set sail from Tartus. If the situation does not stabilise, Damascus could be besieged and ISIS back on the hills above the Bekaa valley within a week, given the speed of their advance and the short distances involved.
It is no coincidence that the attack on Syria started the day of the Lebanon/Israel ceasefire. The jihadist forces do not want to be seen to be fighting alongside Israel, even though they are fighting forces which have been relentlessly bombed by Israel, and in the case of Hezbollah are exhausted from fighting Israel. What this all potentially amounts to is the end of pluralism in the Levant and its replacement by supremacism. An ethno-supremacist Greater Israel and a religio-supremacist Salafist Greater Syria.
Craig Murray
Romania's Constitutional Court has annulled the results of the first round of the country's presidential election, requiring the process to be rerun. The unprecedented decision followed the declassification of intelligence documents by President Klaus Iohannis which alleged that Russia orchestrated a campaign to promote far-right candidate Călin Georgescu on platforms such as TikTok and Telegram.
The court said in a statement that it "annuls the entire electoral process regarding the election of the president of Romania.nThe government will establish a new date for the election... as well as a new calendar program for carrying out the necessary actions"..
Michael D. Carroll Lottie McGrath Newsweek
The sabotaging of the impeachment vote will add to uncertainty over Yoon’s future less than three years into his five-year single term. His declaration of martial law, which lasted six hours before it was overturned by MPs, has drawn widespread condemnation across the South Korean political spectrum and triggered mass protests in Seoul and other cities. Demonstrators booed, and some wept in frustration, as the ruling party lawmakers walked out of the chamber today.
Given their failure to start the legislative and legal process that could have led to the end of Yoon’s presidency, opposition parties could introduce a second impeachment motion. There is speculation that PPP lawmakers wanted to avoid the drama of impeachment – a move that could hand the political advantage to the main opposition Democratic party when the country elects a new president – and try instead to arrange a more orderly exit.
Justin McKerry The Guardian
Dozens of transgender activists and their allies demonstrated at the U.S. Capitol, staging a sit-in inside a public restroom in defiance of a new policy enacted by Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson to force a bill to formally ban transgender people from using restrooms that correspond with their gender inside the Capitol building, Nancy Mace's direct attack on incoming Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Delaware), who is set to be the first openly trans lawmaker to serve in Congress.
McBride opposed the measure and the moves by Johnson, but chose not to focus on the issue, stating that she viewed the transphobic actions as a distraction. The act of civil disobedience was organized by the Gender Liberation Movement (GLM) and took place in a restroom near Johnson’s office. Protesters, including transgender advocate Chelsea Manning, directed their action not only at Republicans, but also Democrats, condemning the party for not doing enough to defend McBride’s rights.
“Speaker Johnson, Nancy Mace, our genders are no debate!” one chant from the demonstrators stated. “Democrats, grow a spine, trans lives are on the line!” another chant asserted.
Chris Walker , TRUTHOUT
Almost one-third of species around the world would be at risk of extinction by the end of the century if we continue to churn out greenhouse gases, according to a new study.n The study found that if global temperatures rise to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above the pre-industrial average temperature, exceeding the target of the Paris Agreement, extinctions would rapidly accelerate — especially for amphibians; species in mountain, island and freshwater ecosystems; and species in South America, Australia and New Zealand.
Earth has already warmed about 1.8 F (1 C) since the Industrial Revolution. Global assessments have predicted rising extinction risks for over a million species, but scientists have not clearly understood how exactly this growing risk is linked to climate change. The new study analyzed over 30 years of biodiversity and climate change research, encompassing over 450 studies of most known species.
Olivia Ferrari LiveScience
Rising temperatures will lead to an increasing number of extinctions, with the highest emission scenario leading to extinction of nearly a third of the Earth’s species, especially those from particular vulnerable taxa or regions.
MARK C. URBAN SCIENCE
Two men in black suits and bowler hats pose with a gravity-defying mound of bison skulls. The 19th-Century image is disturbing – thousands upon thousands of skulls piled in neat rows, towering towards the sky. But beneath the macabre first impression, the photo holds a darker secret still. These skulls aren't just the product of overzealous hunting in the US – and those men aren't hunters, either. The skulls, experts say, are the evidence of an organised, carefully calculated campaign to eradicate the bison, deprive Native Americans of a vital resource, and drive the few communities that survived onto small reservations where they could be controlled by the newly arrived white settlers.
"This image is an example of colonial celebration of destruction", says Tasha Hubbard, a Cree filmmaker who is an associate professor at the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta in Canada. Hubbard describes the extermination of the bison as a "strategic" part of colonial expansion. The eradication of the animal "was seen as the taming of the West, of domesticating this wild space that was needed in order for expansion of settlement".
The colonial mass slaughter of bison dealt a lasting blow to tribes that relied on the animal for sustenance. In the aftermath, nations reliant on bison fared measurably, permanently worse than nations that were never bison-reliant, for example suffering from higher child mortality than those other nations, according to a comparative study. The study concludes that the loss set the bison nations on a fundamentally different trajectory that continues to this day.
Tesla plans to deploy around 1,000 Optimus robots on its factory floors by the end of 2025, which should lead to an increase in the available compute resources for the company's bespoke robot. This resource redirection "will drive an acceleration in the capabilities of Optimus, and ultimately lead to increased production, thereby helping drive costs down".
Optimus leverages a neural network-trained, AI-equipped brain that allows it to interact with the external elements. The bipedal robot is currently capable of performing menial, labor-intensive tasks, with significant AI capabilities in the pipeline. Tesla's humanoid robot is able to leverage its bespoke neural network to map and navigate obstacles as well as track objects. Despite its heft, Optimus is equipped with sensitive tactile finger sensors that allow the bipedal robot to pick up an egg with finesse.
Researchers discovered a new procedure for creating quantum links between particles, and it could be used for building quantum communication networks in the future.
This new method came as a surprise. Mario Krenn at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Germany originally wanted to use a physics discovery algorithm called PyTheus, which he and his colleagues developed, to reinvent an experimental procedure…
A pair of satellites launched by the European Space Agency will create the first artificial solar eclipses, allowing scientists to study the sun’s outer atmosphere for longer periods over the next two years as the spacecraft duo flies hundreds of feet apart in Earth’s orbit.
To create the artificial solar eclipses, the Proba-3 satellites will need to maintain a specific position within one millimeter, or a distance equivalent to the thickness of a fingernail, according to the ESA. The satellites—less than 5 feet wide—rely on GPS, star trackers, lasers and radio links to fly autonomously.
The artificial solar eclipses created by the Proba-3 satellites will not be visible from Earth, according to the ESA. Images from the eclipses, which will be created up to twice a week starting in March 2025, will be released by the agency, however.
Ty Roush Forbes
A newly published report in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) finds that psilocybin-assisted therapy in a group of frontline clinicians during the COVID-19 pandemic “resulted in a significant, sustained reduction of symptoms of depression”.
“In this randomized clinical trial, we aimed to investigate whether psilocybin therapy could improve symptoms of depression, burnout, and PTSD in clinicians who developed these symptoms from frontline clinical work during the pandemic,” authors wrote in the new report, adding that their findings “establish psilocybin therapy as a new paradigm of treatment for this postpandemic condition”.
The study consisted of 30 clinicians who were divided into two groups of 15. One group received a 25 milligram dose of psilocybin, while the other took a 100-mg dose of niacin. Regardless of group, participants completed multiple visits with facilitators: two preparation visits, one medication session—at which they took either the psilocybin or niacin—and three integration visits.
Ben Adlin Marijuana Moment
LETTURE
In 2012, the satirical Onion News Network ran a faux TV story about a smartphone-obsessed teenager capable only of rolling her eyes and texting. The reporter intoned: “Caitlin Teagart was a beautiful, lively girl who loved laughing and playing outside, but all that changed when she was 12.” Now, hooked on technology, the girl is pallid and unresponsive. Caitlin’s parents have decided to have her euthanized. “We can give her eyes”, says the actor playing her father, “to someone who would actually use them to read a book”.
The timing of the video was excruciatingly apt. Smartphones had become ubiquitous, apps were proliferating and childhood itself was in the final throes of what the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls “the great rewiring”.
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