A hard day for an Israel lobbyist is a good day for humanity.

This is a ridiculously wrong framing because this supposedly frontier AI by the IT department of Rio de Janeiro **is Qwen**! So it's not "making Qwen fade into irrelevance"... You just need to read the HuggingFace page this guy linked 👇 (huggingface.co/prefeitura-ri…): "Rio 3.5 Open 397B is built upon the exceptional work of the Qwen Team and their Qwen 3.5 model family... [it is] post-trained from Qwen 3.5 397B." So no, you didn't have a municipal IT department in Brazil somehow leapfrog the frontier: they were able to do this precisely because Chinese open-source models exist. They stood on the frontier, that's the whole point. Which, incidentally, is yet another very concrete illustration of what Chinese open-source AI means for the Global South: it lets a city government in Brazil build, customize, and own its own AI capabilities instead of renting them from Silicon Valley at exorbitant prices. With US models, the municipal IT department of Rio wouldn't be releasing its own frontier model: they'd be writing checks to OpenAI or Anthropic and hoping they don't somehow get cut off or restricted for political reasons.

Israeli lawyer Ben Marmarelli says Palestinian prisoners he represents beg him not to visit because they're raped each time he is due to meet them. This is a scene from Al Jazeera's shocking new documentary on Israel's systematic use of rape.

Everything they told you about China and Russia is actually true of Israel Zionist meddling is a national security emergency

Seems like this should be a bigger story in the U.S., and it would be if the firm was Russian, Iranian, Chinese…

The BBC has fed the public a diet of stories demanding increased defence spending, and a stream of warnings of an imminent threat from Russia. Such spending can happen only through deeper austerity cuts. Despite the propaganda blitz, a majority of Britons want public spending prioritised over more toys for the boys. That is reflected nowhere in the media coverage, as Des Freeman explains: "There are twenty stories from the past six months on the BBC’s page dedicated to ‘UK defence spending’. They draw on 71 different sources, of which not one is critical of an increase in defence spending... "The Trades Union Congress, representing 5.5 million workers, passed a motion at its 2025 conference to ‘reaffirm that our movement’s priority is welfare and wages, not weapons and war’. No broadcaster touched the story and both the Guardian and the Independent ignored it." More here: lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/june/wag…

The jury that convicted them had no idea this would be introduced at sentencing Sick and lawless

According to Oxfam, Elon Musk’s wealth as a trillionaire is equivalent to the combined wealth of the poorest 46% of the world’s population. That's about 3.8 billion people - nearly half of humanity.

The worst part is him saying the strike on the elementary school in Minab (that killed 168 schoolchildren and teachers) "is a use case that doesn't even violate our red lines."

Apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany needed compliant judges to provide a legal veneer to their darkest crimes. Judge Johnson joins their wretched company. He overturned a jury's conviction of four anti-genocide activists for criminal damage and sentenced them as terrorists instead. As one their barristers pointed out, the four defendants were initially arrested by police on suspicion of involvement in an act of terrorism. But the prosecution decided not to charge them with terrorism offences because it knew no jury would ever convict them based on the evidence. Instead the Crown held two trials: a sham one for the jury, and the real one conducted in secret by the judge. That is not justice. It is a show trial worthy of the worst tyrannical regimes.

“A reporter’s job is to uncritically parrot what people in power tell them” is a defense of sorts i suppose

I think we deserve a new National Holiday where Trump is not allowed to declare that an Iran deal is close. Just give us one day off. Then we go back to normal:

A harrowing read from Jonathan Cook. The deep cause of this catastrophe: the belief that Israel can only achieve its political goals through terror and mass murder: 'David Ben Gurion, Israel’s founding father, wrote to his son in 1937, 11 years before Israel’s creation: “We must expel the Arabs and take their places.” 'In a diary entry during the mass expulsions of 1948, Ben Gurion summarised the mood among his generals: “If we accuse a family – we need to harm them without mercy. Women and children without mercy. Otherwise this is not an effective reaction. During the operation, there is no need to distinguish between guilty and not guilty.” 'The goal was the weaponisation of fear, making Palestinians too terrified to remain in their homeland. 'Mordechai Maklef, a senior commander in the fledgling Israeli army, noted two years later, in 1950, the logic behind Israel’s policy: “It is impossible to expel 114,000 people who lived in the Galilee without terror.”' middleeasteye.net/opinion/ga…

Excellent work by @declassifiedUK 👏 The pro-Israel lobby are doing their best to smear this outstanding independent media organisation. Please watch this video and consider supporting @declassifiedUK youtube.com/watch?v=vZER1hv7…

2019-coded. When do we get a movie about how social media companies are either bought up by pro Israel mega billionaires or are bullied into working with the ADL to suppress pro Palestine content.

Whose strikes @nytimes? Who is bombing drinking water facilities?

A popular backlash cornered the High Court into declaring the proscription of Palestine Action unlawful – a decision the government is appealing. That has led to another unprecedented situation: police are still arresting people for holding placards in support of the group, despite the courts ruling that the basis for such arrests is unlawful. The law has never looked more of an ass. Which is why Starmer’s government is pinning its hopes on the judge in the so-called Filton trial riding to the rescue – making an example of four activists who targeted an Israeli factory in the UK making killer drones for use in Gaza. This coming Friday, Judge Jeremy Johnson will pass sentence on the activists, who were convicted by a jury of the relatively minor offence of criminal damage in the second of two trials the judge so carefully rigged. Judge Johnson has not been shy about showing where his loyalties lie. Not to the law, but to the British security state. Which should hardly come as a surprise, given his background. Judge Johnson made it to the bench after years serving as the most favoured barrister of the “secret state”, representing the intelligence services, the ministry of defence and the police. His working environment of choice as a lawyer was behind-closed-doors prosecutions held out of view of the public or proper legal scrutiny. There were many extraordinary, anomalous moments in the two trials. But perhaps the most glaring was Judge Johnson’s efforts to get the main defence barrister in the first trial, Rajiv Menon KC, jailed for contempt of court simply for noting to the jury in his summing up speech that they had a hundreds-of-years-old right in law to acquit. Judge Johnson’s behaviour was so unprecedented and certain to have a chilling effect on the ability of defence barristers to represent their clients – the Filton defendants dismissed their barristers from summing up in their second trial to avoid their lawyers facing prison for doing their job and defending them – that the Court of Appeal had no choice but to overrule Judge Johnson’s contempt proceedings against Menon. Former British ambassador Craig Murray has rightly observed: “Many people will surely conclude, it is Judge Johnson who should be in jail." But even with the convictions for criminal damage secured under these rigged conditions, Judge Johnson is still in a position to cause more harm to the rule of law in Friday’s sentencing hearing. He has reserved to himself the right to sentence the four anti-genocide activists not just for the criminal damage charge they were convicted of after his rigged trial, but – once again in an unprecedented move – to treat those criminal convictions as if they were for terrorism offences. That means he can impose a longer sentence, more draconian prison conditions and more onerous, life-long parole conditions after their release. The jury knew none of this when they were considering whether to convict. Judge Johnson placed a gagging order on his decision during the trial which meant the information was withheld from the jury and could not be reported until after the verdict. The gag was broken only by foreign media and Zarah Sultana, who used her parliamentary privilege to reveal Judge Johnson’s government-friendly, anti-justice machinations. In yet another unprecedented feature to the trial, this will be the first time in British history that someone accused of criminal damage is sentenced as a terrorist. Judges were only given these extraordinary powers in a highly controversial amendment in 2021 to counter-terrorism legislation. Judge Johnson’s logic for taking advantage of his extra powers in this case is quite extraordinary too. He argues that, in destroying Elbit’s killer drones, the activists were seeking to “influence” the Israeli government to change its policy in Gaza – that is, to stop committing a genocide. Putting pressure on governments is what terrorists try to do, he argues, so this must mean the anti-genocide activists are terrorists. Opposition to the genocide, in Judge Johnson’s view, has to be treated as an aggravating factor, not a mitigating one. It is all the more astounding that Judge Johnson is using this argument when he refused to allow the jury to hear any evidence of the activists’ larger political motivations: that they wanted to stop British complicity in Israel’s genocide by targeting a factory that made the drones for use in that genocide. Remember, all this is happening as Starmer’s government makes unprecedented moves to end many jury trials in Britain, leaving us to the mercy of judges like Jeremy Johnson. As Defend Our Juries notes, the government is looking to create “an extraordinary and deeply authoritarian precedent, allowing countless more protesters to be tried for an ordinary offence, but secretly sentenced as terrorists, without juries knowing this when they convict”. This is an extract from my latest article Legal profession revolt against the UK judge whose job is to protect Israel's genocide. Find a link to the rest in the reply post ⬇️

All we did was send our military to the other side of the world, bombed Iran's bridges and elementary schools, then imposed a military blockade to crush their economy and population. Then, out of nowhere, these deranged monsters shoot one of our peaceful liberatory helicopters. These people only understand force! They're like from the 8th century.

Judge Johnson’s rogue manoeuvrings in the rigged trials of the Palestine Action activists have so incensed the legal profession that thousands signed a petition demanding that he take the chance last Monday to recuse himself from the sentencing hearing. He, of course, refused to do so. They call his behaviour during the trial “biased” and “discriminatory conduct” and have referred him to the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office. Here is David Whyte, professor of law at Queen Mary’s University of London, who handed the petition to the JCIO, explaining another reason why so many legal professionals are outraged by Judge Johnson’s actions: He has shown exceptional “cruelty and vindictiveness” in holding the activists in remand for more than three times the normal maximums, even when the prosecution was not asking for them to be remanded, and for refusing them bail between their convictions and sentencing. The Court of Appeal is due to issue a ruling on the government’s appeal against an earlier High Court decision declaring Palestine Action’s proscription unlawful this coming Monday, days after Judge Johnson’s sentencing of the Filton activists. If this is all starting to look like theatre, that it because it is. In dictatorships, these are called show trials. Everyone understands that the outcome is predetermined. Everyone understands that justice is non-existent. The verdict is entirely political. It is a faux-legal rationalisation of what the security state wants. Judge Johnson is the perfect judge to play that part. The courts will do exactly what is expected of them unless they are worried that public revulsion will discredit their decision. Now is the time to raise our voices. This is an extract from my latest article Legal profession revolt against the UK judge whose job is to protect Israel's genocide. Find a link to the rest in the reply post ⬇️

"Self-defense strikes" which are "in response to Iran’s unwarranted and continued aggression." War propaganda isn't supposed to be as transparently deceitful as this.