At usual cruising altitudes (35,000-40,000 feet), an aircraft operates with roughly 100 to 300 times the cosmic ray and solar particle flux we experience at ground level. The Earth’s atmosphere shields from this radiation, so commercial aviation loses a significant portion of protection.

During a solar flare, the sun ejects high-energy protons that travel at nearly the speed of light. When these particles (or the secondary neutrons created when they collide with atmospheric molecules) pass through a semiconductor, they can deposit enough electrical charge to flip a bit in memory or logic circuits (0 becomes a 1, or vice versa). This is a known phenomenon called the Single Event Upset (SEU).

The Airbus advisory traces the exact vulnerability to their ELAC B (Elevator Aileron Computer) hardware running software version L104, the upgrade from L103. Flight control computers process sensor inputs and compute control surface positions many times per second. When a bit flip corrupts a value mid-calculation, such as an elevator deflection command, the output can be wrong without any error-checks.

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Arrest warrant issued for missing Thai mogul Anne Jakkaphong Jakrajutatip, as co-owner investigated in Mexico.

The Miss Universe competition has been overshadowed by legal drama as its owners face charges of fraud in Thailand and an investigation into drugs and weapons trafficking in Mexico just days after the latest pageant concluded.

The Miss Universe Pageant, which once belonged to United States President Donald Trump, has been owned by Thai mogul Anne Jakkaphong Jakrajutatip and her company, JKN Global, since 2022.

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There Is No World In Which This Isn’t Corrupt

It is almost comedic to imagine the narrative pretzels one must jump through in order to pretend that a coherent argument can be made here, that what we are witnessing is the application of a good faith effort in pursuit of justice. You would need to explain how installing your personal defense attorney as a federal prosecutor to indict your named enemies isn’t corrupt. There is no framework that makes this defensible. The appearance of impropriety isn’t subtle—it’s the entire structure. You would need to argue that violating the appointment statute is a “technical” issue rather than a constitutional constraint. But that requires treating the law as an obstacle to be gamed rather than a framework constraining power. Once you make that move, you’ve abandoned the rule of law entirely. You would need to justify why the prosecutor indicted within three days of taking office, presenting to a partial grand jury, mere days before the statute of limitations expired. The timeline screams vindictiveness. There’s no good-faith explanation for this haste—no sudden discovery of crucial evidence, no compelling prosecutorial necessity. Just Trump’s public demand followed immediately by prosecution.

You would need to explain why, after the judge ruled the appointment unlawful, the White House “stands with” Halligan and Bondi says the ruling “does not” affect her role. This isn’t defending a good-faith legal position—it’s doubling down on the violation itself.

None of these things can be defended coherently without abandoning basic principles: that the rule of law constrains power, that procedures matter, that appointment statutes exist for reasons, that the appearance of justice matters, that constitutional constraints aren’t “technical” obstacles. The corruption required destroying these frameworks. And destroying frameworks requires stupidity—not because the people involved lack intelligence, but because intelligent defense of the indefensible is impossible.

You cannot think clearly while maintaining that personal lawyers should prosecute personal enemies, that appointment statutes are technical trivialities, that three-day indictments after presidential demands aren’t vindictive, that partial grand jury presentations are proper procedure, that immunizing your target through illegal process is winning. The framework cannot cohere. So stupidity becomes the only option. Not chosen stupidity, but necessary stupidity—the epistemic collapse that corruption requires.

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The United States and China both have military facilities in Djibouti. Russia has sought access to Port Sudan. Gulf powers, notably Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, have expanded their presence across the Horn of Africa. They’ve done this by investing in ports, infrastructure and military cooperation especially in Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia.

Turkey, Iran and Israel have also established political, economic and security ties. This links the Red Sea to the eastern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf.

However, external powers are not the only drivers of change in the region.

Local actors, from Ethiopia to Sudan, Eritrea, Egypt and Somalia, are exploiting global rivalries to advance their strategic objectives. They are courting competing external powers by trading military access for security guarantees, or seeking investments.

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What has been less clear is whether similar disparities occur within the courtroom. In our newly published study, we examined whether sentencing outcomes differ between Māori and New Zealand Europeans charged with nearly identical offences.

We focused on first-time drink-driving cases, using alcohol readings as an objective, standardised measure of offence severity. Our core question: do Māori face a higher likelihood of a community-based sentence, instead of the more common – and least severe – outcome of a fine?

The results suggest they do.

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Populist poetics

This brings us to the opening stanza of The Hollow Men, where Eliot presents aspiring religio-nationalist torchbearers with an effigy of liberal secularism, ready for immolation.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rat’s feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us – if at all – not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

The scene is reminiscent of the “desolate plain lying between Hell’s portal and the river Acheron” in Dante’s Divine Comedy. When Dante asks his guide why the souls here lament so bitterly, he is told that it is because they were, while on earth, neither spiritually alive nor spiritually dead, neither good nor evil.

As such, they are forbidden from entering Hell proper. They are damned to an eternity of ineffectual fence-sitting, so to speak. Eliot ratifies the assignation elsewhere, when he determines: “So far as we are human […] it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least, we exist.”
[…]
The Hollow Men disregarded many of the liberal shibboleths of its time. In doing so, it communed with a populist, religio-nationalist mindset that was beginning to establish a foothold. One hundred years on, it is a poem that feels very much of our time.

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Animal subjects also played a starring role in research designed to enhance espionage efforts during the Cold War. Surgeons implanted microphones into cats’ ears. An elephant was allegedly injected with a massive amount of LSD. And, in one particularly grisly endeavor, scientists implanted electrodes into the brains of six dogs in an attempt to control their movement and turn them into remote-controlled assassins.

The goal of that last initiative, Subproject 94, which took place in 1961 and 1962, “was to examine the feasibility of controlling the behavior of a dog, in an open field, by means of remotely triggered electrical stimulation of the brain,” according to heavily redacted documents declassified in 2002.

Perhaps more remarkably, the experiments were largely successful. “You could, in fact, remotely control the behavior of these animals, especially using positive feedback,” says John Lisle, a historian and author of the book Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MK Ultra.

The project did face some setbacks. Dogs developed infections and researchers struggled to find a suitable secluded space to test out their mutant puppies. The agency cancelled Subproject 94 before the technique was ever used in a real operation. Yet by the end of the program, Lislle says, the CIA was weighing the creation of even bigger, braver remote-controlled mercenaries: bears, yaks, and even man himself.

~ Full article…

In fact, the researchers estimate that the total death toll from the war among Palestinians in Gaza is between 99,997 and 125,915, with a median estimate of over 112,000 killed. Even the lowest death toll estimate in the study is significantly higher than the death toll estimates in most media reports, which as of this week totaled roughly 70,000 Palestinians killed.
[…]
The study also found that the two-year Israeli assault led to a precipitous plunge in life expectancy. According to researcher Ana Gómez-Ugarte, life expectancy in Gaza “fell by 44% in 2023 and by 47% in 2024 compared with what it would have been without the war—equivalent to losses of 34.4 and 36.4 years, respectively.”

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Here are the documents we have obtained on these subjects so far from Freedom of Information requests. The documents are posted below in approximately the chronological order in which we received them.

In July 2020, U.S. Right to Know began submitting public records requests in pursuit of data from public institutions in an effort to discover what is known about the origins of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which causes the disease Covid-19. We are also researching accidents, leaks and other mishaps at laboratories where pathogens of pandemic potential are stored and modified, and the risks of gain-of-function research, which involve experiments on such pathogens to increase their host range, infectivity, transmissibility or pathogenicity.

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