Weekend Reading
What fresh hell is this? #Corruption #Incompetence
“Slumped in the back seat of his Range Rover, a visibly shaken man once referred to as the ‘Playboy Prince’ stares ahead of him as the car leaves Aylsham police station in Norfolk, England. The photo, taken by Reuters photographer Phil Noble, went viral when it was published late on Thursday. It shows Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the younger brother of King Charles, after he was released from police custody following a day of questioning over allegations he sent confidential government documents to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. When news that Mountbatten-Windsor had been arrested broke early on Thursday, Manchester-based Noble began the six-hour drive south to Norfolk. Journalists knew the former prince had been arrested in Norfolk - the county that is home to the royal Sandringham estate where he resides. Since officers from Thames Valley Police - covering southeast England - were questioning him, there were potentially 20 or more police stations where he could have been held. Following a tip, Noble headed to the police station in the historic market town of Aylsham.” (Reuters)
“President Trump’s sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., on Wednesday kicked off their family’s cryptocurrency venture, World Liberty Financial, with an inaugural forum at their father’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Eric Trump boasted on X that the forum is ‘uniting visionaries from Crypto, Wall Street, tech and beyond to shape the future of finance—free from outdated banks, centralized control, and cancel culture.’ In short, it was an opportunity for the Trump family to make more money off of the presidency in defiance of any ethical concerns. Eric’s brother, Donald Trump Jr., retweeted his post. Speakers at the forum included financial executives Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, NASDAQ CEO Adenda Friedman, Canadian investor Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame, Nicki Minaj, FIFA President Gianni Infantino, and numerous others. The brothers spoke to CNBC from the forum on Wednesday, thumbing their noses at critics who say the Trump family is profiting off people seeking to cozy up to the White House and creating multiple conflicts of interest. ‘The great irony here is they didn’t give us much of a choice,’ Eric said. ‘They created this monster,’ Donald Jr. interjected. Eric claimed that the Trumps were ‘canceled’ by major financial institutions for political reasons, forcing them to turn to cryptocurrency and decentralized finance … Last May, The New York Times discovered that the sovereign wealth fund of the United Arab Emirates paid $2 billion to purchase a stablecoin called USD1 from World Liberty Financial, a blatant attempt by a foreign government to line the pockets of the president and his family. The deal was brokered by Zach Witkoff, who happens to be the son of Steve Witkoff, the U.S. special envoy to the Middle East. Two weeks later, Trump allowed the UAE to import a large amount of AI chips from the United States, with many of them going to a company owned by the man who controls the UAE’s fund, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan.” (Hafiz Rashid/TNR)
“An important driver of African countries’ improved economic performance and surging exports in the early 2000s was the China-fueled commodity supercycle. Between 2000-2014 regional exports nearly quadrupled, per capita income rose by 37.1%, while the share of people living in extreme poverty declined from 62.5% to 45.7%. Overall, the first decade and a half of this century saw the steepest improvements in human welfare on the Continent since the rapid post-independence economic expansions (circa 1960-1976) … Then the music stopped. China’s economic slowdown after 2014 resulted in slower growth rates in many African countries. Thereafter incomes plateaued or declined, and poverty reduction virtually stalled. Meanwhile, commodity-fueled government borrowing (including in private credit markets) during the boom years and the high cost of debt servicing (which many argue came with a steep ‘Africa penalty’) shrunk fiscal space in many countries. Importantly, the return to the private credit market did not discipline public finance management in the region. While corruption consumed a non-trivial share of borrowed cash (see the tuna bond scandal), the more pressing challenge was inefficient and/or wasteful public spending. To this end, a number of governments even borrowed against yet-to-be-proven resource reserves. It did not help that many of the high-ticket capital expenditures failed to yield projected growth (in many cases money was simply misspent), or create the jobs that the Continent desperately needed. Tax collection stalled, even as economies experienced nominal expansions. COVID plus similarly inflationary global geopolitical upheavals exacerbated these problems. Many countries faced fiscal distress. A few defaulted. The aftershocks of these challenges will undoubtedly have long lags into the future.” (Ken Apolo/Africanist Perspective)
“A long-standing mystery about when an ancient European ‘princess’ buried in a log coffin died has finally been solved, a new study reports. The woman’s wooden coffin was initially found in the village of Bagicz in northwestern Poland in 1899, after it fell from an eroding cliff. Archaeologists nicknamed her the ‘Princess of Bagicz’ because of her unique burial style and well-preserved artifacts. Over the decades, researchers determined that she had died in Roman times, but analyses gave conflicting dates spanning nearly 300 years. Log coffins are rarely discovered in archaeological excavations, since they disintegrate over the years. The one found in Bagicz is the only preserved wooden sarcophagus of its kind from the Roman Iron Age, researchers wrote in a study published Feb. 9 in the journal Archaeometry. The Bagicz burial is exceptional, the researchers wrote, because the coffin and lid were carved from a single tree trunk. The coffin likely survived into modern times thanks to its location in a wet, humid environment. Inside the coffin, which came from a larger cemetery associated with the Wielbark culture related to the Goths, was the skeleton of an adult woman who was buried on a cowhide along with a bronze pin, a necklace of glass and amber beads, and a pair of bronze bracelets. An archaeological examination of the style of the grave goods in the 1980s suggested that the Princess of Bagicz died between A.D. 110 and 160. But in 2018, a carbon-dating analysis of the woman’s tooth produced a date of between 113 B.C. and A.D. 65, which would make her significantly older than the artifacts buried with her. To resolve this discrepancy, a team of researchers led by Marta Chmiel-Chrzanowska, an archaeologist at the University of Szczecin in Poland, dated the log coffin itself using dendrochronological analysis, which involves counting the tree’s rings. They collected a small core of wood from the coffin and compared the growth rings to established chronological sequences from northwest Poland. ‘The estimated felling date of the oak used for the coffin was calculated as 120 AD,’ the researchers wrote in the study. ‘It is likely that the coffin was crafted immediately after felling.’” (Kristina Killgrove/LiveScience)
“More than 1,000 Kenyans have been lured to fight for Russia in its war with Ukraine, according to an intelligence report to the Kenyan parliament that highlights the scale of a Russian operation taking African men to the frontline. The majority leader of Kenya’s national assembly, Kimani Ichung’wah, said ‘rogue recruitment agencies and individuals in Kenya’ were continuing to send Kenyan nationals to fight in the conflict, as he read MPs the summary of an investigation by Kenya’s National Intelligence Service. The figure of more than 1,000 individuals is a significant increase on the number given in a statement by Kenya’s foreign affairs ministry in November, which said that more than 200 Kenyans had travelled to fight in the war. A growing number of people from African countries – including Kenya, Uganda and South Africa – and elsewhere have been lured to the frontline as Russia seeks manpower to sustain its invasion. Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, said in November that more than 1,400 people from 36 African countries were fighting for Russia in Ukraine. Many are being held by Ukraine as prisoners of war. According to the intelligence report, Ichung’wah said, employment agencies were targeting former military personnel and police officers and civilians from their mid-20s to 50 years old ‘who are desperate for job opportunities abroad.’” (Carlos Mutheiri/The Guardian)
“Your digital life is likely already stuffed with artificial intelligence offerings you never asked for: AI DJs playing AI music on your Spotify, Microsoft Copilot begging to draft your work emails, Google Search results that force you to say ‘but that’s just the AI overview’ when you look something up with friends. Just when you thought that you could not be stuffed any further, tech oligarchs are moving forward with their nth attempt at finding a profitable use for their latest disruption—what they’re calling ‘agentic AI.’ Agents are meant to go beyond generative AI by actually doing some automation, performing multistep tasks with minimal human input or oversight. Here’s the pitch: imagine a future where an autonomous assistant handles all your little to-dos. Things like finding an outfit for a wedding, buying concert tickets and messaging your friends that they’re booked, and planning the itinerary of your anniversary trip. In exchange for control over your digital personhood, your agent will spend your money, coordinate with your friends, and do your living for you. This trade is being proffered at a time when the tech industry is struggling to justify the cost of AI. As of 2025, 95 percent of companies that invested in GenAI did not profit at all from the investment, per a major MIT report. As the tech journalist Edward Zitron estimated in his guide to the racket, by ‘the end of 2025, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Tesla will have spent over $560 billion in capital expenditures on AI in the last two years, all to make around $35 billion.’ That’s like spending $100 to make $6.25—and then doing it again and again, five billion times, until you bleed the equivalent of Ireland’s entire economy. Agentic commerce seeks to generate some return on these enormous investments in AI infrastructure by hitching its wagon to convenient consumption, one of the most reliable ways to make money in the United States.” (The Baffler/Sohini Desai)
“Sudan is in the grip of the world’s largest and most catastrophic humanitarian crisis. Since a brutal civil war erupted in 2023, almost fourteen million people have been forced to flee their homes, and famine is so widespread that more than 40 percent of the population is not getting enough food. The healthcare system has completely collapsed, and there are reports of another genocide in Darfur. It’s a situation that António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, has described as ‘a crisis of staggering scale and brutality.’ And yet there has been a glaring disparity between the scale of the crisis and the media coverage it has received. One notable exception has been PBS NewsHour, which has consistently covered the conflict since it began. Last week, Ann Curry filed a heartbreaking report for the program from a camp for displaced people in South Sudan. In one particularly harrowing account, Halima Omer, a refugee, told Curry that she fled Khartoum after aerial bomb raids and spent years traveling until she finally reached the camp. ‘There was a woman we spoke to,’ Curry told viewers, ‘who carried her mother, her elderly mother, on her back because she was aging and ran with four kids and keeping them all in line to leave as the bombs were falling. And she said that her mom eventually died.’ Omer does not know if her husband survived. I spoke to Curry on Wednesday, the day she got back from Africa. It was her first international reporting trip since she left NBC News, in 2015. ‘I went because I really believe this is a war we need to know more about. And in the world of journalism today, where people are thinking more about what news consumers want to know and maybe thinking not as much about what we need to know, I just think it’s a mistake to not pay attention to what’s happening,’ she told me. ‘I have not given up my faith in the soul of humanity.’” (CJR/Susie Banakarim)
“The Trump administration is facing mounting criticism over a costly expansion of deportations that sends migrants to third-party destinations in Africa rather than their home countries — in some cases at a cost of more than $1 million per person.A report by Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said Washington has spent more than $40 million on the effort, including at least $32 million in direct payments to governments willing to accept deportees with no prior ties to their countries. Among them: Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, and Rwanda. Because only small numbers were transferred in some cases, the effective per-person cost, factoring in payments and military flights, climbed above $1 million, with Eswatini cited as a prime example.” (Yinka Adegoke/SEMAFOR)
“(Greg) Sargent: It’s metastasizing in a funny way. So a lot of Trump-adjacent right-wing podcasters are really pissed off right now. Let’s listen to this from Shawn Ryan. He’s talking about Attorney General Pam Bondi here. He mentions that Bondi recently hailed the Dow, and then he says this: Shawn Ryan (voiceover): You’re going to protect pedophiles. You’re going to protect pedophiles rather than go after them, and hope that everybody’s happy that the Dow hit 50,000? Are you fucking out of your mind? I guess the whole ‘drain the swamp’ campaign promise was another fucking bullshit lie, huh? Man, the lies are stacking up fast. Sargent: This, too, is like a double shot at Trump elites. He’s saying, ‘You guys are telling us that everything’s just fine because wealthy investors are making lots of money, but you know what? Everything is not fine. You are covering up for global elites.’ Nicole, that just seems absolutely deadly in terms of driving a schism into MAGA. Your thoughts on what you heard there? (Nicole) Hemmer: This very much is about a schism that is happening in MAGA. And some of the schism predates Epstein, and we’re just seeing it play out. The people who are willing to attack Trump over Epstein already had problems with Trump. You even see this in the case—Shawn Ryan is attacking Pam Bondi, and he’s also attacking Trump for putting her there and for his own implication in the cover-up. Somebody like Glenn Beck has spent a lot of time on his podcast attacking Pam Bondi and saying, ‘No, she’s the problem. Trump is perfectly fine. Trump is great. We all love Trump, but Pam Bondi is the problem.’ And so you’re seeing the schisms in MAGA over Trump and over the nationalists versus the MAGA people. You’re seeing that play out through the Epstein files: who they talk about, who they’re willing to implicate, who they’re willing to acknowledge are implicated, and, in particular, what they’re willing to say about Trump himself.” (TNR via Greg Sargent and Nicole Hemmer)
“You’ve probably heard of Best Ranger or Best Sapper: Army competitions that test the skills of teams of infantrymen and combat engineers. This year, the service added Best Drone Warfighter. The inaugural battle kicked off Tuesday at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, bringing teams from across the active, Reserve, and National Guard components of the Army to test their skills and possibly win a slot on the service’s drone competition team. ‘At the end of the day, it’s not about receiving trophies or awards—it is about ‘what lessons can we take from this to find out who the best operator is and how they became the best operator? What skills and resources and training allowed them to become the best operator?’ Col. Nicholas Ryan, who leads the unmanned aerial systems team for the Aviation Transformation Integration Directorate at Fort Rucker, Alabama, told reporters. ‘And who’s doing some amazing innovation out there across the Army…that we can then take and scale across the entire Army?’ The service is moving away from its previous drone operator model, which trained soldiers in its aviation branch to operate specific platforms. Instead, it’s likely that soldiers with additional training in operating UAS will be integrated into infantry, armor and other frontline units, where new doctrine will have them working alongside machine gunners, Abrams tanks, and howitzers. ‘As we proliferate drones, and we’re seeing where they best fit into the formation, what we’re going through right now is deciding who are the right people to operate these, and what level of training do they need?’ Ryan said. ‘And this competition really helps pull that out. For this competition, we didn’t specify what type of soldier—what branch, [military occupational specialty] came here to do this—it was just: ‘Send your best UAS operators’.” (Maghan Myers/DefenseOne)
“Ben Palmer, a stand-up comic in Nashville, has built a following online with his signature style of elaborate deadpan pranks, stumbling his way onto court TV shows and pyramid-scheme calls to poke fun at the latent absurdities of American life. Then last January, he had an idea for a new bit: He’d set up a fake tip line that people could use to report anyone they thought was an undocumented immigrant. It was darker than his other stunts, but it felt topical, the kind of challenge he wanted to try. At the very least, he thought, he might get a few calls he could talk about at his next show. Instead, his website has received nearly 100 submissions from across the country: people reporting their neighbors, ex-lovers, Uber drivers, strangers they saw at the grocery store. One tip came from a teacher reporting the parents of a kindergarten student at her school. ‘I mean, they seem like nice people or whatever,’ the woman told Palmer on the call. ‘But if they’re taking up resources from our county, I’m not into illegal people being here.’ What began as a comedy routine has become one of the most viral pieces of social satire during President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. The kindergarten video has been watched more than 20 million times on TikTok and exploded across Facebook, Reddit and YouTube, where one commenter called it ‘one of the most creative, nonviolent and effective acts of resistance’ they’d ever seen. Palmer’s methods have fueled anger among some conservatives who argue his deception threatens to obstruct how immigration laws get enforced.” (MSN via WashPo)
“Around the time he began taking financial advice from Jeffrey Epstein, Ohio’s richest man made a fateful investment … (Les) Wexner’s relationship with (former Ohio Governor George) Voinovich also planted the seeds for a coalition of CEOs that is credited with shedding Columbus’ image as a Midwestern backwater. Meanwhile, Wexner continued his charitable giving toward pro-Jewish causes, education and other public policy areas — adding to a legacy that put his name on a hospital, art gallery and football training complex at his alma mater, Ohio State University. But that legacy is now in jeopardy, given Wexner’s association with Epstein, the late sex offender who in 2019 was found dead in his prison cell while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges. The specter of Epstein hovers over Columbus and especially nearby New Albany, where, records show, Epstein owned property and had a senior role in Wexner’s development firm in the 1990s. Epstein, in the words of his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell during a Justice Department interview last year, ‘ran New Albany.’ ‘I really believe this guy [Wexner] did 50 years of amazing stuff for Columbus,’ said a GOP strategist, who, like many of the 20 people who spoke with NBC News, was granted anonymity to share candid assessments of Wexner. ‘If you’d have said in 2014 that in 12 years we would be here, I’d have said you were f-----g crazy.’ The fallout has engulfed not only Wexner, but also his allies and admirers in Columbus and the community he made here, essentially, from scratch more than 30 years ago. Members of the House Oversight Committee investigating Epstein traveled to New Albany this week to depose him. There also are calls to pry Wexner’s name off the buildings at Ohio State, where he served two stints as a trustee. And in recent days, politicians who once accepted Wexner’s cash for their campaigns for Congress all the way down to the Columbus City Council have scrambled to distance themselves. ‘He was one of the city elders of Columbus,’ said another longtime Republican strategist in the state. ‘He shaped the future of the city for the better, there’s no doubt. But when you talk about legacy, people tend to forget that because of the more salacious stuff’ … Meanwhile, Wexner money is destined to be an attack line in Ohio’s closely watched Senate race. Sen. Jon Husted, the Republican who was appointed to the seat last year, received a $3,500 contribution from Wexner in July. Husted’s earlier campaigns for state office received tens of thousands of Wexner’s dollars.” (Henry J Gomez/NBCNews)