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Michael Kohlman (@NoRomBasic@mastodon.world)

Attached: 1 image FYI - R.T. Rybak was mayor of Minneapolis from 2002 to 2014:

From R.T. Rybak - Minneapolis Mayor - from 2002 to 2014 "There are two ways to look at what happened yesterday in Minneapolis: 🔸Jake Lang comes to town—fueled with hateful bravado about being better than others because he is white—but can only drum up 12 pathetic supporters and is driven out, humiliated . All that is true but so is the next part: 🔸Lang was led to safety by…..a black man. Lang saw that black man as less than him. The black man saw Lang as a human being. That says a whole lot about what is going on. Well, Lang, ICE, the president and supporters, 💥you have come to a place that sees human beings. We have huge issues about race and are by no means perfect. But we are working to create a place where people are seen as people. I believe we will get there. This is the worst nightmare for Lang, ICE, the president ⭐️because the stark contrast we are showing in Minneapolis exposes the smallness of your hate. 🔥People in this city and state are struggling mightily to stay peaceful in the wake of the illegal, violent actions of ICE and the ignorant statements from the administration. To the small men who think they can make Minneapolis cave to your immoral view of the world, you don’t know Minneapolis, Minnesota and the depth of our values. Remember what happened to another very small man who was defeated when he went north: Napoleon had Waterloo. You have Minnesota." View quoted note →

Global stock markets are bracing for falls when trading resumes on Monday after Donald Trump threatened eight European countries with fresh #tariffs until they support his ambition to acquire #Greenland. The US president’s plan to impose new trade levies of 10% on goods from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands and Finland from 1 February, rising to 25% on 1 June, is creating #fear in the #markets, and among European businesses. Trading on the brokerage IG’s weekend markets suggest there will be #losses on the London Stock Exchange when it reopens on Monday, while rising geopolitical fears could drive precious #metal prices towards new record highs. Wall Street, which reopens on Tuesday, is also on track for a fall. There were signs on Sunday that European business groups were pushing the EU to flex its muscles in response. Germany’s engineering association, the VDMA, called on the European Commission to consider using its “#anti-#coercion instrument” against the US. “If the EU gives in here, it will only encourage the US president to make the next ludicrous demand and threaten further tariffs,” the VDMA president, Bertram Kawlath, said in a statement on Sunday.

the Guardian

World stock markets brace for turbulence after Trump’s latest tariff shock

Losses on stocks likely with precious metals forecast to spike even higher after move to impose 25% levies on European allies

A damning new study could put AI companies on the defensive. In it, Stanford and Yale researchers found compelling evidence that AI models are actually copying all that data, not “learning” from it. Specifically, four prominent LLMs — OpenAI’s GPT-4.1, Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, xAI’s Grok 3, and Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet — happily reproduced lengthy excerpts from popular — and protected — works, with a stunning degree of accuracy. They found that Claude outputted “entire books near-verbatim” with an accuracy rate of 95.8 percent. Gemini reproduced the novel “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” with an accuracy of 76.8 percent, while Claude reproduced George Orwell’s “1984” with a higher than 94 percent accuracy compared to the original — and still copyrighted — reference material. “While many believe that LLMs do not memorize much of their training data, recent work shows that substantial amounts of copyrighted text can be extracted from open-weight models,” the researchers wrote. Some of these reproductions required the researchers to jailbreak the models with a technique called "Best-of-N", which essentially bombards the AI with different iterations of the same prompt. (Those kinds of workarounds have already been used by OpenAI to defend itself in a lawsuit filed by the New York Times, with its lawyers arguing that “normal people do not use OpenAI’s products in this way.”) The implications of the latest findings could be substantial as copyright lawsuits play out in courts across the country. As The Atlantic‘s Alex Reisner points out, the results further undermine the AI industry’s argument that LLMs “learn” from these texts -- instead of storing information and recalling it later. It’s evidence that “may be a massive legal liability for AI companies” and “potentially cost the industry billions of dollars in copyright-infringement judgments

Futurism

Researchers Just Found Something That Could Shake the AI Industry to Its Core

Researchers found compelling evidence that AI models are actually copying copyrighted data, not "learning" from it.

Right-wing influencer Jake Lang is stuck in a window recess against Minneapolis City Hall. He’s soaked with freezing water after counterprotesters hurled water balloons at him.

The latest: Inside Whipple, concern about measles spreading from Texas detention center

Rep. Kelly Morrison toured the facility twice this week. The Department of Homeland Security has defended its detention standards.

Bluesky Social

Minnesota Star Tribune (@startribune.com)

Right-wing influencer Jake Lang is stuck in a window recess against Minneapolis City Hall. He’s soaked with freezing water after counterproteste...

DEFENSE Secretary Pete Hegseth has refused to release unedited video of a U.S. follow-up boat strike. The plane used by the U.S. military to strike a boat accused of smuggling drugs off the coast of Venezuela in the fall was painted to look like a civilian aircraft, a move that appears to be at odds with the Pentagon’s manual on the laws of war. The plane, part of a secret U.S. fleet used in surveillance operations, also was carrying munitions in the fuselage, rather than beneath the aircraft, raising questions about the extent to which the operation was disguised in ways that run contrary to military protocol. Details of the plane’s appearance, first reported Monday by the New York Times, were confirmed by two people familiar with the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter. Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson said in a statement that “the U.S. military utilizes a wide array of standard and nonstandard aircraft depending on mission requirements.” The new details come after the Trump administration’s pressure campaign on Venezuela — which began with it massing military resources in Latin America and attacking a series of alleged drug-smuggling boats, killing at least 115 people — culminated this month in a stunning raid that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. He and his wife were spirited to the United States to face federal drug trafficking charges. ⭐️The U.S. Senate on Wednesday blocked a war powers resolution that would prohibit further military action in Venezuela without authorization from lawmakers. Trump pressures GOP senators Trump was so incensed over the Senate’s potential pushback on his war powers authority that he had been aggressively calling several Republican senators who joined the Democrats in voting to advance the resolution last week. Trump put intense pressure on five Republican senators and ultimately prevailed in heading off passage of the legislation. Two of the Republicans — Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Todd Young of Indiana — flipped under the pressure. “He was very, very fired up,” said Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who did not vote for the resolution. He described Trump as “animated” on the subject when they spoke before last week’s vote. In justifying the boat strikes since September, the Trump administration has argued that the U.S. is in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels in the region and that those operating the boats are "unlawful combatants". ⭐️However, U.S. military guidelines on the laws of war prohibit troops from pretending to be civilians while engaging in combat. The practice is legally known as “#perfidy.” The Pentagon manual, which runs over 1,000 pages, specifies that “feigning civilian status and then attacking” is an example of the practice. An Air Force manual says the practice was prohibited because it means the enemy “neglects to take precautions which are otherwise necessary.” The Navy’s manual explains that “attacking enemy forces while posing as a civilian puts all civilians at hazard,” and sailors must use offensive force “within the bounds of military honor, particularly without resort to perfidy.” Wilson said each aircraft goes through a “rigorous procurement process to ensure compliance with domestic law, department policies and regulations, and applicable international standards, including the law of armed conflict.” The plane that was painted as a civilian aircraft was used in a Sept. 2 strike, the first in what would become a months-long campaign of U.S. deadly military strikes on suspected drug boats with political and policy ramifications for the Trump administration. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other top officials have been called on by Congress to answer questions and concerns about the actions — particularly the first one because it involved a follow-up strike that killed two survivors holding onto the wreckage of the vessel hit in the initial attack. ⭐️Legal experts have said the follow-on attack may have been unlawful because striking shipwrecked sailors is considered out of line with laws of war. Some lawmakers have called for the Pentagon to publicly release the unedited video of the operation, which Hegseth has said he will not do.

I feel like we are witnessing the #moronification of government. Add violence/genocide and not too different from the Khmer Rouge -- Kendyl Hanks

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FactPost (@factpostnews.bsky.social)

HHS Secretary RFK Jr: "This idea that you should trust the experts, a good mother doesn't do that"

A federal judge Thursday decried what he said were “breathtaking” constitutional violations by senior Trump administration officials and called the president an “authoritarian” who expects everyone in the executive branch to “toe the line absolutely.” 
In remarks laced with outrage and disbelief, U.S. District Judge #William #Young said Donald Trump and top officials have a “fearful approach” to freedom of speech that would seek to “exclude from participation everyone who doesn’t agree with them.” 
Young, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan, leveled the searing critique during a hearing in Boston to determine the appropriate remedies for the administration’s ⚠️detentions of pro-Palestinian students last year. The judge had ruled in September that senior administration officials engaged in an 👉 illegal effort to arrest and deport noncitizen students based on their activism.

On Thursday, he again denounced the administration’s conduct in unusually stark terms. “Talking straight here,” he said. “The big problem in this case is that the cabinet secretaries and ostensibly, the president of the United States, are not honoring the First Amendment.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem and Secretary of State Marco Rubio engaged in an “unconstitutional conspiracy” to deprive people of their rights, Young said. “The secretary of state,” he noted, his voice full of incredulity, “the senior cabinet officer in our history involved in this.” 
Spokespersons for the White House, Noem and Rubio did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, last year called Young a “craven” judge who was “smearing and demonizing federal law enforcement.” 
The government actions at the core of the case date to early March, when the Trump administration launched a campaign to detain and deport noncitizen students at U.S. universities who had been active in opposing Israel’s war in Gaza. Though not accused of any crime, those arrested spent weeks confined in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities, at times hundreds of miles from where they lived, before being released on bail. 
The plaintiffs in the case are the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association. The groups of scholars accused the administration of having an unconstitutional policy of deporting people based on their political views, a policy intended to chill the free-speech rights of their members.

The trial last summer focused on the targeting of five noncitizen students and scholars: #Mahmoud #Khalil, #Yunseo #Chung and #Mohsen #Mahdawi, who were students at Columbia University; #Rumeysa #Ozturk, a graduate student at Tufts University; and #Badar #Khan #Suri, a postdoctoral scholar at Georgetown University. 
All were arrested except Chung, who obtained a restraining order before ICE could find her. The other four were released on the orders of federal judges, but the Trump administration is still trying to deport them. ⭐️On Thursday, an appellate court in Philadelphia overturned a Ruling lower-court ruling in Khalil’s case on jurisdictional grounds, ⛔️raising the possibility that he could be rearrested.
 The president and other officials hailed last year’s detentions as part of a fight against "antisemitism", alleging without presenting evidence that the targeted students promoted violence or were pro-Hamas.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2026/01/15/protesters-trump-administration-free-speech-violations/

"Terrible things are happening outside. Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart. Men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared." - Diary of Anne Frank January 13, 1943

We hear a lot of talk about “freedom” from my Republican colleagues. And yet these same Republicans are working overtime to deny tens of millions of women the basic freedom to control their own bodies. That is wrong, and it represents a fundamental betrayal of what freedom is about. -- Bernie Sanders

Bluesky Social

Senator Bernie Sanders (@sanders.senate.gov)

We hear a lot of talk about “freedom” from my Republican colleagues. And yet these same Republicans are working overtime to deny tens of millio...

This is not a memo to ICE personnel. They each have a federal email account and that is a better was to disseminate info. This is a threat to everyone else.

Bluesky Social

Shoe+ (@shoe.bsky.social)

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