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There’s a lot of controversy surrounding Flock cameras. The cops say they help catch crooks. The civil libertarians say big brother is watching you. Some camera operators are using them to spy on girlfriends. Turns out that retail stores have been using them to reduce “shrinkage,” aka shoplifting. But digital surveillance comes at a price. “ Sainsbury’s has paused the use of AI face scanning in one of its stores after a customer was wrongly identified as a shoplifter and ejected from the shop.   “I was embarrassed, mortified even, and felt quite humiliated and powerless,” Matt Arnold, 46, said of his ordeal.   “The comedy promoter was buying supplies in the store in East Dulwich, in south-east   London , for a standup event at Dulwich Hamlet football club when, after scanning his items and a Nectar card, he was approached by two managers who told him he could not be served owing to an earlier incident. He was then asked to leave and they tried to escort him from the store...

“ President Donald Trump has declared the Strait of Hormuz as US territory in a new post on Truth Social.   “Sharing a bizarre map of the region with a large blue circle over Hormuz, the picture declared the vital shipping route as “US territory”.” Putin just needs to grab a map, draw a circle around Ukraine and label it “Russian territory.” Think of all the lives that would have been saved if he’d done that four years ago. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/iran-us-war-live-trump-oman-hormuz-peace-nuclear-weapons-b3034640.html?utm_source=taboola&utm_medium=editorial-push

Democracy is not an easy form of government. It has none of the certainties of the various forms of tyranny. It demands that the governed as well as the governing make compromises, learn to to listen, and sometimes resist impulses. The champions of democracy are not the people who cling to power in its name, but those who put that greater consultation, that larger discussion, that continuing project, above themselves ~Timothy Snyder

Whisky Pete Hegseth is bleating about testosterone testing and supplementation for US servicemen. He seems to believe that testosterone augmentation means a more effective military in the age of missiles and drones. But is testosterone an unalloyed good? “This is what we're seeing in clinic,” she says. “Men will come to see us with zero sperm counts, and will often deny that they've been taking testosterone – but usually from their blood tests and their physique, it's very evident that they’re on testosterone.”   “If you give yourself testosterone […] you're telling your body, ‘I've actually got enough testosterone’,” Satchi explains. “So that signal going to your testicles to produce testosterone and sperm is switched off.” “Like Clavicular, many of these patients will have sourced their testosterone from less-than-reputable suppliers: “they're getting it from their friends at the gym,” she explains, or online – and without the input of a legitimate endocrinolo...

President Trump won’t even be straight with the country about how he’s running out of weapons – when his war has depleted well  upwards of 90%  of certain crucial munitions, as  Zeteo  has learned. When reporters have dug in on this topic, he’s huffily accused them of “ treason ,” and pledged that those responsible for leaking the information “are being hunted down” aggressively.    The staggering rate of U.S. weapons exhaustion is one of many indications of how   colossally disastrous the Iran war has been   for the American side since the very moment Trump launched the conflict in February. And the extent to which Trump has routinely ordered the Justice Department to open sprawling leak investigations and browbeat journalists underscores just how much this president is attempting to make it functionally illegal for a free American press to report on how horribly the war is going.   After all, the only thing “ treasonous ” (to use a term so ...

Trump recently claimed that he would make the Strait of Hormuz American territory. Claiming sovereignty over someplace means more that just writing your name on a map with a sharpie. “Western powers have attempted to control the Strait of Hormuz before. Basically, however, they only held it at Iranian sufferance. When, as in 1622, the Iranians determined to expel the foreigners, they proved able to do so. Nowadays they have 50,000 drones and have damaged or destroyed all 17 US bases in the region, so I don’t think trying to occupy Hormuz would be any fun. “It was known as a strategic trading port even before the age of the great maritime empires.” Marco Polo visited twice and wrote about it. “Portugal took the island of Hormuz briefly in 1507-1508, and then came back to rule it 1515 to 1622. This occupation was during the Little Ice Age and we don’t hear as much about fatal heat. Although the Portuguese were now imperial administrators, they ruled through a vassal dynasty of the kings ...