Tag: technology

Trump heads to Pittsburgh to announce $70 BILLION AI, energy investment with Sen Dave McCormick

President Donald Trump andSen. Dave McCormick (R-PA) will team up in Pittsburgh on Tuesday to announce a $70 billion investment in AI and energy for the state. The push will involve thousands of new jobs for Pennsylvanians.

The annoucement planned for Tuesday will come during the inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit in Pittsburgh, and will “bring together the world’s top leaders in energy and AI, alongside the biggest global investors, labor and trades leaders, and government officials, to showcase Pennsylvania’s incredible potential to power the AI revolution,” a press release from McCormick’s office stated.

McCormick will be joined by Trump, leaders in energy, and others at Carnegie Mellon University for the announcement. The $70 billion is the “largest investment commitment in these industries in terms of dollars for the state and jobs created in the history of the Commonwealth,” McCormick said, per Axios.

“Anticipated investments include new data centers, new power generation and grid infrastructure to meet surging data center demand, along with AI training programs and apprenticeships for businesses,” a preview of McCormick’s speech adds.

COO of Blackstone, an alternate asset manager, is expected to announce a $25 billion investment into the infrastructure needed for AI, including energy and data centers. It will be expected to spur 6,000 annual jobs in construction and 3,000 permanent jobs.

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The ‘Economy of Genocide’ Report: A Reckoning Beyond Rhetoric

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in occupied Palestine, stands as a testament to the notion of speaking truth to power. This “power” is not solely embodied by Israel or even the United States, but by an international community whose collective relevance has tragically failed to stem the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Her latest report, ‘From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide,’ submitted to the UN Human Rights Council on July 3, marks a seismic intervention. It unflinchingly names and implicates companies that have not only allowed Israel to sustain its war and genocide against Palestinians, but also confronts those who have remained silent in the face of this unfolding horror.

Albanese’s ‘Economy of Genocide’ is far more than an academic exercise or a mere moral statement in a world whose collective conscience is being brutally tested in Gaza. The report is significant for multiple, interlocking reasons. Crucially, it offers practical pathways to accountability that transcend mere diplomatic and legal rhetoric. It also presents a novel approach to international law, positioning it not as a delicate political balancing act, but as a potent tool to confront complicity in war crimes and expose the profound failures of existing international mechanisms in Gaza.

Two vital contexts are important to understanding the significance of this report, considered a searing indictment of direct corporate involvement, not only in the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, but Israel’s overall settler-colonial project.

First, in February 2020, following years of delay, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) released a database that listed 112 companies involved in business activities within illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine. The database exposes several corporate giants – including Airbnb, Booking.com, Motorola Solutions, JCB, and Expedia – for helping Israel maintain its military occupation and apartheid.

This event was particularly earth-shattering, considering the United Nations’ consistent failure at reining in Israel, or holding accountable those who sustain its war crimes in Palestine. The database was an important step that allowed civil societies to mobilize around a specific set of priorities, thus pressuring corporations and individual governments to take morally guided positions. The effectiveness of that strategy was clearly detected through the exaggerated and angry reactions of the US and Israel. The US said it was an attempt by “the discredited” Council “to fuel economic retaliation,” while Israel called it a “shameful capitulation” to pressure.

The Israeli genocide in Gaza, starting on October 7, 2023, however, served as a stark reminder of the utter failure of all existing UN mechanisms to achieve even the most modest expectations of feeding a starving population during a time of genocide. Tellingly, this was the same conclusion offered by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, who, in September 2024, stated that the world had “failed the people of Gaza.”

This failure continued for many more months and was highlighted in the UN’s inability to even manage the aid distribution in the Strip, entrusting the job to the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a mercenary-run violent apparatus that has killed and wounded thousands of Palestinians. Albanese herself, of course, had already reached a similar conclusion when, in November 2023, she confronted the international community for “epically failing” to stop the war and to end the “senseless slaughtering of innocent civilians.”

Albanese’s new report goes a step further, this time appealing to the whole of humanity to take a moral stance and to confront those who made the genocide possible. “Commercial endeavors enabling and profiting from the obliteration of innocent people’s lives must cease,” the report declares, pointedly demanding that “corporate entities must refuse to be complicit in human rights violations and international crimes or be held to account.”

According to the report, categories of complicity in the genocide are divided into arms manufacturers, tech firms, building and construction companies, extractive and service industries, banks, pension funds, insurers, universities, and charities.

These include Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Amazon, Palantir, IBM, and even Danish shipping giant Maersk, among nearly 1,000 other firms. It was their collective technological know-how, machinery, and data collection that allowed Israel to kill, to date, over 57,000 and wound over 134,000 in Gaza, let alone maintain the apartheid regime in the West Bank.

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The Pentagon’s about to start using xAI’s Grok — and other federal agencies could be next

Elon Musk’s xAI is launching a new government-facing service. Its first client happens to be the largest employer on Earth.

The Department of Defense will pay up to $200 million for “Grok for Government,” a new collection of AI products geared toward use by federal, local, and state governments.

The department has also awarded similar contracts to Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, which launched its own government-facing initiative last month.

“The adoption of AI is transforming the Department’s ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries,” Doug Matty, Chief Digital and AI Officer of the Department of Defense, said in a statement.

xAI said its government-facing products would include models designed specifically for national security purposes and eventually for use in classified environments.

The company also said those products would be available for purchase via the General Services Administration, opening the door for other federal agencies to use them.

The announcement comes less than a week after Grok went on an antisemitic rant on X. The company later apologized for the chatbot’s “horrific behavior,” though workers at the company erupted in anger internally over the incident.

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IDF Soldiers Say Grenade-Drones Being Used On Civilians: ‘None Of Them Were Armed’

The Israel Defense Forces are routinely killing civilians in Gaza with commercial drones modified to drop grenades on them — often leaving the corpses to be eaten by dogs, according to interviews with seven soldiers and officers conducted by Israeli investigative journalists. The tactic is being used to deter civilians from venturing into areas declared off-limits by the IDF, with indifference to the fact that the individuals — some of them children — pose no threat. Compounding the amorality of the conduct, the soldiers say the off-limits areas aren’t marked on the ground.   

According to Israel’s +972 Magazine and Local Call, every Palestinian killed in this fashion was counted as a “terrorist” in the IDF’s official reporting. The soldiers say that’s utterly false. One soldier identified as “S” says that he coordinated dozens of drone attacks over the 100 days his unit was deployed in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, and that the vast majority of the dead were unarmed civilians. The only two exceptions were a single executed Palestinian who merely had a knife, along with only one legitimate encounter with armed militants. 

By his recollection, the battalion killed a civilian in this fashion on a daily basis, even though it was obvious to him that the Palestinians posed no threat. “It was clear that they were trying to return to their homes — there’s no question. None of them were armed, and nothing was ever found near their bodies. We never fired warning shots. Not at any point.”

Adding another layer of horror to the IDF-orchestrated hell that is Gaza, the corpses — which were upwards of a mile from their killers — were typically left to be eaten by dogs, says S.: 

“You could see it on the drone footage. I couldn’t bring myself to watch a dog eating a body, but others around me watched it. The dogs have learned to run toward areas where there’s shooting or explosions — they understand it probably means there’s a body there.”

Worse, S. said children have been deliberately targeted: 

“There was a boy who entered the [off-limits] zone. He didn’t do anything. [Other soldiers] claimed to have seen him standing and talking to people. That’s it — they dropped a grenade from a drone…In most cases, there was nothing you could tell yourself. There was no way to complete the sentence, ‘We killed them because ____.’”

“There were many incidents of dropping grenades from drones,” said H., a soldier who’d been deployed to central Gaza.  . “Were they aimed at armed militants? Definitely not. Once a commander defines an imaginary red line that no one is allowed to cross, anyone who does is marked for death,” even just for “walking in the street.” These new accounts are consistent with previous reporting that the IDF creates “kill zones” where soldiers shoot anyone moving inside the area, followed by the IDF boasting that another terrorist was killed. Where IDF soldiers’ ability to mow down civilians in kill zones was previously limited by the range of their rifles, drones now let them kill from several kilometers away.  

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France waging ‘crusade’ against free speech and tech progress – Telegram boss

France has embarked on a “crusade” against free speech and progress itself, Telegram founder Pavel Durov said on Friday after Paris launched a probe against the social media platform X. The French authorities should talk to tech companies instead of prosecuting them, the entrepreneur believes.

The actions of the “French bureaucrats” will only “scare off investment and damage the country’s economic growth for decades,” the Russian-born billionaire wrote on X.

The French authorities announced a probe against the Elon Musk-owned platform on Friday for allegedly manipulating algorithms “for purposes of foreign interference.” The investigation was prompted by two complaints, one filed by a French lawmaker and the other by a government cybersecurity official, both of whom accused X of threatening French democracy. Musk has not commented on the development.

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Trump’s BBB busts the budget to benefit arms makers, AI warlords

Trump’s bill slashes spending on veterans to boost corporate welfare for the Big Five arms manufacturers and surging AI spying firms like Palantir.

Originally published at Antiwar.com.

The Senate is on the verge of passing the distinctly misnamed “big beautiful bill.” It is, in fact, one of the ugliest pieces of legislation to come out of Congress in living memory. The version that passed the House recently would cut $1.7 trillion, mostly in domestic spending, while providing the top 5% of taxpayers with roughly $1.5 trillion in tax breaks.

Over the next few years, the same bill will add another $150 billion to a Pentagon budget already soaring towards a record $1 trillion. In short, as of now, in the battle between welfare and warfare, the militarists are carrying the day.

Pentagon Pork and the People It Harms

The bill allocates tens of billions of dollars to pursue President Trump’s cherished but hopeless Golden Dome project, which Laura Grego of the Union of Concerned Scientists has described as “a fantasy.” She explained exactly why the Golden Dome, which would supposedly protect the United States against nuclear attack, is a pipe dream:

“Over the last 60 years, the United States has spent more than $350 billion on efforts to develop a defense against nuclear-armed ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missiles]. This effort has been plagued by false starts and failures, and none have yet been demonstrated to be effective against a real-world threat… Missile defenses are not a useful or long-term strategy for keeping the U.S. safe from nuclear weapons.”

The bill also includes billions more for shipbuilding, heavy new investments in artillery and ammunition, and funding for next-generation combat aircraft like the F-47.

Oh, and after all of those weapons programs get their staggering cut of that future Pentagon budget, somewhere way down at the bottom of that list is a line item for improving the quality of life for active-duty military personnel. But the share aimed at the well-being of soldiers, sailors, and airmen (and women) is less than 6% of the $150 billion that Congress is now poised to add to that department’s already humongous budget. And that’s true despite the way Pentagon budget hawks invariably claim that the enormous sums they routinely plan on shoveling into it — and the overflowing coffers of the contractors it funds — are “for the troops.”

Much of the funding in the bill will flow into the districts of key members of Congress (to their considerable political benefit). For example, the Golden Dome project will send billions of dollars to companies based in Huntsville, Alabama, which calls itself “Rocket City” because of the dense network of outfits there working on both offensive missiles and missile defense systems. And that, of course, is music to the ears of Representative Mike Rogers (R-AL), the current chair of the House Armed Services Committee, who just happens to come from Alabama.

The shipbuilding funds will help prop up arms makers like HII Corporation (formerly Huntington Ingalls), which runs a shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, the home state of Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-Miss).  The funds will also find their way to shipyards in Maine, Connecticut, and Virginia.

Those funds will benefit the co-chairs of the House Shipbuilding Caucus, Representative Joe Courtney (D-CT) and Representative Rob Wittman (R-VA). Connecticut hosts General Dynamics’ Electric Boat plant, which makes submarines that carry ballistic missiles, while Virginia is home to HII Corporation’s Newport News Shipbuilding facility, which makes both aircraft carriers and attack submarines.

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Rock band with more than 1 million Spotify listeners reveals it’s entirely AI-generated — down to the musicians themselves

A fresh new rock band that quickly shot to Spotify’s top ranks announced that it’s actually wholly generated by artificial intelligence, just one month after its celebrated debut album earned it one million listeners.

The ’60s-inspired rock-and-roll band, the Velvet Sundown, revealed on Saturday that nothing about it is real after fans of the up-and-coming artists noticed there were virtually no traces of any people associated with it online.

Its debut album, “Floating on Echoes,” was released on June 5 to mass appeal online.

The most popular song in the album, pro-peace folk rock song “Dust on the Wind,” clinched the No. 1 spot for Spotify’s daily “Viral 50” chart in Britain, Norway and Sweden between June 29 and July 1.

All the while, the one million monthly listeners who started following the Velvet Sundown had no idea they were just listening to a mass of artificial intelligence made by fake musicians.

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Heavy AI use at work has a surprising relationship to burnout, new study finds

The adoption of AI tools in the workplace is making employees more productive, but new research from freelance work marketplace Upwork suggests it might also be hurting their mental health. 

Following a survey of 2,500 workers (including executives, full-time employees, and freelancers) across multiple countries, the research showed that the most devoted users of AI tools, including agents, are also 88% more likely to experience burnout and twice as likely to quit, compared to their colleagues who use the technology less frequently.

The vast majority of freelancers (88%) who responded to the survey, in contrast, said their use of AI has positively impacted their careers, without the psychological downsides reported by their full-time, salaried counterparts.

Among all respondents, 90% said they’ve come to view AI more as a fellow coworker than merely a tool. Interpersonal workplace dynamics are shifting as a result, according to the report: for example, 85% of respondents said they’re more polite to AI than to their fellow human workers, while 67% report feeling a higher level of trust towards AI than towards their human coworkers.

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Japan Achieves World Record 1.02 Petabits per Second Internet Speed

Japanese scientists at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) have set a new world record by sending data at 1.02 petabits per second (over 125 terabytes per second) over a fiber optic cable spanning 1,808 kilometers. Using a 19-core fiber cable and advanced amplification tech, they achieved a data transfer rate equivalent to more than 125 terabytes per second. To give a sense of scale, this means transferring massive amounts of information — like the entire Netflix library — in less than a second or streaming millions of 4K videos all at once.

While still in the research phase, this breakthrough holds promise for the future of internet infrastructure. It could significantly speed up 5G and upcoming 6G networks, improve cloud computing and AI data handling, and pave the way for enormous storage devices like 1-petabyte SSDs. The tech is expected to make data transfers faster and more efficient across industries.

That said, faster speeds also come with challenges. Infrastructure remains vulnerable; for example, submarine cables can be damaged by ship anchors, as recently happened in Finland. Plus, the higher the data rates, the more important cybersecurity becomes to protect sensitive information.

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Air Force Confirms Drone Swarms Over Wright-Patterson AFB Led to Airspace Shutdown; Videos and Reports Released

Newly released Air Force records confirm that Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (WPAFB) in Ohio experienced multiple drone incursions in mid-December 2024, prompting the temporary shutdown of military airspace and a large-scale security response. The disclosure, made through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to The Black Vault, includes incident reports, sworn witness statements, law enforcement documentation, and supporting video footage—all now public for the first time.

The base, one of the most prominent and historically significant in the U.S. Air Force system, initiated emergency procedures on December 13, 2024, after security forces reported observing several unmanned aerial systems (UAS) operating in restricted airspace.

Initial sightings occurred at 10:08 p.m., when patrols near the Hot Cargo Pads spotted a drone hovering in the area and heading toward the West Ramp of the installation. The object was described as “black, with four (4) propellers, was roughly 6 inches in size, and had alternating red and green lights.” It was later seen flying over Fire Station #2 at about 20 feet off the ground.

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