a.p. mess

Wild story here. Apple just paid $2bn for an Israeli tech company with no revenues. The company builds infrared sensors to map imperceptible facial movements that determine the words you're thinking. 30% of its staff were called up to do genocide donotpanic.news/p/apple-just-b…

Tesla: Workers in Nueces County spotted a pipe from its new lithium refinery dumping what they described as “very dark” almost black water into a public drainage ditch near Robstown, Texas. The ditch flows toward Petronila Creek and eventually Baffin Bay, a coastal ecosystem.

🔴 BREAKING: The Israeli government has approved a proposal to register large areas of the occupied West Bank as “state property,” for the first time since the Israeli occupation of the territory in 1967 aje.news/k3e35i

Statement from Oscar-winning director Hamdan Ballal: This afternoon, nearly a year after we won the Oscar, the same settler who attacked me shortly after I returned from Los Angeles--Shem Tov Lusky--again led an attack against my home and my family. Four of my family members are currently arrested and one is in the hospital. I invite all journalists and diplomats to come visit me and my family this Tuesday, February 17, to hear about how the situation has gotten worse in the year since we won the Oscar, as it has across the West Bank. Email me to coordinate your visit: hamdanalhrane90@gmail.com Two weeks ago we managed to get a decision from the Israeli court that the area around my home is closed to non-residents, but the settlers break that order and still come with their flocks almost every day. We call the police, they do nothing. The army comes, they do nothing. Today, Shem Tov Lusky--the settler who attacked me in my home shortly after I won the Oscar last year--came with his flock to my home. My brother called the police to report the incursion. The army came first and immediately raided our house, attacking everyone inside. Then they arrested two of my brothers, a nephew, and cousin. Another brother was badly injured and is now in the hospital. The Israeli court decision was supposed to make things a bit quieter for us. But the opposite has been true. The settlers have ramped up their harassment and the Israeli authorities have done nothing to enforce the decision, and today they joined the settlers in the attack.

Israel killed all these Palestinian journalists .don't look away

Slavery Was a Rape Economy, And You Know It They show cotton fields, but never breeding plantations. Never the girls raped at puberty, reduced to livestock, their children counted as yield. Law protected this because Black and Indigenous people were declared subhuman. This was not just a “dark chapter” but a system. Sanitising it is moral cowardice.

@Kristen_Arnett Congratulations!!!! So well deserved!!!

hell yeah florida

Whistleblowers told The Electronic Intifada that the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) scrapped its annual Impunity Index because Israel was set to rank number one. The index—published annually since 2008 and regularly referenced in UN reports—measures countries where journalists are deliberately killed and killers go unpunished. The 2024 edition, covering killings through 2023, ranked Israel second. The 2025 index, reflecting 2024 amid record killings of Palestinian journalists in Gaza, would have pushed Israel to the top of the list. Since the index is calculated as a 10-year rolling rate relative to population, Israel would Israel would have been ranked near the top, if not number one, for many years to come, the whistleblowers said. They allege donor and board pressure played a role. In response to Electronic Intifada, CPJ denied that donor considerations play any role in its decisions with respect to Israel or any other country.

Private prisons are criticizing ICE on their investor calls for not filling up their prisons fast enough. Your reminder that ICE is a for-profit industry — and the companies profiting are big campaign donors to the politicians voting to fund them.

🧵There is an epidemic of child sex crimes in and around Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Since 2021, and the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, dozens of elite soldiers stationed at the military base have been convicted of raping children, distributing child pornography, and other similar offenses. Many of these soldiers served in Afghanistan, where it is now acknowledged that the U.S. military aided their local allies in “bacha bazi” (boy play): the practice of kidnapping and keeping boys as sex slaves, large numbers of whom were enslaved on U.S. military compounds. A new MintPress investigation by @AlanRMacLeod sheds light on this deeply disturbing topic.

A mosque in Los Angeles was vandalized and set on fire, and even people who live in LA wouldn’t know because there’s been almost no media coverage. When churches or synagogues are targeted, there’s wall-to-wall coverage and immediate security funding. When mosques are targeted, it doesn’t even register.

🦔 HP launched a gaming laptop subscription where you pay monthly but never own the hardware. The high-end option is $130/month for an RTX 5080 Omen Max 16. That same laptop costs $2,110 to buy outright, meaning you'd pay the full price in about 16 months but still own nothing. If you cancel after the first month, you face hefty fees. Canceling the top-tier subscription in month two costs $1,430 plus you have to return the laptop. You can only cancel for free after 13 months, by which point you've paid $1,690 and still have no laptop. HP's justification: "The traditional upgrade cycle keeps most gamers perpetually one step behind. But with access to a new laptop every year, your subscription breaks that cycle completely." My Take This feels like the logical endpoint of the subscription economy. You pay forever, you own nothing, and the company frames it as doing you a favor. HP is betting that people are so conditioned to monthly payments that they won't do the math showing they'd pay full price in 16 months and keep paying after that. Memory chip prices are up 60% because data centers are consuming everything. Hardware costs are rising. And now HP is using the affordability crisis to push a model where you never build equity in anything you use. We've seen this with software, streaming, cars, and now gaming hardware. The pitch is always about flexibility and staying current. The reality is you're perpetually renting your life from companies that figured out recurring revenue beats selling you something once. At least when you finance a laptop you eventually own it. I don't know how we got to a place where "you will own nothing" stopped being a dystopian warning and became a business model. Hedgie🤗

Mexico's President Sheinbaum says Americans are spreading measles into Mexico, which had nearly eliminated the disease

The Ditch gained access to Jeffrey Epstein’s FedEx account – records show it was used for shipments long after his death and an address book including a senior Israeli military officer now considered a “strategic consultant” for “diplomatic matters”. ontheditch.com/gained-access-…

In apartheid South Africa, 95% of people sentenced to death were Black. In apartheid Israel, 100% of people who will be sentenced to death will be Palestinians.

The Baffler reported that Israeli occupation authorities used Palestinian bodies for military and medical training in cooperation with American universities, including the University of Southern California. The platform explained that the bodies sometimes lost their humanity after being held, as they were placed in unnamed graves or temporary burial sites. Documents also revealed the involvement of some American institutions in supplying bodies to the Israeli military for training in simulated trauma environments, without the families' consent. The report highlighted ongoing violations of Palestinian cemeteries, including bombing, digging, and shallow burials, as well as forcing families to identify their deceased under difficult conditions. The platform confirmed that these practices have a profound impact on survivors and on Palestinian cultural memory.

(1/10 🧵) If you live in NY, you may see a new warning: “THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA.” This mandatory disclosure went into effect late last year, and it’s the first attempt by a US state to grapple with a new generation of surveillance pricing.

Lots of people talk about Israel’s “organ theft,” sometimes in conspiratorial terms. @maryturfah, one of our best writers on Palestine who somehow also finds time to be a surgeon, lays out what’s actually happening, how it works, and—most importantly—what it means.

⭕️ NEW: An Al Jazeera investigation finds that Israel has used U.S.-supplied thermal and thermobaric weapons in Gaza that burn at up to 3,500°C, leaving no remains of victims. Gaza’s Civil Defence documented 2,842 Palestinians who effectively “evaporated” since October 2023, identified through forensic cross-checking at strike sites where only blood spray or small tissue fragments were found. Experts link the disappearances to munitions such as MK-84 bombs and GBU-39 glide bombs, whose heat and pressure vaporize bodies. Legal experts say the use of indiscriminate weapons constitutes war crimes and implicates Israel’s Western suppliers, as killings continued despite provisional measures from the International Court of Justice and an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Thermobaric bombs dropped on Gaza which create temperatures up to 3,000 Celsius and are supposed to be banned under international law were used to vaporise nearly 3,000 Palestinians. Vaporise. We're dealing with world-historical evil