LuLu

1/9 🧵Iran's military recently released a video threatening the "complete and utter annihilation" of the $30 billion OpenAI Stargate data center being built in Abu Dhabi. My @newyorker investigation with @andrewmarantz into Sam Altman and OpenAI helps explain how we got here—and the geopolitical entanglements at the heart of OpenAI's expansion into the Gulf. Thread below, read in full here for much more: newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…

Today Meta started removing ads from lawyers looking for clients who have been harmed by social media while they were under age 18, according to Axios.

Applebaum: Trump is listening to Putin. He is getting information about NATO only from his speeches. He is not looking at American history — which he doesn't know — nor at what's actually happening on the ground. 1/

Peak economist brain.

If sanctions on Russian oil have been lifted because of the war in the Middle East, will the U.S. sanctions be reimposed now that there is a ceasefire? I think that an answer to this question will expose the reason for lifting sanctions in the first place. We just need to wait and see. In my view, Russia played the Americans again – played the President of the United States. The Russians lied about the role their oil supplies played in keeping oil markets stable. If the U.S. reimposes sanctions, that would be fair. But if it doesn’t… We heard that Russia wanted Americans to buy certain energy assets in Europe belonging to Lukoil. I ask myself, “If I want to sell sanctioned energy assets, what do I do?” I come up with a scheme to lift sanctions. How else could I sell it? From an interview with Rai Radio 1 (3/3).

🚨 “Vance doesn’t participate in negotiations; if he did, he would have a better understanding of what this so-called ‘just a patch of land’ really means,” Zelenskyy responded to JD Vance. CONTEXT: U.S. Vice President JD Vance claims Russia and Ukraine are prolonging the conflict over a negligible portion of territory, questioning if it is “worth losing hundreds of thousands of additional Russian and Ukrainian young men”, and criticised Ukrainian President Zelensky's "scandalous" comments about Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. RESPONSE: The Vice President (Vance), with all due respect, doesn't participate in negotiations between the United States, Ukraine, and Russia. And I think if he and other officials were involved, they’d have a better understanding of what this so-called ‘just a patch of land’ really means - what is actually Ukraine’s sovereign territory, critically important for security, with strong defensive structures and fortifications, and home to nearly 200,000 people. And understanding that Russia's goal from the start of the occupation, the first occupations, this goal has always been there (to get that land) in one form or another, in one order or another, right? And so we understand what the occupation of the East actually means. It's an opportunity to prepare a staging ground, you could say, for future offensive actions. So before doing anything, you need to know the details and have detailed security guarantees. Yes, we're talking about strong security guarantees, but right now we simply don't have them. Ukraine just doesn't have the security guarantees to discuss other steps. And of course, every square meter of our land is Ukrainian land. It is not— with all due respect to any of our partners—definitely not theirs.

People who don’t care about cops beaten on the Capitol steps for trumps lies also don’t care about US soldiers killed in Iran for Trump’s lies.

We cannot simply speak about withdrawing from Donbas as a matter of compromise. Our withdrawal from Donbas would open up opportunities for the Russian Federation to occupy our most fortified territories without losses. Some people say it would take a year to a year and a half to build new fortifications. But everyone forgets: first and foremost, that is a year and a half. And even if it were less, fortifications in an open field are a completely different matter from those in urban areas. They can never provide equally strong protection. A withdrawal would give the Russian Federation room for large-scale maneuver. They could advance either toward Kharkiv or toward Dnipro, destroying our cities. And two major cities would be at risk – cities that, incidentally, generate a significant share of our GDP. So many people have died there… The morale of our army would certainly decline. There would undoubtedly be a rift in society. The army – which would surely not support such steps – on one side, and society on the other. And division within society is precisely what Putin is aiming for. Moreover, there are currently 200,000 people living in the territories of Donbas that we are defending. Withdrawal does not mean preserving anything. You leave, and without any guarantees, you risk losing everything. And that is a major risk. From an interview with Rai Radio 1 (2/3).

🚨LEVER TIME: He once worked in the tech industry, then he passed landmark AI regulation - now he's a target of retribution. How tech oligarchs aim to buy a congressional election, destroy a lawmaker's career & send a message of intimidation to every other politician in America.

ICE deports U.S. citizen to Mexico—racially profiled driving to work. Agents refused to look at his birth certificate or social security card—or even medical records proving born in U.S. hospital. Then they threatened him with 5 years in prison for fraud—accusing him of lying to federal officers about his citizenship. Brian Morales was born in Denver, Colorado—he was detained as part of a construction crew in Fredericksburg, Texas. ICE deported him just days later to a state in Mexico that he had never been to—far away from even distant relatives. Lidia Terrazas is a National Correspondent for N+ Univision—their flagship news network.

They should’ve never received any bailout money

The U.S. spends far more on healthcare than other rich countries. $15,000 per person (almost double), 18% of GDP (nearly twice as high), and healthcare inflation is 7% (roughly double others). Yet outcomes are worse. Life expectancy is lower, infant & maternal mortality higher, and chronic disease like diabetes and heart disease higher. Canada with single payer has far lower costs than the US, and even than Germany & Switzerland, and provides better, universal coverage. Most important, in an AI world, people's healthcare must not be dependent on their job. Every doctor should be in network. Medicare for All is needed for our time. It is a moral and economic imperative.

I try to avoid watching Hegseth, because I hate that our secretary of defense is such an embarrassment. But I had an interview scheduled at the time of his remarks this morning, which the station carried. The juvenile braggadocio, the brazen lying, the unctuous piety--sickening.

Agree. Why did Trump threaten Denmark and Canada?

A recently developed Defense Department program was meant to reduce civilian harm during military operations. But months before the Iran war, the mission was dissolved as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made “lethality” a top priority. propublica.org/article/trump-…

The self-proclaimed “President of Peace” who started a war in the Middle East wants to register 18-year-old boys for the same national military duty he shirked on five occasions. trib.al/pMFplap

Ukraine, Hungary, lifting sanctions, etc. I defy anyone to find rationales for the Trump admin's loyalty to Putin's and Russian agendas that have anything to do with promoting US national interests, long or short. They don't even try to hide it anymore.

Trump's pardon attorney Ed Martin argued in a wild new legal filing that the misconduct charges against him, stemming from threatening emails he sent to Georgetown Law, are an unconstitutional attack on the president's authority. Martin faces potential sanctions or disbarment through the ethics case. democracydocket.com/news-alerts/tr…

The City of Festus, MO canceled their Council meeting for tonight following last night's election whereby citizens voted out of office every single member who voted for the data center there that the people did not want. Micro to macro, that is how we hold them accountable.

This is what it looks like when you’re critically out of your depth, yet still trying to speak about things you have absolutely no understanding of -- things you neither care about nor even grasp, because they lie far beyond the horizon of your knowledge and your thinking. Go ask those questions to your Russian counterparts whether they should keep grinding hundreds of thousands more of their own people into a bloody pulp over a few square kilometers of territory. And no -- you are not smarter than the Ukrainians who have been fighting for years over those “few square kilometers” in Donbas. It means nothing to you but for people here on the ground, the Sloviansk–Kramatorsk area is the largest defensive stronghold, fortified and prepared for battle for over a decade, and one the Russians have been trying to break for just as long, including four years of full-scale war. What looks like a stupid inconvenience to your boss, something standing in the way of what he imagines will be profitable deals with the Kremlin, is, for Ukraine, the main defensive line protecting the country’s heartland from a deeper breakthrough. Ukrainians refuse to surrender it not because they are less clever than JD Vance, but because they understand exactly what the consequences would be and what the word of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump is worth. And that’s not even getting into the fact that this is the homeland of hundreds of thousands of people, their homes, their land, which they would be forced to abandon. It’s about abandoning our own people and their hopes, about a nation and its sovereignty, things that are often absent from this kind of discussion. You see, people here in Ukraine are dealing with matters far more serious and consequential than posturing in front of TV cameras, talk this delusional arrogant BS, and acting as a rally agitator for a corrupt authoritarian in Central Europe that your boss likes very much.