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A prime mover behind the Shirion Collective, a conspiracy-minded, pro-Israel disinformation network seeking to shape public opinion about the Gaza conflict in the US, Australia and the UK, is a tech entrepreneur named Daniel Linden living in Florida who co-wrote a guidebook for OnlyFans users, the Guardian can reveal.

Heidi Beirich, co-founder and chief strategy officer at the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said of Linden’s Shirion campaigning that his apparent “grifting” is common among extremists, “but his ideology seems very confused”.

The Shirion Collective is an online operation that since late 2023 has appeared on platforms including X, Telegram and GoFundMe to coordinate the spread of pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian propaganda, and the harassment of pro-Palestinian protesters in the west.

The move attracted the attention of critics including Representative Ilhan Omar, who spoke out in Congress against Shirion’s screening of the footage to the University of California, Los Angeles protest encampment.

And since late last year, it has claimed to have developed an AI technology, Project Maccabee, whose goal it has described as “Hitting and creating AGI for the PROTECTION and survival of our people”, and “EXPOSING these putrid antisemites”.

On Amazon, Linden is credited as co-author of a Spanish-language ebook whose title translates as Master OnlyFans in just 7 days!, and whose blurb promises to show readers techniques to build “an account that will give you an average of 2,000 dollars a month”.

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A Panamanian court has acquitted all 28 people charged with money laundering in connection with the Panama Papers scandal, concluding a trial that began in April.The secret financial documents were leaked in 2016, revealing how some of the world’s richest and most powerful people use tax havens to hide their wealth.Among those exonerated were Jurgen Mossack and the late Ramon Fonseca, founder of Mossack Fonseca, the defunct law firm at the centre of the scandal.Judge Baloisa Marquinez said the evidence considered by the court was “not sufficient” to determine the criminal responsibility of the defendants.During the trial, the prosecution sought the maximum sentence of 12 years for money laundering for both Mr Mossack and Mr Fonseca, who died in hospital in May.Both Mr Mossack and Mr Fonseca denied they, their firm or their employees had acted illegally.The trial, which took place in Panama City, lasted 85 hours, took testimony from 27 witnesses and considered over 50 pieces of documentary evidence, according to local news reports.

After an extended period of deliberation, the judge said evidence collected from Mossack Fonseca’s servers had not been gathered in line with due process and dropped all criminal charges against the defendants.The biggest data leak in history, the Panama Papers, saw 11 million documents released to the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung and shared with an international team of journalists.In 2017, Mossack Fonseca said the firm had been the victim of a computer hack and that the information leaked was being misrepresented.Foreign Secretary David Cameron, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and Argentinian football star Lionel Messi were among those whose affairs came under scrutiny following the leak.In total the data revealed links to 12 current or former heads of state and government, including dictators accused of embezzling money from their own countries.

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The judge noted that other evidence in the Panama Papers case “was not sufficient and conclusive to determine the criminal responsibility of the accused.”

“We feel satisfied in the midst of mixed emotions, because many lives were affected along the way,” Guillermina Mc Donald, who was the defense attorney for Mossack and Fonseca, told The Associated Press.

Judge Balaoisa Marquínez had decided to combine the Panama Papers case with another known as “Operation Car Wash,” a major anti-corruption investigation that began in Brazil.

On Friday, she ruled that in the car wash case, “it was not possible to determine the entry of money from illicit sources, coming from Brazil, into the Panamanian financial system with the purpose of hiding, concealing, disguising or helping to evade the legal consequences of the preceding crime.”

The investigation in Brazil began in 2014, with the Mossack & Fonseca firm later coming under scrutiny after 11 million financial documents tied to the company were leaked.

The repercussions of the leak were widespread: it led to the resignation of a prime minister in Iceland and brought scrutiny to now former leaders of Argentina and Ukraine, Chinese politicians and Russian President Vladimir Putin, among others.

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The Biden administration said this week that it opposed gender-affirming surgery for minors, the most explicit statement to date on the subject from a president who has been a staunch supporter of transgender rights.

The White House announcement was sent to The New York Times on Wednesday in response to an article reporting that staff in the office of Adm. Rachel Levine, an assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, had urged an influential international transgender health organization to remove age minimums for surgery from its treatment guidelines for minors.

Levine shared her view with her staff that publishing the proposed lower ages for gender transition surgeries was not supported by science or research, and could lead to an onslaught of attacks on the transgender community,” an H.H.S.

The Texas Supreme Court on Friday upheld a state law banning all gender-affirming medical treatment for minors.

The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to hear a challenge — brought in part by the Biden administration — to a Tennessee law that bans treatments including puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgery for transgender minors.

In contrast, Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, announced a plan in a video posted in 2023 on Truth Social to pass a federal law banning all gender-affirming care for minors, which he described as “child sexual mutilation.”

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It was the armoured vehicles circling the Plaza Murillo - the normally tranquil central square in historic downtown La Paz – that initially set Bolivians on edge on Wednesday afternoon.

By 2.30pm, a small tank was repeatedly ramming the gates of the neoclassical building known as Palacio Quemado until troops forced their way in and, in an extraordinary scene, the coup leader – disgruntled former army chief Juan José Zuñiga – faced off against the president, Luis Arce.

It lasted just three hours, during which time Arce rallied Bolivians to “mobilise” to defend democracy, apparently defused the mutiny in a one-on-one confrontation and appointed a new military command which ordered mutinous troops back to their barracks.

Just before he was detained on Wednesday, the alleged plotter Zuñiga sowed seeds of doubt, telling journalists – without providing evidence – that Arce had ordered him to stage a sham coup in a bid to boost the president’s flagging popularity.

In Arce’s defence, Deisy Choque, a legislator for the governing Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party, warned that the coup might have been successful “had it not been for the position taken by the president, the ministers and Bolivian society as a whole in immediately repudiating these actions”.

Amid plummeting gas exports and dwindling foreign reserves, there are growing protests over rising food prices and the scarcity of fuel and US dollars, as well as deep divisions within his political party.

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When Mr. Duterte left office, his administration said 6,252 people had been killed by security forces — all described by officials as “drug suspects.” Rights groups say the overall death toll stands at roughly 30,000.

Mr. Duterte is unlikely to face any consequences from the congressional hearings; this week he was asked to testify before the panel but through a spokesman declined to do so, invoking his constitutional right against self-incrimination.

That has left many looking overseas, to the International Criminal Court, which is investigating the drug war and is expected to be nearing some action against Mr. Duterte.

Mr. Duterte burnished his law-and-order credentials as the mayor of Davao, a city in the south where hundreds are thought to have been killed by gunmen linked to the authorities, acts that the I.C.C.

On a recent Thursday, Dr. Fortun was trying to piece together what could have happened to Jay-Ar Jumola, a 21-year-old construction worker killed by unidentified men in an alleyway in the city of Navotas in June 2019.

He was found with masking tape around his head and a sign on his body that said, “Don’t imitate me, I’m a drug pusher.” Nearly five years later, Angelo Ocdin, 28, was shot in the back by four men in Manila’s Tondo district.

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As negotiations to end the long legal brawl between Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, and the United States reached a critical point this spring, prosecutors presented his lawyers with a choice so madcap that a person involved thought it sounded like a line from a Monty Python movie.

In April, a lawyer with the Justice Department’s national security division broke the impasse with a sly workaround: How about an American courtroom that wasn’t actually inside mainland America?

By early 2024, leaders in Australia, including Kevin Rudd, the ambassador to the United States, and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, began pressuring their American counterparts to reach a deal — not so much out of solidarity with Mr. Assange, or support for his actions, but because he had spent so much time in captivity.

But after a short period of internal discussions, senior officials rejected that approach, drafting a somewhat tougher counteroffer: Mr. Assange would plead to a single felony count, conspiracy to obtain and disseminate national defense information, a more serious offense that encompassed his interactions with Ms. Manning.

Instead, his initial refusal to plead guilty to a felony was rooted in his reluctance to appear in an American courtroom, out of fear of being detained indefinitely or physically attacked in the United States, Ms. Robinson said in the TV interview.

Nick Vamos, the former head of extradition for the Crown Prosecution Service, which is responsible for bringing criminal cases in England and Wales, believes the ruling might have “triggered” an acceleration of the plea deal.

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The Joint Program Executive Office Armaments & Ammunition says the MK-84 bomb, which the US used extensively in the Gulf War from 1990-1991, has a blast and fragmentation mechanism and is ideally suited for strikes on “buildings, rail yards, and lines of communication.”

“The use of 2,000-pound bombs in an area as densely populated as Gaza means it will take decades for communities to recover,” John Chappell, an advisor on legal and policy issues at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, previously told CNN.

Tom Karako, a weapons expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the agency that this clearly demonstrated “a substantial level of support from the United States for our Israeli allies.”

While the full extent of US weapons shipments to Israel remains unclear, a senior Biden administration official recently confirmed that the US has delivered $6.5 billion in security assistance since October 7.

But Biden is yet to take any further action to condition military aid deliveries, and the latest Reuters report on shipment details suggests there has been little reduction in the amount being delivered to Israel.

Tensions have also been brewing between Israel and the US in spite of the continuing aid deliveries, with Biden recently saying that there was “every reason” for people to think Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was prolonging the war in Gaza to stay in power.

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Attempts to flee the country are expected to increase after Ukraine’s recent adoption of new sweeping mobilisation measures, which allow the military to call up more soldiers and impose stricter penalties for draft evasion.

Ukraine has intensified its efforts to stop people fleeing across borders and evading the draft, highlighted by Zelenskiy’s dismissal of all regional military recruitment chiefs in April.

The detailed instructions outlined two escape pathways: one involved crossing the Moldovan border using a fake passport, while the other option would list Andrei as an artist, a category occasionally permitted to exit the country.

There are no exact figures for how many men are hiding or planning to leave, but in big cities Telegram channels with thousands of members have sprung up where users report sightings of state representatives to help others avoid them.

While overall support for the country’s troops remain high and polls show that there is still a considerable number of men willing to be mobilised, Ukraine’s conscription drive risks dividing Ukrainian society, already plagued by war fatigue.

Standing outside a cafe in Kyiv, leaning on a crutch, Roman, who was discharged from service after a shell hit his right leg, expressed his disappointment when hearing stories of men hiding or attempting to flee the country.

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You can transform it from a sleek work laptop to a decent gaming machine in two minutes flat, one which charges with the world’s first 180W USB-C power adapter.

The product gave me multiple Blue Screens of Death, glitched, felt flimsy in places, and ran hotter and louder than its performance would suggest.

I’m happy to say I’ve only seen the computer fail once during that entire month — an “It looks like Windows didn’t load correctly” error I haven’t been able to reproduce.

We even figured out my mystery issue where the excellent 2560 x 1600 screen would suddenly seem to wash out — that’s due to AMD’s Vari-Bright setting, which attempts to save battery when the integrated GPU is in command.

Despite this replacement coming with a slightly weaker 7840HS, I’ve measured 100.8°C at peak while playing a game — and as high as 92.5°C one day when I was just writing a story in a web browser.

After a month, I’ve decided I could live with the lid flex and the uneven surfaces created by Framework’s modular spacers and touchpad.

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In communications with a federal confidential informant, the pair allegedly planned to “coordinate to get multiple [substations] at the same time.” Clendaniel pleaded guilty to conspiring to damage or destroy electrical facilities in May of this year.

But in a court filing, the ACLU attorneys say Russell has “reason to believe” that the government “intercepted his communications” and subjected him to a warrantless “backdoor search” by querying the Section 702 databases.

And less than a month after that initial query, we disrupted that US person who, it turned out, had researched and identified critical infrastructure sites in the US and acquired the means to conduct an attack.” The defense’s motion to compel the federal government to provide notice of use of Section 702 surveillance of Russell includes both the Politico report and Wray’s speech as exhibits.

The ACLU’s response, filed this Monday, notes that the government “does not dispute that Mr. Russell was subject to warrantless surveillance under Section 702” but instead claims it has no legal obligation to turn over FISA notice in this instance.

Legislators’ attempts to rein in the controversial surveillance authority failed, and multiple amendments requiring the FBI to obtain warrants to search or access Americans’ communications under Section 702 were voted down.

“Especially as recently expanded and reauthorized by Congress, this spying authority could be further abused by a future administration against political opponents, protest movements, and civil society organizations, as well as racial and religious minorities, abortion providers, and LGBTQ people.”

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A US soldier has been charged with the kidnapping and rape of a teenage girl in Okinawa, a Japanese island chain that hosts the region’s largest American military base.

The case is likely to stoke the long-standing local opposition to US military presence - the islands are home to more than half of the 54,000 US soldiers serving in Japan.

The anger has also been fuelled by sexual assault cases - one of the most high-profile was in 1995, when a 12-year-old girl was raped by three US service personnel, sparking months-long protests.

The heavy American presence is reflected in the malls, shops and restaurants that serve steak, burgers, tacos and root beer floats across the island chain.

The case led to curfews for US troops all over Japan.There have been efforts to move the US bases to less populated parts of Okinawa, but locals want them removed altogether.Experts, however, say Japan’s miliatry alliance with the US is too strong for that to happen.

And they say Tokyo needs Washington given the challenges it faces, be it China’s growing claims over disputed waters and islands, or North Korea’s barrage of missile tests.

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Players looking forward to Obsidian Entertainment’s next fantasy role-playing game (RPG) will experience some variety in the world that they explore.

Patel says that the “target” for the overall experience is comparable to Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire, a top-down RPG from Obsidian that was released back in 2018, though Patel adds that there’s a lot of “tonal variety” depending on the exact side quest or section of the main path players are on.

Giatta is a magic-wielding Ocean Human, Kai is a brawling Coastal Aumaua, Marius is a Mountain Dwarf ranger, and Yatzli is a spell-slinging Hearth Orlan.

I’ve been interested in Avowed since it was first announced all the way back in 2020 simply by dint of it being an Obsidian Entertainment RPG.

As the developers have shared more details, such as revealing the third-person mode, that interest has only steadily grown.

On that note, we do really need a release date for this — as well as Bethesda Softworks and MachineGames’ Indiana Jones and the Great Circle — soon.

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Standing in a courtyard framed by the white walls of one of Marseille’s Armenian churches, Sabrina Agresti-Roubache, France’s secretary of state tasked with citizenship, took a deep breath, choosing her words carefully as she addressed a voter who had admitted she was considering switching allegiances to the far right.

Agresti-Roubache, born to a family with Algerian roots, led with the heart, describing how concerns over the snap parliamentary election results had left her elderly mother “in tears” daily.

It was a hint of the kind of conversations playing out across France as the centrist alliance of Emmanuel Macron, the French president, makes a last-ditch effort to shore up votes before elections in which the far right is expected to win.

As Marine Le Pen said she expects her RN party to win an absolute majority, Macron has faced growing heat among his allies over his shock decision to call a snap election.

“There is a very strong sense of worry, rage and fatigue,” a former prime minister for Macron, Édouard Philippe, who leads an allied party, told France’s Inter radio on Wednesday.

On Thursday the basketball superstar Victor Wembanyama, who plays for the San Antonio Spurs, became the latest to weigh in, telling reporters: “Of course, political choices are personal, but for me it is important to keep a distance from extremes, they are not the direction to take for a country like ours.”

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“Since the rise of large language models like ChatGPT there have been lots of anecdotal reports about students submitting AI-generated work as their exam assignments and getting good grades.

His team created over 30 fake psychology student accounts and used them to submit ChatGPT-4-produced answers to examination questions.

The anecdotal reports were true—the AI use went largely undetected, and, on average, ChatGPT scored better than human students.

Scarfe’s team submitted AI-generated work in five undergraduate modules, covering classes needed during all three years of study for a bachelor’s degree in psychology.

Shorter submissions were prepared simply by copy-pasting the examination questions into ChatGPT-4 along with a prompt to keep the answer under 160 words.

Turnitin’s system, on the other hand, was advertised as detecting 97 percent of ChatGPT and GPT-3 authored writing in a lab with only one false positive in a hundred attempts.

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Microsoft AI boss Mustafa Suleyman incorrectly believes that the moment you publish anything on the open web, it becomes “freeware” that anyone can freely copy and use.

When CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin asked him whether “AI companies have effectively stolen the world’s IP,” he said:

That certainly hasn’t kept many AI companies from claiming that training on copyrighted content is “fair use,” but most haven’t been as brazen as Suleyman when talking about it.

Speaking of brazen, he’s got a choice quote about the purpose of humanity shortly after his “fair use” remark:

Suleyman does seem to think there’s something to the robots.txt idea — that specifying which bots can’t scrape a particular website within a text file might keep people from taking its content.

Disclosure: Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company, has a technology and content deal with OpenAI.

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A Chinese woman who tried to shield a Japanese mother and her child from a knife attack has died.Hu Youping was working as a school bus attendant in Suzhou city when a man attacked a Japanese woman and her child at a bus stop outside a Japanese school.She suffered serious injuries while trying to restrain him.Tributes for her have poured out online and the local government has said she will be given the title of “Righteous and Courageous Role Model”.

The Japanese embassy in China also lowered its flag to half-mast to honour Ms Hu.

It followed another stabbing earlier this month, which injured four US university instructors at a park in Jilin, in China’s north-east.

Chinese state newspaper Global Times ran an editorial on Friday paying tribute to Ms Hu, where it also claimed that “China is undoubtedly still one of the safest countries in the world”.Separately, the newspaper reported that Weibo had removed 759 posts that “incited nationalist sentiment” following the attack.

These posts contained “extreme opinions” that “promoted group hatred and even applauded criminal behaviour in the name of patriotism”.The stabbing in Suzhou sparked concern among the local Japanese community and led the embassy to issue a safety alert warning its citizens living in China to take precautions while they are out.China’s foreign ministry said the incident was “regrettable” and that it will “continue to take effective measures to earnestly protect the safety of all foreigners in China”.China has seen a spate of knife attacks in the past year.

In May, two people were killed and 10 others injured in such an attack at a primary school in the southern Jiangxi province.

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Like in past versions of the survey, battery-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles performed worse than their gas equivalents in just about every repair category measured by JD Power.

“Owners of cutting edge, tech-filled BEVs and PHEVs are experiencing problems that are of a severity level high enough for them to take their new vehicle into the dealership at a rate three times higher than that of gas-powered vehicle owners,” Frank Hanley, senior director of auto benchmarking at JD Power, said in a statement.

JD Power attributes this to major design changes in Teslas, such as the removal of traditional feature controls like turn signal and wiper stalks.

And when car owners try to find relief from terrible native software experiences by mirroring their smartphones, they run into even more obstacles.

Someone who buys a Ram truck every few years is going to report way fewer problems with their experience than someone who is taking a risk on a new brand — or even a new powertrain.

We’re in the midst of a huge shift from traditional gas-powered vehicles to high-powered computers that run on enormous batteries.

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Sheinbaum highlighted González’s experience in renewable energy and in handling finances, an area that will prove useful in the department’s relationship with state-run companies like oil giant Pemex and the Federal Electricity Commission.

Buenrostro, who served for more than two decades in government tax, treasury and economic agencies, was described by the future president as an “incorruptible woman” with 28 years of experience in public administration.

Edna Elena Vega Rangel, who also previously worked for the Mexico City government, will head the secretary of agrarian, territorial, and urban development.

The day after the June 2 election, Sheinbaum confirmed that Finance Minister Rogelio Ramírez de la O had accepted to continue in his role, in an effort to calm investors after the country faced a sudden meltdown in the stock and currency markets.

Among the possible picks for the job is Omar García Harfuch, the former chief of Mexico City’s police who was present at Sheinbaum’s meeting with the White House envoy, Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, two weeks ago.

Last week Sheinbaum announced her first Cabinet picks, presenting an even gender distribution, as well as a heavy presence from academia and her prior administration as Mexico City’s mayor.

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BNEI BRAK, Israel (AP) — Hundreds of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men blocked a major highway in central Israel for two hours on Thursday to protest a recent Supreme Court decision ordering young religious men to enlist for military service.

But politically powerful ultra-Orthodox parties have won draft exemptions for their followers that allow them instead to study in religious seminaries.

This long-standing arrangement has bred widespread resentment among the broader public — a sentiment that has grown stronger during the eight-month war against Hamas in Gaza.

Over 600 soldiers have been killed, and tens of thousands of reservists have been activated, straining careers, businesses and family lives.

Many fear that greater contact with secular society through the military will distance adherents from strict observance of the faith.

The Supreme Court this week ordered the government to begin drafting ultra-Orthodox men, saying the system of exemptions is unequal.

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