The Central Bank's key rate has stood at a record-high 21% since October 2024.

AMD's komende Radeon RX 9070-videokaarten gaan 'begin maart' in de verkoop. Dat bevestigt ceo Lisa Su tijdens de bespreking van AMD's kwartaalcijfers. Een AMD-topman noemde eerder al een release ergens in maart, maar Su maakt dat nu concreter.

Temperatures at the north pole soared more than 20C above average on Sunday, crossing the threshold for ice to melt. From a report: Temperatures north of Svalbard in Norway had already risen to 18C hotter than the 1991-2020 average on Saturday, according to models from weather agencies in Europe and the US, with actual temperatures close to ice's melting point of 0C.

By Sunday, the temperature anomaly had risen to more than 20C. "This was a very extreme winter warming event," said Mika Rantanen, a scientist at the Finnish Meteorological Institute. "Probably not the most extreme ever observed, but still at the upper edge of what can happen in the Arctic." Burning fossil fuels has heated the planet by about 1.3C since preindustrial times, but the poles are warming much faster as reflective sea ice melts. The increase in average temperatures has driven an increase in fiercely hot summers and unsettlingly mild winters.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Egypte en Jordanië wijzen soortgelijke voorstellen al decennia af, omdat ze Palestijnen ten diepste wantrouwen en minachten en omdat hun regimes gebaat zijn bij een doorlopend Israëlisch-Paletijns conflict. Maar Jordanië en Egypte ontvangen miljarden dollars aan Amerikaanse bijstand, dus Trump heeft wel degelijk de nodige drukmiddelen. Zijn voorstel is om daar 1 tot 12 luxe locaties te bouwen waar Gazanen een nieuw leven op kunnen bouwen, terwijl Amerika de komende drie jaar de fundering van Gaza ontdoet van tunnelnetwerken en al het puin ruimt zodat er een "Riviera voor de wereldbevolking" gebouwd kan worden. Ondertussen komende de wereldwijde reacties hierop neer:

Egypte: wijst plan tot verplaatsing van Gazaanse bevolking (naar voornamelijk Egypte) af.
Jordanië: heeft formeel nog niet gereageerd, maar gezien de twee landen al jaren met 1 stem spreken, en dat gisteren nog benadrukten, zal Jordanië's reactie waarschijnlijk hetzelfde als die van Egypte zijn.
Hamas: noemt plan "belachelijk en absurd", kan "de hele regio ontsteken", in tegenstelling tot 7 oktober natuurlijk.
Abbas' Palestijnse Autoriteit: wijst plan af, noemt "Palestijnse rechten niet aan onderhandeling onderhevig".
Houthi's: Trumps plan is "Amerikaanse arrogantie", zullen Egypte en Jordanië "bijstaan indien nodig".
Saoedi-Arabië: verwerpt plan categorisch, noemt Palestijnse staatsvorming een voorwaarde voor de normalisering van relaties met Israël.
VN-SecGen Guterres die onder geen enkele omstandigheden ook maar enig spreekrecht heeft: noemt het plan tot verplaatsing "etnische zuivering".
Frankrijk (?): wijst plan af, wil "geen derde staat met gezag over Gaza".
Engeland (?): neemt afstand van het plan, wil dat Gazanen terugkeren naar Gazaanse woonplaats.
Spanje en Duitsland (?): tegen.
China: verwerpt verhuizingsplan.
Nu.nl en 'experts': tegen.
Nee-DDR-Land: "Plan onbespreekbaar, Gaza is voor de Gazanen."
Israëlische kolonisten: V O O R.

De bijsluiter van Trumps plan door zijn Gaza-hoofdonderhandelaar

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De premier van Nederland namens bijna alle Nederlandsers

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KOPENHAGEN (ANP) - Het Deense scheepvaartconcern Maersk gaat voor maximaal 14,4 miljard Deense kroon aan eigen aandelen inkopen, omgerekend bijna 2 miljard euro. Dat heeft het bedrijf woensdag bekendgemaakt. Het besluit volgt op een winstgevend jaar voor het bedrijf, als gevolg van de hogere vrachttarieven door aanhoudende onrust in de Rode Zee.

De door Iran gesteunde Jemenitische Houthi's vielen schepen in de Rode Zee aan als steun voor Hamas in de oorlog met Israël. Vorige maand besloten de Houthi's hun aanvallen te beperken, nadat een staakt-het-vuren tussen Hamas en Israël was ingegaan.

Maersk presenteert donderdag de jaarresultaten. Het afgelopen jaar heeft het scheepvaartconcern meerdere keren de winstverwachting verhoogd. Aanleiding daarvoor was dat het in Kopenhagen gevestigde Maersk verwachtte dat de onrust in de Rode Zee nog even zou voortduren. Door de grote vraag naar containerschepen en de langere vaarroute via zuidelijk Afrika stijgen de tarieven voor zeevrachtvervoer en dat stuwt de winstgevendheid van rederijen als Maersk.

Employees working for the agency now known as DOGE have been ordered to stop using Slack while government lawyers attempt to transition the agency to one that is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, 404 Media has learned.

“Good morning, everyone! As a reminder, please refrain from using Slack at the moment while our various general counsels figure out the best way to handle the records migration to our new EOP [Executive Office of the President] component,” a message seen by 404 Media reads. “Will update as soon as we have more information!”

Another message seen by 404 Media provides an update and asserts that the US Digital Service (which is now DOGE) will “split” from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). 

“I spoke to the DOGE team about Slack. Because of the USDS split from OMB, OMB is asking us to stop generating new slack messages starting now,” the message says. “We expect this to be a temporary pause, and we expect to continue having access to historical Slack material. We may have intermittent access as we go through this system transition so continue to use good data hygiene and backup any critical material. We will keep you updated.”

The messages indicate that, under Elon Musk’s leadership, DOGE is actively taking steps to make sure its communications and records are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, a records transparency law commonly used by journalists and lawyers to hold government accountable. Instead, DOGE is asserting that rather than reporting up through the Office of Management and Budget as the United States Digital Service did for years, it is reporting through the Executive Office of the President and to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. Under OMB, it was generally subject to FOIA. Under the White House Chief of Staff, records it creates are generally not subject to FOIA.

This would make DOGE a Presidential Records Act entity, meaning records it creates are not FOIAble until years after a president leaves office rather than a Federal Records Act entity, which would make its records FOIAble now. This is a very notable, but unsurprising move that federal records experts have been worried about since the issuance of Donald Trump’s executive order renaming the United States Digital Service—an agency of federal tech workers that was formed under the Obama administration—to the United States DOGE Service. That executive order specifically states that the renamed entity “shall be established in the Executive Office of the President,” and that the USDS administrator (Elon Musk) “shall report to the White House Chief of Staff.” The Dispatch, for example, wrote a very informative article about this could limit public scrutiny of DOGE and the “clever” executive order that did this.

Government experts 404 Media spoke to said the directive to not use Slack and the assertion that DOGE is now under the Executive Office of the President rather than OMB is not surprising but that it is very concerning, and that this assertion can be, will be, and is being legally challenged.

"Just changing the name alone under the Executive Order doesn't affect DOGE's recordkeeping status,” Jason R. Baron, professor at the University of Maryland and former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration told 404 Media in a phone call. “The administration apparently has made a determination that DOGE will be a presidential component subject to the Presidential Records Act. However, that will surely be challenged in the courts in connection with FOIA lawsuits. Under FOIA, it will be for the courts to decide whether under existing DOGE is acting more like a federal oversight agency or as a presidential component that solely advises the President.”

The Presidential Records Act was created in part to make it so that the president does not need to publish records about their decisions, advice, and considerations while they are president. But Barron said that the way DOGE is currently acting—going into agencies across the federal government and gutting or threatening to gut them—is not a presidential advice function, it is a cross-agency function. He suggested that a court will have to consider this in any lawsuit about DOGE’s status.

“DOGE staff certainly do not appear to be solely advising and assisting the President,” Baron said. “They appear to have taken actions in the real world that affect Treasury Department and USAID operations involving electronic systems. Whether those activities are deemed illegal or not under other laws, they are certainly actions beyond what a group of people who are solely advising and the president would do.”

Lauren Harper, the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy, wrote a blog post explaining that DOGE’s move to EOP was almost definitely an attempt to hide records, but that journalists should challenge this. “Does Musk think that placing DOGE within the government will make it easier to hide its records? If so, let’s prove that troubling assumption wrong.”

Harper told 404 Media that beyond not being governed by FOIA, in the Presidential Records Act, “there is a carveout for personal records that doesn’t exist in the Federal Records Act.”

“This means that the president and their staff get to decide if records are personal, which means, they can do whatever they want with them without consulting anybody,” she said. 

Both Harper and Baron stressed that any distinction over DOGE’s status matters only to records they themselves are creating, and that many of DOGE’s actions will remain FOIAble via other agencies. For example when DOGE employees email people at the Treasury Department, those records should be able to be obtained directly via the Treasury Department even if they are not available from DOGE. 

Already, DOGE has been subject to several lawsuits about its status within the government and what transparency laws it must abide by. The Congressional Research Service, a segment of the Library of Congress that analyzes changes to government, meanwhile published a paper about DOGE’s “early implementation,” which raised the question about what types of records would be available to the public: “Certain transparency statutes might apply to USDS, depending on its membership and implementation,” the paper says. “These statutes include the Freedom of Information Act, where members of the public can request agency information, and the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires public reporting and meetings for advisory committees where at least one nonfederal member is providing advice to the federal government. Will USDS and the DOGE effort involve nonfederal persons in advisory roles? What level of public and congressional information access is anticipated?”

If there’s one thing I’d hoped people had learned going into the next four years of Donald Trump as president, it’s that spending lots of time online posting about what people in power are saying and doing is not going to accomplish anything. If anything, it’s exactly what they want.

Trump’s second presidential term has arrived amidst a new golden age for internet grifters, propagandists, and bad-faith hucksters of all stripes. The contours of this era of untruth have been flashing like neon signs for the past decade, constantly enticing us to engage with its impenetrable nonsense. Whether it’s gaslighting everyone who saw Elon Musk give two Nazi salutes during the inauguration or blaming the Los Angeles wildfires on the racist dog whistle of “DEI,” lies and absurdities now regularly flood our senses, having long outpaced the media’s capacity to filter them.

Many of my journalist colleagues have attempted to beat back the tide under banners like “fighting disinformation” and “accountability.” While these efforts are admirable, the past few years have changed my own internal calculus. Thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Hannah Arendt warned us that the point of this deluge is not to persuade, but to overwhelm and paralyze our capacity to act. More recently, researchers have found that the viral outrage disseminated on social media in response to these ridiculous claims actually reduces the effectiveness of collective action. The result is a media environment that keeps us in a state of debilitating fear and anger, endlessly reacting to our oppressors instead of organizing against them. 

To that end, the age of corporate social media has been a roaring success.

“The reality is you are oxygenating the things these people are saying even as you purport to debunk them,” Katherine Cross, a sociologist and author of Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix, told 404 Media. “Whether it’s [New York Times columnist] Ross Douthat providing a sane-washing gloss on Trump’s mania or people on social media vehemently disagreeing and dunking on it, they’re legitimizing it as part of the discourse.”

Cross’ book contains a meticulous catalog of social media sins which many people who follow and care about current events are probably guilty of—myself very much included. She documents how tech platforms encourage us, through their design affordances, to post and seethe and doomscroll into the void, always reacting and never acting.

But perhaps the greatest of these sins is convincing ourselves that posting is a form of political activism, when it is at best a coping mechanism—an individualist solution to problems that can only be solved by collective action. This, says Cross, is the primary way tech platforms atomize and alienate us, creating “a solipsism that says you are the main protagonist in a sea of NPCs.”

“Everything on social media is designed to make you think like that,” said Cross. “It’s all about you—your feed, your network, your friends.”

In the days since the inauguration, I’ve watched people on Bluesky and Instagram fall into these same old traps. My timeline is full of reactive hot takes and gotchas by people who still seem to think they can quote-dunk their way out of fascism—or who know they can’t, but simply can’t resist taking the bait. The media is more than willing to work up their appetites. Legacy news outlets cynically chase clicks (and ad dollars) by disseminating whatever sensational nonsense those in power are spewing. 

"For most people, social media gives you this sense that unless you care about everything, you care about nothing. You must try to swallow the world while it’s on fire"

This in turn fuels yet another round of online outrage, edgy takes, and screenshots exposing the “hypocrisy” of people who never cared about being seen as hypocrites, because that’s not the point. Even violent fantasies about putting billionaires to the guillotine are rendered inept in these online spaces—just another pressure release valve to harmlessly dissipate our rage instead of compelling ourselves to organize and act.

This is the opposite of what media, social or otherwise, is supposed to do. Of course it’s important to stay informed, and journalists can still provide the valuable information we need to take action. But this process has been short-circuited by tech platforms and a media environment built around seeking reaction for its own sake. Many Twitter refugees made a good choice in migrating from Musk’s X to Bluesky, carving out a new online space that is inhospitable to bigoted debate bros and time-wasting trolls. But in their enemies’ absence, many of these Left-leaning posters have just reverted to dunking on each other, preferring the catharsis of sectarian conflict over the hard work of organizing. 

Under this status quo, everything becomes a myopic contest of who can best exploit peoples’ anxieties to command their attention and energy. If we don’t learn how to extract ourselves from this loop, none of the information we gain will manifest as tangible action—and the people in charge prefer it that way.

It’s no surprise that tech billionaires like Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg have rushed to kiss the ring of the twice-ascendent Trump. The marriage of big tech and Trumpworld should make clear that Silicon Valley and authoritarians share the same goal: to crush dissent by keeping their would-be opponents spinning on an endless hamster wheel of reactive anger. And just like in the classic 1983 thriller WarGames, the only winning move is not to play.

That can be a tough pill to swallow when the internet is our main window into the world, and that world seems to be rapidly falling apart. We gaze into our phone-portals, paralyzed by the trance of the doomscroll, reacting and swiping from one news article and hot take to another. Authoritarians issue frightening proclamations that may or may not be legally enforceable, seizing our attention and energy and ensuring that the process will repeat, ad infinitum.

So what is the alternative? If we log off, what exactly are we supposed to do instead? How are we supposed to get information without constantly raising our antennae into the noxious cumulonimbus cloud of social media?

It isn’t quite as simple as “touch grass,” but it also sort of is.

Trusted information networks have existed since long before the internet and mass media. These networks are in every town and city, and at their core are real relationships between neighbors—not their online, parasocial simulacra. 

Here in New York City, in the week since the inauguration, I’ve seen large groups mobilize to defend migrants from anticipated ICE raids and provide warm food and winter clothes for the unhoused after the city closed shelters and abandoned people in sub-freezing temperatures. Similar efforts are underway in Chicago, where ICE reportedly arrested more than 100 people,  and in other cities where ICE has planned or attempted raids, with volunteers assigned to keep watch over key locations where migrants are most vulnerable. 

A few weeks earlier, residents created ad-hoc mutual aid distros in Los Angeles to provide food and essentials for those displaced by the wildfires. The coordinated efforts gave Angelenos a lifeline during the crisis, cutting through the false claims spreading on social media about looting and out-of-state fire trucks being stopped for “emissions testing.” Many mutual aid groups in Los Angeles have not just been helping people affected by the fires but have also focused on distributing information about how to learn about and resist ICE raids in Los Angeles. It is no surprise that some of the largest and most coordinated protests in the early days of Trump’s term have happened in Los Angeles, where thousands of anti-ICE protesters shut down the 101 highway and several streets in downtown Los Angeles Sunday. 

Some of these efforts were coordinated online over Discord and secure messaging apps, but all of them arose from existing networks of neighbors and community organizers, some of whom have been organizing for decades.

“For most people, social media gives you this sense that unless you care about everything, you care about nothing. You must try to swallow the world while it’s on fire,” said Cross. “But we didn’t evolve to be able to absorb this much info. It makes you devalue the work you can do in your community.”

It’s not that social media is fundamentally evil or bereft of any good qualities. Some of my best post-Twitter moments have been spent goofing around with mutuals on Bluesky, or waxing romantic about the joys of human creativity and art-making in an increasingly AI-infested world. But when it comes to addressing the problems we face, no amount of posting or passive info consumption is going to substitute the hard, unsexy work of organizing.

It’s a lesson the Extremely Online Left still hasn’t fully learned, failing where its political enemies succeed. Reactionary right-wing groups like the homophobic and transphobic Moms for Liberty—which seeks to ban books from LGBTQ and BIPOC authors under the guise of “parental rights”—have claimed political victories by seizing power one public school board and small town at a time. Other reactionaries have similarly managed to take their pet grievances about diversity and wokeness to the national level by moving from online outrage to on-the-ground community organizing. 

You can d­iscourse and quote-dunk and fact-check until you’re blue in the face, but at a certain point, you have to stop and decide what truth you believe in. The internet has conditioned us to constantly seek new information, as if becoming a sponge of bad news will eventually yield the final piece of a puzzle. But there is also such a thing as having enough information. As the internet continues to enshittify, maybe what we really need is to start trusting each other and our own collective sense of what is true and good.

We don’t need any more irony-poisoned hot takes or cathartic, irreverent snark. We need to collectively decide what kind of world we actually do want, and what we’re willing to do to achieve it.

Janus Rose is New York City-based journalist, educator and artist whose work explores the impacts of A.I. and technology on activists and marginalized communities. Previously a senior editor at VICE, she has been published in digital and print outlets including e-Flux Journal, DAZED Magazine, The New Yorker, and Al Jazeera.

In a post last Saturday, Substack writer Robert Hubbell provided a partial list and analysis of the situation unfolding within the US government, writing: "Speaking the truth about what is happening is difficult and unpleasant. Hearing the truth is also difficult and unpleasant. But the longer we fail to recognize the current situation for what it is—a slow-rolling coup attempt—the longer it will take for us to recover."

Major recent US coup developments covered by Hubbell are summarized below. In a follow-up post, Hubbell emphasized the responsibility and opportunity available to regular Americans, saying: "It is up to us. It always has been, and it always will be. Every generation faces a moment when it is called upon to redeem democracy from an existential threat. We must not bemoan the fact that we are playing our part in the long arc of redemption that has safely delivered us to this point. Our task is to serve as a bridge in the arc to the next generation." Developments of the Trump coup, version 2.0 (see references in Hubbell's Substack): - Elon Musk and DOGE infiltrators took over the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) by connecting private servers to the mainframe. Musk sent an unauthorized memo offering federal employees eight months of paid leave in exchange for resigning. - Musk and his team seized control of the US Treasury payments system - The channel through which all federal government funds are distributed. - The Acting US Attorney for D.C. fired 30 attorneys involved in prosecuting January 6 insurrectionists. - The FBI demanded the resignation of eight senior leaders responsible for cybersecurity and national security. - Trump freezes foreign assistance, dismantles USAID - Over a dozen FBI agents working on January 6 investigations were fired, and a full list of agents involved was requested. - Numerous government websites were taken offline to remove references to diversity, gender, and DEI. - The CDC website was heavily scrubbed, including pages on vaccines and gender-affirming care. - The Pentagon informed major media outlets like NBC, NYT, and NPR that they would be replaced by more right-wing outlets like NYPost, Breitbart, and OANN.

tez-guitar has added a photo to the pool:

江の島

We hebben de kapsalon uit Rotterdam, de Dubaireep uit Schiedam en nu heeft ook Streefkerk zijn eigen lekkernij: het broodje Koet. De pita, belegd met kipdöner, kaassoufflé, 'frietpatat' en een rijke hoeveelheid knoflooksaus. Broodje Koet is na een bezoek van influencer en 'snackspert' Eke Bosman viral gegaan. De vette hap is zo populair dat zelfs de populaire YouTubers de Bankzitters langs willen komen.