NicIng

Any views expressed are mine & RTs are not endorsements

[Christo Grozev @christogrozev]

German courts are already sharing investigation data with Gazprom (=FSB) lawyers. De facto, Germany is already doing Kremlin's intel work - using EU legal mechanisms Russia lacks.
And this before AfD even grabs power. What's going to happen after? Hand over the Ukrainians to RU?

[Kieran Maguire @KieranMaguire]

Chelsea’s new front of shirt sponsor Circle is currently subject to a criminal complaint in Wisconsin relating to stolen crypto coins.

Its Trustpilot score is 1.2 out of 5.

Critics say Crypto companies seek legitimacy and normalisation by sponsoring institutions held in high regard such as football clubs.

https://t.co/UEuIsp21oM

[Karen Piper @PiperK]

The Trump and Witkoff families are opening a bank in Florida. The investors in this bank are undisclosed. It will not have to follow FDIC rules.

I smell a money-laundering opportunity.

[NicIng @JsyNicIng]

@DamianHastie Have you said this to companies house?

[Damian Hastie @DamianHastie]

I kind of get the need for security and anonymity for a drone supplier but their own website show the names of those involved 🤷

[Liz Hoffman @lizrhoffman]

Jensen Huang: We're creating a new financial asset class

The lawyers: We're not creating a new financial asset class, please do not regulate this like a new financial asset class

SEC: got it

[Paul Powlesland @paulpowlesland]

In exquisite timing, local river guardians discovered two significant sewage discharges on the Roding today. The quantity & volume was so big that they were visibly polluting the river (& likely poisoning aquatic life) for hundreds of metres downstream.

Even worse, this stretch of the River at Wanstead Park is one of the most popular natural swimming & paddling spots in East London that will be very busy during the heatwave this week. This deluge of sewage is putting people’s lives (particularly paddling children) at risk. Perhaps @thameswater could use some of the million pound bonus they gave out to stop the sewage & warn local people instead?

[NicIng @JsyNicIng]

@db_maggi @Garnet_2203 What goes around comes around…

[Michael Thomas @curious_founder]

This week I found permits and satellite photos suggesting Amazon is backing what could be the largest gas power plant ever built in the US.

I just got off the phone with the company and confirmed they're behind it.

Amazon confirmed that it has acquired a site in Pecos County, Texas called GW Ranch, where it plans to build an AI data center campus powered by a 7.65 GW gas plant. It would initially be entirely disconnected from the Texas electric grid.

In January, GW Ranch received a permit from the state of Texas allowing the gas power plant to emit 33 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

If the project emitted that much CO2, it would be the largest single source of pollution in the United States—emitting more greenhouse gases than the country’s largest coal plant. It’s worth noting that companies rarely emit as much as their permits allow.

The paper trail linking Amazon to GW Ranch surfaced earlier this week when Amazon filed three construction permits with the state. The permits showed Amazon’s plans to build three data center buildings with construction beginning immediately.

Cleanview reviewed satellite imagery to look for the project and discovered that land clearing had begun at the site described in GW Ranch’s air permit records.

We reached out to Amazon and the company confirmed it had acquired the GW Ranch site and plans to buy power from the plant, which is being developed by Pacifico Energy.

Partnering with GW Ranch marks Amazon’s first major investment in an off-grid data center. In doing so, the company joins Microsoft, Google, and Meta who have all invested significantly in natural gas power this year.

Data center developers have announced nearly 60 behind-the-meter gas power projects since the beginning of 2025 with a combined capacity of 90 GW, according to Cleanview’s latest report.

Not all of these projects will be built, but in recent months a growing share of them have begun construction and signed key tenant deals.

Amazon’s project in West Texas is unlikely to be its last bet on large-scale natural gas power. Yesterday, the company confirmed that it is in talks with the developers of a 4.5 GW gas power plant in Homer City, Pennsylvania.

When the developers of the Homer City gas plant first announced their project, they said it would be the largest gas power plant in America.

Now it’s just one of many giga-scale power plants that have been proposed across the country.

[NicIng @JsyNicIng]

@EvanLuthra Anyone seen the old movie Fahrenheit 451? Exactly this 😳

[NicIng @JsyNicIng]

@chris_spencer04 @david_hollas Co house docs say relative lent money - what relative. Wife…oakeshott?

[Barbarian Herodotus @BBHerodotus]

After seeing a post on it yesterday, I’ve looked more deeply into Anthropic’s purchasing and destruction of millions of used books.

They spent tens of millions of dollars acquiring and destroying books to train their AI model, Claude.

They knew, from the beginning that it would be unpopular. They knew what they were doing, was wrong.

An internal memo from 2024 stated:

“Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.”

“We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”

Why used books?

Companies like Anthropic and Meta found it impractical to gain permission from authors and publishers to use their work.

So instead, they stole their work to train their product through mass purchases of used books and through pirating them from the internet.

The authors of these works, didn’t receive a dime for their efforts. These companies stole the hard won literary talent of others to train machines to replace the victims of their theft.

Anthropic cofounder Ben Mann personally downloaded countless books for this purpose from LibGen, a book pirating website.

When a new book piracy website debuted in 2022, Mann sent an email sharing the link with his employees stating: “just in time!!!”

Meta employees were wary about the piracy of books, with one engineer writing, “Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right.”

Anthropic purchased millions of books, in batches of tens of thousands from Better World Books and U.K.-based World of Books.

They then used a “hydraulic powered cutting machine” to slice off the spines of these books before scanning them. Finally, the remains of these books were picked up for recycling.

Feel free to use AI, it’s a free country.

But remember that, if you use Claude, that Anthropic has committed a great wrong, and they knew that they were doing it from the beginning.

Below is an image, from a court case, of a warehouse full of used books, that instead of being held and read by you and your children, have been destroyed forever.

AI is inevitable, but spend your money on the companies who do good, and do not knowingly commit evils.

May the most moral company win.

[Charlie D. Becker @charliedbecker]

I'm a second-generation bookseller. My family runs Houston's largest used & rare bookstore and I'm building an AI tool for used bookstores. We got hit by exactly these orders, including a single order for 70 obscure books that made us pause online sales entirely. So I dug in. I don't think this connects the way people want it to.

Every ingredient of the viral story is true. ISBNdb really does advertise sourcing books for AI companies. Anthropic really did destructively scan millions of books though they were mostly acquired through things like library deaccessions, not bookstore inventory. And booksellers really are getting bizarre bulk orders. But "rare" here isn't what you're picturing. It's The Insider's Guide to Metro Denver (1995) and how-to-use-WordPerfect 1991 manuals. Obscure, but often not precious.

When we combed through our orders, nearly every book bought from us was either unavailable on Amazon or listed there at 5, 10, 20x our price on the platform they were purchased on. And the shipments are going to FBA prep companies: which is what you do with a book you're about to resell, not one you're about to cut apart. There is more than circumstantial evidence that this is a well-funded company running algorithmic arbitrage, buying underpriced or out-of-stock books to relist on Amazon at markup. This evidence includes an official denial that they are selling to train AI but I don't want to mention them for several reasons. You can Google it.

That's more mundane than the shredder story. The actual risk is worse, though, because it's quieter: books that don't sell via FBA eventually get liquidated. If we really hold the last copies of some of these (and comparing platforms, it looks like we might) we're feeding them into a portal they may not come back from. No AI company required.

Everyone assumes the internet preserved everything. It didn't. Many of these books have almost no metadata anywhere, just a scattered listings across proprietary databases then nothing. That's what my project is for: building better bibliographic records for these books than exist anywhere else, so we at least have a map of what we stand to lose. So the Library of Alexandria is still burning, just more slowly, and kore from “who cares” than from some cinematic villain.

(I am open to being corrected.)

Full writeup: https://t.co/tHXMH0L3us

[NicIng @JsyNicIng]

@TomWinnifrith got it

[Benjamin Strick @BenDoBrown]

New investigation shows how Libya has become a weapons trafficking and training hub for the RSF, who are committing horrific acts in Sudan, with the backing of the UAE.

Extremely important work by @JCSteers @LHreports @sudanwarmonitor and Evident Media.

[JP Lindsley | Journalist @JPLindsley]

Belgium’s Russian Steel Loophole—

Belgium remains the EU’s largest importer of Russian steel slabs, using an exemption that allows deliveries to continue until September 2028 despite more than four years of sanctions. The trade supports two Belgian plants linked to Russian steel giant NLMK and protects local jobs, but it also channels revenue and an artificial cost advantage to a company controlled by Kremlin-linked billionaire Vladimir Lisin.

Brussels argues that sanctions should hurt Russia more than European workers, yet alternative suppliers already exist in countries such as India, Brazil and China.
https://t.co/6mC5vGk6pI

Get our daily insights: https://t.co/B67VPpa8Nk

[John Hemmings @JohnHemmings2]

Hikvision is part owned by the PRC & supplies 60% of UK public bodies w CCTV cameras. Cameras from Hikvision & Dahua are in 73% of local authorities, 35% of police forces, and 63% of schools in the UK. This is a huge problem which no one is talking about. https://t.co/wEJbOEBavB

[Alexander Stahel 🌻 @BurggrabenH]

I doubt the barefoot hike. I'm no fan of the Christopher Columbus complex, and I happen to admire elites who develop a country rather than exploit one. So let me explain what is actually going on here.

I did, among others, property across Eastern Europe during my years at Babcock & Brown, and I spent the better part of a decade fighting a court case in Romania against people who tried to defraud my land title. I won. And here is the lesson I paid for: the one thing that separates an investable Eastern Europe from an uninvestable one is European Union membership. It is the guardian of the rule of law in an otherwise wild East, the easiest place in the world to lose your money.

That is the lens through which I read what is happening on Sazan Island.

You see, there was a time when Western elites saw themselves as custodians of institutions, rules and the places they touched. That instinct is fading. What remains too often is the Columbus reflex: arrive by yacht, "discover" land that people already know perfectly well, and treat the rules as obstacles reserved for everyone else. And then have the wisdom to go on camera and brag about it. Jesus. No wonder Albanians are now on the streets in their thousands.

"We were on a friend's boat and stopped for a swim. That's how we found it. We swam to the island. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated."

What she "found" has been there for millions of years, in the Adriatic, not "the Mediterranean." It has a name. Sazan Island sits where the Adriatic meets the Ionian: a former military base, Italian and then Cold War, including a Soviet submarine base, inside a protected national marine park that has been open to the public since 2017 via boat tour from Vlorë. An island crawling with snakes, including the nose-horned viper, Europe's most venomous. So much for the barefoot hike.

Nothing was discovered, and nothing justifies any entitlement. Quite the contrary.

What actually happened is that Jared Kushner set out to cash in on his father-in-law's temporary power as President of the United States. That status means precisely nothing in Switzerland, with its seven centuries of direct democracy and institutions no outsider can buy. But it means everything to a weak man like Albania's prime minister, Edi Rama, cornered at home, courting Washington, and now under criminal investigation for how his government handed this deal away. Kushner understands that asymmetry perfectly. And he wants to exploit it. Period.

In Albania, he can. Albania is chronically bureaucratic, the long tail of its communist heritage, a home-grown Stalinism so absolute it broke even with Moscow and sealed the country off from the world. That legacy is the same one that ran, and still runs at times, from Sarajevo to Tirana, from Bucharest to Belgrade: decades of one-party rule that hollowed out the courts, the press and property itself, and left a vacuum filled by the personalised, strongman power of a connected few. It is the soil in which corruption flourishes, and Albania's greatest vulnerability.

And on that soil, in one of Europe's poorest countries, the island's protected status was suddenly changed in December 2024, in the weeks between Trump's election victory and his inauguration. Just like that. The public-tender rule was bypassed. "Strategic Investor" status went to a Kushner-linked SPV before the inauguration: no business plan, no feasibility study. Wonderful. Because Ivanka "discovered it". Right? Wrong.

A country vulnerability like that can be met in two ways. A responsible investor sticks to the rules and ties his fortunes to the country's long-term development, because that is what makes returns durable in the first place. And that will take a lot of time and upfront investment, with a highly uncertain reward. That's called risk-taking.

A powerful one, on the other hand, willing to bend the rules, as this deal suggests the Trump family is content to do, sees only something to exploit.

The subsequent damage runs far deeper and longer than a few harmless bungalows built without a proper concession. What is happening here is that Kushner is becoming part of the problem that corrodes Albania's path into the European Union. That is the real issue here. Just like the issue when JD Vance travelled to Europe and openly campaigned for illiberal politicians while lecturing Europeans about democracy. Who do these people think they are? Guardians of democracy?

Consider what the Albanian path actually looks like right now. The Balkans, like much of post-communist Europe, are chronically corrupt. But they are also full of people fighting to turn their countries toward something better, and EU accession is the single most powerful tool they have. It forces the one thing that actually develops a country: predictable rules, secure property, contracts that hold, and the credible belief that the same rules apply to everyone.

That belief is what brought the great wave of investment into Poland. Its absence is why Romania and Bulgaria remained under special monitoring for years after accession. The rule of law that eventually held in that Bucharest courtroom, and saved me, exists because membership forced it into being. Brussels learned the lesson. Today enlargement runs on a "fundamentals first" basis.

Which is exactly where Albania stands.

Last month it became only the second candidate after Montenegro to clear those rule-of-law benchmarks, with the EU's own enlargement commissioner describing SPAK, the very prosecutor now investigating this deal, as the country's "most trusted institution." The concession lands squarely on the chapters that decide membership: the judiciary, justice and public procurement. So this is not a side issue to Albania's European future. It is a direct test of it.

And that is why this does not help. It does the opposite. A single family connected to the presidency of the United States showing that the rules bend on demand corrodes the one asset a poor country cannot afford to lose: the belief, hard-won and easily lost, that the rules are real.

Then those same people have the chutzpah to complain about corruption in Eastern Europe and lecture the world about American exceptionalism. It is all so deeply wrong. And make no mistake, it erodes our democracies too, ever so slightly.

The thousands in the streets of Tirana understand all of this instinctively. They are not protesting a resort. They are defending the only thing that gives their country a future and hope: the rule of law applied equally to all.

And make no mistake about who the brave ones are. They are not on a yacht. They are on the street of Tirana and inside SPAK, because in Albania, stepping on the toes of the powerful is done in the knowledge that the danger is real. Confronting entrenched corruption in the Balkans has cost prosecutors, judges and journalists their their lives. That is the issue here, ladies and gentlemen!

I doubt Ivanka loses any sleep over any of this. Her concern is closing the deal while her father remains in office. And on a timeline that tight, a public tender, one they may well have won fairly, becomes an inconvenience rather than a safeguard.

That is the difference between a custodian of capitalism and democracy like Warren Buffett and the late Charlie Munger and a primitive land-grabber without any moral compass and integrity.

[NicIng @JsyNicIng]

@QuibbleUK @Jimmy_onions And a global reject signal too please