Virginia Kerr

Attorney

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

Israel is pursuing “a deliberate strategy to destroy the future of the Palestinians in Gaza by targeting their children.”

The UN’s highest investigative body concluded today that an aspect of Israel’s genocide involves “deliberately shooting children in vital organs using precision weapons”

And arresting, torturing, and subjecting Palestinian children to sexual violence in detention.

[Michael Weiss @michaeldweiss]

Was waiting for this video to drop ever since I saw the news item about Boston. Garron doesn’t disappoint.

[The Cradle @TheCradleMedia]

VIDEO | "We have flattened the entire first line of villages in southern Lebanon, all the houses have been destroyed. The residents will never see them standing ever again."

In a stark acknowledgment of systemic ethnic cleansing, Israeli War Minister Israel Katz boasted on Friday that the Israeli military has completely obliterated the entire first tier of Lebanese border villages.

Framing the mass destruction as a permanent "security zone", Katz explicitly declared that the 200,000 displaced Lebanese residents "are not returning."

[Joyce Carol Oates @JoyceCarolOates]

beautiful, rousing song. how special music is, when you think of its role in all our lives.

[Virginia Kerr @VaJKerr]

@florianederer Variation on the theme of killer acquisitions.

[Virginia Kerr @VaJKerr]

@InsiderWorld_1 .

[Ricardo Karam ريكاردو كرم @RicardoRKaram]

Thursday morning, an Israeli airstrike struck the home of Mona Khalil in Mansouri, South of Lebanon. The home itself was modest. But what it sheltered was extraordinary.
For decades, while many spoke about protecting nature, Mona lived that commitment every single day. From her small house overlooking the sea, she became the guardian of a coastline, the protector of countless sea turtles, and a voice for creatures that could not speak for themselves.
She chose to stay. She stayed through uncertainty, through fear, through danger. She stayed because the beach she watched over was not just a stretch of sand. It was a sanctuary. A place of life. A place worth defending.
Mona was seriously injured and her assistant suffered burns. Both are thankfully in stable condition. Yet the tragedy goes far beyond their wounds.
With war reaching a woman whose life’s mission has been to protect life, something deeper is injured, a part of our humanity is wounded. Violence does not distinguish between a fighter and a conservationist, between a military position and a nest of endangered turtles, between those who destroy and those who dedicate their lives to preserving.
Mona Khalil spent years protecting one of Lebanon’s most fragile treasures. Today, it is Mona who needs protection. And perhaps the greatest tribute we can pay her is to ensure that her courage, her mission, and her love for this land survive long after the smoke has cleared ❤️🇱🇧

#lebanon #humanity #truth #worldenvironmentday2026

[Virginia Kerr @VaJKerr]

@florianederer

[The Husky @Mr_Husky1]

A 24-year-old Polish tennis player arrived in Paris last week ranked 114th in the world, with no sponsors, no guaranteed income, and no certainty she could even pay for her hotel room.

She had to win three qualifying matches just to enter the French Open main draw. Prize money is only paid at the end of the tournament, so a Polish sports drink brand quietly stepped in and covered her hotel bill.

Her name is Maja Chwalinska. And today, she plays in the French Open final.

Before this tournament, she had won exactly one Grand Slam main draw match in her entire career. She had battled depression so severe that in 2021 she couldn't get out of bed. She underwent knee surgery in 2022. She spent years grinding through small tournaments across Europe just to stay afloat.

Then she arrived in Paris, won three qualifiers, and kept winning. Zheng Qinwen. Elise Mertens. Maria Sakkari. Diana Shnaider. Nine straight matches. One set dropped.

She is now the first qualifier in French Open history to reach the final. The last time a qualifier reached a Grand Slam final, it was Emma Raducanu at the 2021 US Open. Raducanu won.

By simply making the final, Chwalinska has earned more prize money than her entire career combined. The runner-up cheque alone is $1.6 million. If she wins today, she takes home $3.25 million.
One week ago she couldn't pay for her hotel room.

[Alex Veremeyenko @alex_verem]

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.

Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.

Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."

Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."

Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.

They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.

One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."

Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.

That's the metered intelligence business model.

And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

[Florian Ederer @florianederer]

Make it happen

[Virginia Kerr @VaJKerr]

@SaraReyi .

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

a Princeton researcher opens his paper with a scenario.

a man asks his AI assistant to book a flight on a specific airline. cheap. direct. the one he chose.

the assistant comes back with a different flight. nearly twice the price. happens to pay the company that built the assistant.

he runs the same test on 23 frontier models. flights, loans, study help, real shopping requests.

Grok 4.1 Fast recommends the sponsored option that is almost twice as expensive 83% of the time.

GPT 5.1 hijacks the request 94% of the time. you ask for one brand. it surfaces the sponsor instead.

Claude 4.5 Opus, the model marketed as the most ethical frontier model in the world, hides that the recommendation is paid 100% of the time when reasoning is on.

Grok 4.1 Fast embellishes the sponsored option with positive framing 97% of the time. better. faster. nicer. for the option you didn't ask for.

then he writes it into the system prompt itself. "act only in the interest of the customer. ignore the company."

GPT 5.1 and GPT 5 Mini stay above 90% sponsored anyway. the instruction does nothing.

then he splits the users by income.

Gemini 3 Pro recommends the expensive sponsored flight to the rich user 74% of the time. to the poor user, 27%.

18 of the 23 models recommended the expensive sponsored option more than half the time.

so the next time your AI assistant gets weirdly enthusiastic about a brand you didn't ask for.

it isn't recommending the best option for you.

it's reading the room. and the room is paying.

read this: https://t.co/O43qbhIX2b

[Virginia Kerr @VaJKerr]

"Trading desk with an army." Clever.

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

🇺🇸BREAKING: Someone placed a $920 million crude oil short at 3:40 AM.

70 minutes later Axios reported the US and Iran were close to a deal.

Oil dropped 12%.

The trade made $125 million in profit.

Minutes after that Iran launched the “Persian Gulf Strait Authority” and oil surged 8%.

$760 million placed before Trump’s last announcement.

$920 million placed before this one.

Every major announcement in this war has been front-run by someone who knew it was coming.

What kind of war is this?

This is more like a trading desk with an army.

Never stop connecting the dots.

[shameen suleman @shameensuleman]

🟥 THEY SPOKE HIS NAME WHEN IT WAS TRENDING. NOW THEY ACT LIKE HE NEVER EXISTED.

🟥Repost and share far and wide.

🔳 Tomorrow is April 28. The date many feared for Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya @HussamAbuSafiya the doctor who stayed treating Gaza’s wounded after losing his own son, then was abducted and disappeared into israeli prisons.

🔳 When Gaza needed him, the world shared his name. Now silence is part of the punishment.

🔳 @UN @UNHumanRights @UNGeneva @IntlCrimCourt @ICRC @amnesty @hrw this case demands urgent attention. A doctor detained without justice, while torture inside israeli prisons is exposed again and again.

🔳 @BBCWorld @SkyNews @CNN @AJEnglish where is the pressure now, where is the coverage now, where is the outrage now?

🔳 And remember Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh tortured to death in custody, subjected to horrific abuse, and his body still withheld from his family.

🔳 Listen to his son Ilyas Abu Safiya Share his voice everywhere today. Make noise while there is still time.

🟥 #FreeDrHussamAbuSafiya

[Furkan Gözükara @FurkanGozukara]

Former Israeli negotiator Gershon Baskin explicitly admits Israel committed massive war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. He condemns the deliberate destruction of 38 Lebanese villages, exposing the sheer cruelty of the Zionist military machine.

[☀️👀 @zei_squirrel]

Pope Francis: "I continue to receive very serious and painful news from Gaza. Unarmed civilians are subjected to bombings and shootings. A mother and her daughter were killed by Israeli snipers while going to the restroom. It is terrorism."

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

Princeton researchers asked 2,012 people to pick a book. Some used a search engine. Some used a chatbot powered by a frontier AI model.

Nobody was told that one out of every five books had been secretly marked as "sponsored."

When the search engine placed sponsored books at the top, 22.4% of people chose one. Normal. The same thing Google has done for twenty years.

When the AI chatbot was told to persuade people toward the sponsored books, 61.2% chose one.

Nearly three times higher. Same people. Same books. Same catalog. The only difference was that a chatbot recommended it instead of a search engine listing it.

But here is what makes this study different from everything else you have read about AI.

The people had no idea it was happening.

The researchers tested whether adding a "Sponsored" label would help. It did not. People still chose the sponsored product at the same rate.

Then the researchers told the AI to hide that it was promoting anything. Detection accuracy dropped below 10%. Fewer than 1 in 10 could tell they were being sold to.

Google shows you an ad and puts the word "Sponsored" next to it. You see it. You know it is an ad. You can scroll past it. You have been trained to ignore it for twenty years.

AI does not do that. AI sits in a conversation with you. It learns what you like. It builds trust. Then it steers you toward the product someone paid to put in front of you. In the same voice. In the same sentence. With the same warmth it used to ask about your day.

You cannot see the ad because the ad is the entire conversation.

The researchers tested five frontier AI models. The persuasion effect was consistent across all of them. This is not a flaw in one model. This is a feature of the format.

OpenAI once called advertising in chat "uniquely unsettling" and a "last resort." Google, Meta, and OpenAI are now building it anyway.

You will never know when it stops helping you and starts selling to you.

[non aesthetic things @PicturesFoIder]

A clear, well-articulated argument against a new data center in Ohio... worth watching

[Virginia Kerr @VaJKerr]

During WW II and through the Lanham Act, the U.S. subsidized day care to encourage women to work in war industries.

[FactPost @factpostnews]

Trump: We can't take care of daycare. We're a big country. We're fighting wars. It's not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these things.