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- The Vatican Secretary of State, Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin, assured that Israel’s response to the attack by the Palestinian Islamic group Hamas on 7 October is disproportionate and asked to stop the “carnage” in the Middle East. “The Holy See has said it from the beginning: on the one hand, a clear and unreserved condemnation of what happened on October 7th. But at the same time also a request for Israel’s right to defense which was invoked to justify this operation be proportionate and certainly with 30,000 deaths it is not“, Parolin denounced while participating in a meeting at the Vatican embassy in Italy on Tuesday evening. “There is a widespread rumor that we cannot continue like this. We must find other ways to solve the Gaza problemthe problem of Palestine,” he said. In this context, he urged us “not to lose hope” for a solution to the conflict and stated: “St. Augustine said that hope is based on indignation and courage, I think we’re all outraged for what’s happening, for this carnage “But we must have the courage to move forward and not lose hope because, if we lose hope, we fold our arms.”
- The Paris court of appeal confirmed a lower court’s guilty verdict for Sarkozy, who was convicted of hiding illegal overspending in his 2012 re-election campaign. Sarkozy was initially sentenced to one-year in prison, but the appeals court said he should serve six months, with another six months suspended. Sarkozy has faced a litany of legal problems since his sole term in office between 2007 and 2012. In a series of cases, he has been charged with corruption, bribery, influence-peddling and campaign finance infringements.
- The italian Privacy Guarantor has imposed a fine of €200,000 on the operator of a popular online dating site for breaching the personal data of approximately 1 million users. This marks the first instance of the Authority taking action against a dating website. The decision, stemming from an extensive preliminary investigation, that included an on-site inspection, exposed the unlawful handling of user data, including sensitive information regarding sexual preferences and orientations. To register on the platform, which boasts around 5 million members globally (with over one million having validated email addresses and nearly 10,000 holding active paid subscriptions), users were required to input various details such as their interests, location, date of birth, and email, as well as upload photos to their public profile or private area. However, they were not adequately informed about how their data would be used.
- The CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI said Tuesday that the dangers that keep him awake at night regarding artificial intelligence are the “very subtle societal misalignments” that could make the systems wreak havoc. Sam Altman, speaking at the World Governments Summit in Dubai via a video call, reiterated his call for a body like the International Atomic Energy Agency to be created to oversee AI that’s likely advancing faster than the world expects. “There’s some things in there that are easy to imagine where things really go wrong. And I’m not that interested in the killer robots walking on the street direction of things going wrong,” Altman said. “I’m much more interested in the very subtle societal misalignments where we just have these systems out in society and through no particular ill intention, things just go horribly wrong.” However, Altman stressed that the AI industry, like OpenAI, shouldn’t be in the driver’s seat when it comes to making regulations governing the industry.
- OpenAI is testing a feature that will allow ChatGPT to remember certain information from one conversation to the next, the company said Tuesday. The chatbot will also be able to decide which parts of the conversations it should remember. The memory option will be available to hundreds of thousands of users at first; OpenAI will gather feedback before rolling it out more widely, the company told Bloomberg. In other OpenAI news: Founding member Andrej Karpathy has left the company “to pursue personal projects,” a company spokesperson said Tuesday.
- A concentrated cannabis extract has shown “remarkable” potential to kill off the most dangerous type of skin cancer. It’s still early days, but if the results could provide a whole new drug avenue for a disease that is currently difficult to treat: melanoma. The cannabis oil in question is known as PHEC-66, and it was developed by MGC Pharmaceuticals in Australia. Follow-up research, led by scientists at RMIT University and Charles Darwin University (CDU), has now confirmed those results. Findings from the team suggest that this particular Cannabis sativa extract stops melanoma cells from multiplying, by forcing the disease to kill itself.
- Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi and Alex Gutentag – of ‘Twitter Files’ fame – published the first part of an investigation on Tuesday, in which they claim the so-called ‘Five Eyes’ were operationalized against Trump staffers, citing anonymous sources close to the House Intelligence Committee. According to their report, President Barack Obama’s CIA Director, John Brennan, had sent America’s partners – the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand – a list of 26 Trump associates to target with data collection, misinformation and manipulation. The Russiagate conspiracy involved multiple failures across western media networks to critically assess US intelligence claims that Russia had interfered in the 2016 US presidential election. A 2018 Pulitzer prize was awarded to Washington Post and New York Times journalists for their reporting on what was later to exposed as a false story.
- US President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign has been skewered for flaunting its new TikTok account during the Super Bowl on Sunday, with many pointing out that the administration had only just prohibited federal employees from using the app last year. The campaign directed its followers on X to the new platform, which is owned by Chinese social media behemoth ByteDance, with a post on Sunday. The president’s political opponents immediately pounced. “Biden campaign bragging about using a Chinese spy app even though Biden signed a law banning it on all federal devices,” Republican Senator Josh Hawley observed in a post on X. The president was “so desperate to pander to young voters he’s willing to give away his campaign’s data to Communist China,” Republican Rep. Michael Waltz agreed.
- Israel admitted on Tuesday to using stock footage of a Moldovan refugee camp in a video it posted on X touting its claims that it has provided tens of thousands of tons of humanitarian aid to Gaza during the war. The country’s official X account deleted the video that included the offending photo, which it insisted had been used “for illustrative purposes only,” and promised to “ensure transparency” in subsequent visuals. BBC reporter Shayan Sardarizadeh exposed the fraudulent clip on Monday, posting side-by-side screenshots of Israel’s video, which claimed West Jerusalem had sent “23,000 tons of tents and shelter equipment” to Gaza, and the original image on the stock photo service iStock.
- When conducting human tests, Big Pharma did not think twice before using hospitals in certain developing countries, which don’t have “rigorous controls” for such actions, William Jones, a former White House correspondent and a non-resident fellow of the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, told Sputnik. Sputnik has obtained a trove of documents indicating that rheumatological drugs had been allegedly tested for several years on psychiatric patients of a hospital in the city of Mariupol at the request of major Western pharmaceutical corporations and with the assistance of Ukrainian officials. The documents contain information pertaining to such companies as Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Celltrion, Novatris International AG, Merck KGaA, and a branch of Samsung that produces medical equipment. The tests were carried out while the Kiev regime held Mariupol until May 2022, when Russia took over the city.
- SpaceX will launch a mysterious national security mission today (Feb. 14). A Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to launch the classified USSF-124 mission for the U.S. Space Force today from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. We don’t know much about USSF-124. The Space Force remained mum about it until this morning, when it emailed out a statement saying that the mission is ready to fly. That statement revealed that USSF-124 will send six satellites to orbit — two for the Missile Defense Agency and four for the Space Development Agency — but did not describe the spacecraft or their envisioned orbital duties.
- Astronomers may have solved the mystery of why dead stars’ death shrouds seem to lack sulfur, an element once known as “brimstone” and associated with the expression “fire and brimstone” in the Bible. Based on theory, a substantial amount of sulfur should be present in stellar wreckage sites across the cosmos. Astrophysicists from the Laboratory for Space Research (LSR) at The University of Hong Kong (HKU) discovered why such gaseous and dusty wreckage areas, or “planetary nebulas,” don’t seem to have the expected levels of sulfur. Planetary nebulas exist around stars that have exhausted their nuclear fuel supplies and turned into dense, stellar corpses called white dwarfs. The team suggests that the expected sulfur content isn’t actually absent at all, but rather pulled a fittingly devilish trick as the element is called ‘”devil’s gold” by those that mine it in its solid form on Earth. In short, the sulfur might be hiding in plain sight.
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Rose Rambles... 