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When I began Schwartzreport my purpose was to produce an entirely fact-based daily publication in favor of the earth, the inter-connectedness and interdependence of all life, democracy, equality for all, liberty, and things that are life-affirming. Also, to warn my readers about actions, events, and trends that threaten those values. Our country now stands at a crossroads, indeed, the world stands at a crossroads where those values are very much at risk and it is up to each of us who care about wellbeing to do what we can to defend those principles. I want to thank all of you who have contributed to SR, particularly those of you who have scheduled an ongoing monthly contribution. It makes a big difference and is much appreciated. It is one thing to put in the hours each day and to do the work for free, but another to have to cover the rising out-of-pocket costs. For those of you who haven’t done so, but read SR regularly, I ask that you consider supporting it.
Ai is becoming a factor in a wide range of public sectors with very little public discussion in Congress as to how this should be regulated. In this report, you can already see how AI is becoming a major factor in criminal cases in courts all over the country. As time goes on and the AI technology continues to develop I predict this is going to become an even bigger factor shaping American society.
Summit County Common Pleas Court in Akron, Ohio. Credit: Google Maps
Law enforcement agencies and prosecutors from Colorado to New York have turned to a little-known artificial intelligence tool in recent years to help investigate, charge and convict suspects accused of murder and other serious crimes.
But as the software, called Cybercheck, has spread, defense lawyers have questioned its accuracy and reliability. Its methodology is opaque, they’ve said, and it hasn’t been independently vetted.
The company behind the software has said the technology relies on machine learning to scour vast swaths of the web and gather“open source intelligence” — social media profiles, email addresses and other publicly available information — to help identify potential suspects’ physical locations and other details in homicides and human trafficking crimes, cold cases and manhunts.
The tool’s creator, Adam Mosher, has said that Cybercheck’s accuracy tops 90% and that it performs automated research that would take humans hundreds of hours to complete. By last year, the software had been used in nearly 8,000 cases […]
More Congressional corruption, this time a Democrat Representative from the 28th District of Texas. This is the most corrupt Congress in our history as far as I can tell, and we keep voting these cretins into office. The problem is not just the corrupt politicians, it is the willfully ignorant American voters. That is the worst problem our democracy faces.
Democrat Representative from Texas 28th District Henry Cuellar: ‘Everything I have done in Congress has been to serve the people of South Texas.’ Credit: Mark Schiefelbein / AP
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The US justice department on Friday accused the Democratic congressman Henry Cuellar and his wife, Imelda Cuellar, of accepting about $600,000 in bribes in exchange for influencing policy in favor of Azerbaijan and a Mexican bank.
The Cuellars had made their first appearance before a federal magistrate judge in Houston by the afternoon, but it was not clear how they pleaded. Earlier, the congressman, who has represented a swath of Texas’s border with Mexico in the US House since 2005, issued a statement denying unspecified “allegations” against him.
“I want to be clear that both my wife and I are innocent of these allegations. Everything I have done in Congress has been to serve the people of South Texas,” Cuellar said.
He added that “I’m running for re-election and will win […]
More corruption of the political process. We are one of the most corrupt developed nations in the world, and this is yet another example of an existing industry trying to block an emerging technology in order to ensure its continuing profits even though it does damage to society’s wellbeing.
A piece of GOOD Meat’s cell-cultivated chicken cooks on a grill at the company’s California office in July 2023. Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty
On Wednesday, Florida became the first US state to ban the production and sale of lab-grown, or “cell-cultivated” meat.
“Take your fake lab-grown meat elsewhere,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said before signing SB 1084 into law. “We’re not doing that in the state of Florida.”
Alabama is on the cusp of passing similar legislation.
Cell-cultivated meat is different from products made by companies like Impossible Foods that use plant ingredients to mimic meat. Instead, cell-cultivated meat is real meat, but made without slaughtering an animal. It’s produced by taking a small sample of animal cells and feeding them a mix of amino acids, sugars, salts, vitamins, and other ingredients for a few weeks until it grows into edible meat.
The Florida law’slead sponsor, Republican state Rep. Danny Alvarez, had claimed the novel technology’s “unknowns are so great,” despite a multiyear review from the US Agriculture Department and US Food […]
Yet further proof that the carbon industry has known for years that their argument that gas was a green replacement for coal was deliberate misinformation. I think a case could be made that the executives of the petroleum industry are criminals working against the wellbeing of humanity in order to protect their profits. Will they ever be held responsible for what they have done to increase the negative effects of climate change? They should, but I doubt it.
Burning gas well. Credit: Ken Cedeno / Corbis / Getty
A congressional hearing on the fossil fuel industry’s “evolving efforts to avoid accountability for climate change” turned into a spectacle on Wednesday morning as lawmakers in Washington, D.C., grilled a panel of experts on wide-ranging — and often irrelevant — topics. The thousands of internal oil company documents released before the hearing, however, contained some bombshell findings.
One of the biggest revelations is that BP executives understood that natural gas, which the company promoted as a “bridge” or “destination” fuel to a cleaner future as coal declined, was incompatible with the goals of the Paris Agreement signed in 2015. “[O]nce built, gas locks in future emissions above a level consistent with 2 degrees,” at least without widespread carbon capture technology, according to a comment on a draft outline for a speech by BP’s CEO in 2017.
“This is the first evidence I’ve seen of them acknowledging internally, at the highest levels, that they know […]
Carbon dioxide pipelines. Once again we are going down a path controlled by misinformation, lobbying, and corruption. We must give up carbon not try it under a new system. This is part of materialism and the denial of the Matrix of Consciousness.
Credit: Rogelio V. Solis / AP
A carbon dioxide pipeline rupture in the small village of Satartia, Mississippi, sent nearly 50 people to the hospital with “zombie”-like conditions in 2020, and now another major leak from a pipeline in Sulphur, Louisiana, has once again exposed the risks carbon dioxide pipelines pose to communities in their path.
Soon, pipelines like this could be coming to cities and towns throughout the country. Spurred by federal tax incentives from the Biden Administration, the fossil fuel industry is planning to build tens of thousands of miles of carbon dioxide (CO2) pipelines across the United States for experimental carbon capture and storage — a process aimed at sequestering carbon emissions from power plants, sending it through pipelines, and injecting it underground.
While regulators are working to craft updated safety rules for these pipelines, major fossil fuel companies and their trade groups — including Chevron, ConocoPhillips, the American Petroleum Institute, and the Liquid Energy Pipeline Association — have launched […]
The geopolitical status of the United States, as this Gallup survey illustrates, is declining. Our international policies, largely because of the way the Congressional Republicans are controlling funding, and because of the choices being made by the Biden administration are causing a loss of confidence in America. Other world leaders see The Great Schism Trend as it is happening, and the very real possibility we may no longer be a democracy after the November election, and the other nations of the world, particularly in Africa, no longer trust us to the same degree.
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM — The United States lost its place as the most influential global power in Africa last year as its star status dimmed and other countries — China in particular — gained fans.
A new Gallup report shows median approval ratings of Washington — indicative of the country’s soft power — slipped from 59% in 2022 to 56% in 2023. Of the four global powers asked about, the U.S. was the only one not to see its image improve across Africa in 2023. Meanwhile, China’s approval in the region rose six percentage points, from 52% in 2022 to 58% in 2023, two points ahead of the U.S.
How China’s Image Improved in Africa
Last year, China recorded its highest leadership approval rating in Africa in a decade. In seven countries — many in western Africa — Beijing saw double-digit increases in approval compared with 2022. The largest of these came in Ghana (+15 points), Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal (+14 points each).
In all of these three countries, similar proportions of people disapproved of China’s leadership in 2022 and 2023. The decisive […]
Alejandra Marquez Guajardo , Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance and Classical Studies at Michigan State University. - truthout
Stephan:
With abortion essentially illegal in what was the old Confederacy, states now controlled by TCP Republicans, are seeing a dramatic decrease in the quality of female healthcare. Concurrently Mexico is becoming a more gender-equal nation. Another pathetic shift in the status of America. And here is something I did not know, and you probably didn’t either. Women’s studies professor Lina-María Murillo, who studies the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and teaches a course on global reproduction, explains that abortion in the United States was legal and performed by midwives before the Civil War. In the following decades, declining birth rates and gender inequality led to restrictions across the country and a nationwide ban in 1910.
Credit: ISTOCK / Getty
When its six-week abortion ban went into effect on May 1, 2024, Florida joined nearly two dozen other U.S. states that ban abortion or greatly restrict it.
These laws came into effect after the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturnRoe v. Wade ended nearly 50 years of the constitutional right to abortion in the United States.
Florida health officials in 2023 reported more than 84,000 abortions statewide, including nearly 7,800 from out-of-state residents.
The Tampa Bay Times recently reported that about 2 in 5 abortions in Florida over the past six years occurred in the first six weeks of pregnancy, meaning that roughly 60% of the procedures performed over that time frame would be illegal under the new restrictions.
The new laws in Florida and other states are sending some Americans across the border into Mexico to access an abortion, where the procedure was legalized in recent years.
Clinics in Mexico do not require proof of residency, so solid numbers about who they are treating are hard to come by. But […]
James Elder, UNICEF’s Global Spokesperson - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan:
It is my opinion that the Biden administration has committed a grievous error, or more accurately continued an American practice that over the last half-century has resulted in the murder of millions of people, to our great and everlasting shame. To understand Gaza I think one has to see it in the context of the Vietnam War, and the Iraq War. In all three of which our shameful and erroneous geopolitical policies resulted in mass death. We haven’t put soldiers on the ground in Gaza, but it is our weapons supplied to a blatantly corrupt fascist that have killed thousands of innocent women and children. I think Yaḥyá al-Sanwār leader of Hamas, and his cohort, carried out a war crime against humanity for which he and they should be held accountable. But it was followed by the Israeli leadership under Benjamin Netanyahu also carrying out inexcusable war crimes for which they should likewise be held accountable. And I think Biden should apologize to the world for the role the United States has played in this carnage.
Children near a camp housing displaced Palestinians in Rafah on Tuesday. Credit: AFP / Getty
The war against Gaza’s children is forcing many to close their eyes. Nine-year-old Mohamed’s eyes were forced shut, first by the bandages that covered a gaping hole in the back of his head, and second by the coma caused by the blast that hit his family home. He is nine. Sorry, he was nine. Mohamed is now dead.
Over three visits to the European hospital’s ICU in Rafah, Gaza, I saw multiple children occupy the same bed. Each one arriving after a bomb had ripped through their home. Each one dying despite doctors’ immense efforts.
Only a few weeks ago the world was decrying the senseless killing of seven aid workers in a convoy for the World Central Kitchen. It was another grim milestone for Gaza. A week later, a Unicef vehicle was hit, again when trying to reach those in the most desperate need. This week further airstrikes in […]
