Unfettered and Unaccountable: How Trump Is Building a Violent, Shadowy Federal Police Force
ProPublica: “…Although ICE is conducting itself out in the open, even inviting conservative social media influencers to accompany its agents on high-profile raids, the agency operates in darkness. The identities of DHS officers, their salaries and their operations have long been withheld for security reasons and generally exempted from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.
However, there were offices within DHS created to hold agents and their supervisors accountable for their actions on the job. The Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, created by Congress and led largely by lawyers, investigated allegations of rape and unlawful searches from both the public and within DHS ranks, for instance.
Egregious conduct was referred to the Justice Department. The CRCL office had limited powers; former staffers say their job was to protect DHS by ensuring personnel followed the law and addressed civil rights concerns. Still, it was effective in stalling rushed deportations or ensuring detainees had access to phones and lawyers. And even when its investigations didn’t fix problems, CRCL provided an accounting of allegations and a measure of transparency for Congress and the public.
The office processed thousands of complaints — 3,000 in fiscal year 2023 alone — ranging from allegations of lack of access to medical treatment to reports of sexual assault at detention centers. Former staffers said around 600 complaints were open when work was suspended.
The administration has gutted most of the office. What’s left of it was led, at least for a while, by a 29-year-old White House appointee who helped craft Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint that broadly calls for the curtailment of civil rights enforcement…
Meanwhile, ICE is enjoying a windfall in resources. On top of its annual operating budget of $10 billion a year, the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill included an added $7.5 billion a year for the next four years for recruiting and retention alone. As part of its hiring blitz, the agency has dropped age, training and education standards and has offered recruits signing bonuses as high as $50,000…”
A tale of two chants: Why Starmer now casts even the British police as antisemitic Jonathan Cook
ICE boosts weapons spending 700% Popular Information. “…there have also been significant purchases of chemical weapons and “guided missile warheads and explosive components.” Seems rather important.
PRO-NATALISM IN ACTION: Poland Has No Income Tax to Parents to 2 or More Children
STRONGER PEOPLE ARE HEALTHIER AND HARDER TO KILL: Study links stronger muscles to reduced organ damage from obesity
Over 50% of New Online Articles Are Being Cranked Out by AI
Vice: “About a year ago, AI began outpacing human writers on the internet. For every one article written by a real-life, blood-bag of a meat puppet, slightly more than one was written by a machine.
Don’t get all twisted up about “slightly more than one” article; it’s fractions, my friends. The news was broken when Graphite published a study showing that AI-written articles surpassed human-written articles by a small margin in November 2024. “We find that in November 2024, the quantity of AI-generated articles being published on the web surpassed the quantity of human-written articles,” “We observe significant growth in AI-generated articles coinciding with the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. After only 12 months, AI-generated articles accounted for nearly half (39%) of articles published.
The raw data for this evaluation is available The authors randomly selected 65,000 English-language articles using Common Crawl. The criteria for the articles reviewed were that they were at least 100 words long and were published between January 2020 and May 2025. To determine whether they were AI-written, the authors used Surfer’s AI detector.
According to the study’s authors, most of these AI-written articles, though, don’t appear in either Google or ChatGPT. “We do not evaluate whether AI-generated articles are viewed in proportion by real users, but we suspect that they are not.” The authors didn’t speculate on Although the rise of AI-written articles (I’m not calling it content, darnit) was swift, it also plateaued relatively quickly.
“While AI-generated articles grew dramatically after ChatGPT launched, we do not see that trend continuing,” the study’s authors wrote. “Instead, the proportion of AI-generated articles has remained relatively stable over the last 12 months. We hypothesize that this is because practitioners found that AI-generated articles do not perform well in search…”
See also NewsGuard – OpenAI’s Sora Spreads False Claims in the News 80% of the Time and a Russian Disinformation Laundering Loop that Relied on Microsoft’s MSN and a Member of Congress.
This week’s episode covers the ease with which OpenAI’s Sora can generate realistic deepfake videos designed to spread false claims in the news at scale. We also unpack how a fabricated corruption claim about Volodymyr Zelenskyy traveled from a fringe Turkish outlet through Russian media to the mainstream platform MSN operated by Microsoft and a member of Congress, before returning to Moscow as supposed “proof.”
ICE Agents Can Now Be Arrested in ChicagoMigrant Insider
Exclusive: FEMA Workers Improperly Collected Data About Politics of Disaster Victims Matt Taibbi, Racket News
Why We Must Protect Both Turning Point and Mark Bray Jonathan Turley
