Court Having Trouble Assembling Jury for Elon Musk Because People Hate Him So Much Futurism
Do You Trust Epstein Elite With Nuclear Weapons?
No arms limitation treaties, few diplomatic channels, AI integration into nuclear command systems, and an elite with Epstein social values. What could go wrong?
From AI tools to Prince Andrew’s arrest: How newsrooms are digging into the Jeffrey Epstein files
Reuters Institute: “Over 3.5 million documents, 180,000 images and 2,000 videos. The Jeffrey Epstein files, released by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) in several tranches, constituted a disclosure of rare magnitude.
This trove of documents opened a window into the ecosystem surrounding a powerful, well-connected convicted child sex offender. The release offered journalists an opportunity to interrogate a sprawling evidentiary record and trace networks of access and influence stretching across politics, academia, finance and royalty.
So far, journalists have broken stories on Epstein’s connections to powerful figures such as Peter Mandelson, Noam Chomsky, Steve Bannon, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, and many others. Yet those revelations account for only a small fraction of what the files contain. As reporting teams continue to excavate the archive, more disclosures are almost certainly to come. But how are journalists identifying patterns of power and proximity in such a huge trove? What, precisely, are they looking for?
And how do they search for it? To answer those questions, I spoke with five editors and newsroom leaders from the BBC, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Miami Herald and Bellingcat, who are coordinating coverage of the Epstein files in their newsrooms across multiple beats…”
See also AI-Powered Epstein Files Research Databases and Data Explorers
How to buy a law firm if you’re not allowed to buy a law firm
FT.com – no paywall – “…So, how exactly can you buy a law firm if you are not allowed to buy a law firm? The answer is that the law firm gets split into two parts: one entity, fully controlled by lawyers, that provides legal advice to clients, and a second, called a management services organisation, that houses technology and other back-office assets and all the non-lawyer staff. The MSO sells services back to the other side of the business in exchange for fees that are large enough to make the entity profitable, and it is the MSO that sells an ownership stake to private equity.
That way, private equity does not fall foul of the American Bar Association’s Rule 5.4, which says non-lawyers cannot be in the business of law and firms cannot share fees with non-lawyers. “Investors are trying to fine-tune the structure and get a handle on what exactly constitutes legal work,” said Austin Maloney, a lawyer at Hunton Andrews Kurth, which advises private equity. “The goal is to perform as many services as possible in the MSO.
No investor is going to sign up to this if they can’t get the right amount of juice out of it.” The MSO structure has been used by a handful of small US firms over the past 20 years, and concentrated in those specialising in personal injury cases, but interest has exploded in recent months. There appear to be several reasons. Private equity has swept through the US accounting sector in the past five years, leaving law the last frontier in professional services.
Meanwhile, a handful of states, notably Arizona, have set aside Rule 5.4 to allow new ownership structures breeding an openness to experimental financial models. A Texas state bar committee ruling last year effectively gave their blessing to the MSO structure, as long as it leaves control over legal cases in lawyers’ hands and the financial payments to the MSO are not calculated as a share of legal fees.
Private equity and their advisers are beginning to get confident about extracting significant amounts of a law firm’s value by shifting more assets into the MSO, potentially expanding the number of firms that could make a deal add up. “A lot of the discussion and creativity comes up in the fee structure by which the firm pays the MSO,” said Lucian Pera, a professional ethics lawyer who says he advised on a law firm MSO as long ago as 2006 and has never been busier than now. In MSOs set up by personal injury law firms, for example, Pera said the rights to the name and likeness of the lead attorneys can be owned by the MSO and licensed back. Dealmakers might hire valuation experts to weigh in on what is a fair fee. As long as the rates are fixed or calculated on a per-lawyer basis, rather than linked to firm revenue, it will not fall foul of Rule 5.4’s ban on fee-sharing, he said. “We value everything step by step and charge it back to the law firm at a market rate,” said Seth Deutsch, founder of Samson Partners, an advisory firm that has published a “how to” guide for law firm founders wanting to sell their business and has helped structure MSO deals…”
Microsoft Says Bug Causes Copilot To Summarize Confidential Emails
“Microsoft says a Microsoft 365 Copilot bug has been causing the AI assistant to summarize confidential emails since late January, bypassing data loss prevention (DLP) policies that organizations rely on to protect sensitive information.
According to a service alert seen by BleepingComputer, this bug (tracked under CW1226324 and first detected on January 21) affects the Copilot “work tab” chat feature, which incorrectly reads and summarizes emails stored in users’ Sent Items and Drafts folders, including messages that carry confidentiality labels explicitly designed to restrict access by automated tools.
Copilot Chat (short for Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat) is the company’s AI-powered, content-aware chat that lets users interact with AI agents. Microsoft began rolling out Copilot Chat to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote for paying Microsoft 365 business customers in September 2025…”
Epsteinalysis.com
Under the moniker – Axiomofinfinity – for which there is no further information that I could locate – a individual or group has posted a remarkable searchable database, Epstein Files Explorer, of over one million documents and over two million pages that comprise the Epstein Files released by the DOJ. Applications used – Programmatic applications – Extracted via spaCy NER and clustered by similarity. = curated key figure. Use “Known Only” to filter.
Features include the following:
- Search – There is a search feature for: Documents, Bates numbers, Entities
- Analyze – Timeline; Event, Network, Events, Meetings
- Images – All Images, Faces
- Videos – All Videos
- Redactions – Inconsistencies, Statistics
Trump Action Tracker
Trump Action Tracker – “Documenting the actions, statements, and plans of President Trump and his administration that echo those of authoritarian regimes and may pose a threat to American democracy, since January 2025…This project is led by Professor Christina Pagel, a UK-based health services researcher and science communicator.
She created and maintains the dataset underlying the tracker, drawing on her background in data analysis and evidence-based policy to monitor and document how the trajectory of Trump’s presidency is aligned with the authoritarian playbook. There are a few different types of actions included in this domain:
- Any action weakening democratic checks and balances such as restricting press freedom, undermining the authority or oversight of Congress, reducing the independence of arms length bodies, violating political norms, making it harder to hold power to account, or restricting access to public information
- Any action undermining States’ rights
- Any action that undermines the Rule of Law, such as violating court orders or the Constitution, circumventing Congressional appropriated funds, attacking law firms or judges.
- Hollowing state / weakening federal institutions
- Suppressing dissent / Weaponising state power against ‘enemies’
- Controlling information including spreading misinformation and propaganda
- Control of science to align with state ideology
- Attacking universities, schools, museums, culture
- Dismantling Social Protections & Rights
- Corruption and Enrichment
- Aggressive Foreign Policy & Global Destabilisation
- Anti-immigrant or Militarised Nationalism