Palantir funnels earnings to US to avoid European taxes, report finds
A new study finds that Palantir, which boasts of high profit margins in the U.S., barely scrapes a margin in Europe, which helps slash its tax bill.
Is God Punishing Me?
Christianity Today: Is God Punishing Me?, by Kristen Wetherell & Sarah Walton (Co-Authors, Jesus Will Meet You There (2026)):
Suffering. Nobody wants it. And rarely can we make sense of it.
That’s why, when life hurts, we often look for someone or something to blame. Something is awry, and our pain needs somewhere to go.
At times, there’s an easy target for our blame. Someone ran a red light, and their negligence is now the cause of our debilitating back pain; a friend spread a false accusation against us, and we’re left to pick up the pieces of our reputation; a doctor’s error turned a routine surgery into the heart-wrenching loss of our loved one.
But that logic has nowhere to go when a diagnosis shatters our once-comfortable life or a tornado rips through our town, taking the life we knew right along with it.
Most often, we turn in one of two directions: We blame God, who we trusted to protect us from such senseless heartbreak, or we blame ourselves, convinced we must have done something to deserve such pain.
N.Y. Times: Microsoft Disclosure Provides Rare Glimpse of Tax Haven Tactics
In the New York Times, Jesse Drucker and Karen Weise have a piece, “Microsoft Disclosure Provides Rare Glimpse of Tax Haven Tactics.” From the piece:
A compliance report released by Microsoft this week provided a rare look into how tech giants shift profits out of the countries where they have many employees and significant sales and into low-tax havens that help them cut their tax bills by billions of dollars.
Microsoft was most likely the first major U.S. technology company to make a so-called country by country report of its finances to comply with a new European Union directive. Like other big companies, Microsoft uses transactions between subsidiaries to shift profits around to reduce its tax bill. The report revealed a consistent pattern: high returns in low-tax jurisdictions and slim margins in higher-tax ones.
For the full report described in the piece, click here.
Opinion | ABC is done playing defense against the FCC
Opinion | Can the new hires for ‘60 Minutes’ meet the challenge?
Opinion | ‘60 Minutes’ makes big hires, including one that will raise eyebrows
EFF Guide to Recording Law Enforcement
EFF: “Recordings of law enforcement, whether by bystanders or by those directly encountering officers, can be powerful tools of government accountability and can support movements for social change. But recording officers can come with risks. Below are important legal and practical considerations related to recording the police and other law enforcement officers.
Can I legally record the police or immigration officers?
- Yes. All Americans have a First Amendment right to record law enforcement.This includes local police and federal officers such as those from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Although the Supreme Court has not squarely ruled on the issue, nine different federal appellate courts have recognized and affirmed this right, relying on decades of Supreme Court precedent.
- Courts typically frame the right to record law enforcement as the right to record officers exercising their official duties in public. This right extends to bystanders as well as people recording their own interactions with law enforcement, such as livestreaming their own traffic stops. The right also applies to private places where the recorder has a legal right to be, such as in their own home.
- You may take photos, or record video and audio. Courts have held that wiretap laws, which generally protect private conversations, do not prohibit civilians from audio recording law enforcement. That’s because officers exercising their official duties, particularly in public, do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Neither do civilians in public places who speak to law enforcement in a manner audible to passersby.
What are some limitations on the right to record law enforcement?
- Courts have been clear that behavior that obstructs or interfereswith effective law enforcement or the protection of public safety is not protected. Officers can’t order you to move because you are recording, but they may order you to move for public safety reasons even if you are recording…”
"The public fogginess about data centers is not an accident. It is the product of a willful strategy by the world’s largest tech corporations, whose business models rest on the public assumption that the internet, and all the data it holds, is as immaterial as air"
The world’s most valuable assets are stored on rows of servers in giant, anonymous buildings. And they can be stolen.
Terry Ellis’s fixer wore an overcoat, a multicolored ascot, a Rolex. He had a husky voice and a good suntan. He reminded Ellis of the English actor Ray Winstone, best known for playing hard men in films like “Sexy Beast” and “The Departed.” Ellis, who was himself a hard man, sought inspiration from crime movies, the way an artist scrutinizes the canvases of the great masters; it was a viewing of “Ocean’s Eleven” that had led to the most successful phase of his criminal career. By the winter of 2007, Ellis had become one of his generation’s most dependable, and accomplished, heistmen.
Listen to this article, read by Robert Fass
The fixer — Ellis called him Ray and won’t reveal his name — met him in North London near Hampstead Heath for coffee and cakes. When it came time to discuss business, to avoid being overheard, they strolled into the park.
Ray had brought Ellis a few jobs before. But this job, he warned, was of an entirely different order. As Ellis claims in “The Art of Robbery,” a self-published memoir written after his release from prison, he eventually learned that Ray had been contacted by a consultant employed by “some influential bankers from America.” The bankers “were involved in prime mortgages” and had “circumnavigated” certain regulations. Damning evidence of these circumnavigations could be found in banking files held in the King’s Cross area in a giant building known as a data center
This data center was operated by the business division of Verizon, which had inherited the facility, and about 20 other data centers, through a recent series of corporate mergers. Among the corporations that rented server space from Verizon were various major financial institutions, including one of the world’s largest banks.
Ellis’s assignment was to break into the data center and steal around 80 servers that hosted the incriminating files. Ellis usually worked with a crew of four other professional thieves, but none of them knew much about computers. For this job, he concluded, he would have to smuggle in four computer technicians who could disable the servers without destroying the data they held. Ray also insisted that another man affiliated with his client join the operation. To break 80 servers out, Ellis would have to break 10 people in.
There were additional challenges, Ray noted. Surveillance cameras monitored nearly every square inch of the facility, inside and out. Every door was reinforced with steel and opened outward, making it impossible to force entry. The windows were sealed shut. The glass was bulletproof. The excessively lit front entrance led into an airlock vestibule secured by biometrics and swipe-card readers. Eleven security guards patrolled the building at all times; an independent security firm monitored the surveillance feeds remotely. Three police stations, which could be alerted by various panic buttons, stood within a 10-mile radius. It was, Ray observed, “a high-risk heist.”
Yes, Ellis agreed. That did seem to be the case.
Ray added that his clients would pay “one and a half bar” — 1.5 million pounds in cash — the equivalent, today, of about $4.82 million…
Ellis liked the sound of that. But as he sat with the idea, he began to realize that the job’s appeal extended beyond the potential financial windfall. A data center heist promised to be a legacy job, one that would distinguish him from his peers — a bid for criminal immortality. His “criminal Mount Everest,” he would later call it.
“It was all about doing something that was so different, taking our robbery to the next level,” he said in a recent interview. “It was sublime.”
The world’s most valuable commodity is not stored in banks, jewelry boutiques or the Louvre. It lives in giant, anonymous, energy-devouring warehouses filled with fiber-optic cables, industrial-scale cooling systems and server racks.
The latest generation of data centers will mainly be used, at a cost of several trillion dollars, to power artificial intelligence. Until now, however, the primary function of data centers has been to store the world’s information. The entire searchable internet, for instance, lives in data centers. But that’s not all. Data centers also store most private digital systems: your email accounts; your medical, pension and educational records; every book and archive ever digitized; every social network and dating app; every government and corporate database. Nearly any time you access electronic data — any time you swipe or scroll or speak a voice command — you rely on the services of a data center.