Finishing Off
Earth’s climate is now departing from the stable conditions that supported human civilization for millennia. Crossing critical temperature thresholds may trigger self-reinforcing feedbacks and tipping dynamics that amplify warming and destabilize distant Earth system components. Uncertain tipping thresholds make precaution essential, as crossing them could commit the planet to a hothouse trajectory with long-lasting and potentially irreversible consequences. - Cell Press Journal
AI PANIC: Europe’s broader software sector is valued at roughly €300bn and is heavily concentrated in a handful of companies. That concentration makes every percentage drop more visible — and more painful. Germany’s flagship technology group SAP is by far the largest European software company with a market capitalisation of around €200bn. Shares in SAP have already fallen roughly 20% year-to-date and by 40% since its peak in February 2025. In terms of market value, SAP has wiped out €188bn over the past year alone, nearly half of its current capitalisation. Even more worrying than the number is the trend: SAP is heading for its ninth straight month of decline. That’s never happened in over 30 years of trading. - Euronews
The data point that seems to have caught Wall Street’s attention the most is the estimated capital expenditure (CapEx) for this year, which collectively represents an investment of over $700bn (€590bn) in AI infrastructure. That is more than the entire nominal GDP of Sweden for 2025, one of Europe’s largest economies, as per IMF estimates. Global chip sales are also projected to reach $1tn (€842bn) for the first time this year, according to the US Semiconductor Industry Association.Currently, projected AI revenue for 2026 is nowhere near matching the spending, and there are valid concerns. For instance, the possibility of hardware rapidly depreciating due to innovation, and other high operational costs such as energy usage. It can be confidently stated that the numbers have a heavy reliance on future success. As Google CEO Sundar Pichai acknowledged this month, there are “elements of irrationality in the current spending pace”. Amid all this spending, urgent questions have also been raised about Europe’s ability to compete in a race that has become a battle of balance sheets. For the European Union, the transatlantic contrast is sobering. While American firms are mobilising nearly €600bn in a single year, the EU’s coordinated efforts do not even match the financial firepower of the lowest spender among the US tech titans. However, the numbers tell a stark story. Total European spending on sovereign cloud data infrastructure is forecast to reach just €10.6bn in 2026. While this is a respectable 83% increase year-on-year, it remains a rounding error compared to the US AI build-out. - Euro News
A sweeping Israeli Channel 13 investigation has exposed the Biden administration’s complicity in Israel’s 19-month war on Gaza. Nine top Biden officials acknowledged avoiding real pressure on Israel—even as the death toll surpassed 30,000. Israeli leaders openly bragged they dragged out the war, playing for time until Donald Trump’s return. - Drop Site
An aide to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday that Israel will give Hamas a 60-day deadline to disarm, and if it doesn’t, Israel will restart its full-scale bombing campaign in Gaza. - Antiwar
Ontario students are drowning in debt. The provincial government’s recent announcement to end the domestic tuition freeze and mandate that a minimum of 75% of OSAP funding will now be loans drastically shifts the grant-to-loan ratio. Previously offering up to 85% in grants, OSAP will now provide a maximum of just 25% in grants, leaving students with significantly more upfront costs and decades of heavier repayment across the province. - Wall of Debt
If the EU has mismanaged its relations with Russia, a middle power, it has performed equally poorly with regard to China, a budding superpower. A massive shift has taken place in EU-Chinese relations. In 2000, the combined GDP of the EU countries was roughly seven times as big as China’s GDP. Now, both are about the same size. By 2050, the GDP of the EU will be about half the size of China’s. And yet the EU countries speak condescendingly toward China and have blocked deals that would productively strengthen ties, such as the EU-Chinese investment agreement. - Foreign Affairs
Nuclear war is obviously the most dangerous type of war that could take place, with potential participation by other nuclear powers. But Netanyahu may believe that the risk is manageable because Israel is not perceived as a threat to any nuclear powers. And he is counting on the US taking care of Israel’s economic needs in the war’s aftermath. Certainly, Israel will be widely condemned and probably ostracized. But Netanyahu and his supporters likely believe that this is another major step in fulfilling the Zionist vision, and that with time, Israel will be stronger than ever. - Defend Dem.
TRIBUTE TO REV. JACKSON: Because Rev. Jackson had made it possible to speak about Palestine, we were able to build coalitions around the issue during the 1988 presidential campaign. Not only did we elect a record number of American delegates across the country, but we also built coalitions with Black, Latino, and progressive Jewish delegates, among others. We succeeded in passing resolutions in support of Palestinian rights at 10 state Democratic conventions. And by the time we got to the national convention in Atlanta, we had earned enough delegates to call for a minority plank on Palestinian rights. - Zeteo
Facing a demographic catastrophe, Ukraine is paying for troops to freeze their sperm
‘My research shows that the Oslo Accords was a deal created solely on Israel’s premises, where Norway was willingly running a duty for Israel’ - Hilde Waage, University of Oslo
Chinese policymakers seem to treat AI not as an existential rupture in human history but as a powerful, general-purpose technology like electricity, computers, or the internet that can turbocharge many other domains: manufacturing, scientific research, services, defense, healthcare and medicine, and so on. Indeed, China’s AI+ initiative shares many parallels with China’s 2015 “Internet+” initiative where the goal was to boost adoption and use this new technology to drive progress across a whole range of areas, from industry to public services. Nobody “won” the internet. Instead, the question was: who can make the most of this new technology over the long run? While China may see AI as more significant than previous technologies, Beijing’s approach to AI lines up with a longer pattern of trying to harness new cross-cutting technologies through a broader process of economic and social transformation: “informatization” 信息化, “digitization” 数字化, and “intelligentization” 智能化. - High Capacity
With the swift Nazi advances in western and eastern Europe in the early years of the second world war, the German press claimed in November 1941 that “the United States of Europe has at last become a reality”. After Nazi Germany’s defeat in 1945, this notion of the continent united under the domination of one nation was superseded by a commitment to cooperation. This led in 1951 to the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community and in 1957 to the European Economic Community, which eventually morphed into the European Union with its motto of “united in diversity”. - The Conversation
Hazardous substances found in all headphones tested by ToxFREE project. Substances include chemicals that can cause cancer, neurodevelopmental problems and the feminisation of males. - Guardian
The Epstein outrage and Trump’s demolition of American prestige have alike led the collapse of enforced silence. Mark Carney’s admission at Davos that the US-led order had passed was applauded by the very Atlanticist elites who championed it for decades. Trump’s obscenity has made the system impossible to defend with the usual pieties. That these same commentators were unmoved by Biden’s sponsorship of genocide shows what actually troubles them: not the order’s concealed violence, but the loss of its dignified facade. It is now a scramble to salvage reputations amid general collapse. ..Aimé Césaire observed that fascism became objectionable to Europeans only when it unleashed in Europe the brutality they had inflicted on the “inferior” peoples of Asia and Africa. His insight is verified today at dizzying speed by the contrast between European alarm over Greenland and official indifference to a loudly proclaimed campaign of extermination against Palestinians. Western leaders still smilingly pose for pictures with wanted Israeli war criminals…History will be made increasingly outside the West, conforming to none of the rational designs posited by intellectual frameworks originating in a relatively small and uniform part of the world. Our task is to participate in this dialogue without pretending to escape complicity, to build new forms of solidarity while admitting our implication in systems of oppression, to envision futures that do not replicate the violence of the past while registering how deeply that past has shaped our present capacities for imagination. This is the work that confronts us: the difficult practice of learning to think and act without the guarantees and certainties that made our complicity possible. - Equator
The annual financial reports recently released by Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Tesla disclose that these corporations collectively reported $315 billion in U.S. profits for 2025, and collectively paid just 4.9 percent of that amount in federal corporate income taxes—with Tesla paying exactly zero. That amounts to a collective tax savings of $51 billion last year for these four giant multinational corporations, versus what they would have paid if they paid the full 21 percent federal corporate income tax rate. - Itep
Palantir Gets Millions of Dollars From New York City’s Public Hospitals
Third Conservative Canadian MP defects to Carney’s Liberals
