activescott's Notes

Donald Trump’s state department intends to allocate $12m to organisations in the UK founded by the prominent Conservatives

They include $7m for 878, a “leading British and American think tank” devoted to “the rediscovery of our ancient culture” and “ending mass immigration”.

On Wednesday, German chancellor Friedrich Merz responded to the prospect of grants to Maga-aligned groups in Berlin by saying: “I do not ‌want the American government or institutions close to the government to interfere in German ⁠elections.”

A state department spokesperson said that the DRL grants would “continue to undergo the Department’s standard and rigorous vetting process by grant professionals” and that decisions were still under “active deliberation”. They added: “Our foreign assistance programming is aligned to support our strategic priorities. “

The grants are part of a broader shift that has caused dismay among veterans of the state department. In interviews, five former officials suggested that there has been a months-long effort by Trump-aligned individuals in the state department to subvert normal funding procedures and allocate US taxpayer money to conservative and Maga-aligned causes in the UK and Europe.

A former US official who reviewed the allocations called the lack of procedure around them “outrageous and absurd”.

“Sole source awards require significant legal justification to avoid required competitive processes,” they said.

“They are usually given to entities with unique capabilities that are hard to find elsewhere. But in this case I would argue that these entities are being funded to subvert legal and competitive processes.”

Another said that the sole source grants laid out in the document amounted to “horrible stewardship of US taxpayer money.”

The plans are laid out in a congressional notification seen by the Guardian, which documents how the state department intends to spend a sum of money that was allocated last year to a branch of the state department called the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL).

878 has yet to list any specific initiatives, but says that it is focused on “mass migration”, “warfighting” and “rejuvenating energy abundance for urgent re-industrialisation”, as well as “Judeo-Christian culture”.

So when he released his book, literally titled Eat Your Ice Cream: Six Simple Rules for a Long and Healthy Life, I asked him what motivated him.

"Mostly anger at the wellness industrial complex," Emanuel says. He says the wellness industry is selling people all kinds of things that are expensive and clinically unproven, pointing to the latest peptide trend, whole body scans and "all sorts of supplements" marketed as anti-aging elixirs.

And though the title is a bit tongue-in-cheek, he points to evidence that people who are in the habit of eating ice cream have a lower risk of metabolic disease, despite the fact that it has lots of sugar and fat. Researchers have dubbed this the "ice cream paradox." There's data from 2015 that suggests "that ice cream is actually pretty good at preventing development of Type 2 diabetes, and dairy in general is good at preventing Type 2 diabetes," Emanuel says.

• High intakes of olive oil (as the principal source of fat), and a plant-based diet: vegetables (including leafy green vegetables, onions, garlic, tomatoes, and peppers), fresh fruits (consumed as desserts or snacks), cereals (mostly whole grains), nuts, and legumes.

• Moderate intakes of fish and other seafood, poultry, eggs, dairy products (primarily cheese and yogurt), and red wine.

• Low intakes of red meat, processed meat, refined carbohydrates, and sweets.

The Mediterranean diet is associated with a reduction in all-cause mortality in observational studies.[12][13] A 2017 review provided evidence that the Mediterranean diet lowers the risk of heart disease and early death;[14] it may also help with weight loss in obese people.[15] The Mediterranean diet is one of three healthy diets recommended in the 2015–2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, along with the DASH diet and vegetarian diet.[16] It is also recognized by the World Health Organization as a healthy eating pattern.[17]

A 2017 review found evidence that practice of a Mediterranean diet could lead to reduced risk of cardiovascular diseases, overall cancer incidence, neurodegenerative diseases, diabetes, and early death.

A 2023 review provided evidence for a reduction of mortality and cardiovascular disease risk in women on a Mediterranean-type diet.[39] A 2024 meta-analysis found that adherence to consuming these foods was associated with reduction in cardiovascular disease risk.

An updated review in 2021 found that the Mediterranean diet is associated with a 13% lower risk of cancer mortality in the general population.

According to a 2013 systematic review, greater adherence to a Mediterranean diet is correlated with a lower risk of Alzheimer's disease and slower cognitive decline.[52] Another 2013 systematic review reached similar conclusions, and also found a negative association with the risk of progressing from mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer's

Propagation

A great future starts with trees—BIG trees. Plant one and help fight climate change for a thousand years.

Redwoods and Sequoias for the Pacific Northwest

1Password for Claude lets you authorize Claude to complete browser-based tasks that require an account login. This is useful for things like booking travel or managing online accounts.

According to 1Password, approved credentials are delivered through a secure channel and injected directly into the destination page. The password, one-time code, and other secrets never enter Claude’s context, memory, or Anthropic’s systems.

Instead of granting ongoing access to a vault, Claude requests the specific login items it needs for a task. The user can approve or deny that request with a biometric prompt, and the permission lasts only for the current session.

1Password can also broker access across multiple websites during the same task, allowing Claude to complete a multi-step workflow without stopping for a new login each time.

The launch also introduces what 1Password calls Agentic Mode.

When a compatible AI agent takes control of the browser, the 1Password extension automatically locks down the vault so that only the credentials explicitly approved for that task remain available.

It requires the 1Password desktop app and browser extension, along with the Claude desktop app and browser extension.

Support for payment cards and identity information is planned for a later update.

The Anthropic partnership was first outlined in March, when 1Password said Claude would gain consent-based access to vault items.

The Unified Interface For LLMs

xAI's grok CLI tool faced severe community backlash yesterday when it became apparent that running the command in a directory could upload that entire directory to xAI's Google Cloud buckets. One user reported running it in their home directory and seeing it upload "my SSH keys, my password manager database, my documents, photos, videos, everything".

This X1200-c1 case is designed for the raspberry pi 5 X1201 ups shield only, it can fully accommodate the X1201 and the Raspberry Pi 5, with space reserved on the top for mounting the Raspberry Pi 5 Pip boards, such as the X1001, X1000, X1004, X1003 and M901 etc.

Note: Due to the height limitations of the housing, although the X1201 also supports external switch, but no holes of 12 mm in diameter have been provided for the mounting of an external momentary switch.

For Raspberry Pi 5 + PiSugar 3 Plus + Whisplay Hat + RPi Camera Module 3 (Optional)

Updated list of public BitTorrent trackers

Ultralytics creates cutting-edge, state-of-the-art (SOTA) YOLO models built on years of foundational research in computer vision and AI. Constantly updated for performance and flexibility, our models are fast, accurate, and easy to use. They excel at object detection, tracking, instance segmentation, semantic segmentation, image classification, and pose estimation tasks.

highly sensitive video of the man’s physical takedown, wasn’t voluntarily released by the SFPD—which, like most US police departments, rarely releases drone videos even in response to public records requests. Instead, it was accidentally livestreamed onto the open internet via Skydio’s website. That’s where two security researchers, Sam Curry and Maik Robert, discovered that the SFPD was leaking all of the real-time footage from five of its surveillance drones, including both color and thermal imaging, accompanying location metadata, and the drone pilots’ names and email addresses, to anyone who merely found the public web address where the videos were hosted.

Skydio, based in nearby San Mateo, is one of the leading American drone companies selling to police departments, fire departments, government agencies, and the military. Its X10 drones are part of SFPD’s drone program, which began in 2024 and is authorized for vehicle pursuits and active criminal investigations. Since then, the program has grown quickly: SFPD’s fleet has expanded from six drones to 98, and officers logged more than 1,400 launches between May 2024 and March 2026, according to a 2025 SFPD annual report and reporting from the San Francisco Chronicle.

the drone videos were exposed not as a result of any error on the part of Skydio, but rather by what seems to be a misuse of Skydio’s software by the SFPD. Skydio allows users to generate shareable links to videos or access to drones’ data streams in real time, known as ReadyLinks, with the ability to limit access to users with an authentication code or an expiration date. Someone with access to the SFPD’s instance of Skydio’s software, however, appears to have created a link last December to five of its drones’ feeds with no authentication requirement and an expiration date of one full year.

That link was then somehow added to an open-source collection of archived web URLs known as AlienVault Open Threat Exchange, typically used by security researchers, where Curry and Robert found it. In other words, the link appeared to have already exposed the drone feeds for six months by that time, with no assurance that Curry and Robert were the only ones who had been watching.

The innocuous appearance of many of the videos raises questions about whether the surveillance was necessary. In one “auto boost/strip”-related call, the drone follows two young men in their car, at least one of whom is described in police records as having been identified as a “suspicious person in a vehicle.” Then the two men emerge onto a basketball court and start playing, and the drone departs.

A drone flight in response to what police records describe as a “person with a gun” investigation seems to fixate on a seemingly intoxicated man stooped on a sidewalk. Another drone, called in response to an alleged “prowler” incident, hovers over a young person wearing headphones and sitting on the roof of a building, zooms in on them, then flies away. “That one felt like an invasion of privacy, just so uncomfortable,” Curry says. “Like this person thinks they’re by themselves on this roof and has gotten away from everybody, and then there's a police drone watching them.”

Curry and Robert say they first became curious about Skydio last month after seeing an announcement from a Florida police department that it was adopting the company’s drone system, and then learning how widely the company’s drones have been deployed across the US. As web-focused security researchers, they decided to check out the company’s systems. In one routine step, they used the tool GetAllURLs, which pulls all archived web addresses for a given domain from sources including AlienVault Open Threat Exchange, requesting all Skydio links.

Twitter existed for 16 years before Musk bought it. He wasn’t even close to the biggest account during that era. Then he bought it. Now his account is the biggest.

As Silver’s data analysis shows, Musk’s X is not just dominated by right-wing accounts, it’s dominated by “who the hell is that?” right-wing slop accounts.

Twitter chief executive Elon Musk rallied a team of roughly 80 engineers to reconfigure the platform’s algorithm so his tweets would be more widely viewed, tech news site Platformer has reported.

A disgruntled Musk called for an emergency effort after a tweet he sent during Sunday’s Super Bowl game failed to achieve as much engagement as a tweet from Joe Biden, interviews and internal documents reviewed by Platformer have revealed.

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said on Saturday he was detained for over an hour in the West Bank earlier this week by Israeli settlers and that the detention continued with Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers arrived on the scene. “Israeli settlers, brandishing American made M4s, detained me & other Americans on my trip to Palestine,” Khanna wrote in a social media post.  “When the IDF arrived, they sided with the settlers & continued our detention,” he continued. “They made a huge mistake.” The Democratic lawmaker and potential 2028 presidential contender told The New York Times that he was visiting a small Palestinian village in the southern West Bank on Wednesday when armed men blocked the road and began swearing at him and his team and kicking the minibus they were traveling in.

The remilitarisation of the Rhineland (German: Rheinlandbesetzung, pronounced [ˈʁaɪnlantˌbəˈzɛtsʊŋ]) began on 7 March 1936, when military forces of Nazi Germany entered the Rhineland, which directly contravened the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Treaties. Neither France nor Britain was prepared for a military response, so they did not act.

With SAM 3 you can use text and visual prompts to precisely identify, segment, and follow any object in images or videos—coming soon to Instagram Edits and Vibes on the Meta AI app.

Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.