activescott's Notes

Despite the ceasefire, there are still recurring deadly strikes. Israeli tank shelling on Thursday killed four Palestinians east of Gaza City, according to Mohamed Abu Selmiya, director of the Shifa Hospital, where the bodies were taken. The Israeli military did not immediately comment.

residents say fuel and firewood are in short supply. Prices are exorbitant and searching for firewood is dangerous. Two 13-year-old boys were shot and killed by Israeli forces on Wednesday as they tried to collect firewood, hospital officials said.

News organizations rely largely on Palestinian journalists and residents in Gaza to show what is happening on the ground because Israel has barred international journalists from entering to cover the war, aside from rare guided tours.

More than 470 people have been killed by Israeli fire in Gaza since the ceasefire began in October, according to Gaza’s health ministry. At least 77 have been killed by Israeli gunfire near a ceasefire line that splits the territory between Israeli-held areas and most of Gaza’s Palestinian population, the ministry says.

Claude’s constitution is the foundational document that both expresses and shapes who Claude is. It contains detailed explanations of the values we would like Claude to embody and the reasons why. In it, we explain what we think it means for Claude to be helpful while remaining broadly safe, ethical, and compliant with our guidelines. The constitution gives Claude information about its situation and offers advice for how to deal with difficult situations and tradeoffs, like balancing honesty with compassion and the protection of sensitive information. Although it might sound surprising, the constitution is written primarily for Claude. It is intended to give Claude the knowledge and understanding it needs to act well in the world.

Claude itself also uses the constitution to construct many kinds of synthetic training data, including data that helps it learn and understand the constitution, conversations where the constitution might be relevant, responses that are in line with its values, and rankings of possible responses. All of these can be used to train future versions of Claude to become the kind of entity the constitution describes. This practical function has shaped how we’ve written the constitution: it needs to work both as a statement of abstract ideals and a useful artifact for training.

While Washington frames this as a roadmap for “reconstruction and prosperity”, the exclusion of Palestinians from the top decision-making body suggests they will have little say in deciding the future governance structure.

According to the White House statement, the “Founding Executive Council” sits at the apex of the pyramid. This body holds the purse strings and sets the strategic vision. It is chaired by President Trump, who retains veto power.

Advertisement The lineup of Executive Board members is:

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio: Rubio is one of the most pro-Israel officials in the Trump administration. He has said that those who criticise Israel will not be granted US visas. He has also criticised the move by several Western countries to recognise Palestinian statehood as a “reckless decision” that “only serves Hamas propaganda”. US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff: Witkoff is a New York-based real estate developer and investor close to Trump. He was tasked with ceasefire talks in Gaza. Witkoff was accused of reneging on Gaza talks after he accused Hamas of blocking a deal last July. Hamas political bureau member Basem Naim accused him of “serving the Israeli position”. Jared Kushner: Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. is also a staunch supporter of Israel who previously suggested that Palestinians are incapable of self-governance. He has described Gaza as having “very valuable waterfront property”. Kushner was also the driving force of the so-called Abraham Accords, a series of deals that formalised ties between several Arab countries and Israel. Billionaire businessman Marc Rowan: Rowan is a co-founder of Apollo Global Management, which is one of the world’s largest investment firms. He has run philanthropic activities in Israel and has funded pro-Israel advocacy groups in the United States, according to media reports. He has also supported the Israeli-American Council, which works to strengthen Israeli and American Jewish communities.

Aryeh Lightstone: A key figure in the Abraham Accords and the controversial aid organisation the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” (GHF), which faced severe accusations regarding aid mismanagement and coordination failures that led to the killing of hundreds of Palestinians seeking food.

In September 2024, Mr. Witkoff co-founded the cryptocurrency company World Liberty Financial (WLF) alongside his two sons, President Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and Barron Trump.1 On November 12, 2024, President Trump announced that Mr. Witkoff would serve as his Special Envoy to the Middle East.

growing ties between WLF and the very countries Mr. Witkoff negotiates with as Special Envoy is particularly alarming. In May 2025, Witkoff’s son, Zach Witkoff, and Eric Trump jointly announced that the U.A.E.-backed investment fund MGX had agreed to purchase $2 billion in WLF’s stablecoin.6 Two weeks later, the U.S. and U.A.E. announced an agreement to allow the U.A.E. to access advanced U.S.-exported chips for artificial intelligence.7 This deal was reportedly negotiated by Mr. Witkoff, despite his and his family’s financial relationship with the U.A.E. through WLF and national security concerns from senior advisors.8 The timing of these two deals raises serious questions about the impact Mr. Witkoff’s personal and family finances are playing in his official role as Special Envoy

Sen. Bernie Sanders: “Israel is forcing Doctors Without Borders & dozens of other humanitarian groups to end their work in Gaza. Countless innocent people rely on these services amid the ongoing crisis there. This is yet another cruel, inhumane step from the extremist Israeli government.”

The announcement specifically names the distribution of humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza as a duty of the multinational force under Jeffers’ command. This raises renewed concern that the multinational force will militarize the distribution of aid like the Israeli military did under the GHF scheme.

The militarization of humanitarian aid violates the humanitarian principles of humanity, impartiality, neutrality, and independence–just as Israel’s weaponization of food through the GHF did.

The naming of Jeffers as the commander of the multinational force should trigger Congressional oversight of the US military’s activities in Gaza, including the War Powers Resolution.

About 55% less fentanyl was seized by September 2025 than by September 2024.

Canadian company TransAlta’s coal-burning power plant in Centralia, Washington, shut down Dec. 19

The plant has not re-started since then, despite a Dec. 16 emergency order from U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright to keep operating.

On Dec. 9, TransAlta announced it had reached a deal with Puget Sound Energy, Washington’s largest utility, to convert the Centralia plant and run it on natural gas for another 16 years

US job openings fell to 7.15 million in November, down from 7.45 million in the previous month, marking the lowest level since September 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary report released Wednesday.

declined across most industries, with the biggest pullback seen in leisure and hospitality, healthcare and social assistance, and transportation and warehousing. Only a few industries, including construction and retail, added jobs.

Hiring slowed as well, while layoffs declined to a six-month low, extending the “hire less, fire less” mode that has defined the US labor market for much of the past year

Even without adding in Trump’s own $5.5 billion net worth, Forbes estimates that his top advisors are worth $7.5 billion, more than doubling the $3.2 billion combined worth of Trump’s 2019 Cabinet. (By contrast, Biden’s Cabinet of regular Joes was barely worth $110 million combined in 2021.)

Nearly 400 millionaires and billionaires from 24 countries are calling on global leaders to increase taxes on the super-rich, amid growing concern that the wealthiest in society are buying political influence.

“A handful of global oligarchs with extreme wealth have bought up our democracies; taken over our governments; gagged the freedom of our media; placed a stranglehold on technology and innovation; deepened poverty and social exclusion; and accelerated the breakdown of our planet,” it reads. “What we treasure, rich and poor alike, is being eaten away by those intent on growing the gulf between their vast power and everyone else.

“The super-rich are being given complete free rein. It is beyond comprehension that the richest 1% now own three times more than the world’s total public wealth combined.

Israeli demolition teams have begun to tear down the headquarters of the UN Palestinian Refugee Agency, known as Unrwa, in occupied East Jerusalem. Israel says it owns the land on which the compound stands and has accused Unrwa of being infiltrated by Hamas. Unrwa says its premises are protected under international conventions and, while it admits that nine Unrwa staff may have been involved in the 7 October Hamas-led attacks, it says Israel hasn't proven anything more extensive than that. The BBC's John Sudworth reports from the site.

An open source toolkit that allows you to focus on product scenarios and predictable outcomes instead of vibe coding every piece from scratch.

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In the first stage of model training, pre-training, LLMs are asked to read vast amounts of text. Through this, they learn to simulate heroes, villains, philosophers, programmers, and just about every other character archetype under the sun. In the next stage, post-training, we select one particular character from this enormous cast and place it center stage: the Assistant. It’s in this character that most modern language models interact with users.

But who exactly is this Assistant? Perhaps surprisingly, even those of us shaping it don't fully know. We can try to instill certain values in the Assistant, but its personality is ultimately shaped by countless associations latent in training data beyond our direct control. What traits does the model associate with the Assistant? Which character archetypes is it using for inspiration? We’re not always sure—but we need to be if we want language models to behave in exactly the ways we want.

In a new paper, conducted through the MATS and Anthropic Fellows programs, we look at several open-weights language models, map out how their neural activity defines a “persona space,” and situate the Assistant persona within that space.

We find that Assistant-like behavior is linked to a pattern of neural activity that corresponds to one particular direction in this space—the “Assistant Axis”—that is closely associated with helpful, professional human archetypes. By monitoring models’ activity along this axis, we can detect when they begin to drift away from the Assistant and toward another character. And by constraining their neural activity (“activation capping”) to prevent this drift, we can stabilize model behavior in situations that would otherwise lead to harmful outputs.

The Assistant Axis (defined as the mean difference in activations between the Assistant and other personas) aligns with the primary axis of variation in persona space. This occurs across different models

“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America,” Trump's text, sent at 4:15 pm Norway time (10:15 am ET), said.

"I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland," he continued.