Sorry if not quite for the sub, but I am just wondering if anyone that has watched or heard The Odyssey soundtrack from Goransson thinks the love theme from the Odyssey has a similarity with what Zimmer did on Dune.
Not saying plagiarism or anything like that...I just find it interesting there's a kind of similar elemental quality to it all and the direction taken, to me, seems alike.
Anyone else think so?
Donald Trump’s administration is reportedly considering military action against an al-Qaeda-linked group in Mali, what could be the eighth country targeted by the president since he returned to office last year.
The administration is weighing strikes against JNIM, or Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, which has claimed responsibility for a series of deadly attacks and kidnappings since announcing its formation in 2017. The group, which is allied with al-Qaeda, has increasingly attacked nearby West African nations, including a lethal attack at an airport in Niger’s capital last month, while terrorizing Mali’s interior with fuel blockades and sieges.
Trump, whose administration labels him “the peace president” with a “peace through strength” platform as he openly seeks international peace prizes, is reportedly mulling whether to take action in Mali while mired in a months-long war with Iran, according to The Washington Post.
If approved, the attacks would add to a growing list of nations and international waterways bombed by the U.S. military since 2025. The president has previously ordered strikes in Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen in addition to killing more than 200 people on alleged drug-running boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean.
Mali, one of the largest gold-producing nations in Africa, is among an alliance of military-controlled governments including Burkina Faso and Niger that have largely cut Western ties and turned to Russian forces for security help after recent military coups ousted their democratically elected leaders.
Among administration figures reportedly pushing for military strikes against JNIM in Mali is Sebastian Gorka, a deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council.
The White House did not confirm whether the president is weighing military action. An administration official told The Independent that it hopes the Alliance of Sahel States “prevails against terrorism, but the blame for the deteriorating security situation falls upon Russia who has proven to be an ineffective security partner for Mali.”
“We hope that other African nations take note of Russia’s terrible performance in combating terrorism,” the other said.
The administration is urging Alliance governments and other coastal West African governments to purchase U.S. equipment and services “to support their war efforts against the terrorists.”
The administration is also urging NATO and regional allies to support Mali.
The Department of Defense referred The Independent’s questions to the White House.
Mali’s junta-controlled government and Russian mercenaries are struggling to combat JNIM and other military groups that have occupied the region. Another group — the rival IS Sahel, which is affiliated with the Islamic State — has pushed into Mali’s border with Niger, where militants kidnapped American missionary Kevin Rideout last year.
So far this year, JNIM has launched a series of attacks on the nation’s capital of Bamako and killed the country’s defense minister in a suicide attack. Mali’s military and Russia’s Africa Corps troops also battled the group over several days this month, and JNIM shot down and destroyed a military helicopter after forcibly displacing a village.
Last week, the group ambushed a joint convoy, reportedly forcing Africa Corps to leave dozens of Malian soldiers behind. Militants subsequently captured and executed many of them, “demonstrating how exposed Malian forces become when operating without the support of their Russian partners,” according to Héni Nsaibia, West Africa senior analyst at the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project.
“The military relies heavily on aircraft, including helicopters and armed drones, and these losses are likely becoming increasingly difficult to absorb, as this was the second helicopter shot down in just two weeks,” Nsaibia said this week. “The fact that the group eventually succeeded in emptying the town of a population it largely perceives as collectively hostile and state-aligned clearly demonstrates a sustained long-term strategy.”
While JNIM and militant groups are believed to be responsible for at least 232 civilian deaths last year, Mali’s military and Russian mercenaries are responsible for killing hundreds more, according to ACLED. Last year, they were responsible for 925 civilian deaths, ACLED found.
Mali, home to roughly 25 million people, is among Africa’s largest gold producers and contains large lithium deposits that foreign companies are hoping to exploit.
Last year, the Trump administration reportedly began increasing its intelligence sharing and military support to the coup-ruled governments of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger as part of a transnational deal to boost American access to minerals while also warding off Russian and Chinese influence in Africa.
But it’s unclear whether the deal is working in a nation that has largely abandoned any movement towards restoring democratic elections; a similarly designed U.S.-Nigeria security partnership resulted in U.S. strikes that killed one of the Islamic State’s top leaders in Africa last year.
“Opting for the military solution one more time won’t get things resolved,” Wassim Nasr, senior research fellow at the Soufan Center, told The Washington Post. “The French tried that for 10 years. The Russians have been trying for five years. The situation has only gotten worse and worse.”
The original thread I crossposted got deleted:
French modelling scout linked to US sex offender Epstein found dead outside Paris - France 24
Daniel Siad, a French modelling scout with links to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, was found dead at his home outside Paris, prosecutors said on Wednesday morning.
A French modelling scout with close ties to the late US financier Jeffrey Epstein has been found dead at his home outside Paris, prosecutors said on Wednesday.
Under investigation in France, Daniel Siad, 69, was one of several French men accused of aiding Epstein to traffic and abuse women.
Siad had not yet been questioned by investigators, but had denied the allegations, saying he wanted to be heard and give his version of events.
"An investigation to determine the cause of death was opened on Monday evening following the discovery," the Nanterre prosecutor's office said.
An autopsy will be carried out as part of the probe.
Targeted by several complaints, including allegations of rape, Siad was the subject of an investigation conducted by the office specialising in combating human trafficking.
Siad's name appeared in more than 1,000 documents released as part of the declassified Epstein files.
He likened his efforts to recruit women to fishing.
"In This busyness I feel like fisherman some time I cache quick, some time no fish," Siad wrote to Epstein in 2014.
Siad had insisted that the American convicted sex offender had "taken advantage of his trust".
French authorities in 2020 arrested modelling agent Jean-Luc Brunel after allegations he procured women for the US billionaire. He was found dead in prison in 2022.
Epstein died in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial for sex trafficking.
Thought this was good for sharing.
U.S. Lawmakers Challenge Trump’s Claims About Cuba After Visiting the Island
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YouTube vid from article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsQbwjoUO8I
>U.S. lawmakers Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI), Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández (D-NM), and Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-IL) gave an exclusive interview to Belly of the Beast during their recent visit to Havana.
>Their trip to Cuba comes as the Trump administration ramps up its oil blockade and economic war on the island, which it has justified by claiming that Cuba poses a threat to U.S. national security.
>After meeting with doctors, farmers, entrepreneurs, diplomats and ordinary Cubans, the lawmakers accused Donald Trump and Marco Rubio of pushing a “false narrative.”
>“We have seen no proof," said Pocan. "Congress needs to demand it.”
>“Walking through a hospital that is dark and empty because we've cut off energy, we’ve cut off fuel,” said Leger Fernández. “Why would Americans support that?”
https://www.wired.com/story/how-palestinians-are-building-a-digital-archive-that-cant-be-erased/
>Palestinian culture has been looted, destroyed, and displaced for decades. Since October 2023, however, the destruction of Gaza’s cultural institutions has accelerated, prompting a team in the occupied West Bank to build something they hope cannot be seized or erased: a digital archive of Palestinian memory.
>“Within a week, Israel bombed two art galleries, seven museums, two main archives in Gaza, and hundreds of archaeological sites,” says Amer Shomali, a prominent visual artist and general director of the Palestinian Museum. “This battle of trying to erase the Palestinian culture and Palestinian memory—it’s not something theoretical.”
>Shomali says that roughly 80 percent of the country’s national collections have been looted, destroyed, or remain under Israeli control. Against that backdrop, the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit has become both a physical repository of Palestinian heritage and the center of an increasingly ambitious digital preservation effort.
>Designed by New York–based Heneghan Peng architects, the same firm behind Egypt’s Grand Egyptian Museum, the building is home to numerous Palestinian collections, including photographs by Khalil Raad and murals by Vera Tamari.
>The magnificent museum stands in defiance here, among gardens of native flowers and cascading terraces. Yet, Shomali says, the site sits between various checkpoints, making it hard for some Palestinians to access.
>A 2025 report by the Applied Research Institute-Jerusalem says at least 2,400 archeological sites in the West Bank have been taken over by Israel.
>Meanwhile, Reuters reported in June that Israeli lawmakers are advancing legislation that would place ancient sites in the occupied territory under the Israeli Ministry of Heritage, a move that Palestinians and Israeli rights groups say amounts to de facto annexation and could further expand Israeli control over Palestinian heritage sites.
>As of March 24, 2026, Unesco had verified damage to 164 cultural sites in Gaza since October 7, 2023, including historical buildings, religious sites, museums, and archaeological sites.
>Many more cultural artifacts and personal histories have likely been lost amid the war, mass displacement, and the destruction of entire communities.
>“It was a continuous battle all the time between us and them,” says Shomali about historical efforts to archive Palestinian artifacts amid Israeli aggression since 1948. “We document, they loot; but every time we document, we document with less vivid memory.”
>It is one of the reasons the museum turned to technology. In 2018, the team began building what Shomali describes as an “unlootable archive”—a digital repository designed to preserve Palestinian history beyond the walls of any single institution.
>“We created this platform, the Palestine Museum Digital Archive, which is an unlootable archive,” Shomali explains.
>What began with simple door-knocking—visiting families in the West Bank and asking permission to scan old photographs, letters and documents—has grown into one of the most ambitious digital preservation projects in the region.
>The open-source archive now contains more than 500,000 digitized photographs, identification papers, diaries, maps, films, and letters, many of which were collected directly from Palestinian families and might otherwise have been lost forever.
>The Palestinian Museum’s mission is both preservation and access: to safeguard Palestinian history and make it available to those unable to visit Palestine.
>Behind the archive is a team of three full-time staff members dedicated solely to digitization, metadata, and research, supported by a wider network of volunteers. Funded through diaspora donations and partnerships with the University of California and the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the project involves extensive cataloging, translations, and linguistic proofreading. The museum is even exploring a bot capable of reading Ottoman Arabic to help process historical records.
>The effort reflects a broader shift in how communities under threat are using technology—not simply to preserve culture, but to build resilient, distributed archives that can outlive war, displacement, and physical destruction.
>For Shomali, the archive allows Palestinians to reclaim ownership over their history. “All of a sudden, you start to have this mesh, this web of information and data, and it allows you to rewrite the history, but interestingly, bottom-up in the sense that it’s not a state archive.”
>The museum has also taken steps to ensure the archive can survive digital attacks and even physical destruction. Multiple copies of the archive are stored around the world, creating a distributed system designed to prevent the collections from disappearing entirely.
>“We have different backups, but we keep getting cyberattacks on the website,” Shomali says. “Almost every month, we get attacked, and the website goes down, and we reinitiate it based on one of the backups we have.”
>“We can’t protect it from being hacked, but we can protect it from disappearing.”
>The archive’s distributed nature means Palestinian history no longer exists in a single building or on a single server. Even if one copy disappears, others remain.
>One initiative turned the archive into what Shomali describes as “an exhibition in a box, Ikea-style.” Users can download exhibition materials, print them, and stage their own exhibitions on Palestine anywhere in the world, regardless of budget. The project has been exhibited more than 260 times, from Japan to San Francisco, and translated into five languages.
>The archive has also become a resource for artists and curators abroad. In May 2026, artist and curator Leyya Mona Tawil used its collections to create My Name is Palestine: Echoes from The Palestinian Museum’s Music Online Exhibition in San Francisco.
>“They’d come out mostly in tears and just be like, thank you,” Tawil says about the reception to people visiting the exhibition.
>Acknowledging the sheer scale of the archive, Tawil says she accessed just a “fragment of what the museum holds.” But even that had a profound impact on her as an artist and her audience: “It’s not just a history of music, it’s not just a collection of past objects; it’s a living archive that represents a society that is under threat.”
>In Spain, curator Pablo Llorca spent two months sifting through archival imagery before debuting To Tell My Story in Madrid in October 2025. Since then, the exhibition has travelled to around 15 locations across the country and is attracting interest from Spain’s Ministry of Culture.
>Mohammad Rabae, who is responsible for the digitization process, tells WIRED Middle East that some documents are extremely delicate, featuring torn pages and faded handwritten ink.
>Among the most delicate artifacts Rabae has handled are a 19th-century Bible printed in Jerusalem and a Palestinian newspaper from 1930 with brittle pages that had to be carefully unfolded before digitization. “Experiences like these show that digitization is not only about creating a digital image,” he says. “It’s also about preserving fragile historical material safely for future generations.”
>“We always try to respect the privacy, dignity, and rights of the people represented in the records,” says Rabae. “We are not only creating digital files; we are helping to preserve historical evidence and cultural heritage.”
>For Shomali, the archive is more than a database. Every scan, every backup, and every replicated copy is an act of resistance against erasure—and an attempt to ensure that Palestinian memory survives even if the places that hold it do not.
>“Having the digital archive is a way of protecting our memory,” he says.
>He often returns to the words of the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: “We who are able to remember are able to liberate ourselves.”
Graham Platner Inspired Him to Run for Congress in Washington State
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When Maine Democratic Senate hopeful Graham Platner sealed the deal on his resounding primary victory in June, the oysterman turned political lightning rod sounded a note of defiance — one that resonated with another would-be candidate on the other side of the country.
In Washington state, Alex Scheel, who is also a veteran of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, saw Platner’s win and decided to take the plunge. He officially launched his congressional bid to unseat incumbent Rep. Marilyn Strickland on June 13.
“Platner is an inspiration for this, he’s got a similar background to me with the veteran thing,” Scheel said in an interview with The Intercept. “I think Americans are so tired and disengaged. … There’s hope for more left-wing candidates to challenge Trump and the corporate Democrats.”
At 38, Scheel is a few years younger than Platner, but he’s a more seasoned organizer; a longtime member of Democratic Socialists of America, Scheel has been his local branch’s housing justice chair, secretary-treasurer, membership coordinator, and campaign coordinator.
Scheel’s hopeful that his experience with the DSA — which is currently riding high after primary electoral upsets against entrenched incumbent Democrats in Colorado and New York — as well as the political moment that Platner and other insurgent candidates have tapped into will propel him through the state’s August 4 primary. Like California, Washington has jungle primaries, where the top two finishers (of any party) advance, meaning that if his long-shot candidacy pays off, he wouldn’t have to beat Strickland outright until November.
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“People are hungry for normal, regular, working-class people to step up and say, ‘If we get together, we can build power, and we can make America, we can make the world a better, safer, peaceful place,’” Scheel said. “It’s obvious that we’re ready for that. Whether it’s Mainers or whether it’s Washingtonians, we don’t want the same old neoliberal politics.”
While more left-leaning than many of their peers, Platner and Scheel are part of a large cohort of former military service members running for office this cycle. According to data from the advocacy group With Honor, which tracks veterans in politics, 2026 has seen a 47 percent increase in candidates with military backgrounds from 2024, with 752 running so far, up from 513.
Born in San Diego in 1987 and raised in northern Michigan, Scheel joined the military in 2007. He served as an interrogator in Iraq until 2011 and in 2012 worked in intelligence in Afghanistan. That experience “radicalized” him, Scheel said. Speaking to men his age who were potential “enemies,” he instead found common ground with their frustration and could relate to their rage.
“As an interrogator, I sat and talked to Iraqis and Afghans every day and got to know them and got to understand where they were coming from,” he said. Scheel said his interaction with one man, Muthanna, sticks with him in particular. He told Scheel “how the Americans came in, invaded, bombed the electricity plants, and bombed water treatment plants. They had four hours of electricity a day and no clean drinking water, [the U.S.] killed his dad in the invasion, and they threw his uncles into prison.”
Scheel continued, “He was painting this horrible picture. I had enough empathy to put myself in his spot and go, ‘Holy shit, I would do the exact same thing. I would join any sort of group that tried to defend my country and my family and friends.’”
In 2014, Scheel left the military and relocated to Washington, where he attended Evergreen State College. Four years later, he got involved in community activism after joining the Tiki tenants fight in Tacoma, where a developer attempted to displace poor, disabled, and elderly tenants of an apartment building. (While the organizers won some concessions, the project ultimately went forward.)
“Because of my service, I realized that our government is often just straight-up lying to you,” Scheel said. “We can go bomb and kill and do all this horrible shit in the name of democracy or whatever, and your average person doesn’t know it.”
While Democrats can point to politicians like New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill as proof of concept that veterans get elected, it’s not, necessarily, an indicator of long-term success.
For decades, centrist Democrats, perhaps most notably Rahm Emanuel during his time as chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, have looked to recruit veterans to topple popular Republican incumbents, often to little lasting electoral gain. In the last 10 years, liberals have poured money into losing campaigns like Kentucky’s Amy McGrath, MJ Hegar in Texas, and Marcus Flowers in Georgia, with the hope that moderates and disillusioned Republicans would cross the aisle.
Scheel is disrupting that model by running on Medicare for All and housing justice, among other progressive policies he believes will resonate in his 10th Congressional District, which includes the left-wing cities of Tacoma and Olympia. He faces an uphill climb: The establishment Democratic incumbent has around $800,000 campaign cash on hand and the backing of the local party. But he’s betting that his time organizing in the area will help to narrow that disadvantage. He’s raised around $5,000 so far, he said.
In a sign of how the party’s primary contests are splitting down new lines, Scheel is setting himself apart from Strickland by running an anti-war campaign that highlights his opposition to military aid to Israel. Adam Arafat, a fellow veteran who is also running in Washington’s 10th District, led off a candidate questionnaire question about the issues in the race by saying he would refuse “corporate PAC money and AIPAC money.”
The incumbent offers a rich target for this line of attack: Strickland went on a trip to Israel in March 2024 sponsored by the American Israel Education Foundation, an arm of AIPAC, and is a leadership member of the moderate New Democratic Coalition.
Nationally, there is a real hunger for change — and Scheel believes he can offer a new way forward. The party establishment is failing a base that’s expecting them to fight and stand up for what’s right and has been repeatedly disappointed. Scheel told The Intercept he believes Democrats, including his opponent Strickland, have fallen down on the job, which has created an opening for the left wing of the party.
“This last presidential campaign failed because they didn’t deliver on their promises to fight Trump and to make the country a better place,” he said. “Standard of living is horrible, affordability is horrible, and it shows in their polling. Their polling is almost as bad if not worse as Trump. So there’s an opportunity.”
>Postmaster General David Steiner told senators that, under a new proposed rule, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) will not deliver mail ballots unless states hand over their voter lists to the Trump administration.
>“Under our proposed regulation, no,” Steiner said during a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing Wednesday after being asked whether USPS would refuse to deliver election mail if states refuse to divulge their voter lists.
> “We would tell the state that we need the manifest,” Steiner added.
> Steiner’s alarming answer is yet more evidence that the Postal Service is following through with President Donald Trump’s sweeping attack on mail voting and breaking from its decades-long history as a neutral, nonpartisan carrier of U.S. election mail.
>The USPS’s new proposal, which Postal workers have denounced, stems from Trump’s March 2026 executive order that, in part, demanded USPS only send mail ballots to voters on lists created and controlled by the federal government.
>Specifically, the proposal would require state election officials to send USPS a list of voters who have requested a mail-in or absentee ballot at least 30 days before ballots are sent out under state law. If voters aren’t on the list, they will not receive a ballot. If implemented, it would effectively create a federal registration list for absentee voters.
>Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), the ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, told Steiner that the proposal would “coerce” states — particularly states like Oregon, where mail voting is the default form of voting — into providing the Trump administration with sensitive voter data.
>“This is basically a back-door way for the federal government to get voting information that states control under the U.S. Constitution,” Peters said. “You’re telling the states, ‘Give the federal government this information — trust the federal government, trust the Trump administration, we’ll take good care of these — and if you don’t do it, you can’t mail absentee ballots.’”
>“You are going to make a decision that people cannot vote by mail,” the senator added. “That’s unacceptable."
>Asked to describe his actions, Hearn said: “I reached in there, and I was able to grab the end of that flapping piece, the already peeling piece. It was still attached to the bottom. I didn’t remove anything.”
No politic, no politic!
But seriously, total information control appears to be the goal.
This makes me wonder if or when the US is gonna start shitting on or sabotaging Mexico the more and more they start doing better. It also makes me think how most people in the US have been conditioned to not want shit like this from their government. A cheap EV for doing daily city tasks and driving that's under $10k? Come on, wtf.
In smaller news, this is still going on and a complete waste of money
As always these people never stop with wanting to do fascist shit.