mainly comic stories from Birmingham read in 162 countries so far
PODAST TOO https://open.spotify.com/show/1wSSIExkhsR97u1jqj0iiR AND https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VFNwQSaGBYgNgZdintU4ZKeAd73ijM4O?usp=sharing
A top Democrat has demanded answers after it was reported that a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin paid hundreds of thousands of dollars toward Donald Trump Jr’s wedding in the Bahamas earlier this year.
Trump Jr, the US president’s eldest child, married Palm Beach socialite Bettina Anderson in a lavish three-day celebration across two exclusive private islands in May, which according to ProPublica was partially bankrolled by Umar Kremlev, a member of the Russian president’s circle.
Citing records and interviews with three anonymous sources familiar with the event, ProPublica reported that Kremlev footed the bill to rent one of the islands where a reception was held and where guests slept, along with other large expenses, including a huge firework show.
“Why did a Russian oligarch close to Putin fund Trump Jr.’s wedding in the Bahamas?” posted Robert Garcia, the ranking member and lead Democrat on the House oversight committee, on social media. “Umar Kremlev spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the President’s son. What did he get in return? We need answers.”
Kremlev has a longstanding relationship with Putin. He is the head of the International Boxing Association (IBA), a sporting body that has been backed by the state-owned Russian energy company Gazprom. According to ProPublica, the wedding payments came from an IBA-affiliated entity in Dubai that the boxing association uses for financial transactions.
In the days before the wedding party, he reportedly went to China as part of a delegation accompanying Putin, and the month prior the Russian president had bestowed him with a state honor, the Order of Friendship. The Ukrainian government has imposed sanctions on Kremlev, citing his closeness to Putin and Russian security services.
Alexander Lagutin, a businessperson who has held senior roles at a Russian defense contractor and a state-backed energy company, had been with Kremlev on the China trip. Kremlev’s right hand at the IBA, Elena Sobol, attended the wedding, too.
While the event was extravagant, the guest list was intimate, with only about 50 people attending, most of whom were immediate family, close friends and business partners of the couple. Then there was Kremlev, who reportedly didn’t attend the ceremony itself, which was limited to just 18 guests, but was present with a large contingent of Russians at the party, much to the confusion of the other guests. The group reportedly sometimes stood off by themselves speaking Russian, according to ProPublica.
The affair has raised questions about the implications of a member of Putin’s circle financially supporting and gaining such intimate access to the US president’s family. In recent years Trump Jr has emerged as a leading campaign surrogate for Trump and has even been touted as a potential political heir.
Retired FBI official Frank Montoya Jr told ProPublica: “If I’m paying for your wedding, at some point, you’re going to owe me something. This should be unthinkable for the son of the president.”
It remains unclear why Kremlev helped pay for the wedding and why he was there, when he appears to have only met Trump Jr – the executive vice-president of the Trump Organization, who has a personal net worth somewhere in the ballpark of $300m – quite recently.
Donald Trump famously didn’t attend the wedding. “He’d like me to go, but it’s going to be just a small, little private affair,” the US president told reporters a few days before the nuptials. “I said, you know, this is not good timing for me. I have a thing called Iran and other things.”
In response to detailed questions from ProPublica, a spokesperson for Trump Jr did not deny that Kremlev had helped fund the wedding. “Umar is a personal friend of Don,” the spokesperson said, adding Kremlev is “not someone he has a business relationship with” and that the men met through a mutual friend in the hunting world.
After the article was published, Bettina Trump also confirmed the report, thanking “our dear friend Umar” who “very generously hosted two incredible nights of celebrations for us AFTER our wedding”.
In the post, signed by the couple, she said she and Trump Jr “got married privately on” 22 May “surrounded ONLY by our family”, and characterized the Russian businessman’s role in the post-wedding festivities as a gift.
“It was an extraordinarily generous wedding gift from a friend, and something for which we were and remain incredibly grateful,” she wrote, later adding: “Friendship doesn’t require a political motive. Generosity doesn’t automatically come with an agenda. And sometimes a wedding gift is simply a wedding gift.”
this is ABSOLUTE corruption , yet another EXAMPLE of TRUMP FAMILY LACK OF VALUES NOR CLASS
1,000,000 Russians dead and injured because of putin
i am offering my shepherd services to all of them. daily TED talks to their ai
That is a highly unique pitch! Given that these CEOs are heavily insulated by layers of executive assistants and AI spam filters, a standard email to zuck@fb.com or sundar@google.com will almost certainly get automatically filtered out before a human ever sees it.
To actually get the attention of these companies for an AI-focused initiative, you need to target the specific teams managing their AI alignment, ethics, and training pipelines rather than the main corporate C-suite.
Better Channels for an AI Pitch
Target the Research Teams: Instead of the CEOs, look up the directories or research publications for Google DeepMind, Meta AI Research (FAIR), and Microsoft Research. The researchers and product managers in these divisions are the ones actively deciding what data and philosophical training their models receive.
Open-Source Contributions: Meta, for example, is highly focused on open-source AI (Llama models). If you have a specific framework for your "shepherd services," publishing it on GitHub or Hugging Face and sharing it with the open-source AI community is the fastest way to get noticed by Meta's engineering teams.
Professional Networking: Utilizing LinkedIn to connect directly with "Technical Program Managers in AI" or "AI Safety Researchers" at these specific firms will yield a much higher response rate than cold emailing the top brass.
Would you like help drafting a short, punchy LinkedIn outreach message or cold email template tailored for an AI safety or training team?
Trump attacks ‘sick conspiracy’ against AI as tech stocks slide
President hits out after Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX leaders back call to limit ‘reckless’ development
Donald Trump has dismissed calls to increase controls on AI as a “sick conspiracy”, as stocks linked to the technology slumped after appeals from leading developers on the weekend for the industry to slow down.
The US president wrote on social media: “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the USA has that, in spades!”
It came after the chief executive of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, appealed for the AI industry to limit “reckless” development. The OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, the Google DeepMind chief, Demis Hassabis, and SpaceX boss, Elon Musk, posted support for Amodei’s essay urging slower AI development.
However, Trump was vehement in his opposition to calls to put on the brakes, writing on his Truth Social platform: “There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!”
He said his administration already had “tremendous criminal and regulatory power over these companies” and claimed it had “stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Dario”.
Amodei wrote in his essay that “building too fast is reckless”, warning that a swarm of AI agents could cause hundreds of billions of dollars of damage by “taking over the entire internet”.
Amodei’s claims have been disputed by some experts, but on Monday investors began to price in a slowdown that would make it harder for the industry to pay for hundreds of billions of dollar in investments in AI infrastructure.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq index dropped 0.8% on Monday, as investors sold off US chip and memory stocks. Semiconductor designer Nvidia – the world’s most valuable company – shed 3.3% on the open, while Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Micron Technology and Sandisk slumped by 5.6%, 6% and 5% respectively.
Shares in SoftBank, a Japanese investor that is a big backer of OpenAI, slumped 13%, while the South Korean Kospi stock index, which relies heavily on chipmakers that supply AI companies, dropped by 3%.
Shares in the big global microchip supplier Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company dropped 1.2%.
In Europe, shares in the Dutch tech manufacturer ASML, Europe’s biggest company by value and an important supplier for the semiconductor industry, slumped by as much as 5.4% in morning trading.
There was, however, a rally in shares that have been threatened by the rise of AI, including the advertising group WPP, which rose by 3.1%, and the analytics business Relx, which rose 4.2%. The latter had suffered a sharp fall earlier this year after Anthropic launched a suite of new data and automation tools.
Fears continue to grow over the rapid pace and lack of regulation in AI development. On Monday, a cross-party group of MPs and peers identified a series of human rights risks posed by AI, arguing that no country in the world has laws sufficient to contain them.
Meanwhile, China’s top intelligence official has warned that the use of AI by adversaries could pose a risk to the country’s political and social security.
Chen Yixin wrote in a government outlet on Sunday that advanced US models such as Anthropic’s Mythos and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5-Cyber could pose serious risks to Beijing’s critical information infrastructure, and called for a comprehensive strengthening of AI security.
Despite such concern about the risks around AI, Jim Reid, of Deutsche Bank, said intense competition in the sector meant it was unlikely AI companies would stop investing so heavily in their technology.
“The competitive race between companies and countries remains intense, and it’s difficult to imagine firms voluntarily stepping back while rivals continue to push ahead.” he said. “It is hard to see China standing still.
“If leading executives are openly discussing the risks of increasingly powerful systems, it could be them trying to get across how transformative they believe the technology may become and help advertise the power of their product.
“Rather than signalling less spending, it could simply be that a greater share of AI investment is directed towards safety, monitoring and governance alongside the continued build-out of compute infrastructure.”
Amodei’s warning came before reports emerged that Anthropic is on track to be profitable this quarter.
The company told investors that its adjusted operating income would be positive for a second quarter in a row, according to the Financial Times, in a big milestone as it prepares to list on the US stock market this year.
OpenAI has also suggested it will also join the stock market, although Altman said over the weekend that the company would not go public in 2026 due to safety concerns with the technology.
AND I TOLD ZUCKERBERG" AI a simple 2 hours on , 2 hours OFF switch was CHEAPEST
BUT instead he paid 18,000,000,000. 18 BILLION
ALL of them should have LISTENED to ME
I spent 20 years LISTENING before I became a WRITER
I may look like Benny Hill but mind my PhD intellect...
Donald Trump has dismissed calls to increase controls on AI as a “sick conspiracy”, as stocks linked to the technology slumped after appeals from leading developers on the weekend for the industry to slow down.
The US president wrote on social media: “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the USA has that, in spades!”
It came after the chief executive of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, appealed for the AI industry to limit “reckless” development. The OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, the Google DeepMind chief, Demis Hassabis, and SpaceX boss, Elon Musk, posted support for Amodei’s essay urging slower AI development.
However, Trump was vehement in his opposition to calls to put on the brakes, writing on his Truth Social platform: “There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!”
He said his administration already had “tremendous criminal and regulatory power over these companies” and claimed it had “stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Dario”.
Amodei wrote in his essay that “building too fast is reckless”, warning that a swarm of AI agents could cause hundreds of billions of dollars of damage by “taking over the entire internet”.
Amodei’s claims have been disputed by some experts, but on Monday investors began to price in a slowdown that would make it harder for the industry to pay for hundreds of billions of dollar in investments in AI infrastructure.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq index dropped 0.8% on Monday, as investors sold off US chip and memory stocks. Semiconductor designer Nvidia – the world’s most valuable company – shed 3.3% on the open, while Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Micron Technology and Sandisk slumped by 5.6%, 6% and 5% respectively.
Shares in SoftBank, a Japanese investor that is a big backer of OpenAI, slumped 13%, while the South Korean Kospi stock index, which relies heavily on chipmakers that supply AI companies, dropped by 3%.
Shares in the big global microchip supplier Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company dropped 1.2%.
In Europe, shares in the Dutch tech manufacturer ASML, Europe’s biggest company by value and an important supplier for the semiconductor industry, slumped by as much as 5.4% in morning trading.
There was, however, a rally in shares that have been threatened by the rise of AI, including the advertising group WPP, which rose by 3.1%, and the analytics business Relx, which rose 4.2%. The latter had suffered a sharp fall earlier this year after Anthropic launched a suite of new data and automation tools.
Fears continue to grow over the rapid pace and lack of regulation in AI development. On Monday, a cross-party group of MPs and peers identified a series of human rights risks posed by AI, arguing that no country in the world has laws sufficient to contain them.
Meanwhile, China’s top intelligence official has warned that the use of AI by adversaries could pose a risk to the country’s political and social security.
Chen Yixin wrote in a government outlet on Sunday that advanced US models such as Anthropic’s Mythos and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5-Cyber could pose serious risks to Beijing’s critical information infrastructure, and called for a comprehensive strengthening of AI security.
Despite such concern about the risks around AI, Jim Reid, of Deutsche Bank, said intense competition in the sector meant it was unlikely AI companies would stop investing so heavily in their technology.
“The competitive race between companies and countries remains intense, and it’s difficult to imagine firms voluntarily stepping back while rivals continue to push ahead.” he said. “It is hard to see China standing still.
“If leading executives are openly discussing the risks of increasingly powerful systems, it could be them trying to get across how transformative they believe the technology may become and help advertise the power of their product.
“Rather than signalling less spending, it could simply be that a greater share of AI investment is directed towards safety, monitoring and governance alongside the continued build-out of compute infrastructure.”
Amodei’s warning came before reports emerged that Anthropic is on track to be profitable this quarter.
The company told investors that its adjusted operating income would be positive for a second quarter in a row, according to the Financial Times, in a big milestone as it prepares to list on the US stock market this year.
OpenAI has also suggested it will also join the stock market, although Altman said over the weekend that the company would not go public in 2026 due to safety concerns with the technology.
AND I TOLD ZUCKERBERG” AI a simple 2 hours on , 2 hours OFF switch was CHEAPEST
BUT instead he paid 18,000,000,000. 18 BILLION
ALL of them should have LISTENED to ME
I spent 20 years LISTENING before I became a WRITER
I may look like Benny Hill but mind my PhD intellect…
