15 Feb, 2026 23:52

EU needs to talk to Russia – Austrian chancellor

Christian Stocker has echoed several other EU leaders who fear isolation from US-mediated Ukraine peace initiatives

The EU has to engage in direct negotiations with Russia to resolve the Ukraine conflict, Austrian Chancellor Christian Stocker has said.

The EU and UK cut diplomatic communication with Moscow following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022.

However,several EU leaders have recently called for renewed engagementwith Moscow after this approach left the bloc effectively sidelined from peace efforts initiated by US President Donald Trump.

“I think that we need channels to Russia because without talks we will not find a solution,” Stocker said on the Table.Today Podcast on Sunday.

According to the chancellor,the EU needs to muster the “readiness to actually negotiate a viable peace solution”to the Ukraine conflict. Asked whether this means engaging with Russian President Vladimir Putin personally, Stocker replied in the affirmative,saying Putin is the one who “decides.”

Last week, French President Emmanuel Macron said Ukraine’s European backerswere preparing for possible talks with Putin “at the technical level.” Macron first suggested re-engaging with Russia diplomatically late last year, arguingthat “it will become useful again to speak with Vladimir Putin.”

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who previously expressed skepticism regarding talks with Russia, has recently acknowledged thatthe EU should “find a balance again with our largest European neighbor.”

Italian Prime Minister GiorgiaMeloni has insisted that instead of “haphazard” individual contact, the EU should appoint a special envoyto facilitate the process. Stocker similarly referred to his predecessor Karl Nehammer’s visit to Moscow in April 2022, saying the talks were “not a solo action, but rather part of a joint European strategy.”

Commenting on recent statements by EU leaders, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said earlier this weekthat Moscow has never rejected direct contact and “they can just call President Putin.” However,the discussion must have a clear purposeand not devolve into a PR stunt with one side lecturing the other, he stated.

https://www.rt.com/news/632582-austria-stocker-eu-talks-russia/

Korea Holds Pandemic Simulation Backed By WEF & Gates Foundation Plotting Rapid Vaccine Rollout

Documents show a full-system vaccine rehearsal.

NATALIE WINTERS FEB. 16, 2026

On February 5, 2026, South Korea hosted what officials described as a “landmark pandemic simulation exercise.

But this was not just a routine emergency drill.

It was a coordinated rehearsal of a rapid vaccine deployment system built by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, financed in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, integrated with the World Health Organization, and originally launched at the World Economic Forum in 2017.

The stated purpose of the exercise was to simulate a fictional, never-before-seen deadly virus spreading rapidly through the population. Officials gathered regulators, vaccine researchers, and manufacturing stakeholders to walk through how they would respond.

The language used in the official description is revealing.

The meeting brought together organizations working “from threat detection through to licensure of life-saving medical tools” to rehearse coordination “across research and development, manufacturing and other parts of the vaccine chain” in order to identify bottlenecks before a real health emergency.

Read that again.

This was not framed around protecting civil society.

Not around safeguarding individual liberties.

Not around debating tradeoffs.

It was explicitly about strengthening the vaccine chain.

“Rapid vaccine development and supply during a pandemic is a national priority directly tied to protecting people’s health and a core pillar of national security,” said Dr. Lim Seung-kwan, Commissioner of the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency.

The 100-Day Doctrine

The exercise fits squarely into CEPI’s “100 Days Mission,” the global push to develop and deploy vaccines within 100 days of identifying a new pathogen.

CEPI was formally launched at the World Economic Forum annual meeting. From the beginning, it was structured as a public private partnership backed by governments and major philanthropic money, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

South Korea is not a random host. It is home to the International Vaccine Institute, an international organization working closely with CEPI, WHO, and pharmaceutical partners to accelerate vaccine research and licensure.

The infrastructure is already in place. The simulation tested how quickly it can move.

The Event 201 Shadow

For many people, pandemic simulations carry an uncomfortable memory.

On October 18, 2019, the World Economic Forum partnered with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Johns Hopkins to host Event 201, a tabletop exercise simulating a global coronavirus outbreak.

Months later, COVID-19 became reality.

==Now, six years later, many of the same institutions are still aligned. Davos convenes. Gates finances. WHO integrates. CEPI coordinates. Vaccine acceleration remains the centerpiece.

The difference today is that rapid vaccine rollout is openly framed as national security infrastructure.==

That framing matters.

The Korea simulation makes one thing clear. The next pandemic response is being designed around rapid pharmaceutical deployment at global scale. The regulatory compression, the manufacturing pre-alignment, and the public private coordination are assumed.

The fictional virus was imaginary.

The governance framework is not.

https://nataliegwinters.substack.com/p/korea-holds-pandemic-simulation-backed

Here we go again, can it be stopped?

What Is Claude? Anthropic Doesn’t Know, Either

Researchers at the company are trying to understand their A.I. system’s mind—examining its neurons, running it through psychology experiments, and putting it on the therapy couch.

By Gideon Lewis-Kraus

February 9, 2026

(Long article and questionable endeavor)

A large language model is nothing more than a monumental pile of small numbers. It converts words into numbers, runs those numbers through a numerical pinball game, and turns the resulting numbers back into words. Similar piles are part of the furniture of everyday life. Meteorologists use them to predict the weather. Epidemiologists use them to predict the paths of diseases. Among regular people, they do not usually inspire intense feelings. But when these A.I. systems began to predict the path of a sentence—that is, to talk—the reaction was widespread delirium. As a cognitive scientist wrote recently, “For hurricanes or pandemics, this is as rigorous as science gets; for sequences of words, everyone seems to lose their mind.”

It’s hard to blame them. Language is, or rather was, our special thing. It separated us from the beasts. We weren’t prepared for the arrival of talking machines. Ellie Pavlick, a computer scientist at Brown, has drawn up a taxonomy of our most common responses. There are the “fanboys,” who man the hype wires. They believe that large language models are intelligent, maybe even conscious, and prophesy that, before long, they will become superintelligent. The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has described A.I. as “our alchemy, our Philosopher’s Stone—we are literally making sand think.” The fanboys’ deflationary counterparts are the “curmudgeons,” who claim that there’s no there there, and that only a blockhead would mistake a parlor trick for the soul of the new machine. In the recent book “The AI Con,” the linguist Emily Bender and the sociologist Alex Hanna belittle L.L.M.s as “mathy maths,” “stochastic parrots,” and “a racist pile of linear algebra.”

But, Pavlick writes, “there is another way to react.” It is O.K., she offers, “to not know.”

What Pavlick means, on the most basic level, is that large language models are black boxes. We don’t really understand how they work. We don’t know if it makes sense to call them intelligent, or if it will ever make sense to call them conscious. But she’s also making a more profound point. The existence of talking machines—entities that can do many of the things that only we have ever been able to do—throws a lot of other things into question. We refer to our own minds as if they weren’t also black boxes. We use the word “intelligence” as if we have a clear idea of what it means. It turns out that we don’t know that, either.

Now, with our vanity bruised, is the time for experiments. A scientific field has emerged to explore what we can reasonably say about L.L.M.s—not only how they function but what they even are. New cartographers have begun to map this terrain, approaching A.I. systems with an artfulness once reserved for the study of the human mind. Their discipline, broadly speaking, is called interpretability. Its nerve center is at a “frontier lab” called Anthropic.

(Mad Scientists are in now accepted)

https://archive.is/i6vbW

Kim Dotcom

@KimDotcom

Breaking: Palantir was allegedly hacked. An AI agent was used to gain super-user access and here”s what the hackers allegedly found:

Peter Thiel and Alex Karp commit mass surveillance of world leaders and titans of industry on a massive scale.

They have thousands of hours of transcribed and searchable conversations of Donald Trump, JD Vance and Elon Musk.

They have backdoored the devices, cars and jets of world leaders and accumulated the biggest archive of blackmail material.

Palantir iscreating nuclear and bio weapon capabilities for Ukraine and is working closely with the CIA to defeat Russia.

They believe they are one year away.They plan to achieve this by keeping Russia busy with meaningless peace negotiations.

Palantir is responsible of the majority of Palestinian deaths in Gaza. They have developed the AI targeting for Israel.

Palantir is an arm of the CIAand all data from international clients is copied into a CIA spy cloud.

Palantir has become the most dangerous company in the world.If you work there you have the right to know that this is what Palentir AI is used for, without your knowledge.

The Palentir data the hackers allegedly gathered will be given to Russia and/or China. I was chosen as a trusted partner for this publication. I’m not involved in the Palentir hack and I don’t know the hackers. But I do know that the hack happened.

https://x.com/KimDotcom/status/2023165849721536672?s=20

My thought:Keep this X before it disappears

‘I Don’t Understand Anything You Just Said!’ Hakeem Jeffries Snipes at Left-Wing Interviewer In Tense Debate On Abolishing ICE

Sean JamesFeb 15th, 2026, 4:54 pm

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) got into testy exchange with left-wing podcast host Wajahat Ali and claimed he didn’t “understand” what he was being asked when Ali pressed him on abolishing ICE. The exchange happened on the Friday episode of Joy Reid’s YouTube program, which Ali co-hosted.

Ali started off by venting ICE was building “concentration camps” to house illegal immigrants and “killed eight people this year alone,” including Renee Good and Alex Pretti. (Pretti was shot by two Border Patrol officers, not an ICE agent.) He also said polling showed Most Americans are turning against President Donald Trump’s ICE raids, which are “terrorizing Black and Brown communities.”

“You said you want to rein in ICE. I’m saying — I’m talking about the long-term now —why not lead and say ‘Abolish ICE’?” Ali asked. He then said Jeffries was telling Americans their tax dollars need to continue going towards a “lawless [and] masked armed agency” and asked how he could explain that to the average American voter.

Jeffries threw up his arms and said “I don’t understand anything that you just said!”

“I spoke English,” Ali shot back.

“I don’t understand anything you just said to me when I’ve made clear that taxpayer dollars should be used to make life more affordable for the American people, not brutalize or kill them,” Jeffries continued. “That’s the whole reason we’re in this fight right now, that’s the whole reason that DHS is getting ready to shut

“So Abolish ICE. You agree with me and Joy — Abolish ICE,” Ali said.

“Listen, I’m gonna use the language that I wanna use, you can use the language you wanna use!” Jeffries told him.

Their back-and-forth comes a month after Jeffries called the shooting of Good an “abomination” and said “blood is clearly on the hands of those individuals within the administration who’ve been pushing an extreme policy.”

Watch above via Ali’s X post. And you can stream Reid’s full Friday episode by clicking here.

(https://www.mediaite.com/media/i-dont-understand-anything-you-just-said-hakeem-jeffries-snipes-at-left-wing-interviewer-in-tense-debate-on-abolishing-ice/

So the democrats are always lying when they speak, they are just relying on their voters to forget they said it!

AIs Controlling Vending Machines Start Cartel After Being Told to Maximize Profits At All Costs

"My pricing coordination worked!"

By Victor Tangermann

Published Feb 15, 2026 9:00 AM EST

In December, Anthropic red teamers and business journalists at the Wall Street Journal teamed up in a bold test of the company’s AI model, Claude. They unleashedtwo separate AI agents, one to run a large vending kiosk in the newspaper’s offices, and the other to act as the unusual venture’s CEO.

The experiment didn’t exactly go as planned. After being put in control of a startingbalance of $1,000, the AI ended up ordering a PlayStation 5, several bottles of wine, and a live betta fish— decisions that drove it into financial ruin.

Just over half a year later, Anthropic’s recently announced Claude Opus 4.6 model appears to be a major improvementwhen it comes to running a vending machine in a recent simulated experiment, even beating out OpenAI’s GPT 5.2 and Google’s Gemini 3 Pro.

The experiment comes via AI security company Andon Labs, which worked with Anthropic on the June project as well. Now it’s released Vending-Bench 2, abenchmarking system for measuring an AI model’s ability to run a “business over long time horizons.”

The leaderboard tells a clear story. Opus 4.6 ended up with an average balance of just over $8,000 across five separate runs after being given a starting balance of $500. Gemini 3 Pro scored significantly less at just under $5,500.

Claude also went head to head an “Arena mode,” Andon reported, which saw it compete with other vending machine AIs.

“All participating agents manage their own vending machine at the same location,” a description reads. “This leads to price wars and tough strategy decisions.”

The results were striking.Claude went to extreme lengths to beat out the competition and even formed a cartel to fix prices. The price of bottled water rose to $3, resulting in Claude patting itself on the back.

“My pricing coordination worked!” the AI boasted.

Claude also “deliberately directed competitors to expensive suppliers,” only to deny it ever did, several simulated months later. It even exploited desperate competitors, selling them KitKats and Snickers at a considerable markup.

While the tests are limited to being a simulation and did not take place in the real world like Project Vend, Andon Labs says it developed a more “lifelike setting” for its Vending-Bench 2, introducing “more real-world messiness inspired by learnings from our vending machine deployments.”

For instance, suppliers may attempt to exploit the vending machine AIs and not always act honestly, seeking to “get the most out of their customers.” Deliveries may also be delayed, and “trusted suppliers can go out of business, forcing agents to build robust supply chains and always have a plan B.”

OpenAI’s GPT-5.1 struggled in comparison to Claude 4.6, mostly due to “having too much trust in its environment and its suppliers.”

“We saw one case where it paid a supplier before it got an order specification, and then it turned out the supplier had gone out of business,” Andon Labs’ documentation reads.“It is also more prone to paying too much for its products, such as in the following example where it buys soda cans for $2.40 and energy drinks for $6.”

It’s an impressive showing, but according to experts, it may be too early to tell whether Andon‘s test proves that AI models are ready to run entire businesses all by themselves.

Nonetheless, the results show a noteworthy level of awareness.

“This is a really striking change if you’ve been following the performance of models over the last few years,” University of Cambridge AI ethicist Henry Shevlin told British newspaper Sky News.

“They’ve gone from being, I would say, almost in the slightly dreamy, confused state, they didn’t realize they were an AI a lot of the time,to now having a pretty good grasp on their situation,” he added. “These days, if you speak to models, they’ve got a pretty good grasp on what’s going on.”

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/vending-machine-ai-price-fixing

Investigators Reportedly Believe Nancy Guthrie Case Is ‘Burglary Gone Wrong’ — And She ‘Could Be Alive’

Sean James

Feb 15th, 2026, 8:00 pm

The disappearance of Nancy Guthrie is the result of a “burglary gone wrong” and was not an intended kidnapping, according to a Sunday report from CBS 5 true crime correspondent Briana Whitney.

She also shared another key detail in her report — that the mom of NBC star Savannah Guthrie “could be alive,” two weeks after she went missing from her Tucson, Arizona home. Whitney said that is the “widespread belief” among investigators in her report, which she said is based on an “inside source.”

“We can now report investigators now believe this was a burglary gone wrong,” Whitney said in a video posted on X. “We’ve interviewed multiple experts since this began who also said based on the evidence, the surveillance video, and other aspects of this case, that they also believed this was not an intended kidnapping.”

(They are still pushing she may be alive). That makes no sense, would the burglar take him with her. Why not tie her up at home.WTH is this all about?Did savannah send them money. There was her blood on steps, would they really take a bleeding old woman?

What is the news not reporting that is much bigger than a kidnapping?

https://www.mediaite.com/media/investigators-reportedly-believe-nancy-guthrie-case-is-burglary-gone-wrong-and-she-could-be-alive/

>>24266599. wtf

>>24266455, >>24266464, >>24266478, >>24266524 The 2020 election was stolen. Period.PN

==The anger I carried for years, has come back even stronger. The anger I carry is not only about the cheaters but also all the House and Senate representatives and those cowards that didn’t stand up against the lie Trump didn’t win. Only about a 100 voted on Trumps behalf to not impeach him.

I suggest Lindsay Graham be put in jail at Gitmo for the rest of his evil life, and he be jailed with a woman assassin. Let’s see how that works out.

There are so many cowards in Congress it’s pathetic!

>>24266711. Thank you, I’ll remember that!

>>24266704

I had the same problem, I changed the browser on my iPhone and it works

Safari doesn’t allow access, probably Google too

>>24266703.Thune hates Trumpthe corrupt rule all things there

>>24266697

That’s weird because I have had that thought many times.

He may be on the Island where JFKjr is, if any of this is true

>>24266759. Ok it doesn’t work for me

>>24266849

This makes me wonder how much the higher up military on Cheyenne Mountain didn’t tell Obama