All posts tagged: Reckoning

Podcast: GM Energy, Tesla HW3 reckoning, Ford reshuffles EVs, Donut Lab probs, more

Podcast: GM Energy, Tesla HW3 reckoning, Ford reshuffles EVs, Donut Lab probs, more

Published by skeptic

In the Electrek Podcast, we discuss the most popular news in the world of sustainable transport and energy. In this week’s episode, we discuss Tesla having its HW3 reckoning, Ford reshuffling its EV unit, Donut Lab being in hot water, and more. The show is live every Friday at 4 p.m. ET on Electrek’s YouTube channel. As a reminder, we’ll have an accompanying post, like this one, on the site with an embedded link to the live stream. Head to the YouTube channel to get your questions and comments in. After the show ends at around 5 p.m. ET, the video will be archived on YouTube and the audio on all your favorite podcast apps: Advertisement – scroll for more content We now have a Patreon if you want to help us avoid more ads and invest more in our content. We have some awesome gifts for our Patreons and more coming. Here are a few of the articles that we will discuss during the podcast: We talk to Aseem Kapur, energy and eMobility executive at GM Energy! Here’s the live stream for today’s episode starting at …

The furore over Grok’s sexualised images has begun an AI reckoning

The furore over Grok’s sexualised images has begun an AI reckoning

Published by skeptic

Controversy over the chatbot Grok escalated rapidly through the early weeks of 2026. The cause was revelations about its alleged ability to generate sexualised images of women and children in response to requests from users on the social media platform X. This prompted the UK media regulator Ofcom and, subsequently, the European Commission, to launch formal investigations. These developments come at a pivotal moment for digital regulation in the UK and the EU. Governments are moving from aspirational regulatory frameworks to a new phase of active enforcement, particularly with legislation such as the UK’s Online Safety Act. The central question here is not whether individual failures by social media companies occur, but whether voluntary safeguards – those devised by the social media companies rather than enforced by a regulator – remain sufficient where the risks are foreseeable. These safeguards can include such measures as blocking certain keywords in the user prompts to AI chatbots, for example. Grok is a test case because of the integration of the AI produced within the X social media platform. …

The US right’s antisemitism reckoning

The US right’s antisemitism reckoning

Published by Sam Flores

(RNS) — Last week, California beauty queen Carrie Prejean Boller was booted off President Donald Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission after criticizing Israeli actions in Gaza. In a commission meeting, she claimed her Roman Catholic faith does not support Zionism, and she verbally attacked a witness for portraying popular conservative YouTubers Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson as antisemites. That, according to the commission’s chair, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, amounted to hijacking the commission for her own “personal and political agenda.” And yet, these days, the smart money on the right is on the antisemitic side. A sign of this is the current tempest over the Israeli American conservative political theorist Yoram Hazony. Several years ago, Hazony captured the attention of the right with a book, “The Virtue of Nationalism,” which he’s parlayed into an annual gabfest called the National Conservatism Conference. In an interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat back in November, he called antisemitism on the right “pretty bad,” noting how it was particularly gaining ground among the younger generation. “We’ll see …

Time for a Brexit reckoning – POLITICO

Time for a Brexit reckoning – POLITICO

Published by Sam Flores

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney recently received a lot of acclaim for citing Czech playwright and former President Václav Havel’s “The Power of the Powerless” in his speech at the World Economic Forum, inviting the world’s nations and businesses to stop living in the lie of the rules-based international order. And that lesson applies here too: For the U.K. to finally move on, it must choose not to live in lies — especially the ones that fueled Brexit. And yet, both of the U.K.’s main political parties, Labour and the Conservatives, are treating Brexit as a sacred cow rather than grappling with the enormity of its failure. The Conservative leadership that oversaw the U.K.’s shambolic withdrawal from start to finish, and purged any internal dissenters in the process, are now owning its dismal results. The current Labour government, meanwhile, is taking baby steps to reintegrate the U.K. into the eminently valuable parts of Europe’s architecture, like the Erasmus program. Mark Carney recently received a lot of acclaim for citing Czech playwright and former President Václav …

An American Reckoning | Ben Rhodes

An American Reckoning | Ben Rhodes

Published by José Betancourt

Long after he served as secretary of defense, Robert McNamara carried the memory of Vietnam around like a cross, simultaneously punishing and redeeming himself through his statements on the war. Yet the limits of his reexamination help explain why America is now enduring a blend of the authoritarianism and imperialism that it once deployed abroad: McNamara—like the country he served, under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson—could acknowledge mistakes in Vietnam, but he never questioned the American exceptionalism that put us there in the first place. “We were wrong, terribly wrong,” McNamara wrote in his memoir, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (1995). It was a refrain that he delivered many times in writings, interviews, lectures, and, most intensely, Errol Morris’s documentary The Fog of War (2003). As a young think tank staffer in Washington, I remember being engrossed by the film, in which McNamara recalls the clinical brutality of World War II firebombing, the glories of the Kennedy administration, and the cascading errors that led to catastrophe in Vietnam, over …

Germany’s online gambling reckoning draws closer with landmark Tipico case

Germany’s online gambling reckoning draws closer with landmark Tipico case

Published by skeptic

In Germany, a landmark court case is unfolding, and it is one that will have great significance for the iGaming market in the country and across all of the European Union (EU).  The case is C-530/24, DK v Tipico Co. Ltd, which centers around a claim for recovery of gambling losses. The premise of the lawsuit is whether Tipico should refund wagers placed between 2013 and 2020, when the operator held a Malta-issued license but not a German one. Specifically, it relates to the compatibility of German gambling laws with wider EU regulations, and in particular, the outworking under Article 56 of the Treaty of the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). Why DK v Tipico tests EU gambling law After the plaintiff, DK, incurred losses over the seven-year period, Tipico was sued in German courts with the initial case alleging the contracts were invalid due to the absence of a German license. Tipico’s retort was that the German regulatory framework was too rigid, restrictive, and incompatible with EU law. This created the ongoing impasse …

“Justice Is Coming”: Border Czar Homan Vows Reckoning For Anti-ICE Groups

“Justice Is Coming”: Border Czar Homan Vows Reckoning For Anti-ICE Groups

Published by Jenni Sidey

Border czar Tom Homan said Thursday that far-left groups accused of funding and organizing attacks on Immigration and Customs Enforcement will be held responsible. “About the organization and the funding of the attacks on ICE, I’m not going to answer a lot about that because I’m not going to show our hand, but they’ll be held accountable. Justice is coming,” Homan said at a Minneapolis press conference. He also criticized the heated rhetoric aimed at ICE officers nationwide, urging people to ease tensions, according to the NY Post. “I begged for the last two months on TV for the rhetoric to stop. I said in March — if the rhetoric doesn’t stop, there is gonna be bloodshed. And there has been. I wish I wasn’t right. I don’t want to see anybody die,” he said. Homan explained that reduced hostility could allow federal authorities to scale back their presence in Minneapolis. He said discussions with Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison have already led to plans for a partial drawdown. “Based on the …

A Reckoning for the Tech Right

A Reckoning for the Tech Right

Published by José Betancourt

Hours after Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy showed up for a movie night at the White House. Along with other business executives and several prominent Donald Trump supporters, they attended a private screening of Melania, a new documentary about the president’s wife. The moviegoers were treated to buckets of popcorn and sugar cookies frosted with the first lady’s name. Silicon Valley’s top executives have seemingly taken every opportunity to cozy up to Trump. During his inauguration a year ago, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk, and Cook sat smiling behind the president in the Capitol Rotunda. The obsequiousness has not stopped since: In August, Cook presented Trump with a custom plaque atop a 24-karat-gold base in the Oval Office. At a White House dinner the next month, the Google co-founder Sergey Brin praised Trump’s “civil rights” work, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman described Trump’s leadership as a “refreshing change.” Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, and Google are among the companies …

The Reckoning On Immigration Is Here

The Reckoning On Immigration Is Here

Published by Jenni Sidey

Authored by Alex Berenson via Unreported Truths, The easy part is over. Americans wanted the borders closed. For decades, the legacy media and politicians in both parties ignored that wish, claiming the United States had to accept and support an endless flood of illegal migrants. The disconnect between average people and elite opinion was so obvious that academics wrote papers about it. President Trump broke with the elite consensus from the first day of his 2016 presidential campaign, when he announced “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border.” No issue proved more politically potent for him. In his second term, Trump has kept his promise. The wall may not be literally complete, but it might as well be. Customs and Border Patrol reports monthly “encounters” with illegal migrants on the southern border have fallen about 95 percent from the Biden Administration average, and 97 percent from their 2023 peak. But closing the border to new arrivals does not undo the fact that tens of millions of people are living in the …