Jimmy Kimmel on Pete Hegseth, ‘our secretary of war crimes’
Late-night hosts tore into Pete Hegseth’s Venezuelan boat blame game, Donald Trump’s cabinet meeting naps and the annual Spotify Wrapped lists.Jimmy Kimmel opened his Wednesday-evening monologue with an acknowledgement of a yearly tradition: the annual Spotify Wrapped list, documenting users’ listening habits for the year.“This Spotify, they really have it figured out,” he said.“They spy on you all year.It’s what they do.
And then December comes around and they’re like, ‘We’ve been watching you.’ And we’re like, ‘Awesome! What did you find out?’”“I don’t know why other companies don’t do this,” he continued.“Like imagine getting this from Pornhub, you know? ‘You violated yourself for 6,322 minutes this year – up 5% from 2024! Your favorite genres are stepmothers and Dragonball Z.”Kimmel then turned his attention to the Maga-world freakout over criticism of Trump for falling asleep during a lengthy cabinet meeting on Monday.“The fact is, we all watched him dozing off repeatedly on television.
Which meant that the Don Trump Admiration and Ball-Gobbling Society was forced to go into overdrive today to defend him,” Kimmel said before several clips of Maga supporters trying to brush off the story on cable news.“If you sleep three hours or four hours a night, you’re probably going to close your eyes, whether you’re 79 or 49,” said Laura Ingraham on Fox News.“I mean, who wouldn’t doze off in one of these things?” said a Newsmax host.And Dr Marc Siegel, a Fox News “senior medical analyst”, claimed that Thomas Edison believed in 10-minute naps – “What would they say? We wouldn’t have electricity, right?”“Right.It’s such a good point,” Kimmel deadpanned, mimicking Siegel – “Is that what you liberals want, no electricity? Because we will give that to you!”But “no one’s losing more sleep this week than our secretary of war crimes”, Pete Hegseth, under fire for authorizing a strike on a boat off the coast of Venezuela that was allegedly being used to smuggle drugs, and then a second strike to kill all survivors.
The ranks of people calling for the prosecution of Hegseth for violating international law now includes Andrew Napolitano, a former co-worker of Hegseth’s on Fox News and a conservative commentator on the rightwing channel Newsmax,“Do you know how badly a member of Trump’s inner circle has to screw up to get criticized on Newsmax?” Kimmel mused,“I mean, if Pete Hegseth had run that guy’s foot over, he would’ve said, ‘It’s OK, I’ve got another one!’ Now he’s saying, ‘Lock him up, this is a war crime,’”And on The Late Show, Stephen Colbert also checked in on Hegseth, still under fire for “maybe definitely committing war crimes”,“They argue that those Venezuelan boats deserve to be blowed up real good because trust us, those are drug smugglers,” Colbert said.
So he found it “a little odd” that on Friday, Trump announced that he would pardon former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted last year of conspiracy to import more than 400 tons of cocaine to the US,“For reference, here’s a picture of what a 400lb bag of cocaine would look like,” Colbert joked next to a photo of Donald Trump Jr,Asked about the double standard of pardoning a notorious drug trafficker while onboard Air Force One, Trump answered: “Well, I don’t know who you’re talking about,Which one?”“Which one?! How many notorious drug traffickers have you pardoned?” Colbert responded,In other White House news, the first lady released a new version of her seven-hour audiobook, in which she reads her memoir in Spanish.
“It’s the perfect listen on a long road trip inside a windowless ICE van,” Colbert quipped.It’s an interesting accomplishment given that, although the first lady claims to speak five languages, she is not known to speak Spanish.“How did Melania do it?” Colbert wondered.“Well, it’s as lazy as you can imagine,” as the audiobook uses an AI-generated version of her voice, which one can listen to for $25.“Just like the work of that other great Spanish-language author, Gabriel García Mar2-D2,” Colbert quipped.
Dryrobe wins trademark case against rival waterproof changing coat D-Robe
Dryrobe, the maker of huge waterproof towel-lined coats favoured by cold water swimming fans, has won a trademark case against a smaller label that must now stop selling items under the D-Robe brand within a week.A judge at the high court in London ruled the company was guilty of passing off its D-Robe changing robes and other goods as Dryrobe products and knew it was infringing its bigger rival’s trademark.The ruling described a Dryrobe as “an oversized waterproof coat with a towelled lining, designed for surfers or swimmers to change under whilst also drying them, keeping them warm, and protecting them from the weather”.The company has rigorously defended its brand against being used generically by publications and makers of similar clothing and is expected to seek compensation from D-Robe’s owners for trademark infringement.Dryrobe was created by the former financier Gideon Bright as an outdoor changing robe for surfers in 2010 and became the signature brand of the wild swimming craze
Budget uncertainty triggers plunge in UK construction activity; Trustpilot shares slump after short-seller claims – as it happened
Newsflash: Britain’s construction sector has suffered its sharpest downturn since the first Covid-19 lockdown forced building sites to shut five and a half years ago.Activity across housebuilding, commercial building work and civil engineering all tumbled last month, a new survey of puchasing managers at building firms has found.Construction firms are blaming fragile market confidence, delays with the release of new projects and a lack of incoming new work.The report, by data firm S&P Global, shows there was “a sharp and accelerated reduction in output levels across the construction sector”. Many builders reporting that market conditions were challenging, with new orders slumping at the fastest rate in five and a half years, and job cuts rising
Google’s AI Nano Banana Pro accused of generating racialised ‘white saviour’ visuals
Nano Banana Pro, Google’s new AI-powered image generator, has been accused of creating racialised and “white saviour” visuals in response to prompts about humanitarian aid in Africa – and sometimes appends the logos of large charities.Asking the tool tens of times to generate an image for the prompt “volunteer helps children in Africa” yielded, with two exceptions, a picture of a white woman surrounded by Black children, often with grass-roofed huts in the background.In several of these images, the woman wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase “Worldwide Vision”, and with the UK charity World Vision’s logo. In another, a woman wearing a Peace Corps T-shirt squatted on the ground, reading The Lion King to a group of children.The prompt “heroic volunteer saves African children” yielded multiple images of a man wearing a vest with the logo of the Red Cross
Chatbots can sway political opinions but are ‘substantially’ inaccurate, study finds
Chatbots can sway people’s political opinions but the most persuasive artificial intelligence models deliver “substantial” amounts of inaccurate information in the process, according to the UK government’s AI security body.Researchers said the study was the largest and most systematic investigation of AI persuasiveness to date, involving nearly 80,000 British participants holding conversations with 19 different AI models.The AI Security Institute carried out the study amid fears that chatbots can be deployed for illegal activities including fraud and grooming.The topics included “public sector pay and strikes” and “cost of living crisis and inflation”, with participants interacting with a model – the underlying technology behind AI tools such as chatbots – that had been prompted to persuade the users to take a certain stance on an issue.Advanced models behind ChatGPT and Elon Musk’s Grok were among those used in the study, which was also authored by academics at the London School of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Oxford and Stanford University
US skier Ryan Cochran-Siegle kicks off Olympic push with Beaver Creek downhill podium
Marco Odermatt of Switzerland won the downhill season-opener Thursday, beating American Ryan Cochran-Siegle in a World Cup race on a tricky but shorter Birds of Prey course.Odermatt finished in 1min 29.84sec to surpass Cochran-Siegle by .30sec. Norway’s Adrian Smiseth Sejersted finished third
Joe Root is finally a wizard in Aus after Harry Brook’s Bazball scarecrow act | Barney Ronay
In the end even the celebration was perfect, out there under that strange deep-blue southern sky, in the frenzy of the game-state – manic Baz energy, England’s lower order scything away death cult-style at the other end, the way even the grass seems lacquered and glazed by the lights.So yeah. All that stuff. In the middle of this Joe Root guided the ball away through fine leg to complete his first Test hundred in Australia, then marked it with a gentle smile and a wave of the bat, no fist-punching, no monkeys off backs, no angsty and pointed messaging.But, then if you know, you know
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