NEWS ON FIRE
by The Editors
NEWS ON FIRE takes the biggest news stories, and gives them the funny, skeptical FLAMING HYDRA treatment you crave. It’s short, it’s sharp, it’s FLAMING HYDRA all the way. — Zach Rabiroff
Did you know that the head of Palantir in the U.K. and Europe is Louis Mosley, the literal grandson of literal U.K. fascist Oswald Mosley (founder of the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists)? This guy!
Did you know that the U.K. Ministry of Defence awarded Palantir a £750 million (U.S. $950 million) contract in September to “expand AI-powered capabilities across the British military”?? — Maria Bustillos
In April I wrote about Kilmar Ábrego García, a Maryland resident who was then confined, indefinitely and on no specific charge, in El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison facility. Yesterday—four months after a federal judge ordered that he be returned to the United States, whereupon he was immediately reincarcerated, and nine months after his initial kidnapping—he walked out of ICE detention, Judge Paula Xinis having determined that no order for his removal had ever existed. His fight isn’t over yet: the government will try again to deport him. But he is free, for now at least.
The moment Americans learned Ábrego García’s name marked a kind of turning point in the way we had to reckon with mass deportations, as I wrote last spring: what was once an anonymous horde was now embodied in a man with a name, and a home, and a life. It’s easy to believe, after everything we’ve seen this year, that the whole edifice of the law is a farce: that no amount of righteousness can save us from a government that just doesn’t give a damn. But yesterday, Kilmar Ábrego García stood in front of reporters and said, “I stand before you as a free man, and I want you to remember me this way, with my head held up high.” And so we will. — Zach Rabiroff
Measles is breaking out seriously all over South Carolina. It’s hard not to link this to the open season on vaccine denialism headed up by this administration, led by fleshy baseball mitt / maniac RFK Jr. When I think about the kids who died before vaccines came about and those who will die and suffer unnecessarily now because of lies spread by cruel profiteers and those deluded by their lies, it makes me want to explode. Vaccinate your damn kids. — Tal Lavin
Hang with me here. On an earnings call Wednesday afternoon, the high-tech company Oracle reported a negative cash flow of about $10 billion last quarter, the result of a gigantic AI data center spending spree. This would be an item of interest mainly to Wall Street, were it not for the notable fact that Oracle is controlled by Larry Ellison, the megabillionaire father of Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison, who put in a $108 billion hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery only two days ago.
You might wonder where Ellison the Younger found the spare cash, but don’t be silly: he got a lot of it from the Gulf states. Among the backers of Paramount’s bid are the “sovereign wealth funds” (read: state treasuries) of Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar. Together, these royal families contributed $24 billion to the proposed deal.
That’d be the same David Ellison who has already Bari Weiss-ified CBS News and is said to have promised Donald Trump a similar ravaging at CNN if and when he takes over. And the same Saudi royal family whose crown prince was responsible for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. People, in other words, with bone saws they might prefer to remain concealed. — Zach Rabiroff
In a move that has everyone groaning at their bullshit, TIME magazine, which apparently still exists, has chosen “The Architects of AI,” which still does not actually exist, as their 2025 Person of the Year.
On one of the two covers “digital artist” (if you know what I mean) Jason Seiler has recreated the famous 1932 “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper” photograph. Sitting on the beam are Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Lisa Su of Advanced Micro Devices, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Fei-Fei Li of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Sam Altman of OpenAI, and Demis Hassabis of DeepMind Technologies. Whether the imminently-plummeting position of this crew was meant to be a metaphor for the entire AI marketing operation remains unclear. — Luke O’Neil
Netflix got the most Golden Globe noms (35); Warner Bros. second most (31); and Paramount launched a hostile bid for WBD, bringing on Jared Kushner’s failson wealth fund in an all-but-explicit attempt to get Trump to intervene. ComcastNBCUniversal—which will not be buying Warner Bros. Discovery—released Five Nights at Freddie’s 2 to box office success ($63m US; $109WW) and critical disdain. A potential record split between critics’ RT scores (12%) and audience reactions (88%). That gap will henceforth be known as the Delta Fred (∆F). — J.D. Connor
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