The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) called on Iranian civilians to stay away from the railway infrastructure on Tuesday.
In a post on social media, the Israeli military told people in Iran that they should avoid using trains or being near railways, as this could put their lives at risk.
The IDF said that the danger will last until 9 pm local time.
https://breakingthenews.net/Article/Israel-urges-Iranian-civilians-not-to-use-railway/66017932
India is set to import the most oil from Venezuela in almost six years, helping the world’s third-largest crude importer replace Middle East grades disrupted by the Iran war.
More than 12 million barrels are headed to India’s west coast this month from the South American producer, the most since February 2020, according to data from Kpler. The April-arriving cargoes were likely secured before the recent disruptions in supplies from the Middle East, underscoring a longer-term strategic shift rather than a purely reactive move, said Sumit Ritolia, a lead research analyst at the data intelligence firm.
by Bojan Stojovski via Interesting Engineering,
A new handheld coil gun developed in China is designed for discreet, non-lethal use, including law enforcement operations, state broadcaster CCTV reported. Capable of firing between 1,000 and 2,000 rounds per minute, the weapon can penetrate wooden boards from distances of several dozen yards. Its adjustable power settings allow it to incapacitate rather than kill when set lower.
The compact electromagnetic launcher features a 12-inch barrel and is light enough to be comfortably held and operated with one hand, allowing for greater mobility and ease of use in tight or urban environments where traditional firearms or larger coil guns would be cumbersome.
Equipped with a laser pointer for improved accuracy, the device – also called a Gauss gun – uses electromagnetic coils to accelerate metal projectiles at high speeds, miniaturizing technology previously limited to larger military systems.
The latest Chinese handheld coil gun offers a stealthy alternative to traditional firearms, producing no muzzle flash or smoke, minimal noise, and no ejected shell casings. These features make it particularly suited for covert operations, according to Chinese media.
The showcased model represents an upgrade from last year’s test version, featuring a slightly longer barrel and the ability to fire larger, heavier projectiles. While its rate of fire is somewhat slower, the weapon delivers significantly greater kinetic energy and destructive force, increasing its impact per shot, the South China Morning Post reported.
The weapon is equipped with an electronic display that provides real-time information on battery life, ammunition count, and firing modes. Operators can adjust the electric current to control output power, allowing them to vary projectile speed depending on the target’s distance and situational conditions.
This feature enables the coil gun to deliver precise, controlled force, allowing operators to tailor each shot to the situation. By adjusting power and projectile speed, the weapon can incapacitate or deter targets effectively while significantly reducing the risk of fatal injury, making it suitable for law enforcement, crowd control, or other scenarios where non-lethal force is preferred.
The coil gun’s design places a detachable magazine behind its centrally positioned grip, allowing the electromagnetic coils to run the full length of the chassis. This layout maximizes projectile acceleration while keeping the weapon compact and easy to handle.
Currently, the portable device is intended mainly for specialised non-lethal scenarios, limited by battery output. However, as battery technology advances, the weapon could see broader applications, potentially supplementing or even replacing traditional firearms in certain combat situations, offering a new form of precision, low-visibility firepower on the battlefield.
China has been advancing larger-scale electromagnetic weaponry as well. In 2023, the PLA Naval University of Engineering reportedly tested what is believed to be the world’s most powerful coil gun, capable of launching a 273-pound projectile at speeds reaching 435 miles per hour.
Beijing is also advancing railgun technology, a type of electromagnetic weapon that propels projectiles along a pair of parallel rails at extreme speeds, while promising higher velocity and longer range than conventional guns, potentially transforming naval and land-based combat.
by Charles Davis via The Epoch Times,
On a Tuesday night in a dorm room, a student opens TikTok for a “five-minute break.”
The first clip is a montage of rubble and sirens.
The second is a professor-style explainer, neatly captioned, delivering a single moral conclusion.
The third is a shaky phone video of a confrontation on another campus—shouts, police lights, a crowd surging like weather.
The student doesn’t search for any of it.
They don’t even follow the accounts.
The feed arrives already confident about what matters.
This is the political technology of our moment: the system that decides—thousands of times a day—what you see next.
For most of the past century, influence meant broadcasting. You bought a newspaper, aired a radio spot, printed leaflets, argued in the town square. Feedback was slow, indirect, and expensive.
Today, influence runs on a different stack. It is microtargeting—figuring out which slice of the population to target. It is recommender distribution—determining what to place in front of the target group and in what sequence. It is measurement of effects—watch time, rewatches, scroll-hesitation, comments, shares. And it is iteration—rapidly adjusting what works and discarding what doesn’t.
Once those pieces lock together, persuasion stops looking like a party debate. It takes on the appearance of a thermostat: sense the room, nudge the temperature, sense again.
Microtargeting is older than the smartphone feed.
Campaigns have long merged voter files with consumer and demographic data, then tailored appeals to specific segments. What changed, especially by the early 2010s, was tempo: the ability to see what’s working while the moment is still unfolding.
The Obama campaign’s 2012 digital operation offers a useful bridge between the older world and the current one. Their teams watched web behavior in near real time and used it for rapid response. During a presidential debate, when then-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said “binders full of women,” the campaign immediately bought search ads keyed to the phrase and linked to a fact sheet; the campaign’s digital lead described an “immediate uptick in both traffic and engagement” from users searching that term.
That isn’t TikTok. It’s still the open web—search, ads, landing pages. But the shift shows a new logic: observe behavior as it happens, then redirect attention before the story cools. Strike while the iron is hot.
Algorithmic platforms industrialize that loop. Microtargeting is not about “who gets which mailer.” It becomes a live system, stitched to distribution and feedback. Different demographics can be shown targeted versions of the same reality, and the system learns—at scale—how each group responds.
And “response” doesn’t require explicit agreement. It can be attention, arousal, and volatility: two extra seconds of watch time, a rewatch, a comment typed in anger and posted, a share to a group chat.
We don’t have to guess whether ranking changes what people see. Researchers have tested it inside platforms.
A large-scale study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) drew on a “massive-scale randomized experiment” on X, then known as Twitter, that assigned a randomized control group—nearly two million daily active accounts—to a reverse-chronological feed “free of algorithmic personalization,” precisely so the effects of ranking could be measured. The authors reported measurable differences in “algorithmic amplification” across political actors in multiple countries.
That’s the key: ranking is an intervention. When a system orders content, it decides what becomes salient, what feels common to particular groups, what appears urgent, and what fades. Political power can emerge even when nobody writes a manifesto inside the company. The feed trains the user. It is an environment, and environments shape behavior.
This is also why the public debate so often misses the point.
People argue as if the only question is whether a platform “censors” a viewpoint or “pushes propaganda.” Those concerns matter. They just sit on top of a deeper mechanism: the simple act of ranking, repeated billions of times, changes what societies talk about.
The influence stack is powered by dashboards.
A broadcaster might learn weeks later whether a message landed. A platform learns in minutes whether a clip increased retention among 19-year-olds in a specific place, at a given hour, after a strategically set sequence of prior videos.
This creates a persuasion capability that older institutions weren’t built to match: rapid experimentation on human attention. Content becomes a hypothesis. The audience becomes a living lab. The system keeps what works.
Universities update policy once a semester. Newsrooms adjust framing over days. Legislatures move over months. The feed scope and focus can pivot before lunch.
A hard truth about the influence stack is that not all emotions travel equally well through it. High-arousal emotions move faster because they prompt action.
In a landmark study of sharing, Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman found that virality is linked to physiological arousal: content that evokes high-arousal emotions, including anger and anxiety, is more likely to spread than content that evokes low-arousal emotions like sadness.
Politics adds another accelerant: moral emotion. A PNAS study analyzing large datasets of social media debate found that moral-emotional language increases diffusion; in their sample, each additional moral-emotional word in a message was associated with a substantial increase in sharing.
And anger has particular advantages in networked environments. A computational analysis of Weibo found anger to be more “contagious” than joy and more able to travel along weaker social ties—meaning it can move beyond a tight-knit group and spill into wider communities.
Put those together and the targeting logic becomes almost mechanical. Anger keeps people watching. It increases the odds they’ll share. It tends to bridge out of local clusters into broader networks. In an engagement-optimized system, anger is not just a feeling. It’s a distribution advantage.
And then there is the old broadcast trick—the repeated phrase, the tagline, the talking point—reappearing in new clothes.
In television news, theming worked because repetition makes ideas feel common. In the influence stack, the system tests variations. It monitors the retention curve, watches share velocity and comment intensity. The phrases that survive are the ones that travel and harden into slogans that feel “everywhere,” because the platform has learned exactly where “everywhere” is.
This is how a moral frame becomes a transport mechanism. A short phrase is easy to caption, easy to hashtag, easy to stitch and remix. It is also easy for the system to recognize and route toward audiences that have historically responded to that emotional key.
A second political fact of the influence stack is that outsiders struggle to verify what’s happening in real time.
Platforms point to transparency and researcher access. While those programs are meaningful; sometimes they lag the speed of events. The influence stack’s advantage is velocity in a world of slow oversight. When you can’t see the full system—distribution weights, downranking rules, recommendation pathways, enforcement decisions—you can’t reliably separate organic waves from algorithmically amplified waves, or evaluate whether interventions were neutral or asymmetrical.
Over the next installments, we’ll walk up the stack.
We’ll examine emotion recognition and why even flawed affect inference can be dangerous when institutions treat outputs as truth. We’ll look at China’s operational model—identity resolution plus sensor coverage plus data fusion—and why architecture matters more than any single sensor. We’ll treat TikTok as a distribution layer where iteration is fast and verification is hard. Then we’ll apply the framework to a test case Americans lived through: the surge of campus protest dynamics during the Gaza war, what we can measure, and what we cannot responsibly claim.
The point isn’t to reduce genuine political conviction to “the algorithm did it.” People protest for real reasons. Institutions fail for real reasons. But in a world where attention is programmable, it becomes reckless to pretend the feed is only entertainment.
The influence stack doesn’t replace politics. It changes the temperature at which politics happens.
And once you see it, the question stops being whether a single video “caused” anything.
The question becomes: who controls the thermostat—and who gets to audit it?
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/how-modern-influence-operations-work-part-1-new-influence-stack
SpaceX outlined details of its highly anticipated IPO at a meeting with its team of bankers Monday night, telling them it plans to earmark a large portion of shares for retail investors and will host 1,500 of them at an event in June following the IPO roadshow launch, according to two people familiar with the matter.
"Retail is going to be a critical part of this and a bigger part than any IPO in history," Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen said during the virtual meeting, the two people said, asking not to be identified because the discussion was private.
Johnsen said the large retail component is by design as "those are folks that have been incredibly supportive of us and of Elon (Musk) for a long time, and we want to make sure that we recognize that."
Reuters reported last month that SpaceX is rewriting the IPO playbook with a large retail portion in the offering.
The meeting brought together the full syndicate for the first time as part of the process for what is expected to be the biggest initial public offering ever as the rocket maker seeks to raise $75 billion, valuing SpaceX at as much as $1.75 trillion, Reuters has previously reported.
The company plans to launch its roadshow the week of June 8, when executives and bankers will pitch the IPO to investors, the people said. About 125 financial analysts from the 21 banks on the deal are scheduled to meet with the company the day before, they added.
On June 11, SpaceX plans to host 1,500 retail investors at what the people described as a major investor event. In addition to the U.S., everyday retail investors in the UK, EU, Australia, Canada, Japan and Korea would have the opportunity to participate in the offering, the people added.
One of SpaceX's lead underwriters told the group of 21 investment banks the retail demand and allocation will be something they've "never seen before," the two people said.
The structure of the deal and precise amount of the retail allocation are expected to be finalized closer to the IPO launch, they said.
Reuters previously reported that founder Elon Musk wanted to set aside up to 30% of the company's shares for smaller investors, compared with 5% to 10% for most companies.
The company plans to make its IPO prospectus public in late May, they said.
SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin suggested Monday that the Trump administration could take action against international airports in sanctuary cities that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration authorities.
“Some of these cities have international airports — if they’re a sanctuary city, should they really be processing customs into their city?” Mullin told Fox News host Bret Baier, during an appearance on “Special Report.”
“Seriously, If they’re a sanctuary city, and they’re receiving international flights, and we’re asking them to partner with us at the airport, but once they walk out of the airport they’re not going to enforce immigration policy, maybe we need to have a really hard look at that because we need to focus on cities that want to work with us,” he continued.
Baier asked the DHS secretary if he was suggesting international airports in sanctuary cities “might lose their customs.”
“We’re gonna have to start prioritizing things at some point,” Mullin responded. “Right now, remember, the Democrats are wanting to defund Customs and Border Patrol.
“Well, who processes those individuals when they walk off the plane? And so I’m going to have to be forced to make hard decisions.”
US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents operate at more than 300 ports of entry, including international airports, throughout the country.
Removing CBP from sanctuary city airports would be in-line with the Trump administration’s policy of terminating federal funding for jurisdictions that prevent local law enforcement and jails from working with federal immigration enforcement agents.
Reducing the number of CBP agents at sanctuary city airports would likely create long lines for international travelers seeking to enter or re-enter the US.
Federal funding for DHS lapsed on Feb. 14, when Democratic lawmakers voted to shut down the department over concerns about CBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) policies.
ICE and CBP, however, remain funded through President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
DHS did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
During his appearance on “Special Report,” Mullin also revealed that nearly 3 million illegal immigrants have either self-deported or been deported since Trump took office.
“The last number that I’ve seen is we’ve deported between — either deported or self-deported … just shy of 3 million,” Mullin told Baier.
In January, DHS estimated that 2.2 million migrants had self-deported, whereas 675,000 were forcibly deported.
The Trump administration has offered $2,600 exit bonuses, free plane tickets and forgiveness of fines for illegal immigrants that choose to voluntarily leave the country.
When the Ukraine war began over four years ago, North Korea only deepened its relations and defense cooperation with Moscow. Later into the conflict, it even sent thousands of troops to assist Russian military and security forces - and an undisclosed number of DPRK troops died or suffered wounds while fighting Ukraine.
When it comes to Iran, many pundits assumed Pyongyang might also do something similar in defense of Tehran, give the Middle East nation and fellow 'rogue' ally is under US and Israeli bombs; however, there are signs North Korea is actually distancing itself in this case.
Seoul’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) sees no evidence that North Korea has sent weapons or supplies to Tehran since since Trump's Operation Epic Fury began, and is even remaining far away from such a move.
Lawmaker Park Sun-won, who attended a closed-door briefing held by the NIS, described Sunday that North Korea is not at all rushing to the Islamic Republic's aid.
This is also consistent with the Kim Jong Un government's public statements on the crisis, which have by and large been mute:
While Iran’s other allies China and Russia have frequently issued statements on the US-Israel war on Iran, North Korea’s Foreign Ministry has only issued two toned-down statements so far, said the NIS.
While Pyongyang did condemn the US and Israeli attacks on Iran as illegal, it did not issue public condolences after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death or send a congratulatory message when Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, succeeded him.
The spy agency said Pyongyang is likely adopting this cautious approach to position it for a new diplomatic chapter with the US once the Middle East conflict subsides, said Park.
Trump actually mentioned North Korea several times in Monday remarks from the White House on the Iran situation. He charged that a certain past president failed to act properly to prevent Pyongyang from going nuclear - and that the last several presided did as well.
He concluded that Kim Jong Un would not have nuclear weapons if that job was done right. The said that they are afraid to take "strong action".
It could be that Pyongyang is staying on the sidelines, and not offering direct support to its ally the Islamic Republic, given the obvious mismatch in military strength as the Iranians get pummeled by superior US aerial firepower.
In the case of Russa-Ukraine it is the opposite - where North Korea is on the side of the militarily stronger power and so perhaps feels more at east supporting its ally Moscow in such a context.
