In 2017, at the height of the #MeToo movement, six actresses told the Los Angeles Times that a prominent Hollywood director was sexually violent toward them.  Natasha Henstridge said he forced her to give him oral sex. Olivia Munn said that he masturbated in front of her, then lied to others that they’d had sex. Jaime Ray Newman shared that he’d sexually harassed her on a flight. According to Katharine Towne, the director followed her into the bathroom at a party after making unwanted advances. Jorina King detailed hiding from him in the bathroom; seemingly in exchange for a speaking part in a film, she said that he went into her trailer and asked to see her breasts. Eri Sasaki said that, on set, he repeatedly asked her to enter a bathroom with him, and when she declined, he allegedly said: “Don’t you want to be famous?” They were talking about Brett Ratner, who on Thursday will stand next to Melania Trump to celebrate the premiere of Melania, his eponymous documentary about the First Lady. In a 2018 interview about the #MeToo movement, the First Lady told ABC News, “I support the women—they need to be heard. We need to support them. And also men, not just women,” adding that accusers “cannot just say to somebody … ‘I was sexually assaulted’ or ‘You did that to me.’ Because sometimes the media goes too far and the way they portray some stories, it’s not correct. It’s not right.” Ratner, who was ushered out of Hollywood following the allegations, returns to the industry as the film’s director. He denies all sexual violence allegations against him and has not been charged or held liable in court.  Melania: 20 Days to History details the weeks leading up to the 2025 inauguration. Its Thursday premiere at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts—to which President Donald Trump recently affixed his name—follows a black-tie White House screening for around 70 people—including Mike Tyson, Queen Rania of Jordan, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, Apple CEO Tim Cook, New York Stock Exchange CEO Lynn Martin, and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. Jassy, according to the Hollywood Reporter, personally greenlighted Amazon spending $40 million to acquire the doc. The company is reportedly spending another $35 million on marketing.  Thursday’s event is the culmination of a yearlong re-integration into directing for Ratner, who directed the Rush Hour franchise and produced Horrible Bosses, among many other credits. His return is thanks in large part to President Trump—who, according to reporting from Semafor, personally pressured Paramount head and close ally Larry Ellison to revive Rush Hour 4—and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is reportedly friendly with the director and brought him as a guest to the United Nations. (Ratner emigrated to Israel in 2023.) With Trump and Netanyahu’s support, Ratner is now set to direct another documentary—this one on the Abraham Accords, a diplomatic agreement from Trump’s first term involving normalization of relations between Israel and several Arab countries. After the 2017 allegations, Ratner was dropped by Warner Bros., which had a $450-million co-financing deal with his production company. Biopics he had in the works on Hugh Hefner and Milli Vanilli were put on hold and dropped, respectively. The fourth installment of Rush Hour, now once again moving ahead, was also halted.  His directing and producing career had been snuffed out—until the Trump family stepped in. Less than a month after Trump, who has been held liable in court for sexual abuse and has been accused of sexual misconduct by dozens of women, returned to office, Ratner was granted the director role on Melania’s documentary.  An advertisement for “Melania” in Times Square. Richard B. Levine/ZUMA Ratner, like the president, was also captured in a photograph in the portion of the Epstein files that has been released. The undated image shows him hugging a shirtless Jean-Luc Brunel, the French modeling agent and close Epstein associate who died by suicide in a prison in France in 2022.  “As millions of Americans and thousands of Epstein survivors continue to demand the full release of the Epstein files, Trump and his abuser buddies have instead chosen to release a vanity project wanted by no one,” said Elisa Batista of survivor advocacy group UltraViolet Action in a statement about Melania. In his return to directing, Rolling Stone reports, Ratner has been difficult to work with, according to some workers involved in producing Melania. While no new sexual misconduct allegations have come out, one crew member put it like this: “I feel a little bit uncomfortable with the propaganda element of this…but Brett Ratner was the worst part.”

Yesterday I published a story about what was quickly becoming a surprising site of capital R Resistance: the Letterboxd review page for the $75 million documentary film, Melania. Comments were profane, fun, silly, unprintable. I included some of my favorites. The point I was making was this: Even before the movie’s release this Friday, it has become a lightning rod for anger, not least because Melania Trump’s oligarchic private premiere gala at the White House came the same day Alex Pretti was shot dead in the streets of Minneapolis amid her husband’s disastrous siege of the city. A real let-them-eat-cake moment. But as my colleague Arianna Coghill went to promote the story today on our social media channels, she discovered the reviews have been wiped from the site entirely. Wiped clean. Sad. So I sent an email to the Letterboxd press team asking why. What terms were violated? When did that happen? Even though the reviews appeared before the official release of the film, how is Letterboxd to know reviewers hadn’t seen the film itself? They haven’t gotten back to me, and I’ll share their response when they do. But I presume they’ll hit me with their Terms of Service, which prohibit using Letterboxd to “game the Service’s mechanics,” “alter consensus,” or “participate in orchestrated attacks against films or filmmakers.” Letterboxd also asserts the “absolute discretion” to remove any post. Any account can be suspended for “any reason or no reason whatsoever, with or without notice.” Letterboxd is also pretty clear in its FAQ: “Letterboxd is for reviews of films you’ve seen, not those you want to see,” and it encourages people to flag “pre-release reviews,” which, it says, “we’ll remove at our discretion.” It also says its undisclosed platform magic helps ensure its ratings are less vulnerable to being abused in online campaigns “to accurately represent the global consensus for each film”—but says people are welcome to report those suspected of waging such a campaign. I guess we’ll have to wait until Friday, when the “global consensus” will begin to take shape—I suspect somewhat quickly. Meanwhile, as if pocketing $28 million for just 20 days of being followed by filmmakers wasn’t grifty enough, Melania went on Fox News this morning to sermonize about “unity” after the Pretti killing—beneath a banner promoting her new film, bearing her own name. Subtle. > .@FLOTUS: "We need to unify. I'm calling for unity. I know my husband, the > President, had a great call yesterday with the Governor and the Mayor… If you > protest, protest in peace. We need to unify in these times." > pic.twitter.com/oj3skxpAYf > > — Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) January 27, 2026

Jeff Bezos’s $40 million bribe of the Trumps, in the form of his Amazon-MGM-produced Melania documentary, is out in about 2,000 theaters across the country this Friday (5,000 worldwide, according to MarketWatch), backed by an inescapable $35 million advertising assault on the country’s airwaves and commuter transit. The Wall Street Journal reported that Melania will personally pocket $28 million. On the day the nation reeled from her husband’s federal agents shooting and killing Alex Pretti in the streets of Minneapolis, Melania Trump herself hosted a ritzy private White House screening for execs, celebs, and Queen Rania of Jordan. There will also be a premiere at the formerly prominent arts institution once known as the Kennedy Center. All this, and let’s not forget the film’s director Brett Ratner is attempting a comeback after his career imploded in 2017 when he was accused of sexual misconduct (he denied the allegations and no charges were filed, according to People). He also appears in a photo released as part of the Epstein files.  So it was with some solace that I perused the Letterboxd page of Melania, which made for some entertaining reading, as users have pre-swarmed the review section to push the score down and let their voices rip. Here’s a sample of some of my faves. And yeah, there are so many spicier versions on the page itself, not fit for publication here. I’ll leave that to you to scroll through. These are on the PG-rated end: * I really don’t care, do u? ½ star. * ABOLISH ICE. RELEASE THE EPSTEIN FILES * I would, however, love to see a scene-for-scene reenactment by Laura Benanti. * Death of Cinema Death of American Democracy * Lol. No * Nobody asked for this absolute piece of flaming garbage. * I heard all of her lines are taken from a Michelle Obama documentary And my favorite: > ★★★★★ Watched by jbruno7478 > > An astonishing nonfictional rising biopic where an entire life in all its > complications and contradictions is expressed through a series of non-linear, > subjective fragments of storytelling showmanship that simultaneously construct > and deconstruct an enigmatic myth of American empire. Every time I sit down to > watch this I go “ok but is it really that good?” and every single time I am > sucked in by the form which combines expressive deep-focus images with lots of > wide and low-angle compositions that take in the gorgeously-designed, > idiosyncratic interior spaces (including miniatures and optical illusion set > extensions) and serve to heighten the constantly overlapping sound design and > montage that collapses all of the techniques (and the sense of time and space > they establish) into a panoramic stream of memory. This is a triumph in every > sense of the word. I was left speechless, you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll be > angry. You will get all the feels. It’s criminal that we had to wait this long > for this project.

Per quasi tutta la giornata di lunedì 14 ottobre, grossi problemi con il cloud di Amazon, cioè Amazon Web Services, hanno bloccato tanti servizi nel mondo, anche in Italia. Ma attenzione: la causa del down è negli Usa, non in Europa. E allora smettiamola di parlare a vanvera di sovranità digitale europea e italiana e cominciamo a farla sul serio In Italia per quasi un giorno intero – almeno secondo Downdetector come riportato ma molti giornali – ci sono stati forti disservizi in Fastweb, Vodafone, TIM, Wind, Iliad, CoopVoce, OpenFiber, e in Agenzia delle Entrate, Poste Italiane, Intesa San Paolo. Il guasto ha interessato la regione US-EAST-1, con datacenter in Virginia, Stati Uniti. E allora perché sono andati offline servizi pubblici come l'Agenzia delle Entrate o Poste? In sostanza: cosa ci fanno i dati e i programmi del Ministero delle Entrate e di Poste Italiane in Virginia (USA)? Alla faccia della sovranità digitale! Leggi l'articolo di Vannini oppure ascolta il suo podcast

Amazon ha fatto sapere di aver identificato la causa del problema e ha annunciato: "Continuiamo a osservare un ripristino nella maggior parte dei servizi interessati". Secondo quanto riportato da Downdetector, i problemi hanno riguardato diversi servizi e piattaforme fra cui WhatsApp, Open AI, Canva, Clash Royale, Perplexity, Amazon stessa, Airbnb, Intesa San Paolo, Tim, l’Agenzia delle Entrate, Vodafone, Fastweb, Google, Iliad, WindTre e Cloud e Poste Italiane. Questo genere di avvenimenti è un monito al delegare servizi importanti, magari di interesse pubblico, oltre a quelli commerciali, su infrastrutture private in mano ai broligarchi. Link all'articolo qui

Con lo sviluppo dell’intelligenza artificiale i data center consumano sempre più acqua, lasciando a secco intere comunità Una famiglia che abita nella contea di Newton, a un’ora e mezza in macchina da Atlanta, da diversi anni ha problemi con l’acqua. Racconta infatti il New York Times che dal 2018 la lavastoviglie, la macchina del ghiaccio, la lavatrice e il gabinetto hanno smesso uno per uno di funzionare. Poi, nel giro di un anno, la pressione dell’acqua si è ridotta a un rivolo. Finché dai rubinetti del bagno e della cucina non usciva più acqua. Nulla. Ma il problema, ovviamente, non riguarda solo questa famiglia. [...] Tutto questo perché? Perché dal 2018, appunto, è cominciata la costruzione del nuovo data center di Meta. I data center sono immensi centri di elaborazione dati che in breve tempo sono diventati la spina dorsale della nostra economia. Sono l’infrastruttura critica che alimenta l’archiviazione cloud, i servizi di emergenza, i sistemi bancari, le comunicazioni e la logistica. Ma sono i data center sono strutture gigantesche che consumano quantità immense di energia, suolo e acqua. Con il rapido sviluppo dell’intelligenza artificiale, questi consumi sono destinati a crescere a ritmo esponenziale. Leggi l'articolo

AMAZON TARGETED FOR COMPLICITY IN ISRAEL’S GAZA GENOCIDE, TELEKOM FOR COOPERATION WITH THE GERMAN MILITARY AND ELON MUSK’S STARLINK—COMMUNIQÉ ~ Juju Alerta ~ An anti-militarist group has claimed responsibility for two arson attacks on commercial vehicles from Amazon and Deutsche Telekom in the early hours of Tuesday. The Amazon vans were torched on a site on Koppelweg, in the south of the German capital, while Telekom parking was situated in Lichtenberg in Berlin’s east, reported German media. No people were hurt. In a communiqé, the un-named group said it was “celebrating” the opening of the new Amazon Tower in Berlin, citing disgust with the company’s lending its computing power to the Israeli military (along with Google and Microsoft). “The destruction and starvation in Gaza unfolding before our eyes, the planned complete relocation of the population, and the AI-based massacre and mutilation of hundreds of thousands of people, including many children, are being calculated and stored on Amazon Web Services’ servers”, said the group. It also named Amazon as a key contractor for the American military and a “generous sponsor of King Trump’s military parade … State and capital in lockstep toward fascism”. Telekom was targeted due to its “support for the Bundeswehr” and as a “supplier of IT to border authorities, police, and intelligence services”, said the communiqué. The activists also cited T-Systems, which works in collaboration with Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite network. Citing Amazon’s competing Project Kuiper, the text said that “Musk and Bezos, with their corporate networks, are thus technocrats who not only profit from wars but can now influence their course”. “Demanding life against militarism and technologies of death is right, just as it is right to claim and defend antimilitarism against nationalism”, concluded the commuiqué, “It is right to liberate life from all militarism and war, from the state and patriarchy”. Amazon condemned the act, a spokesperson told Reuters, while Deutsche Telekom said it could not comment on pending investigations. These attacks are not unusual, noted observers. In 2020 and 2021 more than 400 cars were set alight in Berlin. In 2021, the total number of cars, including those that caught fire when vehicles in the vicinity were torched, surpassed 700. The post Berlin: Anti-militarists claim arson of Amazon and Deutsche Telekom vehicles appeared first on Freedom News.

David Folkenflik occupies a unique role at NPR: He’s a journalist who writes about journalism. And that includes the very organization where he works, which is once again being threatened by conservatives in Washington. The second Trump administration has aggressively gone after the media in its first few months. It’s kicked news organizations out of the Pentagon. It’s barred other newsrooms from access to the White House. And Trump supporters in Congress have targeted federal funding for public media. In late March, the heads of NPR and PBS testified on Capitol Hill to defend public broadcasting from Republicans accusing them of political bias. Meanwhile, some major news organizations seem to be capitulating and bending to the will of the Trump administration. Folkenflik, who’s been covering media for two decades for NPR, says journalism across the country is facing a two-pronged attack from both commercial and political forces. “You’re seeing sort of discrete and specific and seemingly almost comedic attacks. You don’t say ‘Gulf of America’? Get to the back of the line,” Folkenflik says. “I think it’s actually part of a larger effort to control the flow of information.” On this week’s episode of More To The Story, Folkenflik talks to host Al Letson about this unprecedented moment for journalists, why more media outlets seem to be bowing to pressure from the Trump administration, and how journalism can begin to win back public trust. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app.

La dipendenza europea dall’infrastruttura cloud americana solleva preoccupazioni sulla sicurezza. Il Cloud Act permette agli USA di accedere ai dati globali, mettendo a rischio la privacy e la sicurezza nazionale dell’Europa Cinque settimane di Donald Trump e gli europei stanno scoprendo per la prima volta quello che Vasco cantava 46 anni fa: non siamo mica gli americani. E non solo non siamo gli americani, improvvisamente scopriamo che i loro interessi non coincidono con i nostri. E non solo i loro interessi non coincidono con i nostri, presto scopriremo che spesso sono opposti. Indice degli argomenti * La fine dell’alleanza transatlantica e le conseguenze per l’Europa * L’incontro Trump-Zelensky e la vera natura della politica estera americana * Terre rare: l’estorsione di Trump all’Ucraina e il destino dell’Europa * Il problema dell’infrastruttura cloud e la dipendenza europea dagli Usa * Il Gdpr e i fallimenti degli accordi per la protezione dei dati * La soluzione per liberarsi dal cloud americano * Il ritorno all’hosting come alternativa praticabile Leggi l'articolo

On Monday, workers at Philadelphia’s Center City Whole Foods voted 130-100 to be represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. It marks the first time an Amazon-owned Whole Foods store has voted to unionize—and it is one of the first major union elections of the second Trump presidency.  The organizing effort, which workers say has been in the works for over a year, went public in November. Workers say it was driven by myriad demands, including a push for increased pay. The base wage at the Center City Whole Foods is $16 per hour. According to the MIT Living Wage Calculator, the living wage for a single person in Philadelphia, without dependents, is over $22 per hour. (Amazon, which has owned Whole Foods since 2017, is worth about two and a half trillion dollars.)  Khy Adams speaking to Whole Foods workers in Philadelphia. UFCW Local 1776 Whole Foods workers told me the low pay means they have to work multiple jobs to manage their bills. Khy Adams, 32, makes $16.50 an hour in the hot foods department but has to work as a culinary instructor on the side. She often logs well over 50 hours per week between her two jobs. > “The union-busting propaganda started happening within weeks.” Mase Veney, 26, has worked in the produce department for three years. Mostly, he said, that means “lifting heavy boxes” in a freezing cooler. About a year and a half ago, at the end of his shift, Veney emerged to talk to a friend in another department. “I just came out to take a break because I was freezing cold,” he said. But for this small break, he was castigated for wasting time. Then, he said, some of his shifts mysteriously disappeared from the calendar.  After that incident, Veney joined forces with four other workers to figure out how to start a union. Whole Foods workers marching for unionization.UFCW Local 1776 Almost immediately after going public, they faced opposition. Fliers reading “stay whole, vote no” circulated around the store. Managers that Veney and his coworkers were used to working with were transferred to other locations of Whole Foods. “The union-busting propaganda started happening within weeks,” Adams said. During the first week of January, UFCW 1776 filed an unfair labor practice complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging that at least one worker was fired as retaliation for union activity and that “supervisors coercively told employees that they would not be getting wage increases because of their union activities and made promises of wage increases if they did not vote to unionize.” (Amazon disputes these assertions. A Whole Foods representative said that the company will implement a raise when it is legal to do so.)  Strange faces started showing up around the store, workers said, as the unionization vote approached. “They started bringing in people from Texas, people from Florida—a lot of people from New York. There was one person who was there from California,” Adams told Mother Jones. The new people, who wore “Culture Champion” merchandise, never told her their job title. They were oddly gregarious, Adams remembered. “We’re here to help with anything you need,” she recalls them saying. And the new colleagues were especially eager, Adams recalled, to talk about why unionizing could be harmful to workers. Yet when she tried to assign them tasks, they were nowhere to be found. “On any given day, I would see maybe four or five people that would have ‘Culture Champion’ merch on, but they wouldn’t necessarily be performing a job,” she said. Whole Foods workers with union swag.UFCW Local 1776 Meanwhile, her department was chronically understaffed: dishes regularly piled up because too few people were hired to wash them. Adams often tried her best to manage preparing the rotisserie chickens, operating the hot bar, and tending to the soups all at the same time.  On Monday, when the results began to come in, Adams almost could not believe it. “The propaganda machine wanted us to believe that we were isolated, that no one wanted this, that we were just on an island all by ourselves,” she said. “But I’m not the only person who wants this—we aren’t the only group of people who want this.”  In a statement, the company said: “We are disappointed by the outcome of this election, but we are committed to maintaining a positive working environment in our Philly Center City store.” Now, the challenge for the newly unionized Whole Foods workers is to negotiate with their employers. Amazon has been more than willing to deploy anti-union tactics in the past. In October, the company received a complaint from the NLRB over its refusal to negotiate with unionized delivery drivers employed by a third-party company. And when a Staten Island Amazon warehouse voted to unionize nearly three years ago, the company refused to come to the bargaining table. While refusing to bargain is illegal, the penalties are minimal. After voting to unionize, Whole Foods workers held a press conference outside of the Center City Philadelphia Whole Foods store. UFCW LOCAL 1776 The unionized Whole Foods workers will also be facing a much more anti-union NLRB—just hours after their election, Trump fired former General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, who was well-known for going after Amazon.  Now, “we have to certify these votes, to make sure that everything goes through and that Amazon doesn’t try to throw a wrench in that plan, which they are very much known for,” Adams said. During the vote-certification process, Amazon will have a chance to challenge any ballots filed.  “I feel like it’ll make Amazon fight harder, because they know that Trump’s in office,” Veney said. “But we have a lot of people behind us, backing us up, and I think we can make this thing happen.” The unionized workers, knowing they won’t be supported on the federal level by Trump, are looking to local and state-level politicians for backup.  Their first challenge, Veney said, is simple. Earlier this month, the Center City Philadelphia store was reportedly exempted from a region-wide wage increase. Workers said they were told this was because Amazon didn’t want to sway the outcome of the election.  “The vote is now over,” Adams said. “So where are our wage increases that you said you were going to give us?”