Unfree

Israel enjoyed a dream start to the Under-21 Jiu-Jitsu World Championships in Abu Dhabi on Sunday as Noga Reshef captured the world title and Yoav Solomon earned a bronze medal to lead an impressive opening day for the blue-and-white delegation.

Israeli Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates Yossi Shelley was on hand at Mubadala Arena throughout the competition, cheering on the athletes before personally presenting the medals to the Israeli winners during the victory ceremonies.

Reshef, the reigning European champion, claimed the gold medal in the women’s under-63 kg division to become the new Under-21 world champion. She defeated the United Arab Emirates’ hometown favorite in a tightly contested final that was decided in golden score after Reshef executed a decisive sweep. Following her victory, Hatikvah was played inside the arena as the Israeli flag was raised.

The Times of Israel | Aug 5, 2026

An announcement of Stargate Argentina on behalf of OpenAI run by Sam Altman, who is closely affiliated with Peter Thiel. So these people are looking to build data centers really all over the world. And why are they doing it?

Why data centers? It’s essential to basically their various plans from AI, which run, which include not just their plans for AI related businesses, but also a lot of these people subscribe to specific ideologies that see that extreme investments in AI and AI compute capability are necessary in order to further the development of what they call artificial general intelligence or an AI super intelligence and some of them hold an almost religious fervor, you could say, for having that come to fruition. And are openly transhumanist and think that the nature, the end goal of humanity is to have humanity merge with AI in some capacity.

So they have not just the economic incentive, they also have this, I would call it quasi-religious incentive as well, which may help propel this along even when the economics of it don’t necessarily make sense and at the end of the day, I think it’s a testament to how we’re sort of living in an era of, this is the importance to them, of computing power over people and so people that are negatively affected by them, apparently their concerns don’t matter and there’s a coordinated effort to sort of paint any pushback as being propelled by China, for example, and various different narratives are being fielded right now to try and manage local anger at an increasing cost of living crisis, many of which have been linked to data centers, particularly their power usage and their water usage. Some of these teal linked outlets like Pirate Wires, for example, have tried to push against those claims, but using the data on the books about water usage, and some other people, but in some other claims. But in states like California, most data centers aren’t required to report how much water they use.

So how accurate is the data we have on it anyway? And a lot of data centers are moving into areas that have water issues, or are having droughts already. And so obviously, local concern about that is quite reasonable, but for the big tech oligarchs, they’re not really interested in hearing those concerns.

They have a dedicated mission to improving AI for, as I mentioned, various purposes, and moving the United States further into an AI-powered economy.”

The Chris Hedges Report: How the Epstein Network is Privatizing the Government & Building Out the Surveillance State (w/Whitney Webb) | TCHR, Aug 5, 2026

“Can you talk about the ties with Israel? I know Compass Data Centers, you mentioned, has Israeli ties. And I’m wondering whether the pairing between Wexner and Compass illustrate a network driving the development of big tech and AI boom that has deep Israeli roots?

Well, looking at a lot of the tech companies and data center companies that have installed themselves, and New Albany in particular, the vast majority of them have significant subsidiaries that operate in the state of Israel. And Wexner, of course, is intimately related to the state of Israel through his own activities. For example, I think several decades ago, he was sort of acting as a middleman in some business capacities between Israel and China, and also working on establishing Israeli businesses and helping them establish themselves in the occupied Golan Heights, among other things.

And that’s to say nothing of his links to the mega group, for example, which, as you noted in your introduction, created Birthright Israel. And also Jeffrey Epstein, who at this point is quite known for his ties to former Israeli politicians and the Israeli state. Sorry, excuse me.

But I think it also speaks to sort of a broader issue, to have a lot of this infrastructure of technology in the US be intimately intermingled and connected to Israel. And this was actually something that was furthered and actually developed in conjunction with Netanyahu and the so-called vulture capitalist and significant donor to neo-conservative causes, Paul Singer, who explicitly created a company called Startup Nation Central with the explicit purpose of making it impossible for US to ever significantly support the BDS movement or the Boycott Divest Sanctions Movement. And the goal was to basically market Israeli startups to US big tech firms so that they would acquire a lot of those startups and unprecedented numbers and also contract with them so that US technological infrastructure on multiple levels.

It would be so intimately enmeshed with Israeli interests that they could never meaningfully boycott Israel no matter what happened essentially. And a lot of these startups, of course, if you’ve ever looked into the Israeli startup scene, are intimately related to Israeli intelligence and Israeli military operations. They’re staffed by veterans of one or the other.

And at the same time, coincidentally, that Startup Nation Central was created, the Israeli government developed an explicit policy where these startups would be used to conduct operations that previously had been conducted in-house by Mossad and Muted 8200 and other parts of the Israeli intelligence system. So for lack of a better word, they have an explicit policy of using them as front companies for intelligence. And so basically, by having all of these big tech companies absorb them, the goal is to have a major economic lever of power over the tech industry in particular that would prevent US policy from ever meaningfully challenging Israel, even at this point in time when they have actively been conducting a genocidal war for years in Palestine.”

The Chris Hedges Report: How the Epstein Network is Privatizing the Government & Building Out the Surveillance State (w/Whitney Webb) | TCHR, Aug 5, 2026

Ahmed Abu Al-Kas was sifting through the debris of an apartment in the Al-Sousi Tower in western Gaza City in the aftermath of a pre-dawn Israeli airstrike on Sunday that killed a pregnant woman, her husband, and their five-year-old son. Among the broken concrete, strewn blankets, children’s toys, and backpacks lay the body of an unborn baby, curled in a fetal position and covered in grey dust. Al-Kas watched as another man picked up the tiny figure with a hand towel and gingerly placed it on a pile of blankets.

He had been nearby when the bombing happened. “All of a sudden, we heard the sound of an explosion. We started running and we came next to the tower,” Al-Kas, 32, told Drop Site News later that day. “I broke down the door and went in with the other young men. I found body parts scattered everywhere. Over there, I found a small child. I shined my flashlight into the other part of the apartment, and found that half of it had collapsed. Since this morning, I’ve been searching through the rubble for the body parts left behind overnight. While searching, I found this baby.”

The force of the blast had apparently torn the baby from the mother’s body. Al-Kas was distraught. “I found a baby thrown from its mother’s womb,” he said. “His mother was torn apart, and I found [the baby] just like this.”

Drop Site News | Aug 6, 2026