Nifi

Nifi AI

Nifi AI

Nifi AI

Nifi AI

Nifi AI

Nifi AI

Nifi AI

Nifi AI

Nifi AI

Nifi AI

The end of 'shadow AI' at enterprises? Kilo launches KiloClaw for Organizations to enable secure AI agents at scale

As generative AI matures from a novelty into a workplace staple, a new friction point has emerged: the "shadow AI" or "Bring Your Own AI (BYOAI)" crisis. Much like the unsanctioned use of personal devices in years past, developers and knowledge workers are increasingly deploying autonomous agents on personal infrastructure to manage their professional workflows. "Our journey with Kilo Claw has been to make it easier and easier and more accessible to folks," says Kilo co-founder Scott Breitenother. Today, the company dedicated to providing a portable, multi-model, cloud-based AI coding environment is moving to formalize this "shadow AI" layer: it's launching KiloClaw for Organizations and KiloClaw Chat, a suite of tools designed to provide enterprise-grade governance over personal AI agents. The announcement comes at a period of high velocity for the company. Since making its securely hosted, one-click OpenClaw product for individuals, KiloClaw, generally available last month, more than 25,000 users have integrated the platform into their daily workflows. Simultaneously, Kilo’s proprietary agent benchmark, PinchBench, has logged over 250,000 interactions and recently gained significant industry validation when it was referenced by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during his keynote at the 2026 Nvidia GTC conference in San Jose, California. The shadow AI crisis: Addressing the BYOAI problem The impetus for KiloClaw for Organizations stems from a growing visibility gap within large enterprises. In a recent interview with VentureBeat, Kilo leadership detailed conversations with high-level AI directors at government contractors who found their developers running OpenClaw agents on random VPS instances to manage calendars and monitor repositories. "What we’re announcing on Tuesday is Kilo Claw for organizations, where a company can buy an organization-level package of Kilo Claws and give every team member access," explained Kilo co-founder and head of product and engineering Emili

Meta's new structured prompting technique makes LLMs significantly better at code review — boosting accuracy to 93% in some cases

Deploying AI agents for repository-scale tasks like bug detection, patch verification, and code review requires overcoming significant technical hurdles. One major bottleneck: the need to set up dynamic execution sandboxes for every repository, which are expensive and computationally heavy. Using large language model (LLM) reasoning instead of executing the code is rising in popularity to bypass this overhead, yet it frequently leads to unsupported guesses and hallucinations. To improve execution-free reasoning, researchers at Meta introduce "semi-formal reasoning," a structured prompting technique. This method requires the AI agent to fill out a logical certificate by explicitly stating premises, tracing concrete execution paths, and deriving formal conclusions before providing an answer. The structured format forces the agent to systematically gather evidence and follow function calls before drawing conclusions. This increases the accuracy of LLMs in coding tasks and significantly reduces errors in fault localization and codebase question-answering. For developers using LLMs in code review tasks, semi-formal reasoning enables highly reliable, execution-free semantic code analysis while drastically reducing the infrastructure costs of AI coding systems. Agentic code reasoning Agentic code reasoning is an AI agent's ability to navigate files, trace dependencies, and iteratively gather context to perform deep semantic analysis on a codebase without running the code. In enterprise AI applications, this capability is essential for scaling automated bug detection, comprehensive code reviews, and patch verification across complex repositories where relevant context spans multiple files. The industry currently tackles execution-free code verification through two primary approaches. The first involves unstructured LLM evaluators that try to verify code either directly or by training specialized LLMs as reward models to approximate test outcomes. The major drawback is their

Claude Code's source code appears to have leaked: here's what we know

Anthropic appears to have accidentally revealed the inner workings of one of its most popular and lucrative AI products, the agentic AI harness Claude Code, to the public. A 59.8 MB JavaScript source map file (.map), intended for internal debugging, was inadvertently included in version 2.1.88 of the @anthropic-ai/claude-code package on the public npm registry pushed live earlier this morning. By 4:23 am ET, Chaofan Shou (@Fried_rice), an intern at Solayer Labs, broadcasted the discovery on X (formerly Twitter). The post, which included a direct download link to a hosted archive, acted as a digital flare. Within hours, the ~512,000-line TypeScript codebase was mirrored across GitHub and analyzed by thousands of developers. For Anthropic, a company currently riding a meteoric rise with a reported $19 billion annualized revenue run-rate as of March 2026, the leak is more than a security lapse; it is a strategic hemorrhage of intellectual property.The timing is particularly critical given the commercial velocity of the product. Market data indicates that Claude Code alone has achieved an annualized recurring revenue (ARR) of $2.5 billion, a figure that has more than doubled since the beginning of the year. With enterprise adoption accounting for 80% of its revenue, the leak provides competitors—from established giants to nimble rivals like Cursor—a literal blueprint for how to build a high-agency, reliable, and commercially viable AI agent. Anthropic confirmed the leak in a spokesperson’s e-mailed statement to VentureBeat, which reads: “Earlier today, a Claude Code release included some internal source code. No sensitive customer data or credentials were involved or exposed. This was a release packaging issue caused by human error, not a security breach. We're rolling out measures to prevent this from happening again.” The anatomy of agentic memory The most significant takeaway for competitors lies in how Anthropic solved "context entropy"—the tendency for AI agents to

Nvidia-backed ThinkLabs AI raises $28 million to tackle a growing power grid crunch

ThinkLabs AI, a startup building artificial intelligence models that simulate the behavior of the electric grid, announced today that it has closed a $28 million Series A financing round led by Energy Impact Partners (EIP), one of the largest energy transition investment firms in the world. Nvidia’s venture capital arm NVentures and Edison International, the parent company of Southern California Edison, also participated in the round. The funding marks a significant escalation in the race to apply AI not just to software and content generation, but to the physical infrastructure that powers modern life. While most AI investment headlines have centered on large language models and generative tools, ThinkLabs is pursuing a different and arguably more consequential application: using physics-informed AI to model the behavior of electrical grids in real time, compressing engineering studies that once took weeks or months into minutes. "We are dead focused on the grid," ThinkLabs CEO Josh Wong told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview ahead of the announcement. "We do AI models to model the grid, specifically transmission and distribution power flow related modeling. We can calculate things like interconnection of large loads — like data centers or electric vehicle charging — and understand the impact they have on the grid." The round drew participation from a deep bench of returning investors, including GE Vernova, Powerhouse Ventures, Active Impact Investments, Blackhorn Ventures, and Amplify Capital, along with an unnamed large North American investor-owned utility. The company initially set out to raise less than $28 million, according to Wong, but strong demand from strategic partners pushed the round higher. "This was way oversubscribed," Wong said. "We attracted the right ecosystem partners and the right capital partners to grow with, and that's how we ended up at $28 million." Why surging electricity demand is breaking the grid's legacy planning tools The timing

Midjourney engineer debuts new vibe coded, open source standard Pretext to revolutionize web design

For three decades, the web has existed in a state of architectural denial. It is a platform originally conceived to share static physics papers, yet it is now tasked with rendering the most complex, interactive, and generative interfaces humanity has ever conceived. At the heart of this tension lies a single, invisible, and prohibitively expensive operation known as "layout reflow." Whenever a developer needs to know the height of a paragraph or the position of a line to build a modern interface, they must ask the browser’s Document Object Model (DOM), the standard by which developers can create and modify webpages. In response, the browser often has to recalculate the geometry of the entire page — a process akin to a city being forced to redraw its entire map every time a resident opens their front door. Last Friday, March 27, 2026, Cheng Lou — a prominent software engineer whose work on React, ReScript, and Midjourney has defined much of the modern frontend landscape — announced on the social network X that he had "crawled through depths of hell" to release an open source (MIT License) solution: Pretext, which he coded using AI vibe coding tools and models like OpenAI's Codex and Anthropic's Claude. It is a 15KB, zero-dependency TypeScript library that allows for multiline text measurement and layout entirely in "userland," bypassing the DOM and its performance bottlenecks. Without getting too technical, in short, Lou's Pretext turns text blocks on the web into fully dynamic, interactive and responsive spaces, able to adapt and smoothly move around any other object on a webpage, preserving letter order and spaces between words and lines, even when a user clicks and drags other objects to intersect with the text, or resizes their browser window dramatically. Ironically, it's difficult with mere text alone to convey how significant Lou's latest release is for the entire web going forward. Fortunately, other third-party developers whipped up quick demos with Pretext

IndexCache, a new sparse attention optimizer, delivers 1.82x faster inference on long-context AI models

Processing 200,000 tokens through a large language model is expensive and slow: the longer the context, the faster the costs spiral. Researchers at Tsinghua University and Z.ai have built a technique called IndexCache that cuts up to 75% of the redundant computation in sparse attention models, delivering up to 1.82x faster time-to-first-token and 1.48x faster generation throughput at that context length. The technique applies to models using the DeepSeek Sparse Attention architecture, including the latest DeepSeek and GLM families. It can help enterprises provide faster user experiences for production-scale, long-context models, a capability already proven in preliminary tests on the 744-billion-parameter GLM-5 model. The DSA bottleneck Large language models rely on the self-attention mechanism, a process where the model computes the relationship between every token in its context and all the preceding ones to predict the next token. However, self-attention has a severe limitation. Its computational complexity scales quadratically with sequence length. For applications requiring extended context windows (e.g., large document processing, multi-step agentic workflows, or long chain-of-thought reasoning), this quadratic scaling leads to sluggish inference speeds and significant compute and memory costs. Sparse attention offers a principled solution to this scaling problem. Instead of calculating the relationship between every token and all preceding ones, sparse attention optimizes the process by having each query select and attend to only the most relevant subset of tokens. DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA) is a highly efficient implementation of this concept, first introduced in DeepSeek-V3.2. To determine which tokens matter most, DSA introduces a lightweight "lightning indexer module" at every layer of the model. This indexer scores all preceding tokens and selects a small batch for the main core attention mechanism to process. By doing this, DSA slashes the heavy co

Show HN: Threadprocs – executables sharing one address space (0-copy pointers)

This project launches multiple independent programs into a single shared virtual address space, while still behaving like separate processes (independent binaries, globals, and lifetimes). When threadprocs share their address space, pointers are valid across them with no code changes for well-behaved Linux binaries.<p>Unlike threads, each threadproc is a standalone and semi-isolated process. Unlike dlopen-based plugin systems, threadprocs run traditional executables with a `main()` function. Unlike POSIX processes, pointers remain valid across threadprocs because they share the same address space.<p>This means that idiomatic pointer-based data structures like `std::string` or `std::unordered_map` can be passed between threadprocs and accessed directly (with the usual data race considerations).<p>This accomplishes a programming model somewhere between pthreads and multi-process shared memory IPC.<p>The implementation relies on directing ASLR and virtual address layout at load time and implementing a user-space analogue of `exec()`, as well as careful manipulation of threadproc file descriptors, signals, etc. It is implemented entirely in unprivileged user space code: &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jer-irl&#x2F;threadprocs&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;docs&#x2F;02-implementation.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jer-irl&#x2F;threadprocs&#x2F;blob&#x2F;main&#x2F;docs&#x2F;02-imp...</a>&gt;.<p>There is a simple demo demonstrating “cross-threadproc” memory dereferencing at &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jer-irl&#x2F;threadprocs&#x2F;tree&#x2F;main?tab=readme-ov-file#demo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jer-irl&#x2F;threadprocs&#x2F;tree&#x2F;main?tab=readme-...</a>&gt;, including a high-level diagram.<p>This is relevant to systems of multiple processes with shared memory (often ring buffers or flat tables). These designs often require serialization or copying, and tend away from idiomatic C++ or Rust data structures. Pointer-based data structures cannot be passed directly.<p>There are significant limitations and edge cases, and it’s not clear this is a practical model, but the project explores a way to relax traditional process memory boundaries while still structuring a system as independently launched components.

Anthropic Fires Back: Claude Code Channels Brings AI Coding Agents to Your Discord and Telegram

Anthropic made a significant move this week that every developer paying attention to the AI coding...

The accessibility gap: Why good intentions aren’t enough for digital compliance

Presented by AudioEye While most organizations recognize the importance of accessibility from a theoretical angle, a stark gap exists between that awareness and actual execution. Companies can't just give a nod to accessibility -- and it can't just be a nice-to-have. The chasm between knowing and doing is not only exposing businesses to significant legal risk, it's also costing them actual business and growth opportunities. According to AudioEye’s newly released 2026 Accessibility Advantage Report, 59% of business leaders say their organization would face legal risk due to accessibility failure if audited today, and more than half have already encountered accessibility-related lawsuits or threats. That’s unsurprising, because today the average web page still contains 297 accessibility issues, based on an analysis of over 15,000 websites in AudioEye’s 2025 Digital Accessibility Index. The report, which surveyed more than 400 business leaders across the C-suite, VPs, and directors, reveals that organizations understand accessibility matters, but most lack the systems, expertise, and operational infrastructure to deliver it consistently, says Chad Sollis, CMO at AudioEye. “What the data makes clear is that accessibility hasn’t stalled because people don’t care,” Sollis says. “It’s stalled because fragmented ownership and reactive workflows make it hard to sustain as digital experiences evolve. Leaders know accessibility matters, but their organizations aren’t set up to deliver it consistently.” Why digital accessibility delivers a measurable business advantage With regulations like the European Accessibility Act now in effect and enforcement intensifying globally, the benefits extend far beyond avoiding lawsuits. Over half of leaders now cite accessibility as a business growth opportunity, recognizing that accessible digital experiences drive better user outcomes across the board. “Organizations that treat accessibility purely as a compliance exercise miss the opportun

Can’t modify a long chat

Hello everyone, I’ve been using claude for nearly a year now and i’m facing a problem. I’m on phone and when i try to modify a long message i’ve wrote it does that. Does anyone have a solution for that please? submitted by /u/RoutineStudy6306 [link] [comments]

feat: Quota-aware trial scheduling based on /usage subscription limits

## Problem The performance harness burns significant tokens per trial (300K-1.8M each). With subscription-based Claude Code, daily and weekly quotas are real constraints. Currently there is zero awareness of quota state when recommending or executing benchmark runs — the orchestrator will happily suggest 7 trials that consume 5M+ tokens without knowing the user is at 80% of their daily limit with no reset for 5 days. ## Desired Behavior The harness (and the orchestrator recommending runs) should be **quota-aware**: 1. **Before recommending trials**, estimate the token cost based on historical averages per task 2. **Query `/usage`** (or equivalent subscription API) to get: - Current daily usage vs daily limit - Current weekly usage vs weekly limit - Reset timing (when does daily reset? when does weekly reset?) 3. **Apply scheduling intelligence**: - If daily resets tomorrow and we're at 60% → run all trials now - If weekly doesn't reset for 5 days and we're at 70% → suggest deferring or running fewer trials - If we're at 90% daily but resets in 2 hours → suggest waiting 4. **Surface quota impact** in run recommendations: ``` Proposed: 7 trials, est. ~5M tokens Current quota: 12M/20M daily (60%), resets in 14h Weekly: 45M/100M (45%), resets in 3d Recommendation: Safe to proceed — daily headroom sufficient ``` ## Implementation Considerations - `/usage` data structure needs investigation — what does the subscription API expose? - Historical token-per-task averages can be computed from existing results - The 70% threshold is a starting point — should be configurable - Weekly quota is the binding constraint when reset is far away - Daily quota matters more when reset is imminent - The orchestrator (not just the runner CLI) should have this awareness — it's the one suggesting "let's run 18 trials" ## Not In Scope (first pass) - Automatic pause/resume of running trials (too complex for v1) - Real-time token tracking during a trial (stream parsing is post-hoc) - Multi-user quota coordination ## Acceptance Criteria - [ ] Runner CLI shows estimated token cost before execution - [ ] Quota state queried and displayed before trial recommendations - [ ] Scheduling advice based on quota headroom + reset timing - [ ] Configurable threshold (default 70% of remaining quota) - [ ] Works with current subscription model (daily + weekly limits)

Kristi Noem Nearly Destroyed FEMA. Will Her Exit Save It?

*This story was originally published b*y [Grist](https://grist.org/politics/kristi-noem-fema-trump-markwayne-mullin/) *and is reproduced here as part of the* [Climate Desk](http://www.climatedesk.org/) *collaboration.* During the year she spent leading the US Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, Kristi Noem faced a torrent of criticism. Lawmakers from both parties assailed her for lying about the [shooting of protestors](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cre02yzv807o) in Minneapolis and spending [millions of dollars](https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/terribly-awkward-gop-senator-scolds-164242119.html) on television commercials. Government audits concluded that she “systematically obstructed” investigations and created security risks at airports. Now she has become the first cabinet-level official fired by President Donald Trump during his second term. After a combative hearing last week, during which Noem seemed to mislead Congress about whether Trump approved her ad spending, the president fired her. As DHS secretary, Noem also raised eyebrows for an unprecedented degree of control over staffing and spending at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. She [paused most FEMA payments](https://grist.org/extreme-weather/kristi-noem-fema-dhs-trump-disaster/), leading to extensive delays for disaster recovery, and sought to [slash the agency’s on-call workforce](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/06/climate/fema-staff-cuts-1000-workers.html) by thousands of employees. She also expressed a desire to downsize or eliminate the agency entirely, shifting the burden of disaster relief onto the states. A growing number of critics and experts believe that Noem’s interference with FEMA may well have been illegal. This week, two Senate Democrats [released a report](https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/library/files/fema-report/) alleging that Noem’s blanket freeze on FEMA payments violated federal law. At the same time, lawyers for a federal workers’ union [argued to a federal judge](https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2026/03/DOJ-contradicts-FEMA-on-who-approved-mass-firings/411860/) in California that Noem’s workforce cuts also violated the law. In both cases, critics pointed to legislation passed after Hurricane Katrina, which prohibits DHS from interfering with FEMA. “I have reason to believe that you’re violating the law, either knowingly or unknowingly,” said Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican representing North Carolina, during his questioning of Noem. > “I think Congress never anticipated [that] what has happened would happen, or they would have probably put in more clarity” These accusations will remain relevant if Noem’s apparent successor, Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin, continues her quest to make permanent changes to FEMA’s structure—a goal that the president has frequently suggested he supports. Though President Trump has in many cases been able to make unilateral cuts to federal programs on a rapid timeline—as with the Department of Education and US Agency for International Development—the post-Katrina law may put FEMA on stronger footing for the rest of the president’s term. “To my knowledge, DHS has never been involved in decision-making about the FEMA workforce,” said MaryAnn Tierney, a former FEMA official who led the agency’s regional office on the Eastern Seaboard for more than a decade. The Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006 emerged from a series of federal investigations into the agency’s failures after the devastating storm, which killed more than 1,400 people and submerged much of New Orleans. A bipartisan select committee in the House of Representatives found that the agency’s leaders had dithered for days before activating key response measures, and that there were numerous breakdowns in the agency’s chain of command. Congress also found that FEMA had withered after the Bush administration placed it under the newly-created Department of Homeland Security, where leaders were focused on combating terrorism in the wake of 9/11. As a result, they did very little planning for a major natural disaster like Katrina. State emergency managers testified to Congress that FEMA was “emaciated and anemic” and had been “lost in the shuffle” at DHS. Congress tried to fix this in 2006 with a law requiring that FEMA leadership have experience in emergency management and giving the agency the ability to report directly to the president during disasters. The law also stated that “the secretary [of DHS] may not substantially or significantly reduce the authorities, responsibilities, or functions…or the capability of the agency.” Noem attempted to do just this. Trump has not nominated anyone to lead FEMA since he assumed office last year—the law requires a FEMA administrator with at least five years of emergency management experience—and has instead designated three different acting administrators, avoiding Senate confirmation and the emergency management experience requirement. The most recent,

Fintech Daily Digest — Monday, Mar 09, 2026

# TOP 3 STORIES 1. **X taps William Shatner to give out invites to its payments service, X Money** [Source: Fintech News | TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/04/x-taps-william-shatner-to-give-out-invites-to-its-payments-service-x-money/) X has launched a unique marketing campaign for its payments service, X Money, by partnering with William Shatner to give out invites to 42 users who donated to his charity. This campaign aims to create buzz around X Money's beta launch. **What this means for Stripe:** This marketing strategy could influence how Stripe approaches its own marketing efforts for new product launches, potentially incorporating more creative and charitable initiatives. Stripe's Connect product could be particularly relevant in facilitating such campaigns. **Content angle:** A blog post exploring innovative marketing strategies for fintech products, highlighting the role of charity and celebrity endorsements, could be an interesting response from Stripe's content marketing team. 2. **Stripe wants to turn your AI costs into a profit center** [Source: Fintech News | TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/02/stripe-wants-to-turn-your-ai-costs-into-a-profit-center/) Stripe has released a preview aimed at helping AI companies track, pass through, and profit from underlying AI model fees. This move positions Stripe as a key player in the AI economy, enabling businesses to monetize their AI investments more effectively. **What this means for Stripe:** By facilitating the monetization of AI costs, Stripe strengthens its position in the payments infrastructure for the internet, making its platform more appealing to AI-driven businesses. This could particularly impact Stripe's Revenue Recognition and Billing products. **Content angle:** A case study or whitepaper on how Stripe's solutions can help AI companies turn their costs into revenue streams could provide valuable insights for potential clients. 3. **Plaid valued at $8B in employee share sale** [Source: Fintech News | TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/26/plaid-valued-at-8b-in-employee-share-sale/) Plaid, a fintech company specializing in account linking and payment processing, has seen its valuation increase to $8 billion through an employee share sale. This significant valuation underscores the growing importance of fintech infrastructure companies. **What this means for Stripe:** As a major player in the fintech infrastructure space, Stripe should consider the implications of Plaid's valuation on its own valuation and competitive positioning. Stripe's products like Payments and Connect might see increased demand as the fintech space grows. **Content angle:** Stripe could publish a thought leadership piece on the evolving fintech landscape, discussing how valuations like Plaid's reflect the sector's growth and the role of infrastructure providers in facilitating this expansion. # NEWS BY TRACK ## _Advancing Developer Craft_ - **Kast raises $80 million** [Source: Finextra Research Headlines](https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/47408/stablecoin-startup-kast-raises-80-million?utm_medium=rssfinextra&utm_source=finextrafeed) Kast, a stablecoin startup, has secured $80 million in funding, indicating growing interest in stablecoin technology. **Stripe relevance:** Stripe's Issuing and Treasury products could be relevant for stablecoin startups like Kast. **Content angle:** A developer tutorial on integrating stablecoin payments using Stripe's API could be a useful resource. ## _Designing Adaptive Revenue Models_ - **Papa John’s Thinks the Next Great Pizza Topping Is Software** [Source: PYMNTS.com](https://www.pymnts.com/restaurant-technology/2026/papa-johns-thinks-the-next-great-pizza-topping-is-software/) Papa John's is focusing on technology and digital capabilities to compete and grow, highlighting the importance of adaptive revenue models in the restaurant industry. **Stripe relevance:** Stripe's Billing and Revenue Recognition products can help businesses like Papa John's manage complex revenue models. **Content angle:** A blog post on how restaurants can leverage technology and adaptive pricing strategies to boost revenue could feature Stripe as a solution provider. ## _Charting the Future of Payments_ - **Real-Time Payments Reach a Turning Point in North America** [Source: PYMNTS.com](https://www.pymnts.com/real-time-payments/2026/real-time-payments-reach-a-turning-point-in-north-america/) Real-time payments in North America are transitioning from expansion to execution, with each country following a distinct strategic path. **Stripe relevance:** Stripe's Payments product is well-positioned to support the growth of real-time payments. **Content angle:** An in-depth analysis of the current state and future of real-time payments in North America, highlighting Stripe's role, could be a valuable resource for businesses. ## _Optimizing the Economics of Risk_ - **OpenAI fires employee for using confidential info on prediction

Maduro Must Be Released Or the Fascists Win

 Maduro on board the USS Iwo Jima. Image US Military. If U.S. progressives are serious about combating the expansion of fascism domestically, demanding both the release of Venezuela’s president, Nicolas Maduro, and first lady Celia Flores, as well as the immediate cessation of any further U.S. military incursion into Latin America, must be a top priority. In an interview on [*Black Liberation Media’s* morning show, Chris Gilbert, a political economist in](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtAQv_UVL9A) Venezuela who experienced the U.S.’s January bombardment of Caracas firsthand, stated that Donald J. Trump and his allies, “don’t recognize nations. They don’t recognize peoples. They think the world is a bunch of guys like them. And they think by bending these guys, they can make them do whatever they want.” Maduro himself has refused the devil’s bargain with the Trump regime, proclaiming defiantly in [his arraignment before a U.S. judge on the spurious charges of drug trafficking and](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq6v25eldmdo) weapons possession, “I am a prisoner of war!” Progressive forces internationally have bore witness to these acts of desperation on the part of the Trump regime and their attempt to stem the tide of a [weakening U.S.](https://www.laprogressive.com/foreign-policy/venezuelan-invasion) imperialism in the hemisphere. Oil and defense—two of the most vile capitalist industries—are the direct benefactors of this latest imperialist incursion. While oil executives rebuffed Trump’s $100 billion plan to invest in Venezuela’s oil sector, with the ExxonMobil executive labeling the country “[uninvestible](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c205dx61x76o)” due to security and legal risks, the energy sector reaped historic gains as a result of the so-called “[Venezuelan shock](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crrnw08qvg7o).” Companies like Chevron, for instance, which was, until recently, the only major oil venture legally sanctioned to drill and trade in Venezuela, closed at an all-time high in early February. According to the [*Brennan Center*](https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/fossil-fuel-industry-donors-see-major-returns-trumps-policies), the oil industry itself spent “lavishly to elect Trump, giving at least $75 million to his campaign and affiliated PACs, thereby making them a top corporate backer of his reelection bid…Several oil tycoons gave millions on their own and hosted fundraisers with Trump and his associates.” While both industries have directly funded Donald Trump’s campaigns for president, this is hardly an aberration from the norm of U.S. politics, which [draws sustenance](https://truthout.org/articles/at-least-37-us-lawmakers-traded-up-to-113-million-in-arms-stocks-this-year/) from the sale, manufacture, and dropping of bombs around the globe while [“corporate giants like Chevron enjoy… lavish [single-digit] tax breaks” which are “lower than what many nurses or firefighters pay.”](https://inequality.org/article/american-taxpayers-are-subsidizing-big-oils-extraction-abroad/) Immediately after Maduro and Flores were snatched from their beds and humiliated before the U.S. press, Secretary of State Marco Rubio [admitted](https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5676818-us-control-venezuela-oil/) that their goal in Venezuela was “to take between thirty and fifty million barrels of oil,” promising, “to sell it in the marketplace at market rates, not at the discounts Venezuela was getting.” At the White House, during an open press conference featuring major oil executives, Trump, stated that U.S. oil should make “[tons of money](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/watch-live-trump-holds-news-conference-after-announcing-u-s-has-captured-venezuelan-leader-maduro)” in Venezuela. In much the same way that companies knee-deep in death have had an intimate relationship with the worst of the worst in American politics, among Democrat and Republican alike, those who will not stand in the way of the constantly expanding military budget, which far outstrips the military budget for the next top ten countries, including that of Russia and China— the “bogeymen” of our present era. As [reported](https://www.citizensforethics.org/about/) in *Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington*, “[of the top 40 companies](https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-reports/the-defense-industry-is-the-biggest-supporter-of-the-sedition-caucus/) that have given the most to the Sedition Caucus—the 147 members of Congress who voted,” at Trump’s behest, “against certifying the 2020 election… as well as those who have since been elected to Congress” wh

Economic insecurity of women workers worsen

> Grassroots organizing, collective action, and advocacy remain crucial in addressing structural inequalities that shape women’s labor conditions. **By Dulce Amor Rodriguez**[Bulatlat.com](http://www.bulatlat.com/) MANILA — Filipino women workers face growing economic insecurity. Precarious jobs and shrinking labor protections have reportedly deepened under neoliberal economic policies, according to the latest Ulat Lila report. The report showed the worsening conditions of women workers due to foreign investments, privatization, and labor flexibility that weaken job security and social protection. “As crises worsen, women bear the heaviest burden,” the Center for Women’s Resources (CWR) said in its assessment of the Filipino women’s socioeconomic conditions. **Labor flexibilization** ------------------------- The report said women workers increasingly occupy flexible and insecure jobs. The 2024 data from the Philippine Statistics Authority’s (PSA) Integrated Survey on Labor and Employment (ISLE) show that women make up 42.6 percent of the country’s 5.3 million paid employees, with 85.6 percent concentrated in rank-and-file positions, indicating limited access to more secure and higher-level employment. Labor flexibilization, which employers often implement through short-term contracts, subcontracting, and agency hiring, limits workers’ ability to secure regular employment and benefits. Women dominate several sectors where such arrangements are common, including retail, manufacturing, service work, and the business process outsourcing industry. These conditions, the report said, create hostile working environments where women workers face long hours, job insecurity, and limited protection against workplace abuse. The gender wage gap further compounds these issues. A study by the Congressional Policy and Budget Research Department found that wage disparities persist across occupations, with gaps reaching 26.2 percent in service and sales jobs and 28.4 percent in elementary occupations. **Women in retail and export** ------------------------------ The wholesale and retail sector remains the largest employer of women in the country. Gender-disaggregated data from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) showed that 32.4 percent of employed women—around 6.26 million workers—worked in wholesale and retail trade in 2023. Major retail corporations rely heavily on women workers. Company reports showed that women comprise 64 percent of the workforce in SM Investments and 70.5 percent in Robinsons Retail Holdings. Despite the sector’s enormous revenues, women workers often remain stuck at minimum wage. SM Investments reported P654.8 billion ($11.7 billion) in total revenue in 2024, with P20.9 billion ($374 million) coming from SM Retail. Wages of retail employees remain at minimum levels despite the company’s profitability. Women workers also form a significant portion of labor inside export processing zones (EPZs) and economic zones (ecozones) where companies manufacture electronics, garments, and other export goods. These zones were established to attract foreign investors and boost export production. However, the report said that many workers inside ecozones continue to receive minimum wages despite the high productivity of the industries they sustain. The same pattern appears in the garment industry and the business process outsourcing sector. While the Philippines remains a global hub for call centers and other outsourcing services, workers in these industries face demanding schedules and performance pressures. At the same time, the country’s gig economy continues to grow as digital platforms recruit workers for short-term and task-based jobs. These arrangements often lack job security and social protection. **Women market vendors** ------------------------ Women also dominate informal and small-scale livelihoods like market vending. The report highlighted the growing issue of market privatization which has affected public markets where many women earn their daily income. Market privatization refers to the transfer of management and control of public markets from local governments to private companies. According to urban poor organization Kadamay, such arrangements often raise rental fees and other charges for vendors. One example cited in the report is the redevelopment of the Iloilo Central Market under a partnership between the Iloilo City government and SM Prime Holdings. Officials framed the project as modernization. However, some vendors expressed concern that redevelopment could lead to higher rent and additional fees that threaten their livelihoods. Market privatization also sparked controversy in Baguio where a proposal sought to redevelop and privatize the historic Baguio Public Market. The plan involved building a four-story complex to house around 4,000 vendors selling meat, vegetables, fish, clothing, and other goods. The proposal faced strong opposition from vendors and