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In August 1908, a white mob attacked Springfield, Illinois’s Black community, destroying homes and businesses and lynching two Black men. National outrage over the violence helped spur the movement that created the NAACP the following year.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
Project Panama is a destructive book scanning operation started in early 2024 by the American artificial intelligence corporation Anthropic. Project Panama aims to develop a dataset of books for training Anthropic's large language models.
Prior to Project Panama, Anthropic used pirated books and was sued, agreeing in 2025 to pay $1.5 billion in a settlement. The class-action copyright lawsuit revealed the existence of Project Panama through unsealed court filings, in which it was described internally as an "effort to destructively scan all the books in the world". In the same 2025 litigation, Judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic's use of legally purchased books for digitization and model training constituted fair use, in contrast to its prior use of pirated copies.
Anthropic began by obtaining millions of previously digitized works through digital piracy. According to court documents, Anthropic used Books3, LibGen, and Pirate Library Mirror for this purpose, and may have acquired up to 7 million books in this way.[1]
In 2025, Anthropic agreed to pay US$1.5 billion to settle Bartz v. Anthropic, a class-action lawsuit brought by authors over the piracy, and to destroy its pirated copies of the books. Authors usually received US$3,000 per book from this settlement.[2][3]
Project Panama was started in early 2024, aiming to "destructively scan all the books in the world".[2] Anthropic purchased millions of used books from online retailers such as Better World Books, World of Books, and Zoom Books. The company then sliced off their spines and scanned their pages in order to train its AI chatbot Claude.[4][2][5][1][6] This process involved the use of hydraulic cutters for spine removal and high-speed document scanners. The paper was then recycled.[6][7]
The dataset was then kept private and used only for training models.[1] According to the Project Panama planning document, Anthropic did not "want it to be known that [it was] working on this".[2][1][6]
In the same 2025 settlement, Judge William Alsup ruled that the destruction and digitization of legally purchased books constituted fair use, in contrast to Anthropic's prior use of pirated copies.[2][5]
Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
Project Panama is a destructive book scanning operation started in early 2024 by the American artificial intelligence corporation Anthropic. Project Panama aims to develop a dataset of books for training Anthropic's large language models. Prior to Project Panama, Anthropic used pirated books and was sued, agreeing in 2025 to pay $1.5 billion in a settlement. The class-action copyright lawsuit revealed the existence of Project Panama through unsealed court filings, in which it was described internally as an "effort to destructively scan all the books in the world". In the same 2025 litigation, Judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic's use of legally purchased books for digitization and model training constituted fair use, in contrast to its prior use of pirated copies.
The Panama Canal expansion project (Spanish: ampliación del Canal de Panamá), also called the Third Set of Locks Project, doubled the capacity of the Panama Canal by adding a new traffic lane, enabling more ships to transit the waterway, and increasing the width and depth of the lanes and locks, allowing larger ships to pass. The new ships, called New Panamax, are about one and a half times larger than the previous Panamax size and can carry over twice as much cargo. The expanded canal began commercial operation on 26 June 2016. The project has: Built two new sets of locks, one each on the Atlantic and Pacific sides, and excavated new channels to the new locks Widened and deepened existing channels Raised the maximum operating water level of Gatun Lake Then-Panamanian President Martín Torrijos formally proposed the project on 24 April 2006, saying it would transform Panama into a First World country. A national referendum approved the proposal by a 76.8 percent majority on 22 October the same year, and the Cabinet and National Assembly followed suit. The project formally began in 2007. It was initially announced that the canal expansion would be completed by August 2014 to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the opening of the Panama Canal, but various setbacks, including strikes and disputes with the construction consortium over cost overruns, pushed the completion date back several times. Following additional difficulties including seepage from the new locks, the expansion was opened on 26 June 2016. The expansion doubled the canal's capacity. On 2 March 2018, the Panama Canal Authority announced that 3,000 New Panamax ships had crossed the canal expansion during its first 20 months of operation.
Anthropic, PBC (stylized as ANTHROP\C or A\) is an American artificial intelligence (AI) public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco, California. Its flagship product is Claude, a series of proprietary large language models (LLMs). In January 2021, with the goal of promoting AI safety, Anthropic was founded by former members of OpenAI, including siblings Daniela Amodei and Dario Amodei, who are president and CEO, respectively. The company is privately held but plans an initial public offering in November 2026. At $965 billion in a May 2026 Series H, Anthropic is the world's most valuable AI pure play, rivaled by OpenAI. Anthropic develops the LLM Claude in four tiers: Fable, Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku. Claude is accessible via an online chatbot, an API, and Anthropic's agent harnesses: Claude Code, Cowork, Design, and Science. Its model class Claude Mythos, a less restricted version of Fable, is available only to approved US organizations with a cybersecurity and life sciences focus. Anthropic's Project Panama, internally described as an "effort to destructively scan all the books in the world", provides training data for Claude. Before Project Panama, Anthropic downloaded pirated books and was sued, settling in 2025 a copyright infringement lawsuit from authors for $1.5 billion. Anthropic conducts LLM research including on mechanistic interpretability, safety, alignment, and societal impact. Notable researchers working at Anthropic include Andrej Karpathy, John M. Jumper, Jan Leike, Chris Olah, Amanda Askell, and Levent Alpöge. Anthropic partners with cloud providers including Palantir. From 2024, Claude was used by the US Department of Defense (DoD) and the Intelligence Community. In 2026, Claude was used in the Iran war and the US intervention in Venezuela. In February, the DoD demanded the use of Claude for all lawful purposes, but Anthropic refused to drop restrictions against mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. The dispute led the Trump administration to phase out Anthropic products from government use; by October, the DoD completed this in October. Throughout 2026, Anthropic accused Chinese competitors including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba Cloud, and Z.ai of distilling Claude for their models.
Whereonearth was a company based in the United Kingdom and was acquired by Yahoo! on October 18, 2005. The technology company worked with Hutchson and Yahoo. The company was founded in 1995 with a purpose of producing geocoding technology for partners. In 1998 it acquired GDC, and GDC's global geo-database, GeoPlanet. In 2002, the company was awarded a contract to deliver the underlying technology for Hutchison 3G geo services. In 2002, the company spun off GDC in a management buyout, but retained GeoPlanet. In 2003 the company again reorganized with a view of generating web technology for geolocation, named InternetLocality, for the extraction of location information out of web content and web searches, which eventually led to the Yahoo acquisition in 2005 for integration with Yahoo! Search Marketing project Panama. The whereonearth internet toolset is partly available as part of the Yahoo Developer network.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Joe Louis.