Richie Allen, Tony Gosling, 4th Reich Convenes in Secret, Bilderberg 2024, Sonia Elijah, 03Jun24

“I am urging these officials who seemingly are not bothered by anything, to take some time away from playing computer games, which is apparently what they are doing, given their light-hearted approach to serious issues, and take a closer look at what Putin said, particularly at a press conference following talks in Tashkent,” he added, referring to a warning Putin issued during a recent visit to Uzbekistan.

https://news.antiwar.com/2024/06/03/russia-warns-us-close-to-making-fatal-miscalculation-over-ukraine/

War, AI and more war: the 2024 Bilderberg agenda is sure to set off alarm bells

The secretive annual summit has tried to counter its arcane reputation, but its guest list still reads like a conspiracist’s who’s who of who rules the world

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/01/bilderberg-meeting-spain

Charlie Skelton in Madrid Sat 1 Jun 2024 11.00 BST

This year the Bilderberg summit, now under way in Madrid, turned 70 years old. But the controversial and secretive gathering of the world’s elites shows no signs of slowing down.

For decades the Bilderberg meeting, where the rich and the powerful gather behind closed doors to talk about what ails the world, has been the subject – understandably – of conspiracy theories. In recent years, Bilderberg has sought to remake itself and open up a little: more Davos than Illuminati.

But it still raises hackles from many observers. Its beady eyes, twinkling with billionaires, are this year fixed firmly on the future. Specifically, the “future of warfare”. And with conflicts raging from Sudan to Ukraine to Gaza, it feels like it is the spirit of the age.

This grim subject is being thrashed out under the hum of police drones hovering over the hotel, making sure such luminaries as the king of the Netherlands and the head of Nato are safe inside. Even by Bilderberg standards, the security at this year’s conference is intense, but it managed to gear up even more when the Spanish king’s entourage swept into the venue past a traffic jam of police vans.

The heightened security is perhaps a reflection of the threats and “challenges” packed into the conference agenda: Russia, China, the Middle East, the climate – while the session on Ukraine, titled Ukraine and the World, has a worrying hint of a wider world war. And when the topic of the Changing Faces of Biology is being discussed by the CEO of Pfizer, the head of the EU Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, and the man who led the Human Genome Project, you can almost hear the alarm bells over the police sirens.

The world of Bilderberg in 2024 throbs with threats; it’s what conference participant Alexander Stubb, the president of Finland, recently described as “the weaponisation of everything”. It’s a world of “hybrid attacks” driven by disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence. There’s even a session on AI safety at this year’s gathering, one of two sessions devoted to AI, securing its place at the head of Bilderberg’s agenda.

The conference hall is heaving with tech luminaries, including the heads of Google DeepMind, Microsoft AI, Mistral AI and Anthropic, making the event a high-level AI summit in its own right.

Many of these AI chiefs are tech optimists; Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, recently raved about AI “spreading consciousness to the stars”. But the contingent of US national security officials, who have flowed in from Washington for these talks, tend to take a more worldly and weaponised view of the subject. They’re led by the deputy national security adviser, Jonathan Finer, and Jen Easterly, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. They are joined by one of the US’s most senior soldiers, the supreme allied commander Europe, Christopher Cavoli, who warned recently that the conflict with Russia was shaping up to be a “long fight”. So the immediate future of war sounds like it’ll be more war....