“If you’ve heard any Republicans talk about Saturday’s No Kings marches across the country, you know what they’re calling them. House Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday referred to the marches collectively as a ‘hate America rally.’ He continued: ‘Let’s see who shows up for that. I bet you see pro-Hamas supporters. I bet you see antifa types. I bet you see the Marxists in full display.’ Many others on the right have echoed these sentiments over and over, and Fox News and the other state propaganda outlets have followed suit, thus washing the brains of their viewers into accepting, once again, the exact opposite of reality … Have a gander at this map of march locations for tomorrow. There are 16 in Wyoming—a state notoriously pulsing with Hamasniks. There are 18 in Oklahoma, that veritable hornet’s nest of antifa hooliganism. There are another 18 in my home state of West Virginia (go, Morgantown contingent!), where Marxism has obviously taken deep root among an unsuspecting populace.” (Michael Tomasky/TNR)
“The statement from Prince Andrew emphasises that this was his decision to stop using his titles. But it might be seen as having to jump before he was pushed, as the Palace had seemed increasingly exasperated at the scandals that kept swirling around Andrew. He now won’t be at the royal Christmas events this year - but he missed them last year because of connections to an alleged Chinese spy. The links with Jeffrey Epstein kept being raised, despite Andrew’s strong denials of any wrongdoing. And next week will see the publication of a posthumous memoir from Virginia Giuffre, who had reached a financial settlement with Prince Andrew. There was a growing sense that something would have to happen.” (BBC)
“In Alaska, Putin delivered a rambling historical discursion spanning medieval princes such as Rurik of Novgorod and Yaroslav the Wise, along with the 17th century Cossack chieftain Bohdan Khmelnytsky — figures he often cites to support his claim Ukraine and Russia are one nation. Taken aback, Trump raised his voice several times and at one point threatened to walk out...” (Christopher Miller/FT via X)
“Journalists must fight back against ‘the ancient art of lying’ and resist the growing scourge of ‘clickbait’ articles and news fuelled by artificial intelligence, the Pope has said. In a speech to media representatives at the Vatican on Thursday, Leo said ‘the world needs free, rigorous and objective information.’ He called on his audience to rebel against an increasingly ‘post-truth’ world … ‘I urge you, never sell out your authority,’ the Pope said, adding that solid reporting was ‘an antidote to the proliferation of ‘junk’ information’. Leo added: ‘With your patient and rigorous work, you can act as a barrier against those who, through the ancient art of lying, seek to create divisions in order to rule by dividing.’ ‘You can also be a bulwark of civility against the quicksand of approximation and post-truth.’ Leo cited the claim by the 20th- century German philosopher Hannah Arendt that ‘the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.’” (Tom Kington/The Times)
“How’s this for history repeating? The mainstream American media is botching its coverage of the Trump administration’s mounting military threats to Venezuela, and that failure is contributing to what looks to be a prolonged and violent disaster for both nations. Some experts inside Venezuela are warning that a U.S. armed effort at ‘regime change’ could detonate years of brutal chaos there, much like Iraq in the years after the 2003 American invasion. The media’s incompetence continues despite a major news event that should have instigated higher scrutiny and better reporting—the Nobel Committee has just honored the pro-democracy forces inside Venezuela by awarding the Peace Prize to one of its leaders, Maria Cortina Machado. This event, coming as it did inside a bubble of pure hype surrounding President Donald Trump’s doomed campaign to sway the Nobel Committee into handing him the award, should have been a flashing light alerting the press that a bigger story is already afoot in Venezuela. It’s not certain that the message has gotten through. Meanwhile the media’s failures are stacking up. In the first place, the press has missed the most important truth about Venezuela: the shocking dimensions of the country’s economic collapse. A brilliant Venezuelan economist, Francisco Rodriguez, explains that per-capita income dropped 71.5 percent from 2012 to 2020, which was ‘the equivalent of three Great Depressions.’ He told me that the collapse is not only the most injurious in the history of Latin America, but is also ‘the greatest anywhere in the entire world that was not the consequence of war.’ Some eight million Venezuelans, a quarter of the population, have already fled into exile, which sets a record for the Western hemisphere.” (James North/TNR)
“As Republicans across the country pursue new congressional maps to boost their party ahead of next year’s midterm elections, Democrats are ramping up pressure on states where they can respond. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., has held discussions with members of the Maryland delegation and Democratic Gov. Wes Moore in recent weeks about possible mid-decade redistricting efforts, according to a source with knowledge of the conversations. The source also said Jeffries spoke with members of the Illinois delegation about drawing new district lines, as Politico first reported. Maryland has just one Republican, Rep. Andy Harris, in its eight-member House delegation. And in Illinois, where Democrats control 14 of the state’s 17 districts, GOP Rep. Mary Miller’s seat is the potential target, the source said. Democrats have previously floated Illinois and Maryland, where the party has full control of state government, as states where they could counter Republicans’ moves in Texas, Missouri and elsewhere. But Democrats are feeling renewed pressure to act as Republican lawmakers in states like North Carolina, Indiana and Kansas weigh new maps aimed at shoring up the party’s narrow U.S. House majority.” (Jane C. Timm/NBC News)
“Last night, I was privileged to catch up with my friends Yuri Sak and Gennadiy Kurochka in Kyiv. Yuri and Gennadiy are strategic communications experts and have worked extraordinarily hard since the beginning of the Russian full-scale invasion in February 2022 to ensure Ukraine’s strategic messaging penetrates into European, American and Asian audiences. This has been crucial to sustaining international support and assistance for Ukraine over the course of the war. Yuri and Gennadiy have also become good friends of mine over the last few years. Whenever we are in the same part of the world - Australia or Ukraine - we ensure we catch up. So it was wonderful to see them last night. They had a surprise for me. It was a big one. Before having dinner, they took me to the site of their latest project in Kyiv. It was a massive mural on the side of the factory that had been hit multiple times by Russian missiles and drones. The factory, and an adjacent office building, had been hit so many times by the Russians that it is unlikely that they will be rebuilt until after the war. It provided a suitable, if somber site for the mural. The mural is huge. It is nearly six stories tall and dozens of metres long. It celebrates Ukraine’s ongoing struggle to defend its freedom against the brutal Russian invasion. The mural has some interesting features. The central part of the design features David and a beheaded Goliath. No prizes for guessing that David is Ukraine and the now headless Goliath is Russia. Interestingly, if you look close to Goliath’s head, you can see spiderwebs. This was a deliberate inclusion to celebrate the June 2025 Operation Spiderweb that was executed by Ukraine to successfully attack Russian airbases.” (Mick Ryan/Futura Doctrina)
“A few old-style actual reporters are still allowed into the hours of Presidential briefings that Trump conducts in any given week—unlike at the Pentagon, where pretty much the entire press corps, aside from the slavishly pro-Trump One America News Network, had their press passes confiscated this week after they refused to sign a restrictive new policy that essentially bans all independent reporting in the building. ‘A dark day for press freedom,’ the Pentagon Press Association called it. (The order, promulgated by Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News weekend host now serving as Trump’s self-styled Secretary of War, was so antithetical to basic principles of newsgathering that even Hegseth’s old network wouldn’t sign.) But tough questions for Trump are now few and fewer, even as he spends more and more time in front of the cameras in what has become America’s first live-streamed Presidency. Consider what happened on Tuesday, when a reporter from ABC News tried to ask Trump a question. Before the journalist could get her query out, the President cut her off. ‘You’re ABC fake news,’ he said.” (Susan B. Glasser/TNY)
“As ABC News reported earlier this year, the 2024 Grindfest featured a talk by its founder, Jeffrey Tibbetts, fresh from a trip to Honduras, where a special economic zone with lax regulations and oversight called Próspera is attracting health and medicine entrepreneurs looking to conduct research that may be difficult, if not outright illegal, in the United States. ‘They’re creating environments where we have regulation friendly to what we want to do,’ explains Tibbetts, who goes by his handle Cassox, but not everybody in the biohacking community shared his excitement. ‘Every time I hear of ‘special economic zone,’ says Nadia, ‘it raises some concerns.’ With financial backers like Peter Thiel and Sam Altman, Próspera left a bad taste in some grinders’ mouths and for good reason. Próspera’s conception goes back to a 2009 military coup in Honduras and a 2012 ‘technical’ coup. Forcing the creation of Employment and Economic Development Zones (called ZEDEs locally) against widespread opposition across the country, the Honduran Congress, led by the future right-wing president of the country, Juan Orlando Hernández, illegally dismissed four Supreme Court judges who had found ZEDEs unconstitutional and replaced them with pro-ZEDE judges. The groundwork had been laid and privately run cities became legal in 2013, right before Hernández’s ascent to power. In 2024, the new government under Xiomara Castro declared ZEDEs unconstitutional and now faces a deluge of lawsuits from the prior narco-dictatorship government’s entanglements with various domestic and international companies. The three companies that make up the investor group called Próspera are suing the Honduran government for nearly $11 billion for failing to uphold the corrupt deals of its now-incarcerated former president—a lawsuit that could financially ruin the country. But Próspera continues to expand, annexing territory around the island of Roatan, denuding forests, and threatening to expropriate more land from the community of Crawfish Rock. Cassox, who I could not reach for comment, seems to code switch between the grinder community and the billionaire longevity bros. His biohacking lab on the island, Augmentation Limitless, recently started to inject under-skin crypto wallets activated by NFC keyfobs (yes, I said that).” (Britt H. Young/The Baffler)
“When Daniella Santoro and her husband, Aaron Lorenz, went to clear weeds behind their home in New Orleans’ Carrollton neighborhood, they discovered a heavy marble slab with an inscription in Latin. Santoro, an anthropologist at Tulane University, was at first concerned that her house was sitting atop a forgotten local cemetery. But what she and experts found subsequently was even more astonishing: a 1,900-year-old Roman tombstone that originally sat atop the grave of a sailor from the empire’s Mediterranean fleet. The tablet, about a foot wide and slightly longer, bore a long inscription in Latin. As soon as photographs of it were shared with classical scholars in the United States and Europe, including Tulane’s Susann Lusnia and Harald Stadler of the University of Innsbruck, the message was translated. It read: ‘To the Spirits of the Dead for Sextus Congenius Verus, soldier of the praetorian fleet Misenensis, from the tribe of the Bessi [of Thrace], (who) lived 42 years (and) served 22 in the military, on the trireme [warship] Asclepius. Atilius Carus and Vettius Longinus, his heirs, made (this) for him, well deserving.’ The words identified the stone as the tombstone of Sextus Congenius Verus, a Roman sailor from Thrace. This mariner served on board the warship Asclepius in the imperial fleet based at Misenum, near Naples. Specialists confirmed that it was a genuine second-century CE funerary monument. But how did it end up in the yard of a New Orleans residence?” (Dario Radley/Archaeologymag)
“Nearly a quarter century after the Pentagon awarded Lockheed Martin the contract to develop the Joint Strike Fighter Program into the F-35, the government finally admitted the jet will never live up to Lockheed’s ambitious promises — used to sell the $2 trillion boondoggle to nearly 20 countries around the world. The Government Accountability Office released a report last month detailing the ongoing challenges the program faces. The first paragraph of the highlights page includes this sentence: ‘The program plans to reduce the scope of Block 4 to deliver capabilities to the warfighter at a more predictable pace than in the past.’ The casual reader will be forgiven for possibly glossing over the passage because of its anodyne wording. But the statement is a profound admission that the F-35 will never meet the capability goals set for the program. ‘Reduce the scope of Block 4’ means that program officials are forgoing planned combat capabilities for the jets. Block 4 is the term to describe ongoing design work for the program. It began in 2019 and was termed as the program’s ‘modernization’ phase. In reality, Block 4 is just a continuation of the program’s initial development process. Officials were unable to complete the F-35’s basic design within the program’s initial budget and schedule. Rather than making that embarrassing admission and requesting more time and money from Congress, Pentagon officials claimed the initial development process was complete (it was not) and they were moving on to ‘modernization.’ What they really did was simply reclassify initial development work with a fancy rebrand.” (Dan Grazier/Responsible Statecraft)
“The name of this fall’s most obnoxious classmate: Six Seven. Math teacher Cara Bearden braces herself for any equation that yields the two numbers, knowing her students will immediately scream them right back at her. ‘SIX Sevennnnnn,’ they squeal with a palms-up, seesaw hand gesture that looks somewhere between juggling and melon handling. The meme is ripping across the internet and spilling into real life, especially at school. ‘If you’re like, ‘Hey, you need to do questions six, seven,’ they just immediately start yelling, ‘Six Seven!’’ says Bearden, who teaches sixth- and eighth-graders at Austin Peace Academy in Austin, Texas. ‘It’s like throwing catnip at cats.’ Now teachers avoid breaking kids into groups of six or seven, or asking them to turn to page 67, or instructing them to take six or seven minutes for a task. Six is a perfect number, and seven is a prime number, but only a glutton for punishment would put them together in front of a bunch of 13-year-olds.” (Ellen Gamerman/WSJ)