Tiny Deer in Big Trouble as Chile’s Pudus Face Growing Peril Reuters
Shared genetic mechanisms underpin social life in bees and humans PLOS
The Treaty Mirage: History of Naval Warfare, Part 13 Big Serge Thought
Pandemics
The Covid-19 hospitalization risk associated with air pollution in New York state counties after the 2023 Quebec wildfires Journal of Public Health Research
Climate/Environment
Scientists predict wildfire smoke will be the most costly climate-related health hazard NBC News
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The new gold rush is gripping investors: ‘In the past four years, I’ve invested much more heavily’ El Pais
Ghana’s toxic gold rush Food & Environment Reporting Network
What Republic of Congo’s gold rush is leaving behind Mongabay
Gold, greed, poison: How miners pollute Mozambique’s rivers DW
New gold mining push threatens sacred Black Hills lands and water Environmental Health News
China?
Huawei unveils new AI chip tech to rival Nvidia Business Times
How China’s COSCO is redrawing global shipping routes through Southeast Asia Think China
India
Rajapaksa, Hasina, Oli: Is there a puppeteer behind political upheaval in Indian sub-continent? Hindustan Times
Africa
Trump returns to a failed playbook in Africa Responsible Statecraft
In Congo, army and rebels dig in for war Trump says is over Reuters
Old Blighty
Trump’s visit proved the utter corruption of our political and media class Jonathan Cook
Elon Musk’s call for far-right insurrection in Britain meets silence from Starmer WSWS
Syraqistan
Israel is waging a holocaust in Gaza. Denazification is our only remedy +972 Magazine
Revealed: Tony Blair’s US-backed proposal for ending the Gaza war and replacing Hamas Times of Israel
Israel’s Intelligence Service Mossad: The Myth of “Long Arms” and the Reality of Failure Elijah J. Magnier
Leak indicates billionaire funders of Israeli cyber campaign targeting anti-apartheid activistsAll-Source Intelligence
NYPD arrests eight activists at Brooklyn Navy Yard protest over tenant ties Brooklyn Paper
For Gaza and Genoa Tribune
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Strategic Diversification Becomes Unavoidable — The Result of a Sense of Betrayal Conflicts Forum
Saudi Arabia’s Defense Pact With Pakistan Is A Strategic Loss For The U.S. of A. Moon of Alabama
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Macron says “snapback” of UN sanctions on Iran is done deal Axios
The Outlaw US Empire and the E3 flip their cards against Iran at the IAEA GeoPolitiQ
Erdogan secretly hosted Donald Trump Jr. at Istanbul palace, claims opposition leader Intellinews
Why is Iran Willing to Make an Agreement with the IAEA? Larry Johnson
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As soon as Trump mentioned wanting to “take back” Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, the Western-funded NGOs began posting. pic.twitter.com/vOE9VvWyEX
— DD Geopolitics (@DD_Geopolitics) September 18, 2025
Trump admin has been quietly pushing to retake Afghan base from the Taliban for months, sources say CNN
European Disunion
European Commission set to launch restructure within months Politico. “Streamlining”, “more efficient and cost-effective”, “volatility as the new normal”, “cost-reduction.”
Nationwide protests against Macron’s austerity paralyze France for second day Press TV
Macrons to offer ‘scientific evidence’ to US court to prove Brigitte is a woman, lawyer says BBC
New Not-So-Cold War
EU Plans to Phase Out Russian LNG More Quickly After Trump Call Bloomberg
Lavrov speaks about Trump’s ‘disappointment’ with Ukraine talks RT
Poland hits back at Zelensky’s claim it can’t protect its people from mass Russian drone attack Notes from Poland
Poland Investigating Whether Its F-16’s AIM-120 Missile Destroyed A Home The War Zone
Warsaw turns to Ukraine for drone warfare expertise after Russian drones enter Polish airspace AP
Is Russia really going to build Europe’s largest high-speed rail network? Brian McDonald
Our Famously Free Press
Trump on Jimmy Kimmel: Networks that only criticize him ‘not allowed to do that’ The Hill
On Jimmy Kimmel: It’s Time to Destroy the Censorship Machine and Repeal the Telecommunications Act of 1996 BIG by Matt Stoller
Bosses Are Policing Speech at a New Level After Kirk’s Killing Bloomberg
Irreverence The Sense of an Ending
Trump 2.0
Trump asks Supreme Court to let him fire Fed governor Cook Al Jazeera
Intel’s biggest problem isn’t going away with Nvidia’s $5 billion stake Yahoo! Finance
Weimar Republic
“The Kirk narrative doesn’t hold.” The Floutist
🇺🇸🇮🇱 Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu aka Lady MacBeth has released a video denying accusations that Israel had something to do with the assassination of Charlie Kirk. pic.twitter.com/5HBbsszLBW
— DD Geopolitics (@DD_Geopolitics) September 18, 2025
In his late July focus group with young conservatives on Israel, Charlie Kirk brought up the pressure he was under to cancel Tucker Carlson’s future appearance at TPUSA’s conference. “Whatever, that’s not gonna happen,” Kirk said. “The reason we’re doing this focus group,” he… pic.twitter.com/aH5obZ0nQl
— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) September 18, 2025
Democrats voice fears of violence over Charlie Kirk vote Axios
House leaders okay extra money for lawmaker security Regular Order by Jamie Dupree
***
Military leaders consider recruiting campaign centered around Charlie Kirk NBC News
Erika Kirk, widow of Charlie Kirk, named new CEO of Turning Point USA The Guardian
Here’s a clip from one of the church services — Prestonwood Baptist in TX.
As the pastor, Jack Graham, makes clear, this is not an actual clip of Charlie Kirk. He never said these words. This is an entirely AI-generated fabrication that, nonetheless, garners a standing ovation. https://t.co/JGvX3zNk9G pic.twitter.com/IzJ0IAwCb8
— Jack Jenkins (@jackmjenkins) September 18, 2025
Imperial Collapse Watch
Mission Impossible Harper’s
Rare ‘Naked’ E-4B ‘Doomsday Plane’ Spotted Flying In Texas The War Zone
Accelerationists
Inside Silicon Valley’s pivot to embrace defense startups in Southern California Los Angeles Times
AI
xAI’s Colossus 2 – First Gigawatt Datacenter In The World, Unique RL Methodology, Capital Raise Semi Analysis
AI Craziness Notes Zvi Mowshowitz
Albanian PM’s presentation of AI ‘minister’ to MPs ends in chaos Intellinews
Police State Watch
ICE agents didn’t have body cams during deadly shooting of Silverio Villegas González outside Chicago Chicago Sun-Times
Google Secretly Handed ICE Data About Pro-Palestine Student Activist The Intercept
California nurses decry Ice presence at hospitals: ‘Interfering with patient care’ The Guardian
MAHA
RFK Jr.’s vaccine panel makes a controversial change to the childhood vaccine schedule Politico
Controversial RFK Jr. Advisor Has Access to Private Info in CDC Vax Database MedPage Today
Supply Chain
US import dependence on EU on the rise, outpacing China, study finds Reuters. But as this post pointed out last year: “…it’s plausible that some Chinese exports are going to Mexico and the EU, being incorporated into other products, and then ending up as US imports.”
Europe struggles with chronic drug shortages, auditors warn Reuters
How Are Tariffs Impacting Chinese Exports to the US? China Briefing
Class Warfare
Amazon spends $1 billion to increase pay and lower health care costs for US workers AP
Every year before Prime Day, Amazon dangles a tiny raise to try to shut us up.
At today’s JFK8 all-hands meeting, a Senior Operations Manager bragged about Amazon’s “compensation philosophy” — base pay, benefits, step-plan raises — then announced a 50 CENT cost-of-living raise. pic.twitter.com/sLkn5u7tQP
— Amazon Labor Union IBT (@amazonlabor) September 17, 2025
The social crisis fueling the collapse of democracy in America WSWS
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
“Military leaders consider recruiting campaign centered on Charlie Kirk”
Don’t know much about Charlie Kirk but I doubt that he wanted his Turning Point USA chapters turned into recruitment centers for the military. If he had, he would have set up separate chapters for that pathway as well. This is just another example of people trying to cash in on his death. Say what you will, the guy could laugh at himself-
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/cjYlOWbOcfU
>Trump admin has been quietly pushing to retake Afghan base from the Taliban for months, sources say
The former Bagram Air Base is located in the interior of Afghanistan, near the capital city of Kabul. Recapturing the base would inevitably require large-scale warfare against the Taliban. That doesn’t seem like a good idea.
Not limiting this to the Trump administration, but not being a good idea is rarely the veto it should be for a desired military action when power, money, and decades of influence and grift are in the mix, especially coupled with warped ideology. At least it doesn’t looking back at the last fifty years I remember.
The new gold rush is gripping investors: ‘In the past four years, I’ve invested much more heavily’ El Pais
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For the longest time, the price of old yeller and marijuana were about the same per ounce*, around $300 to $400-it hardly varied for 20 years.
You can buy an ounce of 420 here for $50 now, but it’ll cost you 72x as much the other direction~
* ounces vary, avoirdupois ounces are 28+ grams, while troy ounces are 31+ grams
p.s.
To properly be an Argonaut (not you, Torontonians) in seeking out placer on a river in say Downieville, you need 7 items:
A gold pan and a 6-pack of beer
I suppose you can get a piece of gold, shove it in the ground for a thousand years or more and when you dig it up, it is will as good as new and still worth something. With all these digital coins, how do you even save them for a century without them disappearing?
Use the “print” option?
How long will modern day paper last? Regardless. Gold is worth something all by itself and does not need a backing organization much less infrastructure. Digital coins need both and a lot of the former are just glorified fly by night operators. I’d rather invest in Dutch tulips.
I see silver is set to challenge Hunt bro highs.
“Trump admin has been quietly pushing to retake Afghan base from the Taliban for months, sources say”
Yeah, I know it’s CNN but that headline makes no sense. Neither did Trump when he said ‘We gave it to them for nothing. We’re trying to get it back, by the way. That could be a little breaking news, we’re trying to get it back because they need things from us…We want that base back but one of the reasons we want the base is, as you know, it’s an hour away from where China makes its nuclear weapons.’ He went on to say that Bagram was one of the biggest airbases in the world, with one of the biggest runways constructed of heavy concrete and steel.
OK, for a start I would say that Russia has a stronger claim to that airfield as they actually built it, not the Americans. But when Trump says it is only an hour away from China’s nuclear facilities, what he actually means is that the US could stage nuclear bombers through Bagram to attack China or at the very least, keep Bagram as a dagger at China’s throat. I’m sure that they would not have a problem with that. But Trump saying ‘We gave it to them for nothing’ is just deluded. That’s like saying that the British gave Yorktown to the Americans in 1781 for nothing. If the Afghans let the US back in, it would be a constant source of instability and US forces would use it to help ISIS forces attack Afghanistan. The whole thing is just crazy talk and the Afghans would be better just keeping the place for itself-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagram_Airfield
DT Barnum has to introduce meaningless fluff all the time to divert you from seeing something failing elsewhere on his watch, and by the way-you know the recent inflation numbers on foodstuffs?
…all Biden’s fault!
“Hey, we may have lost the Ukraine war, but we’re back in Afghanistan!”
New rallying cry …
So, what have we learned?
A fair point that. He points and shouts ‘Look at what is happening over there’ – while he guts the First Amendment in the background.
Scientists predict wildfire smoke will be the most costly climate-related health hazard NBC News
Laughably fails to see the fire through the smoke.