‘I’m Not Dead!’ Maine Hospital Informs Living Patients of Their Demise MedPage Today
Toting a tambourine, she built L.A.’s first megachurch. Then she suddenly disappeared Los Angeles Times
A COHORT THEORY OF DRUG-DEATH EPIDEMICS Posting Alone
Universe expansion may be slowing, not accelerating, study suggests The Guardian
Climate/Environment
Philippines declares state of emergency as 241 dead, missing due to typhoon Anadolu Agency
Lebanon Faces Yet Another Drought Al Akhbar
Tehran’s main dams only 11 pct full amid severe drought The Star
What the last gas boom (and bust) says about today’s rush to build Utility Dive
The boldest measures are the safest New Climate Reality
‘Blood rain’ and diseases in the wind: Is the US prepared for deadly dust storms? BBC
Pandemics
Could bird flu be quietly spreading undetected worldwide? Gavi
Exploring predictors of post-COVID-19 condition among 810 851 individuals in Sweden Nature
The Koreas
Russian Nuclear Submarine Technology Will Make North Korean Threat More Palpable 38 North
China?
Taiwan must be allowed equal participation when China hosts APEC, US says Reuters. Already stepping over Beijing’s red lines following trade truce?
Chipmaker Nexperia said it halted China shipments on payment refusal Euronews
China slashes big data centers’ electric bills Semafor
China is running out of garbage. Now they want to burn their neighbors’. Kevin Walmsley
US lifts arms embargo on Cambodia after Trump oversees ceasefire deal Channel News Asia
India
Where does a western chemical plant that contaminated drinking water go next? To India The Guardian
Syraqistan
Gaza officials warn thousands remain trapped under rubble, say aid flow ‘critically insufficient’ The Cradle
Israel begins mass demobilization of reserve forces on all fronts for 1st time since October 2023 Anadolu Agency
Blair emerges on the Lebanon scene as “Israel” escalates aggression on southern towns Vanessa Beeley
Why Germany Is Doing the “Dirty Work” for Trump’s Peace Plan Counterpunch
Revealed: Qatar-linked intelligence operation targeted ICC prosecutor’s alleged victim The Guardian
Washington pushes back after Iraq links US pullout to resistance disarmament The Cradle
US prepares to establish military presence at airbase in Damascus: Sources Reuters
Old Blighty
European Disunion
EU’s AI Legislation Faces Temporary Halt Amid Big Tech Pressure Devdiscourse
Europe’s Cybersecurity Depends on the United States German Institute for International and Security Affairs
BUDGET LAW: KLEPTOCRACY LIES IN THE DETAILS Comidad. Italy.
New Not-So-Cold War
Where are Russia’s immobilised assets? Nobody, except Belgium, wants to say Euronews.
Bulgaria moves to seize, sell Russian energy giant’s refinery amid sanctions pressure Kyiv Independent
Gunvor pulls offer for Russia’s Lukoil as US brands firm ‘Kremlin puppet’ Politico
***
The U.S. Just Fired its Most Powerful Nuclear Missile: Minuteman III Launch Confirmed Military Watch
US tests most advanced nuclear cruise missile aboard 488,000-pound B-52 bomber Interesting Engineering
Africa
A Country of Particular Concern: The Fulani, Faith, and the Failure of the Nigerian State Elnathan John
The Great Game
Kazakhstan set to join Abraham Accords in symbolic move at Central Asia summit Firstpost
South of the Border
Monroe Doctrine Revival? Senate Keeps Trump’s Latitude on Venezuela TeleSur
U.S. Sends Attack Aircraft to El Salvador Amid Regional Troop Buildup New York Times
Colombian Survivor of US Attack at Sea Released From Hospital, No Connection With Drug Trafficking Found Orinoco Tribune
Trump 2.0
‘As Ugly and Cruel As It Gets’: Trump Fights Order to Fully Fund November SNAP Benefits Common Dreams
Food pantries see record demand, as government shutdown becomes longest on record WSWS
The Shutdown of U.S.A.I.D. Has Already Killed Hundreds of Thousands New Yorker. Commentary:
The complicated reality of USAID is that it is (was) both one of the best & worst parts of the US government. It does desperately needed humanitarian work, as well as many destructive acts of political manipulation. Trump is getting rid of the former. https://t.co/rGBxvxrh4P
— ☀️ Jon Schwarz ☀️ (@schwarz) November 6, 2025
America First versus Israel First Larry Johnson
In a first, ballot initiative to divest from Israel wins at the ballot box, in Somerville, Mass. Jerusalem Post
MAHA
Foreign Food Safety Inspections Hit Historic Low After Trump Cuts ProPublica
GOP Funhouse
Why Are Republicans So Irrelevant In Big City Politics? Arbitrary Lines
Democrats en déshabillé
One of the Greatest Wall Street Investors of All Time Announces Retirement 404 Media
Spook Country
The Democratic party is equally owned by Mossad and CIA. The Republicans are Mossad and FBI https://t.co/coEeuCuuxy
— Alon Mizrahi (@alon_mizrahi) November 6, 2025
Immigration
More than 250,000 Venezuelans will lose immigration protection in the U.S. TeleSur
Police State Watch
Judge blasts Trump’s Chicago border ‘Blitz,’ extends curbs on use of force that ‘shocks the conscience’ Chicago Sun-Times
DC “Sandwich Guy” Acquitted: Jury Rejects Assault Charge Over CBP Confrontation Migrant Insider
Accelerationists
The Authoritarian Stack. “How Tech Billionaires Are Building a Post-Democratic America — And Why Europe Is Next.”
Disenchanted Enchantment Los Angeles Review of Books
Mr. Market Rattles the Tin Cup
Nvidia leads tech stock declines as Trump official says ‘no federal bailout’ for AI Yahoo! Finance
AI #141: Give Us The Money Zvi Mowshowitz
Why Is the AI Czar Already Saying OpenAI Won’t Get a Bailout? Gizmodo
AI
Chamber of Progress asks for blank check for big tech Digital Content Next. Wants AI training declared “fair use.”
Google says project on famous crab-covered island is about cables, not combat Ars Technica
Chaos and lies: Why Sam Altman was booted from OpenAI, according to new testimony The Verge
AI Is Supercharging the War on Libraries, Education, and Human Knowledge 404 Media
Groves of Academe
Surge in antisemitism investigations at US universities after October 7 attacks, data shows The Guardian. “According to the report, only one of 102 antisemitism complaints the authors reviewed raises antisemitism claims unrelated to criticism of Israel.”
TikTok Billionaire Is Making Bari Weiss’s ‘Anti-Woke’ College Tuition Free Gizmodo
Mark Zuckerberg Opened an Illegal School at His Palo Alto Compound. His Neighbors Revolted Wired
The Bezzle
Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show Reuters
Netflix’s new “monthly active viewers” statistic is an all-timer.
If you watch 1 minute of NFLX in a month they credit it as if *every person* in your home was reached.
If we used this trick to calculate reach for the World Series, for example, it would inflate reach by 70%. https://t.co/KdMMjM1VpT
— Michael Mulvihill (@mulvihill79) November 6, 2025
Boeing
Boeing avoids criminal charge in 737 Max crashes that killed 346 despite emotional pleas from families The Independent
Economy
Job cuts surge in worst October layoffs in 22 years. Here’s why USA Today
US factories rocked by ‘unprecedented’ rise in unsold stock The Telegraph
What’s really going on with AI and jobs? Blood in the Machine
Guillotine Watch
As Americans Live Paycheck to Paycheck, Tesla Shareholders Approve Musk’s $1 Trillion Package Common Dreams
Wealth Taxes Will Barely Slow Inequality. So Why Do the Super-Rich Resist Them? Truthout
Class Warfare
A New White-Collar Gig Economy: Training AI to Take Over Bloomberg
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
Will there be a stand alone piece about frm CIA in Congress and how they voted and what their influence was?
to dunk on Spook-Span, my uninformed bet is that she isn’t sharing details from that 6-year period because it was incredibly (shockingly) dry and uneventful—despite the 5 passports. The hagiography sounds better on the campaign trail.
One of my good college friends was a spook too, under “cover” at the local embassy., around the same period as Spanny. It was incredibly banal work paid by the intel black box, slush fund. DOGE the CIA.
or maybe i’m wrong and she’s a master hacker and can shiv me with a pen
“Taiwan must be allowed equal participation when China hosts APEC, US says”
Maybe China can mess with Trump as say that they will allow Taiwan to have full participation – so long as they allow New York City to have full participation as well. Whose the Mayor of New York City again?
The Ryukyu Islands, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Northern Marianas, the Chagos Islanders, and the native Hawaiians all have better claims than Taiwan for full participation.
The penguins of Heard and McDonald Islands also deserve full participation since they were recognized by Emperor Trump’s tariff policies. I know they’re more Indian Ocean than Pacific Ocean but American politicians don’t know that.
I think the Guardian oversimplifies the interpretation of the important new study on calibration of Type 1a supernova intrinsic brightness.
Here is the underlying article
https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/544/1/975/8281988?login=false
The implication the authors of the underlying research draw is that the dark energy responsible for cosmic acceleration does not have time invariant energy density, but has declined over the passage of time to the point that the current state of cosmic expansion is deceleration rather than acceleration. It may be that “Lambda-CDM” cosmology can be tweaked by introducing time variation to the dark energy density.
I think there must also be implications for particle physics, given that dark energy (whether constant or time-variable) does not yet have a description in terms of known particles or fields.
A point raised in the paper is that this development may help to resolve the Hubble tension (time variable dark energy density has been in view as a possible solution to this problem; this paper reinforces the likelihood that dark energy density is not time invariant).
A COHORT THEORY OF DRUG-DEATH EPIDEMICS Posting Alone
Thank you for this article. Now, is Belgium following the same path with a drug supply shock? Now cocaine being less expensive than a rum@coke combination in Belgium. The difficulty, so it seems rises from inability to control drug trafficking in the Port of Amberes. They should get serious about it.
regarding the SNAP debacle: i went in to what we around here call the “Old Dollar Store”(because its older, dingier, cheaper and much more disorganised than the new fancy one)
because mom wanted milk.
the freezer and fridge sections that usually have WIC and EBT stuff(per the prominent signage) were totally empty.
whether this is bc smart folks cleaned it out before the cessation, or if its company policy to avoid running afoul of trump’s goons…i have no idea.
he has stated that any retailer offering deals to the now sans-ebt people will be punished.
i find the entire thing utterly disgusting.
It seems that we’re devolving slowly into anarchy. Taco’s SNAP debacle meets an out-of-control judiciary, or maybe nature abhors the vacuum that is Congress (Mike Johnson i.e. the weakest House speaker ever.)
I have a flight scheduled to Florida in two weeks … if it gets canceled can I get an injunction forcing the airlines to restore it?
Amen.
I find his Presidency, Congress and the path this Nation’s leaders are taking us on utterly disgusting.
“Washington pushes back after Iraq links US pullout to resistance disarmament”
Yeah, a bit of a cheek. The US has said that they will never leave Iraq but will only relocate to different parts of Iraq. The Iraqi Parliament demanded that the US leave but it was ignored. But there is a fly in this ointment. Those resistance groups. The Iraqis know that if they disarmed those militias, which are part of the army, then maybe ISIS will come back. And they can’t depend on the US as last time this happened, the US let those ISIS forces get all the way near to Baghdad. The US can’t disarm those groups as they would need to bring tens of thousands of troops into the country and at that, those groups might counter-attack with rockets and drones. And of course that article said that the Israelis are not happy with those militias as well which settled it for the US.
Those “resistance groups” were influential in driving ISIS out.
US likely has a former ISIS lined up to take over in Baghdad. Like Danascus.
Bravo Somerville! D and S are the more important parts of BDS.