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The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: The Olympics

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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features vocal group The Olympics. Enjoy!

^{Olympics - Good Lovin'}

"We have power... Our power isn’t in a political system, or a religious system, or in an economic system, or in a military system; these are authoritarian systems... they have power... but it’s not reality. The power of our intelligence, individually or collectively IS the power; this is the power that any industrial ruling class truly fears: clear coherent human beings."

-- John Trudell

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News and Opinion

When The Gates Of Tech Dystopia Snap Shut

There’s a viral video clip showing a group of wild boars getting caught in a corral trap. When the gate snaps shut the poor animals run around in a panic, searching in vain for an exit.

According to the caption that’s been going around, the trapper waited patiently for five days for the entire sounder to get comfortable enough to take the bait and enter the trap all at once. The gate didn’t close until the final pig walked into the enclosure.

Yaban domuzlarını yakalamak için 5 gün boyunca tuzak alanına alışmalarını bekleyen bir kişi, tüm sürünün içeri girdiği anda kapıyı kapatarak onlarca domuzu tek seferde yakaladı. https://t.co/03qLo270oc

— Bulvar Medya (@Bulvarpress) October 9, 2026

And, yeah. That’s pretty much where we’re at right now.

We’ve been standing around munching on our bait, enjoying our bread and our circuses, blissfully unaware of the trapper who is patiently waiting for the perfect moment to slam the gate shut on us all.

“Man, AI sure is great.”

“Check it out, we’re all Miyazaki characters!”

“I let ChatGPT choose my outfit for today!”

“I wrote a song just by typing in a prompt! Can you believe it? I’m making music!”

“We’re ALL artists now!”

“Oh shit, the gate just closed!”

“They’re listening to everything we say!”

“Fuck, there are police drones everywhere!”

“They’re putting guns on those robot dogs!”

“The state AI canceled my digital money because I tried to start a union!”

“I said Free Palestine and now I can’t access the internet!”

They’ve been quietly constructing a cage around us this entire time in order to lock us into this capitalist dystopia forever. The oligarchs and empire managers have been rapidly developing technologies that will facilitate mass surveillance and autonomous weapons systems — already being field-tested in places like Gaza — which just so happen to be exactly what the ruling class would require in order to undermine and quash any revolutionary movements which might emerge in response to the ever-increasing abuses and inequalities of capitalism.

The trapper is patiently pacing us into accepting mass surveillance, unfettered artificial intelligence advancement, militarized robots, police drones, digital currencies, propaganda, censorship, and the AI-assisted manipulation of the flow of information.

And then, when the time is right, the gate will come crashing down.

It’s essentially a race between revolution and high-tech totalitarianism. A race between the awakening of public consciousness to the urgent need for revolutionary change, and the ability of our rulers to prevent revolutionary change from ever occurring. A race between our ability to start using the power of our numbers to force an end to the abusive systems under which we live, and the ability of rich and powerful dominators to use surveillance, robotics and AI-assisted control mechanisms to nullify all the advantages we hold over them.

And right now our biggest disadvantage is that most of us don’t even know we’re in this race. Our rulers know it, but the average member of the public does not. Most of us are still chewing on the bait in the trap.

There is still time. The trap isn’t shut yet. But we need to awaken the other piggies in the pen to the reality of what the bastards have planned for us, and help them understand that the race is underway.

Saudi Main Oil Hub SET ABLAZE By Houthis

Saudi Arabia strikes oil depots in Yemen and says missiles launched toward location of Saudi Aramco HQ

Saudi Arabia has launched a series of strikes on a strategic oil depot on the outskirts of Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, while later on Tuesday it said it had intercepted missiles launched toward Dharan, location of the headquarters of the huge national energy company Saudi Aramco. The attacks on both sides were a fresh escalation of the conflict between Riyadh and the Iran-backed Houthi forces. Before its offensive on Tuesday, a Saudi spokesperson warned civilians to leave the target area, in an apparent attempt to strike fear into the local population before the biggest attack so far on Houthi energy infrastructure.

The Central Sabaha Station oil depot on the western side of the city contains large tanks that often hold substantial quantities of fuel derivatives, although the Yemeni Oil Company said its storage facilities were empty at the time of the attack. Houthi oil depots at the Ras Isa port in Hodeidah, the subject of Israeli attacks in 2024, were also struck in 10 waves of attacks apparently aimed at immobilising the Houthi army as it continues its push south, including towards the city of Taiz. Earlier the Saudis also struck what they believe to be a Houthi leadership hide-out in the Bani Mu’in area in the Razih border district, west of Saada governorate, northern Yemen.

The strike on the oil depot appeared to be the Saudi response to a Houthi attack on King Khalid international airport in Riyadh on Saturday that killed 13 people and left 300 injured. The airport is closed until Saturday at the earliest, a blow to an economy that is trying to show its security makes the country a safe place to invest.

Baraa Shiban, a Yemen specialist at the defence thinktank Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), warned “Saudi Arabia is struggling to respond to the Houthi’s improved arms technology. Until relatively recently Houthi missiles and drones fell in desert areas or if they got through were intercepted. They have learned how to deploy drones that fly lower and are smaller, and are less easy to detect. They are cheap and it does not take many to get through to be effective”.

ISRAEL PREPS TO HIT IRAN AGAIN AS IRAQI MILITIAS THREATEN TO JOIN THE WAR - w/ Dimitri Lascaris

Report Shows How IMF-Imposed Austerity Hurts Poor Countries Already Reeling From Iran War

The US-Israeli war with Iran has exacerbated economic hardship across the world. It’s especially bad for the developing nations currently being forced to implement austerity programs by the International Monetary Fund.

Under IMF loan programs, countries struggling with debt are required to reduce government budget deficits by introducing spending cuts and tax increases that tend to hurt their poorest citizens. They often include cuts to public services and welfare programs, caps on government workers’ salaries, and the elimination of subsidies that keep basic needs affordable.

According to a report out Monday from Oxfam—amid the IMF’s annual meeting in Bangkok this week—24 of the 28 nations currently receiving IMF loans have been forced to implement austerity measures. Some of them, like Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau, are among the poorest nations in the world.

Even before the war—which has caused oil prices to soar and driven inflation worldwide—people in many of these countries were struggling to meet their basic needs and facing severe economic pressure: 51% were food insecure, and 57% lacked access to clean cooking fuel.

Emergency government programs have been able to backstop the worst effects for up to 130 million of the world’s poorest people, according to a report published before the meeting by the United Nations Development Program.

But as those countries run out of resources, many are being forced to pivot, and the stiff requirements imposed by the IMF may exacerbate the hardship.

In Ecuador and Guinea-Bissau, the IMF is requiring governments to cut spending, raise taxes, or both to the equivalent of roughly 4% of the nations’ annual gross domestic product (GDP).

The terms are even harsher for Sierra Leone, where the government is required to cut spending or raise costs equivalent to more than five times its annual healthcare budget.

A loan approved last week for Bolivia requires the government to slash as much as 8.5% of its GDP from the deficit—about twice its annual healthcare spending. The country has already been forced to eliminate a diesel subsidy that drove high prices down for consumers and businesses.

The IMF has acknowledged that these cuts are likely to make the strain worse for many low-income countries already suffering from the war, but said they had “no choice” but to cut spending or restructure their debts.

Oxfam International executive director Amitabh Behar noted that during previous crises like the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, the IMF has enacted tools to ease the burden on nations in debt by providing emergency loans and access to foreign currency without requiring additional borrowing.

“But this time, the fund is taking a very different path,” he said. “Instead of helping countries withstand another major shock, it is doubling down on austerity—forcing them to cut back on the very spending that can help protect people and recover—and leaving them even more vulnerable to the next crisis.”

Iran WRECKS Trump & Israel's War Plan! Yemen RAZES Riyadh | Mohammad Marandi

Axios: Trump and Netanyahu Discussed Possibility of Major Attacks on Iran Before US and Israeli Elections

President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have discussed the possibility of resuming large-scale attacks against Iran before the US and Israeli elections, according to a report from Axios.

The report, which cited unnamed US and Israeli sources, said that the two leaders had held multiple calls over the past two weeks about the possibility of resuming “major combat operations” against the Islamic Republic, including the possibility of joint US and Israeli strikes on military and nuclear targets.

Restarting major attacks on Iran would likely hurt Republicans in the November 3 midterm elections, as it would worsen the energy crisis and raise gas prices in the US, while Netanyahu and his coalition may benefit in the October 27 Knesset elections.

Phil Giraldi : Trump’s Madness on Display

Ten Israeli soldiers describe killing unarmed Palestinians and recording the dead as ‘terrorists’ during Israel’s Gaza genocide

Der Spiegel has published accounts from ten Israeli soldiers describing how troops killed Palestinian civilians in Gaza and recorded them as “terrorists”. In testimonies published over the weekend, the soldiers recounted war crimes committed during Israel’s genocide in Gaza, including killing unarmed Palestinians and destroying neighbourhoods to prevent civilians from returning.

David, an infantry reservist who served several deployments in central Gaza and Khan Younis, told the German outlet: "My unit killed many unarmed men." A high-ranking officer told him: “The Arabs must be punished. They must understand that we are taking more and more land from them, pushing them back further and further.” David said “relatively educated, secular Israelis” initially committed the war crimes he described. As the war progressed, “more messianic extremists arrived”. Many soldiers treated the killings as a “religious duty”.

Another reservist, Yaakov, volunteered to fight in Gaza and spent 250 days in the central Gaza Strip. He described a “scorched-earth” policy under which “Palestinians were to have nowhere left to return to.”

“My brigade killed 160 to 170 people during our more than 80 days there. Only one man was suspected of carrying a weapon,” Yaakov told Der Spiegel. “All of these dead were reported as terrorists,” he added. In another incident, soldiers labelled Palestinians cooling off at the beach as “terrorists” and shot them dead.

[More at the link. - js]

Trump just shattered the West’s Russia alliance - Varoufakis & Munchau

Allies did not warn Kyiv of Russian ballistic missile strikes, says Zelenskyy

Ukraine received no early warning from its partners about a second night of Russian ballistic missile strikes on civilian infrastructure in Kyiv, including a critical power plant struck after dark, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Tuesday. The Ukrainian president had earlier described an attack involving five missiles on Monday as “particularly vile”. He emphasised that receiving intelligence from Ukraine’s western allies “helps saves lives, and this is one of the most critical issues”.

“This is precisely what helps prevent people from being killed – when there is an early warning about ballistic missiles,” he wrote on social media. He did not apportion blame for the lack of warning, calling it unfortunate.

More ballistic missiles were then launched at Kyiv on Tuesday night, striking a key power plant in the capital despite a purported energy ceasefire claimed by Donald Trump. One person also died in a strike on a high-rise apartment building, according to the mayor, Vitali Klitschko, who said apartments were on fire and being evacuated. A further 13 injuries were reported. “Once again, ‌no advance warning from our partners. The main target was energy infrastructure, specifically thermal plant No 4,” Zelenskyy wrote on the social media app Telegram, again without explaining why he thought there had been no warning.

US officials made explicit threats over the weekend to their Ukrainian counterparts that the Trump administration was on the brink of halting intelligence sharing with Kyiv. On Tuesday, however, Trump denied intelligence sharing had stopped. He told reporters: “We are helping them, and we are sharing intel. We want the war to end, so we’re working with them and Russia on getting the war to end.” Trump has demanded that Ukraine stop attacking Russian oil refineries and has blamed Zelenskyy for the rise in fuel prices in the US.

Zelensky-Trump Dispute Over US Intel Sharing; Kiev Power Grid Hit

Kimberly Guilfoyle ousted as US ambassador to Greece after alleged misconduct

Kimberly Guilfoyle is stepping down as US ambassador to Greece after weeks of reports that she sought payment from a Trump donor in exchange for access to administration officials. The decision, announced by the White House on Tuesday morning, ends the diplomatic career of one of Donald Trump’s longest-standing political allies. It came after the US president and Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, were reported to have grown furious over the allegations.

“We have asked Ambassador Guilfyole to resign, she has been a wonderful asset to the team and we wish her well,” said Katie Zacharia, the new White House press secretary, during her first briefing on Tuesday. Guilfoyle – the former fiancee of Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr – later confirmed her departure from the post, which she described as the “honor of a lifetime”, and denied what she described as “false” allegations.

Pledging to “vigorously defend my name, my reputation, and my integrity” in a post on social media, she wrote: “While my time as Ambassador may be coming to an end, my commitment to President Trump, the America First movement, and the country I love will never end.”

The most serious claim, first reported by the Wall Street Journal on 8 October, centers on the donor Eric Deters. Citing Signal messages, the paper reported that in July 2025, days before her Senate confirmation hearing, Guilfoyle pressed Deters to pay off a $100,000 American Express bill, assuring him the transfer would not show up anywhere. “Honey please I need you to get this done for me today,” she wrote, according to the report.

Guilfoyle offered to use her influence on his tax and legal problems in return and told him she had contacted the IRS commissioner and the justice department on his behalf. He has also said he paid Guilfoyle about $300,000 over the years without receiving “one favor”, and told MS Now the request “absolutely was a quid pro quo”. A lawyer for Guilfoyle, Jesse Binnall, said she disputes the authenticity of the messages.

BBC asks judge to force Trump to sit for deposition as part of his $10bn lawsuit

The BBC is asking a federal judge in Florida to force Donald Trump to sit for a deposition as part of the president’s $10bn defamation lawsuit against the British broadcaster. According to a Tuesday filing, the BBC and Trump’s legal team had agreed for him to be deposed on Friday. The BBC’s lawyers wrote to the judge that they have spent months trying to secure a location for the deposition from Trump’s team.

On 28 September, Trump’s lawyers told the BBC’s counsel that the president “is no longer available for his deposition on October 16 due to other matters of national importance”.

While Trump’s lawyers said they would follow up quickly with a replacement date, they did not, ultimately suggesting that he would be available in the second or third week of January, well after the deadline to complete the discovery portion of the case. Lawyers for the BBC had pledged to keep the location of the deposition confidential. As such, the BBC’s lawyers are now asking the judge to require Trump’s team to schedule the deposition.

“Plaintiff chose to file this lawsuit and, in doing so, he accepted the obligations of civil litigation,” the BBC’s motion reads. “The BBC therefore asks the Court to compel Plaintiff to confirm a date for his deposition, notify the BBC of a secure location where such deposition is possible and any other logistics required to ensure Plaintiff’s safety, and sit for the deposition, as the core rules of discovery require.” Magistrate judge Enjoliqué Aytch Lett has scheduled a discovery hearing that is likely to touch on the deposition issue for 22 October.

Millions of Medicaid recipients to face draconian requirements as of 1 January

It is a date keeping US healthcare providers up at night: 1 January 2027. As the midterm elections loom, everyone from hospital leaders and to patient advocates are focused on the New Year, when Republicans scheduled the most controversial elements of their healthcare reform law to go into effect. Millions of Medicaid beneficiaries will be required, though a maze of government paperwork, to show they are working 80 hours a month. And that’s just the marquee change.

“The costs to the family – and society as a whole – cannot be overstated,” said the American Academy of Pediatrics president, Dr Andrew Racine. HR 1, also known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” and signed into law by Donald Trump on 4 July 2025, cut roughly $1tn in federal spending from the healthcare industry – the biggest clawback of federal health spending ever. Paired with Republicans’ refusal to extend subsidies for plans in Obamacare marketplaces, the cuts are expected to result in about 17 million newly uninsured individuals through 2034.

Although the US has one of the most widely privatized healthcare systems in the world, nearly half of all health spending is paid for by government – whether federal, state or local, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Nearly 40% of US health spending in 2024 was from just two programs: Medicare and Medicaid, the public health insurance programs for the ageing and low-income. To put the scale of the $1tn cut into context, Medicaid spent $937bn in 2024, according to the CMS. As a result, advocates, researchers, hospital leaders and doctors are all expecting more medical debt, more delayed care and more people losing coverage for which they technically qualify.

The Urban Institute estimates that HR 1 will cause $278bn in “uncompensated care” by 2034 – health industry parlance for unpaid bills. That puts hospitals in a bind, many of which operate on the thinnest imaginable margins. “There is a consensus that, particularly in rural healthcare, there is this deepening crisis,” said Dr John Osborne, a former doctor at the Veterans Affairs administration in Washington state, and one of the organizers of a grassroots declaration of a rural health crisis in October. “I would say what’s happening in rural America is a harbinger of things to come throughout healthcare in the US.”

Although rural hospitals were a particular concern during passage – a closure can leave patients traveling hours for even routine care – new research shows both rural and urban hospitals are now closing at the same rate. “Loss of access for acute care in-patient hospitals is not just a rural problem – it’s a national problem,” said Dr Thomas Tsai, a health policy researcher and surgeon at Brigham and Women’s hospital in Massachusetts and an author of the research. That raises the possibility that even in urban cores, healthcare becomes inaccessible as patients from near and far crowd in to try to access care, including many newly uninsured people who will tend to use the emergency room more often.

Is punishing the poor Trump’s last hand to play?

There is a manic quality to Donald Trump’s desperate dash to do something, anything, ahead of November’s midterm elections to convince beleaguered Americans that he can make the pressures his policies have imposed on their livelihoods go away.

The US president offered to lower barriers against beef imports to limit surging meat prices, only to consider backtracking under pressure from the cow lobby. He offered to stop diesel exports, only to find oil companies were not interested. He weakened fuel efficiency standards, claiming this would trim the price of a new car (and forgetting to point out it will also raise spending on gas). In early October he started mailing $500 checks to nearly a million people touting his healthcare “wins”. Oh, and he promised adult Americans a $5,000 check if Republicans maintain control of Congress. That, too, will go nowhere.

In the face of such setbacks, maybe Trump felt he had to demonstrate he still can get something done. Still, it is somewhat counterintuitive that the administration, in the shape of Vice-President JD Vance, decided to broadcast the one initiative it did manage to bring to fruition: ejecting more than 750,000 enrollees from the Affordable Care Act (ACA) health insurance marketplaces, on grounds that they are not entitled to federal subsidies. Trump could argue that the cuts fit within the administration’s promised commitment to restore fiscal discipline. But that part of the platform – which came as Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, promised to trim the budget deficit to 3% of US gross domestic product – was never more than a rhetorical feint.

The savings from the ACA maneuver, estimated by the administration at $2.2bn per year, are chump change compared with the centerpiece of Trump’s fiscal policy – the One Big Beautiful Bill Act from 2025 that is expected to add $4.1tn to budget deficits over the next decade, largely due to tax cuts benefiting the most affluent Americans. Rather than stem budgetary red ink, it’s as if Trump’s objective is to spread misery beyond the 3 million Americans who had to drop their health insurance after the administration last year cancelled subsidies offered by the Biden administration.

Rather than a commitment to sound fiscal policy, a helping hand for American families treading water or an economic platform of any kind, Trump’s latest exercise in “fraud prevention” points to a strategy revolving around punishing people he can define as “bad”. Deep underwater in the polls for his nutty stewardship of the economy, among other things, Trump seems to believe that his one remaining winning card is to do violence against constituencies that his base may not like. Top of the list are immigrants and low-income people. And so it is that ICE is also doubling down, announcing it will hire another 5,000 agents by the end of the year. Punishing the poor and the foreign – alongside an unlikely $5,000 Hail Mary pass – is all he has left.

If the administration wants to investigate anyone, maybe they should look at themselves first.

Anyone remember this? https://t.co/sDf3dZvYFb

— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@RepJayapal) October 13, 2026

Texas man run over by ICE has never met the person agents were allegedly chasing

A Texas man whose leg was broken in multiple places after being struck by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) vehicle during a weekend traffic stop has never met the person the federal agents were allegedly pursuing, according to his representatives. Miguel Parra-Hernandez, 48, suffered serious injuries including a shattered ankle and hip when he was run over in Houston, Texas, on Saturday by an SUV driven by an officer chasing two men who ran from a pickup truck.

ICE, according to multiple media reports, said it was in pursuit of another man, Jose Mendoza-Cervantes, during an early-morning operation and attempted a vehicle stop before the occupants ran away. It said Parra-Hernandez was not its target – but he ran in front of the ICE vehicle and was struck. Video of the incident aired by ABC News affiliate KTRK, however, shows a dark-colored, unmarked SUV following Parra-Hernandez and veering towards him as he ran across empty spaces in the shopping center parking lot in Harris county, whose seat is Houston.

Parra-Hernandez’s attorney, Kim Bruno, and Cesar Espinosa, executive director of the immigrant advocacy group FIEL Houston, told reporters at a news conference on Monday that Parra-Hernandez remained in ICE custody and faced more surgery as well as many weeks of recovery. Espinosa said Parra-Hernandez was hit “in a violent and brutal fashion”. Bruno said he told her that he fled because he did not know who was in the dark-colored vehicle. Neither he nor the other person in the car, whom he had picked up for work, knew Mendoza-Cervantes, she said. The ICE vehicle, she added, was not using a siren or displaying flashing lights.

Espinosa said he and Bruno were able to meet briefly with Parra-Hernandez at the hospital on Monday morning. But their visit ended after about 15 minutes when ICE agents entered the room and began recording their conversation, and they were made to leave. “To add insult to injury, Mr Miguel is in the custody of the ICE agents who ran him down,” Espinosa said, as reported by NBC News. “This is so disheartening and so angering that Miguel has to face the people that brutally attacked them every single day, 24 hours a day.”

Bruno said Parra-Hernandez told her that the other person in the car was not Mendoza-Cervantes, who ICE has identified as an illegal immigrant with multiple previous arrests and a judicially issued final order of removal from the US. She said Parra-Hernandez had lived in the US for 34 years, having arrived at age 14, and has no criminal record. The Harris county district attorney, Sean Teare, said on Monday his office was investigating the Parra-Hernandez case.

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Elon Musk becomes biggest donor of US midterms cycle with $366m spent

Elon Musk has become the biggest political donor of the 2026 US midterm elections cycle, funneling about $366m into political groups and campaigns as he backs conservative candidates and rightwing causes. The world’s richest person has poured more than $276m into politics since July alone, some of the most rapid political spending in US history. He’s targeting key races that will determine which party controls the US Senate.

The New York Times first reported the spending numbers, which will be released in a federal filing on Thursday. Musk’s spending outpaces his 2024 presidential election contributions, in which he sunk nearly $300m into Donald Trump’s re-election campaign.

Musk’s political spending reasserts the SpaceX and Tesla CEO as the top Republican mega-donor and furthers his rightwing political influence. Musk, who led the Trump administration’s efforts to gut federal agencies last year, has become an international linchpin for far-right political movements in recent years as he aligns himself with anti-immigrant, conservative leaders.

The tech mogul’s spending spree is also a reversal from a period in the middle of last year when Musk claimed he would step back from making such large-scale political donations. The failures of his so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) and costly public backlash to his political influence, as well as a dramatic falling out with Trump, appeared to have dampened his interest in Washington politics.

Why Is Right-Wing Dark Money Funding an Ohio Socialist for US Senate?

A mysterious right-wing political action committee has spent nearly $400,000 promoting a socialist running for the US Senate in Ohio, raising questions about an apparent effort to siphon progressive votes from Democratic candidate Sherrod Brown in a key midterm contest, according to reports published Monday.

The Columbus Dispatch and Cleveland.com are among the media outlets reporting that the newly formed Enough Promises Ohio PAC has financed mailers urging voters to support Greg Levy, an independent candidate affiliated with the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), whose working-class platform includes implementing a $30 hourly minimum wage, ending the “US war machine” and “war on Black America,” and working to “save the planet from capitalism.”

The mailers were not produced by Levy’s campaign. Federal campaign finance filings trace the spending to a printing vendor with connections to President Donald Trump’s political network. Seven Farms shares a business address with Whistlestop Strategies, a direct mail operation associated with Big Dog Strategies, a Republican consulting firm that has worked with Republican candidates and has ties to MAGA Inc., Trump’s principal super political action committee (PAC).

“After years of using socialism to frighten voters away from Democrats, political interests with apparent Republican connections are trying a remarkable reversal: selling voters on a socialist,” Cleveland.com reported, noting what some are calling a “cynical attempt to turn growing interest in socialism into a weapon against Sherrod Brown.”

The connections raise questions about whether the spending is part of a Republican strategy to divide Democratic-leaning voters. Enough Promises Ohio has not disclosed its contributors, leaving the source of the money unclear. The PAC and the involved companies have yet to explain the spending.

“The Greg Levy for Senate campaign team has recently discovered, through messages circulating on social media, that mailers falsely impersonating our campaign are being sent out to voters across Ohio,” Levy said on X. “The Greg Levy for Senate campaign has no ties to the entities circulating the mailer, and we condemn this attempted deception of voters.”

“There is a well-established record of both Republican and Democratic Party operatives using their financial resources to try and trick voters,” he continued. “This is a highly undemocratic practice and does a disservice to voters in Ohio and throughout the country.”

“Our campaign is historically rooted in Black and working-class communities throughout our state, and our message of fighting for working people against the biggest banks and corporations is resonating with voters all over Ohio,” Levy said. “We reject and condemn the dirty tricks and racist impersonation of our campaign by entities working on behalf of those same capitalist institutions.”

“This racist caricaturing of our candidate, a form of digital blackface, is a cheap, cowardly attack that is meant to demean the communities we represent and scare voters away from policies that put the needs of working families ahead of corporate profits,” he added. “The Greg Levy for Senate campaign is considering taking legal action against the operatives behind this crude impersonation.”

The murky mailers come as Brown, a former US senator seeking to reclaim his seat, faces Republican Sen. Jon Husted in a closely watched race that could help determine control of the Senate. Numerous recent polls indicate a low- to mid-single-digit lead for Brown.

Progressives who eschew Brown in favor of Levy cite the latter’s pro-working-class economic agenda, Brown’s support for Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, and general frustration with the two major parties.

In an opinion piece published Tuesday by Common Dreams, Ohio Peace Council Chair Werner Lange argued that Levy’s candidacy risks being a “spoiler,” particularly among younger and pro-Palestinian voters dissatisfied with Brown’s record and his acceptance of campaign contributions from pro-Israel interests—including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee—which have given more than $1.2 million to the former senator since 1990, according to the campaign finance tracker OpenSecrets.

“The danger is that Levy may do to the 2026 Senate race in Ohio what Ralph Nader did to the 2000 Presidential race in Florida—snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory for progressive forces,” Lange wrote, repeating the controversial, and, according to some experts, false claim that the consumer advocate’s Green Party run tipped the highly contentious contest in favor of Republican nominee George W. Bush.

That does not mean that Levy can’t divert enough votes from Brown to deliver a win for Husted and, possibly, control of the narrowly divided Senate to Republicans.

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‘Shocking and sobering’: UK bird populations fall to lowest level on record

Wild bird populations in the UK have fallen to their lowest level since records began, figures show, with nearly half of species in decline. Figures produced by leading nature conservation bodies for the government show that average populations across 132 native breeding species fell by 19% between 1970 and 2025, with farmland birds and seabirds the worst hit in recent years. Prof Richard Gregory, the head of monitoring at the RSPB, called the overall findings “shocking and sobering”.

“Birds are indicators of the way we’re looking after the countryside and the world around us,” he said. “We’re losing the birds that people are so emotionally connected to and want to protect.”

Average populations of turtle doves have fallen by more than half in five years, showing no sign of the bird recovering from the brink of extinction. Tree sparrows, wood warblers and capercaillie were among the birds with the next biggest average annual decreases between 2019 and 2024.

Swifts, whose arrival for many marks the beginning of summer, have declined by about 25% in five years, an average of nearly 6% a year across the UK. Bullfinches fell at a similar rate nationally, and by an average of 11% a year in England. Of the 132 native breeding species tracked, 45% have declined over the past five years, while just 27% have increased. In England, 55% of monitored species have declined.

Seabirds are the worst hit group, down by more than a fifth over the past five years. Dr Ailidh Barnes, who helps build the index at the British Trust for Ornithology, said avian flu had “decimated” species such as Arctic skuas and terns. Farmland bird populations have decreased by 63% since 1970 and 12% since 2020. Defra attributes the long-term decline to changes in farming since the 1950s, including the loss of mixed farming (crops and livestock), increased pesticide and fertiliser use, and the removal of hedgerows.

IPCC is under pressure to delay publication of key global climate report

Scientists are coming under pressure from some petro-states and major developing countries to delay publication of a key global report on the climate, despite pleas from vulnerable countries worried that postponement could spell disaster for them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN-convened body of the world’s leading climate scientists, is meeting this week in Addis Ababa to discuss its seventh assessment report, a comprehensive survey of all that is known about the climate crisis.

The report, known as AR7, was scheduled to appear in 2028 in time for deliberations at the UN climate summit, Cop33, late that year. Cop33 is scheduled to critique governments’ actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris agreement target of limiting temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. But a group of countries, led by Saudi Arabia and Russia and including India and China, is pressing for publication of the report to be pushed back to 2029.

They argue this is necessary in order to allow developing countries to have more input into the scientific findings. Climate science has been dominated for three decades by countries and blocs including the EU, the UK and the US, though under Donald Trump’s presidency in the last of these it has has been severely curtailed.

Many poor and vulnerable countries – which are also among those contributing least to the science – strongly oppose any such delay. Ministers from 34 members of the High Ambition Coalition, made up of some of the poorest countries and those most at risk from climate breakdown, as well as the EU and the Least Developed Countries grouping, called on Friday for publication of AR7 to be expedited.

Intense waves and floods batter California waterfront homes and boardwalks

Southern California coastal communities are picking up the pieces after a weekend of extreme weather brought flooding that overtook city streets and intense waves battered beachside homes.

The remnants of Tropical Storm Rachel hit Mexico’s Baja California over the weekend as well as southern California and Las Vegas. While meteorologists noted that Rachel weakened into a post-tropical cyclone as it approached California, it still left a trail of destruction.

Footage showed massive waves crashing into Long Beach homes, destroying a boardwalk and forcing residents to flee. The damage to homes was significant, leaving some at risk of collapse.

At least nine have been deemed unsafe to enter, the Long Beach Post reported, meaning displaced residents cannot return to retrieve personal items. The storm has cost the city more than $1m from its emergency reserves, according to the outlet.

The impacts are just a taste of what’s to come across southern California as a historic El Niño unfolds in the Pacific, threatening to unleash severe storms across the region this winter.

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A Little Night Music

Olympics - Big Boy Pete

The Olympics - Secret Agents

The Olympics - Hully Gully

The Olympics - I'll Do A Little Bit More

The Olympics - The Slop

The Olympics - Well!

The Olympics - No More Will I Cry

The Olympics - Baby, Do The Philly Dog

The Olympics - Dance By The Light Of The Moon

The Olympics - Mash Them Taters

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