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Today is a “Firehose Friday” at RRND/FND with more than 100 items awaiting your attention at our web edition. We don’t do those very often anymore, because starting earlier this year we began supplementing our 60-item email edition with extra web-only content (usually 10-20 additional items) EVERY day. But every once in a little while (like, say, during our annual fundraiser), we like to really push you toward the web edition.
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Yours in liberty,
Tom Knapp
Publisher
Rational Review News Digest / Freedom News Daily
Source: Northeast Times
“A US official told Al Jazeera that the USS Theodore Roosevelt strike group and the Makin Island amphibious force, carrying 2,000 Marines, have left San Diego. The official said three carriers and two landing groups are deploying around Iran. UK Maritime Trade Operations said a supertanker carrying 2.5 million barrels was struck by an unknown projectile and caught fire while passing through the Strait of Hormuz.” (10/01/26)
https://northeasttimes.com/2026/10/01/u-s-sends-carrier-group-and-2-000-marines-toward-middle-east-as-tanker-is-hit/
Source: Antiwar.com
by Thomas S Karat
“What October 7 opened is visible on the ground before it is visible anywhere else. By the reckoning of an Israeli newspaper, Israel has seized more territory from its neighbors since that day than in any comparable span in decades. The war did not stay in Gaza. It moved outward on every front where a border could be pushed. … A war that produces this much cannot be allowed to end, and it has not been.” (10/01/26)
https://original.antiwar.com/thomas_karat/2026/09/30/the-usefulness-of-a-massacre
Source: Reason
“How Nikole Hannah-Jones Gets School Choice All Wrong.” (10/01/26)
https://reason.com/podcast/2026/10/01/how-nikole-hannah-jones-gets-school-choice-all-wrong/
Source: The Hill
“A federal judge on Wednesday ruled the Trump administration must turn over a Department of Justice (DOJ) memo that legally authorizes the Pentagon’s lethal boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific. U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer rejected two of the administration’s three arguments to keep the document secret in a 66-page opinion, requiring that the government submit the memo within two weeks for his confidential review. Three legal organizations — the American Civil Liberties Union, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights — filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit last year to demand the release of this memo and other records related to these strikes. … More than 230 people have been [murdered] in at least 70 boat strikes in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific since the military campaign’s start on Sept. 2, 2025. ” (10/01/26)
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/6124784-judge-orders-doj-memo-release/
Source: The Daily Economy
by Donald J Boudreaux
“Daniel McCarthy — Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought at the Heritage Foundation — recently penned in the pages of American Spectator, an obituary of sorts for libertarianism. His essay is just the latest contribution to what has become a torrent of triumphalist declarations by pundits on the left and right that we Americans, having gorged ourselves on this junk-food philosophy, are now turning to a healthier diet of statism. Yet McCarthy’s eulogy, like the others, is marred by mistakes. Here are three.” (10/01/26)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/libertarianisms-critics-bury-another-a-straw-man/
Source: Yahoo! News
“Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Thursday the country’s military had deployed a domestically developed FP-7 tactical ballistic missile in the war against Russia for the first time. … Zelensky did not specify the target, but published a video of a missile launch at night. The Ukrainian defence firm Fire Point had previously postponed the first combat deployments of its ballistic missile on several occasions. … By developing its own ballistic missile weapon, Kiev aims to achieve parity with Moscow in terms of military capability. Ukraine has already deployed short-range ballistic missiles from old Soviet stockpiles during the war.” (10/01/26)
https://www.yahoo.com/news/world/articles/zelensky-announces-first-ukraines-own-181837283.html
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“The U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq is not as ignominious as the withdrawal from Afghanistan after some 20 years of occupation, nor does it resemble the humiliating U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam but it can be — and should be — an opportunity for Americans to engage in some serious soul-searching about the concept of foreign interventionism that has become a normal and permanent way of life for the American people. This is especially true given the ongoing fiasco of President Trump’s unconstitutional war on Iran, which has wreaked untold death, destruction, suffering, injuries, and impoverishment on the Iranian people, just like U.S. interventionism did to the people of Iraq under the rubric of bringing them ‘freedom.'” (10/01/26)
https://www.fff.org/2026/10/01/american-soul-searching-after-the-iraq-withdrawal/
Source: Space.com
“SpaceX’s latest astronaut launch just set a new space record. The company’s Crew-13 mission for NASA arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) today (Oct. 1) at 7:05 p.m. EDT (2305 GMT), 7 hours and 55 minutes after it launched from Florida’s Space Coast. That’s the fastest any American spacecraft has ever reached the orbiting lab, NASA officials said. … In May 2020, a Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying three astronauts reached the orbiting lab just 3 hours and 3 minutes after lifting off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. … Crew-13 delivered four astronauts to the orbiting lab: NASA’s Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Joshua Kutryk of the Canadian Space Agency and Sergey Teteryatnikov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos. The quartet will live and work in space for the next six months.” (10/01/26)
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/spacex-crew-13-astronaut-mission-docks-iss-fastest-trip-us-spacecraft
Source: The Dispatch
by Justin Stapley
“A major consequence of the American Revolution was the preservation of the free-market realities engendered by the long tradition of salutary neglect, threatened by the remnants of England’s monarchical leviathan. The American colonists proved to be an exception to English constitutionalism, having no direct representation in Parliament and being at the whim of royal prerogative as a colonial venture under the executive authority of foreign policy. The colonies ended up being outside English polity and thus subject to the whims of mercantilism rather than allowed to continue prospering under the spontaneous capitalism of the mother country. And so, the people revolted.” (10/01/26)
https://thedispatch.com/article/how-constitutionalism-allowed-free-markets-to-bloom/
