“As of the time of this writing, eight American warships, manned by more than 4,500 Marines and sailors, have been placed just outside of Venezuelan waters. The New York Times has identified guided-missile cruisers moving close to Venezuelan shores, as well as Reaper drones stationed nearby in Puerto Rico, alongside a number of stealth fighter jets. On Wednesday, War Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed on X that the military escalated this campaign by conducting a lethal airstrike on a vessel in the Pacific Ocean for the first time, off of Colombia’s waters, just days after Trump accused its president, Gustavo Petro, of being an ‘illegal drug dealer’ after he criticized the American campaign in the Caribbean. … The target is clear: Nicolás Maduro, president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. But the United States government is not saying that, at least outright.” (10/22/25)
“Early voter turnout exceeds expectations in California’s Nov. 4 special election over redrawing the state’s congressional districts, a Democratic-led effort to counter Republican attempts to keep Congress under GOP control. ‘We’re seeing some pretty extraordinary numbers of early votes that have already been cast, people sending back in their ballots,’ Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a livestream with former President Obama on Wednesday. More than 3.4 million mail ballots have been returned as of Wednesday, with votes from Democrats outpacing ballots from Republicans and Californians registered as not having a party preference, according to a ballot tracker run by Democratic strategist Paul Mitchell. … That’s roughly the same number of ballots returned by this time in the White House contest between then-Vice President Kamala Harris and then-former President Trump in 2024, notable because turnout during presidential elections is higher than in other years.” (10/22/25)
“A firestorm erupted last week when the British professor and commentator Eric Kaufmann made a bold claim: Identifying as transgender is ‘in free fall among the young.’ … last week I analyzed data from the nationally representative Household Pulse survey, which asked directly about transgender identity. … The Household Pulse data showed a decline in trans identification among 18- to 22-year-olds in 2024, but I was cautious about drawing conclusions from it as the decline appeared only in a limited time period …. Then, over the weekend, I found it—a nationally representative survey that asked the same question about transgender identification from 2021 to 2024. It also asked separately about identifying as nonbinary. The data are from the Cooperative Election Study (CES), fielded each year by YouGov and administered by Tufts University. They show that identifying as transgender really is in free fall among the young in the United States.” (10/22/25)
“Israel’s Supreme Court on Thursday pushed back the hearing of a petition filed by an organisation representing international media outlets in Israel and the Palestinian territories, demanding independent access for journalists to Gaza. Since the Gaza war began in October 2023, Israeli authorities have prevented foreign journalists from entering the devastated territory, taking only a handful of reporters inside on tightly controlled visits alongside its troops. … While Israel has prevented foreign reporters from entering Gaza, its forces have killed more than 210 Palestinian journalists in the territory, Antoine Bernard, RSF’s director for advocacy and assistance, said on Tuesday.” (10/23/25)
“Nicotine pouches — small, smokeless packets tucked under the lip — deliver nicotine without burning tobacco. They eliminate the tar, carbon monoxide, and carcinogens that make cigarettes so deadly. The logic of harm reduction couldn’t be clearer: if smokers can get nicotine without smoke, millions of lives could be saved. Sweden has already proven the point. Through widespread use of snus and nicotine pouches, the country has cut daily smoking to about 5 percent, the lowest rate in Europe. Lung-cancer deaths are less than half the continental average. This ‘Swedish Experience’ shows that when adults are given safer options, they switch voluntarily — no prohibition required. In the United States, however, the FDA’s tobacco division has turned this logic on its head.” (10/23/25)
“U.S. President Donald Trump has frequently talked about taking over Greenland and Canada, but it’s unclear if he was actually serious about it. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Greg Grandin, U.S. leaders from the Founding Fathers onward cultivated a myth of a limitless frontier—the idea that constant expansion could solve internal problems. But limitlessness feels less possible today than it did two centuries ago. What does that then mean for Trump’s ‘America First’ model?” (10/22/25)
“Social media giant Reddit has launched a lawsuit against artificial intelligence company Perplexity, alleging that it illegally scraped user posts to train its AI model, marking the latest data-rights clash between content owners and the AI industry. The complaint filed in New York federal court on Wednesday also named three defendants, which Reddit says helped Perplexity collect its data: Lithuanian data scraper Oxylabs, ‘former Russian botnet’ AWMProxy, and Texas startup SerpApi. Reddit alleged that the three smaller entities were able to extract its copyrighted content ‘by masking their identities, hiding their locations and disguising their web scrapers as regular people.'” (10/23/25)
