“On Wednesday, the Consumer Price Index for September came in hotter than expected. Inflation was up at an annual rate of 3.7 percent. Gasoline prices rose 34 percent over the past year, and home heating oil is up a staggering 74 percent. Combined with other factors, this news spooked the stock market. The tech-heavy Nasdaq fell by 2.7 percent. Then on Thursday, the Producer Price Index (PPI) report clocked a wholesale price rise of 1.3 percent just in September, an increase of 6.3 percent over the past year, and the largest 12-month increase since December 2022. The other factors signaling deep trouble include a bond market that keeps bidding up rates on long-term Treasury securities, now the highest since 2002, reflecting expectations of more inflation, and increasing interest costs throughout the economy. This in turn adds to consumer and small-business pain and increases borrowing costs for the heavily leveraged tech sector.” (10/16/26)
“Israeli [squatter] militants have attacked European diplomats, a French mayor and the archbishop of Cambrai in Taybeh, in the occupied West Bank, injuring three people and damaging a car, in the latest violent attempt to prevent Palestinians from harvesting olives on their own land. Bernard Baudoux, mayor of Aulnoye-Aymeries, was wearing his red, white and blue sash of office and attempting to enter a vehicle with diplomatic plates when he was assaulted and knocked to the ground on Saturday. … [Squatters] first attacked a group working on the lower slopes of hills near Taybeh. As well as stealing olives, they kicked, abused and assaulted a Palestinian woman in her 70s and beat a man so badly he needed six stitches for a head injury. Then they approached the diplomats and Badoux, who was in Taybeh for the launch of a twinning agreement with his town in northern France.” (10/17/26)
“I don’t know where you grew up, but I grew up six blocks north of the Detroit border and one block south of 8 Mile Road, ‘on the bad side’. It wasn’t bad when I was a kid, or at least not as bad, and as I got older, I spent more time in the city. I went to college downtown at Wayne State and lived for a time in the Cass Corridor, back when that was not a place you wanted to be (it’s quite different now). I saw firsthand why there is distrust and dislike between black Detroiters and Arabs in the city, and I’m kind of surprised no one has talked about it in regard to why Democrat Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is doing so horribly with black voters.” (10/17/26)
“A nursery owner and five members of her staff have been jailed after they were found to have poisoned more than 200 children with lead-tainted food. Li Huifang, who operated the Heshi Peixin Kindergarten in Tianshui, in the Gansu province, was sentenced to life in prison for producing and selling toxic and harmful food, according to Chinese state media. In July 2025, 247 pupils and staff at the nursery were found to have abnormally high blood lead levels after children began falling ill. A report into the incident found that chefs at Heshi Peixin had used inedible paint to ‘enhance the look’ of its meals to attract more students – despite the paint being being clearly marked as such. In addition to the sentence, the Lanzhou Intermediate People’s Court also ordered the confiscation of 500,000 yuan (£56,200; $74,700) of Li’s personal assets, state broadcaster CCTV reported.” (10/17/26)
“The European Union’s long project to build the continent into a fortified zone of peace and prosperity has hit a new pitfall. Over the past two weeks, the war in Ukraine has expanded far into the Black Sea. Several merchant ships carrying grain and other civilian cargo were struck by drones – widely viewed as Russian – off the shores of two NATO members, Bulgaria and Romania. Nearly two dozen sailors from many countries were either killed or are missing. ‘The Kremlin is testing the EU and Nato, and will act depending on the results of the testing,’ a popular Ukrainian blogger, Boryslav Bereza, wrote on Facebook.” (10/16/26)
“California Highway Patrol officers had a highly unusual task this week — catching the second-largest bird in the world. California Highway Patrol officers in Santa Cruz received several calls about an emu walking into traffic at Harper Street and 17th Avenue. The big bird had escaped from its owner and traipsed its way in and out of traffic. ‘While we often deal with dogs, cats, deer, and occasionally birds, an emu was unexpected!’ CHP Santa Cruz said on Facebook. An emu loose on a highway can pose a deadly risk to drivers if struck by a vehicle, according to the American Emu Association. The owner quickly arrived to recover their feathered friend, and with the help of the officers, the owner was able to corral the animal and get it back home.” (10/16/26)
“I’ll never forget my first job working on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk project, back in 2008. I was on maternity leave and needed some extra cash to make ends meet, so for several hours a day I would look at and tag photos with as many keywords as possible. If I was looking at a picture of a cloud in the sky, for instance, I would tag additional words such as ’sky’, ‘daylight’ and ‘atmosphere’. I didn’t know then that Mechanical Turk, or MTurk as it came to be called, would become my fulltime job and that in the process I would become one of the hundreds of thousands of data workers who built the backbone of Big Tech’s AI machine. After a little more than two decades of service, Amazon shut down MTurk for good on September 30 of this year.” (10/16/26)
“Nearly every week, another psychodrama arises between the United States and its NATO partners. Europeans blame the Trump administration for the usual things—a lack of cordiality and bombastic threats. But two truths, rarely spoken, characterize all these spats. One is hypocrisy; the other is insecurity. Take Trump’s recent demand that Ukraine cease attacks on Russian diesel refineries. Given the midterms and the critical issue of fuel prices, it was understandable that Trump might request an energy ‘ceasefire’. So both Russia and Ukraine were asked to stop their attacks on refineries to calm jittery global diesel markets and help stabilize sky-high prices. But the American Left, the Ukrainians, and the Europeans went ballistic – given that the aggressor, Russia, is blanketing Ukrainian skies with missiles and drones, while Russia’s critical refining industry remains vulnerable to retaliatory Ukrainian drone attacks.” (10/15/26)
“After a 28-minute-long bidding war, a fully functional ‘Hatfield’ Apple-1 computer sold at Bonhams for $1.15 million on Oct. 14, setting a new world auction record for commercially released Apple-1 computers, the institution said in a recent news release. The primitive personal computer, which was created by engineer Steve Wozniak in 1976, includes a signed letter from Steve Jobs, the original operations manual and a typed invitation to the ‘Apple I Owners Club,’ as well as several hardware components. Perhaps most importantly, Wozniak’s signature is on the motherboard, which still operates 50 years later. Born in San Jose in 1950, Wozniak met Steve Jobs when they were still mischievous teenagers hacking into public telephone networks. Together, they collaborated on the Apple-1 and brought it to the Homebrew Computer Club, a group of hobbyists who gathered in Menlo Park to exchange ideas about personal computing, which was still a novel concept in the mid-1970s.” (10/15/26)
“Executions open to the public, once a popular spectacle in early America, began to lose whatever moral purpose they once had nearly two centuries ago. The last legally sanctioned public execution in the United States was in 1936. And, as a sign of how sentiments have shifted, a monument was erected in Massachusetts just nine years ago to mark the site of the most famous public hangings: 19 people accused of witchcraft in 1692 Salem. This week, three TV news networks reported that the Trump White House is leaning against a plan by the Pentagon to livestream an execution – by firing squad on Dec. 3 – of an ex-Army major convicted of killing 13 people at a Texas military facility in 2009. Not only has airing such an official and gruesome act ignited bipartisan backlash in Congress, but House Speaker Mike Johnson and Vice President JD Vance also say they would not watch the broadcast.” (10/14/26)
