Category: 2026

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Laura Millan, Alastair Marsh, Olivia Rudgard, Kyle Stock @ Guardian:
Banks Start Reviewing Clients’ Loan Terms as El Niño Builds

The powerful droughts and floods arising from a developing turbo-charged El Niño are damaging crops, leaders lenders to assess the credit risk.

Also vulnerable to the flooding that’s becoming more frequent with climate change are the UK’s prisons, according to findings from public auditors — part of their examination of the country’s financial exposure to extreme weather.
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Concerns among banks follow warnings from money managers that the intensity of the current El Niño cycle will leave investors nowhere to hide, as the weather phenomenon disrupts commodities supplies, drives inflation and widens trade deficits.

And on a positive note, the latest episode of Bloomberg Originals’ Primer video series takes us to Ethiopia, which is transitioning to electric vehicles faster than any other country in the world.

(Laura Millan, Alastair Marsh, Olivia Rudgard, Kyle Stock @ Guardian   more…)

Allison Marsh @ IEEE Spectrum:
When Electric Cars Were for Women

Sara Braun @ Guardian:
You can go your own way: US diverges from world on emergency preparedness

As governments urge public to prepare for cyber-attacks and natural disasters, US focuses on military preparation
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Ludivine Bantigny @ Al Jazeera:
No, France is not ‘burning’

It is merely witnessing another episode of unrest that – like many others in its history – has a violent element to it.

For the past few weeks, images of burning buildings and devastated shopping streets have dominated international media coverage of France. “France is burning”, “France in turmoil”, “Chaos in France”, the headlines have declared, focusing on the violent element of an otherwise peaceful student movement demanding better conditions for education.

To understand why this has happened in the past and is happening today, let us start by examining the word “violence”. In today’s context, it is used indiscriminately to refer to a broken shop window, a police officer injuring a demonstrator, a car set on fire, or shots fired at an unarmed crowd.

This confusion tends to inaccurately place material damage and attacks on people, revolt and its repression, on the same level.

(Ludivine Bantigny @ Al Jazeera   more…)

James Chater @ BBC:
Shops looted as German cost-of-living protests turn violent

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Anika Arora Seth, John West, Shelby Holliday, Lara Seligman @ WSJ:
How Iran Battered U.S. Bases and Caused Billions in Damage

Satellite imagery shows hundreds of damaged buildings at more than two dozen installations, in the fullest accounting of the destruction yet

Three American servicemembers were killed in a July 17 Iranian strike on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in the Jordanian desert. Satellite imagery shows the nighttime attack damaged at least 19 buildings where troops sleep.

It was one of the deadliest nights of the war for U.S. forces. But it wasn’t the only attack targeting American troops where they live and sleep. That same week, Iran hit multiple housing units at other U.S. military installations across the region.

The July strikes marked an alarming shift in Iran’s tactics and revealed an improvement in the regime’s ability to sequence attacks and hit targets with precision. Iran was taking more direct aim at the buildings that house American troops, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of satellite data, Iranian military statements and interviews with U.S. officials.

(Anika Arora Seth, John West, Shelby Holliday, Lara Seligman @ WSJ   more…)

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Christopher Hale:
Pope Leo XIV Meets the Chicago Catholics Who Sued Trump to Minister to ICE Detainees

The Chicago delegation carried a banner quoting his call for a “holy rebellion” and handed him letters from detainees. Leo has now cast his own midterm ballot, and the dignity of immigrants is on it.

(Christopher Hale   more…)

Bryce Newberry @ KPRC:
Harris County grand jury indicts ICE agent in crash that injured man

Edgar Sandoval @ NY Times:
Houston Grand Jury Indicts ICE Agent on Charges of Ramming Man in Chase

The agent is facing charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. The immigrant who was struck is recovering from severe leg injuries.

Heather Cox Richardson:
Letters from an American – October 30, 2026

Not much from me tonight, but I do want to call out the political signs reading “Stop Fraud: Vote Republican” I saw today as I left Maine. They seemed especially audacious in light of today’s news from Ernesto Londoño of the New York Times that last summer the Department of Homeland Security paid more than $495 million for a 1,600-bed prison the state of Minnesota declined to purchase a year ago for the asking price of $75 million—or even “a fraction of that price.”
(Heather Cox Richardson   more…)
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James Eagle:
China’s economy grew 4.5% in the three months to September compared with a year earlier.

What’s really interesting when you look at this chart is just how steady that economic growth has been. Despite a complex and constantly changing economic environment, China has continued to maintain a healthy level of economic growth.

Konrad Putzier @ WSJ:
U.S. Economy Accelerated This Summer Despite High Gas Prices

3.4% growth was driven by both businesses and consumers
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Evan Simon @ Floodlight:
NJ data center emitted staggering amounts of air pollution for nearly a year before regulators intervened

Newly obtained public records shed light on emissions caused by DataOne’s unpermitted generator fleet

… The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection last week fined the company over the fleet but didn’t disclose how long the generators had been operating nor how much air pollution they had released into the surrounding community over the past year.
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“Our best estimate is that the generators emitted about 140 tons of NOx,” said Xiaomeng Jin, an assistant professor at Rutgers Department of Environmental Sciences. Her analysis would rank DataOne in the state’s top five NOx polluters of 2025, per EPA data.

(Evan Simon @ Floodlight   more…)

Paul Kedrosky:
Anthropic Is a Bank With a Money-Losing AI Side Gig

Maxine Joselow @ NY Times:
E.P.A. to Stop Considering Lives Saved When Setting Rules on Air Pollution

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Shay Bottomley
@ National Security Journal:
Donald Trump Just Got Handed Proof of a Deeper Problem: Oil Is Flowing Out of the Gulf But Oil Prices Just Won’t Come Down

Oil exports have returned near pre-war levels despite Iran’s insistence that the Strait of Hormuz remains closed. This is partly because exporters are using alternative routes.
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Despite intensified strikes on shipping from Iran in recent weeks, smaller vessels have been able to transit through the Strait of Hormuz with their trackers turned off.
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Despite U.S. optimism, shipowners and captains remain reluctant to risk damage to their vessels and crews, leaving some cargo stranded in the Persian Gulf.

… Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, has remained above $100 per barrel for much of October.
(Shay Bottomley @ National Security Journal   more…)

Heather Delaney Reese:
J.D. Vance told the truth

… Then he said something he might not have meant to about the direct correlation between gas prices and Donald Trump: “They skyrocket every time some tin-pot dictator decides to throw a tantrum.”
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James Eagle:
HIV treatment saves nearly two million

This is probably one of the most significant medical advances in recent times. The development of antiretroviral therapy has changed the lives of HIV patients to such an extent that many of them can now live normal lives and live into old age.

In the past, having HIV was almost considered a death sentence when the pandemic first spread. …

Having said that, people are still dying from HIV and AIDS because they lack access to antiretroviral therapy. …

(James Eagle   more…)

Paul Offit:
RFK Jr.’s “Control Group”

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To RFK Jr., the Amish had proved his point—no vaccines equaled no autism. …

In 2010, about ten years before RFK Jr. had visited Lancaster County, a study of about 1,900 Amish children in Ohio and Indiana found a rate of autism of at least 1 in 271 children, contradicting RFK Jr.’s claim. Although RFK Jr. was wrong about the incidence of autism among the Amish, he was right about two things:

First, RFK Jr. was right that public health officials “would soon be coming for them.” But not for the reason he had imagined. In 2026, five years after RFK Jr. had visited Lancaster County, a large measles epidemic engulfed Amish and Mennonite communities in Pennsylvania’s Lancaster, Jefferson, and Mifflin counties. Health officials recorded at least 1,300 cases, 250 hospitalizations, and 6 deaths. The epidemic launched an “all-hands-on-deck” strategy to vaccinate as many children in these communities as possible, fulfilling RFK Jr.’s prophecy that “they are coming for you.”

RFK Jr. was also right that the Amish had become “the control group that the CDC didn’t want you to know about.” Four years after that visit to Lancaster County, RFK Jr. was sworn in as Secretary of Health and Human Services. And, as he had predicted, the Amish had become “the control group that the CDC didn’t want you to know about.” Or at least the control group that RFK Jr. didn’t want us to know about. With RFK Jr. in charge, the CDC failed to accurately record the number of Amish and Mennonite people on its website who had died from measles. RFK Jr. didn’t want us to know how effective his 20-year campaign against vaccines had been.
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Heather Cox Richardson:
Letters from an American – October 25, 2026

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Trump and his allies keep saying they are digging the United States economy out of a hole dug by former president Joe Biden, but on October 19, 2024, The Economist called the U.S. economy “The Envy of the World.” Trump disagreed, insisting that Biden’s economy was horrible.

He promised the new tariffs he intended to impose would create an economic miracle. Just hours after his second inauguration, he said that tariffs were “the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary,” because “tariffs are going to make us rich as hell. It’s going to bring our country’s businesses back that left us.”

Now Republicans are studiously avoiding the word “tariffs” …
(Heather Cox Richardson   more…)

Marlon Weems:
How prediction markets moved from forecasting tool to political infrastructure

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Thom Hartmann:
The four months Medicare desegregated America

This past July, Medicare turned 61. Most Americans just think of it as the program that gave seniors inexpensive healthcare for the rest of their lives, but — unknown to most Americans — it was also the most successful racial integration program in the history of the United States. Sadly, the way that happened has been almost entirely scrubbed from our national memory.

As recently as 1964, Black Americans were routinely turned away from the majority of America’s hospitals. Even women in labor, even people bleeding from a car wreck, Black people were turned away, and on those rare occasions when they were admitted to a hospital they were segregated to wait in basement wards, sometimes for days, until all the white patients upstairs had been seen. The Louisiana Red Cross labeled its blood supply “White” and “Colored.”

Even though the Civil Rights Title VI outlawed this, the hospital industry ignored it. The American Hospital Association’s own magazine ran an article explaining that keeping the races apart “must be [a hospital’s] primary consideration.”

Enter a brilliant move by Lyndon Johnson and a handful of men at HEW and Social Security: they wrote the Medicare Act in a way that prevented even one dollar of Medicare funds to go to any hospital that wasn’t in compliance with the Civil Rights Act.

Then they tipped off Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the (Black) National Medical Association, who recruited hundreds of Black volunteers to fan out across the country and try to get into hospitals. …

… Johnson held firm and refused to pay them anything at all if there was any proof whatsoever they were still engaging in racial discrimination. And within an astounding 4 months, roughly 6,500 hospitals bent their knees and medicine went from being America’s most segregated institutions to its most integrated.
(Thom Hartmann   more…)

Nat Lash, ProPublica, Julie Leopo @ ProPublica:
Bird Flu Is Raging on a Mink Farm. It Could Spark a Human Pandemic, Experts Say, but Officials Won’t Act.

Bill Gates:
6 things you should know on World Polio Day

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