RationalWiki:What is going on in the world?/July 2023

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July 2023[edit]

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11Serbia Here we go again: Kosovo designates two Serb groups in the North as "terrorist groups" amid rising tensions with the Serb minority (from June)
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16AfghanistanFlag of the Taliban.svg The Taliban begins confiscating musical instruments and burning them in bonfires, claiming that music is "immoral". Music was banned during previous Taliban rule over two decades ago.
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12Niger Other nations have threatened sanctions against Niger if they don't release Bazoum and his family and end the coup. These sanctions would be catastrophic for the incredibly poor nation. Yevgeny Prigozhin, Wagner boss, has offered to send Wagner members to assist with the coup.
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31BulgariaGay Pride Flag.svg Discrimination against queer people in Bulgaria becomes illegal.
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22Saudi ArabiaUkraine Ukrainian-organized peace summit will be hosted by Saudi Arabia. Russia is not invited, and it instead appears to be an effort to gain support for Ukraine among developing countries.
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23United Kingdom British climate change deniers advance into weather denial.
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37ItalyTrans flag.svg Organizers of the Miss Italy contest bar entry to trans women by declaring it's for "women from birth" only. Since they didn't say that people born female who transitioned to male couldn't take part, trans men are exploiting that loophole and over 100 have entered in protest.
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29United StatesTexas. Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill banning city ordinances that mandate water breaks for construction workers. The week after, the state capital saw an unprecedented, 11-day streak of temperatures reaching 105 degrees or more.
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21Niger Coup attempt in Niger. Presidential guard detained the democratically elected leader President Mohamed Bazoum and surrounded the presidential palace. Bazoum is from the Nigerien Party for Democracy and Socialism.Wikipedia A previous coup attempt was thwarted in 2021, two days before his inauguration. Update: Soldiers appear on TV & declare the president has been removed, national curfew instated, borders closed, all republican institutions suspended.
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20Russia Sanctioned Russian spyware billionaire Anton Cherepennikov found dead from self-administered "medical gas". Reportedly weird and dangerous alternative medicine treatments are popular among the Russian elite for stress and anxiety relief since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion, causing multiple deaths.
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0Ireland Sinead O'Connor (also known as Shuhada Sadaqat), famous for her protest against the Catholic church, dead at 56.
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19MoldovaRussia Moldova expels Russian diplomats and embassy staff "over numerous unfriendly actions".
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22United States Morgan Stanley upgrades economic growth for the US this year, crediting "Bidenomics" & particularly the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Most Americans still disapprove of Biden's economic performance (37%-58% split). Meanwhile, Insider reports that income inequality dropped in the US as wages grew.
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19the World A controversial new study warns that the crucial Atlantic Meridional Ocean Current (AMOC), including the Gulf Stream, may collapse sometime between 2025 and 2095 due to anthropogenic climate change. This could lead to plunging temperatures, collapsing ocean ecosystems, and increased storms worldwide. Some experts caution about uncertainties in the study's findings; the researchers plan to update their model with recent data to refine their predictions.
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21United States A majority of Americans support the government restricting "false information" online. An even larger majority support restrictions on "extremely violent" content. Even when it was stipulated that this would also restrict "freedom of information".
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-3United StatesFlorida. Florida will use conservative PragerU videos as "educational curriculum" in public schools. PragerU stated: "schools have been hijacked by the left, they have been politicized, they have been used by union bosses".
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-2Israel Israeli parliament passes Bibi's controversial judicial reform bill.
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36United StatesCalifornia. Trans flag.svg Police brutality in action: video shows thuggish cop beating the shit out of a trans man at a traffic stop.
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34the World Childhood vaccination rates (tetanus, measles, etc) dropped during COVID. Now, they are rebounding modestly.
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63BelgiumGay Pride Flag.svg Belgium bans conversion therapy.
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54RussiaSouth Africa South African government commits to arresting Vladimir Putin if he sets foot in country, per International Criminal Court obligations. A warrant for his arrest is to be issued. Putin decided not to attend the BRICS summit in South Africa in August, anticipating this.
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18RussiaBelarusPolandUkraine Putin: Poland must be "reminded" that their land was "gifted" to them by Russia. He has also said in recent days that any "aggression" by Poland against Belarus is to be treated as an attack on Russia, and that Poland may be plotting to seize territory in western Ukraine.
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19RussiaUkraineRussia has arrested Igor Girkin, a former battlefield commander of its proxy forces in east Ukraine who was convicted by a Dutch court of ordering Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shot down (causing 298 fatalities). He was charged with "extremism" for allegedly calling for Putin's downfall and criticizing Russia's military incompetence.
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32United StatesMichigan. Michigan's "fake electors"—who illegally declared themselves the state's electors—are finally being charged.
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-5United StatesFlorida. As part of a new curriculum on teaching about slavery, Florida schools will now have to teach children that black people gained beneficial skills while enslaved.
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20United StatesFlorida. Four Floridians convicted for selling an industrial bleaching agent through their online church as a miracle cure for "95% of known diseases", including COVID-19, Alzheimer's, autism, brain cancer, HIV/AIDS, multiple sclerosis, and leukemia. See: Miracle Mineral Solution.
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15KenyaGay Pride Flag.svg New anti-LGBT bill set to be tabled in Kenyan parliament. It would "see a total ban on any activities 'that promote homosexuality', such as wearing flags or emblems of the LGBTQ community. Kenya already criminalises same-sex acts with penalties of up to 14 years in prison."
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22United StatesJamaicaGay Pride Flag.svg Jamaica has refused to accredit the spouse of a gay American diplomat. In retaliation, the U.S. is sending three U.S.-based Jamaican diplomats home.
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17Italy Tennis ball-sized hail pounds Italy, injuring more than 100 people. Hope you're all ready for the future, folks.
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27United Kingdom Scientific racist and scientific fraud Doctor-and-not-Professor Richard Lynn is dead, announced in a tweet from his far-right conspiracist friend Edward Dutton. Only the good die young, so Lynn was 93. With due consideration and sensitivity to those who loved Dr-and-not-Professor Lynn, let us all solemnly declare: "RIP in piss bozo lol."
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18ChinaUnited States Xi Jinping hails "old friend", Henry Kissinger, at meeting. In case you hadn't heard that Kissinger is still alive. And 100 years old.
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16BelarusUkraine The head of the Belarusian Red Cross, Dzmitry Shautsou has admitted on Belarusian TV that the organisation has deported Ukrainian children from Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine into Belarus. This action is in fact a war crime under international law, and subsequently Ukraine's foreign minister has called for the International Criminal Court to put him under an arrest warrant.
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16IraqSweden Iraq expels Sweden's ambassador after an Iraqi refugee desecrated the Quran in Stockholm. This followed the storming of and arson in Sweden's embassy in Iraq (the 2nd such storming recently), after which Iraq threatened to cut diplomatic ties with Sweden if the planned Quran burning the storming protested proceeded. Iraq now forbids all trade with Swedish companies.
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26RussiaSouth Africa Putin will not be attending a BRICS nations summit in South Africa this August, presumably because they would be required by international law to arrest him.
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9ItalyGay Pride Flag.svg Italy begins stripping parental rights from lesbian mothers. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni claims she is somehow not homophobic however but simply opposed to "gender ideology" and "LGBT lobbies".
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31the World Astronomers have discovered a star where one side is composed almost entirely of hydrogen and the other side made up of helium.
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19United Statesthe District of Columbia. The Washington, DC city government entered into a contract with a convicted felon who hawks a device that that claims to break the laws of physics to improve the battery life of electric vehicles
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22United StatesFlorida. A Florida family that allegedly formed a faux church called the "Church of Bleach" and made over US$1 million by falsely selling toxic industrial bleach as a miracle cure for HIV, cancer, COVID-19, and other diseases is now standing trial in Miami
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18United KingdomTrans flag.svg Rishi Sunak is likely going to have to delay his plan to force schools to out trans students to their parents and ban them from socially transitioning, as well as using preferred pronouns and names if the parents don't consent to their kids doing so, because it likely violates the Equality Act.
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4United KingdomGay Pride Flag.svg Rishi Sunak apologizes to LGBT veterans for their past mistreatment. It was illegal to be gay in the British armed forces until 2000.
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26United StatesTexas. Mexico Greg Abbott has enforced razor wire installation into the Rio Grande on the Mexico-Texas border, and has ordered state troopers to push small children and babies back into the river, as well as deny people trying to cross any water. The White House has condemned this action. Mexico has officially filed diplomatic complaints stating that this action is a violation of a 1944 water treaty.
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25RussiaUkrainethe World Collapse of Black Sea grain deal poses a massive threat: “Russia’s decision to suspend participation in the Black Sea Grain InitiativeWikipedia will worsen food insecurity and harm millions of vulnerable people around the world." Russia's then made their view of resuming the deal clear by attacking the grain storage infrastructure at Odesa and Chornomorsk with missiles.
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25China China is entering an era of much slower economic growth, raising a daunting prospect: it may never get rich.
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19Australia Australian state of Victoria pulls out of hosting the '26 Commonwealth Games, citing the ballooning costs becoming 'well and truly too much' to bear. Like with the Olympics, it is becoming worryingly difficult to find willing hosts due to said costs.
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23UkraineRussia Explosive strikes have hit the Crimea bridge, which is a key route for supplying the Russian army currently invading Ukraine. Traffic has come to a complete halt.
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23United StatesNew Hampshire. Extremist-friendly tech company LBRY closes after a fine of $111,000+ for securities fraud. Their associated cryptocurrency LBRY crashed to 1/3000th of a cent. The company's founder is a paleolibertarian and part of the Free State Project.
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27Israel Benjamin Netanyahu has been hospitalised for dehydration amid Israel's heatwave.
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40United States The Wall Street Journal has reported that last year, Tesla launched an internal investigation against its CEO, Elon Musk. Why? Purportedly, for using millions of dollars in company funds to build a literal glass house for himself. Yes, really.
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32United StatesFlorida. Inflation plunges across the United States. Not in Florida though. Two months ago, one farming CEO presciently warned that Florida's anti-immigration bill would result in higher grocery prices; Florida's service, construction and agriculture industries relied heavily on immigrant labor.
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8France Following last months riots, France bans the sale, possession and transportation of all fireworks ahead of the Bastille Day national holiday.
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8HungaryGay Pride Flag.svg Hungarian bookseller fined 12 million forints (£27,428/$35,916) for selling a book about two gay people in a section where under-18s could see it.
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18RussiaTrans flag.svg All forms of sex- and/or gender-changing banned in Russia. Trans people are also to be banned from adoption, and their marriages may be annulled on account of their trans status. An exception allows genital sex changes for children with intersex conditions.
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11RussiaUkraine Thousands of Ukraine civilians are being held in Russian prisons. Russia plans to build many more
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6Italy Italian judge rules that groping someone for fewer than 10 seconds doesn't count as sexual assault.
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15Lithuania The North Atlantic Fellas OrganizationWikipedia, an informal pro-Ukrainian trolling network of shiba inu dog memes, has been awarded the Star of Lithuanian Diplomacy medal by the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry.
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17the World Climate breakdown is causing an increase in plankton, which is in turn turning the world's ocean water greener. It's not entirely clear if this within itself is bad yet.
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23United StatesRed flag.svg Disney's CEO, Bob Iger, says the currently-striking actors and writers are "not being realistic" with their demands. Keep in mind he makes over $10 million every year, and could potentially earn $27 million this year.
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14Kosovo A brawl erupts in Kosovo's parliament after someone in opposition to the elections being redone throws water over the PM.
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19United Kingdom Trans flag.svg Senior civil servants have leaked to Vice News a proposed redrafted policy document on trans people, which would effectively institutionalise transphobia in the Civil Service. This includes only allowing trans people with a GRC to use single-sex facilities and use the phrase “adult human female” to describe women.
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28India Obviously-climate change-caused irregular weather in India has decimated crops and forced tomato prices up by 400%. People there are struggling with affording food.
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32Norway Huge phosphate rock deposits discovered in Norway could satisfy global demand for fertilizers and electric vehicles for the next 50 years.
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21TurkeySwedenNATO Erdoğan has agreed to back Sweden's NATO bid. Unfortunately, the Islamist dictatorship now gets to bully Sweden into proposing religious exemptions to free speech just to keep their chances of getting let in up.
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16United StatesOklahoma. Pro-Trump Republican Ryan Walters, Oklahoma's state superintendent of public instruction, said teachers should avoid saying that "skin color" was the central factor behind the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Walters had previously railed against "woke ideology" and "critical race theory".
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24Netherlands Trans flag.svg Dutch model Rikkie Kollé has won the 2023 Miss Nederland pageant, making her the first trans woman to have won a national beauty contest. She will now head to the Miss Universe pageant.
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45United StatesWisconsin. In another incredible win for midwestern Democrats, the Wisconsin governor, Tony Evers, used the power of the Frankenstein vetoWikipedia to cut a sentence in half to change the bill from increasing school funding until 2025, to make it increase school funding for the next 400 years. To quote the linked AP article: "Gov. Tony Evers struck a hyphen and “20” to change the end date for a $325 per-student spending increase from 2025 to 2425." To quote the linked Wikipedia article: "it was changed from "for the 2023–2024 school year and the 2024–2025 school year" into "for 2023–2425" ("for the 2023–2024 school year and the 2024–2025 school year")"
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21Netherlands Dutch government reportedly collapses after failure to reach agreement on asylum measures
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42GreeceGay Pride Flag.svg Greek conservative prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has said he is commited to legalizing same-sex marriage in the country. “Same-sex marriage will happen at some point and it’s part of our strategy.” he says in a TV interview for Bloomberg.
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18United KingdomIn a competition to see who is the most malign and petty member of the British government, the Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick orders the destruction of a welcoming mural for child asylum-seekers on the grounds 'it gives the impression that they are welcome to the UK'.
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25the World Meta launched Threads, likely the first 'serious' Twitter competitor. It heavily piggybacks Instagram, which has ~2 billion users, compared to Twitter's ~230 million. Threads received 30 million signups in the first 7 hours. Twitter responded with legal threats. As a side note, Threads may boost Mastodon's reach, too. Update: Threads hit 55 million users after about a day.
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33United StatesGeorgia (U.S. State). Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has been voted out of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus days after hurling insults at fellow conservative Rep. Lauren Boebert on the House floor.!
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28United States US public schools are censoring the plays that theater programs perform, to prevent controversy or legal trouble. Some avoid plays with gay characters, girls playing male characters, mentions of bullying, mild swearing, or depictions of racial issues.
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37the World July 3, was the hottest day ever recorded globally, according to data from the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction. Update: the record was broken a mere day later. July 4 was the hottest day on Earth in recorded history, and estimated to be the hottest in over 100,000 years.
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24European UnionGreece Greece Migrant ship: Everyone Knew the Migrant Ship Was Doomed. No One Helped.
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-15Uganda Ugandan government raises taxes on diapers after parliament members claim they are mainly used by homosexuals.
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-18United StatesIndiana. Indiana Supreme Court ruled near-total abortion ban can take effect.
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41the World Twitter blocked non-users from viewing tweets, DDoSed itself, and restricted the amount of tweets that registered users can view per day. The API also broke for the developers that are now forced to pay for it.
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30United StatesMaryland. Recreational marijuana is now legal in Maryland. ‘Expect a lot of fun.’
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5United StatesFlorida. Trans flag.svg Florida's trans bathroom ban has been passed. Here's how it'll affect trans (and cis) Floridians.
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32the World "An analysis of foraging societies from around the world has found that women hunt in the vast majority of those looked at, confirming that the idea of gender division in providing food is a myth".