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RationalWiki:What is going on in the world?

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Icon wigo world alt tilted.svg Keep up to date with all the interesting world news and current events that relate to RationalWiki's mission here. The most popular entries are found at Best of the world and the older entries are found in the archives.

Voting is meant to reflect the quality and relevance of a news item — not whether said item brings good or bad news.

What is going on?

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Extra! Extra!

February 2025

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1United StatesThe Education Department has lifted the pause on some civil rights probes, namely relating to disability, but not on probes relating to race and gender.
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2United StatesSome Democrats said some mean things about Musk and SCOTUS and are now being investigated by Trump thug and acting district attorney for DC Ed Martin.
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5United States Kash Patel confirmed as FBI Director by the US Senate.
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19United States In a Truth Social post celebrating his administration's termination of approval for New York's vehicle-congestion tax, Trump refers to himself as a king
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22United StatesUkraineRussia After accusing Volodymyr Zelenskyy of starting the war against Russia, Trump calls him a "dictator".
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20United StatesArizona. Two small planes collide midair in Arizona, leaving at least one person dead, officials say
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18United States Officials who work to prevent bird flu outbreaks were "accidentally" fired.
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21United StatesThe judge who blocked Trump's illegal funding freeze is facing articles of impeachment for daring to lay down the law against a rogue executive.
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16PalestineIsraelAn Israeli military mission in the illegally occupied West Bank has displaced 40k Palestinians.
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19United StatesAbout a third of Project 2025 has already been implemented.
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15United StatesTrump's fascist border czar wants the DOJ to go after AOC.
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16BrazilBrazil’s former President Bolsonaro charged over alleged coup that included a plan to poison Lula
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14United StatesThe New York Times is encouraging writers to use AI to create headlines.
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17United StatesDOGE's illegal budget cuts are hobbling wildfire preparedness.
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18United StatesRaging Neo-Nazi "influencer" Jack Posobiec is being embraced by the Trump administration.
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19United StatesTexas. 11 year old Texas girl bullied over her family's immigration status has taken her own life.
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16United StatesThe Washington Post censors a hundred and fifteen thousand dollar "Fire Elon Musk" ad meant to run in its Tuesday edition. (If you want to check out what Bezos censored, you can click this link here.)
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18United StatesCanada Sneak preview of the water wars.
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20United StatesUtah. Utah governor signs collective bargaining ban for teachers, firefighters and police unions.
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20United StatesMaryland. Trump's anti-DEI order has stopped the Maryland National Guard from celebrating Frederick Douglass.
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13United StatesRomaniaTrump is pressuring Romania to drop restrictions on the Tate brothers.
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13United StatesUtah. Gay Pride Flag.svg New legislation in Utah would allow Nazi and Confederate flags to be flown in schools and government buildings, but not Pride ones.
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17United StatesIsraelPalestineA Jewish man shot two Israeli tourists in Miami because he mistook them for Palestinians.
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19United States You know what America could use right about now? Fewer air traffic controllers.
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11Chile A kayaker in Chile got swallowed and then spit out by a humpback whale.
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17United StatesTrans flag.svg The feds have removed references to the transgender community from the Stonewall National Monument website.
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19United StatesNew York. Trans flag.svg Authorities have found the body of a man who was tortured to death for being trans. Five people have been arrested in connection with the murder.
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11India Eighteen killed in New Delhi station crush.
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22United StatesTrans flag.svg The Pentagon has announced a ban on transgender enlistment.
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39United States Elon Musk sparks chaos at the National Nuclear Security Administration as the agency is forced to fire hundreds of people tasked with maintaining the US nuclear weapons stockpile. However, the firings are now on "pause", since nuclear weapons security might be important or something. Update: Trump administration wants to rehire these people but can't find some of them because they're now locked out of their government-issue email accounts.
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32United Kingdom Over 1,700 scientists sign an open letter to the Royal Society urging it to expel Elon Musk from its fellowship, citing his "assault on scientific research in the US that has fallen foul of federal courts”.
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21United States The US Department of Housing and Development is set to purge half its workforce.
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26United States Matt Schlapp, the chairman of CPAC, allegedly sexually assaulted a man at a bar.
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19United StatesMyanmar A Burmese refugee with lung problems died after being forced out of a US-funded clinic. You can thank Trump's foreign aid freeze for her death.
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18United States Avid defenders of women's sports secure a pay cut for women athletes.
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22UkraineRussia Russian drone damages radiation shield at Chernobyl, Ukraine says
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2United StatesRussia Trump says Russia should be readmitted to G7
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28United States Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. confirmed as US health secretary. Mitch McConnell, in a stopped clock moment, joined the Democrats in the dissenting votes.
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27United States In a win for the corruption lobby, Trump has announced he won't enforce a law that prohibits the bribing of foreign government officials.
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25United States The Trump administration has restored websites containing key health information following a court order.
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24United StatesTrans flag.svg Hegseth orders an immediate pause on gender-affirming medical care for all active-duty service members.
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25United States Trump says he has directed the Treasury to stop minting new pennies.
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22United States GOP aims to pass a "SAVE Act", with 104 congresscritters co-sponsoring it in the 118th Congress. It'd tighten voter ID requirements for federal elections, to prevent noncitizens from voting (which was once legal but no longer is). The bulk of the effect, however, would be on voters who are citizens. This includes married women, who often change their name but may not update documents; that's more likely to describe married Republican women than married Democratic women.
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4United States Trump administration officially declares the Gulf of Mexico is now called the "Gulf of America". Update: The administration blocked an Associated Press reporter from an event because the organization didn't change its style manual to say "Gulf of America". Can you say freedom fries?
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15United States Trump administration aims to cut billions in medical research spending. The order is already being legally challenged by 22 states.
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13United States As Elon Musk and JD Vance flirt with the idea of openly defying federal judges, they risk a constitutional crisis.
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25United StatesCanadaEuropean Union Trump's tariff threats against Canada, aiming for a "51st state", have created a wave of defiant patriotism across Canada, and relations have deteriorated. Justin Trudeau emphasized the long history of very good relations between the US and Canada. Trump continues to insist he's serious about economically forcing Canada to join the United States. In the face of this, the Canadians are looking at increasing trade with the European Union.
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11United StatesPalestine Trump wants the United States to take over Gaza and move its residents to other countries, says they would have no right of return.
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15United StatesUnited Nations UNAIDS: Trump administration's defunding of global HIV/AIDS programs could ultimately result in over 6 million deaths.
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18United States JD Vance brings up medieval Catholic doctrine to justify deporting immigrants. Consulting the modern Church may not have been an option as one can presume they were displeased by potential ICE raids against churches themselves, or really the whole deportation plan in general. Update: Pope Francis releases a letter supporting "U.S. Bishops in migrant advocacy", which references the ordo amoris concept Vance cited.
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22the World Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition "Atrophied and Unprepared": Researchers find that the more people use AI at their job, the less critical thinking they use. D'oh!
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19United StatesMontana. The Montana legislature is considering a bill that would ban the use of mRNA vaccines.
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26United StatesGay Pride Flag.svg Trump administration reportedly threatens the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children with defunding unless they censor mentions of LGBT people on their website. (LGBT acceptance is elaborated in some research to have protective effects for children in areas like homelessness.)
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17United States Trump fires the board of the Kennedy Center and appoints himself as its new chairman.
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23United States One of Musk's DOGE-ies was previously fired for leaking a company's internal information, one may presume that was his qualification. Update: A cybersecurity site claims he was also part of a cybercriminal community.
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22United StatesCanada In a hot-mic moment, Trudeau is heard saying Trump's desire to make Canada a 51st state is "a real thing".
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30United StatesTrans flag.svg A federal judge has put a halt to the transfer of transgender women to all-male prisons.
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37United StatesThe majority of Americans disapprove of Musk and DOGE.
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35the WorldGoogle has quietly dropped a promise not to use AI for weapons.
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20United StatesThe Trump administration is offering "buyouts" to the entire CIA workforce.
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23United KingdomScotlandThe Scottish government announces it will not be banning cats.
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27RussiaGermany Russia supported car sabotage spree in Germany disguised as climate activists to influence general election campaign, report says.
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40United StatesThe Proud Boys lose control of their name to a black church they vandalized. This was because the PBs failed to pay a $2.8 million judgment against them for their vandalizing of the church.
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32United StatesCanada Trump pauses tariffs on Canada for one month to allow time for negotiations; Trudeau promises to increase security at the US-Canada border to halt fentanyl smuggling. Note that US authorities seized a grand total of 43 pounds of fentanyl coming from Canada in 2024, compared to 21,000 from Mexico.
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23United StatesMexico Trump pauses tariffs on Mexico for one month to allow time for negotiations; Mexican President Sheinbaum will send 10,000 soldiers to the US-Mexico border to combat drug trafficking.
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15United States Musk calls USAID a ‘criminal organization’ that should ‘die’
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18United StatesPanama New US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, meets the president of Panama.
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29United States Hedge funds bet that US stock markets will crash after Trump's tariffs go into effect
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23United StatesCanadaMexicoChina Trump starts new trade war with Canada, Mexico, and China. This includes tariffs on oil imports. Trump states the trade war may cause "some pain" but "will all be worth the price". He also says Canada should become the "51st state" to avoid the tariffs. Goldman Sachs reports a sharp rise in hedge funds shorting the stock market.
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31United StatesTrans flag.svg The CDC (a US government agency) sends its employees a list of "forbidden terms" banned from being said in scientific studies produced by CDC researchers. (Article also in MedPage Today.) In similar news, such terms are being scrubbed from health agency websites themselves.
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31United States Department of Justice seeks list of "potentially thousands" of FBI agents for potential mass firings, especially any involved with investigations into January 6 cases. (The FBI employs some 38,000 people.) Trump's nominee for FBI director is known to endorse conspiracy theories about the event, blaming at least parts of J6 on the FBI itself.

January 2025

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33GreenlandUnited States Greenlanders overwhelmingly oppose Trump's proposal to absorb Greenland into the United States.
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16United States Study finds US states that adopt anti-abortion policies will cause a significant draining factor on their population size as a result due to migration out of those states. (Though, it could be swamped out by other factors to achieve an overall net population growth.) (PDF of study.)
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13United States Trump's FCC chair launches investigation into PBS and NPR.
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17United States Archivists work to preserve hundreds of datasets purged from Data.gov. It's not known what was removed or why, however, there's been a purge of content pertaining to diversity topics, including mentions of the grammatical concept of pronouns.
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16United States Elon Musk and friends take over the General Services Administration, along with the Treasury Department's payment system.
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19Syria Bashar al-Assad's cousin arrested.
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12United States CDC purges information for doctors about treating STDs and giving vaccinations, as part of a Trump executive order to snub the transgender anti-measles lobby.
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39Australia Fourteen members of a fringe religious cult are charged with manslaughter over the death of an 8 year-old diabetic girl, whom they denied insulin to believing God would cure her condition via prayer. After dying, the group kept praying over her corpse for a day and a half before calling emergency services.
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22United StatesCuba White House memo announces plans to house up to 30,000 "high-priority criminal aliens" in a detention facility at Guantanamo Bay until a country can be found that is willing to take them.
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33United StatesUnited Kingdom After doing a Nazi salute at the National Pro-Life Summit in Washington DC, the former GB News presenter, ‘’Father’’ Calvin Robinson has been defrocked from the conservative Anglican Catholic Church. The Church says his behaviour demeans the Holocaust.
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23United StatesNew Jersey. Former US Senator Bob Menendez sentenced to 11 years in prison for bribery and corruption charges
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39United StatesIllinois. Trump "border czar" Tom Homan is pissed that migrants in Chicago are being informed of their legal rights: "For instance, Chicago—very well-educated. They've been educated on how to how to defy ICE, how to hide from ICE. I've seen many pamphlets from many NGOs: 'Here's how you escape ICE from arresting you. Here's what you need to do.' They call it 'Know Your Rights.' I call it 'how to escape arrest.'" (here's a link to a website that has printable English and Spanish "Know Your Rights With ICE" pamphlets)
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26United StatesIndiana. Pardoned Jan. 6 rioter shot, killed by police in Indiana: Matthew Huttle, freed last year after six months in jail, was shot to death in a scuffle with a sheriff’s deputy along a rural road. He had 4 arrests since the riot and had a gun in his proximity at the time his death.
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27United StatesKansas. An ongoing tuberculosis outbreak in eastern Kansas is now the largest recorded in the US since the Centers for Disease Control started tracking the illness in the 1950s. 67 people are still being treated for active tuberculosis.
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27GermanyUnited States Musk tells Germans to get over ‘past guilt’ in speech to far-right AfD rally
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19United States Trump fires at least a dozen government watchdogs. Oh I wonder why?
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27United StatesIdaho. Gay Pride Flag.svg Homophobic Idaho Republicans file resolution calling on the Supreme Court to overturn the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.
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16United States Pete Hegseth narrowly wins the confirmation vote to become the US Secretary of Defense.
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14United States House Republican Andy Ogles introduces long-shot measure to amend the United States Constitution to allow Trump to run for a third term.
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34the World ChatGPT is offline.
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26United States Trump is taking a chainsaw to the medical establishment of the United States as he imposes a hiring and grant review freeze and communications ban on the NIH, as well as the CDC and FDA.
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33United States Farms are seeing a massive drop-off in workers as Trump's mass deportation scheme begins to kick off.
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25United States Trump orders Justice Department to halt all Biden era civil rights litigation.
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31IsraelPalestine As fighting in Gaza stops, Israel launches major military campaign in West Bank. So far, at least 10 Palestinians were killed, including a child.
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13United States Trump pardons Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht after 11 years in prison
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28United States Elon Musk's Nazi salute stunt has led the Raphael Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention to issue a new red flag alert for genocide in the United States.
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21United StatesMassachusetts. Trump signs executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship, which has already caused a huge legal battle
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24United States First legal volley fired moments after Trump's inauguration: Trump and Elon Musk’s ‘Doge’ violates federal transparency rules, suit claims
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22United States Trump pardons over 1500 J6 participants. Those set to go free include former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes.
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21United StatesUnited Nations Trump withdraws the US from the World Health Organization.
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16United States Biden commutes long-time Native American political prisoner Leonard Peltier's sentence.
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19United States Elon Musk caught doing what appears to be a Nazi Salute 3 times during Trump's inauguration.
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-22United States Donald Trump has been sworn in as the 47th President of the United States of America.
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19United Kingdom Antivaxxer sentiments are on the rise again in the UK.
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8United States About a quarter of American teens use ChatGPT for schoolwork, which is double the percentage from 2023.
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24Bolivia Bolivian judge orders arrest of ex-president Evo Morales in statutory rape case
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38Romania Andrew Tate is back under house arrest just days after being released.
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21United States Biden says the Equal Rights Amendment is law. MAGA will still fight it tooth-and-nail to keep women oppressed.
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25United StatesCalifornia. the District of Columbia. Man from San Francisco's famed Molinari family arrested on Capitol riot charges could be the last arrest of these coup-plotting motherfuckers
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27United States The US has designated the far-right accelerationist network "Terrorgram" as a terrorist group.
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37United StatesFlorida. Trans flag.svg US appeals court has found Florida's trans healthcare ban to be unconstitutional.
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27United KingdomTrans flag.svg What happens when transphobia is allowed to go unchecked: A teenager has been stabbed outside a Harrow roller blade disco because she was trans.
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20United States By allowing hate speech to go unfiltered, Facebook is laying the narrative groundwork for Trump's mass deportations.
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41United NationsIsraelPalestine Israel and Hamas reach a Gaza ceasefire agreement.
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18United StatesLouisiana. The first American bird flu death has been reported in Louisiana.
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22United StatesChina The upcoming American ban on the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok, has led to an upsurge of interest in the other similar Chinese app Rednote. Ironically, Rednote’s Chinese name is Xiaohongshu (小红书), which means Little Red Book.
(Fact check: the app says its name is not a reference to the Mao's quotations book. The nickname "Red Treasure Book" (Hongbaoshu, 红宝书) is used in China to refer to the Mao book, not "Little Red Book".)
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25the World Again, 2024 was the hottest year on record. The temperatures broke 1.5 degrees Celcius above pre-industrial times, something the Paris Agreement was supposed to prevent.
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31United States A full quarter of Americans are avoiding consuming Tesla products because of Elon Musk.
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24the WorldUnited StatesGay Pride Flag.svg Meta has rolled out an update on its "Hateful Conduct" policy, which now allows "allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation".
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26United StatesNorth Carolina. Deluded Pizzagate gun nut decides to go the death-by cop route over a parole violation
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26United States Citing a "changing legal and policy landscape in the US", Meta announces the immediate discontinuation of DEI programs. Walmart and McDonald's have made similar announcements within the last couple months.
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16United StatesNew York. After the Supreme Court rejected his appeal to stop the sentencing in his New York hush money case, Trump received on an unconditional discharge for his criminal conviction. This means he will receive no fines or penalties, but the conviction will remain on his record.
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30United NationsIsraelPalestine Israel blocks UN probe into Hamas sexual crimes From October 7 to avoid inquiry into abuse of Palestinians
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24United Statesthe District of Columbia. Man arrested trying to enter Capitol with machete as Jimmy Carter lies in state.
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33United States The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finalizes a rule to remove medical debt from credit reports.
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30United States The Heritage Foundation plans to 'identify and target' Wikipedia editors that allegedly spread anti-semitism (read: showcase Israeli atrocities). What they actually mean is to hijack and censor Wikipedia to make sure that it has a conservative bias given that these people are the same folks behind Project 2025.
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19United Kingdom Andrew Tate has launched the BRUV Party (Britain Restoring Underlying Values). Its policies include mandatory live-streaming of solitary confinement prison cells on the BBC, the Royal Navy patrolling the sea 24/7 to stop people from migrating via boat, and the restoration of boxing and wrestling in P.E. classes in school. Tate hopes to become Prime Minister with this party.
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24United States Meta to get rid of their 'fact checkers', instead relying on a 'community based system' of reporting as used on X. Claims it is being done to 'allow more free expression' but if it isn't another example of preemptive sucking up to the returning Great Orange well, I'll eat a MAGA hat.
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29France French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen, a Holocaust denier and unrepentant extremist as far as race, gender and immigration were concerned, dies at 96.
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17United States While Oath Keeper's leader Stuart Rhodes was in prison, the coup-plotting organization was resurrected by a racist ex-cop in 2022
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29Canada Justin Trudeau announces his resignation as Canadian Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Party.
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25Canada An interview between Jordan Peterson and Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre gets released on X, with much praise from Musk. During the interview Poilievre calls Trudeau, the Liberal Party, and the NDP "authoritarian socialists" à la communists.
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22United States The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has struck down Biden's attempt to restore net neutrality laws. Brendan Carr, Trump's nominee for head of the FCC, has supported this decision, embodying Ajit Pai.