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RationalWiki:What is going on in the world?/January 2025

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January 2025[edit]

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34GreenlandUnited 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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17United 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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40Australia 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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40United 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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28United 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.