Until 1970, the US dumped an estimated 17,000 tons of unspent chemical weapons from World War I and II off the coast of the Atlantic Ocean—and that disposal decision continues to haunt commercial fishing operations.

In an article published this week in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, health officials from New Jersey and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that there were at least three incidents of commercial fishing crews dredging up dangerous chemical warfare munitions (CWMs) off the coast of New Jersey between 2016 and 2023.

On 9 September 2022, Lucia Osborne-Crowley flew from London to Miami and caught a Greyhound bus north to West Palm Beach. The writer and journalist had arranged to meet Carolyn Andriano, who was abused by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell from the age of 14 until she was 17, starting in 2001. Andriano had been a crucial witness in the trial against Maxwell in 2021.

When the two women met, Andriano said she had just been visited by a private investigator – a man in his 60s, who had heard she was talking to someone about a book. In a restaurant that afternoon, Osborne-Crowley was approached by a man in his 60s. What was she writing, he wanted to know. He offered her drugs, cash and a meeting with one of Epstein’s pilots, then put his hands under her skirt. When the manager asked him to leave, he waited in the car park; Osborne-Crowley had to escape through a staff exit.

She had been following the Epstein case for six years by then and had written a book about the Maxwell trial, The Lasting Harm; this was just a taste of what others had experienced. In November 2025, 28 Epstein survivors released a statement saying many of them had received death threats. They all asked for police protection.

With Epstein dead and Maxwell in jail, who was paying these men? “It could be any of the people who are not yet facing charges,” says Osborne-Crowley when we meet. “Firstly, they can afford it. The weekend I was in Miami, there was a person following me, a person following a survivor in South Africa who was in my book, and a person following a survivor in the UK. Just so that we all were aware.” Two women withdrew from The Lasting Harm after receiving threats. “Ghislaine used to tell them: ‘If you ever tell anyone what’s going on here, no matter how far into the future, we will find you and we will stop you.’ And in a lot of ways, that promise was kept.”

Andriano died in a hotel in May 2023, eight months after Osborne-Crowley’s visit. The autopsy recorded an accidental overdose of methadone and fentanyl. It was a shock to those who knew her. “She’d been clean for so long and I spoke to her the day before,” says Osborne-Crowley. “It didn’t feel like she was about to relapse for the first time in 10 years.”

HyperNormalisation is a 2016 BBC documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. It argues that following the global economic crises of the 1970s, governments, financiers and technological utopians gave up on trying to shape the complex "real world" and instead established a simpler "fake world" for the benefit of multi-national corporations that is kept stable by neoliberal governments.

The European Commission has launched TraceMap, an AI platform that allows national authorities to detect food fraud, trace contamination, and speed product recalls.

A sustained disruption of traffic through Hormuz would not simply constitute an energy crisis. It would also represent a fertiliser shock (where prices go up dramatically and supply goes down) – and, by extension, a direct risk to global food security.

What gives I'm american?

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10980696

"Setareh Sadeghi, assistant professor of World Studies at the University of Tehran, speaks to The Grayzone's Max Blumenthal from Isfahan, Iran as her country defends itself against a vicious combined assault by the US and Israeli militaries."

"Sadeghi addresses the teachings and legacies of the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and explains how his assassination has galvanized the Shia masses and united Iran in a battle for its national integrity. "

I have always wondered why I was taught in school for so long and it turns out that apparently lots of other people were taught this too.

The only reason I can think if that we were raight that blood in the body is blue is because our veins look blue. But does anyone know where that myth came from or why kids are still being taught this today?

Key Findings

•Crew lists obtained by reporters show that tankers carrying sanctioned Russian oil have been regularly departing the country's Baltic Sea ports with a pair of extra Russian crewmen.

•More than a dozen of these men were found to have links to Russian security organizations including the Wagner Group, paratrooper units, and Russia’s foreign intelligence service.

•European intelligence officers say these covert "vessel protection teams" have been deployed to deter authorities in the Baltic Sea from boarding or seizing the sanctioned ships.

•Russia relies heavily on the Baltic route to transport oil that remains a key income stream for its wartime economy despite Western sanctions.

Though i'm pretty torn if it is even meme when it's entirely factual.

American allies are watching in disbelief as the Pentagon reroutes weapon shipments to aid the Iran war, angry and scared that arms the U.S. demanded they buy will never reach them.

European nations that have struggled to rebuild arsenals after sending weapons to Ukraine fear they won’t be able to ward off a Russian attack. Asian allies, startled by America’s rate of fire, question whether it could embolden China and North Korea. And even in the Middle East, countries aren’t clear if they will get air defenses from the U.S. for future priorities.

Hej lemmings! (Hoping this is relevant enough for the selfhosted commjnity)

Quick question for you all: do you stick with the same distro across your PC, laptop, and server, or do you pick different ones based on the device and what you're doing?

For me, I've been mixing and matching depending on the use case, but I'm starting to think it'd be nice to just have one distro (or at least one family like Fedora or Debian) running everywhere. That way I wouldn't get confused about default settings or constantly have to look up flags for different package managers.

Right now my setup is:

• Gaming rig: CachyOS
• Laptop: AuroraOS
• NAS: Unraid
• Various project servers: DietPi, Debian, Alpine etc..

I feel like NixOS might be the only distro that could realistically handle all these use cases, but I'm a bit scared of the learning curve and the maintenance work it'd take to migrate everything over.

Am I the only one who feels like having "one distro to rule them all" would be nice? How do you guys handle your setups? All ears! 😊