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Before an Afghan refugee, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, yesterday shot and seriously injured two National Guard members who had been deployed by President Donald Trump to Washington, D.C., military commanders had warned that their deployment represented an easy “target of opportunity” for grievance-based violence. The troops, deployed in an effort to reduce crime, are untrained in law enforcement; their days are spent cleaning up trash and walking the streets in uniform. Commanders, in a memo that was included in litigation challenging the high-visibility mission in D.C., argued that this could put them in danger. The Justice Department countered that the risk was merely “speculative.” It wasn’t. There are costs to performatively deploying members of the military—one of which is the risk of endangering them.

Lakanwal’s exact motives are still unknown; he worked for the CIA during the Afghan War. He is now in custody but apparently refusing to speak. Trump offered a predictable response to the shooting: pausing immigration for anyone from Afghanistan, a move that conveniently ignored how Lakanwal had gotten to the United States. He came as part of Operation Allies Welcome, admitted for his assistance to U.S. troops, and was reportedly granted asylum status after vetting by the Trump administration earlier this year.

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In Monday I spoke with a Republican member of Indiana’s legislature who opposes President Donald Trump’s push for the state to redraw its congressional map to gain two GOP seats and help the party hold its House majority in next year’s midterm elections. Trump, with support from Indiana’s Republican governor, Mike Braun, has vowed to back primary challengers against members of the GOP who are, for now, blocking the redistricting plan. The lawmaker I spoke with asked that I not publish his name. He isn’t worried about Trump’s political wrath; he doesn’t plan to run for reelection. His fear of speaking out is much more personal: “I’d rather my house not get firebombed,” he told me by phone.

Such a worry is not as far-fetched as it might sound—not in an America that has seen an eruption of political violence over the past few years, and not in Indiana over the past few weeks. Republicans in the state have faced a wave of “swatting” incidents, in which a false call to emergency services draws a police response, for not endorsing the redistricting plan. (Braun said he and his family have also received threats.)

Last week, I was following up on several rumors that Donald Trump would sign an executive order that would fulfill a longstanding goal of the AI industry: legal preemption that would prevent states from passing their own AI laws. Mostly, I was calling sources trying to get a sense of how the Trump administration planned to approach it: Which agency would be spearheading it? What legal arguments would they use? How would it interact with Congress, which was trying to pass a similar moratorium in the National Defense Authorization Act?

And then I got a copy of the draft order itself — possibly a sign that someone in the administration deeply, deeply loathes David Sacks, Trump’s Special Advisor on AI and Crypto. Even though he’s not a permanent government employee — he is, in fact, a billionaire tech venture capitalist with a provisional employment status similar to the one Elon Musk previously held — Sacks has become deeply influential in setting the administration’s AI and crypto policies. (Just look at Trump’s recent statements about federal AI preemption.)

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In late October, Elon Musk released a Wikipedia alternative, with pages written by his AI chatbot Grok. Unlike its nearly quarter-century-old namesake, Musk said Grokipedia would strip out the “woke” from Wikipedia, which he previously described as an “extension of legacy media propaganda.” But while Musk’s Grokipedia, in his eyes, is propaganda-free, it seems to have a proclivity toward right-wing hagiography.

Take Grokipedia’s entry on Adolf Hitler. Until earlier this month, the entry read, “Adolf Hitler was the Austrian-born Führer of Germany from 1933 to 1945.” That phrase has been edited to “Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and dictator,” but Grok still refers to Hitler by his honorific one clause later, writing that Hitler served as “Führer und Reichskanzler from August 1934 until his suicide in 1945.” NBC News also pointed out that the page on Hitler goes on for some 13,000 words before the first mention of the Holocaust.

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Democratic-backed candidates beat out Republican-backed ones in numerous school board elections nationwide during the recent Democratic Election Night elections, showing a successful repudiation of Republican messaging about banning books and restricting transgender restroom use. Democratic groups hope the recent wave of victories can be repeated in the new wave of school board elections next year.

Republican takeover of school boards spiked after the COVID-19 shutdown, amid conservative upset over mask mandates, trans-inclusive policies, “pornographic” library books, and progressive curriculum (like so-called critical race theory).

The Environmental Protection Agency is moving forward with approvals for pesticides containing “forever chemicals” as an active ingredient, dismissing concerns about health and environmental impacts raised by some scientists and activists.

This month, the agency approved two new pesticides that meet the internationally recognized definition for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as PFAS or fluorinated substances, and has announced plans for four additional approvals. The authorized pesticides, cyclobutrifluram and isocycloseram, which was approved Thursday, will be used on vegetables such as romaine lettuce, broccoli and potatoes.

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An updated version of the Steam Linux Runtime 4 branch was rolled out that has now shifted from Debian 11 to Debian 13 libraries for some significant upgrades. In the process more libraries have gone x86_64 only in foregoing the i386 builds. In addition, the SDL 2 library support for the Steam Runtime is now provided by sdl2-compat as the compatibility layer for SDL2 atop SDL3.

Valve and their partners at Collabora have rolled out a significant Steam Linux Runtime update to shift libraries from Debian 11 to Debian 13.2 after having skipped out on Debian 12. The approximate four year version jump has resulted in some libraries having a new SONAME for breaking ABI compatibility.

Microsoft also points out that the license related only to the source code, and "does not include commercial packaging or marketing materials".

It's a welcome move. However, Microsoft's announcement about making Zork open-source sure has the whiff of AI-generated writing about it. The article is riddled with saccharine, dreamy phrasing and AI-favoured sentence structures. "When Zork arrived, it didn't just ask players to win; it asked them to imagine" is a classic bit of AI-generated hokum, and similar phrases occur multiple times through the text.

The COVID-19 lockdown meant a surge in remote work, and the trend toward remote and hybrid workplaces has persisted long after the pandemic receded. That has changed the nature of workplace management as well. Bosses can't check for butts in seats or look over their employees' shoulders in the office to make sure they're working instead of having a LAN party. So they've turned to software tools to fill the gap.

So-called “bossware” lets managers keep a close eye on employees' activity, tracking everything from knowledge workers’ website visits to the gait and facial expressions of those involved in more physical activities.

Trump’s bizarre war on offshore wind is getting worse — and it’s screwing workers and anyone who uses electricity. In the past year, Trump’s policies have resulted in the loss of more than half of the planned power set to come from offshore wind, according to a new report by the Energy Industries Council released last week. People all across the country are facing relentlessly skyrocketing energy prices, with average electricity bills in July up 9.5 percent from just one year ago. Rising energy costs were a key issue influencing voters in elections this month and are expected to again play an outsized role in the crucial 2026 midterms.

Trump has never been shy about his deep-seated hatred of offshore wind, calling it “pathetic” and “cheap” in his recent address to the United Nations and even claiming that the noise from windmills causes cancer (it doesn’t). On his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order halting new offshore wind leasing and directing the Secretary of the Interior to conduct a review to consider terminating or amending existing leases. The so-called Big Beautiful Bill includes a bevy of billions in bonuses to the fossil fuel industry, while gutting tax breaks and incentives for wind and solar.

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The accounts being discussed here have pushed agendas within the US, and commented on US politics regularly. Many are also named to echo political movements, like some MAGA accounts.

However, these ‘political influencers’ have been found to be based outside the US, raising questions about the motives.

One profile going by 'MAGA NATION' with a follower count of over 392,000, is based out of eastern Europe. Similarly, ‘Dark Maga’ a page with over 15,000 followers is based out of Thailand. ‘MAGA Scope’ which boasts over 51,000 followers is actually operated out of Nigeria, and ‘America First’, an account with over 67,000 followers is based out of Bangladesh.

“At this time thousands of MAGA-aligned influencer accounts and large political pages that claim to be based in the U.S. are now being investigated and exposed with many of them traced to India, Nigeria, and other countries,” a news aggregator page on X noted.

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