Tuesday, October 13, 2026

7 Stroke Warning Signs People Often Mistake for Something Else

We're fundraising in honour of our Son, Brother, Grandson, Nephew, Cousin and Friend - Anand Roopra.

 Posted by Rusna, Wednesday 7th

This year we are taking part in [mo]re than a run, a powerful community-led movement that uses running as a tool to support mental health and prevent suicide. On the final Saturday of November, thousands of us across cities in Australia, New Zealand and beyond will be lacing up for this important cause. Every step we take and every dollar you donate helps fund the life-saving work of Movember. Please support us if you can. Let’s make every stride count.



We surveyed 150k+ working creative professionals, combined with Contra’s marketplace data, to explore how AI is changing creative work. Adoption, emerging workflows, earnings, next-gen AI-native careers, and more.


NEWS YOU CAN USE:  7 Stroke Warning Signs People Often Mistake for Something Else


Drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy are linked to a lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease, new study says.



YES. NEXT QUESTION.  Can You Still Gain Muscle While Drinking? The Science of Post-Workout Alcohol.


IT’S DEJA COVID ALL OVER AGAIN: New York airport monitoring Russian arrivals over fears researcher died from plague



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Ukraine killed 92% of the far right bots on X

 No wonder South African Nazi Felon Musk and Russian Spokesperson Donald Trump are so upset with Zelenskyy. The wheels are coming off the propaganda machines. . .


Uh oh, did someone’s website and personal account experience a big drop in activity after Ukraine hit a Russian data center?




Zelenskyy might be saving our democracy. The mad genius is bombing Russian data centers linked to FAKE NEWS bot farms. Without them, Putin’s midterm influence will accidentally fall from a 30th floor window.


Congratulations to Ukraine for launching drone strikes on Russian data centers/bot farms! Those data centers are the source of many disinformation bots spewing lies across the internet every day. For every data center Ukraine destroys, there are fewer bots spreading discord and lies.

Ukraine Took Out the Bot Farm’s Servers, and Twitter Is F@#king Delightful Again

A bot-traffic chart flatlined at zero, Yandex’s status page called a fire “power interruptions,” and my mentions are nothing but people. Real people! Yippee-ki-yay.





Since UKIP & the Brexit Party, Nigel Farage has relied on Russian bots to amplify social media support, but, oh dear ... "Reform UK supporting accounts have almost gone silent after Ukraine hit a few of Russia’s big data centres" via Karen Maunder




Drone strikes hit three Yandex data centres in four days as Ukraine responds to Russia's attacks

Drones hit Yandex data centres in Sasovo, Kaluga and Vladimir between 8 and 11 October, shutting two of the sites down entirely, disabling several modules at the third and disrupting cloud, transport, banking and media services across Russia.

Russian forces had damaged or destroyed data centres belonging to at least eight Ukrainian companies since late September. No major Ukrainian drone attack on a Russian data centre had been confirmed before 8 October.

Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine's president, told reporters in Kyiv on 8 October that Russian forces had struck and were still striking Ukraine's data centres and that Ukraine had responded. "We always respond in mirror-like fashion," Zelensky said. He did not name Yandex and said he could not share all the details.

Fire Point, the Ukrainian maker of the FP-1 long-range attack drone, wrote on Telegram on 9 October that Ukraine's defence forces had used FP-1s against the Kaluga site. Russia's defence ministry said it intercepted 479 Ukrainian drones over 16 regions, including Vladimir, overnight into 11 October.

Three sites in four days

Yandex said a drone attack overnight on 7 to 8 October caused a fire at its Sasovo data centre in Ryazan region, about 300 kilometres east of Moscow, and that the site had stopped working entirely. Pavel Malkov, governor of Ryazan region, wrote on Telegram that two Ukrainian drones had been shot down over the region and that the roof of a business had caught fire in the Sasovo area.

Sasovo holds tens of thousands of servers and two of Yandex's three supercomputers, Chervonenkis and Lyapunov, which the company has used to train its AI models. Chervonenkis, rated at 21.53 petaflops, ranked 101st on the June 2026 Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers. Yandex said on 8 October it could not yet confirm whether the Sasovo equipment could be restored and has declined to say whether the supercomputers were damaged.

Yandex has occupied part of the former premises of the Sasta machine-tool plant in Sasovo since 2014. Sasta's complex includes machining and assembly workshops and a foundry and serves Russia's defence industry. Whether the data centre, the plant or both were the intended target is unclear.

Yandex's Kaluga data centre, in the Grabtsevo industrial park, lost several modules completely overnight into 9 October, the company said. Yandex designed the Kaluga campus as its largest, with 63 megawatts of capacity and room for more than 3,800 server racks across 130,000 square metres, and brought it into service in 2023.

Vladislav Shapsha, governor of Kaluga region, said air defences shot down 26 drones over the city of Kaluga and three surrounding districts on 9 October and that the attack injured nine people.

Yandex said on 11 October that drones had damaged infrastructure at its Vladimir data centre and that work at the site had been completely suspended. The site, in the Energetik neighbourhood of Vladimir about 180 kilometres north-east of Moscow, hosts the Yandex Cloud availability zone ru-central1-a and houses Galushkin, the third Yandex supercomputer.

Alexander Avdeev, governor of Vladimir region, said drones had attacked infrastructure in the suburbs of Vladimir and confirmed a fire. The strikes damaged electrical substations and cut power to parts of the city.

Yandex reported no injuries at any of the three sites. The company removed its data centres in four regions from its own mapping service after the Sasovo strike.

Outages across Russia

Yandex Cloud lost availability zone ru-central1-b to a power failure from 01:31 Moscow time on 8 October and reported power disruptions in zone ru-central1-a from about 04:00 on 11 October. After the Vladimir strike Yandex told customers the platform was running in emergency mode and advised them to activate disaster-recovery plans.

NetBlocks, the internet monitoring group, reported that connectivity on the Yandex network fell to about 70 per cent of normal levels on 8 October. Downdetector logged more than 1,300 user reports of disruption to Yandex Cloud, Yandex Documents and Yandex Tables the same day.

Russian Railways, the mobile operator MegaFon, the classifieds site Avito, the video service Ivi, T-Bank and the property portal Cian all suffered failures on 8 October, as did several Russian media websites. MosTransAvto, the state bus company for Moscow region, said online ticket sales were unavailable because a data centre had been temporarily shut down. Outage monitors recorded wider failures across Russian internet services from about 16:00 that day.

More than 80 Yandex services went offline after the Vladimir strike, including search, ride-hailing, e-commerce, food delivery and Yandex Cloud, with problems also reported in Kazakhstan.

Yandex shares fell more than 3 per cent on the Moscow Exchange on the morning of 8 October and about 4 per cent after news of the Kaluga strike on 9 October.

Yandex said on 9 October that it had agreed with Selectel, K2Cloud and VK Cloud, three Russian rivals, to speed up the transfer of affected customers' data and services, with extra specialist teams, flexible financial terms and simpler onboarding. Yandex Cloud had offered customers dedicated bare-metal servers as a fallback on the evening of 8 October. Yandex said on 9 October that it could not yet give a timeline for restoring equipment at the damaged data centres.

Russia's strikes on Ukraine's internet

Russian strikes since late September have damaged facilities run by Datagroup, De Novo, MiroHost, Parkovy, Ukrtelecom, Vodafone Ukraine, Cosmonova and Omega Telecom. One attack cut internet access to about 100,000 households. Parkovy's Kyiv data centre stopped working on 1 October, and Omega Telecom said on 6 October that its Kyiv data centre had closed.

Russia's defence ministry said a data centre it struck in Kyiv on 25 September processed and transmitted intelligence for Ukraine's armed forces. The ministry has called its campaign against Ukrainian data centres a "forced digital detox".

Zelensky ordered stronger protection for Ukraine's data centres and other communications sites on 25 September, after Russian strikes on Kyiv damaged several internet and hosting providers.

Vladimir Putin, Russia's president, gave the state power in August to take control of critically important infrastructure judged to be poorly protected against drone attacks.

Ukraine's parliament passed a law about a week before the full-scale invasion of February 2022 that let government and private-sector data move to the cloud. More than 10 petabytes from 42 Ukrainian government authorities, 24 universities and dozens of private companies had moved to Amazon Web Services by June 2022, according to AWS.

Russia's data-localisation law

Federal Law 242-FZ, in force since 1 September 2015, requires operators to record and store Russian citizens' personal data using databases located inside Russia. Roskomnadzor, the Russian communications regulator, permits copies abroad only where the primary database remains in Russia.

Yandex has run a separate cloud region, kz1, from a data centre in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, since April 2024. Selectel, K2Cloud and VK Cloud, the providers Yandex named for customer transfers after the strikes, are all Russian companies.

Data centres as targets in 2026

Drones directly struck two Amazon Web Services data centres in the United Arab Emirates on 1 March, and a strike close to an AWS facility in Bahrain damaged its infrastructure, AWS said. Two of the three availability zones in the AWS UAE region, mec1-az2 and mec1-az3, were severely impaired, and a second Bahrain availability zone was disrupted in April.

Iran's Fars News Agency wrote on Telegram that the Bahrain facility had been targeted because of its role in supporting US military and intelligence activities. Fortune reported that the US military used Anthropic's Claude model, running on AWS, for intelligence assessments, target identification and battle simulations during US strikes on Iran.

AWS said in a status update nearly six months after the strikes that it could not restore access to resources and data hosted only in its Bahrain region, where the damage "exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand". AWS also could not restore access to resources hosted only in mec1-az2 in the UAE.

Legal status of data centres

Article 52 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions bars attacks on civilian objects and limits lawful targets to objects that make an effective contribution to military action and whose destruction offers a definite military advantage. Where there is doubt over whether an object normally dedicated to civilian purposes is being used to contribute to military action, the protocol requires the attacker to presume it is not.

Russia ratified the protocol in 1989 and in 2019 withdrew its declaration accepting the competence of the treaty's International Fact-Finding Commission. Ukraine ratified the protocol in 1990.

Russia's defence ministry cited intelligence processing to justify its strikes on Ukrainian data centres, and Fars cited US military and intelligence use to justify the attack on AWS in Bahrain. Neither the Ukrainian government nor Fire Point has publicly identified a military function at the three Yandex sites, though the Sasovo data centre shares its grounds with a plant that serves Russia's defence industry.

Yandex has not given a repair date for any of the three sites.

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Op Rosny: The Global Rise of Electoral Dictatorships. Is the U.S. Next? Midterms Could Decide

 “People expect governments to operate with transparency, and they expect strong safeguards against undue influence.”


Crackdown on lobbyists after explosive anti-corruption inquiry

Third-party lobbyists will be forced to disclose links to local councils for the first time in a significant shake-up of integrity laws after the explosive Operation Rosny anti-corruption inquiry uncovered links between a slew of senior Liberal Party operatives and fugitive property developer Jean Nassif.
The Minns government will on Monday announce a series of reforms aimed at tightening lobbying laws, including new investigative powers that will formally establish the NSW Electoral Commission as the regulator for lobbyists, and hand the agency new powers to investigate any suspected breaches of the laws.
The Minns government will extend lobbying rules to local government after the Operation Rosny inquiry uncovered links between senior Liberal Party operatives and fugitive property developer Jean Nassif, right.ARTWORK: MARIJA ERCEGOVAC
The changes will also introduce rules restricting post-separation employment for senior bureaucrats, as well as recommending greater disclosure of contact between public servants and lobbyists, and requiring ministers to disclose meetings with lobbyists at political fundraisers.
The reforms, which come five years after ICAC recommended a major overhaul of lobbying laws in the state, are a watered-down version of reforms announced but never passed by former premier Dominic Perrottet before he lost power.
In the most significant change, the local government sector will be covered by lobbying rules for the first time.
While third-party lobbyists who work in the state and federal government spheres are required to be listed on a lobbying register and to adhere to ethical standards, no similar rules apply for local government. The NSW Special Minister of State John Graham said that “needs to change”…

Trump’s Unlikely Strategy to Control History: Footnotes

The Atlantic, no paywall: “Most of Donald Trump’s efforts to control the nation’s largest museum complex have been loud. 

He tried to fire a Smithsonian museum director on social media, ordered the placement of warning signs outside its American-history museum, and demanded that the museum take down a modernist sculpture he dislikes. But while this political theater plays out publicly, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget is quietly using an obscure funding power as part of its campaign to influence how the Smithsonian tells the American story. 

Late last month, according to previously unreported public records, OMB included a footnote in two recent apportionments of federal funds that conditions nearly $190 million for the Smithsonian on the institution’s compliance with Trump’s March 2025 executive order accusing it of spreading “divisive narratives.” Essentially, the White House is trying to force adherence to its preferred version of history through a little-known but legally binding budget mechanism. The fiscal-year-2027 footnote, which applies to funds carried over from last year in two of the Smithsonian’s main salaries and expenses accounts, reads:

To the extent permitted by law, amounts apportioned shall be available for obligation in a manner consistent with Executive Order 14253 (March 27, 2025), “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
That executive order marked the beginning of the Trump administration’s campaign to change the Smithsonian, alleging that the institution had come “under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” and prohibiting “expenditure on exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy.” The footnote does not specify how the Smithsonian should apply the order’s vague prohibition. But it is more than simply a threat: 
Apportionment footnotes are enforceable under the Antideficiency Act, the violation of which can carry criminal penalties. Such footnotes are one of several tactics that the Trump administration has used to try to supplant Congress’s spending power. In this case, the footnote suggests that the fight over the Smithsonian’s purpose goes much deeper than Trump’s most visible attacks…”

The Global Rise of Electoral Dictatorships. Is the U.S. Next? Midterms Could Decide

The Emancipator: “When Americans first elected Donald Trump president in 2016, there were nearly 4 billion people living in nations where they could vote in fair and competitive elections. 

Last year, when Trump took office again, this estimate had fallen by half, to barely above 2 billion  In the intervening years, the number of people barred from voting within conventional dictatorships (or “closed autocracies”) increased from an estimated 1.74 billion to 2.27 billion. But most of the decline in people who can vote in fair and competitive elections can be attributed to the global rise of what I call electoral dictatorships, also known as “electoral autocracies.” 

While elections are banned in conventional dictatorships, elections are regularly held in electoral dictatorships. But to ensure their continuous grip on power, the electoral dictators—who identify as presidents and prime ministers—hold uncompetitive and unfair elections after aggressively suppressing political opponents.

  • In 2016, an estimated 1.94 billion people lived in electoral dictatorships.
  • In 2025, 3.77 billion people did.
  • If Republicans retain control of Congress in the midterms, then an electoral dictatorship is likely to emerge in the United States…”

American High School Students Are Selling Guns Bound for Cartels

The New York Times, no paywall:  Drawn by money and status, teenagers in Arizona are buying, stealing and selling weapons destined for criminal groups in Mexico. They are too young to buy a beer and barely old enough to drive, yet these four teenage boys have already found their way into the criminal underworld. On weekends, they drive into the Sonoran Desert outside Phoenix. I watched them line up AR-15s and AK-style rifles against their cars, pose for photos and spend the afternoon shooting targets. 

At night, they head to parties, smoke pot and scroll endlessly through their social media feeds. These teenagers are part of a growing network of American high school students and young adults who are helping to arm some of Mexico’s most powerful and violent cartels, according to U.S. officials and trafficking experts who are tracking the trend. They source weapons like handguns and high-caliber rifles, and sell them almost exclusively to cartel operatives based in the United States, the teenagers said…”

See also CBS News: “…Gun rights: Viramontes v. Cook County and Grant v. Higgins. This latest Second Amendment dispute to arise following the Supreme Court’s landmark 2022 decision expanding gun rights involves state laws banning AR-15s and similar semiautomatic weapons. The two cases, which will be argued Dec. 2, involve a Connecticut law and an ordinance in Cook County, Illinois. Cook County’s prohibition was put in place nearly 20 years ago, while Connecticut tightened its rules for semiautomatic firearms after the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

 More than 10 states and the District of Columbia prohibit AR-15-style semiautomatic weapons. In both of the cases from Illinois and Connecticut, lower courts upheld the bans. The appeals courts each applied the new standard for determining the constitutionality of gun restrictions that the Supreme Court laid out in 2022, which requires the government to show that a law is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulation. In its ruling then, the Supreme Court recognized for the first time that the Second Amendment protects the right to carry a firearm outside the home. The justices have been asked to take up a number of challenges to longstanding federal and state gun laws in the years since. In 2024, the Supreme Court upheld a federal law that bars people subject to domestic violence restraining orders from having guns. 

Then, last year, it said that under the Second Amendment, the government cannot prosecute a habitual marijuana user for having a firearm. The high court also struck down a Hawaii law that required concealed-carry permit holders to receive permission before bringing their firearms onto private property that is open to the public. The Supreme Court had turned away challenges to laws from Maryland and Illinois banning AR-15s and other semiautomatic weapons, leaving those restrictions in place…”

Relevant and related, via The New York Times: Justice Dept. Turns to Partisans and Conspiracists to Fill Depleted Ranks. The civil rights unit has recruited people whose questionable work histories and dearth of education and experience might have disqualified them in the past, former officials said. 

A former prosecutor forced off a high-profile murder case for peeking at the defense team’s strategy documents. A onetime gambling executive who promoted conspiracy theories about the Las Vegas massacre in 2017. A Florida activist who once served 20 days in jail for hacking a local elections system. 

They are among the 130 lawyers who have recently joined the Justice Department’s short-staffed civil rights division as the Trump administration has struggled to fill the depleted ranks of a unit that was once a magnet for legal talent. Since early 2025, upward of 300 nonpolitical career employees, representing decades of experience, have left the division after its leader, Harmeet Dhillon, repurposed it to pursue President Trump’s agenda…”

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