- Iran's retaliatory measures seem to have escalated. A strike on natural gas facilities in Qatar has reportedly wiped out 17% of the country's export capacity for at least three years. Whether the MAGAts will be able to draw a connection between their Dear Leader's war and the inevitable increase in the cost of home heating is an open question. While a handful of those people might actually change their ways, the best possible outcome for most of them would be for them to become sufficiently disillusioned that they don't bother to vote anymore. And some will stubbornly keep voting for Trump and his associates out of sheer spite, taking consolation in the fact that it's directly hurting people that they hate - assuming that there are even meaningful elections by then.
- Generally, in a functioning democracy law enforcement is supposed to get a warrant to access private information such as cellphone location data. But what if this data is already being sold by data brokers? The FBI under Kash Patel has been buying data from said brokers in order to track people; defenders of the practice argue that this is publicly available information and thus a warrant should not be necessary. Maybe the real question we should be asking is whether this sort of data should be allowed to be sold on the open market in the first place. For instance, if the authorities can buy this data, then presumably so can a stalker.
- London mayor Sadiq Khan is calling on Labour to campaign on rejoining the EU in the next general election. Certainly some recent polling suggests that this might be a good move; the extent to which this would translate into actual votes is far from clear, though.
- The war in Iran has helped to focus the minds of European leaders on renewable energy. Trump wants to export more American natural gas to Europe, but the spike in prices instead incentivized Europeans to try to replace natural gas with renewables.
- In some parts of the world, you can buy solar panels that just plug into a regular outlet and feed power back into your house's wiring. In some US states, electric utilities are trying to keep them out, claiming that it's a safety concern for their lineworkers (suggesting that it could still lead to power being supplied to a line that a worker thinks is dead because it's not being powered by the utility). Advocates say that this hasn't been a problem in other places and suspect that what the utilities are really concerned about is the "safety" of their shareholders' investments.
- Russia has issued new guidelines for physicians, calling on doctors to ask women how many children they want and to refer them to psychologists if they give "zero" as an answer. The country has already imposed restrictions on abortion and prohibited "childfree propaganda", but evidently those measures aren't doing the job in bringing the birth rate up to a level acceptable to Putin.
- Two Texas-based scientists have found a way to make usable soil from simulated lunar surface material, by combining it with vermicompost and certain fungi which are effective at sequestering heavy metals so they aren't taken up by plants so much. They've managed to grow chickpeas to the point of producing seed, though the success of those seeds in producing new plants remains to be seen.
