New news out of Romania
Romanian prosecutors indict Andrew Tate on trafficking minors and money laundering
The agency said on Friday that Tate and his brother coerced a victim by pretending to be in a loving relationship and then forcing her to produce pornographic material for an online webcam business.
The charges in Romania comes on top of the 56 charges in the UK.
The Tate brothers are currently fighting extradition from the US to the UK in the US courts.
A few interesting stories and commentary I have come across recently
Who is Accountable for Measles Deaths?
I was on NewsNation this morning talking to Markie Martin about measles and the political mess that Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has created in Pennsylvania. Yesterday, Reuters reported that Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Erica Schwartz removed two measles deaths from the official tally on Kennedy’s orders.
I told Martin that this was not particularly surprising. Schwartz said in her confirmation hearing that she planned to “disagree in private” when confronted with unscientific requests from Kennedy. It appears that while Schwartz is busy disagreeing in private, she’s altering public-facing data on demand. She is just following orders, even when said orders are to mislead the public about the severity of measles.
This is justified by Schwartz and Kennedy with the erroneous claim that they died with measles, not from measles. This distinction is made up. If you die and test positive for measles, your death is counted as a measles death. As it should be.
Data Center Discontent Drives State Legislation Surge
Over the last year, fights between communities and data center developers have broken out of their local arenas and hit the national media. As awareness of the environmental and quality-of-life toll of data centers converged with a broader AI backlash, activists have been speaking up. And legislators, especially in the Statehouse, have been listening.
The boat strikes are, perhaps, the most stark testament to the lawlessness of the Trump administration.
Colorado high school students participate in statewide walkout to protest ICE
Hundreds of Denver students gathered at La Alma-Lincoln Park, where some clashed with counterprotesters
Looking from outside the current hellhole that is the US, I can’t help think about how the country will ever recover. My main conclusion is there has to be a real reckoning, where there are real consequences for the people who have broken the laws, and who have tried to kill democracy in the US.
This was something which should have been done already after the first Trump term, but unfortunately Biden and his administration were not the right people for this. They thought that they could make the US move on, and more or less forget Trump, and instead it created the opportunity for Trump to return and behave even worse.
The current US administration, and the people around it, have broken numerous laws, and they need to be hold accountable for that. But on top of that, a lot of people have enabled them to do so, especially some of the members of the Supreme Court. These need to be removed from their positions of power – through firings or impeachments, depending on their job.
On top of this, there should be something similar to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the Apartheid in South Africa, allowing the victims of the Trump administrations to speak out and tell their stories. It would also allow lower ranking officials to explain what they were ordered to do, and tell who ordered it.
I have little hope that Trump will ever go to jail, but several of his cohort, including his children and their spouses are deeply involved in criminal behavior, and should be possible to prosecute. As is Supreme Court Justice Thomas, who clearly has accepted bribes, and who in most other countries would not only be fired, but behind bars.
As part of the whole cleanup, it is also important to take a hard look at the laws, and tighten them, so future rogue presidents can’t break them with the help of a deeply partisan Supreme Court.
🚨BREAKING: Federal Court DISMISSES Department of Justice lawsuit to compel Illinois to provide its complete statewide voter registration database. Another big victory for Elias Law Group and its clients.
DOJ is now 0-19 in these cases. ELG remains undefeated. www.democracydocket.com/cases/illino…
— Marc Elias (@marcelias.bsky.social) 1. august 2026 kl. 00.27
This is great news. Once again an attempt to attack democracy by the Trump administration has been defeated.
As Democracy Docket explains in the linked page:
This marks the latest escalation in the DOJ’s efforts to obtain sensitive voter registration data from states across the country. In recent months, the DOJ has intensified its demands for voter information as part of a broader, politically charged push aimed at pressuring states to remove voters from the rolls and advancing the Trump administration’s unfounded claims of widespread illegal voting. The DOJ has now sued 30 states, plus Washington, D.C. — California, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Massachusetts, Georgia, Illinois, Wisconsin, Utah, Oklahoma, Kentucky, West Virginia, New Jersey, Connecticut, Arizona, Virginia, Idaho and Washington — all of which have refused to hand over unredacted voter files containing highly sensitive personal information.
Due to Andy Burnham stepping down as Mayor, in order to get elected to Parliament, so he could become the leader of Labour, there was a by-election to elect a new Mayor. Reform’s candidate was seem as having a good chance at winning, though most serious analysts expected Labour’s candidate to win.
Bev Craig will succeed Andy Burnham as mayor of Greater Manchester, securing a comfortable Labour victory over Reform on a historically low turnout.
Only one in four of the more than 2 million eligible voters across Greater Manchester cast ballots as Ms Craig defeated Reform UK’s Sian Astley in the second round – the first electoral test of Mr Burnham’s premiership.
Ms Craig won 47.15 per cent of votes in the first round, just short of the 50 per cent needed to win outright in the Supplementary Vote system, with Ms Astley, on 20.99 per cent.
It was the first time that a Greater Manchester mayoral election has gone to a second round, which Ms Craig won with 309,525 first and second place votes, ahead of Ms Astley on 157,178, to give her one of the country’s most powerful political jobs outside of Westminster.
By-elections, especially by-elections with low turnouts, usually favour the protest parties, so Reform ought to have been able to benefit from that, if they really were as popular as a lot of people claim they are. Instead they got solidly beaten by the establishment party.
There is a good analysis over at Bearly Politics: Turns Out Reform Isn’t Inevitable After All
Cancer is many things, so one tool or technique cannot be used against all, but even so, it is good news every time a new tool has been discovered that can help fight some cancers.
From ScienceDaily: Light switch wakes sleeping cancer cells and makes them vulnerable again
Some cancer cells evade treatment by entering a dormant state triggered by stress hormones. ETH Zurich scientists have created a light-controlled molecular switch that selectively destroys the receptors responsible for this survival mode. In laboratory lung cancer cells, the approach woke sleeping tumor cells and could help make future cancer therapies more effective while minimizing damage to healthy tissue.
It sounds counterintuitive that you want the cancer cells to be active, but the ScienceDaily article explains it:
In certain forms of cancer, including some types of lung cancer, stress hormones can trigger this response. Specialized proteins called glucocorticoid receptors detect those hormones inside tumor cells. Once activated, the receptors can push the cells into a dormant state where cell division slows dramatically. As a result, many therapies become far less effective.
So, in other words, we can only fight them effectively when they are active.
The ScienceDaily article is based upon the paper Light-controlled disruption of cancer cell dormancy via photoswitchable stress hormone receptor degraders by Karina M. Freitag et al in PNAS.
I will freely admit that the actual paper is a bit above my biochemistry level, but the “significance” section is fairly understandable, especially combined with the ScienceDaily writeup
Stress hormone signaling through the glucocorticoid receptor (GR) induces a reversible, drug-tolerant dormancy state in cancer cells. However, systemic GR depletion is not viable due to its essential roles in non-pathological physiology. In this study, we developed light-responsive Proteolysis Targeting Chimeras (photoPROTACs) that enable reversible, wavelength-specific control of GR degradation. PhotoPROTACs featuring arylazopyrazole photoswitches showed potent, isomer-dependent GR degradation and high target specificity at nanomolar concentrations. In addition, transcriptomic profiling in lung cancer cells revealed that only the active isomer disrupts dormancy-associated gene networks, highlighting the potential of photoPROTACs to target GR-driven dormancy exclusively in cancerous tissue.
I came across an interest research article in PLOS One:
What helps and hinders reproducible research? Researchers’ perspectives from a cross-disciplinary interview study by Magdalena Kozula et al.
Debates and policy initiatives addressing research reproducibility have expanded considerably in recent years. Yet, many of these measures remain generic and risk overlooking the lived realities of research practice. This study aims to explore researchers’ perspectives on the barriers, facilitators, and motivators that shape reproducible research across diverse fields and career stages, using qualitative methods. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 60 researchers affiliated with universities and research institutions across the European Union and the United Kingdom. Participants were sampled to ensure diversity in discipline, career stage, gender, and geography.
As is set forth already in the abstract, there are five themes for barriers and facilitators influencing reproducibility:
Looking at these themes it is hardly surprising that we are still facing reproducibility issues. As the abstract goes on to explain
Researchers described reproducibility as less of an individual choice but as a socially and institutionally mediated activity, dependent on enabling conditions such as supportive policies, adequate infrastructure, and equitable resource distribution. Reproducibility reform cannot rely solely on individual researcher commitment or one-size-fits-all policies. Effective interventions must account for disciplinary and methodological diversity, provide targeted resources and training, and realign incentive structures to reward transparency and rigour. These findings highlight reproducibility as a collective responsibility across the research ecosystem, requiring coordinated action by researchers, institutions, funders, and publishers. Promoting reproducible practices in this systemic, context-sensitive manner is essential for fostering a more credible, equitable, and sustainable scientific enterprise.
The scientific process is still the best way to find out things, but unfortunately, our current system rewards new findings over reproducing findings. New discoveries get papers in Science, Nature etc. while attempts at reproduction at best get a foot-note, unless they fail, and show some theory or discovery to be wrong. And even then, most of the time, they won’t get an paper, but at most a retraction of the original paper.
I work in the world of software development, where we have the concept of technical debt. This is stuff that we ought to do, or redo, but which we postpone until the costs and consequences of the “debt” is too high to ignore. It might be some complex piece of code, that really needs to be simplified, but which works – but every time anyone needs to change anything in it, something important breaks, and a lot of time needs to be spent on fixing it.
In my opinion reproducibility is the technical debt of the science fields. It can be ignored, until the costs are too high, and it turns out that the fundament a lot of work is based on, is deeply flawed.
One way of handling technical debt in software development, is to set aside a certain percentage of your time to go back and “pay” the debt. I.e. time where you actually revisit the issues and fix the problems instead of pushing it ahead in an ever increasing pile.
Maybe something similar could be done in research. Make sure that a certain percentage of resources are set aside to replicate findings from other peoples’ research. Not in order to debunk the work of others, but in order to make sure that the fundament the current research is built upon, is firm.
Anyway, please read the article, it is interesting and also shows clearly why we are nowhere near removing the barriers to reproducibility.
—
Something completely different; while reading the PLOS One research article, I couldn’t help think about a 2019 American Economic Review article:
Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time? by Pierre Azoulay, Christian Fons-Rosen, and Joshua S. Graff Zivin
We examine how the premature death of eminent life scientists alters the vitality of their fields. While the flow of articles by collaborators into affected fields decreases after the death of a star scientist, the flow of articles by non-collaborators increases markedly. This surge in contributions from outsiders draws upon a different scientific corpus and is disproportionately likely to be highly cited. While outsiders appear reluctant to challenge leadership within a field when the star is alive, the loss of a luminary provides an opportunity for fields to evolve in new directions that advance the frontier of knowledge
I can’t help we would something similar in regards to reproducibility. If there is a grand old man (and it is pretty much always a man) in a given field, it is highly unlikely that he and his disciples’ findings would be challenged on the grounds of reproducibility. However when the grand old man leaves the field, this might change and people will start question the validity of the original research, and try to reproduce it.
Today is Independence Day in USA – the 250th since the original one in 1776.
In 1776, Independence Day was about the USA becoming independent from the UK, and no longer be under the rule of the British King. Reading American history books, this is when Democracy was introduced in the US, often ignoring the fact that slavery was still ongoing, and that generally only property-owning/tax-paying white men could vote (for a more nuanced look, see the timeline of voting in the US).
Since the bírth of USA, a lot of things have happened – there was a large land purchase, a civil war, another large land purchase, an invasion, an annexation (later abandoned), numerous wars, Civil Rights Acts increasing democracy, and a number of other things. Looking at the situation 20 years ago, most would say that the US was a robust democratic country with some glaring flaws, especially related to race – but even in this area, the country was improving.
There were some democratic problems like the lack of voting for congress for Washington DC and Porto Rico and for convicted felons, even after they had served their time.
But all in all things looked good, and we expected it to improve.
That was twenty years ago though. Now, the situation is much different.
Trump, the GOP and the current US Supreme Court has dismantled the railguards of democracy, nearly killed the Civil Right Acts, removing bodily autonomy from women, and making partisan decision allowing the GOP to gerrymander and disfranchise people. Now, I can best describe the US as a near-totalitarian kleptographykleptocracy where one party is enriching itself, and trying to keep in power by all means. And this doesn’t even begin to address how the rampant bigotry and oppression of marginalized groups.
I hope the midway election can change this, but in order for this to happen, the voters must vote out the GOP every way the can, in every position – the GOP has shown that they can use every position available to create mayhem, oppress people and disrupt democracy.
A bunch of links to interesting content that I have come across on the internet
Public Health professor’s ‘Coverage Denied’ book dives into health insurance quagmire
Unlike most of us who stress out over and decry the ever-escalating cost and complexities of health insurance coverage, Pitt’s Miranda Yaver did something about it. She wrote a book.
Rather than a hollow rant on over-familiar complaints, however, “Coverage Denied: How Health Insurers Drive Inequality in the United States,” points to possible paths forward. Published by Cambridge University Press and released on April 23, “Coverage Denied” — loaded with data as well as patient and physician narratives culled from 111 interviews — lays out a number of coverage-reform proposals.
US health care and health coverage is unfortunately still an incredibly important subject. The steep increase in health care costs for many Americans certainly hasn’t made the subject any less relevant.
What if all you knew was extremist politics? Welcome to being young in America.
Fascinating article about how the young people in USA has never known a time without extremist politics. Those of us, who are older, can remember a time before regular school shootings, Trump and far-right talking points being pushed by main-stream right-winged media, but this has been part of the whole life of young people – the first president they remember is Trump.
Why you should keep getting mRNA vaccines
The COVID pandemic ushered mRNA vaccines into the spotlight, and the technology has even greater potential. Here’s what to know about the way that they work, their safety, and more.
The article is very US-centric, focusing on US politics and US numbers (the cite a study showing that mRNA covid vaccines prevented 8 million infection in the first six months, without mentioned that this was in the US alone – worldwide numbers were much higher). Even so, the fundamental message is still worth spreading – mRNA is a safe type of vaccines, and we should use this technology in the future.
Half of the population in Dallas County, Alabama, where Selma is located, was African American in 1965. But less than 2% of the county’s registered voters were Black. That wasn’t for lack of trying. They were excluded by systematic racism. Leaders like John Lewis and Martin Luther King Jr. understood that being denied rights was intolerable, and that nothing would change until Black Americans had the same ability to exercise the right to vote that white citizens did.
Alabama newspapers largely ignored events leading up to Bloody Sunday in Montgomery. As marchers approached the state capitol, the local press spilled more ink over what Governor Wallace was eating for lunch as the marchers approached the city (“Roast beef, green beans, corn muffins, sliced peaches, plastic-wrapped chocolate cakes, buttermilk and iced tea,”) than they did on the march itself.
It was national media coverage that drew the public’s attention to what was happening. On March 7, 1965, when a then-25-year-old John Lewis led over 600 peaceful marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma and was met with brutality from state troopers, it was the footage shown on network news that night that shocked the nation’s conscience into finally doing something. By Sunday, March 21, 1965, with the country’s attention focused on them and joined by Dr. King, the original 600 protesters swelled to close to 8,000 people and the march from Selma to Montgomery began. A federal judge, Frank Johnson, ordered the troopers who had attacked them previously to protect them. By the end of the year, the Voting Rights Act was passed and signed into law.
Protest is brewing again in Selma. In the wake of Callais, and the overt gerrymandering and dilution of the Black vote that the Supreme Court now says is legal, protestors marched today.
Once again Selma is at the front of the fight for civil rights, and once again they are largely ignored by national newspapers and other media.
Turkeys Circling A Dead Cat Are Probably Wary, Not Working Dark Magic
I think I will let the headline speak for itself, except that I will link a bluesky post that includes a gif of the video that the article mentions, since it is no longer on twitter – and since you shouldn’t give twitter traffic
— grooveholmes.bsky.social (@grooveholmes.bsky.social) 15. maj 2026 kl. 04.08
If the embedded post doesn’t show, you can go to it here.
You Can’t Build Useful Alliances With Fascists, Dumbass
I hope we all now understand that forging strategic policy partnerships with fascists is like trying to develop an intimate relationship with a running chainsaw.
Great piece by Karl Bode
USAID shutdown has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths
The dismantling of USAID, according to models from Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols, “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children,” Gawande wrote. He noted that the toll will continue to grow and may go unseen because it can take months or years for people to die from lack of treatments or vaccine-preventable illnesses—and because deaths are scattered.
“We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed ‘public man-made death,’” Gawande wrote.
This was back in November. Think of how many hundred of thousands of deaths the decision has caused since then.
Looking at the same model as the article is referring to, the impact after a year is 262,915 adult deaths and 518,428 child deaths, so 781,343 total deaths.
For some reason the impactcounter has been retired, but we can assume that the impact after the first year will be similar to the impact afterwards. This means that Trump, Musk and the Doge team have the blood of millions on their hands.
I travelled a bit around in Japan around Christmas and New Year, and decided to stay for a couple of days around New Years Eve in Shizuoka, which lies between Nagoya and Tokyo.
Unfortunately for me, while the Japanese doesn’t celebrate Christmas, they do celebrate New Year, and most museums and other attractions were closed in the week containing the New Year. This mean that I spend a lot of time walking around outside, sightseeing.
One thing I noticed in Shizuoka, is there model city sculptures
Apparently, Shizuoka produces more than 80% of model kits in Japan, and the city decided to embrace this fact. This is all very well explained on this page (there is a video): The Model City 1:1 Scale
Not all the models they mention in the video seems to have been created, but I did find a few while walking around in the city – they are documented on my Instagram feed