Death toll from elementary school attack in Iran rises to 85: Report The number of people killed in a strike at an elementary girls’ school in Minab, in the southern province of Hormozgan, has now risen to 85, according to the semi-official Tasnim news agency. The number could not be immediately verified.
Your tax dollars at work
28.02.2026 16:15 — 👍 264 🔁 97 💬 6 📌 18
New — I spoke to eight trans people in Kansas about the new state law that invalidated their driver’s licenses overnight, what’s it’s like to live there right now, plus details of two DMV emails exclusively obtained by The Handbasket that shed light on the law’s chaotic and cruel rollout:
28.02.2026 00:12 — 👍 4993 🔁 2099 💬 90 📌 98
Today, @biographic.bsky.social published its first special issue:
Conservation Enters a New Era
One year after the Trump administration slashed biodiversity protections at home and abroad, people and organizations are figuring out where to go from here.
www.biographic.com/conservation...
AD ASTRA PER ASPERA Kansas Department of Revenue Division of Vehicles Phone: 785-296-3671 Fax: 785-296-0691 www.ksrevenue.gov Laura Kelly, Governor Driver's License 300 SW 29th Street PO Box 2188 Topeka KS 66601-2188 Mark A. Burghart, Secretary February 23, 2026 Dear Kansas Credential Holder: House Substitute for Senate Bill 244, enacted by the Kansas Legislature overriding Governor Kelly's veto, requires Kansas-issued driver's licenses and identification cards to reflect the credential holder's sex at birth and directs the Division of Vehicles to comply with K.S.A. 77-207. What does this mean for you? If you have received this notice, our records indicate that, upon publication of this law in the Kansas Register on Thursday, February 26, 2026, your current Kansas credential will no longer be valid. Additionally, please note that the Legislature did not include a grace period for updating credentials. This means that once the law is officially enacted, your current credential will be invalid immediately, and you may be subject to additional penalties if you are operating a vehicle without a valid credential. What do you need to do? Pursuant to this new law, if the gender/sex indication on the face of your current credential does not match your sex assigned at birth, you are directed to surrender your current credential to the Kansas Division of Vehicles. Upon surrendering the credential, you will be issued a new credential reflecting the gender identification consistent with statutory requirements. If you have any questions regarding procedures for obtaining a legally compliant credential, please contact the Kansas Division of Vehicles or visit your local driver licensing office. Can you appeal this notice? Yes. If you believe you have received this notice in error, you may appeal. Appeal rights are available under K.S.A. 8-259. However, please be advised that the filing of an appeal will not preserve the validity of your current credential and associated driving au…
2. The letter, which has been reported to Erin In The Morning by a Kansas-based activist, states that under House Substitute for Senate Bill 244, Kansas trans people must immediately surrender their licenses.
26.02.2026 01:06 — 👍 1450 🔁 365 💬 22 📌 59
“Del Bigtree told me he wants his teenage son to catch polio. Measles, too. He’s considered driving his unvaccinated family to South Carolina, which is in the midst of a historic outbreak, so that they can all be exposed… He’s more than anti-vaccine: He’s pro-infection.”
25.02.2026 00:17 — 👍 359 🔁 94 💬 21 📌 228
In a 5-minute phone call to dispatchers, a federal immigration officer requests police backup last October to help with a kid tailing him on a motorized bicycle. "I need someone here now, or else I'm going to have to shoot this kid," the officer said on a recording of the call obtained by OPB.
25.02.2026 15:00 — 👍 973 🔁 556 💬 48 📌 121
Poster which shows color photo scene of moving, a room with boxes and clothes sitting on the floor, a chair, and the end of a bed (white rails forming a headrest and a mattress with a red cover). The text of the poster is: "Impact (small logo top left)," "According to a new survey by the Movement Advancement Project, approximately 401,000 transgender people have relocated from one U.S. state to another since the 2024 presidential election." "The mass relocations in 2025 due to safety concerns, political conditions, and anti-trans laws nd policies have largely impacted conservative states across the country."
www.mapresearch.org/2025-norc-su...
24.02.2026 18:41 — 👍 2138 🔁 699 💬 69 📌 209It’s also notable that the Fox Varian case was noted, but not the point that she had the support of WPATH and that WPATH said their standards were not met?
24.02.2026 20:56 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
If I have to hear about weak evidence bases one more time…
It is good to be skeptical of science. Science is BY DEFINITION skeptical of science. BUT the evidence base for youth trans healthcare resembles the evidence base for many types of pediatric healthcare!! So why only focus on trans folks?
Ashley Fairbanks @ziibiing.com launched Stand With Minnesota standwithminnesota.com, a mutual aid repository supporting residents under ICE's siege, in early Jan. in the weeks since, it's facilitated covering people's rents and flown folks detained back home from Texas.
she can help you do it, too.
🧟♀️Aurora Comes Online tomorrow!!🧟
Today is the last day to pre-order your copy from @gameoverbooks.bsky.social before the book enters the world. (Link in bio)
Credit to @hencarnell.bsky.social for this awesome video.
📚🪐
If you are looking for the latest examples of deepfakes in the wild, bookmark our deepfakestracker.org research portal. It features a searchable dashboard of fact-checks re: deepfakes and out-of-context or manipulated media from professional fact-checkers.
23.02.2026 11:57 — 👍 7 🔁 7 💬 0 📌 0
Jeffrey Epstein and his network of rich freaks were obsessed with the chiropractor: defector.com/jeffrey-epst...
23.02.2026 17:58 — 👍 80 🔁 19 💬 0 📌 15
The cover of Aurora Comes Online: poems by Haley Bossé. The background of the cover is a green and blue digitized photo of a human torso. The letters are bubbly and translucent like hard plastic
It’s COVER REVEAL DAY! 🧟♀️🖥️🐍
‼️Aurora Comes Online on February 24th‼️
If you ❤️ revenge horror, messy queers, the downfall of AI, video games, coding, and other nerdiness pre-order now 🪐📚
www.gameoverbooks.com/store/p/auro...
I have devoted much of my weather & climate career to engaging with journalists--including 200-300 news media interviews per year, many of which involve recurring conversations to facilitate timely & contextually accurate coverage. This recent collapse has been stunning and deeply disconcerting.
22.02.2026 20:56 — 👍 277 🔁 91 💬 10 📌 3
More than 75,000 Post readers cancelled their subscriptions after the recent cuts. An even larger number bailed after Bezos killed the endorsement of Harris, but now the decline feels terminal. Bezos does not want a great paper with a conservative opinion page (like the Wall Street Journal). He seemingly barely wants a paper at all, treating one of the most important American media institutions like an embarrassing child from a previous marriage that no longer fits his lifestyle.
This sounds unbelievable but its true: since Bezos acquired The Post, his wealth has grown tenfold and the Post has been cut in half.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-trust-...
The headline does not convey how completely batshit this story is. The Archive Today (archive.ph etc) admin weaponized the site's captcha to attack a blogger who wrote about them and *altered archived screenshots* as part of the attack.
arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...
The National Science Foundation’s entire budget is $10 billion.
21.02.2026 18:02 — 👍 934 🔁 376 💬 11 📌 9For people who are unclear on this, archive dot org is the digital archive run by the Internet Archive, and archive dot today is the archiving site that Wikipedia just banned the use of because they were caught changing the contents of archived pages in their collection.
21.02.2026 17:34 — 👍 61 🔁 34 💬 1 📌 0
A lot of people, including me, were wondering how an IRB could ever approve this study.
The answer is that no IRB did. The person who “signed off” on approval from the only ethics board that reviewed it had resigned three years earlier. His signature was used without his knowledge.
In a study published today, researchers reported that the ideal conditions for major wildfires are now aligning across different parts of the world at more than double the rate they did 50 years ago.
@umairfan.bsky.social for @vox.com: www.vox.com/climate/4795...
BREAKING: Trump admin issues new policy aimed at ending transgender-related care in federal prisons.
"It's a really dangerous policy,” an ACLU lawyer representing trans people in federal prison suing the Trump administration tells Law Dork of the new Bureau of Prisons policy.
The political effects of X's feed algorithm https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2 Received: 16 December 2024 Accepted: 4 January 2026 Published online: 18 February 2026 Open access • Check for updates Germain Gauthier,5, Roland Hodler?5, Philine Widmer35 & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya3,4,5 m Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects'. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk's platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users' feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X's algorithm has persistent effects on users' current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.
A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitter’s algorithmic feed significantly shifts people’s political views to the right.
Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement.
This is one of the most concerning papers I’ve read in awhile.
Superb article addressing the controversy regarding our #EBM research – #SystematicReviews of the #evidence regarding #GenderAffirming care in #adolescence and early #adulthood – probably the best yet. Great commentary on my views versus those of #SEGM.
www.motherjones.com/politics/202...
A white, non-binary person with long dark-brown hair holds up a book that says "Aurora Comes Online." Their shirt says "The future is non-binary." They also hold up a mini bottle of champagne.
Happy print day to the one and only @talkinghyphae.bsky.social 🤖🍄🌿🌋🫀
18.02.2026 21:47 — 👍 2 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0
Delirious Cold War panic has been swapped out for noxious trans panic, but the result will be the same: athletes will be punished for no good reason.
@michaelwaters.bsky.social on chromosome testing at the Olympics is a must-read
defector.com/chromosome-t...
They just talk as though the public spontaneously lurched to the right on a few specific issues -- sports, restrooms. And now they just take that as a given, a fact that trans supporters must work around.
But how did that happen? Anyone? It's fucking *bizarre* they never even raise the question.
This whole fight over transgender stuff happening on X is so weird to me. The most notable thing about trans issues in the last 5 years has been the enormous, coordinated anti-trans activism campaign across the right, aided by moral cowards in the center.
But that campaign is *never mentioned*.
when big tech companies say that AI will save the planet, what kinds of AI are they actually talking about — and what's their proof? i took a look at some great new research from @ketanjoshi.co and talked to other experts about how a lot of this talk is probably bullshit:
18.02.2026 15:19 — 👍 270 🔁 106 💬 13 📌 8
