Rex Brynen

CNN Academy at University College Dublin

Earlier this month CNN Academy ran a two-week journalism summer school in Ireland in partnership with the Clinton Institute at University College Dublin. The first week focused on developing journalism skills, while the second week saw students testing…

He's right, and it's not just Brazil.

Around the world, at least 31 democratic leaders who committed similar crimes have been jailed or banned from office since 2010. The failure to hold Trump accountable in the US was a unique and systemic failure of our institutions and political culture.

Screenshot of a news article from The Globe and Mail with the headline: "Judge halts deportation of non-binary American in landmark ruling after Trump’s gender edicts." The article is written by Marie Woolf and was published in Ottawa 4 hours ago, with an update 3 hours ago. The website navigation bar includes links to Home, For You, Canada, World, Business, Investing, and Personal Finance.

In a major precedent setting move, a Canadian federal judge blocked the deportation of a nonbinary US citizen because the Canadian immigration office failed to adequately assess the conditions for LGBTQ people since Trump took office.

archive.ph/Q722T

YouTube video by Rex Brynen CNN Academy UCD 2025

Just wrapped up a terrific two weeks of CNN Academy at University College Dublin - a week of intense training, followed by a week of even more intense simulation set in the fictional country of Brynania, addressing issues of digital disinformation. youtu.be/Rt-EPqMBpFc?...

STAGGERING: This new study of 133 countries is the first to estimate the impact of all USAID’s work. In 2 decades, it has saved *92M* lives. Current cuts, if not reversed, are forecast to cost up to *14M* lives thru 2030. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

McGill Alumni in Manila - Evening Discussion McGill alumni and friends are invited to join our evening talk. Fifty Years of Philippine Labor Migration: Ch...

Professors Kazue Takamura and Erik Martinez Kuhonta have been invited by the McGill alumni association of Manila to give a talk on their research: Fifty Years of Philippine Labor Migration: Challenges and Reforms
alumni.mcgill.ca/aoc/events-t...

Astonishing story. Huge questions over the company culture that allowed this. www.ft.com/content/c0e6...

The (Australian) Army Battle Lab’s Professional Gaming List 2025

The Australian Army Battle Lab has published an updated list of (war)games that they feel are useful in military professional development: DG TRADOC's Professional Gaming List was released in 2022 (See DGTRADOC's Professional Gaming…

Simulation & Gaming (August 2025)

The latest edition of Simulation & Gaming 56, 4 (August 2025) is now available. Editorial A Balancing Act: How to Mitigate Overregulation in Healthcare Playfully Marlies P. Schijven and Toshiko Kikkawa Research Articles Play for the Future: A Cross-Sectional Study…

RFK Jr. says US won’t donate to global vaccine effort Kennedy ripped into Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, in a video address at its pledging summit.

This is a travesty & a nightmare. The US was a founder of @gavi.org. It lowers global vaccine costs, has vaccinated 1B children, & averted 19M deaths. This pull out will cost 100s of thousands of children's lives a year - and RFK Jr will be personally responsible.
www.politico.com/news/2025/06...

@kit-barry.bsky.social has built a small game with data we provided to help visualise just how relentless the Telegraph has been in platforming anti-trans narratives over the past year.

See if you can keep up with the sheer volume.

Sometimes data hits harder when you feel it!

Connections US 2025 registration now open

Registration for the 2025 Connections (U.S.) conference is now open. This year the conference is hosted by Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) at their Kossiakoff Conference and Education Center in Laurel, MD. The form linked…

noem saying thery're going to "liberate" california from its leaders seconds before federal law enforcement restrains and removes one of the state's senators from the room—like what else needs to be said

When a cabinet member announces "We are using the military to liberate an American city from its elected leaders," where do you go from there. What is left to say. The idea of that being anything short of a near-universal "Wait, what the fuck is going on" moment proves how far we've backslid.

DHS is also lying about him being repeatedly told to back away. The video shows the men who pushed him don’t even open their mouths, they just grab him and get them out of the room without saying a word.

Padilla: If this is how DHS responds to a senator with a question you can only imagine what they're doing to farm workers, to cooks, to day laborers out in the Los Angeles community and throughout California.

EXCLUSIVE: American Security Contractor Unloads On US-Israeli ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’ I thought I was signing up for an aid mission. But what I've witnessed in Gaza is horrific.

EXCLUSIVE: American Security Contractor Unloads On US-Israeli ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’

Yes, maybe someday someone will write a book about all the stuff that happened in international politics after World War II. I guess until then, we just won't know. 🙄

Remarkable to watch the US isolate itself by disparaging allies that fought and died alongside it, by betraying local allies like the Afghans who sided with us, and by looking to shred collective defense deals like AUKUS.

(Also, as a Canadian, go fuck yourself Pete)

This is a real thing being posted and circulated by the Department of Homeland Security, referring to undocumented immigrants as “foreign invaders” and urging good Americans to turn them in.

(I’ll leave it to BlueSky historians to find comparisons to WWII era materials.)

Good, and long overdue move: Canada joins allies (UK, Australia, New Zealand) in imposing sanctions on two far-right Israeli ministers, Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.

The Overton Window has shifted all the way to ban all non-white people from coming to America. It was never about illegal immigration.

European Vales Center for Security Policy: Chinese quarantine of Taiwan resulting in European paralysis 

The following piece was written for PAXsims by an anonymous contributor. In a previous entry from a PAXsims reader wrote a commentary on report on a series of games on (or related to)…

Prigozhin 2.0

This is the dinner bell being rung for political consultants.

All across the country, they have started salivating without knowing why.

The more sensitive among them have suddenly felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if billions of dollars have suddenly cried out "some take me."

WWN: Wargaming training series

The Women's Wargaming Network will be holding a 6 week live Zoom course on professional wargaming, taught by Dr. Yuna Wong. You'll find full details and a registration link at the WWN website.

Connections UK 2025 tickets live

Tickets are now live for the Connections UK 2025 conference for wargaming professionals (9-11 September 2025 at Brunel University). Tickets cost £250 for three days, including lunch. There are also a limited number of supported places for students. As usual, there…

Fight Club International: Designing wargames for PME

Fight Club International has recently recorded a number of webinars on designing wargames for professional military education, featuring —to date—Philip Buckingham (Canadian Army), Andrew Somerville (Australian Army), and Nicholas Royer (US…

Mission Critical: Climate and Security Game Jam

Posted on behalf of Archipelago of Design. Wargaming Community, We’re excited to invite you to take part in a new international initiative at the intersection of game design, climate adaptation, and security innovation. The Archipelago of Design…

Some people deny reality because they’re confused.
Some deny it because they’re scared.
Some because they’re angry.
But then there’s something deeper, something more organised.
Something I call disordered denial.