Your Authorized Distributor of Bad Timing
Today is National Bow Tie Day, National Cherry Turnover Day, and National Red Wine Day. The bow tie is what a necktie becomes when it stops pretending to cover anything and starts warning strangers you do card tricks. Red Wine Day is the only holiday a doctor can technically endorse, right up until the second glass talks you into the third. The turnover is a pie that folded under questioning.
And now, the news.
NEPAL: The toll we ran at 270 yesterday is past 469, with about 977 still missing and a barrier lake that breached Thursday, threatening a second wave over the crews still digging. The seismometers in the US and Germany logged an earthquake; there wasn't one. It was the glacier coming down — no rain first, so nothing for any warning system to hear. 🦆
OSLO: Europe's oldest reigning monarch reigned 35 years and, as a young man, spent nine years wearing down his father for permission to marry his own girlfriend. His son becomes King Haakon VIII and inherits a crown, a country, and his wife's freshly surfaced letters to Jeffrey Epstein. Support for the monarchy dropped from 72% to 54% in a year — a rough poll for a job that is entirely popularity. 🦆
THE HAGUE: The Bosnian Serb general directed the 1995 Srebrenica massacre — more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys — and the 44-month siege of Sarajevo. He spent nearly 16 years on the run, drew life in 2017, and died this week at 83, or maybe 84; nobody's sure and nobody's mourning. The genocide a court convicted him of was denied 149 times in Bosnia this quarter alone — he finally quit denying it too, just by dying. 🦆
STRAIT OF HORMUZ: Six months into the war we keep running, Navy divers and SEALs quietly pulled Iran's mines from the shipping lanes. Iran called it "propaganda" and kept the strait shut anyway — Tehran would hate for anyone's oil to feel calm. Traffic's down to single digits a day against last year's 138, yet pipeline-brained Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent swears it all goes "irrelevant" in two years — says who? Pipes can't carry that, and liquefied gas has no pipe at all. 🦆
The AI company Anthropic asked one thing before letting the Pentagon near its models — don't point them at autonomous weapons or at spying on Americans. The thin-skinned Pentagon wanted unlocked doors, didn't get them, and branded Anthropic a "supply chain risk" — the obscure label built to keep foreign saboteurs out of weapons systems. First time that saboteur-catcher ever swung at an American company — the sabotage being a contract clause — and Judge Rita Lin in San Francisco threw the whole thing out Thursday. The Pentagon plans to appeal, because the cure for losing a retaliation case is obviously more retaliation. 🦆
The Supreme Court killed the tariffs in February, and $160 billion is flowing back to the importers who paid at the border and quietly buried the charge in your receipt. You ate the markup; they collect the refund. Costco and Nintendo shoppers are suing for a cut, while one woman still waits on the extra $3,500 a 145% tariff tacked onto her wheelchair. The only customers made whole: FedEx, UPS and DHL itemized the tariff, so honesty turned out to be the loophole. 🦆
GHANA: President John Mahama counts $78.2 million torn out of the health budget, the childhood-vaccine slice of a $156 million hole Washington opened and walked away from. These were the shots that were finally winning, now left to collapse over an American spreadsheet's rounding error. No taxpayer here pays a cent more, no headline breaks, and a few thousand miles off a kid just doesn't get the shot. 🦆
"The problem with political jokes is they get elected."— Henry Cate VII
The FDA cleared the updated Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax shots against the XFG variant, then quietly trimmed who counts as invited. It's an automatic yes at 65-plus or with a qualifying condition, and a "talk to your pharmacist" for everyone else — code for an insurer who may not pay. Novavax stays the lone non-mRNA holdout, shipping in days to whoever's still on the list. 🦆
They studied 112,000 US health professionals — the people who tell you to cut soda. The daily-drinkers ran about 2.5 times the gastric-cancer risk of the once-a-month set, near triple for women. It's observational, a link and not a verdict. But diet soda drew no extra risk in the same data — the rare nutrition study where the fake sugar plays the hero. 🦆
It topped out at 431 sick across 32 states and 57 hospitalized, no deaths, all of it traced to one grower's jalapeños in Sinaloa. Chipotle swapped suppliers in July and Qdoba pulled the peppers; the case curve flattened and stayed flat. One farm, a whole lot of ruined burritos, zero funerals — file it under wins. 🦆
The tender for the E1 corridor — the strip that would split the West Bank in two — is open through October 19, a week before Israel's election, and nothing's been built. The UK has threatened sanctions; Europe has formally demanded a halt. It's a land grab that so far exists only as a form and a deadline. 🦆
A Berkeley team pulled two unknown human lineages out of modern DNA — no fossils, no ancient bone, just the genomes of people alive today. One split off 800,000 years ago and still makes up about 1% of you, right up there with Neanderthal. The other, a "super-archaic" branch 1.8 million years old, reached you secondhand through the Denisovans — a great-uncle relayed by a cousin who's also extinct. Two mystery relatives the whole time, and the DNA had your address all along. 🦆
Yansheng Zhang's Cambridge team cooled potassium atoms into a flat cloud, tucked a quantum field inside, and got an image of the vacuum fidgeting when it thought no one was looking. Then they proved it was the vacuum shaking, not the camera. A vacuum is where nothing is supposed to happen, which makes a candid of it seething faintly rude. It's an August preprint nobody's reviewed, so file it under "probably." 🦆
SEATTLE: Interlune, a lunar-mining startup too impatient to wait for the sun, blasted helium ions at fake Moon soil about 32 million times faster than our star manages. That crammed millennia of weathering into four hours, all to build regolith realistic enough to test its helium-3 harvesters on Earth before they fly. It worked — the squeezed-out helium matched real Apollo samples, and somewhere the sun is quietly updating its résumé. 🦆
The screwworm we flagged in Sonora on Tuesday kept walking north, so the FDA issued an emergency clearance to use ivermectin on cattle against it. The very same livestock dewormer that spent 2021 getting mistaken for a COVID cure turns out to be excellent at the thing it was always for: deworming livestock. The horse paste goes home. 🦆
IRELAND: For about 30 years, a pile of bones from Ferriter's Cove in County Kerry stood as the earliest proof of farmed cattle in Ireland and Britain. Then a Dublin team ran the proteins through a mass spectrometer and the "cattle" came back as bear and wild boar. Three decades of prehistory rested, load-bearing, on one lab's confident misreading of dinner. Fittingly, the correction ran in a newsletter literally called Past. 🦆
That's the firehose. Switch to the diet soda you've spent years apologizing for, and if a company owes you a tariff refund, mail the store a thank-you card — that's where your money went. And when a Treasury Secretary calls the world's busiest oil strait "irrelevant," ask him when he last saw a boat. Tomorrow is International Day Against Nuclear Tests, National Chop Suey Day, and National Lemon Juice Day — a solemn plea against the bomb, a dish invented to use up the leftovers, and a condiment that got itself a whole holiday. Observe the first sincerely, eat the second without asking what's in it, and let the lemon juice stay in its lane.
Until next time —
Ya roasted!
— Roastie