Powderhorn

A wildlife photographer on a whale-watching trip in waters off Seattle captured dramatic video and photos of a pod of killer whales hunting a seal that survived only by clambering on to the stern of her boat.

Charvet Drucker was on a rented 20ft (6 metre) boat near her home on an island in the Salish Sea about 40 miles north-west of Seattle when she spotted a pod of at least eight killer whales, also known as orcas.

The orcas’ coordinated movements and tail slaps suggested they were hunting. Drucker used the zoom lens on her camera to spot a harbor seal that was trying to flee from the pod. One of her shots showed the seal flying through the air above the scrum of orcas frothing the water, and she assumed she was witnessing the seal’s last moments alive.

But as the orcas got closer to the boat, Drucker and her group realized the pod was still chasing the seal. In line with wildlife boating regulations, they had cut the engine to prevent any injury to the whales. The seal clambered out of the water and on to a swimming platform at the stern of the boat near the motor – claiming it as a life raft of sorts.

Video included in story.

When President Donald Trump told reporters on Sept. 5 he’d started looking at sending the National Guard to Portland, Oregon, he said it was because of something he saw on television.

He said the city was being destroyed by paid agitators. “What they’ve done to that place, it’s like living in hell,” he said, a comment that became an internet meme as some Portland residents juxtaposed it with tranquil images of the city.

Trump didn’t say which channel he watched; he said at one point he saw something “today” and at another “last night.”

The evening before, on Sept. 4, Fox News aired a two-and-a-half-minute segment spotlighting protests outside a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Portland. Similar footage aired the morning of Trump’s remarks. The president went on to announce Sept. 27 on Truth Social that he would send troops, saying that he was “authorizing Full Force, if necessary.”

He later said he’d told Oregon’s governor, Tina Kotek, that “unless they’re playing false tapes, this looked like World War II. Your place is burning down.”

ProPublica examined months of Fox News’ coverage and reviewed more than 700 video clips posted to social media by protesters, counterprotesters and others in the three months preceding the Sept. 4 broadcast.

The domain looked rather suspicious, and I'm not entirely certain this wasn't "written with the help of AI," but they actually list citations. The sheer scale of this across multiple sectors should put any fears that we're not in a recession to rest.

This many layoffs, reorgs and "flattenings" (while jettisoning underperforming products and services) doesn't say "economic growth." Middle management doesn't get the axe when the excrement is happily cooped up a full plane ride away from the oscillator.

And we're talking hundreds of thousands of layoffs at minimum in the U.S. alone. That's going to drastically alter the labour market while also reducing consumer spending.

We've only just begun.

The year 2025 has become one of the most turbulent periods for the global workforce in recent history. Across major industries, from technology and energy to automotive and pharmaceuticals, thousands of employees have faced layoffs as companies restructure to adapt to changing market conditions. Rising operational costs, slower revenue growth, and the accelerating shift toward automation and artificial intelligence have reshaped corporate priorities worldwide.

These large-scale job cuts highlight a broader trend in the global economy: businesses are redefining efficiency, focusing on digital transformation, and preparing for long-term sustainability amid uncertain demand. While some layoffs are driven by declining profits, others reflect a strategic move to reallocate resources toward high-growth areas such as AI, renewable energy, and cloud infrastructure.

This article reviews the most significant layoffs of 2025 to provide a clear overview of how global corporations are navigating a year marked by transformation, cost restructuring, and shifting workforce dynamics.

First, they came for the editors. And I was an editor, so I was fucked.

Then, they came for the designers. And I was a designer, so I was fucked.

Then, they came for the writers. And they used too many em-dashes.

Clear enough where this goes. This said, while music and language are obviously both artistic endeavours, the former is far more geared toward generative content.

Gibberish in iambic pentameter is useless, but an eight-bar hook with tried-and-true chord progressions, plus a few layers to keep things marginally interesting? And then a quick prompt for lyrics?

It's unsurprising that decades of formulaic label tripe can't be distinguished from generated music.

Three songs generated by artificial intelligence topped music charts this week, reaching the highest spots on Spotify and Billboard charts.

Walk My Walk and Livin’ on Borrowed Time by the outfit Breaking Rust topped Spotify’s “Viral 50” songs in the US, which documents the “most viral tracks right now” on a daily basis, according to the streaming service. A Dutch song, We Say No, No, No to an Asylum Center, an anti-migrant anthem by JW “Broken Veteran” that protests against the creation of new asylum centers, took the top position in Spotify’s global version of the viral chart around the same time. Breaking Rust also appeared in the top five on the global chart.

“You can kick rocks if you don’t like how I talk,” reads a lyric from Walk My Walk, a seeming double entendre challenging those opposed to AI-generated music.

Days after its ascent up the charts, the Dutch song disappeared from Spotify and YouTube, as did Broken Veteran’s other music. Spotify told the Dutch outlet NU.nl that the company had not removed the music, the owners of the song rights had. Broken Veteran told the outlet that he did not know why his music had disappeared and that he was investigating, hoping to return it soon.

A stat of note:

AI music has improved in quality from its early, clanking days. As part of its study, Deezer surveyed 9,000 people in eight countries and found that 97% could not distinguish between AI-generated music and human-written music.

Begun, the water wars have.

State negotiators embroiled in an impasse over how to manage the imperiled Colorado River were unable to agree on a plan before a federally set deadline on Tuesday, thrusting deliberations deeper into uncertain territory.

Stakeholders have spent months working to iron out contentious disagreements over how to distribute water from this sprawling basin – which supplies roughly 40 million people in seven states, 5.5m acres of farmland, dozens of tribes and parts of Mexico – as the resources grow increasingly scarce.

Long-term overuse and the rising toll from the climate crisis have served as a one-two punch that’s left the system in crisis.

Enough progress was made to warrant an extension, according to a joint statement issued by federal officials and representatives from the seven western states. But the discussions – and the deadline set for them – were set to an urgent timeline; current guidelines are expiring and a new finalized agreement must be put in place by October 2026, the start of the 2027 water year.

Just what one wants to hear ahead of a last-minute flight to see my dad one last time. These feckless assholes don't give a (pun intended) flying fuck about Thanksgiving, or people going about regular daily commerce.

Flight cancellations and delays are set to grow as airline passengers across the United States spent the weekend grappling with those issues at major airports nationwide after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) mandated a 4% reduction in air traffic in response to the ongoing federal government shutdown.

If the shutdown continues, the FAA has instructed airlines to cut 6% of flights on Tuesday – and to do the same to 10% by 14 November. The transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, has warned that flight reductions could reach 20% if the shutdown persists, and on Sunday he predicted a “substantial” number of people in the US would be unable to celebrate the upcoming holidays with their families if the shutdown wasn’t resolved.

“You’re going to see air travel be reduced to a trickle,” Duffy said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union. “We have a number of people who want to get home for the holidays. They want to see their family … Listen, many of them are not going to be able to get on an airplane because there are not going to be that many flights that fly if this thing doesn’t open back up.”

The FAA’s requirement for airlines to cut 4% of daily flights at 40 “high traffic” US airports began Friday and represented an attempt to ease the mounting pressure on air traffic controllers. Like other federal employees, those controllers have not been paid for weeks amid the government shutdown, which has become the longest in history and reached its 40th day.

Those damn Democrats interested in reducing insurance premiums for shitty coverage.

Water levels at the dam reservoirs supplying Iran’s north-eastern city of Mashhad have plunged below 3%, according to reports, as the country suffers from severe water shortages.

“The water storage in Mashhad’s dams has now fallen to less than 3%,” Hossein Esmaeilian, the chief executive of the water company in Iran’s second largest city by population, told the ISNA news agency.

He added: “The current situation shows that managing water use is no longer merely a recommendation – it has become a necessity.”

Mashhad, home to around 4 million people and Iran’s holiest city, relies on four dams for its water supply. Esmaeilian said consumption in the city had reached about “8,000 litres per second, of which about 1,000 to 1,500 litres per second is supplied from the dams”.

Authorities in Tehran warned over the weekend of possible rolling cuts to water supplies in the capital amid what officials call the worst drought in decades. The Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, has cautioned that without rainfall before winter, even Tehran could face evacuation.

/r/nottheonion

The secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Kristi Noem, reportedly authorized the purchase of Spirit Airlines jets before discovering the airline didn’t actually own the planes – and that the aircraft lacked engines.

The bizarre anecdote was contained in a Wall Street Journal report released on Friday, which recounted how Noem and Corey Lewandowski – who managed Donald Trump’s first winning presidential campaign – had recently arranged to buy 10 Boeing 737 aircraft from Spirit Airlines. People familiar with the situation told the paper that the two intended to use the jets to expand deportation flights – and for personal travel.

Those sources also claimed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials had cautioned them that buying planes would be far more expensive than simply expanding existing flight contracts.

Complicating matters further, Spirit, which filed for bankruptcy protection for the second time, in August, did not own the jets and their engines would have had to be bought separately. The plan has since been paused, according to the Journal.

He spent the twilight of his career denouncing Donald Trump as a threat to the republic he loved. But Dick Cheney arguably laid the foundations of Trump’s authoritarian takeover of the United States.

The former vice-president died on Monday aged 84. The White House lowered flags to half-mast in remembrance of him but without the usual announcement or proclamation praising the deceased.

Cheney, who served under George W Bush for eight years, was one of the most influential and polarising vice-presidents in US history. Some critics said they would never forgive him for pushing the US to invade Iraq on a false pretext but suggested that his opposition to Trump offered a measure of redemption.

Perhaps Cheney’s defining legacy, however, was the expansion of powers for a position that he never held himself: the presidency. Cheney used the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks as a pretext to assert a muscular executive authority that Trump now amplifies and exploits to challenge the system of checks and balances.

Some of us actually saw the Patriot Act for what it was when it was enacted. At least they skipped the armbands for a time.

Well, get ready for everything to get even more expensive! I'm sick of the winning at this point. But at least I won't have to vote, right?

Magical thinking is indispensable to understanding Team Trump’s economic policymaking. The White House often seems to believe two opposing policies can work together while one policy can do two or three contradictory things.

A heavy dose of hocus pocus will be needed to make the administration’s dollar policy work in the interest of the United States, for it appears that they want to end the US dollar’s supremacy in global finance.

At least some part of it does. True, Donald Trump has warned countries not to replace the dollar, or else. And, reportedly, some members of the administration want to encourage more countries to adopt the dollar outright. But what is also true is that Stephen Miran, the president’s chief economic adviser, on leave to act as board member of the Federal Reserve, thinks the dollar’s position as the main reserve currency of the world is an undue burden for the US and a principal driver of the large trade deficit that Trump finds so odious.

“America runs large current account deficits not because it imports too much,” Miran wrote last year. Rather, it imports too much because it must export Treasury bonds to provide other countries with assets in which to park their reserves. This leads to “persistent dollar overvaluation that prevents the balancing of international trade.”

Salt Lake City’s oldest and longest-running LGBTQ+ bar has closed, with workers claiming the shuttering was a “stunt” to prevent unionization.

The SunTrapp, widely considered the oldest LGBTQ+ bar in Utah, was founded in 1973 and is one of the few safe havens for the community. It shut on 31 October after workers pushed to unionize.

Workers who spoke with the Guardian allege the owner of the bar engaged in numerous unfair labor practices after they submitted a letter requesting voluntary recognition of the union with Communications Workers of America Local 7765 in late September.

In a Republican dominated state ranked as one of the least safe states in the US for the LGBTQ+ community, workers called the bar “a really special place” and a safe haven for the community. The bar had to increase security after the Charlie Kirk assassination that occurred in Utah in September heightened concerns over threats toward the community.

“It’s a really special place where you can go and be judgment free,” Natalie Jankowski, a lead bartender at the SunTrapp, told the Guardian. “We have a lot of older queer people, older trans people, who feel comfortable coming there and nowhere else. We have a lot of Mormons who just left Mormonism who want to have their first drink, judgment free, come there, and we get a lot of people who are questioning their sexuality and they just want to talk to the bar staff about it.”

Yeah, I added a comma. Close your asides, Guardian!

A year out from the 2026 midterms, with Republicans feeling the blows from a string of losses in this week’s elections, Donald Trump and his allies are mounting a multipronged attack on almost every aspect of voting in the United States and raising what experts say are troubling questions about the future of one of the world’s oldest democracies.

While Democratic leaders continue to invest their hopes in a “blue wave” to overturn Republican majorities in the House and Senate next year, Trump and some prominent supporters have sought to discredit the possibility that Republicans could lose in a fair fight and are using that premise to justify demands for a drastically different kind of electoral system.

This is not the first time Trump has questioned the credibility of US elections – he did it almost as vigorously in 2016 and 2024, when he won his bids for the White House, as he did in 2020, when he did not – but now the president’s confidants are threatening emergency powers to seize control of a process over which presidents ordinarily have no control.

Trump’s former chief political adviser, Steve Bannon, is urging him to get the elections “squared away” even before the voters have a chance to weigh in. Former legal advisers have suggested the electoral system is in itself an emergency justifying extraordinary intervention, possibly including federal agents and the military stationed outside polling stations.

If you can still afford a hat, hold onto it!