Fifteen years ago, Google processed 250,000 takedown notices in a single year. The takedown counter for 2025 has already exceeded five billion.
This figure isn’t just hard to fathom; it represents an explosion in removal requests. The all-time ten billion milestone was passed just over a year ago.
If we break this down further, we see that on average, rights holders flagged more than 14 million allegedly-infringing URLs per day, or close to 10,000 every minute. That stream of takedowns continued throughout the entire year, day and night, a pace that human moderators couldn’t track with a stopwatch, let alone a spreadsheet.
Battle of the Bots?
While little is known about how Google processes these requests, it’s safe to say that these takedowns are not all reviewed manually. Instead, they are likely processed by an algorithm that greenlights URL removals unless there are clear signs that something is wrong.
Similarly, rightsholders also rely on their own ‘bots.’ This definitely applies to Link-Busters, the takedown partner of many major book publishers and the leading sender of takedown notices by far.
In 2025 alone, Link-Busters was good for more than 3.2 billion reported URLs, which dwarfs all other senders. Rivendell is the runner-up with roughly 420 million reported links, followed by MG Premium, the copyright enforcement arm of Pornhub parent company Aylo, which requested 390 million removals.
In terms of accuracy, Link-Busters has a good track record. The company appears to be strictly focused on a subset of problematic sites, mostly shadow libraries. It doesn’t target other domains, which lowers the risk of errors. But the same can’t be said for all senders.
If Google spots a problem, it takes “no action”, a response seen in roughly 3% of all URL reports in 2025. A further 8% of URLs could not be removed because the same URL had already been reported previously.
While most reports target live search results, many of the URLs reported in 2025 hadn’t yet been crawled by Google. These are categorized as “not in index,” and they accounted for roughly 35% of all requests this year, totaling more than 1.7 billion links.
These “non-indexed” URLs are placed on a preemptive blacklist by Google to ensure that they don’t appear in future search results. This activity is also emblematic of the “bot battle”, as it often includes mirror domains or new URL structures of pirate sites. These are then picked up or predicted by takedown bots before they’re indexed by Google.
Ultimately, the “removed” category remains the largest. In 2025, Google successfully removed over 2.7 billion URLs, which is roughly 54% of all requests. When we combine this with the “not in index” figures, it’s clear that the vast majority of rightsholder reports result in either successful removal or blacklisting.
As we head into 2026, the question is no longer whether the volume will grow, but rather how much more the system can take. Currently, Link-Busters’ volume appears to be capped at 10 million takedowns per day, but that might change in the future.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
With national public health being run by RFK Jr., or run into the ground if you prefer, it’s been left to individual states to figure out where and how to fill in the gaps. Some states, such as Florida, have fully embraced Kennedy’s anti-scientific posture and are moving as quickly as possible to dismantle public health mandates and programs that have kept people, particularly children, from being infected with horrific infectious diseases. In other, saner states such as Colorado, state laws have been enacted such that state health policy no longer relies strictly on federal agencies like HHS and CDC, but instead takes into account other recommendations from NGOs that are more, well, let’s call them “traditional”.
It seems like California is about to go a step further than that and is constructing its own “Public Health Network Innovation Exchange” that will work with state health departments to advise on policy and advance public health in the state. Leading the charge for PHNIX (eyeroll) will be some familiar names.
The leaders of the new project are former CDC Director Dr. Susan Monarez, whom RFK Jr. forced out of her job just 29 days after the Senate confirmed her, and Dr. Debra Houry, the CDC’s former chief medical officer, who resigned after Monarez was fired.
At a presser announcing the initiative, Newsom called the leaders of the new project a “dream team” of public health experts, noting that Drs. Monarez and Houry would also be joined by Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, the founder and chief executive of the Your Local Epidemiologist newsletter. She’ll be advising the California Department of Public Health on building confidence in public health, which is kind of desperately needed after years of rightwing attacks on institutions and expertise.
Monarez is the former CDC director who was summarily fired by RFK Jr., reportedly for refusing to rubber stamp the anti-vaxxer nonsense that everyone knew would come out of Kennedy’s handpicked immunization panel at CDC. Kennedy disputes that as the reason for the firing, but his claims are as dubious as those he has about vaccines generally. Houry, meanwhile, was one of the senior CDC professionals that resigned in the wake of Monarez’s firing.
On the one hand, it’s an embarrassment of riches for California, to suddenly have leadership for public health in the state of the caliber of former high-ranking CDC professionals. The downside is that they’re now confined to 1 of 50 states instead of all of them. States like California shouldn’t have to do this sort of thing. And states should also not be in the position of jockeying to gobble up this talent before other states get there first simply because RFK Jr. is completely out to lunch.
But leadership isn’t about wishing for the best case scenario; it’s about making the absolute best you can with the hand of cards you’re dealt. I generally don’t think much of Gavin Newsom, to be honest, but in this case I’m impressed by his decision to lead for the benefit of his state.
In her new role, Monarez will be in charge of coordinating with the private sector, technology and academic partners, while Houry will engage with existing public health alliances.
“This collaboration,” the release continued, “is critical at a time when our public health community needs to coordinate our response to evolving gaps in federal leadership.”
Somebody has to do this job at the state level, in other words, because the Trump administration is too busy playing games with plaques about former presidents and installing gravel-mouthed charlatans in positions of authority over public health to do their damned jobs.
row, and, besides, as well as, line up, rank with, rival, equal
ヘイ ホウ
な.み なみ なら.べる なら.ぶ なら.びに
並ぶ (ならぶ) — to line up 並み (なみ) — average 並び (ならび) — line 街並み (まちなみ) — townscape 並行 (へいこう) — going side-by-side 町並み (まちなみ) — townscape 並べる (ならべる) — to line up 軒並み (のきなみ) — row of houses 並びに (ならびに) — and (also) 並木 (なみき) — roadside trees
The state of streaming is… bad. It’s very bad. The first step in wanting to watch anything is a web search: “Where can I stream X?” Then you have to scroll past an AI summary with no answers, and then scroll past the sponsored links. After that, you find out that the thing you want to watch was made by a studio that doesn’t exist anymore or doesn’t have a streaming service. So, even though you subscribe to more streaming services than you could actually name, you will have to buy a digital copy to watch. A copy that, despite paying for it specifically, you do not actually own and might vanish in a few years.
Then, after you paid to see something multiple times in multiple ways (theater ticket, VHS tape, DVD, etc.), the mega-corporations behind this nightmare will try to get Congress to pass laws to ensure you keep paying them. In the end, this is easier than making a product that works. Or, as someone put it on social media, these companies have forgotten “that their entire existence relies on being slightly more convenient than piracy.”
It’s important to recognize this as we see more and more media mergers. These mergers are not about quality, they’re about control.
In the old days, studios made a TV show. If the show was a hit, they increased how much they charged companies to place ads during the show. And if the show was a hit for long enough, they sold syndication rights to another channel. Then people could discover the show again, and maybe come back to watch it air live. In that model, the goal was to spread access to a program as much as possible to increase viewership and the number of revenue streams.
Now, in the digital age, studios have picked up a Silicon Valley trait: putting all their eggs into the basket of “increasing the number of users.” To do that, they have to create scarcity. There has to be only one destination for the thing you’re looking for, and it has to be their own. And you shouldn’t be able to control the experience at all. They should.
They’ve also moved away from creating buzzy new exclusives to get you to pay them. That requires risk and also, you know, paying creative people to make them. Instead, they’re consolidating.
Media companies keep announcing mergers and acquisitions. They’ve been doing it for a long time, but it’s really ramped up in the last few years. And these mergers are bad for all the obvious reasons. There are the speech and censorship reasons that came to a head in, of all places, late night television. There are the labor issues. There are the concentration of power issues. There are the obvious problems that the fewer studios that exist the fewer chances good art gets to escape Hollywood and make it to our eyes and ears. But when it comes specifically to digital life there are these: consumer experience and ownership.
First, the more content that comes under a single corporation’s control, the more they expect you to come to them for it. And the more they want to charge. And because there is less competition, the less they need to work to make their streaming app usable. They then enforce their hegemony by using the draconian copyright restrictions they’ve lobbied for to cripple smaller competitors, critics, and fair use.
When everything is either Disney or NBCUniversal or Warner Brothers-Discovery-Paramount-CBS and everything is totally siloed, what need will they have to spend money improving any part of their product? Making things is hard, stopping others from proving how bad you are is easy, thanks to how broken copyright law is.
Furthermore, because every company is chasing increasing subscriber numbers instead of multiple revenue streams, they have an interest in preventing you from ever again “owning” a copy of a work. This was always sort of part of the business plan, but it was on a scale of a) once every couple of years, b) at least it came, in theory, with some new features or enhanced quality and c) you actually owned the copy you paid for. Now they want you to pay them every month for access to same copy. And, hey, the price is going to keep going up the fewer options you have. Or you will see more ads. Or start seeing ads where there weren’t any before.
On the one hand, the increasing dependence on direct subscriber numbers does give users back some power. Jimmy Kimmel’s reinstatement by ABC was partly due to the fact that the company was about to announce a price hike for Disney+ and it couldn’t handle losing users due to the new price and due to popular outrage over Kimmel’s treatment.
On the other hand, well, there’s everything else.
The latest kerfuffle is over the sale of Warner Brothers-Discovery, a company that was already the subject of a sale and merger resulting in the hyphen. Netflix was competing against another recently merged media megazord of Paramount Skydance.
Warner Brothers-Discovery accepted a bid from Netflix, enraging Paramount Skydance, which has now launched a hostile takeover.
Now the optimum outcome is for neither of these takeovers to happen. There are already too few players in Hollywood. It does nothing for the health of the industry to allow either merger. A functioning antitrust regime would stop both the sale and the hostile takeover attempt, full stop. But Hollywood and the federal government are frequent collaborators, and the feds have little incentive to stop Hollywood’s behemoths from growing even further, as long as they continue to play their role pushing a specific view of American culture.
The promise of the digital era was in part convenience. You never again had to look at TV listings to find out when something would be airing. Virtually unlimited digital storage meant everything would be at your fingertips. But then the corporations went to work to make sure it never happened. And with each and every merger, that promise gets further and further away.
We’ve noted how Larry Ellison, as part of his attempt to control the entirety of media, had launched a $108 million hostile takeover bid for Warner Brothers. Larry, as we’ve seen with CBS and his interest in TikTok, is trying to convert what’s left of U.S. media into a giant safe space for affluent right wing autocrats and the right wing culture war grievance and infotainment complex.
While the Ellison deal is higher, Warner’s board is concerned with a few things. One, that Larry Ellison isn’t fully using his own cash to fully back the bid, which could create chaos when it’s time to actually get the money together:
“Warner Bros has raised doubts about Paramount’s financial condition and creditworthiness. The offer relies on a seven-party, cross-conditional structure, with the Ellison Revocable Trust providing just 32% of the required equity commitment while capping its liability at $2.8 billion, Warner Bros said. It noted that the trust’s assets could be withdrawn at any time.”
The Warner board is also nervous that the involvement of Saudi money in the hostile takeover attempt could generate more national security regulatory heat than they’d like, further complicating a deal. In total, they see Netflix as the cleaner, easier, and more predictable path.
What happens next? Well, Netflix has already begun kissing Trump’s ass in the hopes of regulatory approval, and I suspect you’ll see Netflix executives debase themselves repeatedly and creatively in the new year to appease the President.
If that’s not enough to satiate Donald’s ego, then I suspect you’ll see his DOJ launch a fake antitrust, fake populist intervention sometime in the new year trying to scuttle the deal and redirect the assets back to Ellison so he can continue his goal of creating autocrat-friendly state television leveraging the combined assets of CNN, HBO, CBS, and TikTok (if the Chinese give their approval).
Again, none of this will be reported clearly or honestly by the corporate American press, whose ownership has zero interest in journalism that’s critical of mindless consolidation or their pathetic groveling in the face of authoritarianism. Ideally a functioning government (which we don’t have) would block all media consolidation, but Netflix remains the better of a slate of bad options moving forward.
Netflix has fewer redundancies that would possibly mean potentially fewer layoffs. And they’re slightly less lodged up Donald’s colon (though they’re going to test that thesis to gain approval). And while they’ll certainly fire people and generate plenty of homogenized slop post acquisition, that’s still somehow a better option than letting Donald Trump and his autocrat friends flesh out their dream of state television.
A bipartisan group of the most anti-internet Senators around have released their latest version of a plan to “sunset Section 230.” We went over this last year when they floated the same idea: they have no actual plan for how to make sure the open internet can continue. Instead, their “plan” is to put a gun to the head of the open internet and say they’re going to shoot it… unless Meta gives them a different alternative. Let’s bring back Eric Goldman’s meme:
There is no plan for how to protect speech on the internet. There’s just hostage-taking. And remarkably, the hostage-takers are saying the quiet part out loud. Here’s Senator Dick Durbin’s comment on releasing this bill:
“Children are being exploited and abused because Big Tech consistently prioritizes profits over people. Enough is enough.Sunsetting Section 230 will force Big Tech to come to the table take ownership over the harms it has wrought.And if Big Tech doesn’t, this bill will open the courtroom to victims of its platforms. Parents have been begging Congress to step in, and it’s time we do so. I’m proud to partner with Senator Graham on this effort, and we will push for it to become law,” said Durbin.
Read that bolded part again. Durbin is admitting—in a press release, for the record—that he wants Big Tech to write internet policy. He’s threatening to blow up the legal framework that allows everyday people to speak online unless Mark Zuckerberg comes to his office and tells him what laws to pass. This is Congress openly abdicating its responsibility to govern in favor of letting a handful of tech CEOs do it instead.
The problem? The people who benefit from Section 230 aren’t the big tech CEOs. They’re you. They’re me. They’re every small forum, every Discord server, every newsletter with comments, every community space online where people can actually talk to each other without first getting permission from a building full of lawyers.
They want “big tech” to come to the table, even though (as we’ve explained over and over and over again) the damage from repealing 230 is not to “big tech.” Hell, Meta has been calling for the removal of Section 230 for years.
Why? Because Meta (unlike Durbin) knows exactly what every 230 expert has been saying for years: its main benefit has fuck all to do with “big tech” and is very much about protecting you, me, and the everyday users of the internet, creating smaller spaces where they can speak, interact, build community and more.
Repealing Section 230 doesn’t hurt Meta at all. Because if you get rid of Section 230, Meta can afford the lawsuits. They have a building full of lawyers they’re already paying. They can pay them to take on the various lawsuits and win. Why will they win? Because the First Amendment is what actually protects most of the speech these dipshit Senators are mad about.
But winning on First Amendment grounds probably costs between $2 million and $5 million. Winning on 230 grounds happens at an earlier stage with much less work, and probably costs $100k. A small company can survive a few $100k lawsuits. But a few $5 million lawsuits puts them out of business.
We already know this. We can see it with the DMCA, which was always weaker than Section 230. A decade and a half ago, Veoh was poised to be a big competitor to YouTube. But it got sued. It won the lawsuit… but went out of business anyway, because the legal fees killed it before it won. And now YouTube dominates the space.
When you weaken intermediary protection laws, you help the big tech providers.
Separately, notice Durbin’s phrasing about children being exploited. Can some reporter please ask Dick Durbin to explain how removing Section 230 protects children? He won’t be able to answer, because it won’t help. Or maybe he’ll punt to Senator Graham, whose press release at least attempts an answer:
“Giant social media platforms are unregulated, immune from lawsuits and are making billions of dollars in advertising revenue off some of the most unsavory content and criminal activity imaginable.It is past time to allow those who have been harmed by these behemoths to have their day in court,”said Graham.
Day in court… for what? Most “unsavory content” is constitutionally protected speech. The rap sheet is mostly First-Amendment activity—Section-230 just spares hosting it; repeal means litigating over legal speech, one plaintiff at a time.
As for criminal activity, well, that’s a law enforcement issue, not related to Section 230. If you don’t think that criminal activity is being properly policed online, maybe that’s something you should focus on?
Section 230 gives companies the freedom to make changes to protect children. That was the entire point of it. Literally, Chris Cox and Ron Wyden wanted a structure that would create incentives for platforms to be able to protect their users (including children!) without having to face legal liability for any little mistake.
If you take away Section 230, you actually tie the hands of companies trying to protect children. Because, now, every single thing they do to try to make their site safer opens them up to legal liability. That means you no longer have trust & safety or child safety experts making decisions about what’s best: you have lawyers. Lawyers who just want to protect companies from liability.
So, what will they do? They’ll do the thing that won’t protect children (which is risky), the thing that avoids liability, which tends to be to putting your head in the sand. Avoiding knowledge gets you out of these lawsuits, because under existing distributor liability concepts, knowledge is key to holding a distributor liable.
The only benefits to killing Section 230 are (1) to the biggest tech companies who wipe out competitors, (2) to the trial lawyers who plan to get rich suing the biggest tech companies, and (3) to Donald Trump, who can use the new rules to put even more pressure on the internet to suppress speech he doesn’t like.
I know for a fact that Senator Wyden has tried to explain this to his colleagues in the Senate, and they just refuse to listen.
Reminding everyone for no particular reason that Section 230 is one of the last things standing between free speech online and Trump having control over everything you see and say on the internet
This is exactly why Techdirt needs your support. When the most powerful people in government are ignoring experts and pushing legislation based on lies, someone needs to keep explaining what’s actually happening. We’ve been doing that for over 25 years, and we’re going to keep doing it—but we need your help to make sure that continues.
Meanwhile, the actual users of the open internet—and the children Durbin claims to be protecting—come out worse off. Senator Durbin and his cosponsors (Senators Graham, Grassley, Whitehouse, Hawley, Klobuchar, Blackburn, Blumenthal, Moody, and Welch) know all this. They’ve been told all of this. Sometimes by Senator Wyden himself. But all of them (with the possible exception of Welch who I don’t know as much about) have a long and well-known history of simply hating the fact that the open internet exists.
The bill isn’t child protection, and it sure isn’t tech regulation. It’s a suicide pact drafted by people who’ve always despised an internet they don’t control. Zuckerberg gets handed the pen; we get handed the bill—and the bullet.
Rose Natabo needs to leave one of her starving sons behind. At dawn, she squeezes her firstborn goodbye, then wraps her youngest, Santo, to her back, his legs akimbo at her waist. Taking the hand of her middle child, James, she hurries away toward help, her pink plastic sandals clapping over the dry dirt.
A couple hours later, the trio are in the back of an ambulance speeding by soccer fields, slums and footpaths. They turn through an iron gate and into the only hospital in Kakuma, a sprawling refugee camp in Kenya’s northern desert. After running from wars and natural disasters, this camp, the third-largest in the world, is their home. They have nowhere else to go. Rose joins a crowd of other mothers checking into the pediatric malnutrition ward.
It is July 8. Rose ran out of food less than three weeks ago after the World Food Program cut rations across the camp. At the hospital, she learns why: WFP lost its funding from the United States, the program’s biggest donor. What she doesn’t know is that aid workers and government officials from both the U.S. and Kenya spent the previous months begging and warning Trump administration leaders that families like hers depended on that food to survive. But for months, nothing changed. So Rose and thousands of other mothers watched their children starve.
Trump’s aides say the funding cuts were necessary to reform America’s broken foreign aid system, and they’ve begun making new investments into Kenya. “What you’ve seen right now,” one senior official at the State Department explains, “is there’s always some period of disruption when you’re doing something that’s never been done before.”
For WFP, that disruption meant telling 300,000 refugees in Kakuma that a little more than half of them will receive a meager portion of rice, lentils and oil some time next month, in August. The rest will get nothing. Rose doesn’t know which group she’s in. And she doesn’t know if her sons will survive that long anyway, especially Santo, who is only 2 years old.
Under the fluorescent lights in the malnutrition ward, nurses try to get an IV into him. But Santo is so swollen with edema — a result of severe protein deficiency — they can only find a vein on his head. Drained of color, his skin peels off in patches like burns. They drip milk into his mouth because feeding too quickly can be fatal. “Their bodies have adapted to starvation,” a nurse explains.
At night, Rose and Santo lie on a small vinyl hospital bed surrounded by a mosquito net. The swelling abates after a few days, but the little boy shrinks to 14 pounds and disappears into a loose, unstrapped onesie meant for a 9-month-old. The nurses tell Rose that God has performed a miracle, but Santo is still a long way from recovery. This is not his first time in the malnutrition ward this year.
Days pass. On July 16, the hospital discharges James, her 5 year old with dark marble eyes. He has somehow overcome a bout of malaria, which can be nine times more likely to kill a severely malnourished child like him. Without other options, Rose decides to send him home to her eldest, 7-year-old Lino, who is still staying with neighbors and relatives, even though she knows they have little food to spare. She has to stay behind at the hospital just a little bit longer, she tells James. Santo needs her.
July turns to August, and Rose becomes a fixture in the clinic. Five-foot-nothing and soft-spoken, she often enters and leaves rooms without notice. Every day, she sees other panicked mothers come to the clinic with sick children, a dozen a day on average. Some leave alone, after their children die.
Rose does laundry, bathes Santo and tidies up around their bed to stay busy. She wonders who, if anyone, is looking after James and Lino and what, if anything, they are eating. She starts asking staff any chance she gets if today is the day they will discharge Santo.
Some of the other mothers are so desperate to check on their children they sneak out at night and walk hours back home. Others abscond altogether. At least one baby died this year after her mother took her from the clinic before she was ready.
Rose considers leaving, too. “I don’t want my kids to suffer alone,” she says as her fingers work over black and white beads of a necklace she’s making for Santo, a traditional charm popular in South Sudan. Rose separated from her husband, who she says abused her, and now raises her boys alone. She inflates her cheeks and presses her face nose-to-nose with Santo. She’s the only one who can make him laugh.
Rose fled her home for Kakuma as a teenager in 2018, after South Sudan’s civil war found her village and left few survivors. She’s now about 23 — she doesn’t know her exact birthday — but still feels like an orphan in need of help.
On Monday, Aug. 4, a young, gentle nurse named Mark Kipsang walks through the pediatric malnutrition ward with a clipboard. Medical staff had promised Rose before the weekend that she and Santo would be discharged soon.
When Kipsang reaches their bed, Rose sits the boy upright and encourages him to greet their visitor. Kipsang offers a hand for a high five, but Santo doesn’t budge. His little feet dangle from the bed, still swollen with edema. Kipsang is worried Santo’s condition will worsen at home and that he’d quickly end up back at the hospital. This year, Kipsang’s ward has seen about six relapses every week on average.
“Has he had diarrhea?” he asks, inspecting the loose skin on Santo’s backside.
“No,” Rose lies.
“Can he walk?”
Rose nods and places Santo on the cold concrete, his shirt slipping from his shoulders. When he stands motionless, Rose holds his hands above his head and wills him forward, his feet barely shuffling. Santo starts to wail, and Rose sighs and lifts him back into her lap.
Santo is not ready to leave. Just then, Kipsang looks at Rose sitting cross-legged and notices what she has kept to herself all this time. Rose is pregnant.
Kipsang sends her straight to the hospital prenatal offices. She pads across the courtyard clutching a worn purple book that shows her first and only checkup was months ago. Rose speaks three languages but cannot read or write. Staff take her blood and conduct other tests and then explain the results as they jot them down in the book. She is extremely anemic, which means she is at risk for fainting, strokes or a preterm birth.
A third of the women in the hospital’s maternity ward have life-threatening complications that could be treated simply with food. They suffer from anemia like Rose, as well as dangerously high blood pressure. Their babies are born early, weighing too little and with underdeveloped lungs.
Jane Atim, a solicitous nutrition counselor, tells Rose that in order to avoid a dangerous birth, she needs to address her iron deficiency. Rose nods but otherwise sits still on a plastic chair, her fingers laced together. Atim flips through a ledger of two dozen other pregnant women she had seen in recent weeks, all with the same problem. There’s a diagram of a balanced diet on her desk. “How many times a day do you eat?” Atim asks.
Three, Rose lies again. She wants to end the conversation and figures there’s not much point in being honest or complaining. Instead, she lists peas, greens and lentils as her typical daily fare.
Atim knows it isn’t true, but she doesn’t think it does much good to despair alongside the starving mothers. So she tells Rose what she tells everyone: “The best thing for you to do is eat.”
The next morning, three days shy of one month in the hospital, Rose comes apart. “I am leaving today,” she shouts to a group of hospital workers who had gathered around her. The other mothers turn on their beds to watch. Her face is wet with tears. She tells them she doesn’t know who’s taking care of her other kids.
Her doctor relents and signs the discharge papers. “This is not ideal,” he says. He’s worried Santo might have contracted tuberculosis as well. But he says it’s better to discharge Santo than let Rose leave against medical advice and risk her ignoring their recommendations for treatment at home.
Later, Rose collects all of their belongings into the plastic wash basin she’s been using for laundry: two dresses, blankets, soap in an empty powdered milk tin, the iron tablets the prenatal ward had given her and papers describing Santo’s treatment plan. She doesn’t know what the files say, but she organizes them into neat piles anyway. The hospital had prescribed Santo 11 ready-to-use therapeutic food bars, and Rose keeps the packaging of one he just finished. She saves the empty wrappers to prove Santo has eaten them. Some mothers resort to selling theirs.
Rose ties Santo to her back with a blanket printed with monkeys, balances the basin atop her head and cups her lower belly with her free hand. “God help you,” another mother says.
As Rose reaches her sister’s house, Lino and James bound around the corner, through an open gate and beneath a clothesline made of concertina wire. Flanked by a posse of other children all coated in a film of dust, the boys beeline for Santo. They coo over their little brother before liberating a nutritional supplement wrapper from his hands to lick it clean. Rose inspects Lino’s dirty fingernails and picks up James, his brittle arms reaching around her neck; his body feels like an empty bookbag. He has a bad cough.
They look rough, Rose thinks, but they are alive.
It takes more than an hour to walk back to their house. James lost his shoes at some point after leaving the hospital. He struggles to stand, much less walk under the blinding East African sun. “He became so thin this year,” says Rose, whose own sandals have broken. “He’s usually fat.”
Strapped to her back, Santo falls asleep. Rose agonizes over being a mother unable to feed her children, with a pain so deep that she feels something like remorse for having had them at all. “There’s no happiness in it,” she says later.
They walk past the occasional house stripped to a husk. Those families, Rose explains, sold their clothes, chairs and even roofs to afford a ride over the border to South Sudan — a place they had not long ago fled for their lives.
Kakuma once felt like her only possibility for a future. She hoped to go into business for herself, selling food of all things. She’d raise money in case she and the boys were ever granted asylum in the U.S., where her sons could receive a good education.
But she’s abandoned that plan. Now she instead imagines joining those returning to South Sudan instead. “This sickness that came upon her baby has broken her,” Rose’s sister Sunday says, using a camp colloquialism for malnutrition.
“The only time she scared me,” Sunday adds, “was when she told me she wanted to take her kids back to South Sudan.”
On the morning of Aug. 11, Rose disappears into a crowd of hundreds of refugees under a pavilion about the size of a basketball court. Children lie across concrete benches while their mothers crane their necks toward the front, struggling to hear over the din. There, a small team of Kenya Red Cross workers holding clipboards call names on a bullhorn. One at a time, the mothers come forward to lift their kids onto a scale.
This outdoor clinic is functionally a pediatric malnutrition referral center. Community health workers fan across Kakuma to measure the circumference of children’s arms. Any kids in the area with arms thinner than 13.5 centimeters below the shoulder are sent here. They’ve made almost 12,000 malnutrition referrals this year.
Rose sits with James and Santo on either side of her, both half asleep despite the noise. Behind a folding table at the front of the crowd is a harried young Red Cross nutritionist. He said on a previous visit that the turnout shows how far malnutrition has spread. “It’s worse than last year,” he added, “because the food has been cut.”
Rose plops Santo on the scale: about 15 pounds. James is 21. Both weigh more than they did last check up, but still far less than what healthy children would at their ages. Each of their arms measures less than 12 centimeters, meaning the aid workers should prescribe them both therapeutic food.
The nutritionist tells Rose to follow him. He unlocks a heavy steel door that opens into a vault typically filled with nutritional supplements. Now, save for a couple boxes torn open on pallets, the room is empty. “We don’t have Plumpy’Nut anymore,” he says. (U.S. funding cuts disrupted the global supply chain that moves therapeutic ready-to-use food all over the world, The New York Times reported, stranding it in warehouses and at shipping companies.) He hands Rose a few bars of what remains for Santo and a different, less dense, supplement for James. They head back home.
Rose gives birth to her first girl two months later, on Oct. 5. It’s a Sunday, which is what Rose names the baby.
Her family still struggles to get food, even though WFP has started giving out more rations after a recent grant from the U.S. She rests under a tree with the children outside their dark, squat home, watching them sit listless in the heat.
All three of her boys have backslid. Lino and James are even thinner. The color has again drained from Santo’s skin and the edema returned to his legs, arms and face. He has lost 1 pound since the August weigh-in with the Red Cross.
Still wearing the black-and-white necklace his mom made him, Santo can hardly open his eyes or sit upright. It’s clear he needs to go back to urgent care. But she’s afraid to risk bringing her newborn to the hospital, where she might catch an infection.
They’ll all stay at home for now. This time, Rose has to choose baby Sunday.
Dive into the world of robotics, programming, and electronics with the PiCar-X, an engaging and versatile smart car designed for learners from elementary school to advanced hobbyists. Combining powerful features, exceptional quality, and a cool design, this robot car kit delivers an engaging learning experience in robotics, AI, and programming. Beyond being an educational tool, its powerful Robot Hat provides abundant resources for you to design and bring to life your projects. Plus, it comes with 15 comprehensive video tutorials, guiding you through each step of discovery and innovation. Embark on a journey of discovery and creativity with Picar-X, where young learners become budding innovators. The Robot Car Kit without a board is on sale for $80. The kit with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W board and 32GB SD card is on sale for $110. There’s also the kit with a Raspberry Pi 4 2GB and 32GB SD Card available for $141.
Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.
Some pits are infinitely deep. Problems that, once addressed, always get worse. N +1. For some folks, the acquisition of money or power are like this. A little leads to a desire for more.
Other problems have known solutions. The tank only holds 8 gallons and then you can move on to filling the next one. A third ice cream cone isn’t as good as the first one. Effort leads to satisfaction.
It pays to decide which sort of hole we’re trying to fill.
Thanks to Trump’s deteriorating brain and baseline malignant narcissism, we’re getting served some astonishing headlines lately. I find myself Googling them just to check if they’re really satire.
This poses a real threat to The Onion. Just yesterday, I had to double check three stories, only to find reality was stranger than fiction.
Since it’s Friday, and we’re only on the eve of war with Venezuela and not actually in one yet, and the Epstein files aren’t likely to be released in full just yet, let’s share a collective moment, plus a pained chuckle, over some of these headlines.
Just when you think Trump can’t get pettier, think again. In the White House presidential walk of fame, Trump has added engraved descriptors beneath each president. And there are two he really doesn’t like.
He already replaced President Biden’s portrait with an “autopen” stand-in. This is ironic given that Trump claims he sometimes doesn’t even remember who he pardoned.
Trump also labels Biden “Sleepy Joe” and “the worst President in American History.”
Trump needs an IMAX for those gigantic projections. The only modern president known for sleeping through cabinet meetings and Oval Office visits is Trump himself. But wait, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles insists he’s just resting with his eyes closed and his head back!
The honor of “Worst President in American History” also belongs to Trump, according to historians.
The plaque below President Obama calls him a “divisive figure” (remember, every accusation is a confession). It claims he “passed the highly ineffective ‘Unaffordable’ Care Act, resulting in his party losing control over both Houses of Congress.” But guess who is about to suffer huge congressional losses next year due in substantial part to his very unpopular mishandling of healthcare?
According to Trump, Obama also presided over a “stagnant Economy” (again, accusation = confession). And then, oh horrors, Obama approved the Iran Nuclear Deal and signed the Paris Climate Accords, “both of which were later terminated by President Donald J. Trump.”
Trump does seem to have found common cause with another notorious president: Andrew Jackson. Of that other purveyor of populism, Trump wrote,
Jackson was often called the “People’s President” for championing the common man, but was unjustifiably treated unfairly by the Press, but not as viciously and unfairly as President Abraham Lincoln and President Donald J. Trump would, in the future, be.
It’s challenging to satirize this level of absurdity, so I’m just going to present it as is—a perfect 10/10, no notes.
The Trump Kennedy Center: Love it or Leavitt
The White House, through press secretary and lip injection cautionary tale Karoline Leavitt, went next level on the announcement of a name change to the Kennedy Center of the Performing Arts. Leavitt declared it would now be known as the “Trump-Kennedy Center” citing “all the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building.”
Note that since Trump took over, ticket sales and attendance at the Kennedy Center have collapsed. A study by the Washington Post revealed that this fall roughly 43 percent of tickets for typical productions remained unsold.
My first thought on reading this announcement was, “This is fake.” The board wouldn’t really unanimously agree to this change, right? Plus, there’s no way Leavitt actually added “congratulations to President Kennedy” to her tweet. Funny, but there’s just no—oh.
I checked her official feed and there it was. So my second thought was, “Wait, can they just do that?” And my third thought was, “What’s next, the Trump Jefferson Memorial? The Trump Washington Monument?”
With respect to the legality of renaming, the answer, thankfully, is, “No, they can’t just do that.” The Center was created by an Act of Congress, so the Board, now stocked with Trump appointees, doesn’t have the power on its own to rename it, any more than other boards could simply rename other presidential memorials. As Craig Caplan of C-SPAN noted,
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was named through an act of Congress, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on January 23, 1964 as a tribute to the late President John F. Kennedy, two months after his assassination: “The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, designated by this Act, shall be the sole national memorial to the late John Fitzgerald Kennedy within the city of Washington and its environs.”
But that didn’t stop the Kennedy Center board from “unanimously” voting for the name change. Only it wasn’t unanimous. As one board member, Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty of Ohio, noted in a video address, she was “muted on the call and not allowed to speak or voice my opposition to this move.”
Rep. Beatty added that the matter was not on the agenda either. “This was not consensus. This is censorship.”
May the odds be ever in your favor
This headline from Mother Jones really takes the cake this week: “Trump Just Announced His Own Hunger Games.”
Oh come on, this can’t be real! So I searched but, sure enough, found a video of Trump announcing what he’s calling “The Patriot Games.” This was not some AI generated clip; per press confirmations, he really made this announcement, calling for an “unprecedented four-day athletic event” as part of those games.
Trump insisted that his Patriot Games would not feature “men playing in women’s sports”—a dig at the trans community and part of his regime’s broader effort to erase trans people from civic participation. His fascistic attacks on trans lives and encouragement of youth sports rang a bell with some: Hitler also promoted youth sports as part of a broad Nazi indoctrination program.
But it was this further detail from Trump’s announcement that caught the attention of nearly everyone. The competition would feature “one young man and one young woman from each state and territory.”
Wait. One boy and one girl? From each state or territory? For real?
Life really ought not to imitate art quite so much.
After years of preparations, the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) will kick off this Sunday at Rabat’s Prince Moulay Abdellah Stadium in Morocco.
Hosts Morocco will get the tournament underway by taking on Comoros in the opening match, where a win would extend Morocco’s winning streak to 19 consecutive matches. The hosts are favored to come out on top in Africa’s biggest sporting event, which is expected to attract around two billion viewers across 180 countries.
How many will watch the tournament via an illegal IPTV or web-based streaming platform is naturally a hot topic.
In a January 2025 report to the Office of the United States Trade Representative, the International Intellectual Property Alliance recommended that Morocco should be placed on the USTR’s ‘Watch List’ (pdf).
The reasons include “extremely high rates” of piracy for film and music, a weak legal framework that fails to empower authorities to tackle digital piracy, administrative authorities that do have the power to act, but fail to do so, and a public that “lacks basic understanding of copyright principles.”
The report dedicated six full pages to Morocco, laying out exactly what needs to be done to meet standards acceptable to the United States.
Describing IPTV piracy as “rampant” and inaction by the Moroccan Copyright and Related Rights Office (BMDAV) as a source of frustration, IIPA added that despite receiving complaints, BMDAV had initiated zero enforcement actions to date.
Yet taken on face value, there are now signs of unexpected improvement.
BMDAV Summit Supported by a Who’s-Who of Anti-Piracy Players
With the Africa Cup of Nations approaching, local news outlet SNRT caught up with BMDAV director Dalal Mhamdi Alaoui who spoke about the need to prevent the “proliferation” of pirate platforms broadcasting football matches without authorization.
The report revealed that an international anti-piracy summit would take place on December 16, organized by BMDAV in partnership with the French National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI) and the Delegation of the European Union to Morocco.
The summit was also supported by INTERPOL, which held its 93rd General Assembly in Marrakech, Morocco, in late November, and the Motion Picture Association (MPA), whose members’ content regularly appears on pirate services, including those based in Morocco.
“Vast” Anti-IPTV Piracy Operation
The MPA is one the five members of the IIPA and the driving force behind anti-piracy coalition ACE, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment. ACE was also listed for the anti-piracy summit, where one of the central topics was how to tackle unauthorized broadcasting of sporting events.
Despite the alleged lack of enforcement in Morocco, BMDAV informed SNRT that, in partnership with her office, broadcasting rightsholders are preparing to conduct a “vast anti-piracy operation” in which “all necessary legal measures” would be taken to prosecute illegal platforms.
A separate local report from Morocco World News provides more context.
“Recent investigations by ACE reveal a high concentration of piracy operators in Morocco in recent years, particularly in IPTV services, streaming, and content ripping. The organization’s research shows that some of these networks operate vast criminal systems targeting audiences across North Africa, Europe, and the Middle East,” the report notes.
“With AFCON 2025 approaching, experts anticipate a significant increase in illegal live match streaming attempts. The conference aims to strengthen coordination between regulatory authorities, the judicial system, security services, and the private sector while raising awareness about the economic, social, and cultural impact of piracy.”
Working on the assumption that ACE and its partners would play key roles in local enforcement action, telegraphing a “vast” anti-piracy operation via the media isn’t the type of strategy the coalition has ever been known to deploy. Of course, indicating the scale of an operation says nothing about timing, even in the days leading up to an event that will almost certainly be heavily pirated.
In the background, meanwhile, broadcaster beIN has been exploring the potential for site-blocking measures in Morocco.
beIN sues Morocco ISPs
In the second half of 2024, beIN Sports was preparing to launch legal action against three local ISPs, including the largest telecoms company in Morocco, Maroc Telecom.
Details on the specifics are thin, but it appears that beIN’s goal was to obtain a ruling that forced the ISPs to block the illegal sports streaming site live-kooora.com. At the time it was one of the most popular sites of its type in Morocco and may have originally been part of a longer list of targets.
Whether blocking depends on a finding of ISP liability for pirated content isn’t clear, but since beIN’s demands aimed to force the ISPs to block the site to prevent their customers from accessing it, that’s one possibility.
At what stage these are lawsuits are currently at isn’t clear, but on December 10, beIN Media Group announced the launch of its TOD platform in Morocco, from where the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations will be available to stream in 4K.
Not for free, of course, but for those who simply must have uninterrupted, flawless 4K, beIN’s offer is likely to be the only option available.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
If there’s anything the GOP/MAGA party can’t stand, it’s people who won’t fall in line. It openly courts fascism while still pretending its ultimate concern is the protection of (certain) civil liberties. It cheers on politically motivated prosecutions while still making mouth noises about “activist judges.” It’s a land of contrasts, to be sure. But the US — under this leadership — certainly isn’t “a place of honor.”
Today, Governor Larry Rhoden announced Operation: Prairie Thunder – a comprehensive, targeted public safety initiative to protect South Dakotans, especially in the Sioux Falls metro area.
“We are keeping South Dakotans strong, safe, and free. When it comes to safety, one of our biggest opportunities to move the needle is right here in Sioux Falls, and that’s where Operation: Prairie Thunder comes in,” said Governor Larry Rhoden. “We are taking decisive action to hold criminals accountable and protect our communities.”
Whew. Sounds like a lot. This July announcement claimed all kinds of good things would be happening in terms of crime prevention and enforcement. But it was actually just more of the usual “war on drugs” stuff: saturation patrols, a few more helicopters in the air, and a concentrated effort to round up anyone who may have given law enforcement the slip while paroled or on probation.
But the part that meant the most is this:
The comprehensive effort to support ICE’s work includes:
Equipping the South Dakota Highway Patrol to assist with ICE’s actions to keep America safe – a partnership that the Governor previously obtained;
Activating six SDNG soldiers to assist ICE with administrative functions; and
Enabling DOC to work with ICE to deport offenders and transfer violent offenders for federal incarceration and assist ICE with processing and transportation of illegal alien criminals.
In other words, it was just a convenient excuse to roll hard with local law enforcement while riding shotgun with Trump’s bigots-in-masks kidnappers.
Since this announcement, “Prairie Thunder” has moved past Sioux Falls and into other towns, including Yankton, Belle Fourche, and Huron. Press releases and appearances from Governor Rhoden claimed this saturation+ICE had been a huge success.
Troopers jailed 75 people in total across the two operations, according to the release — 42 on drug charges and 33 on non-drug charges — and 19 people were charged with drug offenses but not detained.
The patrol interviewed 25 people on behalf of ICE, the release said, 21 of whom were held for the federal agency.
But a lot of locals in a red-coded state weren’t convinced this had anything to do with real crime. The towns targeted by “Prairie Thunder” weren’t exactly hotbeds of criminal activity. Huron, in particular, is the state’s most diverse city, which raised obvious questions about why it was next on list after the Thunder had rolled through the state’s most-populous city, Sioux Falls.
[T]he November patrols raised concerns for the city’s Hispanic community, according to Republican state Rep.Kevin Van Diepen, who’s also a former police chief.
He said many residents believed that ICE — not state law enforcement — was behind the saturation patrols in the city of 14,000.
The governor had never announced this unexpected expansion of the program to other South Dakota cities. But it’s clear that Prairie Thunder is still an ongoing program. The city of Brookings (pop. 23,377) decided it wasn’t going to play nice with ICE or the governor’s desire to keep all of this under the radar. An extremely short post on the city’s official website let every resident know what was headed their way, as well as making it clear the city had no desire to pitch in with ICE’s deportation efforts:
The City of Brookings has been made aware that Operation Prairie Thunder, an anti-crime task force with the State of South Dakota, will be in the Brookings area Dec. 17-19. The City of Brookings will not be participating in these operations.
The governor voiced his disapproval with the city of Brookings Friday afternoon, suggesting that the broadcasting of when and where stings, saturations or any other temporary, concentrated policing will take place undermines law enforcement operations — and the men and women carrying out that work.
“For security reasons, we are not going to comment on operational specifics. It’s unfortunate that the City of Brookings would jeopardize an anti-crime operation and put the safety of our officers at risk by publishing this information,” he said in a statement provided to The Dakota Scout. “In South Dakota, we enforce the rule of law.”
This is dumb for several reasons. First, even the mayor of Sioux Falls issued statements distancing himself and his city’s police officers from ICE activity related to “Prairie Thunder.” So, even at the initial flash-point of the operation, politicians knew it would be bad for political business to be thought of as complicit in ICE raids.
Second, saturation patrols are often announced ahead of time by the cities and law enforcement agencies engaging in them. We hear radio announcements for these patrols ahead of every major holiday. Local cops also let people know ahead of time if they’re going to be running sobriety checkpoints. None of these notifications have ever been portrayed as “jeopardizing anti-crime operations” by local politicians.
Finally, go fuck yourself, Governor Rhoden. What ICE does has almost nothing to do with the “rule of law.” And the administration overseeing ICE only cares about the “rule of law” when it needs to get the Supreme Court to sign off on its latest constitutional violations. You’re nothing but a Kristi Noem understudy, which means you’re incapable (or unwilling) of doing anything that doesn’t align exactly with the New MAGA Order.
If ICE wants to perform a bunch of crimes of opportunity in Brookings, it should still be able to do so even if its officers are being filmed, insulted, or otherwise treated like the pariahs they are. You serve the state, not Donald Trump and his fleeting whims. If it won’t hurt your brain too much, try to remember that now and then.
There were rumblings about this for a while, but it looks like the Trump TikTok deal is done, and it’s somehow the worst of all possible outcomes, amazingly making all of the biggest criticisms about TikTok significantly worse. Quite an accomplishment.
The Chinese government has signed off on the deal, which involves offloading a large chunk of TikTok to billionaire right wing Trump ally Larry Ellison (fresh off his acquisition of CBS), the private equity firm Silver Lake (which has broad global investments in Chinese and Israeli hyper-surveillance), and MGX (Abu Dhabi’s state investment firm), while still somehow having large investment involvement by the Chinese:
“The new U.S. operations of TikTok will have three “managing investors” that will collectively own 45 percent of the company: Oracle Corporation, Silver Lake, and MGX. Another 5 percent will be owned by other new investors, 30.1 percent will be “held by affiliates of certain existing investors of ByteDance; and 19.9 percent will be retained by ByteDance.”
The deal purportedly involves “retraining the content recommendation algorithm on U.S. user data to ensure the content feed is free from outside manipulation,” but given you can’t trust any of the companies involved, the Trump administration, or what’s left of U.S. regulators, that means absolutely nothing. Oracle will be “overseeing data protection,” but that means nothing as well given Oracle is run by an authoritarian-enabling billionaire with a long history of his own privacy abuses.
Also, this seems to ignore that three years ago, during the Biden administration, it was already announced that Oracle was overseeing TikTok’s algorithms and data protection. It’s kinda weird that everyone seems to have forgotten that. This is all, more or less, what was already agreed to years ago. Just shifting around the ownership structure to give Trump and his friends a “win.”
It wasn’t subtle that the goal was always for Trump’s buddies to just basically steal a big ownership chunk of a Chinese short form video company that U.S. tech companies couldn’t out innovate. Offloading the company to his friends at Oracle and Walmart was Trump’s stated goal during the first administration, only thwarted because he lost the 2020 election. Everything else was decorative.
You might recall that Democrats made a point to join forces with Republicans during election season in support of a ban unless a big chunk of ownership was divested. Now that it’s happened, it’s basically shifting ownership of TikTok to a huge chunk of Trump’s authoritarian allies, while somehow still maintaining the supposed problematic tethers to the Chinese? Impressive. Great job.
You might also recall that folks like Brendan Carr spent literally years whining about the propaganda, privacy, and surveillance threats posed by TikTok. And their solution was ultimately just to shift a small part of ownership over to Trump’s autocratic buddies while still retaining Chinese involvement. Now, with the problem made worse, you can easily assume that Carr will probably never mention the threat again.
Republicans obviously take majority responsibility for this turd of a deal and the corrupt shifting of TikTok ownership to Trump’s buddies. But it can’t be overstated what an own-goal supporting this whole dumb thing was for Democrats, who not only helped Trump’s friends steal partial ownership of TikTok, they saber-rattled over a ban during an election season where they desperately needed young people to vote.
As I’ve spent years arguing, if these folks were all so concerned about U.S. consumer privacy, they should have passed a functional modern internet privacy law applying to all U.S. companies and their executives.
If they cared about propaganda, they could have fought media consolidation, backed creative media literacy reform in schools, or found new ways to fund independent journalism.
If they cared about national security, they wouldn’t have helped elect a New York City real estate conman sex pest President, and they certainly wouldn’t have actively aided his cronyism.
This was never about addressing privacy, propaganda, or national security. It was always about the U.S. stealing ownership of one of the most popular and successful short form video apps in history because companies like Facebook were too innovatively incompetent to dethrone them in the open market. Ultimately this bipartisan accomplishment not only makes everything worse, it demonstrates we’re absolutely no better than the countries we criticize.
In a world where standardized streaming portals have become a commodity, Hayase is a breath of fresh air.
The standalone torrent client, formerly known as Miru, offers a clean and organized media player interface to stream anime content.
The torrent streaming functionality is similar to the likes of Popcorn Time, while Hayase’s reliance on third-party extensions is reminiscent of Kodi. On the official GitHub page, the dev team bills its multi-platform software as a bring-your-own-content streaming tool.
“Hayase is a bring-your-own-content torrent streaming client designed for anime enthusiasts. It provides the technology to stream torrents in real-time, with no waiting for downloads to finish,’ they write.
The decision not to include any content is in part legally driven. After all, most anime torrent sources rely on pirated content. These third-party sources are something Hayase explicitly distances itself from in a disclaimer.
“Hayase is purely a torrent client and media player. It does not provide, index, host, or link to any content sources, torrent files, or unofficial repositories. Users are fully responsible for sourcing their own content legally and in compliance with their local laws.”
Disclaimer
Crunchyroll Asks GitHub to Take Action
While Hayase does not host or link to any infringing content, many users configure it as a pirate streaming anime player. This is a thorn in the side of rightsholders including the American subscription service Crunchyroll, which would rather see it gone.
Through their Indian takedown partner, MarkScan, Crunchyroll recently asked GitHub to remove links to various Hayase releases. Notably, the notice cites Indian IT regulations alongside U.S. copyright law to support its demands.
The takedown notice
“This notice is to bring to your attention that we have found copyright infringement on the application named ‘Hayase’ that is using your services,” MarkScan writes.
“Hayase enables unauthorized access to anime content, an activity which is well established as copyright infringement under applicable laws and relevant case law,” the notice adds.
Crunchyroll’s DMCA notice requests the removal of nearly two dozen URLs but provides no detail on the alleged infringements. Instead, it refers to screenshots in Appendix B, which are not included in the publicly posted notice.
Hayase Takes Action
Speaking with TorrentFreak, the Hayase team notes that GitHub did not send them the references appendix. This means that the developers also have no clue what the alleged infringements are. Consequently, they lack the required information to file a proper counter-notice.
Hayase’s developers could, in theory, try to follow this up with GitHub. However, instead of dragging the matter out, the team simply chose to remove the contested files. These URLs all point to 404 errors now, so GitHub was not required to take action.
The removals don’t appear to impact Hayase, as the links are no longer actively used as live download links on the official website. Also, it’s worth noting that even if the entire GitHub repository is removed, installed applications would still work.
Hayase.watch
Google Play, Discord, and Other Takedown Attempts
Given recent history, it is likely that this won’t be Crunchyroll’s last attempt to disrupt Hayase. Previously, its takedown partner MarkScan sent a DMCA takedown notice to GitHub in October.
Hayase has also been targeted outside of GitHub. On Discord, for example, various messages in the channel were removed for alleged copyright infringement. Whether Crunchyroll is behind these takedowns is unknown, as Discord did not share that information.
The most problematic takedown effort targeted Google Play, where it was indeed removed. The Play Store was the go-to destination for many Android users to download the app. While these people can still download the Hayase APK on the official site, that’s a hurdle for some.
With recently announced changes at Crunchyroll, anti-piracy enforcement will arguably become even more important in the new year. At the end of 2025, Crunchyroll will officially discontinue its free ad-supported service, presumably to convert more fans into paying customers.
Ironically, however, one of the most popular reactions to the news, which generated over 5 million views on X, mentions Hayase as something worth looking into.
Work to do…
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
As RFK Jr. continues to dismantle public health in this country policy brick by policy brick, there have fortunately been some consistent sources of sanity for the public to turn to. One of those sources has been the American Academy of Pediatrics, an important organization that provides guidance and dispenses funds to healthcare professionals and researchers to provide for the public health of American children writ large. Because the AAP is made up of medical professionals that are sane, it has been a vocal critic of many of Kennedy’s policy decisions, particularly when it comes to Kennedy’s war on childhood vaccines and his misinformation about autism.
While Kennedy used to fashion himself a liberal, he has become a remarkably quick learner when it comes to the finer points of facism from his boss. His latest move is downright Trumpian: HHS has yanked back millions in approved grants to the AAP.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has canceled millions of dollars in grants awarded to the American Academy of Pediatrics, it said on Wednesday, including ones the group said were aimed at reducing sudden infant death and early detection of autism.
The move comes as the AAP, a vocal critic of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., challenged vaccine policies enacted under his leadership in federal court. Kennedy, a longtime critic of vaccines, has accused the organization of accepting funding from drug and vaccine makers to further their interests.
“These grants, previously awarded to the American Academy of Pediatrics, were canceled along with a number of other grants to other organizations because they no longer align with the Department’s mission or priorities,” an HHS spokesperson said.
SID and autism detection are the headliners and for good reason. This is a cruel move that will likely result in some increase in the deaths of babies. It also takes away detection of Kennedy’s favorite hobbyhorse in autism spectrum diagnoses. Those are two things that Kennedy claims to very much care about, yet here we are.
But those aren’t the only things those grants funded. There are also things like mental health services and healthcare access in rural areas, the latter of which tend to be Trump territory. It seems that those who voted for Trump often times are his preferred victims.
CEO Mark Del Monte explains how bad this is and what they try to do about it.
“The sudden withdrawal of these funds will directly impact and potentially harm infants, children, youth, and their families in communities across the United States,” said Del Monte, adding that the group is assessing its options, including potential legal action.
No explanation I can find has been given for these clawbacks of previously approved grants. In lieu of such an explanation, we can but speculate, and the most reasonable speculation out there is that Kennedy is big mad that AAP has disagreed with him, and denounced him, at times. And so he punished American children and rural areas in desperate need of more access to healthcare.
He’s an egomaniac, in other words. And while that sure does make him fit in nice and comfy in the Trump administration, he remains likely the worst HHS Secretary in its nearly 50 years of existence.
Cookies. A core feature of web browsing since the 90s. Likely something you never thought all that much about. That is, web cookies. I’m sure we’ve all thought about real cookies. I’m personally a Snickerdoodle fan.
Anyway, if you’re working to build an audience, you have to think about cookies. They’re a key piece of the way the internet works and vital to helping you understand your audience.
Why? Let’s start by breaking down where cookies come from and what they do.
What Are Web Cookies?
At the most basic, cookies are information packets a web server creates and sends to a web browser. The cookie is held by the browser, usually until the session ends. And most importantly, the web browser will know to attach that relevant cookie for future use.
The cookie contains some information about you that will get used to improve your experience. Online stores use cookies to track what you have in your cart while you shop. Sites with a log-in will use cookies to keep you logged in across various site pages.
These cookies are stored on your machine, usually in a folder created by your browser, and accessed while you are on the web.
Why Did We Need Cookies?
Cookies broadly serve three purposes: session information, personalization, and tracking. There’s a lot of nuance that I’m not going to get into, but these three purposes encompass most of the ways you’ll interact with cookies.
Session cookies hold information about your session. My example of keeping you logged in to a site while you navigate various pages is a session cookie.
Personalization cookies are exactly what they sound like: cookies to store details to help personalize your experience. When you tell a site to remember your user name, that’s a personalization cookie.
Tracking cookies are the ones that cause you to see ads for the products you most recently searched. The website stores that cookie and allows other sites that use the same tracking to see that information. Tracking cookies are also how websites track their users’ behavior—important information for any growing business.
The Difference Between First-Party & Third-Party Cookies
This is key. And thankfully simple.
A first-party cookie is placed in your browser by the site you’re currently visiting. A third-party cookie comes from some other site than the one you're visiting.
As I’m sure you can guess, first-party cookies allow for session data, personalization, and for the site to understand how you use it. Third-party cookies are largely used for advertising to you based on the sites you visit and your interests.
If you’ve ever wondered why those sneakers you were looking at on nike.com are suddenly being advertised to you on Instagram, blame the cookies.
What’s the Deal with Third-Party Cookies and Google?
Unless you manage your own website or are involved in SEO work, you might not know much about Google’s proposed change to third-party cookies.
A brief history: back in 2020, Google announced they were getting rid of third-party cookies for their Chrome browser. This change would have had a major impact on how sites gather information for advertising to you.
It’s important to note that Safari and Firefox, two other popular browsers, already block third-party cookies by default. So it’s not like there isn’t precedent to do this.
But because of Google’s existing marketing tools and their huge piece of the search market, there was a lot of pushback to removing third-party tracking by default. Earlier in 2025, Google walked back their plans, announcing they would continue to make third-party cookies the default.
That means those useful tracking cookies are still happening on Google. With a bit of a catch, though.
Privacy Regulations Impacting User Tracking
In recent years, the EU and some US states (particularly California) have introduced regulations to protect individuals’ data privacy and to force businesses that capture and track data to do so in more transparent ways. The most significant one, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), requires that sites ask before applying any cookies.
This regulation technically only applied to nations within the European Union, but because of the nature of the web, sites have universally adopted some form of ‘opt in’ before they apply cookies. For example, here’s what the Lulu homepage looks like when you visit it for the first time (or through an incognito browser).
The consent banner allows you to opt in so that we can apply cookies or to manage which cookies we use. Some, like session cookies, are necessary for the site to operate. Others, like tracking cookies for marketing purposes, are not required. Consent managers like the one we built allow you to manage which cookies you allow.
All legitimate sites today have some form of opt-in to get your consent before they apply cookies. Not offering this option could lead to running afoul of GDPR, leading to potentially large fines.
Data privacy regulations like GDPR are a good thing. They give consumers and users control over which companies can access their data and what data they access.
For businesses and individual creators, these regulations are both a burden and a boon.
Content Marketing & User Data
Going back to my earlier explanation of cookie data, it breaks down like this:
Third-party data is information a third party gathers about you based on activities you take on another website.
First-party data is information a site gathers from you as you use it.
Zero-party data is information you voluntarily give to the site you are using.
One of the most common and useful pieces of zero-party data is your name and email. If a user gives you those details, you can email them marketing materials and apply personalizations like ‘Hi Gary!’ instead of ‘Hi person using my site.’
Personalization builds trust; trust leads to returning customers who might even recommend you and your products to someone else.
First Party Data is Critical
GDPR makes it harder to apply third-party cookies, which in turn makes it harder to leverage paid advertising to find new customers. If a user isn’t letting Meta or Amazon scrape their browsing history, they’ll see fewer and less targeted ads.
For many, this is a relief. Having our activities monitored and used to market to us is not something many people are excited about. That means it is harder for us to ‘naturally’ come across new products and services unless we are actively searching for them.
BUT… that’s actually a good thing. It means the people who do find you and your products/services are actively looking for them. They want to know what you offer, how much it is, and if it’s the right solution for them.
Can you guess what this kind of consumer is also more likely to do?
Give you their information willingly.
So, in a world where advertising cookies are something we have to actively choose to engage with, the data people are willing to give you is more important than ever. That willingness shows they are interested in what you’re offering, opening the door to more specific, targeted marketing that speaks to their interests or needs.
The trick, then, is to find ways to encourage and reward people for offering you their information.
4 Ways to Earn & Respect Customer Data
Asking for and using your customer’s data is important and something you need to take seriously. So, to close us out today, I’ve got four methods we employ at Lulu and we’ve observed successful businesses and creators use to help inspire people browsing their site or searching to offer up zero- and first-party data.
1. Give Them a Reason
This might seem painfully obvious, but you should try to give people a reason to share their information with you. One popular thing to do is to offer access to a white paper, a chapter from your book, or some other piece of content in exchange for their name and email.
One great example of this tactic is Australian author Phoebe Garnsworthy. Her homepage has a banner offering you a free ebook in exchange for your name and email. If you’re interested in her work, a free ebook is a great way to learn more and it serves Phoebe’s marketing goals by adding more subscribers to her mailing list.
2. Be Transparent & Honest
When you ask for personal data, be very clear and open about how you’ll use it. Something like “Enter your name and email address to get the first chapter of my new book and updates on the full book release.”
Be clear and be direct. Then follow through on it. If you tell them you’ll send them updates about an upcoming book launch, do so. Don’t share a bunch of spammy marketing encouraging them to pay for a service or something else that they didn’t explicitly ask for information about.
You can gently offer up other products or services, but the primary communications you send should be tied to the promise you made when they offered their information to you.
3. Carefully Manage Their Data
This is twofold:
You need to monitor and manage your lists to ensure you’re sending communications your subscribers are interested in.
You need to make it easy for subscribers to unsubscribe and remove their personal data from your site.
Maintaining your list of followers and subscribers is a general task that you should do periodically. Look for folks that haven’t engaged in a long time or aren’t clicking through your content to see if there might be an adjustment you can make. Or maybe it’s time to suppress that follower and stop sending them content for a while.
But most importantly, anyone who has given you their information should easily and quickly be able to remove it. If you offer account creation on your site, make sure it’s easy for logged in users to request their data be removed. If you don’t offer a log in, then be sure to include a procedure, even if it’s as simple as them emailing you a request.
4. Create Valuable, Personal Content
Finally, create content people want. If you write blog posts that are well-optimized for SEO and are showing up in search results, you’re going to get some traffic.
But once that reader is on your site, you know the final goal is for them to sign up for emails (and eventually purchase a product/service from you). People only drop their email and name into a sign up box if they’re enjoying what you’ve offered and they want more. Remember that—you need to be continuously creating valuable content that speaks to your readers and their needs.
This is another way that zero- and first-party data can be useful.
If you’re asking your subscribers and fans for information about themselves, use it to guide your content.
Managing Data & Marketing
Cookies and access to data from people browsing the web will certainly continue to change and shift. Big retailers will always want to apply third-party cookies to enhance their advertising, but it seems likely that regulations like GDPR will also continue to build a barrier around our personal information.
For you and your content business, the most important thing you can do today is to build a list of followers/fans who willingly offer you their data. That severs any reliance on third-parties and creates a direct connection between you and that subscriber. Building those kinds of connections will be the path forward—for you and for consumers.
Direct relationships built on asked for and offered data are strong relationships. You might not have as much reach, but you’ll have a core group of people who are interested in what you do and want to hear from you. That is immensely valuable in today’s crowded digital landscape.
Your Free Lulu Account
Create a Lulu Account today to print and publish your book for readers all around the world
In the last Ctrl-Alt-Speech of the year, Mike and Ben round up the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation with the following stories:
We filed our own comment with the USPTO regarding their attempt to weaken the important inter partes review (IPR) process that has been hugely helpful in getting rid of bad patents. Over at EFF, Joe Mullin wrote up an analysis of some of the comments to the USPTO, which we’re running here as well.
A massive wave of public comments just told the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO): don’t shut the public out of patent review.
EFF submitted its own formal comment opposing the USPTO’s proposed rules, and more than 4,000 supporters added their voices—an extraordinary response for a technical, fast-moving rulemaking. We comprised more than one-third of the 11,442 comments submitted. The message is unmistakable: the public wants a meaningful way to challenge bad patents, and the USPTO should not take that away.
The Public Doesn’t Want To Bury Patent Challenges
These thousands of submissions do more than express frustration. They demonstrate overwhelming public interest in preserving inter partes review (IPR), and undermine any broad claim that the USPTO’s proposal reflects public sentiment.
Comments opposing the rulemaking include many small business owners who have been wrongly accused of patent infringement, by both patent trolls and patent-abusing competitors. They also include computer science experts, law professors, and everyday technology users who are simply tired of patent extortion—abusive assertions of low-quality patents—and the harm it inflicts on their work, their lives, and the broader U.S. economy.
The USPTO exists to serve the public. The volume and clarity of this response make that expectation impossible to ignore.
EFF’s Comment To USPTO
In our filing, we explained that the proposed rules would make it significantly harder for the public to challenge weak patents. That undercuts the very purpose of IPR. The proposed rules would pressure defendants to give up core legal defenses, allow early or incomplete decisions to block all future challenges, and create new opportunities for patent owners to game timing and shut down PTAB review entirely.
Congress created IPR to allow the Patent Office to correct its own mistakes in a fair, fast, expert forum. These changes would take the system backward.
A Broad Coalition Supports IPR
A wide range of groups told the USPTO the same thing: don’t cut off access to IPR.
Open Source and Developer Communities
The Linux Foundation submitted comments and warned that the proposed rules “would effectively remove IPRs as a viable mechanism for challenges to patent validity,” harming open-source developers and the users that rely on them. Github wrote that the USPTO proposal would increase “litigation risk and costs for developers, startups, and open source projects.” And dozensofindividualsoftware developers described how bad patents have burdened their work.
Patent Law Scholars
A group of 22 patent law professors from universities across the country said the proposed rule changes “would violate the law, increase the cost of innovation, and harm the quality of patents.”
Patient Advocates
Patients for Affordable Drugs warned in their filing that IPR is critical for invalidating wrongly granted pharmaceutical patents. When such patents are invalidated, studies have shown “cardiovascular medications have fallen 97% in price, cancer drugs dropping 80-98%, and treatments for opioid addiction becom[e] 50% more affordable.” In addition, “these cases involved patents that had evaded meaningful scrutiny in district court.”
Small Businesses
Hundreds of small businesses weighed in with a consistent message: these proposed rules would hit them hardest. Owners and engineers described being targeted with vague or overbroad patents they cannot afford to litigate in court, explaining that IPR is often the only realistic way for a small firm to defend itself. The proposed rules would leave them with an impossible choice—pay a patent troll, or spend money they don’t have fighting in federal court.
What Happens Next
The USPTO now has thousands of comments to review. It should listen. Public participation must be more than a box-checking exercise. It is central to how administrative rulemaking is supposed to work.
Congress created IPR so the public could help correct bad patents without spending millions of dollars in federal court. People across technical, academic, and patient-advocacy communities just reminded the agency why that matters.
We hope the USPTO reconsiders these proposed rules. Whatever happens, EFF will remain engaged and continue fighting to preserve the public’s ability to challenge bad patents.
For the past three years, the Tor Project has been working to improve the tools, resources, and protocols used to monitor the health of the Tor network. This work aims to strengthen the Tor network's resilience and resist relay attacks.
As part of this effort, in October 2025, 7aSecurity conducted a code audit of those tools.
The code audit focused on the following projects:
TagTor is a Flask web app to display metrics about the Tor network and its nodes.
DescriptorParser is a small, standalone Java app to import Tor network descriptors into a PostgreSQL DB and a VictoriaMetrics time series.
Margot is a Rust command-line application using Arti that provides a series of commands for the network health team.
Exitmap is a fast and modular Python-based scanner for Tor exit relays.
Tor_fusion parses Tor network documents in the Rust programming language.
Simple Bandwidth Scanner is a Tor bandwidth scanner that generates bandwidth files to be used by directory authorities.
C Tor protects your privacy on the internet by hiding the connection between your Internet address and the services you use. This software is the one that runs on each relay of the Tor network.
Arti is the implementation of Tor in Rust. The code to be audited is the one that changed during this project.
The audit found six vulnerabilities and highlighted eleven hardening recommendations. All findings have been reviewed by the Tor Project, and remediation work is being tracked as part of our ongoing security and maintenance processes.
But most of the day got hung up on a very simple question: is the FCC an independent agency, or is it dutifully bound to obediently do whatever the president wants without question? If you’re new to this, the answer is supposed to be the former, but Carr, ever the dutiful Donald Trump earlobe nibbler, really struggled with this line of questioning all day long:
LUHAN: Is the FCC an independent agency?CARR: I think th—L: Yes or noC: There's a test for this in the la—L: It's yes or no, Brendan! On your website, it simply says, man, 'the FCC is independent.' This isn't a trick questionC: The FCC is notL: So is your website lying?C: Possibly
This was apparently such a sensitive line of questioning for Carr and the Trump FCC that it actively changed its website during Carr’s testimony to falsely state the agency was no longer independent:
Just so people understand: Carr has always been shameless liar and opportunist, whose underpinning legal and “intellectual” logic for what he’s doing will just randomly change, at whim, to justify his actions. Republicans, and a lot of our press, will then work tirelessly to normalize this as serious adult policymaking.
Something important to note that highlights Carr’s hypocrisy: back during the net neutrality wars in 2014, Barack Obama publicly stated that he supported imposing some basic rules, which was perfectly normal and legal. At the time, Republicans positively freaked out, insisting that the president’s vocal support was among the greatest indignities ever conceived and violated FCC independence.
“President Obama’s one minute and 57 second video was the culmination of an unprecedented and coordinated effort by the Executive Branch to pressure an independent agency into grabbing power that the Legislative Branch never said it had delegated.”
That FCC independence had been somehow destroyed because Obama legally vocally supported net neutrality has been a central talking point for Republicans for years now. It was the centerpiece of phony Republican congressional inquiries and reports for the better part of a decade.
Yet here you have a Republican president openly ordering the FCC to censor critics, journalists, and entertainers. And Carr, shamelessly trying to now claim the FCC serves entirely at the whim of the president:
KIM: I want to read you a quote & see if you agree with it. 'Congress long ago determined that the FCC is an independent expert agency.' Is that correct? CARR: Senator, there has been a sea change in the law & approach since I wrote that sentenceKIM: Yes you did. You said it in front of Congress
This is who Carr is (and who modern Republicans are). For decades they’ve wanted to have their cake and eat it too. When it’s time to implement even modest oversight of predatory telecom monopolies or media giants, folks like Carr will insist the FCC is just a helpless puppy with no authority. When it comes time to offload TikTok to Trump’s billionaire friends, censor journalists critical of their mad king, or bully comedians, suddenly the FCC has all the authority in the world.
There’s absolutely zero legal coherence to any of it. It’s kakistocracy. It’s authoritarianism at the hands of the dimmest, least ethical people imaginable. It’s frequently illegal. And it’s embarrassing.
One downside of the day’s focus on FCC independence is that Congress didn’t really pressure Carr on any of the other ethically problematic and illegal things he’s been doing, whether it’s a fake “investigation” into public media, his abuses of the merger approval process to require that companies be more sexist and racist, or his complete decimation of FCC consumer protection and media consolidation limits.
On July 18, a mild, overcast night in Nairobi, Kenya, a team of President Donald Trump’s top foreign aid advisers ducked into a meeting room at the Tribe Hotel, their luxury accommodations in the city’s diplomatic quarter, for a private dinner.
The visitors from Washington included Marcus Thornton, a former Border Patrol agent known for a series of public lawsuits against the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate; Kenneth Jackson, a former oil executive who had done a stint in government under the first Trump administration; and Laken Rapier, who’d previously managed communications for the city of Fort Worth, Texas. This year, all had been appointed to leadership roles in the U.S. Agency for International Development, the premier government humanitarian agency in the world.
Five months earlier, some of the visiting aides had celebrated USAID’s destruction over cake and speeches in Washington. With that job done, they’d embarked on a world tour of half a dozen cities, including the Kenyan capital. They were granted special permission to fly business class “to help ensure maximum rest and comfort,” according to an internal memo. Thornton alone received authorization to expense more than $35,000 in taxpayer money for the trip. The plan was to conduct exit interviews with USAID’s top experts, who were being forced out of the agency amid the administration’s stated commitment to austerity.
When the U.S. embassy in Nairobi learned of the visit, officials there arranged the dinner with a goal in mind. It would be their last opportunity to explain, face-to-face, the catastrophic impact of Trump’s drastic cuts to foreign aid.
A top concern: the administration’s failure to fund the World Food Program’s operation in Kenya, where about 720,000 refugees, among the most vulnerable people on earth, relied on the organization to survive. After providing $112 million in 2024, the U.S. abruptly cut off money in January without warning, leaving the program with no time to find adequate support or import the food needed for the rest of the year.
For months afterward, U.S. government and humanitarian officials warned Washington that the cutoff had led to increasingly dire circumstances. They begged Trump’s political advisers, including Thornton, to renew WFP’s grant and give the money it needed to avert disaster. The embassy in Nairobi sent at least eight cables to the office of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, explaining the situation on the ground and projecting mass hunger, violence and regional instability.
Those warnings went unheeded. Rubio, facing pressure from lawmakers and humanitarian groups, nevertheless publicly asserted that the agency’s mass cuts had spared food programs — even as the administration failed to fund WFP in Kenya behind the scenes. “If it’s providing food or medicine or anything that is saving lives and is immediate and urgent, you’re not included in the freeze,” Rubio told reporters on Feb. 4. “I don’t know how much more clear we can be than that.”
By the spring, WFP still had not received funding, ran low on supplies and would be forced to stop feeding many of Kenya’s refugees. In Kakuma, the third-largest camp in the world, WFP cut rations to their lowest in history, trapping most of the 308,000 people in the camp with almost nothing to eat.
They began to starve, and many — mostly children — died because their malnourished bodies couldn’t fight off infections, ProPublica found while reporting in the camp. Mothers had to choose which of their kids to feed. Young men took to the streets in protests, some of which devolved into violent riots. Pregnant women with life-threatening anemia were so desperate for calories that they ate mud. Out of options and mortally afraid, refugees began fleeing the camp by foot and in overcramped cars, threatening a new migration crisis on the continent. They said they’d rather risk being shot or dying on the perilous route than slowly starving in Kakuma.
To press the urgency of the situation in East Africa at dinner, the embassy officials enlisted Dragica Pajevic, a WFP veteran of more than two decades. Pajevic arrived at the Tribe Hotel early. She brought props. The bag slung over her shoulder held a collection of Tupperware containers with different amounts of dry rice, lentils and oil.
As they ate, she placed each container on the table. The largest represented 2,100 daily calories, what humanitarians like her consider the minimum daily intake for an adult. The next container showed 840 calories. That is what a fifth of refugees in Kakuma were set to receive come August. Another third would get just over 400 calories. Then she showed an empty container. The rest — almost half of the people in Kakuma — would get nothing at all.
Pajevic ended her presentation by relaying a truism that she said a government official in Liberia had once told her: The only difference between life and death during a famine is WFP and the U.S. government, its largest donor.
“The one who’s not hungry cannot understand the beastly pain of hunger,” Pajevic said, “and what a person is willing to do just to tame that beastly pain.”
The response was muted, according to other people familiar with the dinner. Jackson, then USAID’s deputy administrator for management and resources, said the decision to renew WFP’s grant was now with the State Department, and gave no indication he would appeal on the organization’s behalf. Thornton, a foreign service officer who ascended to a leadership post under Trump, did not speak. Instead, he spent much of the meal looking at his cellphone.
The dinner plates were cleared and the visitors headed to the airport. “They just took zero responsibility for this,” one of the attendees said, “and zero responsibility for what’s going to happen.”
The details of this episode are drawn from accounts by six people familiar with the trip, as well as internal government records. Most people in this article spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. This year, ProPublica, The New Yorker and other outlets have documented violence and hunger due to the aid cuts in Kenya’s camps. But the scale of suffering throughout Kakuma — and the string of decisions by American officials that contributed to it — have not been previously reported.
The camp had seen similar spikes in pediatric malnutrition in recent years, but they were tied to natural causes, such as malaria outbreaks, extreme drought or COVID-19, according to staff of the International Rescue Committee, a U.S.-based nonprofit that operates Kakuma’s only hospital.
This was something different: an American-made hunger crisis. So far this year, community health workers have referred almost 12,000 malnourished children for immediate medical attention.
“What has come with Trump, I’ve never experienced anything like it,” said one aid worker who has been in Kakuma for decades. “It’s huge and brutal and traumatizing.”
In response to a detailed list of questions, a senior State Department official insisted that no one had died as a result of foreign aid cuts. The official also said that the U.S. still gives WFP hundreds of millions a year and the administration is shifting to investments that will better serve both the U.S. and key allies like Kenya over time. “We just signed a landmark health agreement with Kenya,” the official said, pointing to recent endorsements by government officials there. “That’s going to transform their ability to build their domestic capacity, to take care of their populations, to improve the quality of health care in Kenya.”
The day of the dinner, 370 miles from the Tribe Hotel, Mary Sunday sat on a vinyl bed in the pediatric malnutrition ward of Kakuma’s hospital, cradling her 7-month-old baby, Santina. The name means “little saint” in Italian, and Mary could only pray that God would save her baby’s life.
Slender, with close-cropped hair and arresting eyes, Sunday had rushed Santina to the hospital four days earlier after the infant developed severe diarrhea. Her husband, Juma Lotunya, had stayed behind to care for their 2-year-old, Grace.
Devout Christians in their early 20s, the couple fled to Kakuma together from South Sudan. They considered parenthood a sacred responsibility — especially Sunday, whose own mother died when she was young. As their family grew, Lotunya had hoped to start a small shop so he could afford to send their daughters to school. “I had that simple dream,” he said.
But in June, when Santina was 6 months old, WFP cut the camp’s food rations. Families like theirs were allotted just a small amount of rice and lentils — 630 daily calories per person — which they were expected to make last until August. Sunday and Lotunya stretched it as long as they could, eating one small meal per day. But the food ran out before the end of June. Sunday stopped producing enough breastmilk to feed Santina, and their chubby baby began to waste away. By the time they arrived at the hospital, Santina weighed only 11 pounds. Staff noted in her charts that she was severely malnourished, her eyes sunken.
Sunday watched helplessly under the clinic’s fluorescent lights as hospital staff pumped her baby with medicine and tried to reintroduce more calories.
On the clinic’s walls, next to decals of butterflies, monkeys and seahorses, loomed dry-erase boards with columns of data tracking how many children and babies had died in the room this year. Sunday spoke no English, but she knew what the numbers meant: One row listed admissions to the pediatric malnutrition ward — about 400 per month on average, including the highest number of edema cases, a key marker of severity, in years.
Another row on the whiteboards tallied those who never left the clinic: At least 54 children have died in the hospital with complications brought on by malnutrition in 2025 alone, including a surge in the spring when families first began rationing their food because of the USAID cuts. Worldwide, this year is the first in decades that early childhood deaths will increase, the Gates Foundation recently reported. Researchers said a key factor is the cuts to foreign aid.
In the hospital’s courtyard, another mother, 20-year-old Nyangoap Riek, leaned against a tree with her two children at her feet and said she was considering an extreme solution. “The thing I think about is committing suicide,” she told ProPublica, “because I heard the U.N. takes care of the kids when the parents are gone.”
Kakuma has been a sanctuary in East Africa since the United Nations and Kenyan government began accepting refugees there in 1992. People have come fleeing deadly violence in some two dozen countries — mainly from South Sudan like Sunday and Lotunya — but also as far away as Afghanistan. Covering an area about half the size of Manhattan, Kakuma is a loose constellation of head-high mud and thatch neighborhoods and corrugated metal slums, like a macabre oasis in a desert, stitched together by rutted motorcycle trails.
Its sheer scale has drawn political figures, Olympic gold medalists and Hollywood celebrities on humanitarian visits. Movies have been made, including a documentary about the “Lost Boys of Sudan,” a group of unaccompanied minors escaping war and conflict. Angelina Jolie opened a school there.
A high-ranking Republican-appointed diplomat from the U.S. once called Kakuma the hottest, driest land on earth, “a place that is very close to the edge of Hades.”
“We are sustaining life,” she said, “by helping fund the World Food Program.”
In the past, USAID gave WFP’s global operations billions every year, including the funds to feed refugees at camps in Kenya. The aid is one end of a bargain to bring stability to the region. Countries like Kenya take in refugees from a host of other countries fleeing violence, famine or natural disasters. In exchange, the U.S., along with other wealthy nations vested in saving lives, help foot the bill for essential services. Without food, experts say, refugees would likely spill out of Kenya into other countries. Conflicts may last longer, claim more lives and create new refugees.
USAID has been ubiquitous in Kakuma for so long that it’s a literal building block in the camp; millions of old cans of cooking oil bearing the agency’s letters have been flattened and repurposed as lattice fencing.
When the Trump administration froze thousands of USAID programs during a putative review of the agency’s operations in January, Rubio insisted food programs would be spared.
But then Rubio’s lieutenants failed to extend WFP’s Kenya funding, blowing up the typical timetable the organization needed in order to ship food to Kakuma by summer.
WFP was blindsided. The organization’s leaders had received no notice ahead of the cuts and no communication about whether the Trump administration would ever renew their grant. “There was zero plan, except causing pain,” said one U.N. official. “And that is not forgivable.”
Even before the second Trump administration, funding shortfalls in recent years had forced the organization to drop rations by around 20% to 40% throughout the camp. To adjust for the long term, WFP was planning to reform its model in Kenya to make sure the small minority of people with some income, like small-business owners, didn’t receive food.
Thousands of Refugee Families in Northwest Kenya Starved After USAID Funding Cuts
In August, food rations were cut to historic lows. Almost half the Kakuma camp got nothing at all.
Note: Rations and population sizes represent an Aug. 11 food distribution in Kakuma. ProPublica extrapolated the 100% ration amounts from the 20% ration. Amounts vary between distributions. Source: Documents obtained by ProPublica. Chris Alcantara/ProPublica
But this year, WFP’s leaders were forced to stretch their remaining supplies from last year. They made the drastic decision to cut rations to their lowest in Kakuma’s history. They also reduced distributions to once every other month instead of monthly.
In August, the handouts would become even more austere, as WFP rushed to prioritize families based on need. They determined only half the population would receive food. Most people learned which half they were in from a number stamped on the back of their ration card.
Across the world in Washington, the fate of places like Kakuma was in the hands of a select few political appointees, including Thornton, who was named the agency’s deputy chief of staff on March 18. Thornton first worked beneath Peter Marocco, Rubio’s head of foreign assistance, and later under Jeremy Lewin, initially an Elon Musk hire. Besides Rubio, none of them were subject to Senate confirmation.
As pleas poured in from government officials in Washington and abroad to restart aid operations in Africa, including WFP in Kenya, the appointees often failed to act, records and interviews show.
On March 18, USAID’s political leadership invited career government aid officials from the agency’s major bureaus to pitch the handful of programs they thought were most critical. It was the only time the agency’s Africa bureau had an opportunity to make a full-throated case for its development programs across the continent. They had just 45 minutes to do it.
In the room was Thornton, a member of the Ben Franklin Fellowship, an organization that champions “the primacy of American sovereignty.” Thornton said in podcast appearances that his campaign against President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for federal workers introduced him to a government bureaucracy “that is not reflective of the values of the people that it serves” and requires “fear and accountability” to come to heel, Mother Jones reported.
As part of the meeting, Brian Frantz, acting head of USAID’s Africa bureau and a diplomat with nearly 25 years of experience, pitched Kenya as an important trade and national security partner. At one point when discussing another country, Frantz mentioned the U.S. Trade and Development Agency, using the acronym TDA. Thornton perked up, according to two attendees. Then he asked: Was TDA a reference to the Venezuelan criminal organization Tren de Aragua?
The USAID officials were stunned. “That was the one thing he said in that meeting,” one of the attendees recalled. “There was just zero interest in the subject matter.”
In a blistering memo circulated around the agency before he was laid off in late summer, Frantz upbraided political leaders. He detailed how they had prevented lifesaving programs from coming back online by refusing to pay for services already rendered and restricting access to USAID’s payment systems. He said they had frequently changed the process for how to appeal program terminations, burying their subordinates in paperwork for months.
“We were given make-work to keep us spinning our wheels,” another former official recalled.
Months before the last-ditch appeal at the Tribe dinner, embassy staff in Nairobi had also tried unsuccessfully to get funding restored to WFP. In March, Marc Dillard, the acting U.S. ambassador, went to Kakuma for a tour of the hospital where Sunday and Santina would later check in.
After seeing the stakes firsthand, Dillard signed a series of cables to Washington documenting the chaos and death in Kakuma and other camps caused by the sudden funding cuts to WFP. On May 6, the embassy wrote that declining food assistance had “already contributed to several deaths and could result in escalating instability in Kenya.”
At one point, a group of teenagers and young men in Kakuma splintered off from a protest and set fire to WFP’s tents. Kenyan police responded by shooting at them, wounding at least two, including a teenager who was hospitalized with a gunshot wound to the head. Ordinarily considered among the most peaceful refugee camps in Africa, Kakuma went into lockdown. Aid workers hid inside their compounds.
Sexual assault, violent protests and other crimes would only increase without aid, Kenyan government officials warned the embassy, according to another cable. They predicted the cuts could destabilize one of America’s closest allies in Africa, “undermining Kenyan willingness to host thousands of refugees, many of whom would likely otherwise join the illegal migration flows bound for Europe and the United States.”
At a roadside staging area, some of those fleeing Kakuma hired smugglers to take them the 70 miles to the South Sudan border — the same country where they had escaped violence. As many as two dozen women, children and babies contorted inside cars with their belongings piled on the roof. “It’s hunger that chased us,” one woman said through the cracked window of a car about to depart. “It’s hunger that’s making us leave.”
In mid-May, USAID’s humanitarian assistance bureau in Washington delivered a memo again requesting the political appointees approve funding for WFP Kenya. “Without this additional assistance,” the appeal stated, “the WFP-provided food rations will reduce from normal levels of 60% to 20%, putting nearly 1 million people at risk of starvation and death and likely triggering additional insecurity within the refugee camps.”
Records show seven advisers in the chain of command signed off on more funding for WFP in Kenya. When the request got to Thornton, who by then had been promoted to USAID’s chief of staff, he did not. No money went through at that time. “Thornton became a real road block,” a former USAID official said.
Thornton did not respond to a request for comment. In response to questions about episodes like this, the senior State Department official said the Office of Management and Budget, not USAID or the State Department, has ultimate authority to approve new foreign aid money. They said they worked closely with OMB to review all of the funding requests. “In order to make an obligation like that,” the official said, “you need to have apportioned funds from OMB.”
When ProPublica asked about the funding delays and the State Department’s explanation, OMB’s communications director Rachel Cauley said in an email, “That’s absolutely false. And that’s not even how this process works.” She did not clarify what was false.
Santina declined rapidly in the days after arriving at the clinic. Hospital staff tried everything. They gave her IV fluids, put her on oxygen support and updated the diagnosis to marasmus, a severe form of malnutrition where the body starts to eat itself. Pneumonia gripped her lungs. Santina’s color faded and she struggled to breathe. She became unresponsive to pain.
Cradling her baby, Sunday thought about her oldest daughter back at home. Two-year-old Grace wore a little bell around her ankle because she was prone to wandering off. Sunday thought: What will Grace eat today? Tomorrow? Will she end up here too?
Just after 5 a.m. on July 21, hospital staff pronounced Santina dead.
A doctor and nutrition specialist with the International Rescue Committee said Santina almost certainly would have survived if she weren’t malnourished. To Lotunya, the cause was clear: After starving for weeks, his wife could no longer breastfeed, which is why Santina had become so tiny and weak. “That is why she died,” he said.
Santina was transferred to the hospital’s morgue, a squat concrete building at the edge of the compound. Lotunya borrowed $10 to bury his daughter in Kakuma’s cemetery, just on the other side of the hospital fence.
Once proud to be the mother she’d grown up missing, shame washed over Sunday. “I felt I wasn’t mother enough,” she said later, nearly in a whisper.
In early August, Sunday came home after helping to harvest the sallow greens a neighbor was growing out of dry, cracked earth. In exchange, they had given her a few handfuls of the vegetable wrapped in fabric. It was the family’s only food.
The August food distribution was supposed to come any day; the camp was tense. WFP’s new rankings determined that only half of Kakuma would receive food, a decision most refugees deeply opposed. Lotunya, Sunday and Grace were among those who would get nothing.
Someone had stolen the roof off the family’s single-room mud house, so Lotunya had used tarp and cardboard for a makeshift cover, which was disintegrating in the hot sun. Grace played on the dirt patio, the bell on her ankle chiming as she moved between her parents, clinging to their legs and crawling into their laps.
Doting on her, they said, was the only way to cope with losing Santina. They have just one picture of their youngest child: a fuzzy, black-and-white image on the family’s refugee registration. “But,” Sunday said, looking at her oldest daughter asleep on Lotunya’s shoulder, “I have Grace.”
In late September, the State Department signed an extension to WFP’s Kenya operation. This year, the U.S. gave $66 million, which is 40% less than it received last year and, critically, the funds arrived nine months into the year.
WFP has told refugees it plans to provide food through at least March. Even then, most families are set to receive between one-fifth and three-fifths of the recommended minimum daily calories.
Sunday, Lotunya and Grace would each get the equivalent of 420 calories a day.
Where do you show up, what do you publish? Who do you ask, and what do you answer to? What gets better because you persist?
Are there systems you support or work to change?
What do you do when you don’t feel like it? Especially then.
The ocean is made of drops. And our practice turns those drops into something of significance.
It’s a practice if we show up even if it’s not working (yet). And it’s a practice if we understand how to make it better.
Our actions become our habits, and our habits attract others. That becomes our community, and our community builds systems. Those systems feel awkward until they become normal, and then, once normal, they become the status quo.
Bolts of lightning rarely change the world, but erosion does. Streams turn into rivers, and rivers persist.
A perfect distillation of the social uselessness of finance (permalink)
I'm about to sign off for the year – actually, I was ready to do it yesterday, but then I happened upon a brief piece of writing that was so perfect that I decided I'd do one more edition of Pluralistic for 2025.
The piece in question is John Lanchester's "For Every Winner A Loser," in the London Review of Books, in which Lanchester reviews two books about the finance sector: Gary Stevenson's The Trading Game and Rob Copeland's The Fund:
It's a long and fascinating piece and it's certainly left me wanting to read both books, but that's not what convinced me to do one more newsletter before going on break – rather, it was a brief passage in the essay's preamble, a passage that perfectly captures the total social uselessness of the finance sector as a whole.
Lanchester starts by stating that while we think of the role of the finance sector as "capital allocation" – that is, using investors' money to fund new businesses and expansions for existing business – that hasn't been important to finance for quite some time. Today, only 3% of bank activity consists of "lending to firms and individuals engaged in the production of goods and services."
The other 97% of finance is gambling. Here's how Stevenson breaks it down: say your farm grows mangoes. You need money before the mangoes are harvested, so you sell the future ownership of the harvest to a broker at $1/crate.
The broker immediately flips that interest in your harvest to a dealer who believes (on the basis of a rumor about bad weather) that mangoes will be scarce this year and is willing to pay $1.10/crate. Next, an international speculator (trading on the same rumor) buys the rights from the broker at $1.20/crate.
Now come the side bets: a "momentum trader" (who specializing in bets on market trends continuing) buys the rights to your crop for $1.30/crate. A contrarian trader (who bets against momentum traders) short-sells the momentum trader's bet at $1.20. More short sellers pile in and drive the price down to $1/crate.
Now, a new rumor circulates, about conditions being ripe for a bounteous mango harvest, so more short-sellers appear, and push the price to $0.90/crate. This tempts the original broker back in, and he buys your crop back at $1/crate.
That's when the harvest comes. You bring in the mangoes. They go to market, and fetch $1.10/crate.
This is finance – a welter of transactions, only one of which (selling your mangoes to people who eat them) involves the real economy. Everything else is "speculation on the movement of prices." The nine transactions that took place between your planting the crop and someone eating the mangoes are all zero sum – every trade has an evenly matched winner and loser, and when you sum them all up, they come out to zero. In other words, no value was created.
This is the finance sector. In a world where the real economy generates $105 trillion/year, the financial derivatives market adds up to $667 trillion/year. This is "the biggest business in the world" – and it's useless. It produces nothing. It adds no value.
If you work a job where you do something useful, you are on the losing side of this economy. All the real money is in this socially useless, no-value-creating, hypertrophied, metastasized finance sector. Every gain in finance is matched by a loss. It all amounts to – literally – nothing.
So that's what tempted me into one more blog post for the year – an absolutely perfect distillation of the uselessness of "the biggest business in the world," whose masters are the degenerate gamblers who buy and sell our politicians, set our policy, and control our lives. They're the ones enshittifying the internet, burning down the planet, and pushing Elon Musk towards trillionairedom.
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.
"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
My piece out later today in The Big Picture takes a look at where everything stands today, as we near the end of the first calendar year of Trump’s second term. And I gotta say, it’s not looking good for Dear Leader.
Instead of a hard powering executive leading us ahead full throttle, the Trump train is a hodge podge of railcars, with random cargo booked by competing factions and personalities. The result is that on every major policy issue, from inflation to healthcare to military deployment, we are seeing things go quite badly.
The entire Trump project is backfiring, and voters are noticing.
Look for my round up of the year’s failed Trump policies in your inboxes later today. If you’re not yet subscribed, you can do sign up for free using the button below. But please do consider becoming a paid supporter if you can spare it! My team and I depend on voluntary support for our work and offer some great benefits for our paid subscribers.
Fifteen years ago, Google processed 250,000 takedown notices in a single year. The takedown counter for 2025 has already exceeded five billion. 
After years of preparations, the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) will kick off this Sunday at Rabat’s Prince Moulay Abdellah Stadium in Morocco.
In a world where standardized streaming portals have become a commodity, Hayase is a breath of fresh air. 
