L'action intentée par Geneviève Hinse contre l'ancienne cheffe parlementaire du PLQ pourra suivre son cours.

Le déplacement forcé d'une population civile est un crime de guerre, au regard du droit international.

Various laws and 250 years of tradition prevent the likeness of living people from appearing on currency. Donald Trump and Scott Bessent don’t want you to worry about that

• This was originally published in This Week in Trumpland. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday

Two hallmarks of Donald Trump’s second-term: the president’s enthusiasm for putting his name and face on things, and his cavalier approach to established law.

Today the president is once again combining both those interests, as the government releases a $1 coin bearing his image, an item of currency which scholars say should be illegal, but which is happening anyway. How many times have you heard that in the last 18 months?

While leaders focused on Hasan Piker, two of the party’s more conservative members salvaged a GOP measure that was poised to fail

House Democratic leaders have spent the past few weeks waging a bitter campaign against their own left flank over a leftwing streamer. On Tuesday, it was the party’s center-right who blindsided them.

Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, announced late on Tuesday that he had asked the Democratic caucus’s committee on caucus rules to consider punishing the retiring Jared Golden of Maine and Blue Dog Coalition leader Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington after the pair sided with Republicans on a procedural vote that had appeared doomed.

La Canadienne l'emporte contre la Thaïlandaise Mananchaya Sawangkaew à Flushing Meadows.

Here are five stories from across the globe you might have missed

Ukraine saved more than $45 million on a single army purchase by opening it to competing bidders. The purchase was 5,000 pickup trucks, carried out through the open Prozorro tender system, Ukraine's Defense Ministry said on 2 September.

Competitive tenders of this kind saved its procurement agency nearly $362 million on non-lethal supplies in 2025, about 15 percent below expected cost, the ministry reported. The trucks are one more category moved from closed contracts to open bidding.

Volunteers used to carry this

Pickups are among the most-wanted vehicles at the front and among the longest neglected by the state, the Defense Ministry noted when it launched the tender. Until now, the need fell to volunteer drives and troops' own money.

"These are brand-new vehicles with a manufacturer's warranty, all-wheel drive, with powerful diesel engines," Mstyslav Banik, Ukraine's deputy defense minister, said.

The trucks do everything up close

The pickups are essential for logistics, evacuation, unit mobility, and drone-crew work, former DOT director Arsen Zhumadilov said when the tender opened. That range of use is why they rank among the most-requested vehicles on the front.

The agency ran the market consultations, set the technical requirements, and vetted the suppliers for the order.

Six suppliers, not one

The order was split into lots, so six different companies will deliver the trucks rather than a single contractor. The ministry frames that as insurance: if one supplier fails, the rest still deliver. This is the largest batch of pickup trucks from the state.

The purchase began in May, so the first trucks would arrive before the cold. The full batch is due by the end of 2026.

Drones are meant to be next

Then-defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov said in May that an earlier competitive tender for 155mm shells had cut costs by more than 16 percent. The next category to move to open bidding, he said, would be FPV, mid-strike, and deep-strike drones.

Asked about reports in Ukrainian and Western media that Russia could order a mass mobilization after September’s parliamentary elections, Vladimir Putin replied: “That’s complete nonsense. It’s an information attack on Russia,” RBC reported. He was speaking after the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Bishkek.

Ukraine’s military and foreign intelligence services say Russia’s General Staff has prepared a scenario for mobilizing an additional 600,000 people during 2026 and 2027—300,000 each year. Their briefing described a contingency, not an issued call-up, and did not say mobilization had begun. If activated, the agencies said, the recruits would primarily reinforce units fighting Ukraine and newly formed military units.

Ukraine’s intelligence services linked the scenario to mounting battlefield losses and a slowdown in contract recruitment. They said Russia lost roughly 240,000 personnel from January through July, including at least 140,000 killed or permanently lost, while recruiting about 232,000 contract soldiers. The figures could not be independently verified.

Russia’s military also rehearsed procedures for mobilizing residents of Kaliningrad Oblast in July, Ukrainska Pravda reported, citing The Wall Street Journal.

Reports of a possible draft have generated concern inside Russia. More than 20,000 people crossed into Georgia through the Verkhny Lars checkpoint in a single day amid fears of mobilization, as EP previously reported.

Ukraine’s warnings and Russia’s denials

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in August that Moscow planned to mobilize several hundred thousand people after the elections and roughly the same number in 2027, citing military intelligence. HUR deputy chief Vadym Skibitskyi later assessed that a call-up could provide troops for a northern offensive by February 2027, while stressing that the agency saw no preparations underway at the time.

Dmitry Medvedev, Vasily Nebenzya, and the State Duma’s defense committee have all denied plans for another mass draft. Russian officials issued similar denials shortly before Putin announced the 2022 call-up. RBC notes that the decree authorizing that mobilization was never formally revoked. No new call-up has been publicly announced or reported as underway.

Ukraine’s General Staff confirmed that Ukrainian forces struck the Novatek-Ust-Luga production complex in Russia’s Leningrad Oblast on 1 September, saying the target was hit and a fire followed. The scale of the damage remains under assessment.

Russian authorities initially acknowledged damage and a fire but did not identify the facility. Ukraine’s military intelligence later named the Novatek complex as the target, and the General Staff has now confirmed the strike and said the facility supports Russia’s armed forces. It did not explain how, nor say whether, production was disrupted.

Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, HUR, was first to identify the target, saying on 1 September that its operators had struck the complex alongside Ukraine’s Defense Forces in a joint deep-strike operation. Key elements of the site’s oil-processing installation and other equipment were hit, and a large fire broke out, the agency said. The General Staff confirmed the strike the following day.

The Novatek complex at Ust-Luga separates stable gas condensate—a liquid produced during natural gas extraction—into fuel and petroleum components and handles their shipment through the Baltic port. Its design capacity exceeds six million tons a year, the General Staff said. The plant produces light and heavy naphtha, kerosene, a diesel fraction, and a marine-fuel component.

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Drone attack damages Russia’s Baltic oil port as drone crosses Latvia into Estonia

Ukraine has repeatedly targeted the Ust-Luga port

Before Ukraine named the target, Leningrad Oblast Governor Alexander Drozdenko acknowledged infrastructure damage and a fire at Ust-Luga on 1 September, but did not identify the specific facility. HUR subsequently named the Novatek complex as the target and reported damage to key equipment.

The operation continued Ukraine’s campaign against Ust-Luga’s energy and port infrastructure. Ukrainian agencies confirmed the first strike on Novatek’s complex overnight on 24–25 March. Drones returned on 31 March, setting fuel-storage tanks ablaze, damaging a pier and pumping equipment, and temporarily halting port operations, followed by another reported attack on 7 April. Ukrainian drones last hit the port on 14 August, marking the sixth such attack there in 2026.

Yesterday a16z published an article in which NYU Professor of Design, AI and Media Theory Ruby Thelot argued that “enshittification,” or the concept that technology platforms get worse after they lock in users, isn’t real. In reality, Thelot says, people use social media more than ever and report that they are satisfied with it. 

Thelot argues that, enshittification, a term coined by Cory Doctrow which has become one of the stickiest ideas of our era to explain the current state of technology and capitalism, is a misdiagnosis of what he describes as “platform narcissism.” The idea is that people, namely older people like Doctrow and western geratric millennials who used to get a lot of value out of Facebook, selfishly think platforms should continue to cater to their needs even though they aged out of them and should be focused on raising their kids. The platforms are actually popular and well liked, but by younger people who are using Instagram and deriving value from it in a way older people can’t understand, or by people in other countries and contexts than their own. Additionally, Thelot argues, the theory of enshittification allows users who should log off an excuse to stay on platforms that it is fashionable to hate. They spend time there, but say they hate it and can’t leave because they are trapped. 

“Perhaps the reason why the platform seems worse is because your life has changed,” Thelot says. “Over the same period of time, your goals have changed, and they no longer fit with the platform’s new features. Why the hell would a fifty-five year-old be watching Reels? Go take care of your kids.”

The indisputable fact of Thelot’s argument is that various social media platforms have more users and are more profitable than ever. This data is readily available from reliable market surveys, polls, and quarterly earning reports from the companies themselves. It’s important to note that companies like Meta have a history of juking the numbers, and that despite this it recently reported its first ever decline of 20 million users, but Thelot’s point stands: Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok are massively popular. 

I will also cosign Thelot’s advice that people should log off. There are many reasons why some people can’t, present company included, but it’s never not good advice and even if you have to be on social media you can probably reduce your time scrolling. 

Thelot’s argument falls apart when he tries to prove people are actually satisfied with their time on these platforms. To prove this, he points to research from American Customer Satisfaction Index, a private company which surveys customers’ satisfaction with various products and services. In its ACSI Entertainment Study 2026 it surveyed 30,886 customers and found that overall satisfaction with social media rose by 1 percent to a score of 75 out of 100. If satisfaction with social media is rising instead of falling and doesn’t have a terrible score, it’s doing the opposite of enshittifying and people don’t actually hate it, he argues.

Kudos to Thelot for finding data that appears to contradict the human civilization-wide backlash to social media and nearly the only political issue that a deeply divided country can agree on, but this is cherry picking. 

Here are the type things customers are asked to evaluate with a score of 0-100 in the survey this rising satisfaction score for social media: “Quality of mobile app, reliability of mobile app (minimal down time, crashes, lags), loading speed and reliability, ease of navigation, ease of using the site on different devices, speed and reliability of video clips, variety of services and information, freshness of content, relevance of content, ability to use site without disruption, personal relevance of ads seen.”

Customers scored all these aspects of social media highly (between 68 and 84), and I agree with their evaluation. Instagram loads really fast. I can scroll videos on TikTok very quickly. I watched one YouTube Short about Warhammer 40,000 lore, and then was served more than a dozen other YouTube Shorts about Warhammer 40,000 lore that were both fresh and relevant. I do not contest any of this and I don’t think that is why both my friends in the DSA and my Trump supporting family members agree that Instagram is bad. 

If we wanted to find out why Americans have negative feelings about social media or why we think these platforms are enshittifying, we might ask questions like: Does using Instagram make you feel good? Do you think children younger than 13 should have unlimited access to TikTok? Has Facebook been a net positive for your family?

Let’s look at some other data. A recent survey from The Searchlight institute found that voters “overwhelmingly believe social media has a negative impact on society.” Last year, anEmerson College poll found that Americans have low confidence in information they get from social media and that social media platforms are most responsible for the creation of “fake news.” In 2021, the Cato Institute found that 75 percent of Americans don’t trust social media to make fair content moderation decisions. In August, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that three in five Americans support stronger oversight of social media companies. 35 percent said social media stressed them out. 52 percent said they spend too much time on social media. A Pew poll in July found that 6 in 10 Americans supported a social media ban for kids under 16. 

These opinions, especially as they relate to the impact social media has on younger people, has nothing to do with how fast videos load on Instagram or how effective the ads are. The apps function well technically and the ads are making money, this is self-evident and the reason we have a problem. The reason people feel like social media is enshittifying is that these companies promised to connect people across the world but in reality have chased engagement, catering to basest the human urges to hold our attention. Kids especially feel socially pressured to use these apps because that’s what every other kid is doing and where they feel their community is. It is such a clearly awful and obvious result of the way these apps have enshittified that in August Meta agreed to pay $17 billion dollars in penalties and finally curb the most dangerous aspects of its platforms over claims it endangered children. 

People need to be on Linkedin to find jobs. Municipalities and news organizations share important updates on social media first. You might be pulled onto Facebook or WhatsApp against your will because your local school or community of parents congregate there. That doesn’t mean they like it. It is possible to hate something with your entire being and still participate in it.

There are Warhammer and cute cat videos, but every scroll is a spin of a slot machine that cycles between hate, fear, jealousy, disgust, and horniness. We all see it and no amount of pro big tech propaganda, funded by the same firm that invested in these companies is going to convince anyone otherwise. 

The Texas sheriff’s office that used Flock to search more than 80,000 cameras nationwide for a woman who had a self-administered abortion used Axon’s Draft One AI tool to help write a police report about the incident, documents shared with 404 Media show. The tool was used in part to summarize a discussion of “the legal implications of the situation.”

404 Media first reported on the incident in May 2025 in which the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office in Texas searched Flock’s nationwide network for the whereabouts of a woman who self-administered an abortion, highlighting the threat of this AI-powered surveillance system being used to criminalize or track women seeking reproductive healthcare. The use of both Flock and Axon’s Draft One, which uses audio from body camera footage to automatically draft police reports using artificial intelligence, shows how quickly police departments have come to use AI surveillance tools even in critically sensitive cases. 

“I acknowledge this report was generated using Draft One by Axon,” a section of the report reads.

The abortion case has since become a flashpoint in the controversy over the use of Flock automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras. Flock’s CEO, Garrett Langley, has repeatedly and erroneously suggested that 404 Media misreported the case and that the search was done only for the woman’s safety because her family was worried about her. 404 Media previously reported that the entire police investigation was done at the behest of the woman’s abusive partner and that police discussed whether they were allowed to charge her with a crime: “It was discussed at the time with the District Attorney’s office and learned the State could not statutorily charge [the woman] for taking the pill to cause the abortion,” a police report previously obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and shared with 404 Media said. Concern from her family is never mentioned in that earlier police report or in the AI-generated police report used to write this article. 

The AI-generated incident report was obtained by journalist Cameron Probert of the Tri-City Herald and shared with 404 Media. The report shows there is extensive body camera and audio evidence that would clarify what happened in the case, and that at least one police officer, sergeant Damien Bethel, used Draft One to write his report on the incident. Parts of a police incident report show that Draft One was used to summarize a discussion between police over “the legal implications of the situation” and other investigative aspects of the case. The Johnson County Sheriff’s Department has repeatedly refused to release body camera footage from the case, including in response to 404 Media’s public records requests.

“Deputies discussed the legal implications of the situation, noting that while the girlfriend self-administered the abortion pill, there were no criminal charges applicable under current Texas law,” Bethel’s report states, providing no more details about the specifics of the discussion. “Deputies also considered the possibility of a civil lawsuit against the pharmaceutical company that supplied the pill.”

Bethell’s Draft One report further states, “There is digital multi-media evidence from Body Worn Camera footage of this call for service in the AXON Evidence Library. There is digital multi-media evidence of In-Car Camera footage of this call for service in the AXON Evidence Library or the WatchGuard Evidence Library. There were digital images captured while on the scene.” The Johnson County Sheriff’s Department has thus far refused to release even redacted versions of this evidence that the EFF and 404 Media have separately requested.

Leaked audio of Langley obtained by 404 Media, recorded by Signal Akron, shows that as recently as earlier this month, Langley was still lying about the specifics of the case to law enforcement customers of Flock. “She was in an abusive relationship and the family was concerned that she was in danger. They were trying to find her because they were worried her life was at risk,” he said. There is no mention of the woman’s family being concerned about her in any of the police reports; the only person who expresses concern about her in the police narratives is her abusive partner, who told police that the abortion happened weeks prior to their investigation. So-called “welfare checks” have repeatedly been used by abusers to harass women who have gotten abortions and, in Wisconsin, a police officer allegedly illegally used Flock to see if his ex-girlfriend had gone to an abortion clinic.

Another section of the report detailing the Flock searches shows that the officer who did the Flock searches never went to the woman’s house, and looked her up in a credit card header database system called TLO to find her addresses and vehicle information. His section of the report describes his searches as being for her safety because he worried that the man who reported her (her abusive partner) could have hurt her. He does not mention doing the search at the behest of her family. 

“I began to believe the victim may have been hurt by the RP [reporting person] due to the call and it not making sense. I wanted to use resources available to help find where the victim and her children could be to make sure they were okay,” the officer wrote. “I entered the vehicle into FLOCK to see if we could see where the victim and her children might be at due to multiple different locations being given for the victim and her children. Deputies had attempted to try and contact the female, but were unsuccessful. The FLOCK hit showed the victim had been in Dallas prior but nothing recent. The reason for the FLOCK search was to find out what city the victim and her children might be in and give us an idea of where to look for them, due to the large area of where the victim and her children cold [sic] be at.” 

When contacted for comment, the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office would not provide more details about the case or the use of Draft One to write portions of the police report to 404 Media. Keven George of the sheriff’s office said, “Draft One works by uploading and transcribing body‑camera audio once an incident concludes. Within about five minutes, a preliminary narrative based on that transcript is generated. Officers remain fully in control of the final report: they review and edit the draft, fill in missing details, and approve it before submission. Safeguards, such as placeholder ‘insert’ prompts, help ensure accuracy and prevent the system from guessing details it cannot verify.” He added, “the Deputy has to digitally sign before the narrative can be used.”

Paris Lewbel, public relations manager at Flock, told 404 Media “As Garrett said, the case report from Johnson County details that authorities explicitly stated she could NOT be charged with a crime.”

Forbes recently reported Axon’s AI tools sometimes introduce errors that officers then need to spend time removing.