Outraged by accusations that an asylum-seeker had sexually assaulted a 10-year-old girl, thousands of flag-waving, bottle-throwing, firework-wielding Irish citizens surrounded a migrant hotel in southwest Dublin, Ireland on Tuesday night, setting fire to a police vehicle.

Six people were arrested from a furious crowd estimated to have numbered approximately 2,000. The Irish police force -- or "Gardai" -- say they were on the receiving end of "sustained violence" that included glass bottles, bricks and fireworks. Despite the onslaught, a line of Gardai in riot gear were able to prevent the mob from reaching the hotel. Bringing the "torches and pitchforks" metaphor to life, the fed-up citizens brandished pitchforks and other garden tools, along with fireworks and handheld lasers, and chanted "GET THEM OUT!" Some 300 Gardai mounted the defense, employing a water cannon.

"This was obviously not a peaceful protest," said police commissioner Justin Kelly. "The actions this evening can only be described as thuggery. This was a mob intent on violence against gardai. I utterly condemn the attacks on gardaí who did their jobs professionally and with great courage to keep people safe."

The weather is getting colder, and that means getting back to anti-wood-burning propaganda.

Did you know a wood burner can kill you? They pollute more than cars and cause cancer, "similar to cigarette smoke," and so on.

Jeremy Vine is asking if it's time to ban them.

This isn't new - for want of a better word - "information". We covered this last Christmas. Then over the summer, it was folded in with a barrage of "indoor air quality" fear-mongering, only to re-emerge now that the days are getting shorter again.

Sort of like reverse-hibernation.

A trendy wood burning stove almost killed me...they need to be banned before they do anymore damage

...screams the Daily Mail.

I like the word "trendy" — they keep using it — it's so shamelessly manipulative, painting the humble stove as some pretentious luxury accessory, rather than the basic means of heating your home for literal millennia.

Anyway, the crux of the story is that this lady - Lizzie - had a severe asthma attack, and she "believes" it was linked to wood-burning stoves.

So they should be banned. Or something.

When your best engineers log off for good, don't be surprised when the cloud forgets how DNS works

"It's always DNS" is a long-standing sysadmin saw, and with good reason: a disproportionate number of outages are at their heart DNS issues. And so today, as AWS is still repairing its downed cloud as this article goes to press, it becomes clear that the culprit is once again DNS. But if you or I know this, AWS certainly does.

And so, a quiet suspicion starts to circulate: where have the senior AWS engineers who've been to this dance before gone? And the answer increasingly is that they've left the building — taking decades of hard-won institutional knowledge about how AWS's systems work at scale right along with them.

What happened?

AWS reports that on October 20, at 12:11 AM PDT, it began investigating "increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region." About an hour later, at 1:26 AM, the company confirmed "significant error rates for requests made to the DynamoDB endpoint" in that region. By 2:01 AM, engineers had identified DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint for US-EAST-1 as the likely root cause, which led to cascading failures for most other things in that region. DynamoDB is a "foundational service" upon which a whole mess of other AWS services rely, so the blast radius for an outage touching this thing can be huge.

Damage to remote Alaska villages hammered by flooding last weekend is so extreme that many of the more than 2,000 people displaced won't be able to return to their homes for at least 18 months, Gov. Mike Dunleavy said in a request to the White House for a major disaster declaration.

In one of the hardest hit villages, Kipnuk, an initial assessment showed that 121 homes — or 90% of the total — have been destroyed, Dunleavy wrote. In Kwigillingok, where three dozen homes floated away, slightly more than one-third of the residences are uninhabitable.

The remnants of Typhoon Halong struck the area with the ferocity of a Category 2 hurricane, Dunleavy said, sending a surge of high surf into the low-lying region. One person was killed, two remain missing, and rescue crews plucked dozens of people from their homes as they floated away.

The German automaker reportedly lacks €11 billion needed to fund next year's operations and investments.

Germany's largest carmaker, Volkswagen Group, is facing a potential financial crisis, with a multi-billion-euro cash-flow gap expected in 2026, Bild has reported, citing internal company figures.

The German auto giant will be about €11 billion short next year, leaving it unable to fund planned spending and investments, according to the newspaper. Volkswagen's half-year report for 2025 showed operating profit down 33% from a year earlier and a negative cash flow of €1.4 billion.

A slump in profits, weak business in China and competition from Chinese brands, as well as the tariffs imposed by US President Donald Trump have been blamed for the company's financial woes.

The German carrier has cited a doubling of state-imposed costs since 2019 in explaining the move.
Rising German aviation taxes and fees will force national flag carrier Lufthansa to cut about 100 domestic flights from its forthcoming summer schedule, the company's chief executive, Carsten Spohr has said.

Government-imposed costs for airlines in Germany have roughly doubled over the past six years, he explained.

"Without a reduction in location costs, further cuts will be unavoidable," Spohr said. "This involves around 100 domestic flights per week, which could be eliminated again next summer."

Higher taxes and fees on economy ticket costs are accelerating a shift in the airline's passenger mix towards first, business, and premium economy cabins.

The complaints from Lufthansa echo long-standing grievances from airline executives about Germany's aviation cost base, which they argue hinders competitiveness.

United Airlines Flight 1093 was flying from Denver to Los Angeles when the captain reported hitting space debris at 36,000 feet, forcing a diversion to Salt Lake City. The Boeing 737, carrying 140 passengers, landed safely on Thursday following visible damage to the cockpit windshield and a minor injury to the pilot's arm.

Photos shared online show cracks across the cockpit glass and small fragments scattered inside the flight deck. Aviation social media account JonNYC was the first to report the pilot's theory that orbital debris was responsible.

Flight-tracking website Flightradar24 reports that an Air ACT (ACT Airlines) Boeing 747-481 BDSF (a variant of the Boeing 747 cargo aircraft) veered off the runway at Hong Kong International Airport at 03:53 local time (19:53 UTC) and broke apart after hitting water at a ground speed of 49 knots.


"According to ADS-B data, flight #EK9788 had a ground speed of about 49 knots when it hit the water," Flightradar24 wrote on X.

If you believe what is written on those hats worn in the Israeli Knesset - "Trump the Peace President" - you are deluded beyond hope. Halloween may be coming, but you don't need a frightening mask to realize the horrors that confront us. Trump is the culmination of a long developing horror story.

Unlike his predecessors who prepared the way for him and who generally wore traditionally allaying masks to hide their evil actions, he is the greatest blatant fraud to ever occupy the White House. He is a war monger, a genocidal killer, and an enemy of people home and abroad so obvious, so capricious, so erratic - a man of endless threats - that no one should be surprised to wake up one morning to news that might seem "shocking." Everyone should expect surprises, not treats but tricks.

Trump is like an advertisement that tells you its characters are not ordinary people but actors and their spiel isn't true - only to tell you to buy the product they are pitching. Every pitch Trump throws is a curve ball.

The only way his schtick can be explained is that he is the culmination of a decades' long development in American culture where acting is presented as so fake that the audience thinks it's real because of its fakery. He is a dangerous joke, and all the more dangerous because he fits so comfortably into the larger cultural development that Neil Postman in 1985 aptly termed Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business and Neal Gabler later called Life:The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality.

He is the culmination of the latent stream of despotism that has flowed through American history, especially during the last twenty-five years, but which many see as only a battle between political parties, the so-called good and bad. They fail to see that fascism is like a castle that takes years to build from the foundation up, and it necessitates the slow acceptance by all shades of political opinion of the gradual loss of fundamental freedoms, the acceptance of a corporate warfare state, and a secret government lodged in "intelligence" agencies such as the CIA, the NSA, and the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), working hand-in-glove with the major media and Silicon Valley corporations in their partnerships to propagandize and spy on the public.

Prominent Jeffrey Epstein victim Virginia Roberts Giuffre was brutally bloodied, beaten and raped by a "well-known prime minister" in a series of savage encounters that finally helped the teenager break free from the sex trafficker's spell.

In her posthumous memoir "Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice," Giuffre recalled begging Epstein to step in after the unnamed politician forced her to beg for her life — but the pedophile coldly told her it was simply part of her job.

"After the attack, I couldn't stay a fool. Having been treated so brutally and then seeing Epstein's callous reaction to how terrorized I felt, I had to accept that Epstein meted out praise merely as a manipulation to keep me subservient," Giuffre wrote, according to an excerpt shared with The Post.