Tootfinder

U.S. scales back troops on NATO’s eastern flank
The United States has informed its NATO allies that it will scale back its troop presence along Europe’s eastern border with Ukraine as it focuses on security priorities elsewhere in the world, Romania’s defense ministry said on Wednesday.
The U.S. Army later confirmed the move but denied it was a sign of lessened commitment to NATO.
Depending on operations and exercises, around 80,000-100,000 U.S. troops are usually present…

Day 3: Octavia Butler.
Incredibly dark, graphic, and disturbing near-future science fiction, which has proved absolutely prophetic. In the 1990's she was writing about a charismatic Conservative Christian and white nationalist president elected in 2024, and the horrors his paramilitary followers would unleash, including forced labor & indoctrination camps. Did I mention those books include ebikes & pseudo-cellphones too? Characters fleeing north from a disastrous social collapse in Loss Angeles? This is "The Parable of the Sower" and "The Parable of the Talents" and the later was tragically rushed to an end because of Butler's declining health.
Her work deals unflinchingly with racism and the darker parts of society, and to those who might say "her depiction of social collapse is overblown," I'd say that while it's not literally the world we live in, it's *effectively* the world that the poorest of us live in. If you're a homeless undocumented latinx person in LA right now, I'm not sure how meaningfully different your world is from the one she depicts.
Her work comes with a strong content warning for lots of things, including racial violence, sexual abuse and slavery, including of children, animal harm, etc., so it's not for everyone. Reading it in 2023 was certainly an incredible trip. Her politics are really cool though; with explicit pro-LGBTQ themes and tinges of what might today be considered #SolarPunk.
#20WomenAuthors

Rethinking Layer-wise Model Merging through Chain of Merges
Pietro Buzzega, Riccardo Salami, Angelo Porrello, Simone Calderara
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21421 https://

Rethinking Layer-wise Model Merging through Chain of Merges
Fine-tuning pretrained models has become a standard pathway to achieve state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of domains, leading to a proliferation of task-specific model variants. As the number of such specialized modules in-creases, merging them into a unified model without retraining has become a critical challenge. Existing merging techniques often rely on interference heuristics,importance weighting, or activation matching while treating each layer independently, thereby failing…

E.W. Scripps agrees to sell its Indianapolis ABC affiliate station WRTV to Circle City Broadcasting for $83M; Scripps agreed to sell WFTX for $40M in September (Lucas Manfredi/The Wrap)
https://www.thewrap.com/ew-scripps-wrtv-circle-city-broadcasting-sale/

E.W. Scripps to Sell Indianapolis ABC Affiliate WRTV to Circle City Broadcasting for $83 Million
The deal for the Indianapolis ABC affiliate station will close following receipt of regulatory and other customary approvals

According to the following article "The D.C.-based think tank estimates the tariffs will bring in an estimated $1.3 trillion of net new revenue through the end of Trump’s current term "
OK let's run some numbers... And remember, the R party wants to cut households in with a one time $500 check. Remember that number $500.
US population is very roughly 300,000,000, about 3x10**8
$1.3 trillion is 1.3x10**12
So if the R's want to repay us for the tarif…

Trump is bringing in so much revenue from tariffs that it’s seriously reducing the $37 trillion national debt
It's the equivalent of a new payroll tax or a 17% cut in the size of the military, according to a top think tank.

𝐉𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝: 𝑁𝑜𝑟𝑚𝑎𝑙 𝐴𝑐𝑐𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑠 by Charles Perrow. It made a big impression on me when I first came across it but when I put it in my backpack for a trip to Binghamton I recalled that the versions of many incidents in it aren’t the best you can find in the literature.
Not sure how well it aged: flying has gotten safer and people don’t write about maritime accidents like they did in the 70’s
#books

The president of the United States is invading multiple US cities and liberal strongholds, in troop deployments that are now the primary component of his vast, lawless, smash-and-grab efforts to shred the nation’s constitutional and democratic order, all in the service of his personality cult.
And his enthusiasm for doing so is partially, and meaningfully, fueled by how mad he gets while binge-watching hours and hours of TV, current and former Trump advisers tell Zeteo.

Trump’s Addiction to Watching Fox Is Killing American Democracy
Our country is falling apart because one old man, Trump advisers and former administration officials say, won’t stop ‘yelling’ at his TV.

Christian therapist Kaley Chiles
wants the Supreme Court to rule
that
Christian therapists’ free speech rights outweigh a law that bans therapy aimed at changing a minor’s sexual identity.
The case could affect laws in nearly 30 states.
https://www.was…

Christian therapist seeks right to counsel gay teens to change feelings
The Supreme Court will consider whether therapists’ free speech rights outweigh a law that bans therapy that seeks to change sexual identity. Almost 30 states have such bans.

Well-posedness for the periodic Hyperbolic nonlinear Schr\"odinger equations
Engin Ba\c{s}ako\u{g}lu, Yuzhao Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03211 https://

Well-posedness for the periodic Hyperbolic nonlinear Schrödinger equations
We establish local well-posedness for the hyperbolic nonlinear Schrodinger equation (HNLS) in the critical spaces. Following the approach of Killip and Visan, we derive scale-invariant Strichartz estimates for HNLS on both rational and irrational tori, thereby removing the epsilon-loss of derivative present in the hyperbolic Strichartz estimates of Bourgain and Demeter.

Manufacturing employment has been falling since April,
and job growth is slower than it was between January 2024 and August 2024.
The timing of the manufacturing declines corresponds with the Trump administration’s disastrous tariff policies,
which are projected to cost American households $2,400 annually.
Since Donald Trump’s tariff announcement in April 2025,
overall manufacturing employment has declined by 42,000,
while job openings and hires have fall…