Wired

In less than a week, Swifties have turned their community into an online election headquarters for US vice president Kamala Harris—and the campaign wants in on the effort.

After President Joe Biden announced that he would not seek reelection last week, Emerald Medrano, 22, flipped on the news. As he watched pundits yap about the Democratic ticket, he felt he had to do something. He had never been politically involved, but he had a popular Swift stan account. Not sure of what to do, he posted on X: “I feel like us U.S. swifties should mass organize and help campaign for Kamala Harris and spread how horrendous project 2025 would be to help get people’s butts down the polls.”

For the past six months, election denial groups across the United States have been laser-focused on efforts to purge voter rolls in support of former president Donald Trump’s reelection bid.

Using new apps and online tools, they claim their volunteers have filed hundreds of thousands of voter registration challenges. Though these efforts are based on unreliable data and debunked election fraud conspiracies, they threaten to disenfranchise voters by removing legitimate registrations. And as the deadline to file these voter roll challenges approaches next week, experts warn that these groups are already planning out their next moves to stop Democratic voters in swing states.

In the skies over Al Ain, in the United Arab Emirates, pilot Mark Newman waits for the signal. When it comes, he flicks a few silver switches on a panel by his leg, twists two black dials, then punches a red button labeled FIRE.

A slender canister mounted on the wing of his small propeller plane pops open, releasing a plume of fine white dust. That dust—actually ordinary table salt coated in a nanoscale layer of titanium oxide—will be carried aloft on updrafts of warm air, bearing it into the heart of the fluffy convective clouds that form in this part of the UAE, where the many-shaded sands of Abu Dhabi meet the mountains on the border with Oman. It will, in theory at least, attract water molecules, forming small droplets that will collide and coalesce with other droplets until they grow big enough for gravity to pull them out of the sky as rain.

In April, an unassuming old building in New Delhi’s furniture market housed roughly 30 youngsters. Some were hunched over their laptops crunching data on Excel or analyzing a heat map, while others huddled to discuss strategy. These were engineering graduates, economists, political scientists, and others. There were office chairs, desks, and a couple of white boards.

The entire setup could easily have passed as a startup office, but it wasn’t. This was an election war room.

Neo-Nazis and white supremacists are sharing Hitler-related propaganda and trying to recruit new members on TikTok, according to a new report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) shared exclusively with WIRED. The TikTok algorithm is also promoting this content to new users, researchers found, as extremist communities are leveraging the huge popularity of TikTok among younger audiences to spread their message.

The report from ISD details how hundreds of extremist TikTok accounts are openly posting videos promoting Holocaust denial and the glorification of Hitler and Nazi-era Germany, and suggesting that Nazi ideology is a solution to modern-day issues such as the alleged migrant invasion of Western countries. The accounts also show support for white supremacist mass shooters and livestream-related footage or recreations of these massacres. Many of the accounts use Nazi symbols in their profile pictures or include white supremacist codes in their usernames.

People line up to take their picture next to a cardboard cutout of former President Donald Trump; fist in the air, blood on his face post assassination attempt. Above them a second copy of the cutout rotates atop a tower of bitcoin mining equipment. Superimposed over his clenched hand is a big bitcoin.

Trump is the headliner of the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville, arguably the most high-profile speaker for the conference since El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele appeared via video in 2021 to announce that he’d make cryptocurrency legal tender in his country.

Former president Donald Trump outlined a plan to turbocharge crypto growth and make the US a crypto mining powerhouse in his keynote address to the 2024 Nashville Bitcoin Conference on Saturday.

Trump announced that if elected, he would create a strategic bitcoin reserve in the US. “It will be the policy of my administration to keep 100 percent of all bitcoin the US government currently holds or acquires in the future … as a core of the strategic national bitcoin stockpile,” he said.

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As delegates arrived at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in mid-July to officially nominate former president Donald Trump as their 2024 candidate, a right-wing policy think tank held an all-day event nearby. The Heritage Foundation, a key sponsor of the convention and a group that has been influencing Republican presidential policy since the 1980s, gathered its supporters to tout Project 2025, a 900-plus-page policy blueprint that seeks to fundamentally restructure the federal government.

A gigantic, weather-defining current system could be headed to collapse. Peter and Susanne Ditlevsen had a simple yet controversial question: How much time might we have left to save it?

Off the southwest tip of Iceland, you’ll find what’s often called a “marginal” body of water. This part of the Atlantic, the Irminger Sea, is one of the stormiest places in the northern hemisphere. On Google Maps it gets three stars: “very windy,” says one review. It’s also where something rather strange is happening. As the rest of the planet has warmed since the 20th century—less in the tropics, more near the poles—temperatures in this patch of ocean have hardly budged. In some years they’ve even cooled. If you get a thrill from spooky maps, check out one that compares the average temperatures in the late 19th century with those of the 2010s. All of the planet is quilted in pink and red, the familiar colors of climate change. But in the North Atlantic, there’s one freak splotch of blue. If global warming were a blanket, the Irminger Sea and its neighboring waters are where the moths ate through. Scientists call it the warming hole.

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Another election-shattering event took place this week after President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race. The right lost itself in another conspiracy cycle because of it, Silicon Valley megadonors started writing donation checks again in response, and Vice President Kamala Harris and her new presidential campaign embraced all the memes.