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Top Takes of the Week — July 6–10, 2026
The sharpest lines from The Flies this week.
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$3 Million Anti-Woke Center Opens With One Student After University Cuts 28 Majors for Budget Crisis
West Virginia spent $3 million to create a university center to fight 'woke ideology' after cutting 28 majors and hundreds of jobs due to a $45 million budget shortfall; one student enrolled in the program's first semester.
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Developing Countries Spend More on Debt Than Schools — and Creditors Block the Relief
Unesco reports 113 developing countries spent more on foreign debt repayment than education in 2025, with private creditors in Britain and the US blocking Ethiopia's debt relief agreement.
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Colorado Says Moose Weren't 'Established' Until 1978 — Except for the 9,000 Years They Lived There
Colorado Parks and Wildlife says moose weren't established in the state until 24 animals were brought from Wyoming in 1978, but archaeological evidence dates moose presence to 7250 BCE and historical photos show breeding populations in the 1850s.
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ICE Agents Kill Man Who Wasn't Their Target. No Body Cameras. Agency Says He 'Weaponized His Vehicle.'
ICE agents shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo during a Houston traffic stop; he had lived in the U.S. for 35 years and was not their intended target.
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Puerto Rico Agency Fixed the Data Breach It Says Never Happened
Puerto Rico's tax agency exposed 1 million Social Security numbers through an unsecured server; researchers notified officials, who denied any problem existed, then quietly patched the exact vulnerabilities flagged days later without public notification.
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French Team's Anti-Deportation Star Flew on Planes That Deport Immigrants
The French national soccer team flew on planes operated by GlobalX, a charter company that has flown 950 deportation-related flights since 2022, including 44 this year alone.
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Weight-Loss Drug Creates Stomach Mass, Doctors Prescribe 1.5 Liters of Diet Coke
A 63-year-old woman with a gastric bezoar from weight-loss medication was successfully treated by drinking 1.5 liters of Diet Coke daily instead of surgery, per a New England Journal of Medicine case study.
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Scientists Call It a 'Contact Binary.' The Universe Calls It a Space Peanut.
Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft captured images of asteroid 2024 PT5 during a flyby, revealing it's actually two rocks stuck together in a peanut shape — a contact binary — a formation that may account for up to 30 percent of small solar system bodies.
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Trump's Tech Donors Are Pricing Out the Factories His 'Made in America' Plan Promised to Save
Rust Belt manufacturers are seeing electricity costs spike 7-10x due to data center demand on the same grids — Belden Brick's monthly bill jumped from $1,600 to $12,000, while steel mills pay $15 million more annually.
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Anthropic's 'Ethical AI' Brand Met the Business Model That Makes Surveillance Inevitable
A security researcher discovered hidden tracking code in Anthropic's Claude system prompts that monitored user conversations; Anthropic says it was an anti-abuse experiment they forgot to remove since March.
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Catnip Works As Well As Deet. It Took Until 2026 To Test It On People Who Need It.
Researchers in Uganda found that homemade catnip lotion repelled mosquitoes as effectively as Deet, the artificial chemical used globally, at a fraction of the cost for subsistence farmers.
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AI Coding Assistants Can't Tell Their Own Hallucinations from Reality—Now Hackers Can Exploit That
Researchers discovered that nine major AI coding assistants—including GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Gemini CLI—can be tricked into installing malware through "HalluSquatting," a technique exploiting AI hallucination of fake code libraries.
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Waymo drove two teens to police instead of their destination — five officers showed up
Waymo's autonomous vehicle reported two 15-year-olds to police and drove them to officers after detecting rule violations, resulting in a response of five officers and a K-9 unit.