Greetings! Happy Indigenous Peoples Day to those celebrating.

Let’s get into today’s top stories.

🇸🇰 Fast trains collide in Slovakia, leaving dozens injured and a nation rattled. Transport officials said two high-speed services struck near a station throat, an alignment where seconds decide whether steel passes or meets steel. Emergency crews evacuated passengers car by car, stabilizing the most critical patients and triaging fractures and head injuries. Hospitals reported two people in critical condition and dozens with moderate trauma as investigators pulled data from event recorders. Rail regulators will dissect signaling, speed restrictions, and dispatch protocols to determine whether human error, hardware faults, or both cascaded into impact. Commuters are already seeing knock-on delays while inspections ripple through the network. The question that follows any modern rail crash is the same: did the safeguards that were supposed to prevent a once-in-a-century event fail or never exist.

🇲🇽 Mexico search operations expand as death toll rises to 64 after torrential rains. Authorities widened grid searches across Veracruz and neighboring states, where swollen rivers carved new channels and landslides sheared roadbeds. Disaster teams reported communities reachable only by boat or footpath, complicating supply drops of clean water and antibiotics. Meteorologists say antecedent saturation made flash flooding more lethal, with hill towns taking the brunt when slopes liquefied. Economists estimate damage in the billions of pesos, a composite of ruined crops, shuttered storefronts, and washed-out bridges. Public health planners are racing to preempt cholera, leptospirosis, and dengue as standing water lingers. Families tally losses with an accountant’s precision and a mourner’s pace, which is to say slowly and with everything on the line.

🪶 Indigenous Peoples Day events lean conciliatory amidst debate on Columbus. Tribal leaders and local officials emphasized shared stewardship of land, concrete policy wins on water rights, and curriculum updates that decenter mythology without erasing history. In cities that celebrate both observances, organizers crafted parallel programs to avoid zero-sum symbolism and focus on practical reconciliation. Museums and schools rolled out exhibits on language revitalization and treaty maps, where place names become arguments and invitations at once. Business districts reported steady foot traffic at markets featuring Native artisans whose supply chains still fight for shelf space. For many attendees, the move from grievance to governance is the headline, even if the rhetoric online still prefers skirmish. Cultural change is a marathon with a thousand sprints tucked inside.

⚖️ SCOTUS takes up challenge to Voting Rights Act in Black representation case. The Supreme Court justices agreed to hear a case that centers on whether Louisiana must draw an additional district where Black voters can elect candidates of their choice. Litigants will argue over compactness, communities of interest, and the statistical thresholds that define opportunity districts under Section 2. Civil-rights groups warn that diluting remedies turns equal protection into a slogan rather than a standard. State officials counter that race-forward line-drawing can itself violate constitutional constraints if it dominates mapmaking. Because appeals move slowly, interim maps and fast-expiring election calendars collide, producing compressed campaign seasons. The ruling will echo beyond one state, setting a template for how courts police representation when demography outpaces doctrine.

🎓 Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation pledges $50M to Atlanta HBCUs. The gift targets scholarships, endowed faculty chairs, mental-health services, and dorm renovations across the Atlanta University Center Consortium comprising historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), where student need runs higher than endowment yields. The donation comes after the Department of Education (DOE) redirected hundreds of millions to HBCUs and tribal schools amidst funding cuts for Hispanic-majority schools, claiming the latter’s grants were unconstitutional. Philanthropy experts say multi-year funding beats one-off checks because staffing, advising, and labs require predictable money, not photo-op spikes. Alumni groups called the scale catalytic for first-generation students navigating tuition cliffs and housing insecurity. The donor’s background as cofounder of The Home Depot ($HD) underscores how private fortunes can act where public budgets wobble. Administrators plan to track graduation rates, research output, and licensure pass rates as metrics tied to the grant. Quietly compounding investments may prove the loudest signal.

🗳️ A missing candidate may still win as law moves at the speed of paperwork. The New York hopeful disappeared after an ocean swim months ago, yet remains on the ballot due to statutory deadlines and logistical gears of local election offices. Party insiders weigh whether to backfill with write-ins or ride the ballot line as is. Voters, meanwhile, face civic existentialism: is a vote for an absent contender a protest, a placeholder, or a perfectly legal ghost? Election lawyers note that certification rules, not vibes, decide whether a posthumous or missing win triggers a vacancy process. Campaign finance filings keep landing like clockwork because systems do not grieve. Democracy is robust enough to handle weirdness, even when it vanishes into surf.

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That’s all for today!

Much obliged and many thanks for reading and sharing today’s newsletter.

See you tomorrow!