A Tesla solar customer went to pull up their lease agreement in their Tesla account this month and found something other than a contract waiting for them: the Book of Enoch, an ancient apocalyptic text about fallen angels.
Not a scanned copy of their agreement. Not an error page. The full text of a roughly 2,000-year-old religious book, sitting exactly where their legally binding solar lease was supposed to be. Electrek confirmed it.
The owner, who asked to stay anonymous, needed to check the document, which dictates the terms of a decade-long lease, but it had been quietly replaced by scripture.
The owner posted about it on Reddit. At first, I thought it was a joke, but then I thought: “How do you even come up with something like that?” I asked the owner for more details and was able to confirm that it was, in fact, true.
When they contacted Tesla support, a representative acknowledged the swap in a chat conversation Electrek reviewed. Tesla confirmed the lease had become the Book of Enoch. What Tesla didn’t offer was any real explanation.
They did apologize and sent the lease by email.
For the uninitiated: the Book of Enoch is a Hebrew text from around 200 BCE, cut from most Bibles and considered canonical mainly by the Ethiopian Orthodox church. It’s best known for the Watchers, fallen angels who come down and father a race of giants. It is a lot of things. A residential solar lease is not one of them.
This lands as Tesla is trying to rebuild its home solar business. The company brought back solar leasing in late 2025 after killing its solar subscription in 2021.
We don’t know for certain, and Tesla hasn’t said. But there are a few plausible paths.
The AI theory is the fun one. Like most big companies, Tesla has been shoving automation and AI into its back-office systems. If an automated pipeline indexes, migrates, or serves the PDFs customers see in their accounts, a hallucinated retrieval or a mis-mapped file could drop the wrong document in. And the Book of Enoch is public domain, free on Project Gutenberg, exactly the kind of text floating around training sets and test libraries.
Engineers use random public-domain books as placeholder files all the time. If someone used the Book of Enoch as a dummy contract while testing and it leaked into a live account, that’s a QA failure, not the End Times.
It would be a strange choice for a placeholder document, but it’s possible.
Then there’s the plain backend mix-up — a document ID pointing at the wrong storage object, a filename collision. Or, and we can’t rule it out, somebody’s idea of a joke.
The punchline writes itself. But there’s a real problem under it.
A solar lease is a legally binding contract. It’s the document that tells you what you owe, for how long, and what happens if you want out. For homeowners, it is critical if you want to sell your house. It should be the one file Tesla guards most carefully. Instead, at least one customer’s copy got overwritten, and Tesla’s own support confirmed it without being able to explain how.
That points to loose control over customer documents. If a signed contract can be silently replaced in your account, what else can quietly change in there? This isn’t the first time we’ve flagged it. Tesla recently retroactively added “supervised” to FSD contracts owners had signed years earlier, editing agreements after the fact inside people’s accounts. The supposed source of truth for what a customer agreed to is apparently editable — and, this month, biblical.
Tesla just revived solar leasing to win homeowners back. Winning them back means being the boring, reliable company that keeps the paperwork straight. Serving up the Nephilim instead of a payment schedule is the opposite of that.
We’d love the real answer. AI? A stray test file? A bored employee? Tesla, if you’re reading this (and if your systems haven’t replaced this article with Leviticus by the time you do), we’re all ears.
If you’re leasing solar to lock in your energy costs, it helps to know you’re actually getting the best deal, contract included. With electricity rates up almost 10% last year and expected to keep climbing, going solar is one of the best ways to protect yourself against rising costs. And with lease and PPA options, you can do it with zero upfront cost and start saving immediately. If you want to find the best deal, check out EnergySage. It’s a free service with hundreds of pre-vetted installers competing for your business, so you save 20 to 30% compared to going it alone. No sales calls until you pick an installer. Get your free quotes here.
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Wildfires are raising questions about the toxic legacies of mining and how fires might redistribute the contamination left behind.
Fires burned areas around Sawmill Bay but buildings were left intact
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Wildfire smoke hangs around the abandoned camp at Sawmill Bay on June 18. It is a former storage site for uranium ore from Eldorado mine and is part of the Great Bear Lake Remediation Project. (Submitted by Canadian Nuclear Laboratories)
Both N.W.T. and federal authorities say they are monitoring wildfires burning near historic uranium mining sites in the Sahtu region — sites that carry radiation concerns.
The Great Bear Remediation Project is located on the eastern shore of Great Bear Lake. It encompasses four former mine sites that have been abandoned and are in the process of being cleaned up.
Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada (CIRNAC), the federal department responsible for the remediation project, confirmed on July 20 that a fire had burned near the abandoned Sawmill Bay camp. They said neither vacant buildings nor a nearby airstrip had been affected.
Decades after it closed down, the Sawmill Bay camp continues to have "residual radiation concerns," according to the government of Canada's remediation website, including multiple former uranium ore storage areas which still need to be cleaned up.
CIRNAC explained it is working with the territory to keep an eye on the fire situation and its work isn't impacted.
Mike Westwick, N.W.T Fire information officer, said the territory is in touch with the remediation team about potential risks at the site.
“Certainly value protection work is something they’ve taken seriously on that end,” Westwick said.
“We’ve been collaborating closely with the folks in the federal government on that.”
The Canadian Nuclear Laboratories is a contractor assisting Northern Affairs with the cleanup of radioactive material at Sawmill Bay.
A spokesperson for that organization said that an overflight Saturday showed that much of the ground in the area was blackened and still smoking from fires and that it would be some time before they could safely get on site for summer cleanup projects.
“Open forest fires do remain in the area, and since the fire load remains, so does the risk to staff should the fires return,” a spokesperson wrote in an email Wednesday.
The history of uranium and Délı̨nę
Sacks of pitchblende concentrate awaiting shipment at Port Radium, Echo Bay, Great Bear Lake in 1939. (NWT Archives/Richard Finnie fonds/N-1979-063: 0081)
The four former mine sites on the shores of Great Bear Lake that have been abandoned are in the process of being cleaned up.
The Sawmill Bay operation took in uranium ore mined at Port Radium from 1942 to 1960. At its mining peak, 300 people lived at the mine site.
This includes residents of nearby Délı̨nę, who were employed to carry sacks of pitchblende ore containing radium and uranium on their backs to load it onto ships, exposing them for years to radioactive material.
Residents have raised concerns over cancer deaths and other health issues which they associate with the impact of uranium mining operations.
Scientists are currently investigating how wildfire smoke can redistribute radioactive particles, known as radionuclides, into land and water. Uranium is among a host of naturally occurring radionuclides which are present throughout the environment.
Uranium is a common radionuclide and deposits of it are found in the boreal forest regions of Canada which are regularly subjected to wildfire.
But little is still known about the role of fires in redistributing radionuclides.
Stephanie Walsh, a radioecologist and researcher at the Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, is looking into that question.
"We would expect that the movement and levels of radionuclides in an environment will change and will depend on factors such as what radionuclides were there before, the forest type, the severity of the fire, and the local environment conditions,” Walsh said.
“But what we don't know yet and that is one of our primary research goals is how much movement occurs.”
Stephanie Walsh, radioecologist and researcher at Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CBC)
Walsh said she hopes this work will prove critical scientific understanding for protecting ecosystems and the communities that rely on them.
A sampling trip this month took her to the Fort Providence wildfire experimental site. This is an area where wildfire researchers from across the continent can visit to study wildfires, about 50 kilometres from the community.
“And this is really the first step towards better human and environmental health protection because you need to know what is present and how it moves before you can evaluate potential exposure and risk,” she said.
Walsh said she expects to publish the results of the study by this time next year.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Niles Niemuth has more than a decade of experience in digital news. He has reported and edited stories covering politics, public affairs, labour and community issues in Canada and the United States. He holds a master's degree in history from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. You can reach him at <a href="mailto:niles.niemuth@cbc.ca">niles.niemuth@cbc.ca</a>.
Chef Katie Chin demonstrates a Copper induction range during an event in Sacramento in May. (Photo courtesy of Building Decarbonization Coalition)
There’s already lots of research showing that gas stoves fill our homes with nasty air pollution, including cancer-causing chemicals and toxins that increase the risk of kids getting asthma.
Still, a study published this month blew my mind.
Led by Dr. Ash Sehgal, a professor at Case Western’s School of Medicine, researchers recruited families from across the Cleveland and Akron areas where at least one person had asthma. Using funds from the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act, they replaced gas stoves with electric induction stoves in 91 homes.
And then they did something unprecedented: They studied whether people got less sick after they stopped cooking with gas. It was the first time time scientists had replaced gas ranges with electric ranges and examined the health impacts.
For 72 homes where at least one resident suffered from “poorly controlled asthma,” the team measured health outcomes before and after the gas-to-electric switch: How often were participants awoken by asthma at night? How much time did they spend wheezing? How much shortness of breath did they experience? Did they need to visit the emergency room? Did they have to stay home from work or school?
Lo and behold: Across every health metric studied, people got better. Not just better, actually — dramatically better.
“Our improvement was about twice as much as you typically see with medical treatment of asthma,” Sehgal told me.
Let that sink in: twice as much improvement as with medical treatments of asthma.
We’ll get to the caveats, the climate policy implications and the Gavin Newsom of it all.
But first a frustrating fact: As amazing as the study was, it could have been even more amazing if the Trump administration hadn’t killed most of the funding.
CHICAGO – July 21, 2026 – A new study from Northwestern Medicine shows that adult women experience more severe neurological symptoms of long COVID than adult men.
While past studies have found that women are more frequently affected by long COVID than men, the new study published today in the Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology showed for the first time that women report more neurologic symptoms of long COVID and experience worse impacts on quality of life and cognitive function than men.
“We were surprised to see such a significant difference between female and male patients,” said Igor Koralnik, MD, chief of neuroinfectious disease and global neurology at Northwestern Medicine. “Both in the frequency of neurologic long COVID symptoms and in levels of self-reported fatigue, as well as in a cognitive task of attention.”
Women more frequently reported neurologic symptoms such as brain fog, dizziness, headache, numbness and tingling and pain.
No neurologic symptoms were more common in men.
Women also reported more non-neurologic symptoms, such as fatigue, shortness of breath, chest pain, dysautonomia and gastrointestinal issues.
Women also reported worse alteration of their quality of life caused by fatigue than men on standardized questionnaires.
Women scored lower than men in a task of attention on objective cognitive tests.
“We think that the reason women are more frequently and severely affected by long COVID than men is because long COVID is an autoimmune disease, and women are more prone to autoimmune diseases than men, including multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis,” Dr. Koralnik said. “We and others have found evidence of immune dysregulation and autoimmunity in patients with long COVID. We next want to understand the underlying causes for the neurologic symptoms of long COVID and identify and validate biological markers that show how active the disease is. We hope our study will alert providers about the importance of timely diagnosis and targeted interventions in female patients, who are often negatively affected by gender bias in medicine.
“A Household Pulse Survey conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics estimated that nearly 18 percent of U.S. adults had experienced long COVID and that five percent were experiencing it as of September 2024. It is safe to estimate that long COVID still affects millions of adults in the United States currently,” said Dr. Koralnik.
To date, the Neuro COVID-19 Clinic has treated more than 3,300 patients with long COVID from 44 states. While severe cases of COVID-19 requiring hospitalization have become rare, Dr. Koralnik says COVID-19 continues to occur and the risk of developing long COVID increases with repeat occurrences of COVID-19.
Northwestern Memorial Hospital is ranked No. 6 in the nation for neurology and neurosurgery by U.S. News & World Report, 2025-2026. For more information, visit nm.org and to schedule an appointment with the Neuro COVID-19 Clinic, call 312.695.7950.
LONDON — With no end to Russia’s war with Ukraine in sight, a record-high 60% of Russians interviewed between March and May said their local economic conditions are getting worse. Less than half as many (27%) said things are getting better.
This marks the first time since 2006 that a majority of Russian adults have said their economy is getting worse. The previous highs were in 2020 (45%) and 2021 (50%) during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Between 2010 and 2016, the plurality of Russians — roughly 40% each year — were neutral about the trajectory of their local economy, volunteering that things were getting neither better nor worse. However, in recent years, only about one in 10 Russians have said their local economy is staying the same, and more have said the economy is either getting better or getting worse.
Russians also feel gloomy about their own living standards, with 56% in the latest poll saying their standard of living is getting worse. That’s the highest level of pessimism recorded yet and the first time in two decades that a majority of Russian adults have expressed this view.
The increasingly negative outlook comes as Russia’s wartime economy shows signs of slowing. Growth in recent years has been supported by high defense spending, but the government recently lowered its growth forecast for 2026 from 1.3% to 0.4%, despite higher global oil prices because of the Iran war. Labor shortages are also intensifying as military recruitment and defense production compete with the civilian economy for workers.
As the civilian economy weakens, higher military spending is needed to sustain economic output and employment. This dynamic makes Russia even more reliant on higher defense spending, making it harder to pull back from the war without triggering a further downturn.
Job Market Positivity Sinks
Russians’ views of the job market have deteriorated sharply this year. Thirty-five percent in the 2026 survey say now is a good time to find a job where they live, while 58% say it is a bad time.
The decline follows an unusually strong period for job market perceptions. A year after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, perceptions of the job market improved sharply and remained elevated through last year. During this period, an average of 51% of Russians said it was a good time to find a job where they live, the highest level Gallup had recorded in two decades and significantly higher than any reading since the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009.
Unemployment in Russia remains low, primarily because of labor shortages linked to the war and mass mobilization rather than because of economic strength. Historically, Russians’ views of their job market have typically tracked closely with the unemployment rate — but perceptions are worse than conditions in 2026, reflecting wider economic pessimism across the country.
Biggest Year-Over-Year Declines in Confidence in Institutions, Media Freedom
This year, the public’s confidence levels in the military, national government and the honesty of elections have suffered their largest single-year declines on record. Confidence in the military has dropped by 13 percentage points to 66%, confidence in the government by 14 points to 53%, and confidence in the honesty of elections by 16 points to 40%.
Perceptions of media freedom have fallen even further, declining 25 points from a trend high of 59% to a new low of 34%. The sudden downturn in trust in institutions and views of media freedom — after years of stability in the wake of the 2022 invasion — demonstrates that Russians’ discontent is not limited to the economy.
Bottom Line
Moscow’s pared-back Victory Day parade in May offered a visible sign that Russia remains far from victorious in Ukraine. Shortly after the full-scale invasion, when Russia hoped to take Kyiv in a matter of days, Russian public opinion rallied around the flag, and people grew considerably more positive about many areas of life.
More than four years later, pessimism has replaced that initial optimism. Pessimism about the economy and living standards has reached a record high. Job market optimism has sunk, as has confidence in key national institutions and perceptions of media freedom.
Russian ministers have admitted publicly in recent months that the economy is overheating, with the effects now showing up in the public’s mood. The longer the war grinds on, the more it may test people's patience with the conflict and the sacrifices it demands.
Stay up to date with the latest insights by following @Gallup on X and on Instagram.
Workplace violence has become one of the defining occupational health and safety (OHS) issues of our time. For workers across the country, being punched, kicked, spat on, threatened or assaulted is now an ordinary part of going to work.
This normalization is precisely what the Manitoba Federation of Labour (MFL) seeks to challenge in its new report, “Ending Manitoba’s Workplace Violence Epidemic.”
Drawing together provincial Workers Compensation Board (WCB) injury statistics, interviews with workers from multiple sectors and existing OHS research, the report argues that workplace violence is both far more widespread than official statistics suggest and far more preventable than governments and employers have been willing to admit. Rather than treating violence as an unavoidable feature of health care, education, public transit or retail work, the report insists that it is an OHS hazard that employers have a legal responsibility to prevent, and that governments must regulate.
As the report’s findings make clear, the scale of the problem is staggering.
According to WCB data, accepted workplace injuries caused by violence more than tripled between 2015 and 2025, rising from 641 accepted claims to 2,187. Even more alarming, workplace violence injuries increased by 20 per cent in just the past two years, suggesting the trend is continuing rather than stabilizing.
Though this growth is dramatic, it’s likely only an approximation of the issue.
Injury statistics depend on claims accepted by the WCB (or the equivalent workers’ compensation agency in other provinces). But OHS research finds that these figures significantly underestimate the prevalence of workplace injuries and occupational deaths.
The report warns that these data limitations also impact what we know about the full extent of workplace violence. Roughly 25 per cent of Manitoba workers, including teachers, are not covered by the provincial compensation system, despite mounting evidence that classrooms have become one of most common sites of occupational violence.
Many other workers who are covered never file claims at all, either because injuries are normalized, employers suppress injury reporting, workers fear reprisal or incidents don’t result in any lost time away from work.
Claim suppression is a particularly widespread problem. The report notes that many employers continue to discourage reporting because compensation claims affect the cost of WCB premiums and their public reputation, while workers who fear retaliation may conclude that reporting incidents will accomplish little.
The official injury numbers — whether in Manitoba or elsewhere — consequently underestimate the true extent and cost of worker injuries. When it comes to workplace violence, therefore, the epidemic is almost certainly considerably larger than the official data indicate.
To complement the statistics, labour studies instructor (and my colleague at the University of Manitoba) Karen Naylor conducted interviews with 38 workers employed in health care, education, emergency response, security, retail, transit, and social services. Their testimony gives life to the data and reveals the human impact of workplace violence.
Workers describe constantly evaluating escape routes, anticipating assaults before entering rooms, worrying about weapons and accepting levels of danger that would have been considered unimaginable a generation ago. As workers’ narratives reveal, violence has become built into the organization of work itself rather than treated as an exceptional event.
The report also identifies where the burden falls most heavily.
Health care dominates nearly every measure. Indeed, according to the report’s figures, nearly 40 per cent of violent workplace injuries in Manitoba are experienced by health-care workers. Home support workers and housekeepers recorded the largest number of time-loss violence injuries in 2025, followed closely by nurse aides, orderlies, and patient service associates, while registered nurses also remain among the occupations experiencing the greatest numbers of violent incidents. Workers describe physical assaults, verbal abuse, biting, spitting, kicking and threats as routine occurrences.
Chronic understaffing, often driven by inadequate public funding, compounds these risks. When workers are left alone with patients, response times slow, experienced staff cannot mentor newer workers and increasingly frustrated patients and families face longer waits, creating conditions where violence becomes more likely.
Education emerged as another major sector of concern. Although teachers themselves fall outside WCB coverage, educational assistants rank among the occupations with the highest number of accepted violence claims. The report argues that the exclusion of teachers from compensation data obscures the true scale of violence in Manitoba’s school system. Educational assistants frequently bear the brunt of behavioural incidents while working with students who require additional supports, yet many schools lack sufficient staffing, specialized programming and training.
Social service workers similarly face escalating dangers. Workers serving vulnerable populations increasingly confront threats linked to housing insecurity, addiction, untreated mental illness and deepening poverty.
Emergency responders, including paramedics and firefighters, report regular assaults while attempting to provide care. Security personnel and correctional workers also experience persistently high rates of violence, reflecting broader pressures across public institutions.
Public transit workers also face many of the same dynamics. Bus drivers regularly encounter aggressive passengers, intoxication, mental health crises and interpersonal conflict while operating transit vehicles alone.
Retail workers likewise increasingly experience assaults connected to organized retail theft, shoplifting, drug use and economic desperation.
Although these sectors differ considerably, the reportidentifies common structural causes, including: understaffing, inadequate training, insufficient security measures, poor workplace design and employers who too often regard violence as simply “part of the job.”
It would be easy to conclude that the solution is simply harsher policing, tougher sentencing or expanding security powers. The report instead adopts a more nuanced position. It recognizes that properly trained security personnel can play an important role in specific high-risk workplaces, particularly hospitals and other settings where immediate intervention is sometimes necessary. Interviewees note improvements associated with institutional safety officers and controlled entry systems in certain facilities.
But the report is equally clear that security alone cannot solve workplace violence. Most violence grows from deeper organizational and social failures. Long wait times, impossible workloads, overcrowded facilities, inadequate staffing levels and deteriorating public services all increase tensions that eventually spill over onto frontline workers. Prevention therefore requires investing in public services rather than merely responding after violence occurs.
Across Canada, governments have often responded to visible social disorder by expanding coercive institutions while neglecting the conditions that produce insecurity in the first place. Workers deserve protection from violence, but that protection should not come at the cost of deepening punitive approaches toward poverty, homelessness, addiction or mental illness.
The report implicitly points toward a different framework, rooted in public investment rather than criminalization. Better staffing means shorter waits and less frustration. Expanded mental health and addictions services reduce crises before they reach emergency departments or transit systems. More supportive educational resources reduce pressures on classrooms. Stable housing reduces many of the confrontations experienced by frontline workers in health care, retail and public transit. Worker safety and social justice are not competing goals; in many cases, they are mutually reinforcing.
Toward that end, the report concludes with 10 recommendations designed to move Manitoba toward that preventative approach.
First, it calls for Safe Work Manitoba to develop a province-wide workplace violence prevention strategy, a striking omission given the dramatic rise in violence injuries. Second, it urges governments to fund safe staffing levels across health care, education, emergency response and other high-risk sectors, recognizing that understaffing consistently emerged as one of the strongest predictors of violence. It also recommends ensuring appropriately trained security personnel where risks are highest.
Equally important are the recommendations focused on enforcement. The report argues that Manitoba already has legal requirements governing violence prevention, hazard assessments, working alone, worker training and joint health and safety committees. The problem is that these obligations are too often ignored because enforcement has been inadequate. Strengthening inspections and ensuring employers comply with existing workplace safety laws could significantly reduce preventable injuries. Finally, the report calls for a formal provincial training standard so that violence prevention becomes a consistent OHS practice rather than an afterthought.
For decades, unions have argued that every workplace injury is preventable. Workplace violence should be treated no differently. The MFL’s report demonstrates that the current trajectory is neither inevitable nor acceptable. Violence is increasing because public services have been stretched, staffing has been cut, prevention has been neglected and employers have too often accepted dangerous working conditions as normal.
Now governments must respond with investments that address both the immediate hazards workers face and the broader social conditions that produce them. Workers in Manitoba, and across Canada, deserve workplaces that are safe, not because they are more heavily policed, but because they are adequately staffed, properly funded, effectively regulated, and supported by stronger public services.
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