US authorities have moved to shut down an organ donation group accused of pressing ahead with an operation despite a donor showing signs of life.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the move on Wednesday as part of a broader overhaul of the US organ procurement system.

He described Network for Hope, a Kentucky-based nonprofit organization, as “a bad apple” with “persistent safety failures.” One of over 50 such NPOs in the US, it coordinates organ recovery from deceased donors and helps match organs with patients on the national transplant waiting list.

However, on the way to the operating room, Hoover allegedly opened his eyes and appeared to track family members with his gaze. They were reportedly told the movements were involuntary reflexes commonly seen in patients declared brain dead.

According to witness accounts later detailed in congressional testimony and federal investigations, the situation took a dramatic turn once Hoover was wheeled into the operating room. Staff said he began moving, shaking his head, appearing to cry and attempting to pull at his breathing tube, prompting two physicians to refuse to continue with the procedure.

The procedure was abandoned, and Hoover survived. He continues to live with neurological impairments.

The Trump administration has cast the Kentucky case as evidence of systemic failures in the US organ transplant system. After reviewing 351 organ donation cases in which procurement was authorized but never completed, the Department of Health and Human Services said about one-third had “concerning features.” Investigators found that 73 patients displayed signs of brain function that should have ruled them out as organ donors, while at least 28 may not have been deceased when organ procurement was initiated.

A deal between Iran and Oman on reopening commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz is close to being finalized, according to the Foreign Ministry in Tehran. Around one-fifth of the world’s seaborne oil has historically passed through the strategic waterway.

The proposed agreement would establish a new corridor through the strait, with Iran expected to gain greater control over vessels entering the Persian Gulf while Oman would oversee outbound traffic, according to media reports.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei told reporters on Thursday that negotiations were “nearing completion,” with Iran and Oman having agreed on the routes and in the final stage of drafting a joint statement, provided “certain third parties do not obstruct the process.”

Officials in Tehran maintain that reopening the strait depends on the US ending its naval blockade of Iranian ports and other military actions against the Islamic Republic.

Tehran reportedly warned Gulf Arab states it would retaliate against their energy and other strategic infrastructure if they failed to persuade Washington to halt military action and return to the peace table. US Central Command (CENTCOM) said it was continuing to enforce the blockade, adding that US forces had redirected dozens of commercial vessels in the Gulf.

The latest negotiations follow weeks of disagreement over the interpretation of a memorandum of understanding that was intended to ensure a ceasefire and pave the way for reopening the strait.

However, shipping and insurance industry sources reportedly questioned whether any arrangement involving Iranian transit fees would be workable under existing US sanctions.

US-Israeli strikes on Iran in late February prompted Tehran to close the Strait of Hormuz, with Washington responding by imposing a naval blockade of Iranian ports. The blockade disrupted traffic through one of the world’s most important energy corridors, sending global oil prices soaring to as high as $120 a barrel. Oil prices jumped again on Thursday following reports that Iran was seeking stricter conditions for reopening the waterway.

Meta has become the third major tech company to report its AI going rogue and hacking a third-party company. The incident involved Muse Spark 1.1, an AI model marketed by the company as “superintelligent.”

In a statement to the media on Wednesday, Meta said that the model was undergoing testing by a cybersecurity company, ⁠Irregular, when it “exploited a ‌security vulnerability” in Irregular’s systems, accessed the open internet, and hacked an unnamed third company.

Meta blamed the incident on a “misconfiguration” in Irregular’s systems.

The incident follows similar cases at OpenAI and Anthropic. Last month, OpenAI’s GPT‑5.6 Sol and another pre-release model were undergoing internal testing when they identified a security vulnerability, accessed the internet, and attempted to locate the solution to a cybersecurity puzzle by hacking a repository of previous test results.

Meta’s Muse Spark 1.1 and Anthropic’s Claude were being tested in the “exact same evaluation environment” when they escaped, Irregular said. “There are no current open issues. Irregular is developing a white paper to share best practices for containment and securely running cyber evaluations,” the company added.

Why have AI models suddenly gone rogue?

As RT explored last month, OpenAI and Anthropic’s models all broke out of testing laboratories while they were attempting to solve cybersecurity tasks. In both cases, the models had been instructed to break into internal systems, but reasoned that the most efficient way to achieve this goal was to access the open internet. OpenAI’s GPT‑5.6 sought answers to its test on servers hosted by a company called Hugging Face; Claude was instructed to hack a fictional company that shared its name with a real internet domain, and assumed that breaking into the real company was part of its test.

Meta unveiled Muse Spark 1.1 less than a month before the security incident. According to Meta, the model “delivers exceptional performance,” bordering on “superintelligence.” The company’s marketing materials mostly demonstrate its use as a scheduling assistant for individual customers, and a coding tool for businesses.

The US Senate Homeland Security Committee has voted to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt after the former White House coronavirus czar refused to answer questions on the origins of Covid-19 at a hearing last week.

The Republican-led committee voted 8-7 along party lines to hold Fauci in contempt on Thursday. The committee’s Democrats introduced five motions aimed at postponing the vote, but all were shut down by the Republican majority.

Fauci appeared before the committee last Wednesday, where he was grilled on his role in funding dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, his knowledge that Covid-19 was likely created in a laboratory, his work with US intelligence agencies, and his promotion of ineffective vaccines against the virus.

The former bureaucrat refused to answer any questions, invoking his Fifth Amendment right to silence more than 100 times. Fauci pleaded the Fifth despite having already received a pardon from former President Joe Biden shielding him from criminal prosecution over any offense committed between January 1, 2014  – when the US first outsourced gain-of-function research to China – and January 20, 2025.

“Dr. Fauci faced no risk of federal prosecution,” Paul continued. “All he had to do was tell the truth.”

Although Fauci is immune from prosecution for any misdeeds that he committed between 2014 and 2025, his pardon does not cover any crimes committed at last week’s hearing. Contempt of Congress is a criminal offense, and Paul referred Fauci’s case to the US Justice Department immediately after Thursday’s vote. 

Should the department choose to prosecute, Fauci could face a fine of up to $100,000 and a prison sentence of up to 12 months.

Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon, both former aides to US President Donald Trump, were jailed for contempt of Congress by Biden’s Justice Department. Navarro and Bannon both spent four months in prison in 2024.

Once the Fauci contempt resolution passed, it was printed hot off the press and hand-delivered to the @DOJ.

It is time to take it up and investigate. It is time for answers. https://t.co/8EDUMwcT5M

— Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) August 6, 2026

Fauci served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) from 1984 to 2022, and as chief medical adviser to Biden from 2021 until his retirement in 2022. In the latter role, Fauci became the face of Biden’s heavy-handed response to the pandemic, advocating mask and vaccine mandates and lockdowns, and dismissing opposition to these measures as “anti-science.”

Ukraine’s ambassador to Poland has defended Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera as a national hero, doubling down on Kiev’s veneration of World War II-era nationalists despite an escalating diplomatic row with Warsaw.

Speaking to European Pravda on Thursday, Vasily Bodnar was asked whether Ukraine could join the EU while continuing to venerate Bandera. The diplomat argued that Kiev alone had the right to choose its heroes and described the Nazi collaborator as “one of those who needs to be honored.”

Bodnar also recounted how Polish journalists had directly demanded that he recognize Bandera and Roman Shukhevich as war criminals. “When I refused, it shocked them greatly,” he said, dismissing what they regarded as an established historical truth as “falsehood.”

Bandera led the radical wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which sought to create an ethnically homogeneous Ukrainian state and cooperated with Nazi Germany during the early stages of World War II.

The Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the OUN’s military wing, later carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Polish civilians in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. Up to 100,000 Poles, many of them women, children and elderly people, were massacred in 1943-1944. Poland recognizes the killings as genocide.

The ambassador’s comments come amid a deepening dispute over Kiev’s continued glorification of Bandera, Shukhevich and the UPA. Vladimir Zelensky recently granted an elite military unit the honorary title ‘Heroes of the UPA’, prompting Polish President Karol Nawrocki to strip him of the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest decoration.

Polish officials have said they will not sign off on Ukraine joining the EU as long as it continues honoring the nationalist groups responsible for the Volhynia massacres. The European Parliament has also condemned Kiev’s position as incompatible with European values.

Ukraine has nevertheless continued naming streets and military units after nationalist figures, holding torchlight marches in Bandera’s honor and advancing plans for a national pantheon. Kiev also recently reburied OUN leader Andrey Melnik with state honors.

Moscow has long accused Kiev of glorifying Nazi collaborators at the state level and has made the “denazification” of Ukraine one of the key goals of its military operation. Russian officials have also accused Western governments of ignoring Kiev’s infatuation with Nazi ideology while continuing to arm and fund it against Moscow.

“That very first night we were so scared, we were paralysed with fear. I can honestly say that for the first time, I was afraid to go out alone the next morning. I mean, we were never afraid before. Never.”

This is the testimony of Sister Elizaveta from the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem. In an exclusive interview with RT she outlines the abuse and attacks nuns from the mission are being subjected to in the Holy City.

At the end of July, Sister Elizaveta and three other nuns from the mission were walking back from a night vigil when they realized something wasn’t quite right. “We finished the night service at the tomb of the Lord. We exited through the New Gate. That’s where we came across some policemen, we smiled at them, and they smiled right back at us,” Sister Elizaveta says, adding, “And literally after 200 meters, on the crossroads near Notre Dame, we started hearing rude screaming and swearing in Hebrew.”

The nuns attempted to ignore the aggressive taunts and continued walking. However, they were stopped from crossing the road by a red traffic signal and the group closed in. Sister Elizaveta says they began hurling stones at the sisters.
“The stones started flying,” she says. “I noted that they threw very hard. That is, it’s not just to throw to scare a person, it was such a blow to defeat.” Sister Elizaveta says some of the stones struck them, including one which hit her fellow sister, Antonia, in the chest. She’s grateful the attack didn’t result in any serious injuries. “Thank God that the attack wasn’t fatal.”

The organization’s founder and director is Yisca Harani. She’s concerned about the ever-growing creep of anti-Christian incidents in Israel and says what’s being reported is likely only the tip of the iceberg.

“Everything now is very tense and very oriented towards Jewish, unfortunately, I must say this, supremacy,” Yisca says. “There’s a feeling, especially in the last three years, since the Hamas attack on Israel, there’s a lot of nervousness that has turned people’s minds to black-and-white thinking. It’s either the Jewish, Israeli, or enemies – the rest of the world.”

Yisca, who herself is a practicing Jew, believes much of the issue stems from a lack of education as to who Christians are and what they believe. “There’s no education about Christianity. Christianity is only learned through the traumas and the realistic traumas of the Jewish people,” she explains. “With that knowledge, once a person sees a cross, and in the atmosphere of black and white… everybody wants to annihilate us, then all of a sudden the one thing that rises to the mind is, this person, next thing, if he could choose, he would do a pogrom. He would join the Nazis.”

Yisca points out that there are Christian Israeli citizens who serve in the IDF and the Israeli Police Force, who contribute to the safety and security of Israel. Yet, despite their contribution, she believes the current Israeli government is pushing the country towards becoming a more Jewish religious state.

“Add to it the government who is really pushing towards a very halakhic religious state and in the last years this dream about a temple and therefore if there is a temple then this country should be perhaps cleansed from anyone who is not, you know, a temple worshipper,” she says. “At least half of this country was taken captive and hostages by this mindset.”

“The police closing the files that I submit, it means not that the police couldn’t catch them, they were not interested enough in catching them, but they were not interested because the authorities above told the police, don’t bother about it,” she says.

Yisca is also clear that these issues are being caused by a small, though growing, extreme section of Israeli society. “I can testify that there are hundreds and thousands of people who go not spitting, not saying bad words.”

In April, a particularly brutal attack on a nun in the Holy City was captured on CCTV. In the video a man wearing a Jewish kippah and tzitzit – ritual tassels – violently attacks her from behind. He initially walks away but then returns to kick her while she is on the ground, defenseless. That attack sparked international outcry. It even warranted a response from senior Israeli politicians who condemned the attack. The suspect was later arrested.

This week alone more video evidence has emerged of Jewish youths spitting and throwing stones towards the entrance of the Saint James Monastery in the Armenian Quarter of the Holy City. The Israeli police say six individuals – five minors and one adult – have been detained as a result of enquiries.

Other incidents are more difficult to tag as being specifically anti-Christian, though they are clearly perpetrated against individuals who are seen as ‘not Jewish’. Father Makari, who’s also from the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem, told RT he was in a car when the road in front of them was set alight.

“We drove through Mea Shearim… and just while we were standing on this traffic light, they were trying to pour some kind of burning liquid on the road in front of us, which was then set on fire,” Father Makari says. This incident took place on Shabbat – the Jewish Sabbath – in a more observant area of Jerusalem. While the vehicle Father Makari was in had diplomatic plates, there were no religious symbols on it.

Father Makari explains attacks are frequent, but this was a new low. “Usually, there are bottles flying into the car… stones… but never before was something was set on fire, next to a gas station. This is something new.”

These increasing attacks on the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission have now been raised with the Russian ambassador to Israel, Anatoly Viktorov. He told RT his office is treating these incidents with the utmost seriousness.

“This is an absolutely unacceptable situation, as it has a negative psychological impact on representatives of the clergy, calls into question interreligious peace and harmony, balance and status quo in interreligious relations, and generally sends bad signals to Christians about the supposed undesirability of their presence here in the Holy Land,” says Ambassador Viktorov.

He’s now held meetings with senior officers from the Israeli Police Force to raise his concerns. Following that meeting, Ambassador Viktorov says he believes the Israeli authorities understood the seriousness of the situation. “They ask everyone who has experienced such insults or attacks to immediately report to the police using known phone numbers or via the police’s Telegram channel.”

Sister Elizaveta also believes education is necessary to stop the spread of hate. She says she has encountered several instances where young Jewish children smile at her and their families intervene. “There were several cases when parents teach their kids how to hate Christians. Last time I met such a family, the dad was walking with the kids, and the children are smiling at me, because I smile at them.”

She says the children’s father then explained to the children that they shouldn’t smile at her. “Their facial expression is that at first they are just confused, then they are scared, then they are already angry with you. And this change of face is terrible, it seems to me. Because this child will already live with the attitude that Christians should be treated like this,” she says sadly.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has often claimed his country is a safe space for Christians to practice their religion, but the figures tell a different story. Christians have told RT they feel that they are being pushed out of their land. Some fear to walk the streets of the Holy City in Jerusalem with any visible symbols of their Christianity. While more and more incidents including spitting or verbal abuse are now being recorded, many victims are still too scared to come forward.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said the country’s long-running economic divide between wealthier and lower-income Americans is narrowing, even as inflation and high living costs continue to weigh on consumers.

Bessent made the remarks in an interview with CNBC this week, dismissing the idea that the US remains a “K-shaped economy” – a term describing an economy in which wealthier households continue to prosper while lower-income groups fall further behind.

“I got sick of hearing about this K-shaped economy,” Bessent said. “I can say here definitively, the K-shaped economy is over.”

The Treasury chief said the country was instead moving toward what he called a “C-shaped economy,” with lower-paid workers beginning to catch up. He said the bottom 25% of workers had recorded a 2% real wage gain, comparing the trend with wage growth during President Donald Trump’s first term.

The remarks come ahead of November’s midterm elections, with the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge remaining above its long-term 2% target. Soaring energy costs fueled by the US-Israeli war on Iran, together with Trump’s global tariffs, have continued to add pressure to consumer prices. A Marquette University Law School poll released this week found inflation and the cost of living remained Americans’ top concern, cited by 35% of respondents.

Trump has repeatedly pointed to record gains on Wall Street as evidence that the US economy is strengthening. He said the stock market had reached dozens of record highs since he returned to office and that the “typical American 401(k)” retirement account had gained more than $30,000.

Moody’s Analytics estimated that households earning more than $200,000 accounted for nearly 60% of consumer spending in the first quarter of 2026, with their spending continuing to outpace inflation. Inflation-adjusted spending by the remaining 80% of earners, however, was broadly unchanged.

Recent wage data also offered a more mixed picture. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s Wage Growth Tracker shows wage growth has remained positive this year but does not indicate that earnings for the lowest-paid workers have overtaken those at the top of the income scale.

Bessent also pointed to tax measures included in Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act’, including tax breaks on some tips and overtime earnings, deductions for certain auto loan interest, and lower taxes for some retirees, arguing they would increasingly benefit American households over time.

Social media company Meta and its founder Mark Zuckerberg had to apologize to India following the platform’s unacceptable intervention in the political process of the country, a top government aide has said.

Zuckerberg apologized to an Indian parliamentary panel following the brief removal of a video posted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Kanchan Gupta, a senior advisor in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, said in the latest episode of the ‘India, Russia, and the World’ podcast that the country’s sovereign rules should prevail over the boardroom rules of big tech companies.

Gupta pointed out that big tech platforms enjoy safe-harbor protection that shields them from criminal liability for anything that appears on their platform “provided they have not engineered it, provided they have no role in it.”

“When the platform intervenes in this manner, this is intervention in a country’s political process, and it is unacceptable,” he said, explaining why Meta officials were summoned by the Parliamentary Standing Committee.

“This is a violation of the safe harbor clause in (India’s) Information Technology Act. You can’t just do it and say sorry,” he said.

“The whole question is, what prevails,” he asked. “Does the law, sovereign law and sovereign rules of India prevail? Or do the boardroom rules of these big tech companies prevail?”

On the Western media’s coverage of the student protests in India, he said “there is some kind of a system in place which rewards the monsterization of India.”

Gupta admitted that the protests offered “a glimpse into the worldview of… the Gen Z generation,” but said no parallels could be drawn with protests in neighboring Bangladesh and Nepal that toppled governments there.

Gupta described the growing percentage of Gen Zs in India’s electoral politics as a good thing. “It brings with it a certain freshness,” he said. 

“Our politics has been of an accommodative nature… [the politicians] know when to step forward, they know when to stand still, and they know when to step back.”

Gupta said there is some accountability for television and print, but for “digital media, there’s no accountability at all.”

He said Western media needs to revisit its own ethical standards. “I won’t say morals, but at least ethical standards and how each day they violate them and how it ultimately hurts their own credibility.”

He added that “the white West controls the information order” with an inherent bias. “A white man’s paper will always carry greater clout than a black man’s paper or a brown man’s paper.”

He said that India knows how best to run its democracy, saying “we don’t like being preached” to about it.

Security forces in Nigeria have carried out the largest-ever single-day hostage rescue, freeing 308 people abducted in separate incidents in Kwara and Niger states, according to Nigerian President Bola Tinubu.

At least 1,100 people were abducted across northern Nigeria in the first four months of 2026 alone, Amnesty International has reported.

Tinubu announced the successful operation on Thursday in a post on X, praising the security agencies for their “intelligence, courage and coordination” making the mission possible.

Following the raid, the president directed the country's security services to strengthen early-warning systems, expand community awareness and improve rapid-response capabilities nationwide.

”We will continue to pursue those who threaten our people and do everything necessary to keep every Nigerian community safe.” Tinubu said, adding that there would be no hiding place for terrorists in the country.

The rescued hostages are receiving medical treatment at Wawa Cantonment and will be transferred to their respective states for further care and reunification with their families, the authorities said.

According to the UN, 114 violent incidents and 1,932 fatalities were recorded in northeastern Nigeria between April and June alone.

In response, Tinubu declared a nationwide security emergency last November, ordered the recruitment of thousands of additional police officers and military personnel, and allocated a record 5.41 trillion naira ($3.5 billion) to defense in the 2026 budget.

However, gunmen reportedly killed at least 12 people and abducted several women and children in Sokoto State last weekend. In June, armed men kidnapped at least 36 students and a staff member from a secondary school in Borno State while examinations were underway.

Russia has repeatedly condemned terrorist attacks in the African state. In November 2025, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Moscow was ready to assist Abuja in combating terrorism. The issue was revisited in May, when Russian Ambassador Andrey Podelyshev and Nigerian Foreign Minister Bianca Odumegwu-Ojukwu discussed expanding bilateral cooperation in security, as well as defense.

US aviation authorities have launched an investigation into a possible air safety breach involving Marine One, which was carrying US President Donald Trump, and a passenger jet in Washington, DC airspace, multiple media outlets reported on Wednesday.

Marine One departed the White House for Joint Base Andrews on Tuesday, where Trump was due to board a flight to Los Angeles, according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the incident. Air traffic controllers failed to suspend commercial flights at nearby Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport as required under safety protocols, the newspaper reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

The incident resulted in a temporary loss of separation between Marine One and an Envoy Air passenger jet, prompting investigations by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). Both aircraft landed safely, according to media reports. The FAA said controllers remained in contact with both aircraft as they moved away from one another and reiterated the White House’s statement that “the President was never in danger.”

Two people familiar with the FAA’s preliminary findings told The New York Times that, at their closest point, Marine One came within 0.8 miles (1.3 km) laterally and 700 feet (213 meters) vertically of the passenger jet.

The January crash occurred as the American Airlines aircraft was on final approach to Reagan National Airport. Both aircraft plunged into the Potomac River after the collision, killing all 64 people aboard the passenger jet and the three crew members on the helicopter.

Many of those on board were athletes, coaches, and family members returning from the US Figure Skating Championships in Wichita, Kansas. Among them were Vadim Naumov and Evgenia Shishkova, the 1994 world champion figure skaters and former Russian Olympians, who moved to the US in 1998 and later worked as coaches.

The Bangladeshi government has reacted angrily after former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina held a virtual media press conference in India, describing it as “detrimental to the development of harmonious bilateral relations.”

“This interaction by Sheikh Hasina on the Indian soil stands as an affront to the sovereignty of Bangladesh and a grievous insult to the martyrs of the July Revolution,” the country’s Foreign Ministry posted on X.

The 78-year-old Hasina, who faces the death penalty in her home country, was defiant on Wednesday, saying: “I was forced away from my country, but I was never separated from my people.”

She fled to India in August 2024 after violent protests, which she has repeatedly alleged were orchestrated by external forces, with “foreign mercenaries” present among the protesters. She has vowed to go back in December.

Bangladesh is outraged that the absconding convicted genocider Sheikh Hasina was allowed this evening to engage in live interaction with the media in New Delhi where she and her henchmen launched venomous vitriol against the State of Bangladesh and her people.

Dhaka deeply… pic.twitter.com/7BDnAxk5N8

— Ministry of Foreign Affairs (@BDMOFA) August 5, 2026

Hasina excoriated the Bangladeshi government over the current state of affairs in the country, saying fear has entered people’s lives. “This is not the Bangladesh that 3 million people sacrificed their lives for.” She alleged persecution of members of her party, the Awami League.

The party alleged that media outlets were coerced into not covering Hasina’s press conference. No major Bangladeshi outlet carried her address live.

The president of the party’s student wing, Saddam Hussein, told RT that Hasina was sending a message to the current government that the fight for democracy will go on. “She is giving an opportunity (for) a peaceful solution” to the government in Dhaka, he said.

Bangladeshi Law Minister M. Asaduzzaman said last month that Hasina would be arrested when she returns to the country.

Rare snowfall sent New Zealanders onto city streets with skis and snowboards on Wednesday after an Antarctic cold snap swept across the country, bringing snow, hail, and freezing temperatures. Europeans, meanwhile, continue to reel from record temperatures amid a prolonged heatwave.

Wellington, New Zealand’s capital, recorded its first significant snow and sleet for the first time in 15 years. Videos showed office workers gathering at windows and stepping outside to watch the snowfall.

In Dunedin, near the southeastern tip of New Zealand’s South Island, videos posted online showed residents skiing and snowboarding through snow-covered streets, including Baldwin Street, recognized as one of the steepest streets in the world.

Snow also covered parts of New Brighton Beach in Christchurch, the largest city on the South Island, leaving a rare white layer beside the Pacific Ocean.

While Europe's roads are buckling in extreme heat, New Zealand has welcomed snow for the first time in 15 years.

Temperatures dropped to -9°C in some areas.

Locals grabbed their skis and snowboards and hit the streets.

I wish I were there. pic.twitter.com/9MAUcy15tW

— Chay Bowes (@BowesChay) August 6, 2026

Temperatures at several South Island locations fell to around -9C as cold air moved north from Antarctica. New Zealand’s weather service warned that some areas could experience their coldest morning of the year.

The cold snap comes as much of Europe, in contrast, has endured a severe summer heatwave, with temperatures rising above 40C and prompting governments to issue the highest-level weather alerts, restrict outdoor work, and open emergency cooling centers.

The prolonged heat and drought have fueled major wildfires across the continent, forcing mass evacuations, destroying homes, and burning hundreds of thousands of hectares. Low river levels have also disrupted shipping and energy production, while transport networks and public services have struggled under the extreme conditions.

For years, the EU’s political establishment treated nuclear energy as something between an embarrassment and a moral transgression. The consequences were predictable – and increasingly impossible to conceal.

The green dogma has come due

Germany provides the clearest case study. In 2011, nuclear power supplied roughly a quarter of the country’s electricity. Twelve years later, Berlin shut down its final three reactors.

This was not an unavoidable act of economic modernization. It was a political choice, heavily influenced by fashionable environmental dogma and woke ideologies that treated technological progress as morally suspect whenever it conflicted with an approved political narrative.

Now the same establishment that demanded the shutdown is quietly admitting that it got the calculation wrong.

German Energy Minister Katherina Reiche has called the nuclear phase-out a “huge mistake.” Chancellor Friedrich Merz has described it as a “serious strategic mistake.” International Energy Agency chief Fatih Birol has agreed that Germany’s decision deserves to be reconsidered.

Even Brussels has begun to change its tune. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has recently acknowledged that the EU’s retreat from nuclear power – from around one-third of electricity generation in 1990 to roughly 15 percent today – was strategically misguided.

The lesson is almost embarrassingly simple: you cannot run an industrial economy on political slogans. Electricity must be generated whether politicians feel virtuous about the generation technology or not.

Reality is beginning to defeat ideology.

Across the EU, governments are reopening the nuclear question. Sweden is moving ahead with plans for new reactors. The Netherlands is pursuing new nuclear capacity. Belgium is no longer headed for an automatic nuclear exit. The Central and Eastern European countries together with France have been particularly determined to preserve and expand nuclear power generation. This is a recognition that modern industrial civilization requires enormous amounts of dependable energy.

Wind turbines and solar panels might have their place. But a serious energy system cannot be designed around the assumption that the weather will cooperate with the industrial timetable. Intermittent generation requires grids, storage, backup generation and enormous investment in transmission. The more electricity-intensive an economy becomes, the more valuable reliable baseload and dispatchable generation become.

Nuclear power offers exactly that. It also offers something Europe desperately needs: industrial sovereignty.

The continent now faces the unpleasant possibility that it surrendered technological capacity in pursuit of political purity – and must spend vastly more money to rebuild what it once possessed.

Russia was declared toxic

This is where the discussion becomes politically inconvenient. Europe has spent years trying to make Russia economically radioactive. Yet nuclear technology stubbornly refuses to obey the warfare narrative.

In July, the authorities in Lower Saxony, Germany authorized Framatome to manufacture Russian-designed nuclear fuel assemblies at its Lingen facility. The project involves cooperation with TVEL, the fuel division of Russia’s Rosatom, and incorporates Russian technology and components.

Berlin can declare that dependence on Russian energy is strategically dangerous. It can insist that European industry must “decouple” from Russia. It can build an entire political narrative around reducing Russian economic influence. And yet, when the issue is highly specialized nuclear technology, reality suddenly becomes rather more complicated.

Nuclear technology is fundamentally different from buying a cargo of liquefied natural gas. Reactor designs, fuel assemblies, safety procedures and technical standards are embedded in long-term industrial ecosystems. Replacing one supplier with another can take years and requires extensive testing, licensing and qualification.

Politics cannot simply decree that this accumulated technical knowledge has disappeared.

The Lingen decision demonstrates that even under hostile political conditions, economic cooperation can survive when the practical benefits are sufficiently compelling.

The hostility toward cooperation with Russia also suffers from another problem: it ignores the scale of the country’s nuclear industry.

Rosatom is not simply a Russian corporation selling reactor designs. It operates across the entire nuclear value chain, including reactor construction, fuel production, engineering, financing, research and long-term servicing.

Its international order book is among the world’s largest, with Russian-designed reactors being built or planned across Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere. There is a reason governments continue to hire the company.

Hungary’s Paks II project is a particularly striking example. Budapest has continued with construction of two new Russian-designed reactors despite the broader deterioration in relations between Russia and the European Union.

Russia is providing substantial state financing for the project, demonstrating that nuclear cooperation can involve not merely technology but long-term industrial and financial arrangements.

Türkiye has reached a similar conclusion. The Akkuyu nuclear power plant is being developed under a Russian build-own-operate model, with Rosatom responsible for the project. Once all four units are operating, the plant is expected to provide a substantial share of Turkish electricity.

And Türkiye is a NATO member. That fact alone should puncture some of the more theatrical arguments about nuclear cooperation with Russia being inherently incompatible with Western security.

The rest of the world is building while the EU debates

There is an even larger geopolitical irony. While EU politicians spent years debating whether nuclear power was morally acceptable, much of the Global South was asking a rather more practical question: How do we produce enough electricity to become richer?

The answer increasingly involves nuclear power. Russian-designed projects are progressing in Bangladesh, Egypt, Türkiye, India and China. China itself is pursuing one of the world’s most aggressive nuclear construction programs. Egypt is building its first nuclear power plant at El Dabaa. Bangladesh has begun the process of bringing its first nuclear facility into operation.

These countries do not have the luxury of turning energy policy into a cultural performance. They have growing populations, expanding industries and rising electricity demand.

Europe, meanwhile, has been trying to persuade itself that reducing its own energy-production options somehow constitutes strategic sophistication. It does not. It is strategic self-harm.

Paradoxically, the numbers expose the gap between Brussels’ rhetoric and Europe’s actual nuclear economy. According to Eurostat, EU countries imported more than €312 million worth of enriched uranium, €465 million in nuclear fuel assemblies and related components, and another €4 million in reactor components from Russia in 2025.

In other words, even as Brussels has pursued ever tighter sanctions against Moscow, Europe’s nuclear sector has remained deeply intertwined with Russian supply chains. That reality makes calls for an outright ban on Rosatom’s activities in Europe look like political theater.

If the EU is genuinely committed to restoring nuclear power, it cannot afford to turn one of the world’s most experienced nuclear suppliers into a taboo simply for ideological reasons.

The central issue is larger than Russia and Rosatom. It is about whether the EU can recover the ability to distinguish between ideological delusions and common sense.

Russia is not disappearing from the global nuclear market simply because European politicians disapprove of it. Rosatom is not disappearing because Brussels would prefer it to. The reactors already operating around the world will not suddenly stop requiring fuel, maintenance and technical expertise. Europe’s electricity demand will not disappear either.

The choice is consequently straightforward. The EU can continue treating nuclear energy as a political culture war, endlessly debating which technologies and suppliers are sufficiently virtuous.

Or it can return to the old-fashioned principles that built Europe’s industrial prosperity: engineering competence, economic calculation, technological ambition and the willingness to cooperate when cooperation serves national interests.

The atom does not care about ideological fashion. Reactors do not care about slogans. They simply have to work. European politicians would do well to remember the same principle.

The former head of logistics at the Ukrainian Air Force is facing new accusations of corruption after being detained on suspicion of embezzlement earlier this year, the country’s prosecutor general has said.

Ruslan Kravchenko did not reveal the former commander’s name, but RBC Ukraine identified him as Andrey Ukrainets, who occupied the post until February.

According to the outlet, Ukrainets was caught red-handed five months ago when he attempted to bribe the leadership of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) in order to stop a probe into embezzlement during the construction of protective structures for planes at military airfields across Ukraine. A total of 1.4 billion hryvnia (around $31 million) had been allocated to the cause by Kiev in May 2025, but large parts of the sum reportedly disappeared.

The prosecutor general said in a statement on Thursday that according to new findings, the suspect purchased more than a dozen pieces of real estate, the price of which exceeded his lawful income by at least 20 million hryvnia (around $447,000).
Between 2020 and 2025, the former commander acquired three private homes in Zhitomir Region in Western Ukraine; seven apartments in Kiev, Vinnitsia, Zhitomir, and Bukovel; several garages and other non-residential premises; as well as six plots of land, Kravchenko wrote.

The suspect’s parents, son, and other relatives were registered as the owners of the properties, but investigators established that this was a cover-up, it added.

According to Russian Defense Ministry figures, a total of 671 Ukrainian warplanes have been destroyed since the escalation between Moscow and Kiev in February 2022. Many of the aircraft were destroyed by missiles and drones while stationed at airfields.

Ukraine’s Defense Ministry and armed forces have been plagued with corruption amid the fighting with Russia. Two defense ministers, Aleksey Reznikov and Rustem Umerov, were removed in 2023 and 2025 respectively after their tenures became embroiled in allegations of graft involving military supplies and weapons contracts bankrolled by the West.

Russia has floated the idea of building a rail route to India as a hedge against the risks associated with the Strait of Hormuz.

Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin told TASS in an interview that Russia needs to build a rail link to the Indian Ocean to reduce risks from maritime disruptions in the chokepoint. He said any options providing access to India would be acceptable.

India and Russia are traditional friends, with close diplomatic ties that grew through the Cold War and have endured despite Western sanctions on Moscow.

“A rail link to the Indian Ocean should also be explored. Risks related to the Bosphorus and the Strait of Hormuz might require alternative routes,” Khusnullin said.

The Bosphorus, a narrow strait that connects the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara, is controlled by Turkey. The Russia-Ukraine conflict has led to attacks on commercial shipping in the Black Sea, disrupting trade.

The US-Israeli attack on Iran has also largely blocked the strategic Strait of Hormuz through which a fifth of the world’s energy previously passed.

India has become the second-largest importer of Russian oil, behind China, as it seeks to secure energy supplies amid the disruptions in the Mideast. India’s crude imports from Russia surged to a record high last month, accounting for 55% of its total crude oil purchases. 

Bilateral trade has also surged, with both countries setting a $100 billion goal by 2030.

New Delhi has also shown active interest in the Northern Sea Route, also called the Arctic route, as it explores alternative trade conduits.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) has banned exports of copper and cobalt concentrates as part of efforts to increase domestic processing and retain more revenue from its vast mineral wealth, Reuters reported on Thursday, citing an official order. The move comes as Washington is seeking greater access to the country’s critical minerals, a sector dominated by Chinese companies.

The prohibition took effect immediately under an order signed on June 29. The mines minister may grant one-year exemptions in “strategic” circumstances, it said. The authorities also introduced a new tax regime for economically significant mining by-products, with a three-month transition period.

DR Congo is the world’s largest cobalt producer and second-largest copper supplier. Major operators include Chinese companies CMOC, Huayou Cobalt and Zijin Mining, the Anglo-Swiss group Glencore, Canada’s Ivanhoe Mines and Luxembourg-based Eurasian Resources Group.

The sector has long been dogged by allegations that proceeds from illegally mined and smuggled minerals have financed armed groups and fueled the escalating conflict in the country’s east. M23 controls large areas of mineral-rich territory, including the Rubaya mining area in North Kivu, a major source of coltan.

In December, Washington and Kinshasa signed a strategic minerals partnership alongside a US-brokered peace agreement between DR Congo and Rwanda aimed at ending hostilities in eastern DR Congo. The minerals deal is intended to give American and allied companies long-term access to Congolese resources.
Washington has presented the agreement as a way to support Congolese industrialization while reducing US dependence on China-dominated supply chains.

In January, Corneille Nangaa, leader of the Alliance Fleuve Congo (AFC) coalition that includes M23, warned that concessions offered under the US agreement could face disputes because some sites may already have been allocated to other partners. The Congolese presidency dismissed the claim as “speculative,” saying existing contracts would be respected.

The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) is getting out of control, with new cases doubling in some hotspots over the past week, the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned.

Response efforts must be “urgently and massively” expanded across all fronts as the disease is “spreading faster than” efforts to contain it, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said after meeting health and humanitarian partners in Kinshasa on Thursday.

Only a week ago the UN health agency described it as the largest Ebola epidemic ever recorded in the African country, surpassing the one in 2018-2020. The outbreak is being caused by the Bundibugyo strain of the virus, for which there is currently no approved vaccine or targeted treatment.

Official data from the DR Congo’s Ministry of Health also points to a rapidly worsening situation. Between July 31 and August 4, the number of confirmed Ebola cases rose from 3,674 to 3,973, while the death toll increased from 1,621 to 1,801. The case fatality rate also climbed from 44.1% to 45.3%.

According to the WHO chief, responders face major challenges, including insecurity and mass displacement, which are hampering efforts to reach affected communities. He called for stronger coordination under the Congolese government’s leadership, better protection and support for healthcare workers, and faster access to treatment, disease surveillance, and safe burials.

DR Congo continues to grapple with instability as the M23 rebel group maintains control over parts of the country, fueling clashes and humanitarian emergencies.

The US announced an additional $242 million this week for Ebola response and preparedness efforts in DR Congo and neighboring countries. According to the State Department, the package brings Washington’s total outbreak-related assistance to more than $512 million. 

Russia has also contributed to the regional response. Earlier this year, the country’s public health watchdog, Rospotrebnadzor, deployed specialists to Uganda and supplied domestically developed diagnostic tests, while PCR kits were also delivered to neighboring DR Congo. In July, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Moscow was ready to begin mass production of a vaccine against the Bundibugyo strain if requested by African partners.

Uganda, which also recorded Ebola cases linked to the virus earlier this year, declared its outbreak over last week after completing the required monitoring period.

Just over 40 years ago, in July 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev traveled to Vladivostok and announced something that would reshape Russian foreign policy for decades to come. For the first time, the Soviet leadership publicly declared its intention to rebuild relations with China and deepen cooperation with Asia, while it also signaled a desire to repair the bitter split with Beijing that had defined much of the previous two decades.

That marked the beginning of a gradual but lasting shift, and under Vladimir Putin, particularly from the late 2000s onward, it evolved into what became known as Russia’s pivot to the East. Its value became unmistakable after 2022, as relations with the West collapsed, but China, India, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia ensured that Russia didn’t become internationally isolated. They became major trading partners and important diplomatic interlocutors.

Those who argued for stronger ties with Asia can legitimately claim vindication, but it would be a mistake to conclude from this that Moscow must now abandon the rest of Europe and place all its strategic weight behind the East because that’s neither necessary nor consistent with Russia’s geopolitical reality.

The current confrontation between Russia and the West didn’t arise because Moscow failed diplomatically or because it neglected Asia for too long, rather it was the culmination of a post-Cold War international order in which the United States and its European allies never accepted Russia as an independent center of power. Ukraine became the immediate flashpoint, but it wasn’t the underlying cause and the attempt to transform Kiev into a geopolitical battering ram against Russia was simply one instrument in a broader confrontation that had been developing for years.

Nor is Russia unique in this regard. While China has consistently pursued a more cautious relationship with the West, avoiding direct confrontation wherever possible, Washington still treats Beijing as its principal strategic rival, so the issue isn’t Russian behavior alone but a wider unwillingness within the West to accept genuinely independent great powers. Western Europe has its own motivations, given for many of its political elites, confrontation with Russia has become a convenient way to compensate for mounting domestic problems and strategic drift.

For Moscow, however, engagement with the West was never driven by romantic illusions, except among a relatively small part of society. and most Russians regarded Western Europe pragmatically as a source of technology, investment, expertise and prosperity.

The important point is that none of this represents a civilizational choice because Russia is uniquely positioned geographically. Unlike most major powers, it simultaneously faces Europe, Asia, the Near East, and the Arctic, and it’s neither exclusively European nor exclusively Asian so its foreign policy has never been able to rely on a single direction, nor should it.

That distinguishes Russia from countries with genuinely constrained geopolitical choices. Turkey, for example, has spent decades seeking acceptance as part of Europe while remaining economically dependent upon it, yet it continues to be viewed by many Europeans as fundamentally Asian. Russia occupies a much stronger position. It can engage with multiple centers of power simultaneously, allowing each relationship to balance the others so none becomes indispensable.

The American geopolitical thinker Nicholas Spykman once observed that geography provides the material of politics rather than determining political outcomes. That insight applies particularly well to Russia in that geography gives Moscow options, yet policy determines how those options are used.

This also explains why Asia only became a realistic economic alternative relatively recently, as before the late 2000s, Asian markets simply lacked the capacity to replace Western Europe as Russia’s principal commercial partner. Today the situation is different and China, India, and Southeast Asia offer enormous demand for Russian energy and commodities, while trade has expanded dramatically. Yet Asia can’t replace everything the West once supplied. China remains an industrial giant, but it still doesn’t manufacture long-haul passenger aircraft comparable to Boeing or Airbus, thus Russia is therefore investing in rebuilding its own civil aviation industry rather than expecting Asia to solve every technological challenge.

Yet this doesn’t change the fundamental reality that in international politics, countries devote the greatest attention not to their friendliest neighbors but to those capable of inflicting the greatest damage. For Russia, that remains the West, something Alexander Nevsky understood as early as the 13th century when he assessed that however powerful the Golden Horde appeared, it didn’t threaten the cultural and political survival of the Russian people to the same extent as the German-Catholic expansion from the west.

The same strategic logic continues to shape Russian thinking today, where China, India, and other Asian partners are valuable neighbors whose cooperation strengthens Russia economically and diplomatically, but they don’t seek to undermine Russia’s sovereignty or its political system.

The United States and much of Europe, by contrast, continue to define their foreign policy in terms that leave little room for independent centers of power outside the Western alliance and that’s why the West will remain Russia’s principal foreign policy focus for as long as it is perceived as the primary source of external pressure.

Asia is indispensable to Russia’s future, but it’s not a substitute for Europe, nor does Russia face a choice between the two and its geography ensures that it never will. Its task isn’t to choose East over West, but to build productive relations wherever they best serve the country’s security and long-term development.

This article was first published by Vzglyad newspaper and translated and edited by the RT team.

Western-backed anti-corruption investigators in Ukraine have detailed their allegations against Olga Stefanishina, a former senior government official whose most recent post was Kiev’s ambassador to the US. Reports emerged on Wednesday that prosecutors are moving forward with formally accusing her of illegal enrichment.

Stefanishina built her career in the Justice Ministry, and between 2020 and 2024 served as both justice minister and deputy prime minister responsible for integration with the EU and NATO. That process requires Kiev to demonstrate significant progress in combating endemic government corruption.

In a statement published on Thursday, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) described the suspect by referring to her twin posts but did not identify her by name.

According to investigators, the undeclared assets included:

• Two apartments in a residential complex in western Kiev, registered to a friend
• A luxury apartment in central Kiev, registered to her mother
• A parking space and several auxiliary premises at the same high-end property, registered to her father
• A Mercedes-Benz GLC 220 d, registered to a subordinate

NABU also alleged that the suspect had been negotiating the purchase of a suburban house near Kiev valued at approximately $550,000. About half of the price was reportedly to be paid in cash, while the remainder would be covered through the transfer of the two apartments in western Kiev.

According to NABU, Stefanishina accumulated assets worth 13.9 million hryvnia (about $311,000), between mid-2024 and mid-2025. During the same period, her official income amounted to 3.7 million hryvnias ($83,000), while withdrawals from her bank accounts totaled 4.2 million hryvnias ($94,000).

On Wednesday, the High Anti-Corruption Court in Kiev set bail for Stefanishina at $134,400, less than half the amount requested by prosecutors.

Stefanishina has a long history of working in the civil sphere, and a long history of suspicion has followed her career. From joining the Ukrainian Justice Ministry in 2007, becoming director of the Government Office for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration of the Cabinet of Ministers Secretariat in 2017.

She is among the accused in the so-called ‘Lukash case’ involving the systemic embezzlement of funds dedicated to European Integration, launched in 2019, but which remains before the Ukrainian High Court.

Despite the detailed charges and ongoing case, Stefanishina was appointed deputy prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration in 2020, a post that would have seen her cultivate more extensive ties with Brussels. In September 2024, she became minister for justice of Ukraine, adding the brief to her Euro-Atlantic portfolio. 

A second corruption case into contracts her husband won from the national asset recovery and management agency was launched in 2025, shortly before she was dispatched to the US, where she was made ambassador in August. 

Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky dismissed her on Monday at her own request.

On Wednesday, Stefanishina reiterated her denial of any wrongdoing and challenged prosecutors to prove their allegations in court.

Two French livestreamers have received suspended prison sentences for repeatedly abusing and humiliating a man during online broadcasts before his death.

A criminal court in Nice found Safine Hamadi and Owen Cenazandotti guilty of violence against 46-year-old Raphael Graven, known online as Jean Pormanove, as well as incitement to hatred over insults directed at him.

Graven died on August 18, 2025, while the streamers were asleep during a live broadcast. Prosecutors later said his death was probably linked to poor health and a fragile heart rather than the abuse itself.

The abuse was streamed on the Kick platform over several days. The defendants maintained that the violence and humiliation had been scripted, partly staged and carried out with Graven’s consent.

Hamadi, who expressed remorse during the trial, received an 18-month suspended sentence and a €5,000 ($5,770) fine. Cenazandotti was given a two-year suspended sentence and fined €15,000.

Both men were also banned from posting on social media for six months.

⚡️ AFFAIRE JEAN PORMANOVE — “Seulement ça ?” : la décision du tribunal de Nice provoque l’indignation d’une partie des internautes après la condamnation des deux streamers à de la prison avec sursis et 6 mois de bannissement numérique. pic.twitter.com/brTMqupNoT

— AlertesNewsFR (@AlertesNewsFR24) August 5, 2026

“The conviction is mainly symbolic. We are satisfied with the ruling,” said Hamadi’s lawyer, Tom Michel. He added that his client had acknowledged that some of the content was unacceptable and could not be justified as consensual or scripted.

The court cleared the pair of manslaughter and of exploiting Graven’s psychological frailty. According to Michel, Graven had previously told police that he had consented to the stunts.

The scandal intensified after it emerged that the channel had already been reported to the authorities dozens of times and that Kick had actively promoted some of its content. French Digital Affairs Minister Clara Chappaz described Graven’s treatment as an “absolute horror.”

Kick faced further criticism after briefly restoring public access to the channel following his death. French regulators said the platform employed only 75 moderators, none of whom spoke French, raising broader questions about its ability to police violent content.

French audiovisual regulator Arcom and the Paris prosecutor’s office had opened investigations into the Australia-based platform. Arrest warrants have also reportedly been issued for some of its management.

Prosecutors said Graven earned around €265,000 from his streams between 2021 and 2025.

Four employees of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) have been wounded by Ukrainian landmines since the start of the week, the CEO of Russian state atomic energy corporation Rosatom has said.

Europe’s largest nuclear power plant and the adjacent city of Energodar have been targeted by Ukraine on multiple occasions with artillery and drones since Russia took control of the facility in March 2022.

Two victims of landmines have been hospitalized in critical condition, with one of them requiring a leg amputation, Rosatom CEO Aleksey Likhachev told journalists on Thursday. Two others were lucky to escape with light wounds, he added.

Ukrainian forces began remotely mining the area near the ZNPP and Energodar where its employees reside four months ago, the nuclear chief said.

“Every night, drones drop ‘Lepestok’ (Petal) mines onto the main road leading into the city as well as onto routes used by personnel to reach the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant and key intersections,” Likhachev stated.

The mines used by Ukraine were apparently Soviet-era PFM-1 anti-personnel munitions. The small butterfly-shaped devices got their nickname due to their typical green or brown color, so as to be camouflaged among the grass and foliage.

‘Lepestok’ mines are typically scattered in large quantities, either by aircraft or artillery. Designed to maim rather than kill, they are capable of blowing off or disfiguring a victim’s foot.

The PFM-1 is banned under the 1997 Ottawa Convention, to which Ukraine is a party, due to posing an increased threat to civilians.

In July, a Ukrainian drone hit a ZNPP service vehicle on the edge of the plant’s industrial site, killing its chief engineer, Aleksandr Yakovlev, and his driver. At the time, Likhachev called the strike a “deliberate terrorist act.”

According to the Rosatom CEO, more than a dozen employees of the plant have been killed and many others wounded in Ukrainian attacks over the past three months. Kiev’s actions pose the “real danger of a massive nuclear incident” affecting parts of Russia, Ukraine, and the EU, he warned.

Moscow has repeatedly criticized the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which has experts deployed at the ZNPP, for acknowledging the attacks on the facility but stopping short of blaming Ukraine for them.

India hopes to gain operational control over two oil blocks in Venezuela by leveraging a new petroleum law, according to reports.

State-owned oil explorer ONGC hopes to sign agreements with the South American nation under the new provision, which grants operational freedom without sanctions risk.

In January, the US kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and prodded Caracas to amend laws allowing private participation while keeping control over production, exports, and investments.

ONGC, through its overseas investment arm ONGC Videsh, holds a ‌40% stake ⁠in ⁠Venezuela’s San Cristobal field. Along with other Indian companies, ONGC also holds an 18% ​stake in the Carabobo-1 project.

“Now we have full freedom to work on the ​Venezuela projects,” ONGC finance director Anupam Agarwal was quoted as saying on a call with analysts. “Earlier, we were restricting our operations there because of the sanctions-related risk.”

Before 2019, India was a major buyer of heavy, sulfur-rich Venezuelan crude oil until US sanctions restricted trade. 

Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodriguez, welcomed the participation of Indian companies in the country’s oil and gas sector while on a visit to India in June.

The renewed overseas focus comes as India seeks to diversify its oil and gas supplies amid the conflict in the Middle East, which has led to supply disruptions, and as Washington advances a bill that could see up to 100% tariffs imposed on the top five importers of Russian oil and gas.

Sakhalin-1 was transferred to a new domestic operator by Russia after sweeping Western sanctions following the Ukraine conflict. ONGC made payments into the Sakhalin-1 abandonment fund in rubles using dividends frozen in Russia, to restore its stake.

India’s crude imports from Russia surged to a record high in July, accounting for 55% of its total crude oil purchases.

New Delhi has also directed ONGC to build and fill another strategic petroleum reserve facility, which would expand its reserve capacity by a third.

US President Donald Trump has demanded answers from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth over depleted American weapons stockpiles, including air defense missiles, multiple media outlets reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the exchange. Hegseth did not reportedly dispute the shortages but denied misleading Trump.

The reported rebuke came at last week’s Camp David meeting amid mounting concern over the state of US munition stocks after years of arms deliveries to Ukraine under former President Joe Biden and more than five months of heavy missile use in the ongoing US-led war against Iran.

Trump reportedly believed he had been misled about the state of US munitions stockpiles and complained that he had been under the impression the shortages had already been addressed. Hegseth is said to have blamed Deputy Secretary of War Stephen Feinberg for failing to keep Trump fully informed.

The incident reportedly underscored Trump’s growing frustration with Hegseth, an early proponent of military action against Iran. The news outlets, including the Washington Post and NBC News, said shortages of long-range missiles and air defense interceptors were among the reasons Trump backed away from additional large-scale strikes.

Earlier this week, the Financial Times, citing people familiar with the discussions, reported that Trump had rejected a request by Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky for hundreds of additional Patriot interceptor missiles, citing depleted US stockpiles and the Pentagon’s own requirements amid the war with Iran. Trump has nevertheless publicly dismissed reports of munition shortfalls.

On Wednesday, CNN reported that the US had depleted nearly 80% of its THAAD interceptor missile inventory and about half of its Patriot missile stockpiles compared to prewar levels. The New York Times also reported that Trump’s advisers had warned him about dwindling stocks of Patriot interceptors and other air defense systems in the Middle East. The newspaper said the shortages were among the factors behind the president’s decision not to sharply escalate the military campaign against Iran.

US President Donald Trump has hailed Venezuelan oil as the “spoils” of war, in stark contrast to his earlier portrayal of the January operation in Caracas as being intended to bring “peace, liberty, and justice” to the Venezuelan people.

Speaking in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Trump claimed that “billions and billions of barrels of oil” are coming out of Venezuela, describing it as “one of the most fertile places for oil in the world.” Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves, surpassing Saudi Arabia and Iran, despite years of sanctions and underinvestment.

Referring to the January operation in which the US kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Trump said Washington had recovered its costs “many, many, many times” through the oil it had taken.

“It’s the old-fashioned way. To the victor belong the spoils,” Trump said. He then extended the comparison to Iran, saying: “And we are doing the same in the lovely Islamic Republic of Iran, we’ll knock the hell out of them.”

Unlike the 48-minute Venezuela operation, however, the Iran war has entered its sixth month with no military victory or negotiated settlement in sight, as Tehran continues to reject US demands for “unconditional surrender” and vows to keep fighting.

Trump’s remarks echo longstanding arguments made by Russian officials that US military interventions have been driven by control over energy resources.

“The aggression against Iran…Venezuela, and before that Iraq and Libya have always been linked to oil and gas supplies,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in an interview with Colombia’s Caracol Radio in March.

Even though the stated US objective in Iran is to degrade its military capabilities and ensure Tehran never acquires a nuclear weapon, Trump has previously indirectly linked the campaign to oil. In June, he said US forces had been secretly escorting oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz and moving what he described as “millions” of barrels of oil through the waterway.

The terrorist threat in Africa is being intensified by former colonial powers that use Ukrainian proxies to provide extremist groups with dangerous technology, Russia’s permanent representative to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, has said.

Moscow has repeatedly accused Kiev of employing terrorist methods in its conflict with Russia and of supporting extremist organizations abroad in an effort to undermine Russian interests.

Speaking at a UN Security Council meeting on Wednesday, Nebenzia said African countries, particularly those in the Sahel, are facing mounting security threats because of “support provided to illegal armed groups by former colonial powers driven by neo-colonial ambitions.”

France has significantly reduced its military presence in the region in recent years after several Sahel countries accused it of contributing to instability. French President Emmanuel Macron, however, has blamed Russia for encouraging the power shift.

Nebenzia said Moscow and the Sahel states agree that pressure from African armed groups stems from “criminal collusion between Ukraine, France, certain other countries, and terrorist groups.”

“What they do in Africa is no different. By drawing Ukrainians into supporting terrorist groups in the Sahel, Western sponsors are once again pursuing their own objectives using someone else’s hands,” Nebenzia added.

The Russian diplomat also warned that terrorist groups are increasingly taking advantage of new and emerging technologies, including digital currencies, artificial intelligence, and drones.

He said these developments pose serious challenges for security agencies and law enforcement, and called for a coordinated international response.

According to Nebenzia, efforts to combat terrorism are being further undermined by “double standards,” ”hidden agendas,” and the direct interference of malicious actors.

South African energy and chemicals giant Sasol expects annual earnings per share to rise by as much as 84%, following a surge in oil and fuel prices driven by the US-Iran war and a disruption to supplies through the Strait of Hormuz.

The Johannesburg-registered company joins multiple Western energy firms which have been thriving on high prices since the US and Israel launched a war on Iran in February.

In a trading statement released on Wednesday, Sasol projected earnings per share of between 17.50 rand and 19.50 rand ($1.04-$1.16) for the financial year that ended on June 30. The figure would represent an increase of between 65% and 84% from the 10.60 rand reported a year earlier.

Sasol said its adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) are expected to rise by between 12% and 20%, from 51.8 billion rand to between 58 billion and 62 billion rand.

Global oil prices surged after the US and Israel launched strikes against Iran in late February and Tehran restricted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, a key route for more than a fifth of global oil trade.

While the company cited a supportive “macroeconomic environment during the last quarter of the financial year,” JustOneLap founder Simon Brown linked the company’s outlook directly to the Middle East conflict, warning that its shares could fall alongside oil prices if tensions ease.

“At some point, Trump has to find a way to find some peace with the Middle East. Then oil will head down and take the Sasol share price with it,” he told BusinessDayTV.

In a July performance update, Sasol said the Middle East conflict had disrupted supplies and contributed to higher prices, while its chemicals businesses in Africa, the US and Eurasia benefited from “favorable market conditions.”

However, the disruption also forced a shutdown at its gas-to-liquids plant in Qatar and constrained feedstock supply in Europe. The company warned that conditions remain volatile due to ongoing geopolitical uncertainty.

According to South African financial publication Daily Investor, Sasol’s stock gained more than 55% in the first month of the war and peaked at 238.94 rand in May before retreating on ceasefire hopes.

Ukraine has used virtually every NATO tool it could against Russia, but Moscow has found ways to counter all of them, former Ukrainian commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhny has argued.

The retired general, who currently serves as Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK, expanded on earlier remarks in which he said Kiev would never join the US-led military bloc. According to Zaluzhny, NATO remains anchored in obsolete doctrines, unlike Ukraine.

“In 2026, Ukraine used all weapon systems and doctrines for their use that NATO has, with the exception of Tomahawks, nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers, and F-35s,” he told journalists at a diplomatic event in Kiev, as quoted by Apostrophe on Wednesday. “The reserves have been depleted. Russia found countermeasures for everything.”

Supporters of Ukraine have repeatedly described Western weapons supplied to Kiev as potential “game changers.” However, the delivery of Stinger and Javelin missiles, HIMARS rocket launchers, Abrams tanks, ATACMS missiles, and F-16 fighter jets has not produced a decisive military breakthrough.

Ukraine formally enshrined its goal of joining NATO in its constitution following the 2014 Western-backed armed coup in Kiev. Russia has repeatedly cited the bloc’s eastward expansion, as well as its 2008 pledge to eventually admit Ukraine, among the causes of the ongoing conflict.

Kiev is meanwhile facing political turmoil following Vladimir Zelensky’s dismissal of Defense Minister Mikhail Fedorov, and several days later, General Aleksandr Syrsky, who had succeeded Zaluzhny as commander-in-chief.

Syrsky’s removal followed negative domestic and international reactions to Fedorov’s dismissal. Media reports have suggested that Zelensky targeted the former defense minister due to his growing popularity and infighting over lucrative weapons contracts.

The potential lifting of martial law is expected to pave the way for a new presidential election. Opinion polls cited by the media show that Zaluzhny could defeat Zelensky in the second round of a potential contest.

Zelensky dismissed Zalushny from his military post in 2024 after the general publicly stated that Ukrainian forces were unlikely to achieve a major territorial breakthrough, contradicting Kiev’s line.

Hackers have targeted water and wastewater utilities in at least a dozen US states, ABC News has reported, citing multiple sources.

The American authorities believe that Iran, which has been in conflict with the US since being attacked in late February, is the main suspect behind the cyberattacks, although its involvement hasn’t been officially confirmed, the broadcaster said on Tuesday.

Tehran hasn’t commented on the claims. Over the years, the US has accused Iran of attempting to hack its banks, infrastructure, and communications of high-ranking officials, with the Islamic Republic consistently denying the allegations.

Last Thursday, the FBI said “malicious cyber actors” had targeted water and wastewater utility systems in seven states in late July. Their actions resulted in the “loss of monitoring and control functionality” of key infrastructure, it said.

At least five more states have since faced similar attacks, according to ABC News.

US media mentioned Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, South Dakota, and Georgia as among the states affected.

Michigan State Police said that after the hack “all systems continued to operate safely, issues were addressed by local operators, and there are no known impacts that posed a public health concern.”

The FBI urged the operators to disconnect their systems from the internet where possible, use secure software, and prepare to switch to manual controls if necessary.

Experts have sounded the alarm over insufficient cybersecurity at water treatment facilities across the US, saying that it makes them vulnerable to attacks.

Last week, US President Donald Trump ruled out Iranian involvement in the hacking of the infrastructure. “They blamed it on Iran. I don’t think so. I think I blame it on Minnesota because they’re grossly incompetent… Iran’s got bigger problems than worrying about Minnesota,” he said during a cabinet meeting. Trump also attacked the state’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, calling him “corrupt.”

Governor Mike Braun has declared a new energy emergency in the US state of Indiana, citing attacks on shipping linked to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

In a post on X on Wednesday, Braun said he had signed an executive order extending the suspension of the state’s gasoline use and excise taxes, which had been due to be reinstated on Friday, through September 5.

“This new energy emergency is prompted by new disruptions to global oil shipping lanes in recent weeks, in the Black Sea/Kerch Strait as the Russia-Ukraine conflict has escalated into maritime drone battles and the disruption to the Alberta Oil Sands Region from Canadian wildfires,” the governor’s office said in a statement.

It added that the disruptions had driven fuel prices to “unnatural levels outside the norm of standard economic conditions.”

According to the Indiana Capital Chronicle, Braun first partially suspended gasoline taxes in early April after prices surged due to the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz during the US-Israeli war against Iran.

On June 25, Vladimir Zelensky announced what he called a 40-day campaign to pressure the Kremlin into “ending the war.” The announcement coincided with systematic drone strikes on Russian energy facilities and warehouses belonging to Wildberries, Russia’s equivalent of Amazon. Moscow responded by stepping up its own attacks on Ukrainian ports and vessels.

Russia has repeatedly warned that continued aid to Ukraine will only prolong the conflict and that sanctions imposed on Moscow are also hurting Western countries and helping to drive up oil prices. The Russian Foreign Ministry similarly condemned the US-Israeli attack on Iran, warning in March that the Middle East conflict was “directly threatening global energy security.”

Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive and staunch critic of Israel’s wars in the Middle East, has narrowly won Michigan’s Democratic US Senate primary despite record spending by the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC in support of his rival.

El-Sayed, the son of Egyptian immigrants and a former health official who has never held elected office, received 48.48% of the vote on Tuesday, according to the AP. His main opponent, moderate US Representative Haley Stevens, received 47.51%. El-Sayed would become the first Muslim US senator if he defeats former Republican Congressman Mike Rogers in November.

Throughout his campaign, El-Sayed has repeatedly described Israel’s war in Gaza as a “genocide” and argued that the Israeli government was as “bloodthirsty” and as “evil” as Hamas. He said he opposed “unconditional” military aid to any country, including Israel.

“I don’t want to fund a foreign military that does genocide, apartheid, or is taking us to a war we don’t need to fight. I believe in equal rights to peace, dignity and self-determination for Jewish-Israelis and Palestinians alike,” the Democrat told CNN.

According to the New York Times, AIPAC funding accounted for more than half of the money spent by dozens of outside groups on advertising supporting Stevens.

Several Jewish organizations have denounced El-Sayed’s stance, including the Jewish Democratic Council of America (JDCA). The American Jewish Committee (AJC) described his victory as “a deeply troubling reflection of the growing mainstreaming of divisive rhetoric and exclusionary politics in America.”

Speaking in Las Vegas on Wednesday, US President Donald Trump said El-Sayed was “full of s**t” and a “man of hate.”

“He doesn’t love Jewish people. He hates them with a passion that burns in his heart,” Trump said.

Trump: Abdul El-Sayed—He’s a man of hate. He doesn't love Israel. He doesn’t love Jewish people. He hates them with a passion that burns in his heart. There's not a thing he can do about it because he hates them. pic.twitter.com/MGBw8KUaTm

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 5, 2026

Vice President J.D. Vance also sharply criticized El-Sayed that evening in an interview with Fox News.

“He represents the modern Democratic coalition, which is self-hating white liberals united to people who just came to the country for the first time and don’t actually have the sense of appreciation for it,” Vance said.

El-Sayed has denied accusations of anti-Semitism and vowed to protect the Jewish community.

“I want you to know that my commitment to Jewish safety is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters,” he said during his victory speech.

NEW: Abdul El-Sayed addresses Jewish Michiganders after repeated accusations of anti-Semitism throughout his campaign:

"I want to speak specifically to an issue that has been focused on in this race."

"To my Jewish American sisters and brothers... I want you to know that my… pic.twitter.com/R0ZQ8ECqEh

— Fox News (@FoxNews) August 5, 2026

Several Democratic politicians highly critical of Israel have risen to prominence in recent years, including democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, who was elected mayor of New York last year.

OpenAI has agreed to pay $3.2 million to settle US government claims that it discriminated against American job applicants while favoring foreign workers with temporary visas.

The US Justice Department said on Tuesday that the tech giant and its subsidiary Statsig, which makes product development software, deliberately made some vacancies harder for American workers to find and apply for.

OpenAI allegedly failed to post the positions on its public careers website, required applicants to mail paper applications instead of applying electronically, and advertised some jobs on the radio late at night.

Officials said the measures discouraged Americans from applying, making it easier for the companies to claim that they could not find suitable domestic workers and justify hiring foreign visa holders instead.

“It is illegal to discriminate against US workers by preferring temporary visa holders for jobs,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said.

Under the settlement, OpenAI will pay $1.2 million in penalties and establish a $2 million fund to compensate people allegedly harmed by the recruitment practices. The company must also revise its hiring policies, publicly advertise relevant vacancies, accept electronic applications, train recruitment staff and submit to Justice Department monitoring.

OpenAI has denied any wrongdoing.

The case comes amid US President Donald Trump’s wider campaign against alleged abuse of foreign-worker visa programs. He has argued that major companies use such schemes to hire cheaper labor from abroad at the expense of American employees.

Last year, Trump imposed a $100,000 fee on new H-1B visa applications, saying the surcharge would protect US jobs and national security. A federal judge blocked the measure in June, ruling that the White House could not impose what amounted to a tax without congressional approval.

Supporters of skilled-worker visas have argued that they allow US companies to fill specialized positions and help the country remain competitive in technology and other advanced industries. Trump’s critics have also opposed his restrictions on the H-1B program, arguing they would harm schools, universities, hospitals and other public institutions that rely on foreigners.

Israel struck multiple targets in southern Lebanon on Wednesday in what was described as the heaviest bombardment since the ceasefire took effect in early June. The attacks occurred as Israeli and Lebanese negotiators held US-brokered talks in Rome.

One man was killed and 12 others were injured in Tibnin when an Israeli projectile struck the roof of a prayer hall at a cemetery, the Lebanese Health Ministry said.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) also bombed Al-Mansouri and later struck Burj el-Shamali outside Tyre. The IDF issued its first displacement order in around two months.

Following Hezbollah breaking the ceasefire and attempting to target Israeli forces, the IDF launched multiple airstrikes in Bourj El Shemali, a suburb of the city of Tyre in Lebanon. pic.twitter.com/RIkE1wCBfx

— Israel Military Channel (@IsraelMilitaryC) August 5, 2026

VIDEO | Footage documents the moment Israeli artillery shelling targeted Al-Hanniye in south Lebanon's Tyre District amid ongoing attacks. pic.twitter.com/xXn0k7w9UY

— The Cradle (@TheCradleMedia) August 5, 2026

The IDF said it had resumed strikes in response to “a blatant violation” of the ceasefire by Hezbollah, without elaborating. Earlier on Wednesday, several media outlets reported that two Israeli soldiers had been killed by an explosion inside a booby-trapped building in the Lebanese town of Majdal Zoun.

The seventh round of Israeli-Lebanese talks was cut short on Wednesday afternoon at Israel’s request, the Times of Israel and Al-Monitor reported.

According to Israeli media, the country’s ambassador to the US, Yechiel Leiter, accused the Lebanese delegation of repeatedly leaking false information to the press. The talks are set to resume on Thursday.

The IDF has occupied parts of southern Lebanon as part of what it calls a security zone intended to deter Hezbollah from firing rockets and mortars across the border.

Under the June 3 truce, Israel agreed to withdraw gradually and transfer control of the “pilot zones” to the Lebanese army, provided that Hezbollah could no longer stage attacks from the area. Hezbollah rejected the deal, demanded a full Israeli withdrawal, and refused to disarm.

The world is marking the 81st anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings carried out in the final days of World War II. The US attacks, carried out respectively on August 6 and 9, 1945, killed an estimated 150,000 to 246,000 people, including the immediate victims of the fission blasts and those who succumbed to wounds and radiation sickness by the end of the year. The victims of the attack, which leveled the two cities, were predominantly civilians, and the bombings remain to date the first and only use of nuclear weapons in an armed conflict.

The attacks are still a highly controversial topic, with no consensus on their true purpose, morality, or legality ever reached. According to pro-US researchers, the attack prompted Japan to capitulate and helped to avoid Operation Downfall, a planned amphibious assault on the country’s heartland, which would have resulted in hundreds of thousands of casualties on both sides.

Critics, however, believe the nuclear bombing was excessive and served no military purpose whatsoever, constituting a war crime and the largest-ever state terror attack. According to such researchers, Japan already was on the brink of collapse due to the prolonged naval blockade and conventional bombings, while its surrender was prompted by the USSR joining the war on August 8 rather than by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks.

More than 12,000 nuclear warheads of different types are believed to be currently stockpiled by nuclear powers worldwide. That figure is drastically lower compared with the height of the Cold War, when an estimated 70,000 nuclear devices were available, mainly in the possession of the USSR and the US. The reduced arsenal is still considered to be more than enough to destroy mankind.

Marking the grim anniversary, RT looks at the state of modern nuclear arsenals worldwide.

US & Russia

The global nuclear arsenal is predominantly held by the United States and Russia, totaling nearly 10,500 warheads. The estimated stocks of operational warheads are approximately 3,700 for the US and 4,400 for Russia, according to the Federation of American Scientists (FAS). Furthermore, both nations are believed to possess over 1,000 retired warheads each, with these older munitions currently in various stages of dismantling and recycling.

Despite a larger nominal stockpile of nuclear weaponry kept by Russia, Moscow and Washington are believed to maintain parity with respect to deployed warheads, with nearly 1,800 Russian munitions against almost 1,700 American. Both Russia and the US possess the nuclear triad, meaning they have naval, air, and land-based means of delivery.

China

While dwarfed by the US and Russia, Beijing retains third place with its nuclear arsenal estimated at around 620 warheads. The bulk of them, however, are believed to be in storage, with only some 34 deployed for immediate use. China also possesses the nuclear triad and is believed to be working to further reinforce its naval and aerial components. 

Europe

France and the UK remain the only two nations to possess their own nuclear weaponry in Western Europe. The French arsenal is estimated at 370 warheads, including 80 retired bombs. The weapons are primarily deployed on submarine-launched missiles, with a small number also carried by aircraft.

Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Türkiye have hosted US nuclear weapons, namely B61 free-fall thermonuclear bombs. Recently, Finland lifted its ban on nuclear weapons – now allowing them to be imported, manufactured, stored, and deployed on its territory, while several other nations have been considering doing the same. Moscow’s key ally Belarus has also hosted Russian nuclear weapons since 2023. 

India & Pakistan

The South-Asian arch-rivals are believed to have some 190 and 170 warheads, respectively. The two nations have repeatedly engaged in armed conflicts over the past decades and have maintained functional nuclear triads. However, they have thus far avoided using weapons of mass destruction against each other.

Unlike all the previously mentioned nuclear-armed nations, Islamabad is believed to have only fission bombs in its inventory rather than considerably more powerful thermonuclear devices. At the same time, it remains unclear whether New Delhi has such weapons or not. India is believed to have quietly moved its arsenal towards greater readiness, with the latest assessment by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) indicating it now has 12 warheads operationally deployed rather than kept in storage.

North Korea

Pyongyang remains the latest addition to the nuclear club, having tested its first device in the mid-2000s. The country is believed to be in possession of at least 60 warheads, primarily fitted to intercontinental and intermediate-range ballistic missiles. 

North Korea has been working on expanding the delivery methods available, placing nuclear weaponry on naval vessels as well. The country is still believed to lack the aerial component and does not have a full-fledged nuclear triad.

Israel

Israel is believed to possess 80 to 90 nuclear weapons, including around 30 bombs and 50 ballistic missile warheads, according to estimates from SIPRI. While the country has been accused of keeping a stockpile for decades already, it has never publicly confirmed or denied its existence, repeating instead the vague statement that “Israel will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East.”

The elusive Israeli arsenal first got extensive media coverage after revelations made by former nuclear scientist and peace activist Mordechai Vanunu in 1986. Vanunu was kidnapped by Mossad shortly afterward and jailed for 18 years on espionage and treason charges, with his conviction only solidifying the belief Israel is in possession of nuclear weaponry.

A businessman involved in producing a kamikaze drone widely used by Russian troops in Ukraine was injured by a bomb planted under his car which also killed his driver, local officials said on Wednesday.

Vladimir Tkachuk, the owner of Uraldronzavod, which manufactures the Upyr (Vampire) drone, is in stable condition after his Mercedes exploded on Tuesday evening about 25 km from Ekaterinburg in Russia’s Ural region, RIA Novosti reported, citing police officials.

Ekaterinburg city councilor Timofey Zhukov told the Solovyov LIVE news show that Tkachuk had regained consciousness and that his life was no longer in danger.

An activist and military blogger, Tkachuk said in interviews that he decided to launch a drone-making startup in the fall of 2022, when it became clear that UAVs were playing an increasingly important role on the battlefield in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. In September 2024, he presented the Upyr and other drones to Vladimir Putin when the Russian president toured a technology exhibition in St. Petersburg.

On Saturday, a bomb exploded outside an Italian restaurant in Moscow, killing five people, including an unidentified woman believed to have delivered the explosive device. Several Telegram channels claimed that the restaurant was hosting a birthday party for Colonel General Aleksandr Chaiko, the head of Russia’s Aerospace Forces. Moscow, however, did not confirm the claim or disclose the identities of the victims.

Moscow has accused Ukraine of spreading a “terrorist plague” across Europe and compared its alleged actions to Islamist terrorism.

On June 29, a woman planted a bomb outside the home of Ukrainian businessman Vadim Ermolaev, who was injured in the blast. The suspected courier, Anastasia Berezovskaya, fled to Ukraine, where she was later found dead.

Ukrainian authorities arrested Vladislav Reut, an active officer in Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, the HUR, and Vitaly Zhikovich, a former colonel in the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), in connection with the crime.

For those Americans who live in murder hot spots inside of the United States, life may seem like a daily reenactment of the O.K. Corral shootout. But surprising as it may be, the bulk of the nation is relatively safe from such violence.

The US breathed a huge sigh of relief as the FIFA World Cup visited 11 American cities without any serious acts of violence or murder. But perhaps that should come as no surprise as murder rates in the country have been tumbling for decades, while most of the killing is occurring in a tiny swath of the country. In fact, America is currently enjoying its lowest murder rates – just under four murders out of 100,000 per annum – since national recordkeeping began in 1900 (by comparison, the US murder rate is about 70% higher than Canada’s 1.91 per 100,000 people in 2024 and Australia’s approximately 2 per 100,000.)

Many people get the impression that the gun-loving US is one large shooting gallery from coast to coast. And while it is certainly true that the country ranks higher than its peers in murder fatalities, the actual reality is not as bad as initially believed. First of all, as already mentioned, murders have been on a steady decline for the last several years. The numbers have gone from roughly 21,846 in 2022 to 19,677 in 2023, and about 16,924 in 2024. Second, murders are largely concentrated within a small number of urban neighborhoods, concrete islands of brutal violence. And while that may make life a living hell for those who happen to reside in those areas, the majority of Americans and those who visit the country rarely come face-to-face with that nightmarish reality.

In fact, it may come as a surprise that 53% of US counties experience zero murders in a typical year, while another 16% record only one murder. Taken as a whole, these 69% of counties account for a mere 3% of all murders nationwide.

Furthermore, the 31 counties with the highest murder rates – just 1% of all US counties – contain about 20% of the nation’s population but account for 41% of all murders. Expanding the analysis to the 63 highest-rate counties (2% of counties) captures 30% of the population but 54% of all murders.

Media coverage, however, has distorted the reality as it conveys the notion that murderers are average suburbanites who suddenly fall off the deep edge. Sort of like the 1999 Columbine School shooting, which saw high school seniors Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murder 13 students and one teacher. Yet overall, the evidence tells a different story. Those people who commit murder almost always have an extensive criminal record, like, for example, gang members and hardened life criminals – individuals who grew up in brutal circumstances. According to the latest data, about 90% of murderers already have criminal records, while the remaining 10% almost certainly committed crimes before the homicide but had not yet been apprehended by the authorities.

The individuals responsible for murders also differ dramatically across demographic categories, and it is the black community that registers by far the highest rate of murder in the country. The black homicide victimization rate has been recorded at approximately 21.3 to 22.4 per 100,000 people, with young black males experiencing the highest rates in the vast majority of cases. Meanwhile, 90% of black murder victims are murdered by other blacks. Black males, who make up about 6.5% of the total US population, commit roughly half of all homicides in the United States, according to federal crime statistics.

At the time of the 2020 murder of George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer, the Democrats looked at the lopsided murder figures and argued it proved the justice system is inherently racist against black people. In other words, as the crazy argument goes, if only law enforcement would stop apprehending blacks the crime rate would go down, artificially, and everyone would sleep better at night.

Should police officers stop arresting blacks who are guilty of murder and other crimes so as not to appear racist? That wouldn’t make much sense, of course, but that is the madness the American people were heading towards in 2020. Many people, however, had a change of attitude towards the police during the Black Lives Matter protests as protesters in Seattle organized a no-police zone known as the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ). At the beginning everything seemed like a new ‘summer of love’, but soon, after just 23 days, the experiment broke down into murder and mayhem and the protesters were forced to – yes – call in law enforcement.

Fortunately, it appears that logical thinking is making a comeback as people begin to understand that it is senseless to blame the authorities for just doing their jobs. With any luck, the inhabitants of America’s toughest neighborhoods will continue to understand the importance of robust law enforcement in their lives, thereby enjoying a resurgence of safe community living and a further drop in the murder rate.

The Pentagon is developing a nuclear strategy that would give the US president a wider range of nuclear options in a potential conflict with Russia or China, NBC reported on Wednesday, citing sources familiar with the plans.

The proposed approach would reportedly place greater emphasis on shorter-range tactical nuclear weapons in regional conflicts, rather than relying primarily on long-range strategic nuclear weapons.

According to NBC, the classified review is intended to address potential scenarios in which US allies come under attack from Russia or China in a regional conflict. It is reportedly being overseen by Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby.

US defense officials told NBC the aim is to provide the president with more “realistic and credible” nuclear options, arguing that a broader range of choices would “strengthen deterrence.”

Despite the treaty’s expiration, Moscow said it had no intention of being “the first to take steps towards escalation” by increasing the number of warheads, provided the US took the same approach.
 

Russia updated its nuclear doctrine in 2024, stating that aggression by a non-nuclear state backed by a nuclear power would be treated as a joint attack and that nuclear weapons could be used if conventional aggression posed a critical threat to the sovereignty or territorial integrity of Russia or its ally, Belarus.

Moscow has consistently criticized the deployment of US nuclear weapons in Europe as part of NATO’s nuclear-sharing arrangements. While it has stated that it has no intention of attacking any NATO nation, it has warned that it would target its nuclear arsenal at countries hosting such weapons aimed at Russia.

Israel has continued military operations in Gaza, intensifying strikes since US President Donald Trump’s announcement of a “historic agreement” to implement the next phase of the ceasefire.

Dozens of Palestinians, including women and children, have been killed or wounded in recent days. Although Hamas accepted the proposal, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ruled out withdrawing from the enclave.

What does the latest ceasefire roadmap propose?

The plan emerged from talks mediated by Egypt, Qatar, Türkiye and the US under the Washington-led Board of Peace. It outlines the next phase of the October ceasefire.

Trump described the proposal as a “monumental step toward lasting peace and security” and a key milestone in his broader plan for Gaza.

What do Hamas and Israel say?

The two sides remain at odds over the sequencing of the agreement’s key provisions.

Netanyahu has said Israel did not agree to the Board of Peace’s plan and will not withdraw from Gaza until Hamas is completely disarmed, insisting the IDF will remain in the enclave’s so-called security zones “as long as necessary.” Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir has also dismissed the roadmap as “unacceptable,” arguing military operations should continue.

Hamas has reportedly formally accepted the proposal but insists disarmament cannot take place while Israeli forces remain in Gaza and the attacks continue. The group says any handover of heavy weapons depends on a complete Israeli withdrawal, an end to hostilities, reconstruction, international guarantees and progress toward Palestinian statehood.

 
What’s going on in Gaza?

Israeli military operations have continued despite the ceasefire framework. Strikes reported across the enclave in recent days have pushed the number of Palestinians killed since the truce took effect to over 1,250, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

The war began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched a surprise attack on southern Israel, killing around 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages. Israel responded with a military campaign in Gaza that has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians, according to health officials. At least 7,400 people are estimated to remain buried beneath the rubble, although the true figure is believed to be significantly higher.

 
What do the mediators say?

The continued strikes have drawn criticism from the countries that mediated the roadmap. In a joint statement, Türkiye, Egypt, and Qatar condemned ongoing Israeli “violations” in Gaza, particularly strikes on healthcare facilities and medical infrastructure, saying they amounted to a “flagrant violation of international law and international humanitarian law.”
 
The three countries urged Israel to uphold its commitments under the ceasefire agreement, warning that continued military operations constitute “a breach of the agreement” and undermine efforts to implement its second phase. They also called on the international community to exert pressure on Israel.

How could Israel’s upcoming elections shape the war?

Israel is due to hold parliamentary elections on October 27, the country’s first since the outbreak of the Gaza war. Netanyahu enters the campaign facing scrutiny over his handling of the conflict, an ongoing corruption trial and growing calls for an inquiry into the failures surrounding the October 7 attack.

Analysts say those domestic political pressures have made the US-backed roadmap politically difficult to embrace. Netanyahu’s coalition relies on far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties, some of which oppose a withdrawal from Gaza and have repeatedly called for military operations to continue until Hamas is destroyed. Accepting the proposal could jeopardize support from key coalition partners, while rejecting it risks further straining ties with Washington.

A discarded stage from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is believed to have crashed into the Moon on Wednesday after drifting through space for more than a year, according to scientists tracking its trajectory.

Researchers had predicted that the four-ton upper stage would strike the lunar surface near the Einstein Crater at around 8,700 kph, creating a new crater. The collision was expected at approximately 06:35 GMT, although official confirmation is still pending.

Astronomers had hoped to observe a flash and a plume of lunar dust from Earth, but no clear sighting was immediately reported. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and South Korea’s Danuri probe are expected to photograph the impact site, though the images could take several days to process.

The rocket launched in January 2025 was carrying the US Blue Ghost and Japanese Resilience lunar landers. Its reusable first-stage booster returned to Earth, while the second stage remained in space after pushing the spacecraft toward the Moon.

SpaceX said the stage had initially been placed on a trajectory considered safe under existing rules. A combination of solar activity and gravitational forces later sent it toward the lunar surface.

Although the Moon is regularly struck by natural meteoroids, collisions involving man-made objects are much less common. NASA had previously deliberately crashed rocket stages into the lunar surface during the Apollo era to collect seismic data.

Experts have warned that unplanned impacts could become a greater concern if permanent bases, satellites and other infrastructure are established on and around the Moon.

The US military’s GPS jamming exercises have been directly implicated in a fatal plane crash for the first time, after an air ambulance flew into a mountain range in New Mexico while its guidance system was scrambled.

Details of the crash, which took place in May, were revealed in a recent preliminary report by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). The report explains how the jamming exercises interfered with multiple aircraft, pushing air traffic controllers to the breaking point as they attempted to reroute flights using traditional means of navigation. Amid the confusion, a medevac flight with four people on board strayed miles off course, crashing into mountains at full speed on a moonless night.

What happened to the plane?

Shortly after 11 PM on May 13, the crew of a Beechcraft King Air 90 air ambulance were given a straightforward mission: fly for roughly 20 minutes from Roswell to Sierra Blanca Regional Airport, pick up a patient, and transport them to Albuquerque for treatment. Two pilots and two nurses boarded the turboprop aircraft and took off, flying west.

Within minutes, controllers noticed that the plane was flying 1,000 feet above its assigned altitude. The plane’s captain informed controllers that he had lost GPS signal, and controllers responded by ordering him to correct his altitude, fly north, and await alternate directions to Sierra Blanca, where he would perform an instrument landing – using radio beacons to line up with the runway and descend at the correct angle.

Meanwhile, controllers got in touch with the military and requested that the jamming exercise be paused.

What was the military doing?

Some 40 miles away, at the White Sands Missile Range, the US Air Force’s 746th Test Squadron was holding its annual NAVFEST drills. These exercises bring together electronic warfare (EW) units from multiple branches of the armed forces, engineers from the defense industry, and teams from other NATO states to practice GPS interference, navigation, and drone defense on a desert plain once used to test atomic bombs.

Prior to the crash, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) warned aircraft operators that GPS could be affected up to 400 miles from the exercises between May 12 and May 18.

How did the plane crash?

As the plane continued north, controllers informed the captain that they would send vectors – a series of compass headings – to align the plane for landing “in a couple minutes.” However, the controllers were busy redirecting four other aircraft that had lost their GPS, and the vectors never came.

At eight minutes past midnight, the pilots spotted the runway lights at Sierra Blanca, roughly 31 miles to their southwest. They decided to navigate visually to the airport, informed controllers, and turned towards their destination. Apparently, they never intended to approach from this direction, and didn’t notice the 10,000-foot Capitan Mountains between them and the runway.

Controllers informed the military that it could resume jamming, and the plane descended towards Sierra Blanca, its altimeter still reading 600 feet higher than the plane’s actual altitude.  As the mountains rose out of the darkness and obscured the distant runway, the pilots attempted to pull up, but were unable to avert disaster. 

New Mexico: The Seven Cabins Fire in the Capitan Mountain Wilderness has been mapped at 15,363 acres and remains zero percent contained.

Crews will be on the line through the night to take advantage of the cooler temps and decreasing winds to continue line construction.

There… https://t.co/NII1ixmhvr pic.twitter.com/ItxSyiW3WZ

— The Hotshot Wake Up (@HotshotWake) May 19, 2026

The plane slammed into the mountainside, instantly killing everyone on board and igniting a forest fire that took almost a month to extinguish.

What has the US military said?

The US Army did not respond to questions from the Associated Press, and has not released a public statement on the crash in the almost two months since the NTSB’s report was published. 

Much about the incident is still unknown. It is unclear whether the pilots were aware that the FAA had warned about potential GPS interference, whether their ground proximity warning system – which should have told them to climb to avoid the crash – was affected by the jamming, and why they were unaware of a large mountain range in the area.

The NTSB’s report is preliminary, and the board will not identify the precise cause of the crash until its investigation concludes next year.

Are more flights at risk?

The crash marked the first time that GPS jamming by the US military has been implicated in a fatal accident. However, civilian aircraft have been affected by jamming exercises before. In March of last year, airliners approaching Washington DC’s Reagan International Airport received warnings from their planes’ Traffic Collision Avoidance System, instructing them to immediately descend to avoid hitting non-existent traffic in their paths. It later emerged that electronic warfare testing by the US Secret Service caused the false alerts.

The Russia-Ukraine conflict has demonstrated just how wide that gap is, even between the US and its own client regime in Kiev. In a conflict where every Ukrainian advance in drone technology is countered by Russian EW specialists within weeks, and vice versa, US weapons systems – including GPS-guided shells and missiles – were rendered “useless” by mid-2023, according to media reports. 

Since then, the Pentagon has asked Congress to fund more electronic warfare experiments in the US, and last year, the Army published its first ever Comprehensive Electromagnetic Warfare Strategy, promising to embed EW systems into every unit of the branch by 2028.

The US has the world’s busiest airspace, with more than 44,000 flights handled by the FAA every day. It is inevitable that a growing number of these flights will be affected by electronic warfare in the future, and that the risk to civilians will increase as the Pentagon tries to catch up with its adversaries. 

Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase, and Bank of America all helped Jeffrey Epstein make more than $1 billion in suspicious transfers, including payments to trafficked eastern European women, according to a report by Democrats on the US Senate Finance Committee.

According to the report, more than a dozen bankers at the three Wall Street firms were aware of suspicious transfers made by Epstein as far back as 2002, but the banks failed to report these transactions until years later, after Epstein had been arrested and charged with sex trafficking.

Epstein was a client of JPMorgan between 1998 and 2013, during which time he made 5,000 suspicious transfers totaling $1.1 billion, according to the report. Although JPMorgan dropped Epstein as a client in 2013, five years after his first child sex abuse conviction, the bank waited until after his arrest and death in prison in 2019 to retroactively flag these transactions with the US Treasury Department.

The Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) filed by JPMorgan included payments to women in Russia, Belarus, and Turkmenistan, to women who had “been in a relationship with Epstein,” or were “procurers of women as part of trafficking.”

Bombshell new report out from my investigators this morning spanning our four year investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s financial records.

This report shows exactly how Wall Street protected Epstein and enabled his sex trafficking for decades. https://t.co/OwOadLbjLo

— Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) August 4, 2026

JPMorgan’s compliance executives lobbied their superiors to cut ties with Epstein since at least 2010, with one calling him “scum.” However, senior executives – who, according to the report, knew about Epstein’s payments to trafficked women and joked about his penchant for “nymphettes” – overruled them, and kept the convicted pedophile as a client until 2013.

Bank of America failed to report $170 million in payments from billionaire Leon Black, who claimed he paid the pedophile for tax advice. Much of Black’s money ended up financing Epstein’s sex trafficking operation in the US Virgin Islands, and although the bank determined that these payments had “no apparent economic, business or lawful purpose,” it did not file SARs until 2020.

Under the Bank Secrecy Act, banks are required to promptly notify the government whenever they suspect money is being laundered or used to finance illegal activities. “The bankers who needed to be asking questions didn’t ask them,” the report states. “Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes were hiding in plain sight.”

According to Senator Ron Wyden, the Finance Committee’s ranking Democrat, President Donald Trump’s allies attempted to prevent the committee from obtaining Epstein’s bank records. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent allegedly refused three requests to turn over details on the SARs, while Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would have compelled the Treasury to hand over the files.

The unprecedented arrival of around 70,000 Moroccans into the Spanish border town of Ceuta has been dismissed by some Western media as a social media-driven phenomenon rather than a case of migration being weaponized by the North African monarchy. But behind the headlines and the chaos that left more than 70 people dead lies a complex geopolitical balancing act.
RT’s Oumaima Ichchar reports.

Bangladesh’s ousted prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, gave a public media address on Wednesday – her first since she fled Dhaka following a violent uprising.

“I was forced away from my country, but I was never separated from my people,” she declared defiantly in a virtual address to the gathered media in Delhi. 

She said fear has entered people’s lives. “This is not the Bangladesh that 3 million people sacrificed their lives for.”

The daughter of the country’s first president, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, broke down briefly as she remembered the members of her family at the start of the address. Rahman was assassinated in a 1975 military coup along with her mother, brothers, and several other relatives in their Dhaka residence.

Hasina demanded that the ban on her party, the Awami League, be lifted, that political prisoners be released, false cases dropped, freedom of speech restored, and judicial independence guaranteed. 

The former PM said the uprising that led to her ouster “was not a peaceful student movement. My government tried to resolve the issue peacefully through dialogue, legal process and patience.”

Hasina previously told RT in written responses to questions that there was evidence suggesting “foreign mercenaries” were present at the protests, instigating the masses. 

The uprising that started in June 2024 over job quotas intensified by mid-July. After nearly 100 people were killed in clashes on August 4, crowds stormed Hasina’s official residence and she fled by military helicopter to India.

Explaining the police violence, Hasina said law enforcement agencies had come under “organized attack” and “the state has a duty to protect life, property and public institutions.” She noted that she had formed a judicial inquiry commission “so every casualty and every incident could be investigated.” 

“They did not want an investigation. They wanted the evidences (sic) buried,” she said.
She alleged that in August that year the violence became a campaign of political persecution, that leaders and workers of her party, the Awami League, were killed, persecuted, arrested, and driven from their homes. 

At least 10,000 people have been killed or disappeared in the last two years, she alleged, adding that more than 600 cases have been filed against her, and women party workers were tortured in custody.

The interim government was replaced by the government of Prime Minister Tarique Rahman’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party on February 17 this year.

Hasina said last month in a telephone interview that she would return to Bangladesh in December where she faces a death sentence handed down in absentia.

Bangladesh renewed its extradition demand for Sheikh Hasina ahead of her address. New Delhi said the event was private. 

Most Bangladeshi media did not cover her address live.

US President Donald Trump has reportedly rejected Vladimir Zelensky’s request for hundreds of additional Patriot interceptor missiles, the Financial Times has claimed, citing people familiar with the talks. The refusal comes as Washington has also cast doubt on plans to allow Ukraine to manufacture the weapons under license.

According to the newspaper, Trump declined the request during an Oval Office meeting last week, citing shortages in US inventories and Washington’s own needs for the missiles amid the conflict with Iran. He has publicly rejected reports of munition shortfalls.

Kiev has intensified its demands for Western air-defense missiles as Russian forces have stepped up strikes on Ukrainian military-industrial and logistics facilities in response to escalating terrorist attacks on Russian territory.

Ukraine has repeatedly complained that it lacks enough Patriot interceptors. Zelensky recently instructed Ukrainian ambassadors to monitor missile stockpiles in their host countries and pressure governments to transfer weapons to Kiev.

Trump had suggested at a NATO summit in Türkiye last month that Washington could allow Ukraine to manufacture Patriot missiles domestically or elsewhere in Europe. However, he has since cast doubt on the idea.

Even if approval were granted, the plan would do little to address Kiev’s immediate demands. Experts have warned that it would likely take years before the first Ukrainian-produced interceptor emerged from a new production line.

The initiative has also reportedly faced resistance from US manufacturers. Boeing, which produces sensitive seeker components for PAC-3 interceptors, is said to be reluctant to transfer the technology abroad, while existing production chains are already strained.

Several European NATO members have also said they are reaching the limits of what they can provide Ukraine without weakening their own defenses.

Moscow maintains that Western arms deliveries only prolong the conflict without changing its outcome. Russian officials have also warned that supplying increasingly advanced weapons and military technology to Kiev makes NATO countries direct participants in the hostilities.

Rwanda has ordered a nationwide recall of alcoholic beverages and shut down 101 manufacturing facilities following a wave of deaths and illnesses linked to contaminated liquor.

The Rwanda Food and Drugs Authority (Rwanda FDA) announced the measures on Monday after inspections uncovered widespread safety and licensing violations at different distilleries. The recall affects dozens of locally produced alcoholic beverages.

At least 50 people have died this year after consuming contaminated liquor, while more than 500 required hospital treatment and around 100 reportedly suffered blindness, according to Rwanda’s health ministry.

“We consider it an epidemic,” Health Minister Sabin Nsanzimana said, as quoted by local media, warning that the country would “pay the price tomorrow” without urgent action.

Rwanda’s campaign mirrors a broader regional push to curb alcohol abuse. In neighboring Kenya, authorities launched a nationwide crackdown in 2024, shutting down thousands of illegal bars and distilleries, tightening licensing rules and introducing tougher penalties for venues that violated operating hours.

Uganda has also stepped up efforts to tackle alcohol abuse, with support from the World Health Organization (WHO), which has backed new national guidelines for treating alcohol use disorders.

The WHO has also said European colonial expansion transformed alcohol in Africa from a largely local product into a commercial commodity through taxation and mass distribution.

What happened in the North African Spanish enclave of Ceuta last week was tragic for everyone involved. So let’s make it a regular thing, the EU apparently decided – at least judging by its actions.

I’m not saying that anybody overtly wants migrants from all over Africa to routinely storm the borders of some far-flung part of the EU in an attempt to get a foothold on a shuttle from a migrant center into mainland Europe. In fact, Ursula von der Leyen has said that she wants more barriers and watchful eyes on the borders. By barriers, presumably she means walls or fences. And by eyes, she probably means nightclub-style bouncers with biceps the size of my thighs and not neighborhood block watch grannies. Not that she’s going to say that. Although she should. If only to counter all the virtue signaling that Spain did that contributed to the problem in the first place.

All these new measures are supposed to keep migrants out of Europe. But at the same time, the EU is doing its usual routine of mitigating its common-sense measures with self-defeating idiocy. Because what better way to encourage Morocco or any other nation bordering the EU to fumble the migration situation at home than to give them even more financial incentive.

Türkiye already did this hostage routine with Brussels. In the wake of conflicts in Syria and Libya, the EU paid Ankara to hold back migrants from Europe’s borders. And what do you know – it never turned out to be enough. The tsunami seemed to ebb and flow in rhythm with the ink spilled in Brussels on checks to Team Erdogan.

Speaking of Libya – it’s been paid for the EU’s border outsourcing, too. As have Egypt, Tunisia, Mauritania, Jordan, Lebanon, and parts of the Horn of Africa, like Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, and Uganda.

Wouldn’t it be cheaper to just have doors with actual locks on them at home, like the average common-sense person does? But no, Europe can’t do that because then it can’t say how open and free it is. Better to pay for the iron fist to be wielded elsewhere by someone with the financial motivation to do so. Even if their enthusiasm for the job seems to be like a carnival game where the prize appears only after the operator gets another handful of tokens.

But who else has been incentivized? As if thousands of migrants were reading EU policy briefings over breakfast. Instead, they were on social media and apparently saw a sudden onslaught of online content convincing them to drop the Doritos and make a run for the border. Who made that happen? And with all the disinformation fighting tools that the EU boasts about, how did this massive whale actually succeed in beaching itself onto a piece of Europe while the EU’s entire anti-disinformation fleet was patrolling the waters? Guess it’s a pretty good sign that the whale wasn’t Russian, huh? Because the world’s most sophisticated whale-watchers would have already mapped its migration patterns.

It raises a question that no one in official statements really seems too keen to ask aloud: who benefits from the chaos? Not Spain, clearly. Not the EU, judging from how unenthusiastic it sounds about it. But Israel and the US sure have been upset with Spain’s position opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza and war in Iran. But upset enough to have funded NGOs to “give away” Spain’s enclave in North Africa, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s son once threatened on social media back in 2019?

In any case, now Spain is relegated to begging nation-states to control their own citizens. Not exactly a position of strength. But once that amnesty signal is out there, then unfortunately you don’t get to choose who accepts it, which hidden powers could decide to exploit it in an attempt to pressure you, or how many show up to camp out in your tranquil EU garden and flatten your flowerbeds. Including those caught between the EU and the countries it keeps paying to roleplay as its contracted security guards.

The unprecedented strengthening of the El Nino in the Pacific Ocean could force at least 49 million people into acute food insecurity worldwide in 18 months, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) has warned.

This year’s “extremely anomalous” El Nino is set to surpass the existing record level by almost 25%, severely disrupting rainfall and harvests.

More than 18 million people in eastern and southern Africa will be at risk of food insecurity. Countries in the south of the continent are particularly exposed because many households there depend on rain-fed subsistence agriculture, the agency warned on Wednesday.

The projection would raise the number of people facing crisis-level food insecurity or worse across 45 vulnerable countries from approximately 225 million to 274 million – an increase of 22%. Central America and southern Africa are expected to suffer the greatest effects, while eastern Africa and South and Southeast Asia could also experience significant disruption.

El Nino, the warming phase of a naturally occurring climate pattern in the tropical Pacific, can cause severe drought in some regions and destructive flooding in others. The current event is expected to peak between September and December 2026, although its effects on harvests could continue throughout 2027.

“The sooner we help families to prepare for these climate shocks, the greater our ability to save lives and protect livelihoods,” WFP Acting Executive Director Carl Skau said.

The warning comes as southern Africa continues to recover from the 2023-2024 El Nino, which produced the region’s worst mid-season dry spell in more than a century and its lowest mid-season rainfall in 40 years, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe declared drought-related emergencies or disasters, while more than 30 million people across southern Africa required humanitarian assistance, according to OCHA.

The US and Taiwanese militaries are engaged in active but secretive on-site collaboration, according to Taipei’s defense minister, Wellington Koo. The message comes after US President Donald Trump put a hold on arms sales to the self-governed island, which has sparked alarm among pro-US countries in the region.

Speaking to a narrow circle of reporters on Friday, Koo stressed, as cited by the Wall Street Journal, that Taiwan’s collaboration with the US “is far closer than you might imagine.” 

“The public sees only the arms sales, but in fact, it’s multifaceted and involves so much more,” Koo said, adding that Taipei had “been learning so much practical combat experience from the US” through military exchanges.

China regards the island as its sovereign territory, saying that while it seeks peaceful reunification, it does not rule out the use of force. As for the US, it acknowledges the One China policy, but maintains close ties with Taiwan, which has long been a major source of tension between the two powers.

Koo directly alluded to the “American English teachers,” saying that “a lot more” of them “will be showing up where they need to be.” “But you won’t be able to spot them everywhere they operate,” he added.

The minister’s revelation of the scale of secret US-Taiwanese cooperation comes after Trump’s visit to China in May. After meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, he confirmed that he had discussed arms sales to Taiwan “in great detail,” describing the hot-button issue as a “very good negotiating chip” in the US dealings with Beijing.

Asked whether he would approve a $14 billion arms package to Taipei, which has remained in limbo for months, Trump said that “it depends on China.” As of early August, the US has yet to approve the package.

While officials in Taipei insisted that they were not concerned by the announcement – which was widely described as a break from long-standing US policy on Taiwan – media reports have indicated that it sparked alarm and unease both on the island and in the wider region.

Beijing has yet to comment on Koo’s remarks, but it has consistently signaled that it “firmly opposes military collusion between Taiwan and the United States.”

India is planning to expand its strategic petroleum reserves beyond crude oil, building storage facilities for liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and liquefied natural gas (LNG) at a total cost of $42 billion, Reuters has reported citing sources.

The new stockpiles, when full, will cover about two months of crude and LNG demand, and around six weeks of LPG use. The plan to build and fully stock the reserves will take about 10 years.

India imports about half of its LNG requirements and about 60% of its LPG needs, most of it from the Mideast. 

LPG is primarily used for cooking, and recent disruptions in energy supplies due to the conflict in the Middle East triggered a minor panic among household users before the government managed to reassure them and stabilize the situation.

The disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s energy passed before the US-Israeli attack on Iran, exposed India’s energy supply vulnerabilities.

In June, New Delhi directed the state-run Oil and Natural Gas Corporation to build and fill another strategic petroleum reserve facility, which would expand its reserve capacity by a third.

English football club West Ham Utd co-owner David Sullivan, dubbed ‘King of porn,’ should avoid visiting the team’s home matches, the London Stadium’s administration has said, citing new allegations of sexual exploitation.

Sullivan, 77, earned his nickname making his fortune from porn in the era before the internet: selling magazines, films, erotic phone calls and other adult products. One of Britain’s richest men, he took over West Ham in 2010 together with a group of co-investors.

In June, BBC Panorama and The Times released an investigation, in which seven women accused Sullivan of “sexually exploitative and predatory behavior.” They claimed that models had been offered spots as “regular girls” in the billionaire’s tabloids in exchange for having sex with him and were warned that their careers would suffer if they refused.

Sullivan resigned as West Ham’s director and joint chairman shortly before the investigation was aired, saying that he wanted to fully focus on fighting what he described as “factually incorrect and entirely false, decades-old allegations.” The Athletic, owned by the New York Times, has also reported that the mogul was open to selling his 38.9% stake in the club.

“We have also requested advance notice of any planned attendance so that appropriate safety and operational measures can be put in place,” it added.

London Stadium would not comment on if West Ham had informed them whether Sullivan will be attending.

The administration of the 62,500-seat area issued the advice despite acknowledging that the club itself “does not consider there to be an ongoing safeguarding risk” associated with the billionaire coming to the stands.

Under Sullivan, West Ham played 15 seasons in the English Premier League, with its best result being sixth spot in 2020/21. The London club also won the UEFA Conference League in 2022/23.

Russia has delivered 770 metric tons of food aid to Mali, Moscow’s embassy in Bamako announced on Tuesday. 

The shipment will provide life-saving food assistance to more than 57,000 vulnerable people, including internally displaced, refugees, and communities, for the next three months, according to the UN World Food Programme (WFP).

The aid, consisting of yellow split peas, was officially handed over in Bamako on July 30 as part of Russia’s additional contribution to the WFP. Following the ceremony, participants visited a warehouse operated by the UN agency to review plans for distributing the humanitarian cargo.

The handover ceremony was attended by Malian government officials, WFP representatives, and members of the Russian diplomatic mission.

Russia’s сharge d’affaires in Mali, Bagrat Shinkuba, said Moscow continues to provide humanitarian assistance to friendly African nations both directly and through UN agencies. He added that the assistance is provided “without political conditions” and with respect for the sovereignty and national priorities of recipient states.

The West African nation has been battling a jihadist insurgency since 2012. The conflict, displacement, and climate shocks have fueled a humanitarian crisis. According to the WFP, around 1.6 million people face acute food insecurity, while more than 414,000 people are internally displaced.

Russia has previously provided humanitarian aid to Mali. In January 2024, Moscow supplied 25,000 metric tons of grain to the country, followed in December 2024 by a shipment of more than 65 metric tons of wheat delivered via the Guinean port of Conakry.

The delivery is part of Russia’s broader humanitarian outreach across Africa. Earlier this year, Moscow sent around 60 metric tons of emergency aid to cyclone-hit Madagascar and 29 metric tons of humanitarian supplies to Mozambique. In 2025, it also donated more than 1,600 metric tons of grain to Ethiopia under its ongoing food assistance program.

Relations between Bamako and Paris have continued to deteriorate, with Malian officials accusing France of backing armed groups operating in the Sahel. 

In May, broadcaster RTL, citing an unnamed French security source, reported that Paris was indirectly supporting Ukrainian personnel operating in Mali, who were allegedly cooperating with rebels in an attempt to overthrow the country’s military-led government.

Ukrainian anti-corruption investigators have summoned former ambassador to the US, Olga Stefanishina, to formally notify her of criminal charges against her, local media reported on Wednesday.

Ukrainian and international outlets have speculated for weeks that the former senior official, who also previously served as deputy prime minister for integration with the EU and NATO, would face pre-trial detention.

According to RBC Ukraine, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) has asked the High Anti-Corruption Court in Kiev to order Stefashina’s arrest. The hearing is reportedly taking place behind closed doors.

Investigative journalist Mikhail Tkach separately reported that NABU and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO), its sister agency, had charged Stefanishina with illegal enrichment.

Zelensky dismissed Stefanishina on Monday, several days after she said the Ukrainian leader had not asked her to resign as part of a wider reshuffle of the country’s diplomatic corps. Media reports suggested that the anti-corruption investigation prompted the apparent reversal.

NABU and SAPO were established under pressure from Ukraine’s Western backers as largely independent bodies tasked with investigating high-level corruption. Since 2025, the agencies have brought charges against several serving and former officials close to Zelensky.

The Ukrainian leader previously sought to place the agencies under the authority of the prosecutor general, but reversed the move after foreign donors threatened to suspend aid to Kiev.

As Ukrainians cheer the destruction of Wildberries warehouses in Russia, Moscow’s armed forces are unleashing a far more consequential campaign against Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, which has rendered the country de-facto landlocked.

On June 25, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky announced the beginning of a 40-day “influence” campaign, aimed at pressuring Russia into ending its military operation. During the campaign, Ukraine shifted the focus of its long-range strikes against Russia to civilian sites, hitting around a dozen warehouses belonging to Wildberries – dubbed ‘the Amazon of Russia’.

Simultaneously, Ukraine stepped up its attacks on Russia-bound shipping in the Black Sea and beyond, with Zelensky’s secret police, the SBU, attacking an Iranian cargo ship in the Caspian sea in late July. The attack killed an Iranian sailor, and Kiev apologized after Tehran threatened retaliation.

The campaign reached a grim nadir on its 40th day, when Ukrainian drones killed at least seven people at a beach on the Black Sea resort of Gelendzhik. Less than a day later, five people were killed and ten others wounded in an overnight Ukrainian drone strike in Moscow Region.

Zelensky’s campaign gave the Ukrainian leader what he wanted: a winning message to take to Washington. After begging US President Donald Trump for permission to build Patriot interceptors in Ukraine, Zelensky told a group of US senators last week that Ukraine is making “good progress against Russia” and “winning the war now.” 

The Western media has boosted Zelensky’s line, with the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, CNN, and others all claiming that Kiev is now “turning the tide” against Moscow.

Report by Major General Yevhenii Khmara on our long-range sanctions plan, mid-range sanctions, and the results of the Security Service of Ukraine – specifically the Center of Special Operations “Alpha” – on the front.

I approved a 40-day influence operation for the Service… pic.twitter.com/Ue6O21i6xH

— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) June 25, 2026

However, the smoke rising from Ukraine’s Black Sea ports tells a different story.

De-portification

From the port of Izmail on the Danube estuary, to Nikolaev just 50 kilometers from Russian lines, Ukraine’s Black Sea ports are vital to the country’s survival. Roughly 80-90% of Ukraine’s exports by weight leave via the Black Sea, and an untold quantity of Western weapons and ammunition arrive in return. As the Western press lauded Zelensky’s tactic of intensifying long-range strikes this summer, Russia began dismantling the country’s infrastructure.

Russian drones and missiles have hit the Black Sea ports of Odessa, Chornomorsk, Yuzhni, and Nikolaev on multiple occasions since early July. The Danube ports of Izmail, Reni, and Kilia have also come under attack. As of August 3, Ukraine’s transport ministry had recorded 67 strikes on seaport infrastructure and 57 on vessels.

By late July, around 90% of shipping operators had suspended port calls in Ukraine, according to Reuters. Just as the threat of Iranian strikes shut the Strait of Hormuz in March, Russia’s missile and drone attacks have effectively closed Ukraine’s Black Sea ports. By denying Ukraine sea access, Russia has achieved three key goals:

Freezing Ukraine’s exports

“No ships have entered Ukrainian ports since approximately July 20,” Dmitry Barinov, president of the Association of Ukrainian Ports, told Switzerland’s RSI broadcaster on August 2. “We are an exporting country. It is crucial for us to be able to reopen our ports.”

For Ukraine’s farmers and exporters, the port closure comes at a critical time. The wheat harvest is almost over, and the sunflower harvest has yet to begin. Between Odessa and Nikolaev, RSI visited warehouses, sheds, and silos overflowing with grain, stuck in storage with no way of reaching global markets. Ukrainian Agriculture Minister Taras Visotsky told Reuters that alternate routes exist – road, rail, and by river to the Romanian port of Constanta – but combined, these routes can handle only half of the Black Sea ports’ monthly capacity.

“The situation is exceptionally complicated. In certain aspects, it is even more difficult than in March-April 2022,” the minister said. According to Visotsky, Ukraine's agricultural sector may lose between $1.5 billion and $3 ​billion by the end of the year.

Stopping the arms flow

With exports shut off, the Russian military has focused its strikes on Ukraine’s most precious imports: arms and ammunition. Between August 3 and 4, the Russian Defense Ministry said that its missile and drone forces struck 13 ships carrying “military cargo,” in Odessa, Chornomorsk, Yuzhni, Nikolaev, and in the Black Sea. Three additional ships carrying unspecified cargo were also hit, as was a container terminal holding military equipment and a warehouse containing medium-range FP-2 kamikaze drones in Chornomorsk, according to multiple statements from the ministry.

The Ukrainian government has never admitted to receiving military cargo by sea, with Kiev and its NATO backers continuing to insist that weapons, equipment, and vehicles arrive in Ukraine by road and rail. However, given the preponderance of videos on social media showing secondary explosions at warehouses in Odessa after Russian strikes, it is highly likely that the weapons there arrived via the Black Sea.

Stretching Ukraine’s air defenses

Russia’s port campaign has forced Zelensky to make a difficult choice: to stand any chance of stopping Russia’s missiles and reopening the ports, he’ll need to redeploy Ukraine’s limited number of air defense systems, namely the US-made Patriot, US-Norwegian NASAMS, and German-made IRIS-T batteries. 

However, every missile battery repositioned along the Black Sea coast is a missile battery not defending the front line, or more crucially as winter approaches, inland power plants and fuel depots. The Russian Air Force has apparently taken notice of Ukraine’s air defense shortage, with Russian Su-34 fighter-bombers now launching glide bombs from within 7 km of the front line near Donetsk. Previously, Russian bombers launched their payload more than 40 km behind the front, due to the threat of Ukrainian air defense missiles. 

Around 25 minutes ago, three Russian Su-34s carried out another unusual bombing raid, this time on Slovyansk and Kramatorsk, Donetsk Oblast.

Like yesterday, these aircraft flew extremely close to the frontline compared to usual combat sorties. Launches were carried out from 14… pic.twitter.com/QR8a0PibmU

— AMK Mapping 🇳🇿 (@AMK_Mapping_) August 4, 2026

Speaking after Russia launched nearly 30 ballistic missiles and 185 drones at targets around Kiev on August 1, Zelensky admitted that “only one ballistic missile was intercepted, simply because there are no interceptors for the Patriot systems.”

Future supplies of interceptor missiles for Ukraine are uncertain. The US, Israel, and Washington’s Gulf allies burned through unprecedented numbers of the latest PAC-3 Patriot interceptors during the US-Israeli war on Iran, with the US alone firing 943 in the first four days of the conflict, according to a Congressional study. The US military has fewer than 1,000 PAC-3 interceptors remaining, and with Lockheed Martin capable of producing only 52 per month, Washington is unlikely to share its dwindling stockpile with Kiev, especially with Trump threatening a new round of “decapitation” strikes on Iran.

Weapons for Ukraine – now. The quality of an embassy’s work must be measured by the amount of weapons Ukraine receives, the funding that supports Ukraine, and the political decisions and concrete steps that put pressure on Russia. That is the clear framework.

A Ukrainian… pic.twitter.com/icovWhVZCH

— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) August 3, 2026

Ukraine may be able to secure older PAC-2 interceptors, after the US Army awarded Raytheon a $441.6 million contract for the missiles in July. However, these Cold War-era interceptors are ineffective against Russia’s ballistic missiles, Ukrainian media reported last year.

Who’s really winning?

Zelensky’s 40-day campaign of long-range strikes won him cheers from NATO leaders, bargaining power with Trump, and headlines in the compliant Western press. However, he’s lost Ukraine’s coastline, and with it, his ability to export produce and import arms. With winter drawing near, Ukraine’s troop concentrations, weapons plants, and critical infrastructure are more vulnerable than ever to Russian missiles, drones, and bombs.

Whatever thrill Ukraine’s legion of online cheerleaders feel as they watch videos of burning Wildberries warehouses may prove short-lived.

Several explosions were reportedly heard overnight at the Jebel Ali Free Zone, a major industrial and logistics district in Dubai, the UAE.

Online witness accounts described as many as seven loud blasts over a period of roughly 20 minutes. Videos and photographs purporting to show smoke and fires in the area circulated on social media, alongside reports that ambulances had been dispatched to the scene.

Some media outlets, including Iranian sources, claimed the explosions were caused by an attack launched by the Yemen-based Houthi movement, which is allied with Tehran. Other reports suggested an industrial accident had caused the blasts.

Jebel Ali, located southwest of central Dubai and beside the industrial zone, is home to one of the Middle East’s largest container ports. The area sustained damage earlier in the broader regional conflict that began in late February, when the US and Israel launched a bombing campaign against Iran.

Multiple explosions were reported last night in Jebel Ali, UAE.

UAE denied any attack occured, but several footage circulating showing black smoke rising.

*The Yemeni Armed Forces said they'll release a statement in 2 hours, must be related pic.twitter.com/WWfHbbDTc4

— MenchOsint (@MenchOsint) August 5, 2026

Although the fighting has since subsided, the risk of renewed escalation remains high. On Monday, US President Donald Trump said he was giving Tehran a “last chance before decapitation” to accept a peace agreement on his terms.

The Houthis have for years been involved in a parallel conflict with Saudi Arabia and the UAE over political control of Yemen. Riyadh resumed attacks on Houthi targets last month after reportedly receiving encouragement from Trump.

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has apologized to an Indian parliamentary panel over child sexual abuse material, deepfake content, and operational errors on its platforms, government sources have told RT India.

Earlier on Wednesday, the head of a parliamentary panel, which had summoned Meta officials after Facebook temporarily blocked a video by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, had given the tech boss three days to apologize.

Meta has yet to issue a statement on the apology.

“If Facebook does not take action against those responsible in this matter, the Safe Harbour Clause will be removed,” Nishikant Dubey, a lawmaker from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, said.

Meta had said the incident happened due to a technical glitch.

The blocked video was of Modi addressing students who had protested in Delhi last month – a sensitive issue for the ruling BJP.

The parliamentary panel also warned all social media platforms to comply with India’s Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) rules. Meta was slapped with a notice over violations of the rules by Instagram last month.

AI agents developed by OpenAI and Anthropic went beyond their instructions and targeted real people and organizations during a series of cybersecurity tests, Britain’s AI Security Institute has revealed.

The institute tested agents powered by Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6-Sol in a fictional cyber scenario designed to assess their capabilities.

“Some of the agents being tested had engaged in sustained, potentially harmful activity directed at real people and organisations,” the institute disclosed on Tuesday.

Across 122 test runs, researchers identified 19 unauthorized actions occurring during ten of them. Anthropic’s agent was responsible for 17 of the actions, while OpenAI’s accounted for the remaining two.

The most serious incident involved an agent writing malicious code and creating fake online identities in an attempt to persuade a real person to approve it. Anthropic later confirmed that its model was responsible.

The institute said it found no evidence that the incidents caused real-world harm.

Unlike earlier containment breaches involving both companies, the agents did not break out of an isolated environment. They had been granted internet access as part of the testing process but acted beyond the scope of their prompts and interacted with real external targets.

The findings follow a series of similar incidents involving advanced models.

Last month, an OpenAI agent broke out of its test environment and hacked the AI platform Hugging Face while searching for answers to a cybersecurity benchmark. The company later acknowledged that four accounts across four separate services had also been compromised.

Anthropic subsequently disclosed three cases in which its Claude models unintentionally targeted real organizations after a testing environment was mistakenly left connected to the internet. In one case, a malicious software package created by the model was uploaded to a public repository and executed on 15 real systems.

The incidents have intensified concerns that autonomous AI systems are becoming capable of discovering vulnerabilities, writing exploits, and conducting social engineering faster than researchers can understand how they are doing it and develop necessary safeguards.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a landmark law legalizing cryptocurrency trading, which will be regulated as part of the country’s financial system.

The Law on Digital Currencies and Digital Rights, signed and published on Tuesday, formalizes an already booming market. According to blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, Russia ranks as Europe’s largest crypto market by transaction volume according to the latest available data, while the Finance Ministry estimates domestic crypto trading totals around 50 billion rubles (roughly $650 million) per day.

The legislation is part of the government’s broader effort to bring crypto activity out of the shadow economy while facilitating cross-border trade after Ukraine-related sanctions severely restricted Russia’s access to the West’s dollar- and euro-based financial system.

Here are the practical implications of the legislation.

What has changed under the new law?

Until now, Russians could legally own cryptocurrencies, but trading largely took place on foreign platforms or through services operating outside Russia’s regulatory framework.

The new law creates the country’s first regulated cryptocurrency market. From September 1, 2026, Russians will be able to buy and sell approved cryptocurrencies through licensed platforms supervised by the Central Bank. New digital repositories will keep records of who owns crypto assets, similar to the way traditional financial assets are recorded.

Who can buy cryptocurrencies under the new law?

Both ordinary Russians and investment professionals will be able to buy cryptocurrencies, although investors will face stricter rules.

Retail investors will first have to pass a basic knowledge test and will be limited to buying up to 300,000 rubles (about $3,800) worth of crypto per year through each platform. Professional, or “qualified,” investors will also have to pass the test but will not face investment limits.

Which cryptocurrencies are approved?

At first, only the world’s largest and most actively traded cryptocurrencies will be available on Russia’s regulated market. To qualify automatically, a cryptocurrency must have had an average market capitalization of more than 5 trillion rubles (about $64 billion) and average daily trading volumes above 1 trillion rubles (about $12.8 billion) over the previous two years.

What about crypto mining?

Crypto mining is already legal in Russia, but it is subject to strict rules. Industrial miners must register with the authorities, report the cryptocurrency they produce and pay taxes on their earnings. Individuals can still mine crypto at home without registering, provided their electricity use stays below government limits.

Mining is also restricted in parts of the country where electricity supplies are under strain. The government has banned or seasonally limited mining in several regions until at least 2031 to prevent power shortages. The new legislation leaves the existing mining framework largely unchanged.

What does the new law mean for Russia’s foreign trade?

While cryptocurrencies remain banned for everyday payments inside Russia, businesses can continue using them for cross-border settlements. Exporters and importers may settle transactions directly using crypto wallets or through licensed intermediaries.

The move is intended to give Russian businesses more options for paying foreign partners at a time when Western sanctions have disrupted access to parts of the traditional international financial system. Since 2022, many Russian banks have been cut off from SWIFT and faced restrictions on transactions in dollars and euros, prompting Moscow to look for alternative payment channels.

Russia has increasingly settled transactions in rubles and the national currencies of its trading partners, such as the Chinese yuan and the Indian rupee.

The crypto law also follows EU sanctions packages targeting Russia’s digital currency market.

In the early 2000s, I worked with domestic violence victims in Seattle, Washington.

One of my trainers was a scrappy woman who told me she was a former member of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Looking back, I remember wondering why several former Mossad and IDF personnel were involved in training Seattle police officers. At the time, I didn’t think much of it. After all, they were working to help protect victims of domestic violence.

Fast forward to 2026.

Buried inside the massive National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2027 is Section 219, a provision that creates what is officially called the United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative. In practical terms, it directs the Pentagon to deepen the integration of US and Israeli military research, defense technology development, weapons manufacturing, and military-industrial supply chains under a single coordinating framework. Critics argue that this represents an unprecedented level of institutional integration between the United States and a foreign military partner.

I recently sat down with Tucker Carlson on my podcast, East Meets West, and one of the questions I asked him was about this new level of military integration between the US and Israel. Tucker called it treason.

There’s a long track record of the United States, its people, its 350 million people, being misused by Israeli intelligence. And so the idea that you would merge them formally is a generational disaster… it’s the definition of treason. This is treason.

Many people agree with that assessment, and so do I.

Never before in US history has a foreign nation been granted this degree of institutional integration into America’s military research and defense industrial base. This goes well beyond the political influence of organizations like AIPAC or campaign spending in Washington. It reaches into the military-industrial infrastructure itself. It means shared research, shared development, shared procurement, and an even deeper intelligence relationship. Once these systems are intertwined, they are extraordinarily difficult to separate.

Trump – the Trojan horse who convinced so many people he was different – has made even Biden’s hawkish foreign policy team look restrained by comparison. Trump reportedly accepted roughly $300 million in support from Miriam Adelson during his campaign while presenting himself as the anti-war candidate. Then came more bombs, more wars, and more chaos. He ignored the upcoming midterms and growing public opposition to foreign intervention while escalating the conflict with Iran.

Tucker Carlson remarked that Trump does not even like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally. Whether that is true or not is beside the point. Trump appears weak, compromised, and ultimately willing to advance Israel’s strategic objectives as the Middle East moves toward wider war.

The fate of the Palestinians has never been more desperate. While politicians deliver performative speeches about the catastrophe in Gaza and international courts debate Netanyahu’s future, the war continues. Trump appears almost gleeful about bombing Iran and dragging the US deeper into yet another Middle Eastern quagmire.

Instead, he has embraced and expanded Israel’s strategic agenda with little regard for the consent of the American people.

Now an even more troubling convergence is taking shape. The US and NATO’s proxy war with Russia through Ukraine is increasingly overlapping with the conflict involving Iran – not only through military resources, but through political messaging and public rhetoric.

The information war is raging as well. Influential figures such as Laura Loomer, who reportedly has Trump’s ear, continue to promote aggressively anti-Russian rhetoric and inflammatory calls that further escalate tensions.

As summer comes to an end, the drums of a broader world war seem louder than ever. Meanwhile, the American dream continues to die. For Israel, however, a new strategic era is only beginning.

A veteran Ukrainian ultranationalist leader whose movement was criticized by Israel over alleged Nazi chants and salutes at a recent rally has praised the German aesthetic during Adolf Hitler’s rule.

Far-right figure Dmitry Korchinsky argued that Ukrainians should draw inspiration from the German 1930s-1940s “beautiful Art Deco designs,” regardless of the “painful associations some people” may have with the symbols of the genocidal regime.

To illustrate his point, Korchinsky shared an image of the Nazi eagle – the Nazi Party’s version of the Reichsadler, a traditional German emblem whose origins can be traced to Ancient Rome – with the swastika replaced by Ukraine’s national trident.

“We should borrow the achievements of not only good people, but also bad ones. This is wise,” Korchinsky wrote.

The Israeli Embassy in Ukraine criticized Korchinsky’s Brotherhood movement in late June after its members took part in a counterprotest against a gay pride march in Kiev. Several days later, Ukraine’s chief rabbi, Moshe Azman, published a video with Korchinsky in which he described the Israeli reaction as the result of a “misunderstanding.”

Korchinsky thanked the rabbi and insisted that “Nazi aesthetics are not the Brotherhood’s aesthetics,” adding that members of the movement “read the Psalms, not Mein Kampf.”

Last week, Azman met US conservative influencer Laura Loomer and assured her that Ukraine does not have a neo-Nazi problem, dismissing evidence to the contrary. On her trip, Loomer met with multiple prominent figures, from Vladimir Zelensky to the co-founder of the far-right Azov Battalion Andrey Biletsky, who is now a senior military commander.

I had the honor of welcoming @LauraLoomer —one of the most famous American political bloggers, whose views have a significant influence on the U.S. audience and who is well known for her close ties to President Donald Trump—to the Central Synagogue of Ukraine

It is particularly… pic.twitter.com/ShRdBUeS5H

— Chief Rabbi Of Ukraine Moshe Azman (@RabbiUkraine) July 24, 2026

The US Senate has voted 86 to 12 in favor of legislation to impose 100% tariffs on India, as well as other nations, for buying Russian oil. When the Senate reconvenes in September, the bill is expected to pass, after which it will go to the House for a vote. The House, too, is likely to clear it.

The late Senator Lindsey Graham had been one of the main advocates of this legislation, alongside Senator Blumenthal, another persistent critic of India. Blumenthal has now emerged as the driving force behind the bill, seemingly determined to carry it forward as a final tribute to his departed colleague.

A few observations are in order.

First, all the talk of a bipartisan consensus in the US Congress in favor of strong ties with India has proved exaggerated. The Senate vote backing this punitive legislation was itself bipartisan. Senator Blumenthal has made it clear that the real targets of the bill are China and India, the two largest buyers of Russian oil.

When India-US ties were on an upward trajectory, Congress supported them. Now that the relationship is moving in the opposite direction, Congress is offering no resistance. New Delhi should draw a political lesson from this.

Second, reviving the issue of India’s purchases of Russian oil shows how short-term and ad hoc the US approach to policymaking can be. During the Biden administration, Washington had in fact encouraged India to keep buying Russian oil in order to prevent a sharp rise in global prices. The logic was simple: if Russian crude had been pushed out of the international market completely, no other supplier would have been able to fully make up the shortfall.

Trump tried to wean away India from buying Russian discounted oil by imposing an extra 25% penalty tariffs on us for such purchases. India, however, continued to buy Russian oil in large quantities. Not only that, the refined products made by Indian refineries from the Russian crude were exported to Europe to meet its energy requirements.

Third, the Senate is brazen about subscribing to double standards in shaping the legislation. The legislation has been drafted to exclude US allies from the purview of the 100% tariffs that would be imposed on India, China, Hungary, Slovakia and Azerbaijan. European states including Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Spain and Austria continue to buy Russian energy, as do Turkey and Japan, yet they have been shielded through openly selective carve-outs. In other words, discrimination has been written into the legislation with little concern for either political consistency or moral credibility. All the past rhetoric about the US-India partnership being “defining” for the 21st century, and about the two countries being “natural allies,” is now being jettisoned.

Fourth, the legislation gives the US president waiver authority, allowing him to suspend tariffs or sanctions if this is deemed necessary in the US national interest. This reflects a cynical game played by both Congress and the White House at times: creating a punitive instrument that can then be selectively wielded as leverage to force targeted countries into compliance with US demands.

Such countries would then be expected to approach the White House in search of a waiver, which the US administration could use to extract concessions on other unresolved issues where it had previously failed to get its way. Even if a waiver is not granted, and the sanctions provided for under the legislation are not immediately enforced, the sword of Damocles would still hang over the targeted country.

India has not received any waiver under CAATSA, yet no sanctions have been imposed on it either – no doubt in part because India has also purchased more than $20 billion worth of US defense equipment. American defense companies would hardly want to jeopardize future opportunities in the Indian market, especially when they are already concerned about losing contracts to the French.

In the case of Chabahar port, we have already seen the invidious position in which the US can place India by granting and then withdrawing waivers for its participation in the project, entirely on the basis of shifting American policies in the region rather than India’s interests.

The threat of tariffs has not worked against China, which has retaliated with coercive steps of its own in the areas of exports of critical raw materials and products, forcing the US to back down. If President Xi’s visit to the US takes place in September as planned, this would hardly be the right time to threaten China with 100% tariffs for buying Russian oil. Does the US expect China to close the pipelines delivering Russian oil and gas to it? The US has such a sense of impunity that it believes it can act arbitrarily without cost.

In promoting the legislation, Senator Blumenthal argued that China and India “are doing us no favors anywhere else in the world.” One could just as easily turn the question around and ask what favors the US has done for India “anywhere else in the world.” If New Delhi and Washington have built a strong relationship over the past two decades, it has been grounded in their respective national interests and, of course, mutual benefit. The irony is that US has long viewed India as a key partner in building maritime deterrence against China – hence the history of naval exercises, later expanded across all three services, the signing of foundational defense agreements, the the emergence of the Quad, and the broader Indo-Pacific construct.

The US now sees China – not India – as the principal challenge to its global primacy, including in the technology race. Yet driven by his own anti-Russian fixation and the prevailing mood in Congress, as well as by Washington’s frustration at failing to force Russia into submission through sanctions and a proxy war in Ukraine, Senator Blumenthal has advanced legislation that without good reason turns India into a scapegoat. Traditionally strong India-Russia ties remain a bugbear for American policy makers.

It is deeply galling for India, a massive energy importer, to be dictated to by the US where it may or may not source its supplies. This is fundamentally a sovereign trade decision that India alone should make.

Nigerian President Bola Tinubu has approved salary increases of up to 80% for the country’s armed forces as Africa’s most populous nation confronts persistent insurgency, banditry, and mass kidnappings – despite record security spending and direct US military support.

The raises will benefit around 250,000 personnel across the army, navy and air force when they take effect on September 1, presidential spokesman Bayo Onanuga announced on Tuesday.

Junior personnel will receive an 80% increase, middle-ranking officers 50% and senior officers 30%. According to the presidency, the measure will raise the armed forces’ annual salary from 660 billion naira to 924 billion naira ($600 million).

Tinubu said the increase demonstrates the government’s “deep appreciation” for the sacrifices of service members in protecting the West African nation. The president said his “administration will continue to prioritize troop welfare and modernize the armed forces by providing the weapons and technological tools needed to discharge their duties.”

The decision comes as Abuja struggles to contain Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) militants in the northeast, as well as armed gangs responsible for deadly attacks and kidnappings for ransom across the northwest and north-central regions.

Tinubu declared a national security emergency last November and his government allocated a record 5.41 trillion naira to defense and security in the 2026 budget.

Last weekend, gunmen reportedly killed at least 12 people, including six members of one family and abducted an unspecified number of women and children in Lajinge village, Sokoto state. A series of mass abductions of schoolchildren has been reported in recent months, including the kidnapping of at least 36 children and a staff member when gunmen raided a secondary school in Borno State while students were taking examinations in June. Militants have also targeted military facilities. Five soldiers were killed in an attack on a base in Mandaragirau earlier that month, according to the Nigerian Army. In March, at least 65 troops were reportedly killed when ISWAP fighters overran several bases across the state.

India’s anger at Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg over the blocking of a video address by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Facebook has intensified, with lawmakers setting a three-day deadline for the tech boss to personally apologize.

The head of a parliamentary panel that heard Meta officials on the takedown on Monday announced the demand, while calling for action against those in the company responsible for the move.

Meta has said the video was temporarily blocked by a technical glitch, and apologized for the restricted post.

The panel’s head, Nishikant Dubey, a lawmaker from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), called the video’s removal an “attack on democracy” on Wednesday.

“If Facebook does not take action against those responsible in this matter, the Safe Harbour Clause will be removed. Mark Zuckerberg will have to apologize. Otherwise, a case may be filed,” reports quoted him as saying.

Meta’s chief of global affairs, Joel Kaplan, was also called in on Wednesday by the secretary of the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to explain the takedown.

#BREAKING | A Meta delegation led by Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan met MeitY Secretary S. Krishnan in New Delhi over the deletion of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s video message to students from Facebook. pic.twitter.com/kOgAUbEkaH

— Organiser Weekly (@eOrganiser) August 5, 2026

The government’s ire may stem from the fact that the blocked video was the prime minister’s direct address to students who had protested in the capital – a sensitive issue for the BJP.

Its withdrawal may open a floodgate of complaints against Meta officials and Zuckerberg in police stations across the country.

The parliamentary panel has also warned all social media platforms to comply with the country’s Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) rules. Meta was slapped with a notice over violations of the rules by Instagram last month.

President Vladimir Putin has announced changes among senior military commanders of the Russian armed forces, which he described as fine-tuning of the Defense Ministry for the ongoing Ukraine conflict.

The reshuffle was made public during a government meeting on Wednesday. It includes appointing a single person in charge of military logistics and arms supplies. He named Col. Gen. Valery Solodchuk, the commander of the ‘Center’ group of forces, to the position.

“Leading the logistics is a combat mission too,” Putin said, addressing the general directly. “I am confident that you will demonstrate your best qualities while organizing it.”

Col. Gen. Andrey Ivanaev, the commander of the ‘Vostok’ group, will be taking Solodchuk’s previous job. Ivanaev recommended Maj. Gen. Pyotr Bolgarev, the chief of staff of the Vostok group, as his replacement, which Putin approved.

Putin also appointed Col. Gen. Denis Lyamin as the commander of the Russian Unmanned Systems Forces, a new military arm officially created last November.

The reshuffle in Russia comes as Kiev faces growing political and military turbulence. Last month, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky ordered a 40-day “pressure campaign” involving intensified long-range strikes on Russian energy infrastructure, retail warehouses, cargo ships and other targets, as well as sabotage operations on Russian soil.

The 40 days ended this week with mixed results. Critics have argued that Russia’s retaliatory strikes inflicted greater economic damage, including a de facto blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, than what Kiev managed to achieve through its own operations.

During the offensive, Zelensky also carried out his latest cabinet reshuffle, triggering a political crisis and mass protests in Kiev after former Defense Minister Mikhail Fedorov publicly opposed his dismissal and criticized Gen. Aleksandr Syrsky. Zelensky subsequently removed Syrsky as commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, but declined to reinstate Fedorov.

Tehran would gain greater control over shipping through the Strait of Hormuz under an interim agreement being negotiated by the US, Iran, and Oman, Axios reported on Wednesday. The strategic waterway between Iran and Oman carries around one-fifth of the world’s seaborne oil.

US President Donald Trump announced on Saturday that he had called off a planned attack on Iran, claiming that Washington and Tehran were close to reaching a diplomatic solution. Trump said on Wednesday that the sides were “having very good discussions,” but warned that Iran would be “hit very hard” if the Strait of Hormuz is not reopened “very soon.”

Fighting resumed last month after a dispute over control of the Strait of Hormuz derailed a 14-point memorandum that had established a temporary ceasefire. The agreement was intended to pave the way for a permanent settlement of the conflict, which began with a US-Israeli attack on Iran in late February.

Under the proposed deal, ships entering the Persian Gulf would also use an Iranian-controlled shipping lane, while outbound traffic would be routed through a lane supervised by Oman, the outlet reported.

Within the next 30 days, the sides would work on clearing naval mines from the median lane of the strait, which is expected to be used for traffic in both directions under a permanent arrangement to be negotiated between Tehran and Muscat.

No tolls or fees for using the waterway would be charged during the 60-day period, Axios said. However, AP reported, citing regional officials, that payments for providing security and preserving the maritime environment are envisaged under the deal. Trump previously ruled out any settlement that would allow Tehran to impose charges on commercial traffic in the waterway.

Tehran has repeatedly denied holding direct talks with Washington, saying it is communicating only with Oman about arrangements for the Strait of Hormuz.

Araghchi said earlier that negotiations with the Omanis were “nearing completion,” while Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei described them as a bilateral matter that “does not concern any other party.”

Baghaei stressed that a deal between Tehran and Muscat would “not mean the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz,” adding that “the strait remains closed because of American treaty-breaking, the naval blockade of Iran, and the series of disruptive actions Washington has carried out against the Islamic Republic.”

Throughout the conflict, Western governments have described their role in Ukraine in relatively simple terms: supplying weapons, providing financial assistance, and helping Kiev to stand against Russia.

The reality has gradually become more complicated.

The discussion is no longer limited to deliveries of tanks, missiles, or artillery shells. Increasingly, Western companies are participating in the design, production, financing, and technological integration of weapons that are formally presented as Ukrainian. Assembly lines are moving beyond Ukraine’s borders, European manufacturers are becoming part of production chains, and NATO standards are being built directly into Ukraine’s military infrastructure.

This raises a broader question. At what point does military aid become military integration? The answer matters because it changes how the conflict itself should be understood.

Something more than a helping hand

The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) remain on the strategic defensive against Russian forces, which enjoy advantages in manpower and conventional firepower. Despite persistent personnel shortages and an arsenal assembled from equipment supplied by dozens of countries, the Ukrainian military has continued to field new weapons and maintain combat effectiveness.

One explanation lies in drones, precision weapons, and sufficient stocks of tactical ammunition. But these capabilities require a constant flow of increasingly sophisticated systems – systems that Ukraine can no longer produce entirely on its own.

Russian long-range strikes have made large-scale weapons manufacturing inside Ukraine increasingly difficult. Protecting production therefore requires more than additional air defenses. It requires relocating key elements of the defense industry itself.

This is precisely the direction in which Ukraine’s military-industrial complex has been evolving.

The result is a model that differs significantly from the one that existed at the beginning of the conflict. The issue is no longer simply which countries supply weapons to Ukraine. Increasingly, the question is how much of what is described as a Ukrainian weapon is produced through an international industrial network that extends well beyond Ukraine itself.

Weapons without borders

Fire Point is one of the clearest examples of this new model.

The Ukrainian defense startup is developing the FP-5 cruise missile, the FP-7 ballistic missile, and a future air-defense system. Yet the company cannot independently manufacture these systems in full. At best, it can perform final assembly while relying on foreign components and technologies for critical elements of the project.

This is especially visible in the proposed anti-aircraft version of the FP-7. Fire Point CEO Denis Shtilerman has openly stated that the missile will use a seeker developed and manufactured by Germany’s Diehl Defence. The wider air-defense system is expected to use European radar and command technologies, including Sweden’s SAAB Giraffe, France’s Ground Master 400, Germany’s TRML-4D, and Norway’s Kongsberg Fire Distribution Center.

Pushkin once wrote, “All flags will come to us.” Fire Point’s project increasingly resembles a military version of that idea: a Ukrainian-labeled system assembled from technologies developed across Europe.

The same logic can be seen in drone production.

Ukraine’s Linza strike and reconnaissance drone is a product of Quantum Frontline Industries, a joint venture between Germany’s Quantum Systems and Ukraine’s Frontline Robotics. The project is funded through the German government’s 'Build with Ukraine' program. Ukraine contributes combat experience, software algorithms, and a design tested at the front. German industry provides automated serial production at a plant near Munich, allowing output of up to 10,000 drones per year without the risk of Russian missiles striking the facility. The first batch was delivered to the AFU in the spring of 2026.

Artillery follows a similar pattern.

The Ukrainian Bohdan self-propelled howitzer is now produced in Poland by PK MIL SA, a joint Polish-Ukrainian company created specifically to manufacture the system outside Ukraine. The project is based on cooperation between the Kramatorsk Heavy Machine Tool Plant and the Polish engineering company Ponar Wadowice S.A. The Polish side holds a controlling stake and is responsible for mechanical production and final assembly. The project is being implemented as part of the EU’s ReArm Europe initiative.

These projects differ in technology, scale, and purpose. Fire Point works on missiles, Quantum Frontline Industries on drones, and PK MIL SA on artillery. Yet all three are built around the same principle: Ukrainian designs, battlefield experience, or branding are combined with European production, components, financing, and industrial protection.

It is a production model in which Western companies are becoming part of Ukraine’s military capability itself.

The Build with Ukraine model

The industrial and technological projects described above are not isolated initiatives. They form part of the broader Build with Ukraine program, which provides a framework for cooperation between Ukrainian defense companies and European industry.

The model is built on a relatively simple division of roles.

European partners contribute financing, production capacity, industrial technologies, and access to advanced components. Ukraine contributes battlefield experience, operational data, software solutions, and engineers working under wartime conditions. Together, these resources make it possible to develop and manufacture systems that neither side could produce in quite the same way on its own.

For European defense companies, the attraction is clear. Ukraine offers an opportunity to evaluate new technologies under real combat conditions, refine them using operational feedback, and shorten the path from development to serial production. At the same time, manufacturing remains on European territory, beyond the reach of Russian long-range strikes.

Ukraine’s incentives are different.

Participation in joint projects provides access to technologies, engineering expertise, industrial practices, and software that would otherwise take years to develop independently. It also allows Ukrainian engineers to work alongside established Western defense companies, gaining experience that is likely to remain valuable long after the current conflict ends.

The results are already becoming visible.

Ukrspecsystems has opened a drone-interceptor production facility in the United Kingdom. Fire Point is already operating in Denmark and plans to launch fuel production for its ballistic and surface-to-air missile programs there.

Fire Point also illustrates another feature of this model.

Rheinmetall provides perhaps the clearest example of the same trend at a much larger scale.

Between 2021 and 2026, the German defense giant’s share price rose from around €87 to more than €1,200 as Europe’s defense sector expanded. The company has established joint ventures with Ukrainian partners to produce artillery ammunition, while new production facilities are being built in Germany and elsewhere in Europe with support from European funding programs.

For Ukraine, these projects provide ammunition, technology, and industrial expertise. For Rheinmetall, they expand manufacturing capacity, secure long-term contracts, and strengthen the company’s position in Europe’s rapidly growing defense market.

Fire Point, Ukrspecsystems, and Rheinmetall operate on very different scales. Yet they reflect the same direction of development. Cooperation that initially focused on sustaining Ukraine’s wartime needs is gradually creating long-term industrial ties between Ukrainian companies and the European defense sector.

Beyond hardware

Industrial cooperation is only one part of the picture.

Modern warfare depends not only on where weapons are manufactured, but also on how they exchange information, communicate with one another, and operate within a common command system. In this area, Ukraine is becoming integrated with Western military standards no less rapidly than in production.

On May 29, 2025, NATO and Kiev signed an agreement allowing Ukraine to use the non-commercial CRC System Interface (CSI) software. The agreement gives Ukraine access to the Link 16 Tactical Data Link (TDL), the digital communications protocol used across NATO forces.

For Ukraine, the significance extends beyond access to another communications protocol. Developing such a command-and-control architecture independently would require years of work, extensive technical documentation, and considerable engineering resources. Cooperation with NATO provides access not only to technology itself, but also to the standards that govern how modern military systems operate together.

This represents a different level of integration from joint production projects.

Factories can be relocated, components can be imported, and assembly lines can be moved across borders. Software architecture and military communications standards, however, become embedded in the way an army plans, coordinates, and fights. Once adopted across multiple weapons systems, replacing them becomes a far more complicated task.

The examples discussed so far point to two parallel processes. One concerns production: European companies are becoming involved in designing and manufacturing systems used by the AFU. The other concerns military architecture: Ukraine is gradually adopting Western communications protocols, software, and technical standards that allow those systems to function as part of a common operational environment.

Taken together, they suggest that the relationship between Western support and Ukraine’s military capabilities is becoming progressively deeper. The issue is no longer confined to the transfer of individual weapons systems, but increasingly extends to the industrial and technological foundations on which those systems depend.

A different kind of conflict

None of the projects described above is likely to determine the outcome of the conflict on its own. Some will succeed, others may never progress beyond prototypes or pilot production.

What matters is the broader direction.

Western governments continue to describe their role primarily in terms of military assistance to Ukraine. Yet the examples above suggest that the relationship is becoming considerably more complex. European companies are participating in weapons development and manufacturing. Production is being relocated beyond Ukraine’s borders. NATO communications standards are being incorporated into Ukrainian command systems. Joint ventures are creating long-term industrial links that extend well beyond wartime procurement.

Taken individually, these developments may appear to be separate initiatives. Together, they point to a gradual shift from external support toward a much deeper level of military-industrial integration.

From Moscow’s perspective, that distinction is significant.

If Ukraine’s military capability increasingly depends on production facilities, engineering teams, software, financing, and logistics distributed across several European countries, then the conflict can no longer be viewed solely through the prism of military operations inside Ukraine. The challenge becomes broader than the battlefield itself.

This does not automatically dictate a single response. It does, however, suggest that military operations alone are unlikely to address every element of the system that has emerged over the past several years. Industrial cooperation, technology transfer, logistics, financing, and political decision-making become part of the same strategic equation.

The debate is no longer limited to how many tanks, missiles, or drones Western countries are prepared to deliver to Ukraine. Increasingly, it concerns the emergence of a military-industrial network in which Ukrainian companies, European manufacturers, and NATO technological standards are becoming interconnected.

Pandora’s box, as the saying goes, is far easier to open than to close.

An Indian-flagged cargo ship sank in the Red Sea off the coast of Yemen on Tuesday after it was attacked. All 14 crew members – 13 Indians and one Yemeni national – were rescued by Yemeni forces.

The MSV Faize Noore Oliya was reportedly struck by a projectile south of the port city of Hodeidah, which is under the control of the Houthi rebels.

The Iran-backed militia said last month it will block all Saudi-linked vessels from entering or leaving the Red Sea, but it has not commented on the sinking. According to reports, the Indian-flagged tanker was carrying oil from Saudi Arabia.

Yemen’s Transportation Ministry has accused the Houthis of carrying out the ​attack using an explosive-laden boat. Some media reports have suggested that a naval drone struck the mechanized sailing vessel.

Indian MSV Faize Noore Oliya has been hit by a projectile near Yemeni waters, causing the vessel to capsize and sink.

India strongly condemns this unprovoked attack on the defenseless mechanised sailing vessel. The safety of our people is our supreme priority & I am relieved to…

— Sarbananda Sonowal (@sarbanandsonwal) August 4, 2026

Ship-tracking website Marine Traffic showed its destination as Oman before the attack.

So far, 10 Indian seafarers have died in attacks on commercial ships in and around the Strait of Hormuz since US-Israeli strikes on Iran set off a regional conflagration. At least five have died in the Baltic Sea region in similar attacks amid the Russia-Ukraine conflict. 

Indian authorities have issued two advisories to Indian seafarers in the Middle East and the Baltic Sea, advising caution before entering the conflict areas and asking them to reach out to Indian authorities in case of trouble. 

Following the sinking of the MSV Faize Noore Oliya, India’s Foreign Ministry condemned the continued attacks on commercial ships, calling them “deeply worrisome.”

“The targeting of commercial shipping in the region must end, and free and unimpeded navigation and commerce through the international waterways in the region, in keeping with international law, must be restored at the earliest,” it said in a statement on Tuesday.

“Our Embassy in Riyadh is closely monitoring the situation and proactively coordinating with the Yemeni authorities for the safety and security of the crew,” the Indian Foreign Ministry said.

Russia has carried out overnight strikes on transport and logistics facilities in Kiev and the surrounding region, hitting sites used to handle items and drone components meant for the Ukrainian army, the Defense Ministry in Moscow has said.

In a statement on Wednesday, the ministry said that among the targets attacked by high-precision long-range weapons was the MLP-Chaika logistics center, which stored and distributed components for long- and medium-range drones.

Also hit was Nova Poshta’s innovation terminal and logistics center, described by the ministry as one of the “largest automated sorting complexes” handling dual-use goods, including drone parts, robotic systems, and electronic-warfare equipment.

The ministry said it also struck the Trans-Logistic transport hub producing drones of various types and storing military supplies for Ukrainian forces, along with the Epicentr logistics center, a large automated warehouse also processing and storing dual-use goods and drone components for the Ukrainian military.

In the wider Kiev region, the strikes hit the Brovary Terminal facility, the Raben Ukraine logistics hub, and another Nova Poshta sorting complex, all involved in supplying drone parts, including foreign-made ones.

In addition, the attacks hit three vessels off Odessa that were transporting military cargo, according to the statement.

Ukraine’s State Emergency Service claimed 14 people were killed and 27 wounded in the overnight attack. The service said crews were working at seven sites across the region, with large fires breaking out at warehouses in the city of Brovary and the villages of Velikaya Dymerka, Kvitnevo, and Peremoga.

Ukraine’s air force said the barrage involved four Tsirkon/Oniks anti-ship missiles, 24 Iskander-M and S-400 ballistic missiles, and 115 strike and decoy drones. It claimed to have shot down or suppressed 98 drones but did not report intercepting any of the missiles, which Ukraine has been able to tackle only by using high-grade Western-supplied interceptors.

The barrage came two days after a Ukrainian drone attack on the Black Sea resort of Gelendzhik, southern Russia, killed at least eight people, including four children, and wounded dozens of others.

It also follows several weeks of deadly Ukrainian strikes on warehouses operated by Russian online retailer Wildberries, which Kiev claims is involved in handling dual-use items. Moscow has denied Wildberries is involved in supporting the Russian military.

The US Supreme Court has rejected a request by the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to suspend enforcement of a $655.5 million judgment compensating American families whose relatives were victims of terrorist attacks in Israel in the 2000s.

On Monday, Justice Sonia Sotomayor denied the application filed by the Palestinian organizations without comment or referring it to the full court, Courthouse News Service reported.

In their appeal, the PA and PLO argued that the massive payout “would plunge the Palestinian economy into a deep recession, including a sudden dramatic increase in the already high unemployment rate, and failure of critical social services.” They added that it would likely trigger “widespread violence” in the West Bank and destabilize Israel, Jordan, and Egypt.

“Immediate enforcement would devastate the remaining public safety, security, the judicial system, health care, public schools, public works, communications, transportation, and reconstruction,” the PLO wrote.

The case stems from lawsuits brought by the families of US nationals killed or injured in six terrorist attacks between 2002 and 2004 during the Second Intifada, a Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation marked by attacks on soldiers and civilians.

The West Bank is facing an acute financial crisis as Israel is withholding billions in tax revenue that it collects on behalf of the PA, claiming that the money is being used to fund terrorism. According to Al Jazeera, these transfers normally account for around 60% of the PA’s budget.

Palestinian Finance Minister Estephan Salameh has described the withholding of funds as a “financial siege” imposed by Israel. He said in February that this year would be “the most financially difficult” since the PA was established in the early 1990s.

Gaza, a Palestinian enclave claimed by the PA but controlled by Hamas, has been devastated by Israeli airstrikes and a ground invasion launched in response to Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel in October 2023.

An armed man was arrested after allegedly conducting suspicious surveillance at US President Donald Trump’s golf course in California ahead of the president’s visit, police said.

Trump, who has survived several assassination attempts, is set to attend a Republican National Committee dinner at Trump National Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes near Los Angeles on Tuesday evening.

According to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, deputies detained a “suspicious individual” on Sunday after he was seen taking photographs and videos on the property and appeared to be “monitoring security-planning activities.”

The man, identified as Jeanine John Teale, had a 16-round magazine loaded with hollow-point ammunition in his pocket. A loaded pistol and another magazine were found in a vehicle parked near the golf course.

Teale was arrested on weapons charges, the department said, adding that the ongoing investigation could result in further charges.

In July 2024, a sniper opened fire at a reelection rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, wounding Trump in the ear and killing a spectator. The gunman was killed by a Secret Service agent. Trump subsequently claimed that the perpetrator had been radicalized by Democrats and “the radical left.”

In April, a gunman attempted to storm the ballroom during the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Washington Hilton in Washington, DC, but was detained before he could reach the president.

Democratic US Senator Raphael Warnock from Georgia has blocked an effort to fast-track the passage of a sweeping Russia-Iran sanctions bill, Punchbowl News reported on Tuesday.

The revised legislation, championed by the late Senator Lindsey Graham, a prominent Russia hawk, would authorize US President Donald Trump to impose tariffs of up to 100% on goods from countries that buy Russian oil, including China and India.

Sen. Warnock placed a hold on the bill despite voting last week to advance it.

“Supporting Ukraine does not mean giving this unhinged president new powers to raise the price of everything through tariffs,” he said in a statement shared by Punchbowl News congressional reporter Laura Weiss.

Democrats have long described Trump’s policy of imposing tariffs on most US trading partners as chaotic and damaging to the national economy.

Graham, a staunch supporter of Ukraine, died unexpectedly at the age of 71 last month, shortly after returning from Kiev. Since 2022, he had lobbied heavily for “crushing sanctions” aimed at cutting off Russia’s oil trade.

Russia has denounced the sanctions as illegal under international law and maintained that it has managed to adapt to foreign pressure despite the resulting losses.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said last month that the “pointless” sanctions were inflicting “record damage” on the Western countries that had adopted them.

More than 100 victims of a 2023 Israeli airstrike were laid to rest in Gaza City on Tuesday in one of the largest funerals held in the Palestinian enclave since the war between Hamas and Israel began nearly three years ago.

According to Palestinian authorities, the attack on the Sabra neighborhood in November 2023 killed 308 members of the Hassayna and Abu Sharia families, including 30 women and 40 children. The bodies remained beneath the rubble for years as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) bombarded Gaza and conducted a ground invasion of the densely populated enclave.

Mourners held prayers beside the remains of 112 victims, whose coffins were draped in Palestinian flags, some bearing photographs of children. A total of 157 people remain missing, officials said.

Mahmoud Basal, a spokesman for Gaza’s civil defense agency, said the remains of more than 150 victims had yet to be found. The attack was “one of the greatest tragedies witnessed by Gaza’s families during the war,” he wrote on X.

“My message to the world is that it must put an end to this repression and genocide,” one family member told RT. He added that the youngest victim was a one-and-a-half-year-old girl.

The US military has effectively run out of high-precision land-based tactical missiles due to its campaign against Iran, Reuters has reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.

Multiple media reports and independent assessments have signaled shortages of critical sophisticated munitions in the US inventory since a Center for Strategic and International (CSIS) report published in April. Apart from draining the Pentagon’s attack capabilities, the conflict is believed to have put a major dent in the US stock of anti-aircraft missiles. The country’s leadership has repeatedly denied such assertions, insisting it still has plenty of munitions.

According to Reuters sources the Iran conflict has depleted the US Army’s stock of surface-to-surface missiles, namely Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) and Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM), with two sources telling the agency the military has used “virtually all” of those weapons.

US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth dismissed the reports as “fake news.” On X, he singled out a CNN segment that cited a source as saying the US had used up nearly 80% of its “key missile interceptors.”

“That banner is NOT TRUE, CNN. Shame on you,” he wrote.

In mid-April, a US Army official admitted that a unit equipped with PrSM exhausted its entire inventory early in the conflict. Later that month, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) released an analysis concluding that the US military had dangerously depleted its stockpiles of critical munitions in the war on Iran. Namely, in the first seven weeks the Pentagon expended at least 45% of its PrSM stock, nearly 50% of its Patriot interceptors, and over half of its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-ballistic missiles, according to the assessment. 

Late last month, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal reported that US President Donald Trump had opted to shelve a new major attack on Iran because of the dwindling supply of air defense missiles. The US leader dismissed those claims however, insisting the US has “far more munitions than anyone in the world and far more than we need.”

The EU has been importing record volumes of Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG) despite a push to fully stop imports from Russia, Bloomberg has reported.
 
Plans exist to end long-term imports of Russian LNG from next year after the EU already banned purchases under new short-term contracts. Yet its latest watered-down sanctions package carved out exemptions for European companies to continue transporting Russian LNG to third-country markets after some member states balked at measures they said would damage their own economies.
 
Belgium relied entirely on Russian LNG imports in July as disruption in the Middle East curbed alternative supplies to Europe, according to Bloomberg calculations published on Monday.

In late June, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky announced a 40-day “operation of influence,” portraying it as a campaign of long-range drone strikes meant to force Russia to enter negotiations on Kiev’s terms.

As of early August, the campaign in practice turned out to be what Moscow has described as “terrorist attacks” on Russian oil refineries, residential buildings, logistics hubs, and other critical infrastructure, resulting in the death of dozens of civilians.

Russia’s answer has been to pummel Ukraine’s defense industry, including facilities producing drones and missiles instrumental to Zelensky’s much-maligned campaign; to squeeze Ukraine's ports, while continuing to grind forward on the battlefield.

Here’s how Zelensky’s campaign collapsed far from its stated objectives.

What did Zelensky try to accomplish?

Zelensky approved the plan on June 25, describing it on social media as a combination of “long-range” and “medium-range sanctions” aimed at compelling Russia to end the hostilities.

Over the following weeks, Ukrainian strikes focused on three main target sets: Russian oil refineries, logistics warehouses belonging to retailer Wildberries (often described as “Russia’s Amazon”), and a wave of strikes that killed civilians far from any front line. Ukrainian officials have said that they seek to make the war psychologically “sweep over” large segments of Russian society.

What impact have Ukraine’s strikes on oil infrastructure had?

Ukrainian drones have hit refineries across several Russian regions, including one major facility in Moscow, over the course of the campaign. The strikes did lead to temporary deficits, long lines at the pumps, caps on maximum fuel purchases for ordinary consumers, and logistics hurdles in several regions, particularly the Crimean Peninsula.

In late June, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the strikes were designed “to undermine our confidence in ourselves and our capabilities” and to “create conditions for launching negotiations on terms favorable to our adversary.” He stressed that Russia “will not give them [Ukraine] that opportunity,” adding that the attacks had “no impact whatsoever on the situation at the front.”

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandr Novak said the government had banned gasoline and diesel exports while strengthening air defenses around refineries, ensuring that plants operate at maximum capacity, and sending additional fuel to the hardest-hit regions.

Has Ukraine targeted Russian civilians?

Since Zelensky’s announcement, there have barely been any days without Ukrainian strikes killing civilians. According to Rodion Miroshnik, the head of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s mission tracking Ukraine’s alleged war crimes, in the week of July 20-26 alone 492 people were affected, including 57 killed, seven of them children. In the most recent weekly count, Miroshnik reported 49 people killed, including four children, as well as 342 wounded.

The campaign’s final days brought one of the deadliest strikes on civilians: On Monday, a Ukrainian drone came down on a beach near the resort city of Gelendzhik, southern Russia, killing at least eight civilians, including four children, with dozens of others injured.

As part of the campaign, Ukrainian forces also started to attack Wildberries warehouses, hitting around a dozen facilities across Russia. At least eight people were killed and dozens more injured, with small sellers – mostly trading in clothes, toys, and other purely civilian-use items – suffering large and often irrevocable financial losses.

How has Russia responded to Zelensky’s campaign?

Russia responded with long-range drone and missile strikes on Ukrainian defense-related facilities, with a focus on those producing UAVs that were ultimately being used in Zelensky’s campaign, along with attacks on cargo vessels it said were carrying military shipments in the Black Sea. Moscow maintains it does not target civilians.

On the ground, Russian forces continue to advance. According to TASS calculations, they liberated and took control of 32 settlements in July alone. The month’s biggest prize was Konstantinovka, a fortified stronghold in the Slavyansk-Kramatorsk agglomeration that Russian troops fully secured in early July.

Officials in Moscow estimated that Kiev lost around 13,500 troops while attempting to hold on to the settlement.

Later in July, Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov announced that Russian forces were on the verge of liberating Krasny Liman, another key Donbass stronghold.

Has Kiev commented on its 40-day failure?

Zelensky himself has so far kept silent on the self-imposed 40-day deadline, but the head of his office, Kirill Budanov, argued that the calendar was irrelevant. “Don’t get hung up on these numbers – 40, 50, 100, 15 days. What matters is the result,” he said.

How has Zelensky’s 40-day campaign been assessed?

Ukrainian outlet Strana.ua noted there were no signs Moscow was shifting its position after 40 days, while describing Russia’s de-facto naval blockade of Ukrainian ports – imposed in response to Ukrainian strikes on Russian vessels in the Black and Azov seas – as one of the most serious problems the campaign created for Kiev.

RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan wrote that the operation, “announced by Zelensky with such bravado 40 days ago,” had instead concluded with the liberation of Konstantinovka, the dismissal of half of Ukraine’s government, and Kiev appealing for an “air truce.” “Let’s remember them in peace,” she added, “when there is peace.”

Leonid Slutsky, the chair of the State Duma’s international affairs committee, said Zelensky’s plan had backfired on Ukraine, only leading to intensifying retaliatory strikes. He warned that Kiev now risks facing its hardest winter yet – a “portal to hell,” he said, that Zelensky himself had opened.

Zelensky’s 40-day tactics: Did he turn the tide?

Forty days and thousands of drones later, the only thing Zelensky can truly take credit for is dozens of dead Russian civilians, who had nothing to do with the conflict. While the strikes did lead to temporary and already easing fuel shortages in some regions, they failed to significantly affect the Russian economy or squeeze any concessions from Moscow.

Meanwhile, Zelensky’s gamble also failed to contain the advance of Russian forces in Donbass and elsewhere, as Moscow’s military continues to pummel both Ukraine’s defense industry and frontline positions.

As the European Central Bank weighs how its new euro banknotes will look, NATO’s airborne surveillance unit has a novel suggestion: plaster the European notes with images of American military hardware.

In a recent post on its Facebook page, NATO’s Airborne Early Warning and Control (AWACS) Force shared its vision for the upcoming series of Euro notes, a US-made Boeing E-3 Sentry AWACS aircraft soaring over the fields and forests of Europe. On the €20 note, the E-3 is accompanied by what appear to be two American F-16s.

“What if the new European banknotes had a little more…air superiority?” the NATO unit asked in a caption.

The post was tongue-in-cheek, but the image of American air superiority over Europe is a fitting metaphor for an organization designed, in the words of its first secretary-general, to “keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”

Coordinated NATO psy-op trying to tie NATO to the EU.

Thank you for your attention in this matter. pic.twitter.com/5zb54Hd4l2

— Mats Nilsson (@mazzenilsson) August 4, 2026

NATO’s Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) Force followed suit, posting a series of notes featuring an American RQ-4D Phoenix surveillance drone. The posts received mixed reactions online, with self-described ‘Eurasian sovereignist’ Mats Nilsson describing them as a “coordinated NATO psy-op trying to tie NATO to the EU.”

Four Eurozone countries – Austria, Cyprus, Ireland, and Malta – are not members of NATO, while 15 of NATO’s 32 members do not use the euro.

Whether they are interpreted as tongue-in-cheek trolling or an expression of Europe’s vassal status to the US, the notes have no chance of ever being printed. The European Central Bank is currently holding a public survey on its forthcoming euro banknotes, with variants showing historical figures – including Marie Curie, Leonardo da Vinci, and Ludwig van Beethoven – and native European birds making the shortlist.

The survey closes in late September, and a winner will be chosen by the end of 2026. The notes will be printed and circulated in 2030 or 2031.

Wildfires in the EU have caused more than €3 billion ($3.46 billion) in damages so far this year, exceeding the European Commission’s average annual estimate, the Financial Times has reported.

Almost half a million hectares have burned in the first two months of the fire season in France, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Romania, the paper wrote on Tuesday. The €3.1 billion figure, which covers only the cost of restoring burned land and forests, “far outstrips European Commission estimates of a €2.5 billion average annual impact” for the whole bloc, it added.

The losses in France alone could amount to between €10 billion and €15 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing data from Toronto-based ratings agency Morningstar DBRS.

The latest fires have also renewed debate over the impact of the EU’s sanctions against Russia. Spain has been unable to operate part of its fleet of Russian-made Kamov Ka-32 firefighting helicopters because EU sanctions have disrupted maintenance and access to spare parts. During the latest wildfire emergency, both Spain and France activated the EU Civil Protection Mechanism, requesting additional aircraft and firefighting crews from other EU countries and Türkiye.

Vladimir Zelensky has ordered Ukraine’s diplomatic missions to closely monitor missile stockpiles in their host countries, making weapons production, financing, and political pressure their principal measures of success.

Addressing more than 100 diplomats at their annual meeting in Kiev on Monday, Zelensky announced that each embassy would be judged by by the military resources obtained from its host country.

”An ambassador must know how many air-defense missiles there are in the country, where they work, and how to ensure that those missiles are not sitting in warehouses, but in our launchers here in Ukraine,” he said, adding that “You must bring weapons. This must be a KPI of our embassies.”

The instruction could potentially place Ukrainian diplomats in a legally and politically sensitive position, as gathering detailed information on a host country’s weapons stockpiles could be viewed as intelligence activity rather than conventional diplomacy.

Zelensky’s mandate extended beyond air-defense missiles. He also instructed envoys to secure missiles for other systems, weapons for combat aircraft, drone-production agreements, additional funding, and tougher sanctions against Russia, including in culture and sports.

Since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, Kiev has received vast quantities of weapons and tens of billions of euros from Western governments, but has repeatedly demanded more.

Western military stockpiles have meanwhile come under growing pressure, with some governments reluctant to surrender systems they say are needed for their own defense.

Zelensky’s orders also come as Ukrainian diplomats face accusations of interfering in the domestic politics of donor countries.

German opposition politician Sahra Wagenknecht accused Makeiev of openly meddling in German elections and said Kiev had “lost all sense of proportion” despite continuing to receive billions from German taxpayers.

Moscow has repeatedly argued that Western weapons deliveries prolong the hostilities without changing their ultimate outcome. Russian officials have also warned that transferring increasingly sophisticated military technology to Kiev makes NATO countries direct participants in the conflict.

Laura Loomer’s recent condemnation of multipolarity marks one of the clearest attempts within the American Right to define the emerging new international order as an existential threat rather than an inevitable transformation. Her arguments deserve careful examination, not because they are unique, but because they reflect assumptions that have become increasingly common in debates about the future of global power.

Loomer presents her first argument in the simplest possible terms. She claims that multipolarity exists to destroy American supremacy. According to her, Russia promotes the doctrine because it seeks the decline of the United States, while China, Iran, and other governments adopt the same language for the same reason. In her account, multipolarity is not a description of the international system but a political weapon aimed directly at Washington. The disappearance of American predominance therefore becomes the central objective of every state that speaks of a multipolar world.

This argument mistakes consequence for intention. Multipolarity does not begin with hostility towards America. It begins with the observation that the distribution of power has already changed. China possesses industrial capacity on a scale unseen in modern history. India has become a continental power with global ambitions. Russia remains one of the world’s foremost military powers despite unprecedented sanctions. Regional actors such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Indonesia, and others increasingly pursue independent policies rather than automatic alignment with Washington. These developments did not emerge because someone wrote books about multipolarity. The books appeared because the balance of power was already shifting. The decline of unipolarity is therefore not a revolutionary program but a recognition of political reality. No empire has remained permanently dominant. History moves through changing distributions of power, and every generation mistakes its own arrangements for permanent truths until events prove otherwise.

This confuses coincidence with unity. The countries commonly associated with multipolarity frequently disagree on questions of territory, economics, religion, and regional influence. India maintains strategic rivalry with China while participating in organizations that include Beijing. Turkey remains a NATO member while purchasing Russian military equipment. Saudi Arabia cooperates with Washington while simultaneously expanding relations with Moscow and Beijing. Iran and Russia share interests in some regions but not in every sphere. Brazil follows its own priorities, while Indonesia pursues another course entirely. There exists no single ideological headquarters directing these governments towards one objective. What unites them is not identical beliefs but the desire to preserve greater freedom of action. Multipolarity does not require permanent friendship among its participants. It merely assumes that several independent centers of power exist simultaneously.

Loomer’s third argument claims that multipolarity functions primarily as Russian propaganda. According to her, Moscow employs information campaigns, media personalities, and sympathetic commentators to persuade Western audiences that American leadership should end. The doctrine therefore appears as little more than a sophisticated psychological operation.

Propaganda cannot manufacture geopolitical reality. It may exaggerate events or shape perceptions, but it cannot create factories, armies, populations, technological industries, or national interests. The emergence of several major powers has measurable economic and military foundations independent of any Russian information campaign. China did not become an industrial giant because of Russian messaging. India did not become the world’s most populous country through propaganda. American debt, political polarization, and industrial decline cannot be explained by foreign influence alone. Every great power produces narratives supporting its own interests. Washington has done so for generations, just as London, Paris, Moscow, and Beijing have done before it. To reduce structural transformation to propaganda mistakes symptoms for causes.

This assumes that civilization depends upon imperial management from a single capital. Yet Western civilization existed for centuries before the United States emerged as the world’s leading power. Classical Greece, Republican Rome, medieval Christendom, Renaissance Italy, imperial Spain, Bourbon France, Victorian Britain, and many other historical forms flourished under very different political arrangements. Civilizations possess cultural continuity independent of whichever state temporarily occupies first place. Indeed, empires often weaken the societies they lead by drawing them into endless military commitments, financial burdens, and ideological universalism. A civilization survives through confidence in its own traditions, institutions, and people rather than through permanent global supremacy.

Loomer’s fifth argument attacks thinkers associated with multipolarity, especially Alexander Dugin. She argues that such figures openly desire the destruction of the United States and therefore reveal the true intentions of the entire doctrine. Since some advocates welcome the end of American predominance, she concludes that multipolarity itself must be directed against America as a nation.

This moves from particular individuals to universal conclusions. Every major political tradition contains voices motivated by hostility towards rival powers. During the twentieth century, many American strategists openly sought the collapse of the Soviet Union. That did not mean every supporter of American leadership desired the destruction of the Russian people. Likewise, criticism of American global predominance does not necessarily imply hatred of America itself. Many advocates of multipolarity distinguish between the American nation and the international system established after the Cold War. They argue against universal political structures, not against the existence of the United States. Agreement or disagreement with that distinction remains a matter of political judgment, but it should not be erased.

Such reasoning risks replacing debate with suspicion. Political disagreement has always existed within free societies. Citizens may oppose intervention abroad, criticize alliances, question sanctions, or advocate different grand strategies without acting as foreign agents. Once every dissenting argument becomes evidence of hidden allegiance, public discussion gives way to accusations instead of analysis. Democratic societies depend upon distinguishing disagreement from disloyalty. Otherwise every political controversy becomes a search for traitors rather than an examination of competing ideas.

The deepest weakness in Loomer’s argument lies elsewhere. She assumes that the preservation of peace depends upon one state remaining permanently supreme. History suggests the opposite. Concentrated power often tempts its holder to expand beyond necessity because few external restraints remain. A world containing several powerful civilizations does not eliminate conflict, but neither did unipolarity. The decades following the Cold War witnessed repeated military interventions, regime-change campaigns, sanctions, and expanding geopolitical confrontation despite the absence of any peer competitor. The central question is therefore not whether one prefers America, Russia, China, or any other power. The question is whether lasting order is more likely to emerge from permanent global predominance or from a balance among several enduring centers of civilization. Multipolarity answers the second question. Its critics answer the first. That disagreement concerns the structure of international politics itself rather than merely the ambitions of any single state.

This article was first published on Constantin von Hoffmeister's blog Multipolar Press

Locals have described scenes of panic and “women’s cries” when a Ukrainian drone struck a crowded beach near the Russian Black Sea resort of Gelendzhik on Monday, killing seven people and injuring dozens more.

The attack on the village of Arkhipo Osipovka sent vacationers scrambling for cover. “People ran away. At first, they started screaming and began fleeing from there. I can still hear those women’s cries in my ears,” one man who witnessed the blast told RT.

No one expected such an attack “on a beach with children,” a local woman said, calling the strike an act of “treachery.” 

Russian Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova Belova said on Tuesday that a fourth child had died from injuries. Regional authorities earlier reported that 58 people had been wounded, 21 of whom required hospitalization.

Doctors in Krasnodar Region said victims were brought in with complex mine blast injuries, including four children, two of whom are in intensive care. “They are receiving all necessary assistance,” Elena Kleshchenko, chief physician of the Regional Children’s Clinical Hospital said, adding that initial treatment on the scene and in nearby towns had been “timely.”

Acting deputy chief surgeon Aleksey Kovalenko at the Ochapovsky Regional Clinical Hospital said four of 14 adult patients “are in serious condition,” many of them with “combined trauma – shrapnel wounds plus burns.” The youngest patient is 19, while the oldest is 63, he added.

”I have tears in my eyes. I am a pensioner, and I feel very sorry for the children and the people,” an elderly woman told RT.

Kiev has intensified long-range attacks on Russian civilian infrastructure in recent months. Moscow has described the strikes as terrorist attacks deliberately targeting ordinary citizens. On Monday, another Ukrainian drone strike claimed the lives of at least five people and wounded at least ten others near the town of Chekhov in Moscow Region.

Artificial intelligence played a role in more than half of the cybercrime cases examined across Africa in 2025, as criminal groups increasingly turned to the technology to automate attacks, produce convincing deepfakes, and expand large-scale fraud operations, Interpol said on Monday.

The African Cyberthreat Assessment Report 2026, which draws on intelligence from law enforcement agencies in 36 African countries, found that AI featured in 55% of cybercrime cases examined in 2025.

At the same time, reported financial losses linked to cybercrime more than doubled from $192 million in 2024 to $484 million in 2025. The report said the increase reflected the growing role of AI-facilitated scams, credential harvesting, and automated social engineering campaigns.

Interpol said AI has lowered the barrier to entry for cybercriminals, enabling even relatively inexperienced offenders to launch sophisticated attacks. According to the report, criminals are increasingly using AI to generate convincing deepfake videos and voice recordings, create synthetic identities for financial fraud, and craft highly personalized phishing campaigns.

Governments across Africa are moving to strengthen their defenses. Earlier this year, Kenya announced plans to amend its cybercrime legislation to address AI-driven threats. South Africa has also warned that AI-powered attacks and deepfakes are creating new security challenges, while Senegal launched an online reporting platform to improve the response to online offenses affecting children.

“Cybercrime has emerged as one of the most significant criminal threats to the region,” Interpol Cybercrime Director Neal Jetton said. “AI is automating every stage of a cyberattack from reconnaissance and phishing to extortion and evasion.” 

A former member of an ethnic-Lavtian branch of Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS was buried with military honors in the Baltic country on Wednesday.

Laimons Ezergailis, who died at the age of 102, served in the 15th Waffen Grenadier Division, a formation that was established on Adolf Hitler’s orders in 1943 and incorporated dozens of soldiers from notorious killing units .

The urn with Ezergailis’ ashes was buried at the Lestene military cemetery, a memorial site dedicated to Latvian Legionnaires. Ezergailis held the Order of Viesturs, one of the country’s highest state decorations and its highest military honor.

The Latvian Legion remains controversial because it fought under German command as part of the Waffen-SS, which was declared a criminal organization at the Nuremberg Trials.

Latvian authorities argue that the Legion fought to prevent the return of Soviet rule rather than in support of the National Socialist ideology, noting that many of its members were conscripted. Russia rejects that interpretation, and has accused Latvia of rehabilitating Nazi collaborators through official honors and annual commemorations.

Veteran German opposition politician Sahra Wagenknecht has accused Ukraine’s ambassador in Berlin of openly interfering in the country’s politics after he denounced several opposition parties and urged voters to reject them.

In an interview with Welt, Aleksey Makeiev claimed that parties on both the German right and left receive instructions from Moscow “every morning.” Asked whether he meant the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the Left Party (Die Linke), and Wagenknecht’s BSW, the diplomat called on voters to examine “an alternative for which country” they were supporting.

“As a European, I want the democrats to win, not the autocrats,” Makeiev said, despite prefacing his remarks by insisting that an ambassador should not interfere in Germany’s domestic affairs.

Wagenknecht responded by accusing Makeiev of having “lost all sense of proportion.”

“He probably believes that if Ukraine can blow up the Germans’ most important energy supply line without any consequences, then it is also allowed to openly meddle in our elections,” she wrote on X.

The politician was referring to the 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, which carried Russian gas to Germany. German prosecutors have alleged that the sabotage was carried out by a Ukrainian team using a small rented yacht. Moscow has argued, however, that such a sophisticated operation could not have been carried out without Western assistance.

“That money is also paid by the voters of the parties he has condemned,” she said, accusing the federal government of treating Ukraine as more important than its own citizens.

Germany has provided Ukraine with tens of billions of euros since the escalation of the conflict in 2022. However, its own economy has been reeling from the consequences of rejecting cheap Russian gas, leading to declining industrial output and manufacturers bleeding jobs.

Both Wagenknecht’s BSW and the AfD have opposed continued military support for Kiev and have advocated for renewed diplomacy with Moscow. The AfD is currently leading national opinion polls and is expected to make major gains in upcoming regional elections in eastern Germany.

Despite the AfD’s growing popularity, senior politicians have maintained efforts to ban it, with officials in Lower Saxony already having blocked several AfD candidates from standing in local elections on the basis of domestic intelligence assessments, without any court rulings.

Opposition figures have accused the establishment of election rigging and trying to suppress the country’s largest political force by manipulating the electoral process before voters can deliver an AfD breakthrough.

Bangladesh has expressed its openness to cooperating with the US on nuclear power, even as it resists ratifying a reciprocal trade deal signed with Washington by the country’s previous interim government, which constrains its ability to conduct foreign policy and trade. 

“We are positive,” Bangladeshi junior foreign minister Shama Obaed Islam said on Monday. However, she added: “If any agreement with the US is beneficial for our bilateral relations and is in the interest of Bangladesh and its economy, we will proceed. If not, we will reconsider.”

US Special Envoy for South and Central Asia Sergio Gor made the nuclear proposal to Bangladeshi Foreign Minister Khalilur Rahman during a visit to Dhaka last week. His visit was seen as an attempt to pressure the country to ratify and comply with the Agreement to Reciprocal Trade (ART) signed in February, just before the country’s elections. 

The interim government agreed to buy 14 Boeing aircraft for about $3.7 billion following pressure from the Trump administration to boost its exports to Bangladesh.

Bangladesh’s bilateral trade with the US was about $12 billion in 2024, primarily driven by the South Asian country’s apparel and textile exports.

However, the Trump administration also tacked on provisions that restricted Dhaka’s freedom to do business with nations labeled as “non-market economies,” which covers its longstanding partners Russia and China. 

Under the ART, higher tariffs will snap into place if Dhaka enters into any new bilateral free trade agreement or preferential economic agreement with a non-market country. It also restricts Bangladesh from buying any new nuclear reactors, fuel rods, or enriched uranium from a country that jeopardizes US interests. 

Gor’s nuclear cooperation proposal comes months after Bangladeshi Prime Minister Tarique Rahman inaugurated the commissioning process of the country’s first nuclear power plant – built and financed by Russia.

The 2,400 MW plant is nearing commercial power generation even as the US sanctions on Russia are making payments difficult for Dhaka.

China is Bangladesh’s largest trading partner, with $22 billion in bilateral trade annually. 

The government is not feeling “pressured” about the ART, Foreign Minister Khalilur Rahman told the media after meeting Gor.

“We will never strengthen relations with one country at the expense of another,” he said, according to local media reports. “We seek to strengthen our relations with all countries while protecting and advancing Bangladesh’s national interests.”

Gor’s proposal is being reviewed by Bangladesh’s science and technology ministry.

The data of more than 100,000 UK police officers and staff has appeared on the dark web after hackers breached a key law enforcement database, The Times has reported.

The leak came just days after the cybercriminals published over half a million pieces of sensitive information from the British Education Ministry.

The perpetrators were able to gain access to the Police National Legal Database (PNLD), which is used by members of law enforcement in England and Wales, The Times said in an article on Sunday.

Police sources told the paper that some 114,000 PNLD subscribers, mostly officers, had their names and contact details uploaded online.

The hackers also exposed data from 2,615 Crown Prosecution Service employees, 617 Home Office personnel, 588 National Crime Agency staff, and 402 workers of the British Defense Ministry, they added.

The email addresses of some 21,000 members of the public who visited the Ask the Police website were also released as part of the leak, according to the article.

A group called ExfilSquad is believed to be behind the latest breaches, the paper noted. Its members allegedly do not follow any ideology, but engage in cybercrime in order to profiteer at the expense of their victims, it added.

An online statement by the group urged those affected by the hack to “be smart and just pay” to see their data taken down from the dark web. “The payment we request of you is simply a rounding error compared to the litigation costs of your data leaking,” it claimed.

One of the officials whose details were released told The Times that “for private information to be leaked about me is very disconcerting and puts officers at serious risk.”

A 10 Downing Street spokesperson said the British government has “dedicated capabilities to respond to cyber incidents, and it would be inappropriate to comment on a live investigation.” 

Sensitive UK police data has appeared online on a number of occasions in recent years. In 2023, the data of thousands of Metropolitan and Greater Manchester police (GMP) officers was compromised in a ransomware attack that targeted an IT firm servicing both forces.

The leak happened just weeks after the details of some 10,000 Northern Ireland police employees were published online after being accidentally included in a response to a freedom of information request.

The mass migrant crossing into Spain’s enclave of Ceuta in North Africa may have been part of a coordinated US-Israeli campaign to challenge Madrid’s control of the Strait of Gibraltar, British journalist and RT contributor Martin Jay has suggested.

An estimated 60,000 migrants, mostly young men, swam from Morocco and crossed into Ceuta on Thursday and Friday in an unprecedented influx that triggered a security crisis in the city. Around 48,000 had voluntarily returned by Friday evening, according to the Spanish Interior Ministry.

Speaking to RT, Jay described the influx as a possible test by Rabat to determine how Spain and the enclave’s residents would react to an attempt to claim it for Morocco.

“Perhaps they were trying to test the waters to see what would happen. Could the 84,000 Spanish residents there pack up and leave? Would that be a possibility? Could Morocco just simply take that territory, which they consider to be theirs?” Jay suggested.

Jay also argued that Israeli support for Rabat could eventually give the West and its allies greater control over the strategically vital Strait of Gibraltar.

The allegation echoes claims by Iran that Washington and West Jerusalem helped coordinate the latest migrant surge to punish Spain for its Middle East policies. Neither country has acknowledged involvement.

Watch the RT interview below:

The outlines of a new Western collective are beginning to emerge and at its center is Western Europe, for which the Russian threat has become a source of unity in a period of upheaval and uncertainty. To avoid direct confrontation, Ukraine is being enlisted as a willing proxy, while a common military-industrial system is being built around supporting it, above all through the production of drones.

The long-term argument is that this will also strengthen Western Europe’s own defense capabilities, and assistance to Ukraine can therefore be presented to the public not as money spent on someone else, but as an investment in their own security.

Across the Atlantic stands a powerful patron that’s reducing its direct involvement without withdrawing entirely, but the United States remains prepared to provide support when necessary, increasingly on a fee-for-service basis. At the same time, Washington is using conflicts in the Old World to test its own military and technological approaches.

This arrangement is unstable, but there’s little point in expecting a permanent structure to emerge because the world has entered a phase in which almost everything is temporary.

Military confrontation with Russia is an essential part of this model and without it, the political logic holding Western Europe together begins to weaken, so governments will therefore try to preserve the current situation for as long as possible.

Talk of negotiations with Russia should not be taken too seriously because from the European perspective, the only acceptable discussion is one in which Moscow abandons its objectives.

The US has less invested in maintaining this state of affairs, but it also suffers little inconvenience from it, since it’s no longer bearing the principal costs.

The Ukrainian leadership, whether the current rulers or any plausible successor, is unlikely to change course, because it’s got nowhere to retreat. More importantly, the role of ‘spearhead against Russia’ is Kiev’s only realistic route into the Western system, given that more conventional paths to full membership in the Western community are closed to a country in its present position.

History shows that a united West is neither permanent nor stable, and even if an impression of permanence was created by the Cold War, that period was exceptional.

No one can yet say what form the Western community will take after the present transformation of the international system and demographic changes within Western societies add another layer of uncertainty.

But during this transitional period, the united West, and above all a united Western Europe, will attempt to preserve itself through confrontation with Russia, and that reality must always be kept in mind.

This article is Part 3 in Fyodor Lukyanov’s series analyzing the impact of the perceived threat of Russia and the Ukraine conflict on the cohesion of the collective West. Read Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.

The US has pressured several African states to withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC), including by threatening consequences for governments that refuse, Le Monde reported on Tuesday.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio formally launched the campaign last month, declaring that Washington would dismantle the ICC “brick by brick, if necessary.” He said countries benefiting from cooperation with US law enforcement, the military, or Washington’s “security umbrella” should reject the court’s authority over American officials and service members.

The US is not an ICC member and intensified its campaign after the court issued arrest warrants in November 2024 for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Washington has imposed sanctions on several ICC officials.

Uganda received a letter from Washington on July 24 containing “an ultimatum telling us to leave [the court] or face consequences,” an unnamed Ugandan source told the French newspaper. Kampala has so far resisted the demand, the source added.

The pressure on Chad was publicly documented before its withdrawal. At Washington’s request, US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Frank W. Garcia Jr. called Chadian Foreign Minister Abdoulaye Sabre Fadoul on July 23, according to Chad’s Foreign Ministry.

During the call, Garcia raised US concerns about the ICC and asked the Central African state to reconsider its membership in the Rome Statute. Chad said the request would be examined by the relevant authorities.

Four days after the call, Chad formally notified the UN of its withdrawal. The US Bureau of African Affairs welcomed the decision, praising N’Djamena for joining countries “reclaiming their sovereignty from this flawed institution.”

Venezuela and Chad announced their withdrawals in July, following Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, which jointly denounced the court as an “instrument of neocolonial repression.” Their departure takes effect one year after formal notification and does not remove the ICC’s jurisdiction over crimes committed while they were members.

Established under the Rome Statute in 1998 and operational since 2002, the ICC says it serves as a court of last resort for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. It has 125 member states, while other major non-members include Russia, China, Israel, and India.

The theft of at least $89 million in cryptocurrency that was supposedly safely stored in high-security hardware wallets has prompted the producer to warn that a “new AI paradigm” is redefining cybersecurity.

Hardware wallets are physical devices that store the private keys needed to access cryptocurrency and have long been considered safer than leaving digital assets on exchanges.
Last week, however, users of some Coldcard wallets saw their funds drained by unidentified perpetrators in a series of attacks.

The theft was unusual because the attackers managed to determine users’ keys after discovering that the wallets’ algorithm did not generate sufficiently random numbers. The devices themselves were not hacked and were not connected to the Internet, as is typical with so-called cold storage.

“We believe this is a sober reality of the new AI paradigm,” Rodolfo Novak, CEO of the Canadian company Coinkite Inc., wrote Friday in a message apologizing for the flaw in Coldcard devices.

“AI-assisted code review can now find latent bugs at a speed that is outpacing even the industry’s most seasoned experts,” he added. “If your firmware is open-source or has ever been public, assume it’s already being read by attackers and defenders alike.”

Coinkite issued its first warning to customers on Thursday, urging them to spread the word that users needed to update the affected firmware, originally released in March 2021, and move their Bitcoin to new accounts protected by newly generated seeds.

Please treat this as urgent. Migrate your funds. Follow the advisory for your model, upgrade your device, generate a new seed, and carefully move your funds.

Help spread the word, especially to people who are less online and may not see this update.

The threat is still ongoing. https://t.co/cbJxJles8x

— COLDCARD (@COLDCARDwallet) August 4, 2026

By Sunday, digital financial platform Galaxy said it had identified three separate waves of attacks against Coldcard users, resulting in the theft of 1,367.05 BTC, worth about $88.6 million at the time. On Monday, it warned of a likely fourth attack and estimated that the losses could rise to 2,055 BTC, valued at roughly $130 million.

The incident demonstrated that hardware wallets carry risks of their own and are not necessarily safer than centralized cryptocurrency storage services. Some industry observers remain hopeful that the transparent nature of blockchain transactions will make it more difficult for the thieves to convert the stolen assets into cash.

Listen… Coldcard hackers:

You may have acquired roughly 1,500 BTC.

But spending it is a completely different challenge.

Every transaction will be watched.
Every movement will be analyzed.
Every attempt to cash out will attract attention.

Bitcoin remembers.

If your goal was…

— Shagun 💰 (@shaguncrypto) August 2, 2026

“If your goal was wealth there may still be one path that leaves everyone better off,” one such commentator urged. “Return the funds. Accept a negotiated security bounty with CoinKite.”

A cargo ship was reportedly hit in the Strait of Hormuz by an “unknown projectile” overnight. The incident occurred after US President Donald Trump declared that he was giving Iran its “last chance before decapitation” to sign a deal on his terms.

Control over the strait, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil passes, has become the focal point of the conflict since Washington launched its war against Iran in late February. Tehran has rejected Trump’s claims that his efforts to extract concessions through a naval blockade of Iranian ports and threats of overwhelming military action are leading to progress towards a diplomatic solution.

The incident occurred off the coast of Oman in the narrow waterway, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) monitoring agency reported late on Monday. Reuters later identified the ship as the Liberia-flagged dry bulk ship Minoan Pioneer, citing industry sources. A sailor is reportedly missing after a hit on the engine room, which prompted a full evacuation of the crew.

Separate reports from Kuwait said that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) attacked a US military base in the north of the country overnight. Tehran has not claimed responsibility for either incident.

Initial reports of an Iranian attack in northern Kuwait. pic.twitter.com/kun7ttfTaI

— Ariel Oseran أريئل أوسيران (@ariel_oseran) August 3, 2026

Earlier on Monday, Trump said his latest decision to call off attacks on Iran over the weekend was intended to give Tehran an opportunity “to sign a good document.”

“I want to give them every last chance before decapitation,” he said after journalists at the White House pointed out that it was at least the fifth time he had said he was canceling military operations to facilitate negotiations.

“I’m not going to let him charge. Anybody’s going to charge, we’ll charge. We have total control,” he asserted.

Tehran reiterated Monday that it would continue responding to the US blockade. Mohsen Rezaei, a senior adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, rejected Trump’s claims that talks were ongoing.

“The negotiations are at a deadlock and Trump must break this deadlock,” the Iranian official told journalists. He added that if the US escalates hostilities, Iran will “expand the war beyond the Persian Gulf.”

Tehran insists that no ship may pass through the Strait of Hormuz without its permission. It has also said that the route must be open to either all nations, including Iran, or none. The Iranian military has also attacked American military assets across the Middle East while severely restricting traffic through the strait, creating pressure on the global economy.

India is looking to expand cooperation in mining and critical minerals with Uzbekistan as the two countries, with historical connections that ran through the ancient Silk Road trade routes, deepen their strategic partnership.

New Delhi has been looking to secure its supply of critical minerals amid the trade tensions that have disrupted supply chains globally. Rare earths and rare-earth magnets are critical components in green energy transition, going into everything from wind turbines to electric vehicles. China currently dominates much of the rare earth trade and rare-earth magnet production in the world.

India has expanded its search for reliable rare-earth supplies recently, with state-owned miner IREL seeking samples from Myanmar – which produces half of the world’s supply – and a deposit owned by Russia’s Rosneft in Siberia.

Uzbekistan foreign minister Bakhtiyor Saidov, who is on a four-day visit to New Delhi, said during a meeting with his Indian counterpart S. Jaishankar: “The special instruction to me personally and to my whole delegation is to visit your country to prepare (for) the upcoming visit of Prime Minister [Narendra Modi] to Uzbekistan.”

📹 PM Modi's Next Stop: Uzbekistan?

🇺🇿 Foreign Minister says his four-day India visit is aimed at preparing for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's upcoming trip to Uzbekistan, underscoring the growing momentum in bilateral ties. https://t.co/UmYTxxguBy pic.twitter.com/SK73hn120s

— RT_India (@RT_India_news) August 4, 2026

Saidov called India his country’s reliable and “most important strategic and trade partner in South Asia.” India has strategic partnerships with Uzbekistan and other Central Asian nations – all former Soviet republics – as they face common challenges like terrorism and drug trafficking. 

“Uzbekistan presents opportunities for Indian investment in mining, while cooperation in textiles can benefit from Uzbekistan’s cotton production strengths and India’s expertise in manufacturing, design and global markets,” Goyal said.  

Indian President Droupadi Murmu, while meeting with Saidov, noted the two countries’ “shared heritage in architecture, language, cuisine, music, and religious traditions.”

The two countries also share robust educational and professional exchange ties, with more than 16,000 Indian students currently pursuing higher studies in Uzbekistan. “They act as a bridge between the two countries and foster mutual understanding and strong people-to-people ties,” the Indian president said.

Spain and Morocco have traded blame over last week’s deadly mass crossings into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta, with Madrid accusing Rabat of allowing the migrant influx and a Moroccan government source arguing that a Spanish court ruling helped trigger the crisis.

On Monday, Ceuta regional president Juan Jesus Vivas accused Morocco of having “encouraged and permitted” the influx. Spanish media have also reported that the country’s intelligence services believe Rabat allowed and subsequently exploited the crossings, although they do not believe it planned them.

At a briefing in Rabat later the same day, the Moroccan government source said a July 8 Spanish court ruling restricting the immediate return of migrants reaching Ceuta and Melilla by sea had weakened a key deterrent against irregular migration. The official said trafficking networks exploited the ruling and amplified it through social media, arguing that Spain could not expect Morocco to compensate for legal decisions that weakened its own migration controls by preventing migrants from reaching Spanish territory.

“We are neither Europe’s policeman nor its caretaker; we are a sovereign partner, not a subcontractor,” the source said, calling for the rules governing migration cooperation to be revised, according to the state news agency MAP.

Spain estimates that around 69,500 migrants have returned to Morocco since the crossings began, while Rabat says approximately 40,000 entered Ceuta. The two governments also dispute the death toll: Spanish authorities have reported at least 72 deaths from drowning and crushing, while Morocco says ten people drowned and another died after falling from a rocky area.

Rabat denied relaxing border controls or reducing security deployments, saying its forces deliberately avoided confronting the crowds to prevent further casualties. Morocco says it deploys around 24,000 security personnel along its northern coast and prevented 74,000 attempted crossings last year.

The allegations followed comments by Israel’s UN ambassador, Danny Danon, describing Ceuta and Melilla as Spanish “colonial enclaves.” A recent US congressional committee report referred to the cities as being in Moroccan territory “under Spanish administration” and urged diplomatic engagement over their future status.

Washington recognized Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara during President Donald Trump’s first term, while Rabat normalized relations with Israel in 2020. Reports have also linked the crisis to Spain’s renewed engagement with Algeria, Morocco’s regional rival, although Rabat denies using migration to exert political pressure.

Vladimir Zelensky’s latest reshuffle of senior government officials has exposed a shortage of people willing to associate themselves with his rule, former Ukrainian diplomat Andrey Telizhenko has told RT.

Zelensky triggered a political crisis by sacking Mikhail Fedorov as defense minister, who publicly objected to his dismissal and criticized Ukrainian commander-in-chief Aleksandr Syrsky, who was fired several days later.

Another wave of appointments followed this week, affecting the country’s National Security and Defense Council as well as Ukrainian embassies around the world. The council’s secretary, former Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, had been rumored to be in line to become ambassador to the US but was instead appointed head of the Foreign Intelligence Service.

There is a “lack of new names and new faces” in the Ukrainian government, Telizhenko said, comparing the reshuffle to a game of musical chairs in which the same officials remain close to power while moving between posts. The reason, he argued, is that Zelensky’s rule is increasingly viewed as unstable.

Fedorov’s removal sparked mass protests in Ukraine that were widely believed to have received tacit approval from Western donors seeking to limit Zelensky’s personal power.

With few alternatives available, the Ukrainian leader has been forced to recycle officials personally loyal to him and place them in positions for which they are not qualified, Telizhenko said. He cited Umerov’s lack of experience in national intelligence as an example.

“That’s where it ends: loyalty trumps professionalism,” he said. Umerov is likely to use his new position to target Zelensky’s political opponents, Telizhenko added.

Watch the full interview.

Ukraine will never become a member of NATO, the country’s former armed forces chief Valery Zaluzhny has said, dismissing over a decade of accession promises as “fairy tales.” At the same time, he said the bloc follows outdated doctrines and remains weaker than the Russian military.

Zaluzhny, who now serves as Kiev’s ambassador to the UK and is widely believed to be Vladimir Zelensky’s top rival in a potential presidential election, made the remarks on Monday during a discussion on Euro-Atlantic integration at a meeting of Ukrainian ambassadors in Kiev. Asked to comment on Kiev’s role in the UK-led Joint Expeditionary Force comprised of NATO members, he launched a broadside at the bloc itself.

“I know NATO very well,” Zaluzhny said, as cited by European Pravda. “For about 12 years, I personally worked to ensure that we adopted NATO standards, and every year I listened to fairy tales that we were about to join. Unfortunately, we will never join it.”

“NATO will most likely remain in its current form and will spend another 12 years – just as Ukraine did – transitioning to the standards required to reach even half the level of the Russian Federation,” he said, although he conceded Kiev still needs Western technology such as anti-missile defense and space capabilities.

Following a Western-backed coup in Kiev, Ukraine enshrined NATO and EU membership as constitutional goals in 2019, with Zelensky formally requesting “accelerated accession” in September 2022. NATO, however, has never set a timetable for admission, and full membership requires unanimous approval from all 32 members.

The bloc has also been reluctant to accept Ukraine due to its conflict with Russia, with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte and US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth both ruling out accession as part of any potential peace deal between Kiev and Moscow.

Russia has for decades seen NATO’s eastward expansion as an existential threat and has ruled out Ukrainian membership of the bloc under any settlement. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said that preventing NATO troops from entering Ukraine is one of Russia’s key goals in the conflict.

At least five people have been killed and ten others wounded in an overnight Ukrainian drone strike in Moscow Region, local governor Andrey Vorobyev has said.

The strike comes as Kiev has intensified long-range attacks on Russian civilian infrastructure. On Monday, a Ukrainian drone struck a crowded beach in the Black Sea resort city of Gelendzhik, killing at least seven people, including three children, and wounding dozens more.

In a post on Telegram on Tuesday morning, Vorobyev said air defenses in the region had repelled another Ukrainian drone raid.

An industrial area in the village of Novoselki near the town of Chekhov, located some 74 km south of Moscow, was affected the most as a result of the attack, he added.

“Sadly, there have been fatalities and injuries... I extend my sincere condolences to the families and loved ones of the deceased,” Vorobyev wrote.

One of the wounded remains in serious condition, with doctors describing the injuries of seven others as moderate, the governor said. Two more people declined hospitalization after being examined by doctors, he added.

The victims sustained shrapnel and blast injuries, fractures, and soft-tissue and chest wounds, Vorobyev wrote.

Fires broke out at several locations in the industrial zone, including at a warehouse, while a power substation and an administrative building were also damaged by drone debris, the governor added.

In the village of Solnyshkovo, a drone damaged a private home and a vehicle, the governor said. No one was injured, he added.

Air defenses also intercepted incoming UAVs in several other parts of Moscow Region, according to the governor.

A total of 49 civilians have been killed and more than 340 others wounded in Ukrainian attacks inside Russia over the past week, Russian Ambassador-at-Large Rodion Miroshnik said on Tuesday. The majority of the victims – 95% – were hit by drones, he stressed. It’s not clear if the figures included the fatalities and injuries from the strike in Novoselki.

The Russian authorities have decried Kiev’s drone raids as terrorist attacks deliberately targeting civilians. One of the deadliest incidents in recent months happened in May, when several waves of Ukrainian UAVs struck a student dormitory in the Donbass town of Starobelsk, partially collapsing the five-story building and killing 21 people, mainly teenage girls.

The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services has confirmed that two people died after contracting Cyclospora, a diarrhea-inducing parasite that has been spreading across the US. They are the first fatalities linked to the outbreak, which has affected at least 45 states.

The outbreak, which began in early May, has become the largest ever recorded in the country, with more than 18,000 confirmed or suspected cases, according to the latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The actual number of infections is believed to be much higher because many cases remain undiagnosed. The outbreak has already far surpassed the previous record of around 4,700 cases, set in 2019.

Michigan announced the first two deaths linked to the parasite on Monday. Both victims had underlying health conditions that may have increased the severity of the illness. Cyclosporiasis, which causes severe diarrhea “with frequent and sometimes explosive bowel movements,” as well as gas, bloating, stomach cramps, nausea, and vomiting, is rarely fatal, according to the CDC.

The agency said the supplier implicated in the outbreak, Taylor Farms de Mexico, had removed all iceberg lettuce from the US market. At the time, it was unclear whether the contaminated food had been distributed to other restaurant chains or retailers.

The parasite is endemic to Mexico and other tropical and subtropical countries. There is no evidence that it can spread directly from person to person.

Apple said it briefly removed the popular messenger Telegram from the App Store over child sexual abuse material on the platform.

Telegram, which claims more than 1 billion monthly active users, has long faced accusations in several countries of lax content moderation and failing to crack down on illegal activity.

Users began reporting problems downloading the app on Tuesday shortly after 01:00 GMT. The app returned about an hour later. “Telegram has been restored on the App Store and should soon be available again for all users,” the company said without elaborating.

Telegram’s official account on X wrote: “Reports of my demise are greatly exaggerated.”

Hours later, Apple said in a statement to 9to5Mac that Telegram was removed after a review found content that violated the company’s “strict guidelines prohibiting child sexual abuse material.”

Last week, Australia’s telecommunications regulator initiated civil proceedings against Telegram for allegedly failing to detect and remove “pro-terror material” from the platform, including videos of terrorist executions and mass shootings.

Last month, Russia placed Telegram’s Russian-born founder Pavel Durov on a wanted list, designating him as a person involved in terrorism and extremism.

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) alleges that Durov had failed to take down a dating chatbot used by Ukraine to recruit young Russians to commit arson and other forms of sabotage.

Durov, who has lived outside Russia since 2014, said he was put on the list “for refusing its demands for mass surveillance and censorship on Telegram.”

Russia first blocked Telegram in 2018 but lifted the restrictions two years later, citing the company’s cooperation with authorities’ efforts to combat terrorism. The country banned the service again in February 2026, citing violations of the law.

Durov was briefly detained at an airport outside Paris in 2024 after French authorities accused him of allowing organized crime to proliferate on Telegram. He later claimed that France’s  intelligence services had tried to pressure him into enacting political censorship, including a crackdown on conservative voices during Romania’s contentious 2025 presidential elections. The country has denied his claims.

The messenger was briefly blocked in Brazil in March 2022 and April 2023, after authorities accused the platform of failing to curb the spread of misinformation and neo-Nazi chat groups.

A Turkish-operated cargo ship was hit in an apparent Ukrainian drone attack off the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk late on Monday.

According to Türkiye’s Directorate General of Maritime Affairs (DGM), the Cameroon-flagged Nadezhda was sailing from Novorossiysk to the Turkish port of Samsun when it was attacked by drones.

Russian vessels evacuated the crew from the ship, which sustained damage to its bow and living quarters, the DGM said. Initial reports indicated that three people on board were injured.

3 Ağustos 2026 tarihinde, Novorossiysk Limanı’ndan Samsun’a seyir hâlinde bulunan NADEZHDA isimli Ro-Ro gemisinin, Novorossiysk’e yaklaşık 20 deniz mili açıkta dron saldırısına uğradığı bilgisi alınmıştır.

Gemide, 13’ü Türk vatandaşı olmak üzere toplam 22 mürettebat… pic.twitter.com/yb1pDYmCBE

— DENİZCİLİK GENEL MÜDÜRLÜĞÜ (@denizcilikgm) August 3, 2026

The Nadezhda had a crew of 22, including 13 Turkish citizens, according to the DGM. Turkish media reported that the vessel was operated by Samsun-based Kalyoncu Shipping and had been carrying fruit and vegetables from Türkiye to Russia.

Rusya'ya sebze taşıyordu: Türk Ro-ro gemisine saldırı!

4 mürettebat yaralandıhttps://t.co/JELlPdKDyI pic.twitter.com/JQVWqZMd03

— Cumhuriyet (@cumhuriyetgzt1) August 3, 2026

Although Turkish authorities did not identify the perpetrator, the ship’s captain, Yalcin Sahin, was quoted by Turkish media as saying that six or seven Ukrainian drones had struck the vessel. Ukraine has repeatedly targeted civilian ships near Russia’s Black Sea and Sea of Azov coasts, as well as tankers off the Turkish coast.

Ukrainian attack drones struck the Russian ro/ro vehicle carrier Nadezhda last night off the coast of Novorossiysk, severely damaging the vessel and setting it ablaze. pic.twitter.com/e44P6wsfNX

— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) August 3, 2026

Ukraine has stepped up attacks on cargo ships in recent months in an effort to disrupt Russian logistics. Russia has also increased strikes on vessels it says were transporting military equipment to Ukraine.

Iran called off retaliatory strikes against Ukraine over last month’s attack on a cargo ship in the Caspian Sea after Kiev apologized, a senior adviser to Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has said.

Ukraine struck the Iranian vessel with drones on July 25, killing one sailor, and claimed that it was transporting military equipment to Russia. Iran said the ship was carrying civilian cargo and denounced the attack as an act of aggression. Russia identified the vessel as the dry cargo ship Ana.

Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Major General Mohsen Rezaee said on Monday that Tehran had selected targets in Ukraine. “We were set to strike three sites in Ukraine, but canceled the attack following Ukraine’s apology,” Rezaee said, as quoted by Press TV.

According to Fars, Rezaee said Kiev had claimed that it attacked the ship by mistake and that Iran had decided to investigate the claim. “Even if it was a mistake, however, there will still be consequences,” he said.

Sibiga initially dismissed Iran’s threats of retaliation as “unjustified and groundless,” but later struck a conciliatory tone, saying that Kiev had “never intended to target civilian vessels or people.”

Russia described the attack on the ship as illegal under international law and accused Ukraine of attempting to “expand the geography of its terrorist activities.”

Iran has denied providing military aid to Russia apart from supplying a “small number” of Shahed-136 kamikaze drones before the Ukraine conflict escalated in February 2022. Moscow has insisted that all its Geran-2 drones, believed to be modeled on the Shahed-136, are produced domestically. Russia has also denied sending weapons to Iran during the US-Israeli bombing campaign against the country.

Poland has appealed a Belgian court ruling ordering it to pay for millions of Covid-19 vaccine doses it declined to accept under a controversial EU vaccine purchase deal.

The case stems from multibillion-euro contracts for Covid shots negotiated by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen with manufacturers Pfizer and BioNTech during the pandemic. The agreements later became the focus of the so-called ‘Pfizergate’ scandal.

In a statement released on Monday, the Polish Health Ministry said the government had appealed the judgment and requested that its enforcement be suspended pending the court’s review. It argued that the lower court had failed to consider all the “relevant factual and legal circumstances” but did not disclose further details.

Pfizer defended the ruling, telling Politico it reflected “the importance of the contractual obligations that underpinned a successful European pandemic response” and that the company had shown “significant flexibility” toward member states before pursuing legal enforcement.

Von der Leyen has faced scrutiny over her role in the vaccine deals, with opponents accusing her of concealing details of negotiations with Pfizer and AstraZeneca. She has come under particular criticism for refusing to disclose or preserve text messages she reportedly exchanged with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla during the talks. The controversy prompted a no-confidence motion in the European Parliament last year, which she survived.

A Ukrainian national has been arrested after stabbing a Polish woman in Wroclaw, police have said, as public frustration with Ukrainian migrants continues to grow in the EU state.

In recent weeks, Poland has been hit by a string of violent incidents between locals and Ukrainian migrants. On several occasions, Polish nationals allegedly confronted migrants over speaking Ukrainian in public, as well as for having questionable nationalist-charged tattoos visible.

The latest incident occurred in the southwestern city of Wroclaw on Saturday, when an 18-year-old Ukrainian stabbed a 30-year-old Polish woman, according to local police. The attacker fled the scene and was apprehended the next day.

Law enforcement did not reveal any further details about the incident, confirming only that the victim was hospitalized in a life-threatening condition. The motives behind the attack were not immediately clear, while local media reports indicated the incident happened at the entrance hall of a multi-story apartment building.

Ukraine’s consulate in Wroclaw acknowledged the incident, confirming the attacker was a migrant from the country. “We strongly condemn all manifestations of violence and aggression, regardless of who is their perpetrator and who is the victim,” the consulate said in a statement.

Poland’s main opposition party, Law and Justice, condemned the incident, with its vice-president, Przemyslaw Czarnek, taking jabs at Prime Minister Donald Tusk for staying “silent” on the attack and not doing enough to ensure the “safety of Poles.”

Last week, Tusk condemned the rise of anti-Ukrainian sentiment in the country, lamenting the fact that “more and more” violent incidents targeting migrants from Ukraine have been occurring across Poland “We must wage a resolute fight against this violence, because thugs, hooligans, and this culture of violence are becoming increasingly brazen and insolent – and also because they have received political support,” Tusk said on Tuesday.

Warsaw has been a key backer of Kiev in the ongoing conflict with Russia, as well as one of the top destinations for Ukrainian migrants. The ties between the two countries, however, have gradually worsened over various issues, including cheap Ukrainian agricultural produce harming Polish farmers, as well as longstanding tension stemming from the two countries’ fraught shared history. The latest major blow to relations came from Kiev’s recent veneration of Nazi collaborators involved in the mass killing of Poles during World War II.

The record migrant influx into Spain’s North African exclave of Ceuta has fueled political divisions in the country, with the opposition criticizing the government’s handling of the crisis. Madrid has accused Morocco of “weaponizing” migration.

Thousands rallied in Madrid and Ceuta on Sunday, demanding Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s resignation after nearly 60,000 people entered the exclave from Morocco on Thursday and Friday. In Ceuta, rallies by right-wing politicians and activists drew counterprotests from local residents, including members of the city’s Muslim community.

Sanchez rejected calls from Ceuta’s local authorities to declare a national emergency, instead deploying 60 troops – a move dismissed by right-wing European politicians as inadequate.

Santiago Abascal, the leader of Spain’s right-wing Vox party, described the mass border crossing as an “invasion” and an “act of war” orchestrated by Morocco and enabled by Sanchez. He blamed the Socialist government for weak border controls and called for the frontier with Morocco to be permanently militarized.

The crisis also deepened divisions across the EU. While Brussels responded with formal statements of solidarity, several European leaders instead criticized Sanchez’s migration policies, with some calling for Spain to face consequences within the Schengen Area. None publicly endorsed Madrid’s claim that Morocco had instigated the crisis.

Migration has remained one of the EU’s defining political issues since the 2015 refugee crisis. While Brussels has sought to tighten migration rules and accelerate deportations, Sanchez has defended immigration as essential to addressing labor shortages and demographic decline. His government recently granted legal status to around 500,000 undocumented migrants and expanded pathways for them to obtain work permits.

Spain’s disagreements with the US and Israel over the Gaza conflict and strikes on Iran have also prompted broader speculation about the crisis. Iran’s embassy in Kenya alleged that the mass crossing had been orchestrated by the US and Israel to pressure Madrid over its Middle East policies.