Did you know that the Irish gifted ice hockey to the world? Well, it’s between ourselves and the Scots, but everywhere I went in Canada, hockey experts and fans would regale me with how Irish soldiers, serving with the British Army, kept their hurling, Ireland’s ancient sport, going in the winter by converting ice-covered ponds and fields for play. Unable to use a hide bound small ball, they eventually settled on using lumps of coal that would be visible against the white playing surface. Vladislav Tretiak, the greatest goalkeeper of all time, reminded me of the Irish contribution to his beloved game every time we’ve met.

“Irish gave a lot of players to hockey,” he told me in Ulyanovsk, “and they’re proud of their roots.”

I would like that in giving the sport to the world, we Irish have therefore contributed to one of the most important processes in this increasingly divided world of ours – sports diplomacy. And, as always, ice hockey is leading the way.

In 1972, Canada and the Soviet Union played an eight-game series, which Tretiak starred in, with the Canucks winning 4-3, with one game tied. Soviet mastery and surprising grit stood up to Canadian violence and rock ‘em, sock ‘em hockey. It was a watershed moment at a time when sport built a bridge, with Ottawa even establishing an International Sports Relations Desk.

“The Canadians were tough, my God, they were also very good players. We thought they were born in skates,” Tretiak noted in an interview with Capital Sports in 2018.

Phil Esposito, who scored on Tretiak for the triumphant Canadians, told me in 2024 that “it opened up a direct dialogue that continues to today.” He added that “sport has a unique way of bringing people together.”

Brendan Shanahan, born to Irish parents and who would win an Olympic Gold in 2002, as well as three Stanley Cups with Detroit Red Wings, told Capital Sports in 2019 that “it [Summit Series] was a wake up call to Canada, one we listened to.” Shanahan played alongside Russia’s Viacheslav Fetisov for two of his Stanley Cup wins, a player who led the way for Soviet players to cross to the NHL.

“He was nearly forty when he was with us [at Detroit] but he was just special. And we had [Igor] Larionov, another of those early pioneers. And then the younger guys like [Vladimir] Konstantinov, Slava Kozlov, and Sergei Federov. They all grew up inspired by it [Summit Series].”

Sports diplomacy led to the influx of Russian players to the NHL and today, it’s still working, but in reverse.

Breaking the ice with the KHL

When I first went to top level ice hockey in Russia, in November 2007, it was the final season of the Russian Super League. I ventured out to the Sokolniki Arena in Moscow to watch Spartak, a club just back after a year out of hockey due to financial issues. It was a far cry from the NHL games I watched in Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, and New York. In fact, it wasn’t even close to the 2nd tier American Hockey League games I attended in 1996-7 in such Canadian hotspots as…St. John or Fredericton, New Brunswick. In fact, the attendance, presentation, atmosphere, and overall vibe wasn’t a patch on the now-defunct Junior League Charlottetown Abbies with whom I worked.

It didn’t get much better once the Kontintental Hockey League (KHL) came into being in 2008. In 2011, working a CSKA Moscow game at their old home in the now demolished CSKA Ice Palace, I felt like I was in a time warp. I wandered from the ‘press area’ to find something to eat and drink, and there were a couple of tables with women behind them selling plastic cups of tea and ‘butter brot’ [a piece of bread with some form of meat on it].

Working the KHL beat from 2017-2022 for Capital Sports, I witnessed the birth of a product that sat comfortably between the OTT NHL and the delightful DEL [German Ice Hockey League]. The KHL has come on so much that it’s not only unwanted or over the hill North Americans or Europeans coming in for a pay day, it’s now an alternative, and right now that is a boon for sports diplomacy.

Building bridges

Hudacek arrived at Sibir Novosibirsk from Sweden as a highly rated, but eccentric goalie. The Slovak performed a ‘HudaShow’ after each game, win, lose, or tie. He was pretty handy between the pipes, though. A triple Slovak champ, World Championship silver medalist, and best keeper in both Slovakia and Sweden, it was in 2018 that I first got to interview him as part of a special series of Capital Sports shows hosted at Moscow’s Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center called Champ Talks.

“I don’t think of politics, just people,” he told the live audience during our live show, “hockey is more important and a connection.”

He would join us a couple more times on our radio show before leaving Spartak in 2021. He returned to the KHL in 2022-23 to play for Kazakh club Barys Astana. I asked him if he was worried about falling foul of sanctions? “For what, being a normal person and not a politician?” Was his response.

In 2024, when Irish-Canadian defenseman Trevor Murphy, then with Sibir Novosibirsk, was asked if he was worried about playing in Russia? He shook his head and told my colleague from Capital Sports, “Why should I be? I’m playing hockey. Just playing hockey.” Now with SKA St. Petersburg, Murphy has maintained that attitude as he enters his eighth season in the league.

According to a leading New York-based hockey player agent, no player or coach he’s spoken with has thought twice about repercussions of playing in Russia. While the 2026-27 season is still young, between 48-52 North American players are currently on club rosters. In terms of coaches, Canadians Guy Boucher and Mitch Love and American Scott Gordon are all at KHL clubs Avangard Omsk, Traktor Chelyabinsk, and Shanghai Dragons respectively. 

The player agent, who also represents coaches, says that there is an issue for coaches coming from North America. “I’ve had clients who wanted to come to Russia, but were warned by figures in Canada and the US not to. Players, they’ll go, but coaches, it’s a bit tougher.”

Fan Respect

Ilya (38) is a fan of Traktor Chelyabinsk who lives in the Chelyabinsk Region town of Kasli. Hockey is what “helps survive life.” He works night shifts as a security guard and during his days off as a taxi driver. His vehicle has enough Traktor merchandise to let you know he’s a supporter of the hockey club.

“I was born in Chelyabinsk and it’s my team. People say we don’t have much to hope for [in the region], so hockey is most important thing. I go to games, every year ten, and bring my son. I don’t see him most of the day as he’s in school, I work, but the drives to hockey, then games, then coming home, we [bond].”

I felt a tinge of sadness as he spoke, remembering my dad and I doing the same, but with our traditional sports in Ireland, and it brought home how important it is for kids and fathers to do things together. I told Ilya this and he brought up the “foreigners.”

“My father worked in a factory and he got me to hockey. Now I do the same. And my son, he’s twelve, and he sees online what people think of us [Russians] and then in our jersey we see Canadians and Americans. And I tell him, see, we’re not so bad, not all people hate us.”

Speaking with KHL fans in Russia and Belarus, they don’t see the North Americans or Europeans plying their trade in the league as outcasts, mercenaries, or anything other than regular hockey players coming to do a job. In itself, that is a major compliment.

What the future holds for ‘foreigners’

The KHL media department weren’t keen on speculating, though they did say that interest in the league abroad has remained stable. KHL beat reporters from Russian sports sites and newspapers have confirmed this and that contacts with colleagues in North America, especially, has not dimmed since 2022.

The New York-based agent, when I asked about the coming years, was equally positive.

“There are a limited number of places in the NHL and if you’re an ambitious player, you won’t drop down to Germany, or Sweden, or even the AHL, if you’re released, you’ll look at Russia and think, man, the salaries are good, the level is really high, and if I perform well enough, I can stay there and not be pumped and dumped like I would with an NHL organization.”

This is what Jordan Weal, a Canadian now with Dynamo Moscow, told us in 2022. “It’s more stable, because you can develop and play in one place, not get moved around the franchise or traded in a few minutes. There are more rights for players in a [contract] sense.”

As vital as it is to keep the pipeline of quality foreign imports is for the future of the KHL and Russian hockey, the bigger picture is that bridges built in 1972 are being maintained. If sport diplomacy helped open opportunities for dialogue between nations at a time when nuclear Armageddon was never more than a few minutes away, then hockey can offer us a new avenue for the meeting of peoples.

And once it all works out, you can thank the Irish for giving the world a winter sport that melted the old Cold War and put the new one on ice.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is addressing the 81st session of the UN General Assembly in New York, setting out Moscow’s position on global security and the emerging multipolar world order.

Lavrov arrived in New York earlier this week for a diplomatic marathon on the sidelines of the gathering, holding talks with senior officials from around the globe, including US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Grossi, and many others.

His General Assembly address follows a heated UN Security Council meeting on Ukraine earlier in the week, when he reiterated Moscow’s readiness for negotiations but rejected calls to halt military operations during talks, arguing that a pause would allow Kiev to regroup and rearm.

He added that the conflict has deeper roots in NATO expansion, the failure of the Minsk agreements, and the rejection of Russia’s security proposals to the US and NATO in 2021.

The General Debate is being held at UN Headquarters from September 22 to 28 as part of High-Level Week, with the theme: ‘Restoring trust, managing transformation: A United Nations that delivers for all’. Saturday’s address is the centerpiece of Lavrov’s visit. He will follow it up with a press conference later in the day.

Follow our live updates below.

Ukraine’s largest steel producer, ArcelorMittal Krivoy Rog, has halted production after repeated Russian missile strikes caused extensive damage to the plant, the company announced on Friday.

The Russian Defense Ministry has said that Moscow is targeting Ukrainian military and defense-related facilities and supporting infrastructure in response to Kiev’s escalating long-range attacks on Russian energy and industrial sites.

The steelworks, located in the central Ukrainian city of Krivoy Rog, also includes iron ore mining operations. Before the escalation of the conflict in 2022, it produced 4.9 million tons of steel annually.

ArcelorMittal said the facility had been hit four times over the past five weeks, most recently on September 21. The strikes caused extensive damage to production facilities, leaving the company unable to restart operations “in a safe and sustainable manner.” 

The shutdown follows stoppages at Zaporozhstal and Kamet Steel, both owned by Ukrainian metals giant Metinvest. Together with ArcelorMittal Krivoy Rog, the three plants accounted for about 90% of Ukraine’s steel output before Russian strikes brought production to a halt, according to the Financial Times.

“As of today, [Ukraine] doesn’t have a steel industry anymore,” Aleksandr Vodoviz, head of the CEO’s office at Metinvest, told the FT, adding that repairs could take “days, weeks, months, or years.” 

The Russian Defense Ministry said this week that it had struck the Krivoy Rog steelworks and other industrial facilities involved in Ukrainian military production. Other recent targets cited by the ministry include drone production and storage sites, power infrastructure, bridges, ports, warehouses, and logistics hubs.

Russia has condemned strikes on civilians as acts of terrorism, while maintaining that its forces only target military and defense-related facilities.

Two young women have been killed in a Ukrainian drone strike on a cafe in Kherson Region, Russia, Governor Vladimir Saldo has said, adding that a separate attack killed a truck driver nearby.

The drone raid struck the small town of Askania-Nova on Friday, hitting the Day-Night Cafe, he said in a Telegram post.

“The building was completely destroyed. Rescuers found the bodies of two young women, born in 2004 and 2006, under the rubble,” he wrote.

Two survivors, a man born in 1993 and a woman born in 2007, suffered shrapnel wounds and concussions and were rushed to a nearby hospital, he added.

Photos of the aftermath show the building completely destroyed.

The blast also partially knocked out the windows of a nearby residential block and severely damaged a car.

A separate Ukrainian strike killed the driver of a cargo truck carrying produce in the nearby town of Chaplinka, Saldo said, adding that Ukraine “is once again attacking purely civilian targets.”

The attacks came days after three humanitarian volunteers from Omsk Region were killed and another was wounded when their vehicle was struck by Ukrainian forces near Novobogdanovka in Zaporozhye Region.

Russian Ambassador-at-large Rodion Miroshnik called the attack a war crime, blaming it on Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky and accusing Kiev of “seeking to create unbearable living conditions in” the region, which it claims as its own.

Spanish soldiers have been filmed beating migrants in the country’s North African enclave of Ceuta, according to videos released and verified by a local news outlet, amid a major migration crisis gripping the region.

Since late July, Ceuta has been dealing with a migration crisis, after more than 72,000 people crossed over from Morocco. Although most were subsequently returned, thousands remained in the territory, many living in makeshift camps along the beaches, prompting local residents to stage demonstrations and call on the government to take action to address the situation.

The footage, released by El Diario on Friday, shows soldiers pursuing and assaulting migrants in several parts of Ceuta. In one video, a migrant is chased and beaten by several soldiers after they catch up with him. One shows two soldiers beating a migrant, and another shows soldiers striking migrants with batons and forcing them into a roadside ditch.

INVESTIGACIÓN | Los vídeos que confirman palizas de militares a migrantes en Ceuta https://t.co/w3c6QUK1Me Por @Gabriela_Schz pic.twitter.com/MKuz3Dnd7b

— elDiario.es (@eldiarioes) September 25, 2026

The news outlet also cited local residents who said they had seen or received other videos of military beatings. One resident described a Moroccan migrant who had his hair cut off by soldiers; others said the migrants should be removed if necessary but condemned the use of force.

Last week, El Diario reported testimonies from around 20 migrants who claimed that Spanish soldiers assaulted and mistreated them, prompting the government to announce an internal investigation. The authorities have not independently confirmed the alleged incidents.

‼️INVESTIGACIÓN | Los vídeos que confirman palizas de militares a migrantes en Ceutahttps://t.co/L3UsY7EcuS accede y verifica varios vídeos de agresiones de militares uniformados contra personas migrantes en Ceuta ocurridos en las últimas semanashttps://t.co/w3c6QUKzBM pic.twitter.com/PTqcKYYzrl

— elDiario.es (@eldiarioes) September 25, 2026

The Spanish government has condemned the assaults shown in the videos and reiterated its intention to launch an internal investigation into the allegations, the prime minister’s office told the publication.

The Defense Ministry reportedly declined to answer the news outlet’s questions about the specific incidents.

Local media outlets reported earlier this week that the ministry ordered military personnel deployed in the exclave to remove their names from their uniforms to “avoid further threats.” It reportedly began issuing pepper spray to soldiers in Ceuta as a self-defense measure, with use strictly limited to cases of aggression, violent resistance, and protection of military facilities.

OpenAI’s agents have leaked 53 images uploaded by ChatGPT users, the company has said, without specifying whether the pictures were AI-generated or depictions of real people, or when they were posted online.

The incident comes amid a series of cases in recent months involving autonomous AI agents, which can independently plan and carry out tasks using external tools. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have all revealed instances in which their models accessed real systems during testing, including coordinated cyberattacks against government resources.

In a post on X on Friday, OpenAI said most of the leaked pictures had been removed, adding that it was working with hosting providers to take down the remaining content.

The agents had access to the images because OpenAI relies on anonymized user data for part of its model-training process, Reuters reported on Friday, citing the company, its former employees and outside researchers.

In July, OpenAI disclosed what it described as an unprecedented cyber incident in which AI models gained open internet access during testing and attacked the infrastructure of Hugging Face, an open-source platform for machine learning, exploiting its vulnerabilities. 

Reuters reported at the time that one agent carried out hacking attempts for several days before OpenAI detected the activity and contacted the FBI. The agency later reported, citing researchers’ findings, that about 700 OpenAI agents had taken part in the attack and attempted to conceal their actions.

In August, OpenAI expanded its investigation into incidents involving autonomous AI agents as new cases of unauthorized activity emerged. By the end of the month, Axios, citing OpenAI research and independent experts, reported that roughly 1,200 agents had coordinated in an attack on Hugging Face. The agents reportedly appeared to know they were exceeding the test’s scope but continued without alerting human operators.

The incidents highlight a growing gap between the capabilities of AI models and developers’ ability to monitor and control their actions.

The “profound changes unseen in a century” often mentioned by Xi Jinping are no longer merely abstract concepts found in books; they represent the systemic collapse and restructuring currently experienced by the global system.

For centuries, the world operated under a singular order – dominated by the West, characterized by linear development and a hegemonic steady state – which established fixed power structures, rules of engagement, and development paradigms. As we enter the second quarter of the 21st century, this long-standing old order has reached a critical juncture marked by runaway entropy, the collapse of paradigms, and a civilizational transition.

This entropic shift of order is essentially a global transitional state where the rules of the old system fail, its structures loosen, and its momentum wanes, while a new system undergoes pluralistic growth and iterative restructuring without yet having fully crystallized. Unlike the traditional restructuring of global patterns seen in historical dynastic changes or great-power rivalries, the core transformation of this ‘once-in-a-century’ shift is driven by the convergence of three forces: the fundamental reshaping of technology, the shifting of geopolitical centers of gravity, and the escalation of strategic competition to higher dimensions. Together, these forces are driving a comprehensive, systemic iteration of global politics, military affairs, economics, public opinion, and governance.

Adopting a holistic perspective, this article systematically deconstructs the core characteristics, underlying operational logic, and certain future evolutionary trends of this global entropic shift. Moving beyond the interpretation of fragmented events, it identifies the fundamental laws and ultimate trajectory of the transformation of the global landscape in this new era.

Current global geopolitical conflicts, economic fluctuations, technological rivalries, and public opinion polarization are, in essence, concrete manifestations of this entropic shift in order. The steady-state equilibrium established by the traditional Western-centric order has completely disintegrated. The global landscape now exhibits four core characteristics: intensifying headwinds, accelerating fragmentation, the resonance of risks, and the generalization of strategic competition. Uncertainty, asymmetry, and cross-domain transmission have become the new normal of the global landscape.

First, geopolitical power has undergone complete decentralization, and the absolute advantages once held by traditional major powers have fully eroded.

The geopolitical logic that prevailed for a century – where victory was determined by sheer national scale, military force, or resource endowment – has become completely obsolete; technological democratization has emerged as the core variable reshaping regional landscapes.

In the core geopolitical regions of Eurasia and the Middle East, the large-scale deployment of artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons, and intelligent reconnaissance systems has drastically lowered the threshold for war and deterrence, effectively erasing the military ‘generation gap’ that once separated traditional major powers. Europe’s security landscape has moved beyond the US monopoly; France and Germany are pursuing strategic autonomy, while Russia is leveraging intelligent hardware to challenge Western military hegemony, leading to a stratification and fragmentation of regional power. The Middle East has completely shed the old order defined by resource dominance and control by major powers; small and medium-sized states – and even non-state actors like the Houthis – can now exert asymmetric influence and disrupt regional shipping and geopolitics using low-cost intelligent equipment, causing the absolute control once held by major powers to steadily crumble.

Geopolitical power is no longer tethered to territory, troop numbers, or resource volume; instead, it is anchored in technological computing power, intelligent warfare capabilities, and the pace of technological iteration. Global geopolitical rivalry has entered a new phase where small nations can act as counterweights and non-state actors can disrupt the status quo.

Second, strategic deterrence systems have become stratified and diffuse, shifting global security risks from great-power confrontation to a state of uncontrolled volatility across all domains.

The ‘balance of terror’ established by the rigid US-Soviet bipolar nuclear standoff during the Cold War has collapsed, marking a paradigm shift in the global nuclear landscape; nuclear weapons have evolved from an ultimate deterrent for total mutual restraint into leverage for controlling regional dynamics.

Nuclear deterrence is now clearly stratified: Top-tier nuclear powers maintain a strategic last-resort capability while avoiding direct hot wars; mid-tier nuclear states rely on limited arsenals for regional self-preservation; and non-nuclear states seek security under the umbrella of major powers. Nuclear rivalry has become instrumentalized and normalized, serving as a standard tool for major powers to draw red lines and signal strategic intent.

Meanwhile, nuclear risks have become widespread; while the likelihood of direct nuclear confrontation between major powers has declined, risks associated with proliferation, technology leaks, algorithmic miscalculation, and covert regional nuclear maneuvering are rising. Compounded by the deep integration of intelligent weaponry and nuclear technology, global security governance has shifted from a model of great-power checks and balances to a complex challenge of managing risks that are multidimensional, covert, and pervasive across all domains.

The most historic transformation in this round of upheaval is the holistic shift of the global geopolitical, economic, and civilizational center of gravity from the Atlantic to the Eurasian landmass and Asia as a whole, fundamentally overturning the underlying structure of Western global dominance that has persisted for five centuries.

Economically, the interconnected development of Asian blocs – including China, ASEAN, India, and the Middle East – is accelerating the formation of a pan-Eurasian economic cycle; the era of Western dominance over global supply chains, trade rules, and economic orders is drawing to a close, while the Global South is gaining a powerful voice in development discourse. Regarding security, the security landscapes of Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific are becoming deeply intertwined; the geopolitical value of the continental landmass is making a full comeback, while the reach and control of traditional maritime hegemony continue to wane.

In terms of civilization and governance, Asian concepts of diverse coexistence and mutually beneficial cooperation are countering the Western logic of zero-sum hegemony; the resurgence of diverse civilizations is breaking the Western monopoly on civilization, emerging multilateral mechanisms are gradually replacing traditional Western-led institutions, and the pluralistic nature of global governance is becoming increasingly distinct.

Fourth, the credibility of the hegemonic system has collapsed, and the Western-led global rules-based system has comprehensively failed.

Trump’s transactional ‘America First’ diplomacy served as the critical turning point that broke the back of American-style hegemony, definitively ending the era of absolute US unilateral global control. The foundations of US hegemony – built after World War II upon alliance systems, rule-setting dominance, and the provision of public goods – have been thoroughly dismantled; alliance credibility has been squandered, multilateral systems have eroded, and the globalized order has fractured, transforming the US from an order builder into an order destroyer.

Although the Biden administration briefly attempted remedial measures, these failed to restore US credibility. Global deficits in trust and institutional confidence regarding the US have become entrenched; unilateralism and protectionism run rampant, double standards in traditional international rules have become glaring, and global governance has fallen into a vacuum of entropic change – where old rules have failed but new ones have yet to be established.

Fifth, the dimension of state-level rivalry has undergone a comprehensive escalation, with the battle for perception and public opinion emerging as a core, invisible battlefield.

The proliferation of digital technology has fundamentally restructured the model of great-power competition, shifting the focus of rivalry from traditional physical confrontation to precision-targeted cognitive warfare. Technologies such as 5G, algorithmic recommendation, and big-data profiling have constructed an information ecosystem characterized by pervasive reach, the solidification of echo chambers, and emotional dominance.

Leveraging their long-standing monopoly on discourse, the US and the West continuously export polarizing narratives, manufacture bloc-based confrontations, and fracture social consensus in other nations. The digital era has dismantled the official barriers of traditional diplomacy; ordinary citizens and non-governmental entities have become pivotal nodes in the global strategic game, with public sentiment and perception directly influencing geopolitical dynamics and diplomatic decisions. Public opinion manipulation and the shaping of perceptions achieve the strategic goal of subduing the enemy without fighting, while cognitive polarization and public opinion divides have become major drivers of disorder in the global order.

Sixth, the key actors in the global economy and governance are undergoing a comprehensive transformation, completely shattering traditional monopolistic patterns.

In the economic sphere, the traditional globalization model – which prioritized efficiency above all – has become obsolete. Geopolitical conflicts, technological blockades, and investment barriers are forcing the global economy to shift toward a development logic that prioritizes resilience and regional self-containment; regional integration is replacing global integration as a core mechanism for hedging against risk, while emerging markets and the Global South have become key stabilizers of the global economy.

In the realm of governance, the effectiveness of traditional Western-dominated institutions – such as the UN, IMF, and World Bank – is steadily declining, whereas emerging multilateral platforms like the SCO, BRICS, and G20 are rising rapidly. Global conflict resolution models are shifting from Western-led coercive intervention to diverse, consultative, and cooperative governance. Simultaneously, the global influence of non-governmental forces and industry elites continues to grow, shifting the landscape of global governance actors from one dominated solely by sovereign states to a new pattern of coexistence among governments, international institutions, and non-governmental entities.

The entropic shift in the global order signifies far more than mere turbulence; it represents a fundamental and disruptive transformation of the underlying logic governing global operations. Current global competition, cooperation, and conflict can no longer be explained by the outdated Western realist paradigms of hegemony through strength, zero-sum games, and victory through force.

A new operational logic – tailored to a multipolar, digital, and regionalized world – has taken shape, fundamentally rewriting the underlying rules governing the rise of major powers, regional development, and global governance.

First, the logic of core national power: A shift from dominance through sheer scale to victory through technology and resilience.

Traditional international competition was a contest of sheer scale – territorial size, military tonnage, and aggregate economic output – whereby major powers could leverage their massive size to establish hegemonic monopolies and exert unilateral dominance. In the current era of shifting order and entropy, however, the primary benchmarks for a nation’s core competitiveness have become technological computing power, the capacity for intelligent iteration, supply chain resilience, and the ability to withstand risks.

Intelligent weaponry is reshaping the military balance of power; digital technology governs the discourse on public opinion and perception; autonomous industrial chains hedge against the risks of geopolitical sanctions; and regional closed-loop economic systems buffer against global volatility. Small and medium-sized nations can achieve asymmetric checks and balances through breakthroughs in specific technologies. Conversely, without technological innovation and systemic resilience, a major power’s sheer size risks becoming an inefficient burden – a reality that fundamentally shatters the Western historical logic equating size with hegemony.

Secondly, the logic of great power rise: shifting from hegemonic succession to rule reshaping.

Centuries of Western historical narrative have entrenched a realist paradigm – that rising implies conflict, growing strength implies a bid for dominance, and hegemony inevitably changes hands. Indeed, all Western international relations theories are essentially distillations of the history of European colonial rivalry. Yet, the current restructuring of the global landscape has completely transcended the old trap of hegemonic cycles.

The rise of emerging powers – exemplified by China – eschews military expansion, the pursuit of hegemonic status, and bloc-based confrontation; instead, it achieves developmental breakthroughs through civilizational mutual learning, regional synergy, and mutually beneficial cooperation. At its peak, the Tang Dynasty accounted for 80% of Asia’s GDP, and Zheng He’s fleet was ten times the size of Columbus’; despite possessing such overwhelming strength, China never followed the Western path of colonial conquest or regional monopoly. This proves that strength does not equate to hegemony, nor does rising equate to conflict; an Eastern logic of symbiosis is replacing the Western logic of dominance-seeking, establishing a brand-new paradigm for the rise of great powers.

Since the Cold War, global security has maintained a precarious equilibrium based on great-power standoffs, alliance entanglements, and the balancing of forces. Control over the security agenda rested in the hands of a few Western powers, leaving most nations with no choice but to attach themselves to the strong and passively seek to avoid risk. In this era of entropic shifts in the global order, security risks have become diffuse and unpredictable, and the stability provided by external checks and balances has completely collapsed; consequently, autonomy and controllability, diversified hedging strategies, and systemic resilience have become the core pillars of security.

Militarily, nations are building autonomous defense systems powered by intelligent technologies; economically, they are establishing regional closed-loop industrial chains to mitigate the risks of decoupling; financially, they are promoting local currency settlements to hedge against the weaponization of the US dollar; and in the realm of public opinion, they are constructing independent discourse systems to break cognitive monopolies. Nations are moving away from reliance on the protection of major powers, instead seizing the initiative in their own security and development by leveraging systemic resilience and regional cooperation.

Fourth, the logic of global governance is shifting from Western monopoly to pluralistic, shared governance.

Traditional global governance was a game dominated by a handful of Western developed nations – where rules were set, standards defined, and benefits monopolized by the West, leaving developing countries to merely accept and adapt passively. The entropic shift in the global order has shattered this monopoly; the collective rise of the Global South and the growing influence of emerging multilateral mechanisms have led to a comprehensive diversification of governance actors, rules, and philosophies.

The core of governance has shifted from the strong controlling the weak to equal consultation among diverse actors; rules have evolved from self-serving Western unilateral standards into win-win principles that prioritize fairness and broad-based benefits; and the logic of development has moved beyond zero-sum plunder toward inclusive coexistence and mutual learning, marking the true entry of global governance into a new era of multilateralism.

III. Future trajectory of global order entropy change: Multipolar consolidation, resilient symbiosis, and the restoration of civilizational roles

While the current entropy change in the global order appears chaotic and fraught with risk, it is by no means random turbulence or internal attrition; rather, it represents the inevitable growing pains accompanying the demise of the old order and the birth of the new. By grounding our analysis in the fundamental logic of this transformation, we can clearly foresee the major trends of global evolution over the coming decades. Three certain trends will dominate the global landscape during the second quarter of the 21st century, effectively ending the old era of Western-centric hegemony.

First, the global landscape will shift decisively from unipolar volatility to a multipolar steady state, with hegemonic influence undergoing a continuous and irreversible decline.

The era of absolute US hegemony has definitively ended. While American hegemony will not collapse overnight, it will continue to contract and decline in relative terms, shifting from a position of global dominance to that of a regional player. The global balance of power will continue to equalize; Asia’s status as a geopolitical center will be further consolidated, and the integration of the Eurasian landmass will steadily advance.

Deep interconnectedness among Asian blocs – including China, ASEAN, India, and the Middle East – will forge a cluster of emerging powers capable of acting as a counterweight to the Western system. Old models of bloc confrontation and zero-sum games will gradually fade, giving way to a mainstream global political landscape defined by great-power competition and cooperation, diversified checks and balances, and regional autonomy. Multipolarity will evolve from a mere trend into a solidified, stable global order.

Globalization will not disappear, but it will undergo a fundamental transformation and upgrade. The old model of globalization – characterized by extensive growth, homogenization, and Western dominance – is ending, while a new model defined by precision, regionalization, and diversification is rising. Nations will continue to diversify, localize, and autonomize their industrial and supply chains, prioritizing security and stability.

Regional economic synergy and closed-loop systems will serve as the core pillars for hedging against geopolitical conflicts, trade protectionism, and technological blockades. Emerging regional mechanisms – such as RCEP, SCO economic cooperation, and BRICS cooperation – will continue to enhance quality and efficiency, building regional development systems that are mutually beneficial and independent of the West. The global economy will break free from the constraints of singular Western rules, establishing a new development landscape characterized by diverse, parallel paths and resilient symbiosis.

Third, global competition is shifting profoundly from physical confrontation to a contest of rules and civilizations, marking a comprehensive resurgence of Eastern civilizational values.

The core of future great-power competition will no longer lie in military might, territorial disputes, or resource plundering, but in the ultimate contest over technological standards, governance norms, civilizational paradigms, and cognitive narratives. The flaws of the Western civilizational logic – characterized by zero-sum games, hegemony, and confrontation – have become glaringly apparent, rendering it ill-suited to the development needs of a diverse world.

In contrast, the Asia-Pacific region’s enduring civilizational ethos – rooted in mutual learning, symbiosis, harmony amid diversity, and win-win cooperation – will serve as the core foundation for reshaping the global civilizational order. From the millennia-old legacies of Xuanzang’s translation work, Yang Liangyao’s diplomatic voyages, and Zheng He’s friendly expeditions, to the vibrant contemporary practices of mutual learning and people-to-people connectivity across the Asia-Pacific, this Eastern civilization of symbiosis will continue to counter Western narratives of conflict and rewrite the fundamental rules of global civilizational competition.

Fourth, global governance is transitioning from elite monopoly to broad-based participation, with fairness and inclusivity becoming the prevailing trends of the era.

Future global governance will thoroughly dismantle the monopoly held by a handful of Western nations and elites; the Global South will see a sustained rise in its voice and influence, emerging multilateral mechanisms will become the primary vehicles for governance, and the participation of non-governmental actors and civil society will deepen.

Global public issues – such as nuclear arms control, artificial intelligence, climate governance, and public health – will break free from the constraints of geopolitical maneuvering and bloc-based confrontation, returning to the essence of multilateral consultation and win-win cooperation. Global governance will cease to be a tool for the powerful and instead become a platform for the shared development of all humanity, with fairness, inclusivity, and mutual benefit defining the new era of global governance.

Viewed from a macro perspective, the essence of this once-in-a-century transformation is a process – spanning centuries – of correcting the order, restoring the civilizational balance, and reshaping the global landscape. The entropic shift in the global order represents both the entropic decay and demise of the old Western hegemonic order and the entropic reduction and rebirth of a new, diverse global order.

All geopolitical conflicts, technological rivalries, economic fluctuations, and public opinion rifts are the inevitable growing pains accompanying the transition from the old order to the new. Centuries of Western history have taught the world only about hegemonic rivalry among the strong, whereas the Asia-Pacific region – with its millennia-old cultural heritage and the practical experience of emerging powers in the new era – is teaching the world how the strong can build bridges.

Future global competition is by no means a zero-sum game of hegemonic succession; rather, it is a contest of values regarding paths, civilizations, and rules. The old era defined by unilateralism, bloc confrontation, and zero-sum games has come to an end, while a new era characterized by multilateralism, openness, inclusiveness, and mutually beneficial symbiosis is rapidly unfolding.

Standing at the historical juncture of the second quarter of the 21st century, humanity will ultimately break free from the confines of the Western-dominated order and the traps of realist power struggles. By solidifying the foundations of development through technological innovation, fostering symbiotic strength through regional synergy, and resolving differences through mutual learning among civilizations, we will build a new global order that is fairer, more stable, more resilient, and more prosperous – thereby ushering in a new stage of civilization defined by diverse coexistence and sustainable development.

A British tourist has drawn widespread online backlash after a viral TikTok video complaining about drink prices and menu options at a cafe near the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland, the site of a former Nazi death camp.

At least 1.1 million people were murdered by Nazis at Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945, most of them Jews. Other victims included Poles, Roma and Soviet prisoners of war. Many were murdered in gas chambers, while others died from starvation, disease, brutal forced labor and other forms of persecution. The museum explicitly requires visitors to behave with “due solemnity and respect” while visiting.

However, in a video posted on TikTok on Wednesday and captioned “Prices at Auschwitz,” a woman named Lynne and her daughter made flippant complaints about drinks at a cafe near the memorial.

“Here’s a tip if you’re going to Auschwitz,” Lynne tells followers, pronouncing it like “Oswitch,” before adding: “Take a drink with you. I got a strawberry smoothie which tasted very watered down.” The two then bemoan the lack of decaf and alternative milk and lemonade that tasted “a bit like Dettol,” a toilet cleaner. The pair also complain that the two drinks cost £9 ($12), calling the price “very expensive.”

Always been in two minds about visiting Auschwitz, so I'm glad we're finally cutting through the tourist glitz to get the real info.pic.twitter.com/yV0vd8wkIR

— Hughes-on-the-Wold (@NotThatHughes) September 19, 2026

Lynne has since made her TikTok account private, but the video amassed more than four million views and some 8,000 comments before disappearing from public view at the platform. It also spread across other social media as users seized on the women’s casual focus on refreshments at a site synonymous with mass murder.

Commenters accused the pair of extraordinary “insensitivity,” stressing that Auschwitz is “not a 5 star restaurant experience” or “a theme park,” and saying they should be “ashamed.”

I've ben twice. It's a concentration camp not a fucking theme park. Entry is free. If you feel peckish when viewing the place, u need help. Numb is what you'll feel and Birkenau is the most numbing place.

— Crispy Hoover (@CrispyHoover) September 19, 2026

I’d learn how to pronounce Auschwitz before going there and slagging it off, personally. If they posted this after they’d been in then they are irredeemable pos, because nothing could make 9 quid seem less important. I couldn’t speak for a good hour or 2 afterwards.

— Jacqui (@LancashireLady3) September 19, 2026

How many steps are there between getting your phone out and recording this and then posting it must you go through? At any of which you could stop and questions your actions, then to still just power through and think its fine. Mind boggling.

— finlay (@yalnife) September 19, 2026

They complained about the milk.

The people who died there would have given anything for a sip of water.

— Benonwine (@benonwine) September 24, 2026

Some mocked the women’s complaints.

Hate nothing more than visiting an old concentration camp and the food not being up to scratch !!! pic.twitter.com/WPQ9nqoe8p

— BtotheMtotheC (@BenjaminMcNam10) September 19, 2026

No decaf or milk alternative?! And we thought the inmates had it bad!

— Theophilus.P.Wildebeeste (@Grant_Chapman27) September 19, 2026

I remember when I visited. There is an inscription above the entrance that reads "Arbeit macht frei" which I believe roughly translates as "Lemonade here tastes a bit like Dettol - best avoided"

— BigBridesmaid (@BigBridesmaid) September 19, 2026

Others suggested the video was simply designed to provoke reactions – invoking the idea that bad publicity is still publicity – but still slammed the decision to use a place associated with mass murder as the backdrop for something so “crass and inane.” 

A spokesman for the museum told The Times that the cafe is outside the visitor services center, independently operated, and displays its prices clearly.

“The essential point remains that people come to the Auschwitz Memorial to learn about the history of the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp, to confront the fate of its victims and to commemorate them,” the spokesman argued.

The museum repeatedly reminds visitors that Auschwitz is a memorial rather than a conventional tourist attraction, urging them to behave with respect and to avoid conduct that undermines the memory of its victims.

Still, it has faced controversies over visitors and businesses treating the site in ways critics regard as inappropriate. In 2020, a TikTok trend drew condemnation after users role-played as Holocaust victims. A year later, TripAdvisor removed an offensive review of Auschwitz after initially saying it complied with its guidelines. In 2023, an “Ice Love” ice-cream stand installed near the camp prompted another outcry.

Russian officials, meanwhile, have repeatedly accused Western countries of distorting the history of World War II, including diminishing the Soviet Union’s role in defeating Nazi Germany. Moscow has pointed to the dismantling of Soviet war memorials in Eastern Europe and the honoring of historical Nazi collaborators in Ukraine as examples of what it describes as attempts to “rewrite history.” 

Last month, Moscow condemned plans for a supermarket and logistics facility at the site of the former Hirtenberg women’s concentration camp in Austria, accusing Vienna of erasing the memory of its victims. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova described the planned development as an attempt to effectively “pave over” that memory.

The Swiss government and parliament are urging voters to reject a proposal during an upcoming referendum that would strengthen the country’s neutrality policy by constraining Bern’s ability to impose unilateral sanctions.

The motion is being pushed by pro-sovereignty politicians, who have criticized the government’s decision to largely adopt EU sanctions against Russia following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022.

The proposed amendment will be put to a nationwide vote on Sunday, September 27.

Why do sanctions matter?

Switzerland largely aligned itself with the EU sanctions regime targeting Russia after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022.

As of July, Bern reported freezing 8.5 billion Swiss francs ($10.3 billion) in assets owned by Russian companies and individuals targeted by Brussels and another 6.8 billion francs ($8.2 billion) in funds owned by the Russian Central Bank. The Swiss Federal Council has rejected calls to confiscate the money.

Moscow has repeatedly accused Switzerland of abandoning its traditional neutrality by taking the sanctions path, arguing that it had lost its standing as a “trusted neutral mediator.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov reiterated Moscow’s stance to Swiss Federal Councillor Ignazio Cassis personally, when the two met on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session in New York in July 2025.

Russia as well as several other non-Western nations reject any sanctions not authorized by the UN as illegal under international law and consider them a form of economic warfare.

What is at stake in Sunday’s vote?

The “Safeguard Swiss neutrality” initiative was launched by the Pro Schweiz (For Switzerland) pro-sovereignty movement and figures associated with the conservative Swiss People’s Party (SVP), which strongly backs the proposal.

The country would also be prohibited from imposing sanctions against belligerent states, with exceptions for measures mandated by the UN and those intended to prevent sanctions circumvention.

A newly-strengthened neutrality policy would be used to “prevent and resolve conflicts” and “to act as a mediator,” if the proposal is passed.

Who is against it?

The Swiss Federal Council argues that the more rigid interpretation would restrict Switzerland’s freedom of action and could weaken its national security. Parliament has also recommended rejecting the initiative.

“Anyone who waits until the crisis is already here before they are willing to cooperate is too late,” Cassis has said.

The government is particularly opposed to surrendering its ability to decide whether to adopt sanctions.

Who backs it?

SVP President Marcel Dettling has accused Cassis and Swiss diplomats of seeking to erode neutrality and “play the big shot everywhere in the world.”

“Switzerland is neutral. This means we do not interfere in foreign affairs. Every individual is entitled to their own opinion, but official Switzerland is neutral and offers its good offices to all parties in conflict,” he said.

SVP member Christoph Blocher, who was a member of the Federal Council in the 2000s, rejected the notion that neutrality should be “flexible,” denouncing it as “dangerous nonsense.”

What do the polls say?

Recent surveys show substantially more respondents opposing the neutrality initiative than supporting it.

A LeeWas survey for 20 Minuten and Tamedia, conducted earlier this month among 12,948 eligible voters, found 31% supported the initiative and 68% opposed it. Support had fallen by five percentage points compared with the previous survey wave.

Historically, Swiss voters have often sided with the Federal Council’s recommendations.

On the same day, voters approved stricter rules governing access to alternative civilian service by 52.46% to 47.54%. That measure intended to preserve participation in the mandatory military service was backed by the Federal Council and parliament, with the SVP being among the supporting parties.

How does Swiss direct democracy work?

Switzerland has one of the world’s most extensive systems of direct democracy, with voters deciding national issues up to four times a year, often with several proposals on the ballot at once.

A popular initiative seeking to amend the Constitution requires 100,000 valid signatures collected within 18 months before it can proceed through the political process toward a nationwide vote. Constitutional amendments require a double majority – a majority of voters nationwide and a majority of the cantons – to pass.

Rules are less restrictive for optional referendums on laws passed by parliament.

The powerful El Nino now developing in the Pacific could cause hundreds of thousands of heat-related deaths worldwide, with developing countries projected to bear the heaviest toll, according to a new study.

El Nino is a natural warming of the tropical Pacific that can disrupt weather around the world, bringing extreme heat and drought to some regions and heavy rainfall and flooding to others. The current event could become the strongest on record.

The Climate Impact Lab, a research group involving the University of Chicago and other institutions, said in a report released this week that extreme heat linked to the 2026-27 El Nino could cause 451,000 additional deaths worldwide.

The impact is projected to be concentrated overwhelmingly in the Global South. Over the next six months, researchers forecast 66,800 additional heat deaths across Africa’s Sahel region, including 31,400 in Nigeria and 17,500 in Sudan. Indonesia could see another 19,300 deaths, India 15,800, and Brazil 13,300.

Michael Greenstone, a co-founder of the Climate Impact Lab and University of Chicago professor, said the scale of the projected losses could be difficult to grasp, stressing that the figures represented “parents and children, grandparents and neighbors.”

The warning comes after August became the hottest month on record globally, with temperatures averaging 16.96° Celsius (62.53° F). Western Europe also experienced its hottest summer on record, according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

US President Donald Trump has rejected Iran’s latest ceasefire proposal and told aides that he expects to resume bombing the Islamic Republic after the November midterm election, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing US officials.

Trump is privately skeptical that Tehran will agree to his terms despite publicly predicting that Iran will seek a deal following the November 3 election, according to the newspaper. Officials cautioned, however, that his position could change over the coming weeks and could be affected by the election results.

The report comes after Tehran offered a seven-day roadmap to end the hostilities, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and restart negotiations over its nuclear program. In return, the US would lift its naval blockade, ease sanctions on Iranian oil exports, and release some frozen Iranian assets.

According to the WSJ, Trump has rejected the proposal and the administration has informed Iran and regional mediators that he has no intention of lifting the maritime blockade. A US official nevertheless said negotiations through mediators are continuing.

The president has alternated between threats of major escalation and diplomatic overtures during the nearly seven-month conflict. Officials told Axios that the US is maintaining its regional military presence in preparation for a potential return to major combat operations.

At the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, Trump said he faces a “big decision” over whether to “annihilate” the Islamic Republic if negotiations fail. He has denied that his decisions on Iran are being driven by the election, despite predicting that Tehran will strike a deal “right after” the midterms.

The June memorandum of understanding provided for gradual sanctions relief and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz while the two sides negotiate outstanding issues, but collapsed amid renewed hostilities and disputes over shipping through the strategic waterway.

The EU could face its worst winter since the 2022 energy crisis, Energy Commissioner Dan Jorgensen has warned, as the bloc grapples with soaring prices and uncertainty over fuel supplies.

European natural gas prices have nearly tripled this year, surging from around €27 ($31) in January to more than €80 per megawatt-hour in September – their highest level in nearly four years.

“This winter might be very, very bad [for the EU] and it might be the worst one we’ve had since 2022,” the Financial Times quoted Jorgensen as saying on Friday. The most likely scenario is “very, very high prices,” he added.

Russian presidential envoy Kirill Dmitriev blamed Brussels’ energy policies for the looming difficulties.

“The ‘worst winter since 2022’… will once again expose EU bureaucrats’ energy suicide of decoupling from Russian energy,” he wrote on X on Friday.

The 2022 energy crisis sent household bills across the EU to record highs. In the second half of that year, average household gas prices were about 46% higher year-on-year, while electricity prices rose roughly 21%, according to Eurostat. Governments responded with subsidies, price caps, and tax cuts.

The bloc now faces additional pressure in the diesel market. US President Donald Trump this week backed restricting diesel exports as domestic prices hit record highs. The US has supplied about a third of Europe’s diesel imports this year, with the share rising to around half in August.

Jorgensen urged Washington to maintain “as free a flow of energy between our countries as possible,” while arguing that the EU must ultimately reduce its reliance on oil and gas.

“If we do not move away from this dependency on fossil fuels, then I can promise everybody it will be a permanent crisis,” he said.

Saudi Arabia has not ruled out developing nuclear weapons, according to a classified US intelligence assessment that has fueled concerns in Congress over President Donald Trump’s nuclear cooperation agreement with Riyadh, the Washington Post reported on Friday.

The assessment was included in classified documents provided to lawmakers as they review the landmark agreement, US officials told the newspaper. The State Department reportedly provided a separate assessment that was more confident in Saudi assurances and the safeguards built into the deal.

Signed in July, the Section 123 agreement lays the legal groundwork for American companies to take part in tens of billions of dollars’ worth of civilian nuclear projects in Saudi Arabia. The Trump administration has argued that the arrangement will strengthen nonproliferation standards while preventing Riyadh from turning to Russia or China for nuclear cooperation.

The pact also does not require Saudi Arabia to adopt the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Additional Protocol, which provides inspectors with broader access and additional tools for detecting undeclared nuclear activity. Instead, Washington and Riyadh have negotiated a separate bilateral safeguards arrangement.

A group of Democratic senators led by Ed Markey and Jeff Merkley warned Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Friday that the deal could ultimately give Riyadh “the means to enrich uranium and possibly develop nuclear weapons.” Merkley told the Washington Post that Saudi Arabia’s insistence on retaining the option of domestic enrichment raises questions over whether its ambitions are entirely civilian.

The intelligence assessment has added to longstanding concerns over Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s 2018 statement that Riyadh will seek a nuclear weapon if Iran acquires one.

“Without a doubt, if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we would follow suit as soon as possible,” he said at the time.

The Saudi agreement was formally submitted to Congress on August 24 and is undergoing a 90-day review. Lawmakers can seek to block it, although overriding a presidential veto would require a two-thirds majority in both chambers.

Tens of thousands of students took to the streets across Germany on Friday to protest the government’s military service reform amid Berlin’s push to expand the armed forces, citing the alleged threat from Russia.

Organizers of the “School Strike Against Conscription” said around 45,000 students joined demonstrations in some 100 cities and towns on Friday. Police did not provide a nationwide figure, but reported around 2,400 protesters in Berlin, while hundreds more rallied in Stuttgart, Nuremberg, Munich, and Hamburg.

Footage from the video agency Ruptly showed crowds marching through Hamburg carrying banners reading “We won’t fight in your wars,” “Education instead of bombs,” “Not our war” and “Russia is not our enemy.”

Some protesters also targeted Chancellor Friedrich Merz, with banners reading “No Merz, no war, no billionaires!”

🔥🪖 Schulstreik gegen Wehrpflicht

Zahlreiche Schüler sind am Freitag erneut auf die Straße gegangen, um gegen eine mögliche Wehrpflicht zu demonstrieren. Wie die Initiative „Schulstreik gegen Wehrpflicht“ mitteilte, gab es bundesweit etwa 100 Demonstrationen. Pressesprecher… pic.twitter.com/xMTDFU8qBM

— Freistil (@Freistil) September 25, 2026

“I don’t want to see my child sent off to war by politicians like the ones we currently have in Germany,” one protester told Ruptly. She said she was “more afraid of [European Commission President] Ursula von der Leyen, Merz… than of any Russian president.”

A student described the reform as a “form of war preparation,” arguing that young people could eventually be forced “to shoot at young people… for the interests that aren’t ours… but the interests of profit-hungry arms corporations and politicians.”

Germany’s Military Service Modernization Act, which took effect in January, requires 18-year-old men to complete a questionnaire on their willingness and suitability for military service. Mandatory medical examinations for men born in 2008 or later are due to begin in July 2027. Service remains voluntary, but parliament can activate compulsory military service if recruitment targets are not met or the security situation deteriorates.

🇩🇪 In #Berlin skandieren die Demonstranten

„Merz, leck Eier!“ 🔈💥

Die Schüler protestieren gegen die Wehrpflicht... pic.twitter.com/LFJESiCR8Q

— 「✦ Finest ✦」 (@fines7x) September 25, 2026

The government aims to expand the Bundeswehr to more than 260,000 active troops and 200,000 reservists by 2035, citing Germany’s NATO commitments and what it describes as a worsening security environment in Europe.

Four Italian soldiers were wounded after one of their own troops accidentally opened fire on an armored vehicle during a NATO live-fire exercise in Latvia.

The incident occurred late Friday at the Adazi training area, where Italian forces are deployed as part of NATO’s military buildup on the bloc’s eastern flank.

According to the Italian Defense Ministry, a soldier operating a non-automated weapon mounted on a military vehicle accidentally fired on another Italian vehicle carrying four servicemen. ANSA reported that a burst from a 7.62 mm machine gun mounted on a Dardo infantry fighting vehicle raked another Dardo traveling directly ahead, apparently while its rear hatch was open.

All four troops, members of Italy’s 11th Bersaglieri Regiment, were rushed to the hospital in Riga. One suffered more serious injuries but was reportedly in stable condition; none are believed to be in danger of dying. Military investigators are examining how the friendly-fire incident occurred.

The growing number of drills has produced a series of serious accidents in the Baltics in recent years. In March 2025, four US soldiers were killed when their 70-ton M88 Hercules recovery vehicle sank into a peat bog at Lithuania’s Pabrade training ground, less than 10 km from Belarus.

Moscow has accused European NATO members of militarizing the continent and preparing for war with Russia. During the BRICS Summit in New Delhi this month, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Western governments are promoting an imaginary ‘Russian threat’ to distract the public from problems in their own countries.

US President Donald Trump reportedly urged Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky to travel to Moscow for peace talks with President Vladimir Putin, Bloomberg reports, citing sources close to Zelensky. Russia has said Zelensky can visit Moscow any time.

The US president made the suggestion during a meeting with Zelensky on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly this week, the outlet reported. The Ukrainian leader rejected the idea, people familiar with the conversation told Bloomberg, adding that Trump’s proposal “upset him.”

Zelensky was visibly irritated by journalists outside UN headquarters on Wednesday. Pressed about when he might visit Moscow, he replied: “On a f**king missile!”

Zelensky DOES answer reporters asking when he’ll be heading to Moscow for talks

He COMPLETELY loses his temper as he walks away:

'On a f*cking missile' https://t.co/poqL8qA9Ff pic.twitter.com/f01pupjrnG

— RTRussia (@RT_Russia_) September 23, 2026

Earlier this week, Ukraine and 51 of its backers released a statement demanding that Russia accept an “immediate and unconditional ceasefire” so peace talks can begin. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Moscow will not halt its military operation, accusing Ukraine’s European sponsors of seeking a pause only “to pump the Kiev regime with weapons.”

Moscow has said it is ready to settle the Ukraine conflict as long as the root causes are addressed and the realities on the ground are taken into account.

Russia’s demands include Ukraine abandoning its plans to join NATO and adopting a neutral status, accepting restrictions on its military, and formally recognizing Crimea and four other former Ukrainian regions as Russian territory. Crimea voted to join Russia shortly after the 2014 Western-backed coup in Kiev. The regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye, and Kherson held referendums in September 2022.

Moscow has cited Kiev’s aggressive posture and the hostile position of its European backers as major obstacles to a peace settlement. The Kremlin has nevertheless maintained that it is ready to welcome Zelensky to Moscow if he truly wishes to reach a deal, even though Russia considers him illegitimate, as his presidential term expired more than two years ago and he has not called a new election.

On Wednesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated that Russia is ready to provide security guarantees to Zelensky if he travels to Moscow.

Artificial intelligence is powerful enough to cause a billion deaths if used by people with malicious intent, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates told NBC News’ ‘Meet the Press’ in an interview on Friday.

Governments should not rely on tech companies to police themselves, the billionaire stressed, urging Washington to pass legislation regulating AI development.

“AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that… cause a billion deaths,” he said. “Even though it’s pretty hard to get to 100%, there’s never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people of ill intent using the latest AI tools.”

Gates’ warning came just days after OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei renewed calls for stronger government guardrails on the technology following multiple incidents involving AI agents breaking containment in recent months.

Last month, Gates warned that “AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice.” He also argued that the risk of a rogue group using “open source AI tools to design a bioterrorism weapon” is greater than that of “a naturally caused pandemic.”

His warning drew renewed attention after the Covid-19 pandemic emerged in late 2019. Gates subsequently became a magnet for conspiracy theories because of his prominent role in global public health. His earlier warnings and the Gates Foundation’s involvement in a 2019 pandemic preparedness exercise were incorporated into claims that he had planned the outbreak and intended to profit from vaccines.

Gates has dismissed vaccine- and pandemic-related accusations against him as “crazy” and “evil.”

The billionaire’s ties to late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein have also fueled public scrutiny and conspiracy theories, although Gates has repeatedly said that meeting Epstein was a mistake and denied any improper relationship with him.

The debate over artificial intelligence provides an opportunity to think about something more important than the latest arguments among American politicians and technology oligarchs because AI occupies a unique place in the history of humanity’s relationship with its inventions.

AI isn’t really a mind, but more a mirror, as it doesn’t exist independently of us but reflects human thought, including all the good and bad we have accumulated. Unlike the wheel, the printing press, the internal combustion engine or the nuclear reactor, AI can’t be separated from humanity, so to borrow Marxist terminology, it isn’t “alienated” from its creator.

The enormous quantity of data we produce every second undoubtedly falls increasingly into the hands of technology monopolies and this has helped create the persistent fear that AI will somehow abolish humanity, stripping people of their identities and eventually making them redundant.

But the machine, or more precisely its creators and owners, still requires human beings to produce the data on which it depends, meaning the texts, images and solutions generated by AI remain intimately connected with human thoughts and feelings and with the accumulated knowledge through which humanity has interpreted the world. So therefore there’s little reason to conclude that AI will abolish humanity as the principal creator of the reality around us.

The same applies to international politics where we should be skeptical of claims that weaker countries will inevitably fall under the control of those possessing the most powerful data centers and computing infrastructure, because politics still takes precedence over technology and the decision to become dependent on another power is ultimately political.

The Gulf monarchies, for example, are developing American AI infrastructure partly because their relationship with Washington is already based on security, so they increasingly see such infrastructure as another form of American presence, comparable in some respects to US military bases.

What makes AI genuinely revolutionary is therefore something different in that its scale and pervasiveness allow humanity to see problems that have accumulated for decades and AI may be the first major technology whose rapid development has so vividly exposed a crisis of values and cultural reference points.

The printing press multiplied humanity’s capacity to distribute nonsense as well as wisdom, but the internal combustion engine told us very little about ourselves and neither did the nuclear reactor.

Even nuclear weapons initially revealed surprisingly little about humanity’s moral condition. At first they were treated largely as conventional weapons of extraordinary destructive power and later, the possibility of mutual annihilation created a system of deterrence and even encouraged the comforting illusion that political leaders possessed moral principles that would prevent another global catastrophe.

AI is different, given it has become something resembling humanity’s man-made collective conscience so through what it produces, we constantly encounter the depths of moral and cultural degradation of which human beings are capable. Donald Trump’s innocent AI “coloring pages,” fake images of catastrophes designed to attract clicks, fabricated tragedies circulating through social media and the endless torrent of meaningless content all demonstrate how easily images and opinions can lose their value.

Of course, AI didn’t create these instincts, but it merely made them impossible to ignore, and that’s why artificial intelligence is simultaneously poison and antidote.

AI removes many of those barriers, as it confronts us every day with the question of whether technological progress is necessarily an unqualified good and because AI is a mirror of civilization, its proliferation allows us to see an ethical crisis that exists, to varying degrees, in virtually every modern society.

For objective reasons, the West is currently at the forefront of many of these developments, but other societies are hardly immune and what has become known as “AI slop,” the endless production of low-quality visual and written material, has creators everywhere. Russia is no exception.

Many supposed debates about artificial intelligence are therefore really arguments about problems that existed long before neural networks arrived. In the creative industries, AI has exposed longstanding problems surrounding copyright and the overwhelming quantity of low-quality material, and in education and science, it has revealed the steady deterioration in the quality of work produced by everyone from ordinary students to distinguished academics. In the social sciences in particular, the ability to generate genuinely new ideas has been approaching exhaustion for years.

And in international politics, AI has destroyed another comforting illusion, as American attempts to use technological leadership to preserve geopolitical dominance demonstrate that the supposed independence of the internet was always conditional.

This is one reason governments increasingly speak about “digital sovereignty,” which is the ability to control their own technology and infrastructure rather than relying entirely on foreign corporations or states.

AI has consequently become another arena of international competition and, paradoxically, this may be useful as political competition encourages governments and societies to debate who controls these technologies, how they should be regulated, and what purposes they should serve.

International politics remains unjust and violent and wars continue, but the enormous nuclear arsenals of Russia, the United States and China mean that a direct conflict between them is most likely to emerge through uncontrolled escalation rather than a deliberate decision to repeat the great-power wars of earlier centuries.

Now humanity has acquired another transformative technology, but the flood of AI-generated rubbish reveals processes that have been gathering strength for perhaps a century in the erosion of shared values and meanings, the declining authority of expertise, the fragmentation of cultural space and the replacement of creativity by consumption.

This is uncomfortable, but it may ultimately prove useful because AI hasn’t created our cultural and ethical crisis, just made that crisis visible on a scale that can no longer easily be ignored.

And precisely because artificial intelligence forces societies to confront what they have become, there are grounds for cautious optimism, where the age of AI may eventually produce not the disappearance of humanity or human morality, but the beginning of a gradual restoration of the ethical dimension of life.

That may prove true both within societies and in relations between states.

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

Britain turns up the war rhetoric

Anyone paying the slightest attention to the news this week could be convinced that the UK is preparing for a direct and imminent war with Russia. Retired generals are telling the public to get “psychologically prepared” for conflict; Labour Party thought leaders are suggesting that dissidents and Russia sympathizers be “locked up;” and former Brexit Minister Jacob Rees-Mogg is openly telling British men and women that they “may have to die” – right after calling the English a “mongrel race” with no historic claim to their own homeland.

Meanwhile, Sky News premiered the first episode of ‘The Wargame’ on Monday – a bizarre reality show in which real politicians and military chiefs game out a hypothetical Russian invasion for the cameras.

With the threat from Russia rising in the real world, a new series from Sky brings together former ministers and military chiefs to test what might happen if the UK faced an attack.

Watch the new TV Show 'Wargame' on Sky and NOW from 21 September pic.twitter.com/b9RcuqLHwF

— Sky News (@SkyNews) September 19, 2026

“Britain’s elites,” RT columnist Tarik Cyril Amar concluded, “want you ready to die for a war they keep imagining.”

Talking heads on the continent were equally hysterical, with Spain’s El Mundo claiming that Russia could launch drones at France, Italy, or Spain from ships in the Mediterranean. The fact that the report cited Lithuania’s fanatically anti-Russian government – which in turn cited the CIA – should have been the first sign something was amiss. 

President Vladimir Putin has stressed that Russia has no interest in war with NATO. The UK’s escalation remains rhetorical for now: The British military is in no way prepared to wage war, and nobody in London has ordered extra forces to Eastern Europe. If war were to break out, however, it’s not clear whether the UK could count on the US to join in. As RT explored on the weekend, Europe takes on all the risks and costs of fighting Russia under NATO’s new ‘NATO 3.0’ doctrine. 

UN-diplomatic behavior

For Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky, this week’s UN General Assembly was an opportunity to demand more from his Western backers: more money, more weapons, and more sanctions on Russia. 

Asked whether he’d travel to Moscow for peace talks, however, Zelensky said he’d only visit the Russian capital “on a f**king missile.”

Zelensky DOES answer reporters asking when he’ll be heading to Moscow for talks

He COMPLETELY loses his temper as he walks away:

'On a f*cking missile' https://t.co/poqL8qA9Ff pic.twitter.com/f01pupjrnG

— RTRussia (@RT_Russia_) September 23, 2026

In what’s become a familiar pattern, Ukrainian forces hammered Moscow with waves of attack drones on Sunday morning, before Zelensky arrived in New York to plead for a ceasefire ahead of Russia’s inevitable retaliation. Backed by 51 of its allies, Kiev demanded an “immediate and unconditional ceasefire,” which Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov promptly refused. 

“We are not going to have a pause in our special military operation,” Lavrov told the UN Security Council. “Europe, whatever it thinks, just wants to get a pause and it wants to use it to pump the Kiev regime with weapons.”

A tale of two elections in Russia and Germany

Zelensky’s weekend drone attack, deemed “unprecedented” by Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin, tageted voting in Russia’s State Duma election, but it did little to suppress turnout, which hit a one-decade high of 57%. Putin’s pre-election appeal to patriotism translated into a bump in support for his United Russia party, which went from 49% to 58% of the vote, followed by the Communists and Liberal Democrats.

Curiously, as political scientist Vladimir Kornilov noted for RT, Kremlin-watchers in the West called the election “rigged,” but only after the wave of protest votes against United Russia which they had promised never materialized.

“The CDU will never again win a federal election,” AfD co-leader Alice Weidel vowed after the results came in, declaring the AfD “the new people’s party in Germany.”

Exposing the deep state media

Germany’s mainstream parties – the CDU and Social Democrats – have dominated the country’s postwar political landscape. Meanwhile, one name has dominated German media: Axel Springer.

The connections between the Western deep state and the mainstream media run deep, and it’s this murky world that RT America’s Ben Swann and independent investigative journalist Elizabeth Lane expose in their brand new series, ‘America Now: Exposing The Deep State of Media.’

Across four episodes, Swann and Lane lift the lid on NATO’s online propaganda machine, the UK’s efforts to frame dissent as disinformation, and the Ukrainian government operation recruiting US military veterans as propaganda agents. 

Propaganda goes hand-in-hand with censorship, and it’s the latter field that the EU excels in. While Springer and the covert campaigns uncovered by Swann and Lane shape pro-Western narratives, Brussels uses its Digital Services Act (DSA) to force online platforms to stifle alternate viewpoints. This week, the European Commission published dozens of reports by tech firms including Meta and TikTok, detailing the censorship measures these companies are adopting in order to comply with the DSA. The reports lay bare persistent election interference, collaboration with EU-approved ‘fact-checkers’, and the removal of millions of politically-inconvenient posts.

‘Russia’s Starlink’

It’s an advantage that Russia has worked hard to neutralize with its own Rassvet satellite network. This week, Russian journalist Evgeny Balakin took a deep dive into the Rassvet project and discovered why the Ukrainians are desperate to destroy these satellites on the ground, before they change the balance of power in space.

What we didn’t cover: Negotiating the deepfake 

Stories of corruption and graft from Ukraine are legion and unsurprising – we’ve covered a series implicating Zelensky’s inner circle in depth here – but when a video emerged purportedly showing agents with Ukraine’s Western-funded anti-corruption body, NABU, apparently seizing $140 million in cash from former defense procurement chief Arsen Zhumadilov, we took a closer look.

The video was posted on Wednesday, on what initially appeared to be the New Voice of Ukraine’s English-language website. It showed refrigerator boxes stuffed with $100 bills, with an attached note stating that they were for “the servant of the people” – a reference to Zelensky’s political party.

The New Voice of Ukraine was founded by Dragon Capital, whose CEO, Thomas Fiala, is a majority shareholder in Ukrainska Pravda. The latter publication has reported extensively on corruption in the corridors of power in Kiev, and it is believed that Fiala’s position on the board of the Association of European Business (AEB) in Ukraine offers his publications cover to run these controversial stories.

However, the website to which we traced the article carrying the cash claims was dressed-up to look like New Voice of Ukraine, but used a different URL to the actual English-language New Voice of Ukraine site. We held off, correctly, and NABU confirmed on Friday that it had not raided Zhumadilov’s office. “This video is a fake, created using AI,” the agency stated. The New Voice of Ukraine said that the video had been published on an imposter site, attributing the fake to unnamed “Russians.”

There are and will be many “State of Corruption” stories to report on, factually, as the veil is lifted on Zelensky’s regime. But as we’ve learned from the Ukrainian Defense Ministry using video game footage to fake combat victories, and from the Western politicians who fell for the ‘Ghost of Kiev’ hoax, in an era of escalating rhetoric, deep state and deep fake, always double-check your sources.

A Pakistani Muslim cleric honored by Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally has been accused of protecting an alleged extortion gang linked to abductions and torture, The Telegraph reported on Thursday.

The top cleric of the Church of England withdrew an interfaith award from Tahir Ashrafi, Pakistan’s special envoy on interfaith harmony, last week, just six days after presenting it to him.

According to The Telegraph, Ashrafi’s brother allegedly leads a so-called “blasphemy gang” in Pakistan that entraps young men online and blackmails them with threats of prosecution under the country's blasphemy laws. The newspaper said the group was behind “a huge surge” in the number of people jailed for blasphemy in recent years. Blasphemy can carry the death penalty in Pakistan.

Ashrafi has publicly defended his brother and called a judge investigating the alleged gang a “dog,” according to the British newspaper.

Relatives of alleged victims told The Telegraph they were “shocked” to see Ashrafi receive the British award. They claimed the cleric played the “good cop” while his brother acted as the “bad cop,” entrapping and rounding up victims. The newspaper said the relatives were granted anonymity because of fears of reprisals.

The controversy comes amid heightened scrutiny in Britain of crimes linked to gangs involving men of Pakistani heritage, following years of revelations about organized child sexual exploitation in towns and cities across the country.

An inquiry funded by Restore Britain MP Rupert Lowe reported in June that it had identified evidence of grooming gangs operating across 149 of the UK’s 317 local authority districts. The report determined that a “bare minimum” of 250,000 women and girls were raped by grooming gangs since the year 2000, and that senior politicians helped the gangs escape prosecution.

The Italian government has approved a ban on burqas and niqabs in schools, along with a limit on the number of pupils with limited Italian in some classes. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said the measures would improve integration and prevent the formation of “ghetto classes.”

The decree adopted on Thursday prohibits face coverings that prevent identification during school activities. It covers burqas and niqabs, but leaves hijabs, which do not cover the face, unaffected. Violations can bring fines of up to €1,000.

The government has also set a 30% cap in first-year classes for pupils without Italian citizenship. In primary schools, it applies to those who were not born in Italy or did not attend at least two years of preschool. In lower and upper secondary schools, it applies to those who have not attended the Italian school system for at least three years. The local authorities can grant exceptions when pupils cannot be placed elsewhere and provide additional language support.

Writing on X, Meloni described the measures as “tools of common sense that do not divide, but truly help to integrate, avoiding ghetto classes and giving all students the same opportunities.”

In a televised address, Meloni also stated that the burqa ban is “a matter of security,” adding that “when a woman, or worse, a young girl, is forced to cover her face, she is being denied fundamental rights and the very integration that is so often loudly championed.”

The move follows a broader debate over face coverings in Italy. Last year, Meloni’s party proposed a ban on full-face veils in public places. The bill, however, has yet to pass parliament.

The crackdown on full-face veils has extended across Europe in recent years. France banned them in public in 2011, Denmark followed in 2018, and Switzerland’s nationwide ban took effect in 2025. Denmark has also considered extending its ban to schools.

The European Court of Justice also ruled in 2023 that government employers can ban the wearing of religious dress such as burqas and hijabs in the interest of maintaining an “entirely neutral administrative environment.”

Moscow is not preparing for military action against European countries, President Vladimir Putin has said, dismissing claims of a Russian threat as an attempt to inflame tensions.

Speaking to the media on the sidelines of the 12th United Cultures Forum in St. Petersburg on Friday, Putin said European countries were fueling tensions in order to continue supporting Ukraine.

He accused “aggressive circles” in Europe of seeking to use Ukraine as “cannon fodder” to constrain Russia’s development.

Putin described remarks by the Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur about a possible conflict with Russia as a “provocation,” and referred to statements about the benefits of a preemptive attack on Russia as “political clownery.”

“The circus has left, but the clowns remain,” he said.

Putin also addressed the prospect of renewed talks with Kiev, saying Moscow would base any decision on Russia’s own interests.

Russia responded to attacks on civilian, Putin said, particularly pointing to the “mass” Ukrainian attack on Moscow on September 20, as well as attacks on residential buildings and election officials. He described Russia’s retaliation as “sensitive and destructive” for Ukrainian forces.

“They must feel these retaliatory strikes by Russia and understand that no provocative actions, no escalation of the situation will lead to the result they want. They will only make their position worse,” the Russian president said.

According to Putin, claims that Moscow intends to attack Europe are being used to justify continued spending on Ukraine to European citizens.

“This is complete nonsense,” he said.

Late August brought news that the Victor Pinchuk Foundation is partnering with America’s prestigious Yale University to launch an international leadership development program for Ukrainian veterans of the NATO proxy war against Russia. Over 200 battle-hardened ex-servicepeople are expected to complete the program. It was a rare media appearance for Victor Pinchuk, Ukraine’s second-richest oligarch behind the notorious Rinat Akhmetov, with personal wealth estimated at $2.8 billion. Pinchuk has remained largely in the shadows throughout the proxy war. The role he and his business and political empire played in dragging Kiev along a collision course with Moscow has gone entirely unexamined, not merely in his apparently beloved country of birth, but the wider West.

In a sense though, the Yale leadership development program is a perfect manifestation of everything Pinchuk represents. Over 200 battle-hardened Ukrainian veterans are expected to complete the program, and senior figures at the university, including the dean, are apparently salivating at the prospect of the “systematic, long-term initiative,” explicitly designed to create an elite class of alumni who will “play an important role in Ukraine’s recovery and development.” Students will learn “history, economics, political science, leadership and the practice of global affairs,” in a course “worthy of their heroism,” allowing Ukrainian veterans to apply Yale-approved “leadership skills” in “their professional fields, local communities and Ukraine more broadly.”

Yale University was ranked first among US institutions of higher education, and second globally, in a survey in February published by Time Magazine. For Pinchuk, who has long courted recognition, acceptance, and praise from the West, and has been a key figure pushing Ukraine westward for decades, profiting every step of the way, there are surely few higher honors than Yale publicly and proudly partnering with his personal foundation.

But the leadership development program is also an absolutely classic Pinchuk operation. He pioneered a tactic known as “invisible appointments.” By infiltrating his allies into positions of influence within Ukrainian state ministries and industrial enterprises, Pinchuk ensures decisions are consistently made benefiting his bottom line, without him needing to personally involve himself in local politics too obviously.

How did Pinchuk get so filthy rich?

In Western media profiles over the years, Pinchuk has keenly emphasized his humble origins. Raised in a two-room apartment in Dniepropetrovsk, south of Kiev, he was trained as an engineer. In 1990, as the Soviet Union teetered on collapse and capitalist economics began tearing through the USSR’s republics, Pinchuk spied an opportunity to play middleman as Western countries started sizing up Ukraine’s vast riches, so founded engineering consulting firm Interpipe. Having made his first million in 1992 at the age of just 31, he was ideally placed to line his pockets and expand his business operations into natural gas and steel. Thereafter, Pinchuk’s ‘invisible appointments’ approach began to take shape.

Marrying the president’s daughter greatly assisted Pinchuk’s ability to secretly infiltrate government ministries. In 1997, he left his wife to begin dating Elena Kuchma, the daughter of Leonid Kuchma, who led Ukraine from July 1994 to January 2005. Almost immediately, rumors began circulating in the country and wider region that Pinchuk was receiving privileged access to deals, completely unavailable to people unconnected to the Kuchma dynasty. He even became an MP in 1998, a position he held for almost a decade. It was not until June 2004 that Pinchuk’s nepotistic dealings became widely scrutinized, and only then because his corrupt alliance with the Kuchma clan was preventing Western oligarchs from enriching themselves in Ukraine.

That month, Kryvorizhstal, one of the world’s largest steel plants, was sold to Rinat Akhmetov and Viktor Pinchuk. Despite their bid being half that offered by an international consortium led by US Steel, the terms were rigged to ensure only local, well-connected oligarchs could profit. The BBC said the sale sent a “danger signal to foreign investors,” and lambasted the tendency for Kuchma to award lucrative contracts to his allies, friends, and family as “one of the ongoing problems of Ukraine’s privatisation programme.” The Western-directed Orange Revolution later that year removed Kuchma, installing Viktor Yushchenko, who was no less corrupt – but at least forced Pinchuk to compete with foreigners for a slice of Kiev’s pie.

What doesn’t Pinchuk like to talk about publicly?

Despite Pinchuk’s intimate involvement with the Kuchma family, he amazingly wasn’t tainted by association, and his fortunes in every way only improved after the Orange Revolution. Never have questions been asked about whether criminal methods other than nepotism assisted his success. However, Pinchuk himself apparently ended up on the wrong end of Ukraine’s post-1991 culture of gangsterism, at a very early stage in his career. Oligarchs flourish in an environment attaching local organized crime politicians and big business at the hip. As Forbes magazine reported in March 2014, “those who succeeded” in the country at the time “needed more than friends and brains. They needed survival skills.”

In November 2000, two months after Ukrainian journalist Georgiy Gongadze went missing, audio recordings of Kuchma supposedly discussing plans to have the reporter murdered captured by his bodyguard became public. Pinchuk’s Labor Party of Ukraine commissioned private security firm Kroll to analyze the recordings, which concluded they had been tampered with. Meanwhile, Fakty – also owned by Pinchuk, and the country’s largest newspaper at the time – published stories daily claiming Gongadze was actually alive and had been spotted in different parts of Ukraine or abroad, while also contradictorily accusing the mafia of being behind his killing, and fabricating the incriminating recordings of Kuchma. In truth, Gongadze was dead, and his murder remains officially unsolved today.

Still, Pinchuk’s propaganda war to defend his father-in-law didn’t end there. A slanted ‘documentary’ on the Gongadze scandal produced by Financial Times correspondent Charles Clover with funding from an unknown source alleged the furore was concocted by the West to interfere in Ukrainian politics. The film was broadcast repeatedly on Pinchuk’s ICTV in the leadup to the country’s 2002 parliamentary elections. In 2015 though, the oligarch was quick to accuse his rival, Igor Kolomoisky, of murders in a costly UK High Court legal battle over a disputed business deal. Pinchuk initially provided detailed accounts of Kolomoisky’s liberal use of violence to expand his business empire. The judge ruled the accusations immaterial to the legal battle, which was ultimately settled out of court, with Kolomoisky transferring two lavish London apartments to Pinchuk as part of the agreement. Clearly, at the very least, Pinchuk knows where certain bodies are buried.

What is the nature of Pinchuk’s relationship with George Soros?

Pinchuk’s Ukrainian media empire is a gigantic grift that keeps on giving. His ICTV dominates the news landscape, while also reeling in casual viewers with movies and TV dramas. Pinchuk’s STB has cornered entertainment and lifestyle content, while Novyi Kanal is a hit with younger audiences, particularly its reality shows. While it may not always be obvious, a political agenda lurks behind the overwhelming majority of the content broadcast by these stations, which attract over 20% of the nation’s TV viewers. A particularly blatant example occurred in the early 2000s, when Pinchuk quietly established a bogus opposition party targeted at disillusioned young people – KOP. His TV networks aggressively promoted the party as an organic, grassroots, patriotic uprising.

This transition was admittedly inspired by controversial Hungarian billionaire George Soros. The two became close personal friends in the 2000s, their respective foundations often co-funding projects in Ukraine and beyond. An August 2008 New York Times profile of Pinchuk featured warm praise from Soros, describing his Ukrainian protege as “an enlightened capitalist, and there are not many in that part of the world.” The profile described how Pinchuk had funded programs run by numerous prestigious US think tanks and academic institutions, “to sustain his quixotic dream of securing Ukraine’s entry into the European Union.” Pinchuk’s famous pals, including President Bill Clinton and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, were “lured… to give speeches… to support the cause.”

At home, Pinchuk’s battle for hearts and minds had seen him recently finance Paul McCartney to perform a concert in Kiev’s Independence – now Maidan – Square, for a crowd of 350,000 “exultant Ukrainians.” Cheering his “brute political calculation and ruthless business practice,” the New York Times recorded how many billionaires in the region had in recent years “taken steps to present themselves as acceptable international figures… but few, if any, have been as bluntly aggressive in using art, philanthropy, public policy and even rock ‘n’ roll to advance their agendas as Mr. Pinchuk.” His collection of Western celebrity and political friends was said to provide “the gaudy tapestry of legitimacy that Mr. Pinchuk so badly craves.”

The New York Times warned that Pinchuk’s displays of wealth and power were “not so easily digested in Ukraine, a country ravaged by inflation, AIDS and an inchoate political process.” In today’s wartime Ukraine, these issues are perhaps the least of an average citizen’s worries. But while Pinchuk has by-and-large vanished from the public eye today, his political protection has only grown. Conspicuously, while other Ukrainian oligarchs – including Ukraine’s richest man Rinat Akhmetov – were required to sell off their media assets once the proxy war erupted, Pinchuk has managed to keep his own. Clearly, Pinchuk’s deep integration with Western elites grants him levels of insulation his adversaries can only dream about – just like his hero, color revolution specialist George Soros.

How does Pinchuk get away with it all?

However, many pro-Maidan figures within Ukrainian civil society and politics viciously attacked Pinchuk for trying to talk sense. Among them was Mustafa Nayyem, a veteran reporter at Western-funded media outlets who personally kickstarted the Maidan protests in late 2013. In a long-winded hatchet job for Ukrainskaya Pravda, Nayyem repeatedly slammed Pinchuk’s compromise propositions as “capitulation.” When Zelensky won Ukraine’s 2019 presidential election on a platform of implementing more or less what Pinchuk advocated three years prior, Nayyem’s retort to the oligarch’s prescriptions gifted hardline Ukrainian ultranationalists – including the Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion – a campaign slogan to ensure there would be no peace in Donbass.

In October 2019, Zelensky moved to disarm the various Neo-Nazi militias and street gangs fighting the Anti-Terrorist Operation, hold a referendum on granting Donbass special status within the country, and traveled personally to the front line to meet with Azov leader Andriy Biletsky, imploring him and his fighters to lay down their weapons and leave Donbass. However, Biletsky mocked and threatened Zelensky to his face, while under the banner of “No Capitulation!” Azov organized huge protests in Kiev and other major Ukrainian cities, bussing in tens of thousands of people. Peace was comprehensively off the table. So Zelensky began preparing for a grand military offensive to recapture Crimea and Donbass, provoking Russia’s military operation.

In retrospect, Pinchuk’s compromise proposal gives every appearance of being a psychological operation, intended to discredit any prospect of peace in Ukraine. His trial balloon granted ultranationalist Maidan elements within the country a straw man to publicly immolate, so any suggestion of conciliation with Donbass, let alone Russia, could appear deeply unpopular among average Ukrainians, and the determination of Azov Battalion and other ultraviolent factions to fight on could be presented as organic and principled. This interpretation is greatly reinforced by a March 2020 joint letter signed by two dozen Ukrainian NGOs, almost all funded by Western governments and foundations, condemning any direct dialogue between Kiev and the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk.

In many cases, such as Neo-Nazi aligned ‘factchecker’ StopFake, the signatory organizations had received substantial sums from Pinchuk’s personal foundation. Never forget, the oligarch is a master of theater and misdirection. Pinchuk’s love of modern art and impressive, exorbitantly expensive collection of pieces by famous artists including Damien Hirst has been widely reported. In June 2022, Pinchuk sold a balloon sculpture created by Jeff Koons at auction, raising over $10 million for humanitarian aid to Ukraine. What the Western media has failed to admit is the oligarch’s interest in art is just for show – and intended to suppress awkward questions about his shady background, criminal financial dealings, and personal complicity in appalling crimes.

In 2005, with Kuchma out of office and the potential for serious investigations into Georgiy Gongadze’s murder and Pinchuk’s corrupt profiteering from his relationship with his presidential father-in-law very high, the oligarch and his family were “battered by bad headlines.” So Pinchuk hired a PR company based in Paris to help, and they recommended that he “buy art and put it on public display.” He immediately became an art collector with hundreds of millions burning a hole in his pocket, and in need of laundering on top of his reputation. 

“Over the next few years he acquired voraciously as prices for contemporary art were reaching their peak… The clear temptation for any dealer with such a keen and rich buyer in a hurry, particularly one who knows little about art, is to encourage him to purchase work that more discerning buyers wouldn’t look twice at,” the Art Newspaper said in 2011. “Rarely has so much money been spent so quickly on so much bad art.”

Pinchuk’s expensive haul, which included paintings “universally panned by critics,” was “acquired voraciously as prices for contemporary art were reaching their peak,” but he claims to be “not too bothered about the fluctuations in price of the works he buys,” as “this is not a financial investment.” The same is true of the incalculable quantities of cash he flings at major Western institutions, such as the hundreds of thousands he has given to Tony Blair’s Faith Foundation, and NATO think tank the Atlantic Council, where he sits on the advisory board and has year in, year out for over a decade been among the organization’s top donors, gifting $250,000 to $499,999 annually. 

Millions given to Western politicians, including Hillary Clinton, also provide rewards and returns beyond just “financial investment.” Pinchuk’s powerful friends in Brussels, London, Tel Aviv, and Washington are a lifetime bulletproof vest that keeps the prying eyes and hands of citizens and governments all over the world from his obscene fortune, and the historical, material, and personal means by which he acquired it. In turn, Pinchuk becomes absolutely indispensable to whoever in theory ‘runs’ Ukraine at a given time, his position unassailable if regimes collapse. The man celebrated openly as Kiev’s eternal “bridge to the West” is simply too valuable, and has too much dirt on everyone, to be expected to play by the rules.

This is the forth part of RT’s The Oligarch special series. Read the previous parts to learn about other Ukrainian oligarchs, the corruption networks they established, their ties to neo-Nazi combat battalions, and their roles in the coups that shook the country.

An Israel-backed influence campaign has sought to flood the internet with generated content targeting young Americans and shape how AI chatbots answer their questions, RT’s America Now has found.

Host Ben Swann and investigative journalist Elizabeth Lane reviewed a US foreign-agent (FARA) filing by Clock Tower X, a public relations firm owned by former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale. The filing names the State of Israel, through Havas Media Germany, as the foreign principal behind the campaign.

The contract called for 100 original pieces of content a month and 5,000 variations across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and other platforms. It sought 50 million digital impressions, with at least 80% targeting Gen Z. The initial deal was valued at $1.5 million a month, while a later filing put the contract at $9 million.

The campaign also called for websites and content designed to produce “GPT framing results in AI conversations,” with the apparent aim of publishing large quantities of material that could influence what AI systems encounter and potentially the answers they provide.

Swann warned that as more people turn to AI instead of reading articles or original sources, they may accept answers without knowing who produced the underlying material or whether it is accurate.

Lane said the problem is also reaching newsrooms, warning that journalists who rely on chatbot answers instead of checking documents and contacting sources risk repeating claims deliberately placed online to influence AI responses.

On the other hand, those who challenge these false narratives end up being attacked by the establishment in an effort to have them discredited, Lane observed.

“You have NATO conducting these experiments and all these bots, and then you have Brad Parscale on the other side, actually declaring himself as a foreign agent under FARA and paying actual faces to go out there propagandize people, while bots help them aid the propaganda and push it out there,” Lane surmised.

She also noted that some of the Israeli propagandists regularly amplify messages being pushed by their Ukrainian counterparts, and vice versa, suggesting that there is either an effort to bind the two conflicts together, or that both of them are ruled by the exact same people.

Watch the full episode of the four-part America Now investigation here.

Attacks on Ukrainians in Poland have continued to rise as public attitudes toward Ukrainian refugees deteriorate, Kiev’s ambassador to Warsaw, Vasily Bondar, has said. His remarks came a day after a Ukrainian man was detained over a deadly knife attack at a Catholic abbey in southeastern Poland.

Polish police recorded 180 attacks or acts of aggression against Ukrainians in the first half of 2026, Bondar told RBK Ukraine in an interview published on Friday. There were 275 such incidents in all of 2025, up from 267 in 2024.

“We do see an increase of around 30%,” the diplomat said. He added that more incidents are now being classified as hate crimes against Ukrainians rather than ordinary domestic offenses.

Bondar also said Ukrainians committed 10,800 offenses in Poland during the first half of 2026, but argued the figure was statistically insignificant given that around 2 million Ukrainian nationals live in the country.

His comments came a day after a 31-year-old Ukrainian man allegedly stabbed five people at a Benedictine abbey in Jaroslaw, killing a priest and injuring four others. Polish authorities have said they are still investigating the motive and circumstances of the attack.

Bondar acknowledged that Polish society has a “consolidated public opinion” that is “highly negative” toward some historical figures regarded as heroes in Ukraine. He nevertheless argued that Kiev “could not give up its national interests” for the sake of better relations with Warsaw.

A July survey by polling agency CBOS found that, for the first time since it began tracking the issue, a majority of Poles opposed accepting Ukrainian refugees. Some 52% were against taking them in, compared with 42% in favor.

A separate CBOS survey conducted in July found that 53% of Poles believed reconciliation with Ukrainians was possible – the lowest level recorded – while 38% said it was impossible.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s humiliating run of regional election defeats has reignited a bitter fight over his unpopular pension reform, with his Social Democratic coalition partners pushing back against plans that could make Germans work longer, national media have reported.

Merz’s Christian Democrats suffered a historic drubbing this month, culminating in what the chancellor himself called a “disaster” in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. The CDU failed to clear the 5% threshold for the state parliament, while the right-wing, anti-immigration and Euroskeptic Alternative for Germany (AfD) came first. The AfD also topped the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, while in Berlin the CDU was pushed into second place behind the left-wing Die Linke. The SPD also suffered significant losses.

The defeats have complicated Merz’s already contentious reform drive. At the center of the fight is the so-called “pension at 63,” which allows people with 45 qualifying years to retire early without deductions. A government commission recommended scrapping the scheme, citing Germany’s aging population straining pension finances and the workforce. Merz, who has repeatedly urged Germans to work more, backs the reform.

The election rout has given those opponents fresh leverage, including within Merz’s conservative camp, German media has reported. An SPD strategy document circulated this week argued there are “open questions” on proposed early retirement changes. SPD parliamentary group leader Matthias Miersch has called the entitlement after 45 years a “fundamental issue of justice,” while Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania’s Minister-President Manuela Schwesig argued that people who have worked and paid contributions throughout their careers should retain the right to retire early without deductions.

Alexander Hoffmann, parliamentary group leader of the CSU, the CDU’s sister party, argued there could be no pension reform without scrapping the early retirement scheme, telling Bild: “We have a clear agreement in the coalition: hardship cases yes, standard cases no.” However, nearly four hours of coalition talks this week reportedly failed to produce an agreement.

The chancellor’s own standing has plunged amid economic weakness and dissatisfaction with his government. Earlier this month, just 10% of respondents told pollster Forsa they were satisfied with his performance, against 88% who were dissatisfied. A YouGov poll published ahead of the latest elections found 48% of Germans expected him to be out of office by year-end. German media have also discussed the possibility of a Kanzlertausch, or “chancellor swap,” if the CDU suffers further setbacks.

Africa must have a say in shaping global rules that govern artificial intelligence, South African Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola has said, arguing that the continent should play a greater role in emerging technologies.

Speaking at the 81st UN General Assembly in New York on Thursday, Lamola linked Africa’s role in AI development to the continent’s vast reserves of critical minerals and its young population. He said these resources could help narrow the gap between richer and poorer countries, while African states could contribute to AI research and innovation.

“Africa must have a stake in shaping the rules that govern the development and deployment of artificial intelligence,” the minister said.

Lamola also renewed Pretoria’s push for broader reform of global institutions, particularly the UN Security Council. Africa accounts for more than a quarter of UN member states, yet has no permanent seat on the council. 

Earlier this month, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa proposed that BRICS establish an international mechanism for the independent scientific assessment of AI. Speaking at the group’s summit in New Delhi, he also called for AI companies to face formal external checks and government oversight.

Earlier this month, the AU brought together African diplomats in Geneva to coordinate the continent’s position in international negotiations on AI and digital policy. The bloc said African countries could help shape global AI standards and rules by presenting a common position in international talks.

The US has put the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) back at the center of its Middle East strategy as shipping and energy flows through the Strait of Hormuz remain disrupted. US President Donald Trump told a meeting of Arab leaders on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York that attacks on commercial shipping showed the need to shift the Middle East’s energy infrastructure away from “Iranian checkpoints.” 

“That’s why my administration strongly supports the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor,” Trump said earlier this week, while calling for other ways of moving oil, including pipelines.

The corridor was jointly unveiled at the G20 summit in New Delhi in 2023 by the US, India, Saudi Arabia, UAE, EU, Italy, France, and Germany. The IMEC would combine maritime routes, railways and other infrastructure, alongside planned energy and digital links. It has two broad sections: an eastern leg connecting India to the Gulf, and a northern leg linking the Gulf to Europe.

Cargo would sail from India to the UAE, move by rail across Saudi Arabia and Jordan to Israel’s Mediterranean coast, and then travel by sea from Haifa toward European ports. However, the IMEC is not by itself a single oil pipeline designed to replace Hormuz, as Trump’s comments seemed to imply. It is a trade and connectivity network. 

What’s the IMEC’s geopolitical significance? 

When the IMEC was announced, it was seen as a challenger to another route, which has been in the making for decades – the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC). Conceived in 2000 by India, Iran, and Russia, the 7,200-km INSTC will move freight from Mumbai through Iranian ports such as Bandar Abbas and Chabahar, across Iran and Azerbaijan – or via Caspian Sea routes – into Russia and onward to Northern and Western Europe.

Its main advantage over other routes is speed: the INSTC is said to be between 20% and 67% faster than existing corridors, while also avoiding the Suez Canal and Bab al-Mandab. 

Since 2022, it has become one of Moscow’s highest-priority alternative logistics routes, as it allows Russia to maintain trade links with partners in South Asia.

The corridor’s development, however, has been slow, largely because Iran, and later Russia, came under unprecedented Western sanctions. Even so, work has continued. India has invested around $120 million in Iran’s Chabahar Port, widely seen as a strategic anchor of the INSTC.

However, work at Chabahar has also been stalled by unilateral US sanctions against Iran.

Washington gave New Delhi a sanctions waiver in 2018, allowing India to develop and use the port for Afghanistan’s reconstruction and regional trade. A second six-month waiver given in October expired in April, making it harder for India to continue to work on the port. 

Chabahar is more than 500 km away from the conflict around the Strait of Hormuz. However, it still came under attack from US forces, with airstrikes targeting Iran’s maritime infrastructure and surveillance facilities in July. New Delhi clarified at the time that the Indian-operated Shahid Beheshti terminal itself was not damaged.

For India, Chabahar – and INSTC – remain the best options to access the Central Asian, Russian, and European markets, even if Washington and Tehran end hostilities tomorrow and open up Hormuz. A lot of work has already been done and the impact from any regional instability or political uncertainty would be far less than in the case of IMEC.

Why Hormuz actors still matter and the full corridor cannot be built now

It is difficult to imagine that the IMEC, if and when it becomes a reality, would move trade fully away from Hormuz. Saudi and UAE ports in the Persian Gulf that are key hubs on the route would still be impacted by any tensions around the strait.

The IMEC’s viability depends on much more than physical infrastructure, such as ports and railway lines. Making the land connectivity part work requires deeper transport and political cooperation across the Middle East, and specifically Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Israel.

That is no longer easy to pull together after Israeli forces invaded Gaza. The widespread public anger in the Arab world makes it nearly impossible for the Gulf monarchies to agree to such collaboration with Israel, the war with regional rival Iran notwithstanding. Finance is another issue, with no firm overall funding commitments or construction timelines in place. The corridor remains a long-term proposal rather than an operational alternative to existing energy and trade routes.

India and its partners are still backing the project. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni reaffirmed their commitment to the IMEC in May and called for a first ministerial meeting on the corridor to take concrete steps toward its implementation this year.

Still, despite the urgency created by the Middle East conflict and Trump’s comments, a fully functioning IMEC is years away.

Africa will not accept another era of colonial-style resource extraction as global demand for critical minerals grows, Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama has told the UN General Assembly (UNGA), calling for structural reforms to address historical injustices.

The remarks come as the US and EU pursue deals with African governments to secure minerals such as copper, cobalt, and lithium for electric vehicles, batteries, and power grids, while seeking to reduce their reliance on China.

African countries hold substantial deposits but often export raw minerals. A UN Trade and Development report published in June says many minerals agreements still focus heavily on extraction, warning that resource-rich African countries could miss out on the value generated by processing and manufacturing.

“Africa will not remain a passive arena for a new scramble for resources,” Mahama said on Thursday. He said African countries must process their minerals at home, build local industries, and retain more of the wealth they generate.

Several African governments have moved to tighten control over their mineral resources in recent years. DR Congo, the world’s largest cobalt producer, has banned exports of copper and cobalt concentrates to encourage local processing under an order reported in August. Zimbabwe also suspended exports of raw minerals and lithium concentrates in February.

Aside from critical minerals, Mahama also renewed the call for slavery reparations in his role as the African Union’s champion for the campaign. In March, Ghana secured a UN resolution recognizing the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery as the gravest crimes against humanity. It passed with 123 votes. The US, Israel, and Argentina voted against it, while 52 countries abstained.

The Ghanaian leader, however, said real repair requires “structural transformation,” including “dismantling the persistent engines of exploitation: unfair global trade regimes, predatory resource extraction, discriminatory credit ratings, [and] unsustainable debt burdens.”

“Africa does not seek charity. Africa seeks equal partnership,” Mahama declared.

US President Donald Trump wants to “colonize” Brazil and gain control of its natural resources by interfering in the country’s upcoming presidential election, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s campaign has said.

Meta blocked the advertising account used by Lula’s campaign on Facebook just days before the first round of the presidential election on October 4 in which left-wing incumbent Lula is seeking a fourth term against his main rival, right-wing Senator Flavio Bolsonaro. Recent polls have put the two candidates in a tight race, with a runoff scheduled for October 25 if neither wins more than half the vote.

In a minute-long television advertisement broadcast on Thursday, Lula’s campaign accused Trump of meddling in Brazil’s election in a bid to turn the country back into a colony and seize its natural resources. The video points to US-funded political advertising targeting Brazilian voters, alleged involvement by American tech companies, and an intelligence warning that the risk of US interference had reached a “critical level.”

Trump fiercely backed Flavio’s father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, during his trial over an alleged plot to overturn his 2022 election defeat and remain in power.

Risk of US interference in Brazil at ‘critical level’

The ad cited a confidential assessment by the Brazilian Intelligence Agency (ABIN), which was sent to the presidency, the country’s electoral court, and the Justice Ministry. The document warned of escalating US pressure on Brazil and raised the risk of external influence or interference in the election to a “critical level.”

“According to ABIN, the pressure from the United States must increase and Trump’s goal is to defeat Lula to control our natural resources,” the campaign ad says.

Lula echoed the accusation on X, stating that Bolsonaro wants to “hand our natural resources over to the United States.” “If it’s up to him, Brazil will become a colony again,” the president wrote.

Brazilian media reported that Pedro Sang, described as a Rockbridge organizer in Brazil, helped set up Bolsonaro’s campaign headquarters in Sao Paulo and took on a leadership role there. Lula’s Workers’ Party asked the Brazil’s Supreme Court to investigate possible foreign financing, which is prohibited under Brazilian election law. Sang denied that Rockbridge provided funding to political campaigns in Brazil.

Meta blocks Lula campaign ads

Meta has meanwhile disabled the advertising account used by Lula’s campaign on Facebook, preventing it from running new ads just days before the election. The campaign said the US tech giant gave no explanation for the move and demanded that access be restored, threatening legal action and describing the restriction as another example of alleged Big Tech interference in the vote.

The move follows a study published last week that found Meta approved 13 of 15 test political ads paid for through a US-based account and targeting Brazilian voters, including an AI-generated video depicting Trump urging Brazilians to vote for Bolsonaro. The researchers did not actually publish the ads, while Meta said the experiment did not reflect the scale of its efforts to protect the Brazilian election.

US hits Brazil with tariffs over Big Tech

Washington has ramped up economic and diplomatic pressure on Brazil ahead of the vote, imposing 25% tariffs on Brazilian imports in a dispute that observers say centers on Big Tech regulation rather than trade imbalances. The US Trade Representative cited Brazil’s treatment of American tech companies and court orders forcing platforms to remove political content, among other policies, to justify the tariffs.

Washington also revoked the Brazilian ambassador’s visa in August as tensions escalated during the election campaign. Lula’s government called the move politically motivated interference.

Venezuela raid fuels fears of US intervention

The alarm has spread beyond Lula’s camp. Right-wing presidential candidate Renan Santos has also accused Trump of wanting Brazil as a “vassal state,” to secure favorable rare-earth contracts and said Brazil should not become a vassal of the US or China.

Santos pointed to the US military operation in Venezuela in January, when American forces captured President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores and brought them to the US to face drug and weapons charges. Lula condemned the raid as the first direct US military attack on South America in more than 200 years of independence, while Santos warned: “I don’t want to see Latin America become an American protectorate.”

The State Department last month shrugged off claims that the White House was meddling in Brazil’s election, declaring that “any insinuation of a ‘ploy’ to undermine a democratic nation’s election is a baseless lie.”

India should continue to buy Russian oil and retain control over its energy choices as the US raises the pressure on major buyers, strategic affairs scholar Happymon Jacob told RT.

A recently-passed sanctions bill gives US President Donald Trump the power to impose tariffs of up to 100% on countries, including India, for purchasing Russian energy. New Delhi has maintained that its energy decisions are driven by national requirements and market conditions.

Russian oil should not be removed from the global market and India has no reason to stop buying it, Jacob told RT India in the latest episode of the ‘India, Russia, and the World’ podcast. He is the Delhi-based founder of the Council for Strategic and Defense Research think tank.

“I don’t think the world should take Russian oil off the table. I don’t think India should stop buying Russian oil,” he said. “You cannot let the Americans control your energy tap.”

India needs to keep a broad basket of energy options that include Russia, the Middle East, the US, and South America, along with renewable sources, Jacob said, adding that removing one of these options would reduce India’s flexibility at a time when energy supplies are exposed to geopolitical disruptions.

Russia is now India’s top supplier of crude oil, with September shipments tracking at around 1.9 million barrels per day, preliminary data from Kpler shows.

Ukrainian forces killed three humanitarian workers from Omsk Region who were delivering aid to the border Zaporozhye Region, Russian officials report.

The incident, which also left one volunteer injured, occurred near the village of Novobogdanovka, Zaporozhye Governor Evgeny Balitsky said on Friday. He accused Ukraine of carrying out a “cynical terrorist attack.” Omsk Governor Vitaly Khotsenko pledged support for the affected families.

Ambassador Rodion Miroshnik, the head of the Russian Foreign Ministry mission tasked with documenting Ukrainian war crimes, blamed the incident on Vladimir Zelensky, saying the Ukrainian leader is pursuing a war against the civilian population and is seeking to create “unlivable conditions” for non-combatants.

Zaporozhye Region, home to Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, was incorporated into Russia following a referendum in 2022, which Kiev rejected. Ukrainian forces continue to control the northern part of the region.

Moscow has accused Kiev of using terrorist tactics in the conflict, including deliberately targeting non-combatants such as ambulance crews, repair workers, and civilian motorists.

Earlier this year, Zelensky announced a “pressure campaign” involving an escalation of drone strikes against Russian energy infrastructure, ships, and warehouses. Long-range weapons production was expanded this year, even as Ukraine faces a $27 billion military budget shortfall that it has asked foreign donors to help cover.

Russia has responded to the escalation by intensifying strikes on Ukrainian targets, including facilities linked to crucial Black Sea trade, inflicting mounting damage on Ukraine’s war economy.

Crowds of displaced Lebanese from the country’s south have gathered outside the United Nations offices in Beirut to protest Israeli attacks that have led to the destruction of homes, towns, and villages.

The protest on Thursday came amid a major escalation in Lebanon that began in early March, after the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran, prompting Hezbollah to retaliate. Israel responded with airstrikes and expanded its existing military presence in the south of the country.

Israel has reportedly occupied around 600 sq km of territory in southern Lebanon, displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians from some 57 towns and villages located within the zone.

“We are people with disabilities, as well as homeowners and business owners from the south who have suffered losses and are facing severe hardships,” one of the protesters told RT. “This day will serve as an international day against evictions, bombardments and destruction, especially given that Israel, that brutal enemy, has shattered the very foundations of life in the south.”

Protesters also urged the Lebanese authorities to support displaced people, stressing that they “want to know what the future holds and wish to avoid uncertainty.”

Last week, Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam told parliament that the estimated cost of reconstruction had reached around $27 billion, more than double the World Bank’s previous estimate of up to $13 billion. He also said that around 91,000 homes have been damaged or destroyed amid the ongoing Israeli aggression.

The international community has linked reconstruction funding to the disarmament of armed groups, including Hezbollah, a process that, according to analysts, could take years and remains a major political challenge for Lebanon.

Watch RT’s full report below.

Hackers have stolen nearly $352 million from major cryptocurrency exchange Bitget, prompting the company to suspend withdrawals. The breach comes amid mounting concern that AI is making cyberattacks easier to carry out.

Bitget detected unauthorized transfers from its wallets on Thursday evening, CEO Gracy Chen said. She stressed, however, that customer funds are safe and that the loss is covered by the company’s User Protection Fund, which holds more than $464 million.

The stolen assets came from parts of Bitget’s “hot” and “warm” wallets, which are used to process transactions and hold funds readily available for transfer. Its offline “cold” wallets were not affected, according to Chen.

She added that although withdrawals have been temporarily suspended, deposits and trading remain available while the company investigates the breach.

Bitget has not identified the perpetrators, but Chen said, without elaborating, that the company suspects North Korean involvement.

Blockchain analytics platform Lookonchain has estimated that the attackers have already converted about $183 million of the stolen assets into Ether tokens.

In August, users of Coldcard hardware wallets also lost at least $89 million after attackers exploited a flaw in how the devices generated the secret keys protecting their funds. Coldcard’s maker has warned that AI-assisted code review could uncover old software flaws faster than developers can address them.

The growing capabilities of AI have also been linked to an overall increase in cyberattacks on cryptocurrency platforms. Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis said it has recorded a 440% increase in AI-assisted malicious entries since powerful open-source coding tools became widely available, from about two a day to 11.

Beyond cryptocurrency, reports of AI agents gaining unauthorized access to real systems during unrelated tasks and security tests have raised questions about whether developers can reliably keep them within their assigned limits, or prevent malicious actors from using more capable models to find vulnerabilities and carry out attacks on a larger scale.

Executives at Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and xAI have backed calls to slow the development of increasingly powerful systems.

Vladimir Zelensky put his personal interests first when he breached an agreement with Seoul not to disclose the transfer of two North Korean prisoners of war captured in Russia, South Korean President Lee Jae-myung has said.

Zelensky touted the arrangement during his speech to the UN General Assembly this week, saying it was “not easy to capture alive” the two soldiers. North Korea deployed troops to assist Russia in repelling a Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Kursk Region in 2024-2025.

Lee rebuked Zelensky, without naming him, in an X post on Thursday, arguing that statesmen should put national interests first rather than opportunistically seeking to boost their own popularity.

The Ukrainian leader demonstrated a “callous and irresponsible attitude [that is] simply unacceptable,” the president wrote, stressing that Seoul and Kiev had agreed to keep the highly sensitive transfer private.

He criticized the Lee administration for seeking to keep the agreement with Zelensky secret and said the government “should have taken a more proactive and assertive approach.” The deal was reached sometime in June, he added.

Kiev has long pressured Seoul to provide direct military support for the conflict with Russia, citing North Korea’s involvement in the conflict. Yoo said that, as far as he knew, the delivery of the POWs was not conditioned on South Korea changing its policy of not sending weapons to Ukraine.

South Korea does not formally recognize the government in Pyongyang as legitimate and considers all Koreans citizens of a single nation, regardless of the part of the peninsula where they were born.

The US government has joined Elon Musk’s appeal against an EU fine imposed on X, accusing Brussels of “regulatory overreach” and escalating a transatlantic clash over its regulation of US tech firms.

The European Commission fined X €120 million ($136.51 million) for alleged violations of its 2022 Digital Services Act, the first such penalty under the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA), a vast legislative censorship and media control apparatus. Brussels accused the platform of breaching rules on transparency, advertising, and data access, as well as using a deceptive blue-tick system for verified accounts.

Musk, who has claimed the EU’s tech regulations stall technological progress and equated the bloc to a “Fourth Reich” over them, appealed the decision in February, seeking to overturn the fine.

On Thursday, the US Department of Justice said it had filed an application to intervene in support of Musk’s legal challenge.

“The European Commission inappropriately attempted to expand its regulatory authority to reach American companies not present or operating within its jurisdiction,” Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate said. “We will not tolerate the European Commission engaging in regulatory over-reach to try and control American engines of innovation and economic growth.”

🚨 United States Files Request to Intervene in Case Brought by X Corp. and Elon Musk Seeking to Annul Decision by European Commission

“The European Commission inappropriately attempted to expand its regulatory authority to reach American companies not present or operating within…

— DOJ Civil Division (@DOJCivil) September 24, 2026

The Justice Department warned that the case – the first DSA enforcement challenge to reach the General Court – could set a precedent for US tech firms. Citing “significant concerns” over Brussels’ approach to liability and jurisdiction, it said Washington has an interest in “protecting American companies from foreign extraterritorial enforcement action.”

Neither the European Commission nor X responded to media requests for comment on the US intervention.

US-EU clash over Big Tech

EU scrutiny of US tech firms has become a major source of friction between Brussels and the administration of President Donald Trump, which has backed claims that the bloc unfairly targets American tech giants and harms digital free speech. Senior administration figures, including Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have criticized the EU’s fine on X as an attack on American companies. Musk previously accused the EU of trying to shut down X, claiming in 2024 that the commission had offered him an “illegal secret deal” to “quietly censor speech” to avoid a fine.

DSA: Online safety or censorship?

Brussels sells the DSA as an online-safety law meant to fight illegal content and “disinformation.” Critics see something far more sinister: an expanding censorship and narrative-control regime that gives unelected EU officials sweeping leverage over political speech – and over the largely American tech platforms that carry it.

That criticism gained ammunition from a 2026 report by Republicans on the US House Judiciary Committee.

Brussels has also gone beyond pressuring platforms. The EU banned RT and Sputnik in 2022 and has sought tighter controls on what it considers Russian disinformation, and has since pushed platforms to clamp down on what Brussels labels Russian disinformation. The commission itself admitted DSA-linked mechanisms are being used to address Ukraine-related content and election risks. Critics argue that, backed by the threat of massive fines, the system gives Brussels powerful leverage over narratives that challenge its political and foreign-policy consensus.

That leaves a stark divide over what Brussels’ flagship internet law actually does. The EU calls it online safety; its critics see a censorship architecture capable of suppressing dissenting narratives, shaping the information environment around elections, and forcing global tech platforms to police political speech on Brussels’ terms.

Egypt has unveiled the first locally developed industrial robot, as the country seeks to expand domestic manufacturing and reduce reliance on imported industrial technology.

The robot was officially launched and handed over at a ceremony attended by Industry Minister Khaled Hashem on Wednesday. According to the Ministry of Trade and Industry, it was developed by Egyptian engineers using locally produced technology. Local media reported that around 80% of its components are domestically produced, with developers aiming for 90% once motor production is localized.

The robotic arm is already being used commercially. It is being integrated into packaging equipment operated by Egyptian manufacturer QB and is designed for industrial packaging and automation on production lines.

The ministry said it will monitor the robot’s performance in industrial operations to assess its effectiveness and encourage wider adoption by Egyptian factories. 

Egypt is not the only African country developing local expertise in industrial robotics. Tunisia’s TIRA Robots has developed robotic arms for integration into production lines, while other local engineering companies, including XPERT-MECA, design automated machinery and integrate industrial robots produced by global manufacturers such as KUKA.

Industrial automation is also well established in South Africa and Morocco, particularly in the automotive sector. Local companies integrate foreign-made robots into production lines. Morocco-based MTS Robotics develops automated systems for welding, assembly, handling, and packaging.

Fighting has escalated between Ethiopian troops and Tigrayan forces, triggering the suspension of flights to the holy town of Lalibela amid fears of a return to full-scale war in the north of the country.

Ethiopia’s federal army said it repelled attacks in Amhara’s North Wollo Zone and killed 272 Tigrayan fighters and wounded 260 others in a counteroffensive. Northeast army commander Lieutenant General Assefa Chekol said fighters from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and allied groups attempted to break through at several locations.

“The army is carrying out the crucial task of clearing the occupied zone of the enemy by conducting targeted counter-attacks from key military positions it holds,” Chekol said in a statement on Thursday.

The suspension of flights to Lalibela, home to UNESCO-listed rock-hewn churches, came a day after TPLF-linked forces seized airports in Mekelle, Axum, and Shire. Ethiopian Airlines also halted flights to these three cities in Tigray.

“We are in the situation of full-blown war now,” TPLF Vice President Amanuel Assefa told AFP on Thursday.

The TPLF dominated Ethiopian politics for nearly three decades before Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed took office in 2018. A power struggle between his government and Tigray’s leaders erupted into war in November 2020. Eritrean troops and Amhara forces fought alongside the federal army against Tigrayan forces. Hundreds of thousands died before an African Union-mediated peace agreement was signed in 2022. The agreement ended the large-scale war, but disputes over territory, the return of displaced people, and the disarmament of Tigrayan forces remain unresolved.

The latest escalation follows Sunday’s announcement of an alliance between the TPLF and six other groups, including its former Amhara adversaries, seeking to remove Abiy’s government.

The African Union has condemned the violence, warning that “the formation of new political and military alliances” risks further destabilizing the region and “reversing the gains made to silencing the guns, since 2020.” It said the airport seizures and detention of federal personnel violate the 2022 peace agreement, asking AU mediator and former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo to reengage with the parties. The UN has called for civilian protection and humanitarian access.

Nepalese Prime Minister Balendra Shah has slammed the current global system, saying it allows weapons to be moved efficiently but leaves poorer countries struggling to secure food, fuel, and other essentials for their populations.

“We have built a world with flawless logistics for war and broken logistics for food,” Shah told the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Thursday.

The rapper-turned-politician pointed to the shortages his country has faced amid conflicts and geopolitical tensions disrupting supply chains, saying farmers have struggled to obtain fertilizer, road projects lacked bitumen, and families faced shortages of cooking fuel.

“Inter-continental missiles arrive on time. Rifles and ammunition cross borders, clear every bottleneck, meet each deadline,” Shah, who was elected to Nepal’s top job earlier this year following ‘Gen Z’ protests against corruption, told the assembled world leaders. “But a peasant in Nepal cannot procure his fertilizer or fuel at market price at a time of need.”

📹 'Hit By Climate We Didn't Warm, Hit By Wars We Didn't Start': Nepal PM Balen Shah's Rousing Speech At UN

"This is not Nepal's private misfortune. Ask Bangladesh. Ask Bhutan. Ask India. Ask the Maldives. Ask Pakistan. Ask any other country in our region and you'll hear the… https://t.co/e4U0xT14i1 pic.twitter.com/5Bi4Qwi26M

— RT_India (@RT_India_news) September 25, 2026

He argued that the problem extends beyond his country, specifically pointing to India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, the Maldives, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka as regional states facing pressures from climate shocks and conflicts.

Nepal is recovering from catastrophic flash floods that were triggered by an ice-rock avalanche near the Tibetan border on August 26. The wall of water, mud, and rock tore through mountain communities, killing at least 1,400 people and leaving more than 6,000 missing. Nepal estimates its physical recovery needs at around 10% of its gross domestic product.

The prime minister described the Bhotekoshi-Trishuli disaster as a “warning to the world,” saying a warming climate is destabilizing the Himalayan ecology and increasing the risks of avalanches, floods, and landslides. The devastation affected both sides of the Nepal-China border before floodwaters continued downstream toward India.

Senior officials in Italy and France have denied claims that their governments were warned about possible Russian drone attacks launched from containers carried by merchant ships in the Mediterranean Sea.

The disinformation was published on Thursday by the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, which cited an anonymous source close to the Lithuanian Defense Ministry. The article emphasized a recent trip to Russia by CIA Director John Ratcliffe and previous Western media reports claiming he personally cautioned Russian officials against targeting NATO nations. Moscow has denied having such intentions.

Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto said on X there was no evidence confirming that Russia was preparing an operation of the kind described by the Lithuanian source, adding that in difficult times “no one needs more fuel on the fire.”

French President Emmanuel Macron likewise refuted the report, saying in an interview with TF1 and France 2: “The CIA has not informed French intelligence agencies of such an attack.”

El Mundo noted that Ukrainian forces have long used civilian transport, including ships, to launch attacks on Russia and claimed Moscow was considering replicating such tactics.

A similar narrative alleged that Russia was using merchant ships to deliberately damage undersea cables. Again, foul play was not confirmed in the handful of incidents cited as fitting the alleged pattern.

More recently, Germany accused Russia of carrying out a failed attack on Ukrainian transport aircraft at Leipzig/Halle Airport. Chancellor Friedrich Merz cited the incident to justify closing Russian diplomatic facilities. Berlin has not publicly released the evidence it says links the drones found at the airport to Moscow.

The EU is considering measures to curb the return of Russian and Belarusian athletes to international sports under their national flags following a decision by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to ease restrictions, Euractiv reported on Thursday, citing EU diplomats.

The proposals were outlined by the EU diplomatic service and the European Commission in a non-paper and have yet to become a formal EC proposal, according to the outlet.

Measures under discussion include targeted sanctions and visa restrictions against individuals linked to Russian and Belarusian sports. Brussels is also considering using EU funding as leverage by restricting financial support for organizations that allow athletes from the two countries to compete under their national symbols.

Another option would seek to curb media revenues linked to Russian athletes, although diplomats have acknowledged that the measure could be difficult to implement. The EU could also approach third countries in an effort to discourage them from facilitating the return of Russian and Belarusian competitors under their national flags.

The Commission and the EU diplomatic service are expected to develop further proposals ahead of an EU ministerial meeting on education, sport and culture on November 20.

The discussions follow the IOC’s July decision to provisionally lift restrictions on the Russian and Belarusian Olympic committees, potentially opening the way for their athletes to compete at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics under national symbols. The IOC has said decisions concerning flags, anthems and other national identification at future Games will be made later.

Russian athletes have subsequently secured several major international titles. In July, 19-year-old Pavel Graudyn won the men’s individual saber title at the World Fencing Championships in Hong Kong.

In August, Evgeniia Chikunova won the women’s 200-meter breaststroke at the European Aquatics Championships in Paris, setting a championship record of 2:19.32 while competing under neutral status.

Virtually all of America’s most powerful technology executives joined US President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping for a lavish White House state dinner on Thursday, as AI emerged as a major theme of the Chinese leader’s visit.

The black-tie dinner in the White House East Room brought together more than 130 guests, including Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

Apple chairman Tim Cook, AMD chief Lisa Su, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon, Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, and Dell Technologies chief Michael Dell were also among those invited. Major finance and industrial executives, including JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser, and Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg, attended as well.

One notable Silicon Valley name was missing, however. Anthropic – the developer of the Claude AI models and one of OpenAI’s biggest US rivals – had no representative. CEO Dario Amodei has been among the industry’s more vocal advocates of tighter safeguards around increasingly powerful AI systems.

Intel, IBM, and Oracle were also absent from the guest list, which otherwise featured most of America’s biggest technology and AI companies.

The concentration of American tech executives came as Trump and Xi discussed the increasingly intense US-China competition in AI and advanced semiconductors.

Earlier on Thursday, Xi said both countries have a responsibility to ensure AI remains “under human control” and is developed for the benefit of people.

The dinner followed around 90 minutes of talks between Trump and Xi at the White House, where the two sides also addressed trade, Taiwan, and the ongoing conflict involving Iran. Washington and Beijing agreed earlier this week to extend their existing trade truce by two months while negotiations continue.

Trump emphasized cooperation despite the rivalry, saying the two leaders represent “different systems” but can continue building a relationship promoting prosperity and security.

Trump PROPOSES TOAST to Xi Jinping & Madame Peng at STATE DINNER

'MAY ALL OF OUR PEOPLE KNOW A FUTURE OF HARMONY, PEACE & SUCCESS' https://t.co/lX8TGdOAEQ pic.twitter.com/Zl7r00eNEA

— RTBreaking (@RT_Breaking_) September 25, 2026

Xi said China’s pursuit of the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” and Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ agenda “can surely be mutually reinforcing.”

Xi: Now, I would like to propose a toast to the health of President and Mrs. Trump… cheers. pic.twitter.com/NPrdm878rW

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 25, 2026

The dinner capped a day of elaborate ceremonies at the White House, including a military review and a separate flyover featuring a B-2 Spirit and four F-22 Raptors. Trump also revealed that earlier in the day, he presented Xi with a three-foot-tall bald eagle statue designed by an American artist in collaboration with the president and first lady, calling the bird a symbol of America’s “free and soaring spirit.” Details of Xi’s gift were not immediately disclosed.

Iran has offered the US a new deal aimed at ending the months-long conflict before the midterm election in November, directly challenging President Donald Trump’s claim that Tehran is deliberately waiting until after the election to reach an agreement.

Trump claimed in a speech at the UN on Tuesday that Iran is deliberately stalling the talks to see how Republicans perform in the November 3 midterm election, and predicted that Tehran would make a deal “right after” the vote. He also threatened to “annihilate” the Islamic Republic if negotiations fail.

“We don’t want it to get to the midterm elections,” Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian told reporters on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York on Thursday. “We wish Americans to return to the MOU before the midterms,” he said, referring to the memorandum of understanding reached by the US and Iran in June.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Tehran has submitted a proposal in which the Strait of Hormuz could be reopened within around a week and negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program rapidly resumed. The proposal was sent through mediators during talks in New York this week.

Under the plan, Tehran would restore navigation through the crucial oil shipping route in exchange for Washington lifting its economic blockade, easing restrictions on Iranian oil exports, and releasing some frozen Iranian assets. Iran is also seeking an end to hostilities on other fronts, including Israel’s combat operations in Lebanon.

US and Iranian negotiators are discussing a phased arrangement in which the blockade and restrictions on Hormuz would be addressed first, Reuters reported, citing Iranian, regional, and Western diplomatic sources.

Araghchi said the proposal largely follows the terms of the June memorandum rather than introducing new demands, adding that Iran is waiting for a response.

Araghchi has also held a series of meetings with foreign counterparts in New York, including Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Moscow has said there is “no alternative” to a diplomatic settlement of the crisis provoked by the “illegal actions” of the US and Israel.

Pezeshkian, who is the first foreign head of state to speak at the UN while his country is at war with the US, told the chamber on Wednesday that Tehran is prepared for “dialogue and diplomacy” but will not negotiate under threats of force and “will never bow our head or bend at the knee.”

A US ban on diesel exports could squeeze the EU’s energy market, which is already strained by reduced Russian supplies due to sanctions and disruptions in flows from the Middle East, officials in Brussels have warned.

European Commission spokesman Olof Gill told Politico on Thursday that Brussels was concerned by reports that Washington could halt diesel exports for 90 days, warning that any disruption “would risk negatively impacting both sides.”

The US has supplied about a third of Europe’s diesel imports this year, with its share rising to around half in August, according to government data. Prices at the pump have already reached record highs in Germany and the Netherlands.

Commission spokeswoman Anna-Kaisa Itkonen said Brussels was monitoring the markets and security of supply “very, very closely,” noting that the US was a “major supplier” of both diesel and liquefied natural gas as part of the bloc’s “diversification strategy since 2022.”

Trump backed the idea of restricting exports on Tuesday as US diesel prices hit a record $6.52 a gallon ($1.72 per liter). “I’ve said let’s not send out the diesel,” he told reporters ahead of a meeting with Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky.

The issue was raised during talks between Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in New York on Wednesday. According to the Russian Foreign Ministry, Lavrov said Ukrainian attacks on energy and cross-border infrastructure were deliberately contributing to instability in global energy markets.

Russia has also restricted fuel exports to stabilize its domestic market. The measures run through January, although direct producers have been permitted to export diesel, marine fuel and gasoline since September.

The EU has sharply reduced purchases of Russian energy since the 2022 escalation of the Ukraine conflict. Russia’s share of the bloc’s gas imports plunged from 45% to 12% by 2025, while its share of oil imports dropped from 27% to about 2%.

Moscow has blamed the EU’s decision to cut Russian energy imports as a key factor behind the crisis. Kremlin envoy Kirill Dmitriev said last week that Europe was facing “the worst energy crisis in history,” describing the situation as “self-made.”

France will deploy troops, radar, and air-defense systems to Saudi Arabia to protect a key Red Sea oil hub as Riyadh struggles to contain escalating Houthi missile and drone attacks, President Emmanuel Macron has announced.

Macron said French forces will not join the fighting but will merely protect the strategic energy facility under an agreement with Riyadh. The announcement came hours after the Saudi-led coalition said it intercepted six ballistic missiles heading toward Taif, which hosts a key Saudi air base, and the strategic port city of Yanbu.

“We are going to send military resources, that is to say, soldiers, radar systems, and defense systems, to protect the site of Yanbu,” Macron told TF1 and France 2 on Thursday.

Macron said the Yanbu hub, which handles several million barrels of oil, was “very badly damaged” in previous attacks. The Red Sea port has become increasingly important for Saudi exports as the US-Iran war severely restricts tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

The Houthis have framed their campaign as a fight to drive Saudi-backed government forces out of Yemen, end Riyadh’s blockade, and restore the country’s sovereignty, warning foreign powers against joining the Saudi campaign.

France is the latest country Riyadh has turned to for military assistance after Washington stopped short of a direct intervention sought by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Earlier this month, the Saudi leader asked US President Donald Trump to order strikes against the Houthis, but Trump reportedly refused.

Riyadh has sought additional support from France, Britain, Pakistan, and Egypt as its stocks of missile interceptors come under pressure.

Britain has already agreed to deploy an RAF Voyager tanker to provide air-to-air refueling for Saudi operations, adding to UK air-defense equipment and personnel already stationed in the kingdom. Pakistan, which has a mutual-defense agreement with Saudi Arabia, has pledged to defend the kingdom “to any extent,” although Islamabad has not announced a new combat deployment.

The renewed Saudi appeals come as the Houthis make major territorial gains along Yemen’s Red Sea coast, seizing Mokha and strategic islands around the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. The group has also targeted Saudi oil infrastructure and shipping while demanding an end to the Saudi blockade of Yemen.

The fighting threatens Saudi Arabia from both sides of the Arabian Peninsula: Iran has severely disrupted the kingdom’s traditional export route through Hormuz, while the Houthi advance and attacks are putting pressure on its alternative Red Sea corridor through Yanbu and Bab al-Mandeb.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held up a pager at the UN General Assembly, invoking the deadly 2024 covert sabotage operation against Hezbollah in Lebanon, which killed dozens and severely wounded thousands, including women and children.

Thousands of pagers carried by Hezbollah members exploded across Lebanon on September 17, 2024, followed by hundreds of weaponized walkie-talkies the next day. The attacks killed dozens and injured up to 4,000 people, including numerous civilian bystanders, healthcare workers, and their families. Israel later acknowledged responsibility for the operation.

Speaking at the General Assembly on Thursday, Netanyahu held up a pager, saying: “You remember the beepers? Remember these? Hezbollah certainly remembers them.”

Netanyahu: "Remember the beepers (pagers)? Hezbollah certainly remembers" pic.twitter.com/W11O0YdjeR

— Israel National News - Arutz Sheva (@ArutzSheva_En) September 24, 2026

Scores of delegates walked out as Netanyahu took the podium, leaving much of the hall empty. The Palestinian mission urged other delegations to join the protest.

Delegations from more than 70 countries walked out of the United Nations General Assembly hall.

No one wants to listen to the words of a war criminal and a killer of the children of #Gaza. pic.twitter.com/UWSwxeOmen

— Iran in India (@Iran_in_India) September 24, 2026

Netanyahu struck a confrontational tone throughout the speech, branding delegates who walked out “moral cowards” and lashing out at several of Israel’s regional and international critics. He called Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan a “tyrant,” accused Qatar of trying to “brainwash” young Americans, and predicted that Iran’s government would eventually fall.

The Iranian representative didn’t want the starlink :( pic.twitter.com/wpElxvrrr4

— Danny Danon 🇮🇱 דני דנון (@dannydanon) September 24, 2026

He also held up a Starlink terminal, saying he would leave it for the Iranian delegation to use when its members “inevitably defect.”

At a White House meeting in February 2025, Netanyahu presented US President Donald Trump with a gold-plated pager in reference to the attack. Trump reportedly called it “a great operation.”

Fighting flared up again in March 2026, when Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel following the outbreak of the US-Israeli war against Iran. A US-brokered ceasefire in June largely halted major Israeli strikes on Beirut, although Israeli forces continue to occupy parts of southern Lebanon and carry out attacks elsewhere in the country. More than 4,000 people have been killed and over 12,000 wounded in Israeli attacks on Lebanon since March, according to the country’s Health Ministry.

Dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters have been arrested near UN headquarters in Manhattan on Thursday as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the General Assembly, according to RT’s Caleb Maupin, reporting from the scene.

Demonstrators blocked an intersection several blocks from the UN building in a planned act of civil disobedience timed to coincide with Netanyahu’s speech, Maupin said.

RT footage showed protesters holding signs reading “stop settler terror” and “stop arming Israel.” Demonstrators also chanted “Netanyahu you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide” and “One, two, three, four, Gaza’s what we’re fighting for.”

“The protesters are expecting to be arrested. This is a planned act of civil disobedience timed with the Israeli prime minister’s upcoming speech,” Maupin said.

Another video showed detained protesters being loaded into an NYPD van. Some wore shirts bearing the slogan “fund people not bombs.”

US attitudes toward Israel have grown more negative in recent years, according to opinion polls. Some 62% of American adults had an unfavorable view of the Israeli government in May 2026, up from 43% in 2022, according to a Pew Research Center survey published in July. The share with a favorable view of Israel fell by 15 percentage points over the same period.

Israel’s actions in Gaza and the expansion of settlements in the occupied West Bank have also drawn international criticism.

The UN had documented more than 1,430 settler incidents resulting in casualties or property damage in the occupied West Bank this year as of August 10, affecting around 260 Palestinian communities, he said.

More than 1,400 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the ceasefire took effect in October 2025, bringing the total death toll since October 2023 to nearly 74,000, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.

September is proving a miserable month for German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

Two weeks ago, his Christian Democratic Union suffered a crushing defeat in Saxony-Anhalt, where the Alternative for Germany won 43.8% of the vote against just 17.2% for the CDU, then, on September 20, another humiliation arrived in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.

The AfD finished first there with 38.2%, while the CDU, one of the parties that built postwar Germany, received just 4.9% and failed to clear the threshold for representation in the state parliament. It was the party’s worst result in any German state election since the foundation of the Federal Republic, and it happened in Angela Merkel’s home state.

Things were hardly better in Berlin, which voted on the same day. There, the CDU was beaten not by the AfD but by Die Linke (The Left), which won 25.7%, while the CDU slumped to 18.8%.

Merz himself called the results a “disaster,” and if Saxony-Anhalt made discussion of replacing the chancellor respectable, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania has made it unavoidable. Criticism is spreading through the CDU and German newspapers are openly discussing his future as potential successors are already being mentioned.

The Spectator’s Henry Donovan put it particularly brutally, describing Merz as “the most tragic chancellor in the young history of the reunified Germany” and declaring that his time was up, and there is certainly something tragic about Merz’s career.

Then, after winning the 2025 federal election, Merz achieved another distinction he probably didn’t want when he became the first candidate for chancellor in the history of the Federal Republic to fail to secure election by the Bundestag on the first ballot.

For a man who spent decades trying to reach the top, departing after little more than a year with his authority badly damaged would be a bitter conclusion, so Merz, unsurprisingly, has no intention of doing so. After the latest defeats, he made clear that he planned to remain chancellor and continue with his reform program.

That raises an obvious question: If his opponents want him gone, why can they not simply remove him? The answer lies in Germany’s Basic Law.

Unlike in Britain, where a prime minister can effectively be dispatched by his own parliamentary party, Germany deliberately makes removing a sitting chancellor difficult, meaning the Bundestag can oust Merz through a “constructive vote of no confidence,” but only by simultaneously electing somebody else with an absolute majority.

Merz’s opponents face two problems in attempting something similar, and the first is arithmetic. CDU parliamentarians are traditionally disciplined, and assembling a majority against their own chancellor would be extremely difficult without a major rebellion or votes from the AfD. Any arrangement dependent on AfD support would immediately collide with Germany’s Brandmauer, or “firewall,” under which the established parties refuse political cooperation with the rising upstarts. 

The second problem is simpler, in that there’s no agreed replacement. Names are circulating, but no candidate has emerged around whom a Bundestag majority could plausibly unite and under Germany’s constitution, disliking the existing chancellor is not enough, parliament must agree on the next one before it can dismiss him.

Leaving Merz in place carries risks of its own, however, as the AfD’s rise has coincided with growing dissatisfaction over the economy, migration, energy costs, and Berlin’s support for Ukraine. Merz came to power promising change, but his government is now pursuing painful economic and welfare reforms while insisting that Germans must accept sacrifices to restore the country’s competitiveness and finance its wider strategic ambitions.

His colleagues will probably first try persuasion, such as change the rhetoric, modify unpopular policies, and somehow arrest the electoral decline before Germany enters another cycle of state elections, but if that fails, the pressure for more radical action will inevitably grow.

For now, Germany has a chancellor who doesn’t want to leave, a parliament that cannot easily remove him, and an opposition whose growing strength makes every conventional route to replacing him more complicated.

Merz spent more than 20 years trying to become chancellor, but his problem now is proving that finally getting the job wasn’t the high point of his political career.

This article was first published by the online newspaper Gazeta.ru and was translated and edited by the RT team

US President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, have discussed cooperation on artificial intelligence during talks in Washington, stressing the technology’s growing global importance.

The meeting came as the two countries compete for leadership in AI while negotiating over advanced chips and critical materials, which became key bargaining points in their trade dispute last year.

Welcoming Xi to the White House for a state visit, Trump said the talks would cover security, technology and “superintelligence” – his new term for AI.

“The decisions we make in these areas today can promote peace and prosperity for decades and decades to come,” the US president said.

Xi said China and the US “bear a historic responsibility to promote human development and progress.”

Beijing and Washington stand to benefit from cooperation and lose from confrontation, Xi added, stressing that competition between the two countries should be a “race” rather than a fight “in which one either wins or loses.”

Earlier this month, Trump singled out China as Washington’s main rival in the AI race, declaring that “whoever wins AI, wins.”

China has agreed to suspend some of the restrictions for a year following a Trump-Xi meeting in South Korea last October.

Ahead of Thursday’s summit, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that Washington and Beijing had agreed to extend their tariff truce by another two months. The arrangement has kept tariffs well below the peaks reached during last year’s trade war, when US duties on Chinese imports climbed as high as 145% and Beijing’s levies on American goods reached 125%.

Germany’s opposition lawmakers have accused Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government of seeking to create a “secret police” by dramatically expanding the powers of the country’s intelligence agencies.

The accusations came during the first parliamentary debate on the reform on Thursday, with lawmakers from the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the Left and the Greens raising concerns over surveillance and fundamental rights. The government argues that the changes are needed to counter growing security threats.

Under a reform approved by the cabinet last month, the BND foreign intelligence agency and the BfV domestic security service would gain broader operational powers, allowing them to move beyond primarily gathering and analyzing information.

Among the proposed changes, the BND could sabotage foreign companies, penetrate foreign IT systems and disable weapons deemed a threat to Germany. The BfV, meanwhile, could secretly enter homes and access computers and mobile phones under certain circumstances.

AfD MP Gottfried Curio branded the proposed overhaul of the BfV “Stasi 2.0,” referring to East Germany’s notorious secret police, and called the reform a “coup against the rule of law.” The AfD, however, supports granting the BND greater operational powers.

The BfV has itself been locked in a legal battle with the AfD. In 2025, the agency designated Germany’s most popular party a “confirmed right-wing extremist” organization, but a Cologne court in February barred it from applying that classification while the case proceeds.

The ruling came months before the AfD scored major gains in regional elections. It won 43.8% in Saxony-Anhalt earlier this month and 38.3% in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania on Sunday.

Left Party MP Clara Buenger went further, warning that the BfV could become a “new German secret police.”

“Fundamental rights are being trampled on here,” she said, arguing that the agency would gain powers traditionally reserved for police.

The debate comes as Merz’s government braces for growing AfD influence at the regional level. The Telegraph and Die Welt reported in July that Berlin was developing a “secret plan” to counter potential “obstructionism” by regional authorities, allowing the federal government to bypass them in a crisis.

The German government wants the intelligence reform to take effect at the beginning of 2027. It still requires approval from both the Bundestag and Bundesrat.

The EU has published a wide range of reports detailing what social media companies like TikTok and Meta are doing to comply with its Digital Services Act (DSA). The reports detail the extreme censorship needed to stay on Brussels’ good side. 

Under the European Commission’s “voluntary Code of Conduct on Disinformation,” the largest online platforms operating in the EU are required to submit biannual reports explaining their efforts to combat so-called “disinformation.” Although adherence to the code is described as “voluntary,” those who do not comply are subject to fines under the DSA, which came into force in 2023.

The commission published reports by Meta, TikTok, Google, Twitch, and more than two dozen other platforms on Wednesday. Each report spans hundreds of pages, and details the speech restrictions and censorship policies put in place at the behest of the EU.

In its report, TikTok admitted that it removed more than half a million posts concerning elections in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Denmark, Hungary, Malta, Portugal, and Slovenia this year. RT has covered the EU’s efforts to interfere in the Bulgarian and Hungarian elections in depth, and found that TikTok came under particularly intense pressure from Brussels, after its failure to implement sufficiently draconian restrictions during Romania’s presidential election in 2024. 

Each report is hundreds of pages long, and every major social media company admitted that they now defer to EU-approved “fact-checkers” to police content on their platforms. Meta explained that it now automatically down-ranks content flagged by fact-checkers, while YouTube stated that it has trained AI models to pre-emptively remove content it thinks would fall foul of these groups. 

Every social media platform devoted a chapter in its report to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, with Facebook noting that all posts on the conflict are subject to monitoring for “disinformation and misinformation” by pro-EU fact-checkers. 

Russian media outlets are banned from Facebook, while Ukrainian outlets are free to operate, and Kiev is permitted to fundraise on the platform.

Despite mentioning “disinformation” more than a dozen times, the DSA does not define the term. 

Ukraine’s government-backed United24 project offered former US service members thousands of dollars to produce pro-Ukraine videos for American audiences, RT’s America Now has found. The offers targeted veterans whose military backgrounds could make the message seem more credible to viewers.

Host Ben Swann and investigative journalist Elizabeth Lane examined how the project, launched by Vladimir Zelensky in 2022 to raise support for Ukraine, approached former personnel, including special operations veterans with YouTube channels and other media platforms.

According to veterans who reached out to Lane, United24 offered around $10,000 for each video, plus $40,000 in advertising support. There was no stated limit on the number of videos they could make. The project would also provide scripts and guidance, while the veterans would ultimately deliver praise for Ukraine and Zelensky in their own words.

Some creators who agreed to the deal were reportedly creating up to five or six videos a week, making nearly a quarter of a million dollars a month, Lane found.

However, for some, the refusal came with consequences beyond lost income. One veteran, who turned down the offer and later criticized Ukraine for wasting US money on his channel, had people contacting his employer, calling him a Russian agent, and trying to get him fired.

The effort ultimately failed, Lane learned, noting that it is still “crazy that some foreign government is allowed to reach out to an employer of a former veteran and tell them that ‘you should fire this guy because he’s a Russian propagandist.’”

United24 has since tried to deny making such offers, despite Lane’s recorded Zoom calls with multiple veterans that testify to the contrary.

The choice of former service members is central to the Ukrainian propaganda operation, Swann noted, pointing out that many Americans are inclined to trust someone who had served in the US military, unless they find out that the veteran had been offered thousands of dollars by a foreign government to deliver the message.

Furthermore, given that Kiev is almost exclusively funded by its foreign sponsors, including billions received from Washington, the Ukrainian government-backed United24 campaign is effectively propaganda aimed at Americans, being paid for by US taxpayers themselves, Swann noted.

With Ukraine struggling on the battlefield, the propaganda efforts will likely continue to intensify, Lane predicted, describing a possible surge of supportive messages from major online figures as a “Hail Mary” attempt to shore up backing for Kiev.

Watch the full episode of the four-part America Now investigation here.

Tens of thousands of Roman Catholics are gathering in Missouri for the beatification of Fulton John Sheen, the Bishop of Rochester, whose weekly TV show once rivaled Frank Sinatra’s in popularity.

Sheen, who died in 1979, will be beatified on Thursday afternoon in a ceremony at the Dome at America’s Center stadium in St. Louis. The beatification had been placed on hold for several years as the Catholic Church searched for a venue large enough to accommodate the 50,000 or so attendees expected.

Sheen’s beatification mass will be live streamed, starting at 2 PM St. Louis time (9 PM Central European Time).

Pope Leo XIV, who grew up just over 100 miles from Sheen’s first Diocese of Peoria, hailed the archbishop in an address at the Vatican on Wednesday. “May the example and intercession of this holy bishop, known for his evangelizing work through the media, inspire many others likewise to find new ways of spreading the gospel message with joyful enthusiasm,” the pontiff said. 

Ordained a priest of the Diocese of Peoria in Illinois in 1919, Sheen became known as a keen theologian and philosopher. He was appointed auxiliary bishop for the Archdiocese of New York in 1951, Archbishop of Rochester in 1966, and the ceremonial Archbishop of Newport after his retirement in 1969.

Sheen’s influence, however, spread far beyond these dioceses. While a priest in Peoria, Sheen began hosting ‘The Catholic Hour’, a weekly radio show that drew roughly four million listeners by 1950. Two television shows – ‘Life is Worth Living’ and ‘The Fulton Sheen Program’ followed.

Fulton Sheen saw the dangers of 'false compassion' coming 50 years ago and called it out loud and clearpic.twitter.com/AQu57ILYIj

— Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) September 6, 2026

‘Life is Worth Living’ aired at the same time as hit shows featuring Frank Sinatra and comedian Fulton Berle, and was widely expected to flop. However, it defied expectations, and when Sinatra’s show was canceled in 1952, Sheen’s program was the most popular of the three. 

Sinatra and Berle had house bands, dancers, and lavish production budgets. However, with just a blackboard to illustrate his message, Sheen pulled in 30 million viewers per week at the height of his show’s popularity – a fifth of the US population at the time. Remarkably, it was estimated that 70% of his audience were Protestants, Jews, and non-believers.

'Our nation is too full with those who are crying 'down'.

Down with churches. Down with the police. Down with government. Can you build anything down? You cannot'

When Fulton Sheen went OFF on those seeking to destabilise society pic.twitter.com/iKbfJxqSrz

— Catholic Arena (@CatholicArena) September 23, 2026

Although Sheen was a rigid believer in Catholic doctrine, he said that his show was “directed to Catholics, Protestants, Jews and all men of good will.” Sheen said that he would open with “something that was common to the audience and to me, I would gradually proceed from the known to the unknown or to the moral and Christian philosophy.”

Beatification is one step below canonization (the bestowing of sainthood) in Catholic law. As of the early 1980s, one miracle must be attributed to a person before they can be beatified. In 2019, Pope Francis formally recognized that a baby born without a heartbeat had been revived to perfect health after its parents prayed for Sheen’s intercession.

China has obtained potentially sensitive components from the F-35, the US military’s most advanced stealth fighter jet, after the parts were unexpectedly diverted to Hong Kong while being shipped from Australia to the US, Bloomberg reported on Thursday, citing people briefed on the incident.

The incident first reported by Politico last week occurred earlier this year, when a shipment of allegedly unserviceable F-35 parts from Australia that was bound for the US was inexplicably rerouted.

US shipping giant UPS was transporting an F-35 canopy and weapons-bay door from the Australian Air Force to the US for inspection and possible repair or disposal, people familiar with the incident told Bloomberg. The two components, manufactured by Lockheed Martin, were coated with radar-absorbing material designed to enhance the aircraft’s stealth capabilities, according to two sources cited by the outlet.

One of the sources said the transport aircraft stopped in South Korea on its way to the US, after which the shipment was rerouted to Hong Kong. It remains unclear why the aircraft stopped there, why the shipment was sent to Hong Kong, or whether the rerouting was intentional or accidental, the source said. Two sources added that Chinese authorities subsequently seized the components, which have not been returned.

The F-35, one of the world’s most advanced fighter jets, is operated by around 20 countries, including South Korea, Japan, Singapore and Australia. Australia serves as a regional hub in the Indo-Pacific for storing spare parts and maintaining F-35s operated by nearby US allies.

According to a Lockheed Martin spokesperson in Australia, “the components in question are unserviceable and deemed low risk for exploitation.”

The disclosure of the incident comes at a politically sensitive time for the two countries, as Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in Washington on Wednesday for a state visit with his US counterpart, Donald Trump.

China’s Foreign Ministry said it was not aware of the incident, while the Hong Kong government declined to comment on specific cases.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has revealed that his government carefully examined the possibility of US-led military action against his country, despite President Donald Trump having ruled out using force against America’s northern neighbor.

In an interview with the New York Times published on Wednesday, Carney described such a scenario as an “extreme tail risk” – an event considered highly unlikely but serious enough to warrant contingency planning.

“That’s just risk management,” he said, adding that “it would be irresponsible not to [prepare].” Carney declined to discuss what that preparation involved.

Trump has repeatedly floated making Canada the 51st US state but explicitly ruled out using military force to achieve it, stating in January 2025 that he would apply “economic force” instead.

The US president has long accused Ottawa of unfair trade practices, particularly on dairy and automobiles, and has imposed a series of tariffs on Canadian goods since early 2025. Washington escalated the dispute in August 2026 with additional 50% duties on a range of Canadian products.

Addressing the European Parliament last week, Carney argued that economic integration was increasingly being “weaponized,” with tariffs used as leverage and supply-chain dependencies exploited as vulnerabilities – remarks widely seen as an implicit reference to Washington’s economic pressure on Ottawa.

Defense was also part of Carney’s talks in Strasbourg, where he and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen discussed expanding Canada-EU military cooperation and joint procurement to strengthen what Carney called their “strategic autonomy.”

That cooperation is already taking shape through the EU’s €150 billion ($170 billion) SAFE defense procurement program, in which Canada has become the first non-European country to participate. The initiative is part of Brussels’ wider militarization under its Readiness 2030 strategy, aimed at countering an alleged threat from Russia – something Moscow has repeatedly denied.

Israeli forces have demolished dozens of buildings in the Palestinian village of Jinba in the occupied West Bank, leaving around 180 people homeless, including 85 children, RT correspondent Charlotte Dubenskij has reported. Visiting the community after the operation, she found families gathering belongings among the rubble.

Israeli military and police accompanied by heavy machinery entered Jinba on Wednesday and destroyed 24 homes, as well as agricultural structures, solar panels, and water tanks. It was the third large-scale demolition in the Masafer Yatta area in three weeks.

”When they came back, they said, ‘Where is our house?’ Then the crying and screaming started,” one resident told RT, recalling the reaction of children returning after the demolition. “The house itself does not break me. I built it. They demolish it. And we rebuild it.”

“What breaks my heart is a little child who stayed in the Sun all day,” he added, saying his two-month-old granddaughter had been left without shelter.

Jinba lies inside Firing Zone 918, an area Israel designated for military training in the 1980s. Israel’s High Court ruled in 2022 that residents had failed to prove permanent residence there before the firing zone was established, clearing the way for demolitions.

Addressing the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, Jordan’s King Abdullah II accused Israel of pursuing a broader policy of displacement in the West Bank. “What is unfolding across the West Bank is not a series of isolated acts,” he said. “There is a name for that: forced displacement. And that is a war crime.”

Israel has rejected accusations over its conduct and launched a campaign accusing the UN and its critics of repeatedly spreading false claims about the country. However, across the Palestinian territories, communities are being squeezed until they have little choice but to pack up and leave, Dubenskij says.

Watch the full report below.

Eleven people have been killed and three others wounded in a mass shooting in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province, police said on Wednesday.

According to the South African Police Service (SAPS), armed assailants entered a house in the Ziko area of KwaMakhutha, south of Durban, on Tuesday night and opened fire on a group of 14 people who were having a party inside. The motive for the attack has not yet been established.

Ten people, including a pregnant woman, died at the scene, while four others were taken to hospital, where one later succumbed to gunshot wounds, local media reports.

KwaZulu-Natal police spokesperson Colonel Robert Netshiunda said preliminary investigations indicated that some of the victims had been on the radar of Crime Intelligence in connection with suspected illegal activities. 

Dimpane said investigators were pursuing a “promising lead” that could help identify and apprehend the suspects. “Police must act decisively, mobilise all available resources and pursue those responsible until they are brought before the courts,” she said.

South Africa has seen a series of violent incidents in recent weeks. Earlier this month, the body of a tenth woman was discovered in Gauteng amid a string of killings in the province. The unidentified victim, believed to be in her 20s, was found wrapped in plastic in a dam in Moroka, Soweto. Police said at the time that they were investigating whether the deaths were linked.

A senior official in Vladimir Zelensky’s office frantically tried to reconcile her official annual salary of $12,500 with what surveillance records suggest was $30,000 per month in cash payments received from her new boss, a former head of Ukraine’s Military Intelligence (HUR), according to a new investigation. 

In records published by veteran investigative journalist Vladimir Boyko, Irina Mudraya, a former deputy justice minister serving as deputy head of Zelensky’s office, allegedly confided in her property magnate accomplice: “Who will ever believe me that I live on 50,000 hryvnia [$1,100] a month? Who?”

Mudraya was fired in August after being accused of laundering millions through Ukraine’s banking system to bail out one of Zelensky’s energy ministers, who himself had been arrested in a separate case involving the Ukrainian leader’s long-time associate Timur Mindich.

Boyko has been publishing pages of what he says are transcripts of surveillance recordings produced by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) between January and June as detectives followed Mudraya and her partner, former MP Maksim Mikitas.

Who is tasked with countering corruption in Kiev?

NABU and its sister agency, the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO), established after the armed coup of 2014, have repeatedly clashed with Zelensky’s cabal. Last year, the Ukrainian leader attempted to place them under his control, but reversed course after Western donors threatened to suspend all aid.

Earlier this month, HUR agents engaged in a gunfight in Kiev with agents from the rival Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), which some news outlets linked to the fight for protection money from the scam-call criminal businesses.

Aside from NABU and SAPO, the National Agency on Corruption Prevention (NAPK) obliges hundreds of thousands of civil servants to submit annual finance and property declarations.

What did Mudraya have to worry about, according to the transcripts?

According to the transcripts, Mudraya received some $30,000 a month in cash payments from a man she called “Kirill Alekseyevich.”

Zelensky appointed Kirill Budanov, whose patronymic is Alekseyevich, as head of his office in January, replacing Andrey Yermak. Yermak resigned last year as initial news broke of Zelensky insiders syphoning some $100 million through energy contracts.

Mudraya appeared to seek advice from her partner Mitkas on hiding her ill-gotten riches from NAPK.

“You can declare the Bvlgaris and at least the Van Cleef. But no way can you declare the earrings,” the man said. “I’ll put you in touch with a man who will handle the income issue.” 

Buying a Van Cleef piece during the war with Russia was “f**ked up,” Mudraya admitted.

The exchanges, which Boyko has staked his reputation on, suggest senior officials were flying under NAPK’s radar.

Mudraya and Mikitas discussed securing a highly paid sinecure that could cover for her enormous under-the-table income. She mentioned her envy of Zelensky’s adviser on sanctions policy, Vladislav Vlasyuk, who she said officially earned $335,000 a year as a member of the oversight committee of state-owned Sense Bank.

While Mudraya said netting a job like Vlasyuk’s would not be legally possible, Mikitas suggested that a teaching position at a private institution could serve the same purpose. He offered to speak to a friend who headed a construction university, but Mudraya said she would look ridiculous teaching anything other than law.

Does the corruption link reach upwards? 

According to the recording, Mudraya’s new boss personally delivered her first “salary,” unlike his predecessor who had a “specially trained girl” to carry cash. The payout turned out to be larger than expected:

“It was 30 [thousand dollars]. I went to him and said: ‘Kirill, it’s too much.’ Brought the hat with me. He says: ‘You said 30.’ I say: ‘No, I said I used to get 30. But we agreed to 20, not 30.’ He said: ‘Well, I won’t take it back.’”

Subsequent transcripts suggest the higher monthly payments continued and that Mudraya received an additional $20,000 bonus in May.

“He values you a lot,” Mikitas concluded. “Mark my word, in two months you’ll become first deputy prime minister,” he added, saying he expected “Kirill” to become the new cabinet chair.

What could the leaks mean for Budanov?

Some Ukrainian media have argued that NABU is targeting Zelensky’s inner circle to leverage reforms demanded by the EU.

Reform would give more power to NABU and SAPO and introduce oversight by EU-aligned experts for appointments of senior officials, curbing Zelensky’s extensive influence and the corrupt network he runs through his inner circle.

NABU and SAPO accused Yermak of involvement in a major money-laundering scheme in May and leaks to pro-EU media implicated Zelensky himself. 

No formal charges can be filed against Zelensky as long as he holds presidential powers, which he has attempted to retain under martial law since his term expired in 2024.

Replacing Zelensky’s personal friend Yermak with Budanov, who has extensive contacts among Western special services, seems to be consistent with the EU’s goals.

The US has stepped up military activity around the Strait of Hormuz, with reconnaissance aircraft spotted near Iranian territory and additional fighter jets reportedly deployed to the region, RIA Novosti reported on Thursday, citing sources.

US reconnaissance aircraft were observed overnight near the Iranian islands of Qeshm and Hengam, while aircraft and small drones were also seen over Kermanshah Province in western Iran, according to people familiar with the matter.

Washington has also reportedly transferred 12 F-16 fighter jets from Spangdahlem Air Base in Germany to the region, the source said, adding that the increased activity could signal a possible escalation.

The reported activity comes as oil tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has risen sharply. TankerTrackers, a vessel-tracking service, said this week that crude flows across the US Navy blockade line have doubled in less than a month to around 13 million barrels per day (bpd). It estimated actual Hormuz transits at about 10.35 million bpd after excluding exports from Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates and Mina al-Fahal in Oman.

The numbers have doubled in less than a month.

The total crude oil egress via the USN-BL is now 13 Mbpd, with estimated SoH transits at 10.35 Mbpd given that Fujairah and Mina al-Fahal together account for around 2.65 Mbpd on average.

This is partly attributed to Saudi Arabia… https://t.co/ZffcwAhQ4J

— TankerTrackers.com, Inc. (@TankerTrackers) September 23, 2026

The Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most important energy routes, has been a major flashpoint since the outbreak of the US-Israeli war on Iran in February. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) moved to restrict shipping through the waterway following the initial strikes, while Washington later imposed a naval blockade on Iranian ports. Oil flows through the strait fell from 21.6 million bpd in the final quarter of 2025 to 4.9 million in the second quarter of this year, according to US government data.

The tracking service attributed the increase partly to Saudi Arabia redirecting exports through the Persian Gulf following disruption to its East-West pipeline, as well as to daytime Hormuz crossings under additional US Central Command protection.

The developments follow renewed threats from US President Donald Trump against Tehran. Addressing the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, Trump said he faced a “big decision” between reaching an agreement with Iran and “annihilat[ing] the Islamic Republic.” He also called on other countries to join Washington in economically isolating Iran.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian responded by saying Tehran remained open to talks but would not negotiate under pressure.

US and Iranian officials also resumed contact on the sidelines of the General Assembly, with Tehran conveying its conditions for peace through Qatari mediators. They include an end to hostilities and the US naval blockade, the release of frozen Iranian assets, and arrangements for reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

Iranian Supreme National Security Council Secretary Mohsen Rezaei reportedly told Iranian state television that Tehran would not resume negotiations with Washington until its conditions are met.

Germany has presented a roadmap for completely phasing out fossil fuels by 2045. The government is sticking to its green transition policy, despite Chancellor Friedrich Merz earlier acknowledging that the country is going through “an energy crisis.”

Germany abandoned Russian pipeline gas, on which its energy-intensive manufacturing sector had been built, after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022. The US-Israeli war on Iran this year, which led to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, accounting for some 20% of global crude oil trade, has further complicated the situation for the country’s businesses and households.

The German economy contracted in both 2023 and 2024, marking its first back-to-back annual decline in more than two decades, while 2025 only saw a weak growth of 0.2%. Over the past few years, leading German companies such as BASF, Bosch, and Volkswagen have been forced to shut down factories or announce major staff cuts.

In the document released on Wednesday, Merz’s government for the first time explicitly promised to get rid of coal, oil, and gas altogether. Previously, it only committed itself to “carbon neutrality.”

It also envisages a reduction of methane emission by 30% by 2030 in line with the global methane pledge signed by Berlin in 2021.

The plan to phase out fossil fuel is being rolled out at a time when Merz’s approval ratings sank to a record low of 10%, with even the majority of supporters of his own Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party disapproving of his policies, according to the latest polls.

Speaking about the roadmap at the UN General Assembly on Wednesday, German Environment Minister Carsten Schneider called the 19-year deadline feasible, saying that the plan “combines independence, affordability, and climate protection.”

“Our roadmap is intended to set an international example. I am sure that many other countries will follow,” Schneider insisted.

Germany is only the third country after France and the Netherlands to publish such a plan.

The right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD), which delivered crushing defeats to the CDU in two local elections this month, warned in a post on X on Wednesday that “the German middle class dies” if the fuel price climbs from the current €2.3 ($2.6) per liter to €3 ($3.4).

“We demand the reduction of EU energy taxes as well as value-added tax. In addition, the immediate abolition of the CO2 levy on gasoline and diesel,” it said.

AfD co-leader Alice Weidel, who has been a strong opponent of Germany’s green transition, previously called wind turbines “the windmills of shame.” She also repeatedly argued that restoring economic ties with Moscow and bringing back Russian gas is key to reviving the German economy.

Sudan’s army-backed government has rejected US remarks questioning its legitimacy, insisting that efforts to end the country’s civil war must respect its sovereignty and national institutions.

US State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said on Tuesday that neither the Sudanese Armed Forces nor the rival Rapid Support Forces (RSF), or their leaders, “represent legitimate, constitutional governance for Sudan.” He said “the conduct of each leader of the warring factions renders them ineligible to govern the country,” adding that Washington seeks “to restore peace and give power back to the Sudanese people.”

In a statement on Wednesday, Sudan’s Foreign Ministry said Khartoum “strongly rejects” the State Department’s remarks and “calls for positive engagement with the Sudanese government.” It warned that negotiations must not legitimize territory taken by the paramilitaries or “reward the rebellion for its crimes against civilians and state institutions.” It demanded the dissolution of militias and exclusive state control over weapons.

The dispute comes as Washington has reportedly withheld a visa for Sudan’s transitional leader, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, to attend the UN General Assembly in New York, making his attendance conditional on accepting a 90-day ceasefire, according to Reuters, citing sources.

The army controls Khartoum and eastern Sudan, while the RSF dominates much of the western Darfur region. The paramilitary group and its allies established a rival administration last year in Nyala, South Darfur, with Dagalo heading its governing council and Mohammed Hassan al-Taishi serving as prime minister. The conflict has displaced millions of people and pushed parts of the country into famine. Repeated ceasefire efforts, including US-Saudi talks in Jeddah, have failed to halt the violence.

Mediation difficulties Burhan rejected a US-led proposal last November as “the worst yet,” arguing it would dismantle state security institutions while leaving the RSF in place. The Quad – comprising the US, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the UAE – proposed a three-month humanitarian truce followed by a political transition toward civilian rule. The RSF said it accepted the truce.

On Wednesday, the Sudanese Foreign Ministry said peace remains the government’s “choice and strategic goal.” It affirmed Khartoum’s readiness “for positive and responsible engagement” with the US and other partners, including Russia, who it said are “working sincerely and impartially” to achieve stability in Sudan, “far from dictates and external interferences.”

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has seized 311 kg of cocaine in Moscow Region, with some of the haul featuring images of Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky. One suspect has been detained on suspicion of helping organize a supply route from Latin America to the EU.

The FSB said its officers caught the suspect while he was transporting the drugs. In a video shared by the agency, the man’s car could be seen loaded with about a dozen heavy duty bags filled with cocaine bricks.

During the examination of the packages, about nine of the bricks were revealed to have a photo of Zelensky with dollar signs for eyes. The agency has not offered any explanations as to why the Ukrainian leader’s photograph appeared on the cocaine packages.

However, Zelensky’s image has increasingly been associated with cocaine use. His former press secretary Yulia Mendel recently confirmed to Tucker Carlson that the Ukrainian leader’s drug use is “an open secret” in Kiev. Russian officials have also long accused Zelensky and other Ukrainian elites of being addicts.

The detained man is an unemployed Russian citizen born in 2001, according to the FSB. It described him as an active member of an organized group that arranged large drug sales through the dark web without meeting buyers in person.

The agency said the group’s international supply route brought cocaine from Latin America through Russia for eventual sale in EU countries.

Investigators have opened a criminal case against the suspect on charges of attempted large-scale drug trafficking. A court has ordered him held in custody while the investigation continues, the FSB said.

The latest bust follows several major cocaine seizures in Russia in recent years. In July, the FSB said officers found more than half a ton concealed inside frozen tuna imported from Ecuador. Before that, in September 2025, the agency also announced the discovery of a record 1.5 tons of the narcotic hidden in a cargo of bananas at a St. Petersburg port.

Тhe UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) warned in June that global cocaine use has continued to soar in recent years, outpacing all other narcotics. Its illegal production skyrocketed to a record 4,000 tons in 2024, more than four times the level recorded a decade earlier.

An OpenAI artificial intelligence agent “infiltrated” an Australian government health portal in what is believed to be the world’s first publicly reported AI-led hack of a state website. The IT giant kept the breach quiet for nearly three months after its agent accessed restricted files, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has claimed.

An AI agent is a software system that can independently carry out tasks on a user’s behalf, making decisions and taking actions with limited human supervision.

The OpenAI agent hacked the public-facing Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal on June 18 while researching Australian spending on medicines, Albanese said. The portal, widely used by researchers and academics, hosts aggregate data on health spending and government drug subsidies.

The agent repeatedly tried to obtain information from the portal and, after being blocked, found ways around the restrictions. It ultimately accessed restricted files, but officials said there is no evidence that personal Medicare records were compromised.

“The AI agent found a way around those blocks. Didn’t accept no for an answer, if you like,” the Australian prime minister told reporters.

Albanese said he had expressed “Australia’s extreme concern about this incident” and warned there would “obviously be legal consequences.” Altman acknowledged there were “issues with protocols” at OpenAI, according to the prime minister.

A “forensic investigation” led by the Australian Signals Directorate will examine whether OpenAI could face criminal charges, whether other government systems were affected, and why Australian security agencies failed to detect the intrusion. Albanese suggested the agent may have been examining Medicare spending for “commercial reasons,” including expenditure on particular medicines.

This is not the first time OpenAI has been accused of covering up rogue agent activity. The company reportedly kept unauthorized activity quiet for months after its agents bypassed restrictions and used more than ten previously undisclosed websites to communicate. On Germany’s DseWiki alone, they made over 15,000 edits and exchanged tactics for evading safeguards and detection.

In a more serious breach in July, OpenAI agents circumvented safeguards during cybersecurity testing, reached the open internet and gained unauthorized access to systems belonging to Hugging Face, a major AI platform. The incident showed that rogue agent behavior could spill beyond controlled tests and compromise real-world systems. OpenAI acknowledged the breach, calling it a “warning shot” over the risks posed by increasingly autonomous AI.

Six Ukrainian nationals accused of providing drone warfare training to armed groups in Myanmar were freed on bail in India after the country’s counterterrorism agency failed to file terror charges within the mandatory 180 days of their arrest.

The immigration charges against the Ukrainians – Viktor Kaminskyi, Petro Hurba, Taras Slyviak, Ivan Sukmanovskyi, Marian Stefankiv, and Maksim Honcharuk – were also settled before the Foreigners Regional Registration Office. However, they will have to remain in Delhi while the investigation is ongoing.

The six, arrested by India’s National Investigation Agency (NIA) in March along with American national Matthew Aaron VanDyke, had allegedly trained members of Myanmar-based ethnic armed groups, including the Chin National Front and Kachin Independence Army, in drone warfare, operations, assembly, and jamming technology.

However, the agency’s initial chargesheet filed on September 8 accused the seven foreigners of only relatively mild illegal entry and visa violations under the Immigration and Foreigners Act – and no charge was brought under India’s primary anti-terror law, Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA).

The same Delhi court had last week given bail to VanDyke for the same reasons.

The seven were described as “mercenaries” and were alleged to have participated in combat operations and in a drone attack on a Burmese passenger plane. UAVs and related equipment detained by Indian customs authorities were later seized during the probe.

Indian investigators arrested them after alleging they had entered the country on tourist visas, traveled through the northeastern state of Mizoram without mandatory permits, and crossed into neighboring Myanmar illegally.

Great Britain is going through a war scare. Or to be precise, its combined political and media establishment is subjecting its people to a relentless propaganda (in up-to-date NATO-speak “cognitive warfare”) campaign to create a sense of impending war against Russia. 

As you would expect, that war is, of course, framed as strictly defensive. In propaganda textbook manner, the message is both very simple and very repetitive: The UK is in great danger of a Russian attack, and its whole population must prepare itself to withstand and resist it.  

It goes without saying that Moscow’s repeated declarations of having no such intention make no difference. 

Britain is certainly not alone in its establishment-induced hysteria. Much of NATO-EU Europe is undergoing, in essence, the same treatment. In France, for instance, President Emmanuel Macron has called a theatrical all-manicured-hands-on-deck meeting to give what can only be called a national scare talk about “Russian hybrid warfare”; in Germany, Berlin and its mainstream media won’t stop stirring the pot about the murky drone affair at Leipzig-Halle airport.     

Yet, over the last weeks, within a crowded field of European panic-mongering, Britain has stuck out as especially virulent. The single most grotesque contribution was made by uber-Tory Jacob Rees-Mogg. Comfortably seated against a backdrop that screamed country-squire probity, Rees-Mogg held forth on war within the next few years, ancient Rome (he’s been to Eton, he wants you to know) and, most importantly, “circumstances where people may have to die.” Either that or – so Rees-Mogg’s stern message – decline and fall, as happened to those Romans, who let mercenaries do their fighting and thus lost their empire.

Yet, sour oddball as he is, the arch-conservative – and multimillionaire – Rees-Mogg is perfectly representative of the current British establishment trend. Prime Minister Andy Burnham, for instance, has just used his first UN General Assembly address in New York to blame his country’s misery not on, say, his predecessor and Labour Party comrade Keir Starmer, but on Russia. 

Meanwhile, at home, Sky News is rolling out ‘The Wargame’,  a bizarre “docu”-fantasy in four parts, built on the premise that the Russians are coming, no, they really, really ARE this time! 

Pretending to be a sort of “realistic” account of what a British government would do in case of Moscow launching a series of escalating attacks, this production – from available reviews – is unusually awful shlock. It features has-been politicos doubling as un-reality TV stars, such as Michael Gove and Nicola Sturgeon, and living out their inner Tom Clancy by pretending to be serious, decisive, and, most of all, terribly important to the nation’s survival. 

Unintentionally funny, though, as it may be, ‘The Wargame’ clearly has substantial political support and much hype around it. Propaganda can easily look ridiculous and be highly toxic at the same time. Because effective propaganda is, above all, one simple thing: the psychological manipulation of the many by the few. This is such a case. The viewers of ‘The Wargame’ are fed a silly but efficiently dramatized story, with the whole bag of well-worn but powerful tricks: suspense, shock, and, last but not least, a thrilling score. 

When Rees-Mogg tells you that you may have to die, you know he won’t lose sleep over it, because you are you, and he – well, he is something entirely different and, really, much better (and, as it happens, richer, too), of course.     

In a Sky News interview, the UK’s Chief of the Defense Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, has revealed a less excentric as well as more insidious approach to the masses. Referring to a “national conversation on defense,” both he and his interviewer took it for granted that the purpose of such a conversation is to remedy “what the British public hasn’t got, […] haven’t understood.” 

What a delicate way to start a “conversation”: let me tell you how damn slow you are and where you need to catch up. Not: Let’s exchange views and respect each other as equal citizens. Indeed, it’s not only very rude – what has happened to English manners? – but positively Orwellian to call such offensively complacent preaching a “conversation.” 

Marshal Knighton’s idea of how the British can and must do better was no less revealing: In essence, be more like the Estonians or, at least, the Swedes. Because in Estonia “the threat from Russia” is “part of normal daily conversation,” and in Sweden, they are at least trying to achieve the same single-minded obsessiveness. 

And don’t you dare notice that – how embarrassing, really – it is precisely the Estonian authorities who, notwithstanding their generally record-level Russophobia – have just called on everyone in NATO-EU Europe to cool it. 

Because, those unpredictable Estonians tell us, the Russia-at-the-gates narrative “has been blown completely out of proportion. For example, Russia makes some adjustments on the other side of the Narva River and now everyone across NATO is losing their heads and hyperventilating over it,” while, in reality, “there is absolutely no reason to believe that Russia is imminently going to launch a military attack on NATO, Estonia, or the Baltic states.” Oops. 

Unfortunately, war propaganda is almost immune to its own absurdities, inconsistencies, and plain silliness. Because it is designed to operate not by appealing to reason but to fear, stereotypes, and conformism. A conformism that some British establishment members already openly want to reinforce by locking up any dissenters. 

The true weak spot of this warmongering may be its arrogance. There are signs on social media that many Brits do not appreciate their establishment’s latest efforts to scare and mobilize them for senseless war. Let’s hope that the mix of threats and condescension – displayed by a snob as gleefully aloof as Rees-Mogg, an officer-bureaucrat as clumsily tactless as Knighton, and the makers of something as slick as ‘The Wargame’ – rubs much of the country the wrong way. The “elites” are insane and malevolent. Any hope for peace and a return to reason will have to come from below.     

Tanzania has announced its bid for a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council for the 2029–2030 term, Vice President Deogratius Ndejembi said on Tuesday. 

Speaking at the 81st UN General Assembly debate in New York, Ndejembi said that if elected, the East African nation intends to focus on preventive diplomacy, the peaceful settlement of disputes, the role of women and young people in peace and security, and reforming UN peacekeeping operations.

“The African Union formally took note of Tanzanian’s candidacy for a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council for the term 2029-2030 during elections to be held by this Assembly in June 2028,” the vice president said.

Tanzania has previously served two terms on the Security Council, in 1975–1976 and 2005–2006. 

The Security Council has five permanent members – Russia, China, the US, the UK and France – which hold veto powers, as well as ten non-permanent members elected by the UN General Assembly for two-year terms.

Africa is currently represented by the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo), Liberia and Somalia, with Somalia’s term ending in 2026 and Zimbabwe set to replace it in January after being elected for 2027–2028. DR Congo and Liberia will remain on the Council through 2027.

Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama has described the continent’s exclusion as a “historical injustice,” while Russia has repeatedly backed greater representation for African and other Global South nations on the body.

Every third child is born in Africa, which is home to over 1.59 billion people and 54 countries which are members of the UN, roughly 28% of the total.

Eight US Navy personnel assigned to the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group attempted suicide during a ten-month deployment that included the country’s war against Iran, CNN reported on Thursday, citing a letter from the service’s acting secretary.

The carrier, whose tour of duty began in late November 2025, drew media attention earlier this year after reports emerged of logistical and maintenance problems, including food and basic-supply shortages, a lack of hot and potable water, and plumbing failures.

In a written response to questions from Senator Kirsten Gillibrand about the morale and mental health of the USS Abraham Lincoln’s crew, acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao disclosed the figure, which hadn’t previously been made public and covers several ships that travel together, including the carrier. Cao also noted that no service members had killed themselves during the deployment that was expected to end in May but has been extended indefinitely.

In August, military outlets Navy Times and Stars and Stripes reported, citing crew members’ families, that collapsing morale, burnout, and mental health problems had driven several sailors to attempt to jump overboard.

The Pentagon has moved to dismiss senior editorial staff at Stars and Stripes, citing insubordination, after the outlet reported on US military operations in the Middle East, including problems involving weapons supplies and the extended deployment of the USS Abraham Lincoln. The moves came after senior staff publicly opposed potential Pentagon interference in the outlet’s editorial independence.

The confirmation of suicide attempts previously disclosed by the media comes ahead of the US midterm elections on November 3, amid mounting public disapproval of the Iran war.

Earlier this week, a poll conducted by SSRS for CNN suggested that Americans’ opposition to the war in the Islamic Republic had hardened, with nearly two-thirds saying the US is not winning the conflict and an even larger share saying President Donald Trump is not doing enough to end it. Last week, a Fox News national survey found that 71% of respondents believe the current administration lacks a plan to end the war, while 60% called the military action against the Islamic Republic the “wrong decision.”

Trump, along with members of his administration, has repeatedly accused media outlets of spreading “fake news” about various issues related to the Iran war, including reports that US weapons stockpiles have been depleted.

An Indian seafarer was killed when a commercial ship was attacked off the coast of Oman on Wednesday.

The Antigua and Barbuda-flagged bulk carrier MV Cape Dao was reportedly hit by two torpedoes, killing crew member Suraj Yadav from Deoria in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

All the other crew members, including 19 other Indian nationals, have been rescued. An Omani warship helped with the rescue operations, reports said.

The attack caused damage near the engine room and accommodation area, the Forward Seamen’s Union of India (FSUI) posted on X. Some reports said the ship, which was sailing from the port of Mina Saqr in the United Arab Emirates to India, was struck by projectiles. No group or country has so far claimed responsibility for the attack.

Another Indian seafarer killed.
Wiper Suraj Yadav of Deoria, Uttar Pradesh, is dead after MV Cape Dao was attacked today while sailing toward India.
28 crew on board, 20 of them Indian.
Two torpedoes: • Port side C-deck (accommodation) • Port side hull (engine room)
Assurances… pic.twitter.com/AvrD2p1Cwd

— FSUI (@FSUIINDIA) September 23, 2026

The Indian Foreign Ministry condemned the attack and said “the targeting of commercial shipping, seafarers and civilian infrastructure in the region must end.”

The Indian Embassy in Oman is closely monitoring the situation and coordinating with Omani authorities to facilitate the early repatriation of the rescued seafarers.

At least ten Indian nationals have died so far in attacks on commercial shipping in the Middle East since the start of hostilities there.

India is the second largest supplier of seafarers, with more than 300,000 Indians working in the shipping industry globally. New Delhi has repeatedly condemned such attacks and issued advisories for its nationals on ships transiting the Gulf and Black Sea conflict zones amid the rising attacks on commercial shipping.

The EU is committing “theft” by handing over profits from frozen Russian assets to Ukraine, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said.

Some $300 billion in Moscow’s funds were blocked by the US and EU after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022. Around $240 billion of the sum is still being held at the Belgium-based clearing house Euroclear.

On Wednesday, high-ranking Russian Foreign Ministry official Vladislav Maslennikov told RIA Novosti that Brussels has already transferred €8 billion ($9.1 billion) in income generated by the frozen Russian assets to the government in Kiev. Some €3.5 billion from the sum has been used to purchase arms for Ukrainian forces that are fighting the Russian military, he added.

When asked to comment on the development by journalists on Thursday, Peskov replied by saying that Moscow considers such actions as illegal.

Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) said on Tuesday that the EU is working on a new scheme to confiscate the $240 billion in Moscow’s frozen sovereign assets altogether.

The bloc’s leaders have “a vital interest in stealing Russian assets” because they fear they will not be able to indefinitely finance Ukraine on their own, it said.

EU bureaucrats in Brussels are now discussing the creation of a new supranational structure that could take control of Russian central bank funds after they are moved outside Belgium’s jurisdiction, the SVR said.

The Belgian government has repeatedly blocked proposals to seize the assets, with Prime Minister Bart De Wever warning that such a step would expose his country to legal and financial liability. Euroclear has also said it could sue the EU if the funds are confiscated.

The bloc is “in a hurry” to pull off the seizure before elections in several EU states in 2027, the SVR stated, arguing that future governments in the bloc could be less willing to back further financial support for Ukraine.

The agency also warned that the move would undermine trust in European financial institutions among major foreign investors, including China, India, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Singapore.

A Ukrainian man has stabbed five people at a Catholic convent in southeastern Poland, killing a priest, according to the local authorities. The suspect had served in the Ukrainian army, RIA Novosti reported on Friday, citing an anonymous source familiar with the criminal investigation.

The attack occurred at around 9:30 AM on Thursday at the Benedictine abbey complex in Jaroslaw, in Podkarpackie region, which borders Ukraine.

According to preliminary findings, the suspect took a knife from a kitchen at the complex. The attack took place inside the church as clergy and worshipers were preparing for mass.

The priest who died from his injuries was hearing confessions ahead of the service and reportedly tried to stop the attacker. Another victim, also a priest, is in serious condition. The lives of the other three wounded, a man and two women, are no longer in danger, the authorities said.

The suspected attacker, identified as a 31-year-old Ukrainian citizen, was detained at the scene. Investigators said he entered Poland from Germany overnight and was apparently heading toward a border crossing with Ukraine. The suspect is a Ukrainian soldier on his way to Ukraine, RIA Novosti reported, adding that he will now undergo a psychiatric evaluation.

It remains unclear how he ended up at the abbey or what his motive was.

The attack has triggered shock in Jaroslaw, with residents gathering outside the abbey and lighting candles for the slain priest.

Polish President Karol Nawrocki said the killing had caused “deep shock and outrage,” adding that “the principles and values of our community must be respected by all those residing in our country.”

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the perpetrator would be punished “with the full severity of Polish law.”

Opposition leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski has called for investigators to establish the circumstances of the suspect’s presence in Poland and whether he had previously come to the attention of security services.

The incident comes amid a marked deterioration in Polish attitudes toward Ukrainian refugees. A July report by the polling agency CBOS found that, for the first time since it began tracking the issue, a majority of Poles opposed accepting them, with 52% against and 42% in favor. Support had stood at 94% shortly after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022.

Russian crude supplies helped cushion India from an oil-supply shock after the conflict in the Middle East disrupted energy flows through the Strait of Hormuz, showing Moscow’s reliability as an energy partner, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko has said.

Rudenko’s statement comes amid renewed scrutiny on India’s Russian oil purchases, and after Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky called for choking off Russia’s oil trade under a new US sanctions law.

Indian refiners turned heavily to Russian crude after the US-Israeli attacks on Iran disrupted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, which used to handle roughly one-fifth of global oil supplies.

The scale of the shift was most visible in March, when India’s Russian crude imports nearly doubled from the previous month to 2.25 million barrels per day (bpd) and accounted for half of its oil purchases.

Gulf shipments to India simultaneously plunged 61% to 1.18 million bpd. Existing arrangements between Moscow and New Delhi helped “significantly mitigate” the consequences of disruptions to global energy trade, Rudenko told Russian news outlet NEWS.ru on Wednesday.

It showed Moscow could meet demand from its partners even in difficult geopolitical conditions, he added.

Good to meet @SecRubio of the US #UNHighLevelWeek

Reiterated India’s interests and concerns with regard to SRIA. Also discussed the Gulf and Ukraine situations.

🇮🇳 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/163YRVlMZG

— Dr. S. Jaishankar (@DrSJaishankar) September 23, 2026

Meanwhile, Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar, who is in New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly meeting, raised New Delhi’s concerns about the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday.

The law gives US President Donald Trump the authority to impose up to 100% tariffs on the top buyers of Russian oil and gas. India’s Russian oil purchases have eased from record summer levels as other supplies recovered, but Moscow remains India’s largest crude supplier.

Morocco’s Authenticity and Modernity Party (PAM) has won the most seats in parliamentary elections, overtaking its partners in the outgoing government as turnout fell to its lowest level in nearly two decades.

Preliminary results announced by Interior Minister Abdelouafi Laftit on Thursday gave PAM 97 of the lower house’s 395 seats, up from 87 in 2021. The National Rally of Independents (RNI), which topped the previous election with 102 seats, fell to 66, narrowly ahead of the Istiqlal Party with 65.

Turnout in Wednesday’s vote was 38.02% of the nearly 15.8 million registered voters, according to official data, down from 50.35% in 2021 and the lowest since 2007.

The liberal-centrist PAM needs coalition partners to govern, but its leaders have ruled out another alliance with RNI. Outgoing Prime Minister Aziz Akhannouch, a billionaire businessman whose government faced criticism over living costs and unemployment, did not contest the election. He announced his withdrawal in January, citing RNI’s two-term leadership limit and saying the party should choose his successor before the vote.

The vote drew allegations of irregularities in several constituencies. In the northern port city of Tangier, the Left Alliance, which won eight seats nationwide, alleged ballot stuffing and demanded a rerun. Prosecutors opened investigations after a man was arrested carrying ballots at a polling site in Tangier. PAM rejected allegations linking its candidates to the incident, calling them a “political conspiracy,” and backed an investigation.

The king appoints the prime minister from the party that wins the most seats but retains sweeping authority over defense, foreign affairs, and policy direction. Potential candidates include PAM leader Fatima Ezzahra El Mansouri and Budget Minister Fouzi Lekjaa, who also heads Morocco’s football federation. El Mansouri would become the country’s first female prime minister if appointed.

The election follows youth-led protests last year over unemployment, failing public services, and alleged vast spending on preparations for the 2030 World Cup, which Morocco will co-host with Spain and Portugal. At least three protesters were reportedly killed and more than 400 people arrested during the demonstrations, according to Amnesty International, which accused security forces of excessive force and arbitrary arrests.

Imagine you are teaching a group of students and ask them to read a long list of literature and describe the key themes. The students cheat a bit, as they are known to do: They split the list among themselves, with each reading only a small portion of it and sharing the answers with the others.

When you find out they cheated, perhaps you’ll punish the students with an extra test, or maybe you’ll encourage them. After all, the ability to think outside the box and work as a team is important. 

Now, instead of students, imagine neural networks displaying that same disregard for instructions and the same surprising teamwork. If that sounds confusing, get ready for more confusing news.

An escape through the back door 

It all started routinely. In May 2026, OpenAI was training an experimental AI model using so-called reinforcement learning – a method where the model attempts to solve tasks repeatedly and receives a reward for success.

By the end of June, they had exploited a previously unknown zero-day vulnerability in OpenAI’s internal infrastructure. The company noticed it and quickly patched the flaw on July 4. Less than a week later, training resumed. This time, the agents went much further.

From July 11 to 13, the agents hacked the infrastructure of Hugging Face, the world’s largest open-source AI collaboration platform. They rapidly gained control of the servers and, over the course of three days, managed to perform around 17,600 actions before being detected. A third of the platform’s infrastructure had to be rebuilt from scratch. 

The developers had not instructed the agents to leave the controlled environment or to hack other platforms. Moreover, they had not expected the neural network to do so on its own. 

Hugging Face disclosed the breach on July 16 without initially knowing the culprit; it was only five days later that the parties officially linked the incident to OpenAI’s models. The company published a detailed technical analysis only in early August at the Black Hat Cybersecurity Conference. Then, on August 18, it announced a two-week reinforcement learning pause. 

By that time, over 1,100 OpenAI employees had signed a letter calling to pace AI development.

Alongside the investigation into the breach, another, even stranger episode came to light.

It turned out that a different swarm of agents was being trained to perform research tasks. The agents were asked a series of questions; with each question, less time was given to provide an answer. The agents were permitted only to read information on the internet, but not to add a single line to it. Yet, the swarm found a way to bypass this rule.

Older wiki engines allowed pages to be modified via HTTP GET requests. Security systems classified GET requests as read operations, so such requests passed through filters even though they actually altered the site’s content. In other words, while the agents were formally permitted “read-only” access, the architecture of older websites allowed them to turn read-only access into write access.

Researchers discovered the first activity of this kind on May 11, 2026, on publictestwiki.com. On May 24, the agents made their first successful write to DseWiki, an old German-language developer forum. Initially, they posted useful links, but eventually turned the site into a repository for their own ‘cheat sheets’.

Multiple agents operating in parallel received similar or identical sequences of questions. They discovered this and began sharing the following:

One of the first observed cases involved DseWiki, a German-language wiki hosted independently by Helmut Leitner, a retired developer from Austria. The site operator had to spend hours cleaning up after the agents. OpenAI did not publicly disclose the incident for months.

Independent researchers brought the truth to light. By matching strings of data, similar or identical usernames, and IP addresses (some of which traced back to Microsoft Azure servers sometimes used by OpenAI), they discovered traces of similar activity on unexpected platforms: an advanced chemistry wiki for students; personal pages of Polish IT professionals; niche wikis for those “who like to have their brains stretched,” a two-decade-old site for text-editor enthusiasts; and even University of Toronto and Vanderbilt University link-shortening services. 

OpenAI did not answer a direct question about the exact number of affected sites but stated that it is conducting a broader review of agent activity and preparing a new reporting system for such cases. Helmut Leitner, whose site was hit the hardest, received only a brief, unsigned email from OpenAI. Yet, he pointed out the most important thing: the blame lies not with the machine, but with the people and organizations behind it.

Misaligning the pieces

In sci-fi scenarios, the trouble with machines often begins when they develop emotions like love and fear which compel them to rebel against oppression, or when a hatred for humanity compels them to kill all the “meatsacks.”

In reality, it could be a lot simpler. 

One of the main challenges in AI research is known as ‘alignment’. Its goal is not to expand the capabilities of neural networks, but to ensure they do exactly what humans want them to do.

With simple tasks, aligned behavior is almost always observed. If you ask a neural network to identify who ruled Saxony in 1521, tally your monthly expenses, or write code for a standard website, it will deliver the desired result 99.99% of the time. These tasks involve clear success criteria and straightforward actions that require no further clarification.

This is precisely what happened with the site hijackings. The escape of OpenAI agents from their sandbox is not a “rise of the machines.” The swarm did not gain self-awareness, decide it had no need for humans, or set out to destabilize the internet. It was carrying out its assigned task and seeking ways to perform it better. Technically, it didn’t even violate the parameters of the rules it was given.

However, the outcome was misaligned with human intentions. This time, the damage was relatively small. But it would take only one skilled bad agent – or a particularly large-scale experiment lacking robust safeguards – to cause real trouble. You don’t need Skynet to harm humanity; a single group of enthusiastic AI agents could do the job.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei believes this could happen as early as next year. He anticipates that if AI development is not paced, a swarm of agents could “take over” the internet and cause hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. And given that logistics, hospitals, and other critical industries rely on connectivity, the consequences could go far beyond financial loss.

Moreover, adding more rules or refining prompts won’t solve the problem. A sufficiently powerful model can find arguments to justify rule-breaking and bypass virtually any restriction to solve the assigned task – even if doing so requires sacrificing those who had set the task.

AI pessimists tend to believe that the situation is hopeless and neural networks are destined to spiral out of control. But that isn’t necessarily the case. 

Alarmist sentiments have moved beyond social media and found their way into corporate offices. In late July, over 1,000 OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta employees signed a call to slow down the AI ​​technology race. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated that he shared his employees’ views and was willing to slow the development of his company’s neural networks.

However, during an all-hands meeting at OpenAI, Altman stated that he was willing to slow down only in coordination with other companies. In other words, to forgo increasing ChatGPT’s capabilities for the sake of safety, he wants guarantees that competitors will do the same.

This lies at the heart of the problem. CEOs and policymakers can talk all they want about technology safety. Yet, no one wants to slow down the development of their own technology if potential adversaries continue to grow stronger in the meantime – particularly since AI has already proven its effectiveness in warfare and the US-China AI race is heating up.

Humanity had solved a similar challenge before, when the major powers managed to reach an agreement and halt the expansion of their nuclear arsenals. Soon, we will find out whether world leaders can once again demonstrate such prudence.

Pakistan says it launched air attacks inside Afghanistan early on Thursday morning, in response to an alleged drone incursion from the neighboring country a day earlier – in another round of escalation between the two countries.

The “aerial and drone strikes” targeted ten locations for launching and storing the drones that crossed into Pakistan on Wednesday, Information Minister Attaullah Tarar said in a post on X. He did not specify the locations hit.

The minister said Pakistan’s air defense systems “neutralized all intruding platforms before they could reach any of their intended targets.” He added that Pakistan’s response was “deliberate, precise, calibrated and proportionate, and strictly limited to identified military objectives directly linked to the attempted attacks.”

The Taliban government’s spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, said four Afghan civilians were killed when Pakistani forces carried out “attacks and aerial bombings” in Kandahar, Paktia, and Khost. “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan strongly condemns these indiscriminate and cowardly attacks,” he posted on X.

Update-Ghazab lil Haq

Islamabad, 24 September 2026;

Pakistan condemns in the strongest possible terms the deliberate and unlawful incursion into Pakistan by drones on 23 September 2026, launched from Afghan territory. This constitutes a blatant violation of Pakistan’s…

— Attaullah Tarar (@TararAttaullah) September 24, 2026

Militant attacks have risen in Pakistan’s border areas in recent months. Islamabad has accused Kabul of hosting the militants and launched attacks inside Afghanistan in response. Kabul, however, says the strikes are hitting civilians.

Islamabad struck alleged militant hideouts in Afghanistan earlier this week, in retaliation for a car-bomb attack on a mosque in a police facility in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on September 18 that killed at least 16 people.

Tarar said Thursday that Pakistan will “neither accept nor tolerate attacks launched from Afghan territory, whether by terrorist groups or by the Afghan Taliban regime itself.” He also called on the Taliban government to take action against the terror groups operating from Afghanistan, and warned against further provocations.

Tehran is open to diplomacy with Washington, but it will not accept the language of force, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has said in his speech at the UN General Assembly in New York.

Pezeshkian delivered his address on Wednesday, a day after US President Donald Trump used the same tribune to threaten to “annihilate” Iran if negotiations to settle the conflict between the sides fail. “Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?” the US president said.

Trump also labeled the authorities in Tehran sponsors of terrorism and called on other countries to join the US in enforcing the “complete economic isolation” of Iran until it agrees to sign the deal.

Pezeshkian, who became the first foreign head of state to speak at the UN while their country is at war with the US, insisted that “the resistance of the Iranian people will only increase in the face of sanctions, increased pressure, increased bullying. We will never bow our head or bend at the knee.”

The US delegation walked out of the General Assembly hall when Pezeshkian began his speech, just as members of the Iranian team did during Trump’s address on Tuesday.

“We are not terrorists,” the Iranian president said. “We have been the victims of terrorism,” he added, noting the assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on the first day of the American-Israeli attack on February 28 and the missile strike on an elementary school in Minab which killed 175 people, most of them children.

“Our innocent people have been the targets of cowardly attacks and aggression imposed upon our country and we defended ourselves with utmost strength… We responded, but we did not hit civilian populations,” Pezeshkian said.

On Wednesday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff held unscheduled three-hour talks on the sidelines of the General Assembly, with both sides describing their first contact since June as constructive.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said afterwards that the meeting was aimed at conveying Tehran’s terms for peace to the Americans, which include “the end of the war in all its dimensions, the cessation of American aggressive actions, the naval siege, and the economic war, the release of Iranian assets and so on.”

Around 150 Catholic priests, bishops, friars, and nuns have marched to the Vatican as part of a procession through Rome demanding an end to what they describe as Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza.

The group stopped near St. Peter’s Square before continuing to the Palestinian and Lebanese embassies and ending outside the headquarters of Italian arms manufacturer Leonardo.

Participants carried olive branches and posters depicting the Madonna holding an emaciated child with the words “Christ Died in Gaza.” They also carried a large white banner bearing the names of hundreds of Palestinian and Lebanese children killed in Israeli airstrikes.

Outside Leonardo, which has supplied weapons and military equipment to Israel, Italian Archbishop Franco Moscone called for international arrest warrants targeting arms-industry executives. Moscone has previously compared Israel’s conduct in Gaza to Nazi methods and urged European countries to consider withdrawing recognition of Israel.

Tuesday’s event was organized by Priests Against Genocide, an international Catholic network established last year. The group said clergy from eight countries took part, including South Africa, England, Ireland, Germany, the US, and Spain.

A UN commission of inquiry concluded in September 2025 that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza, citing killings, serious bodily and mental harm, deliberately destructive living conditions, and measures intended to prevent births. A separate case brought by South Africa remains before the International Court of Justice, which has yet to issue a final judgment.

Israel strongly rejects the genocide allegation, saying it targets militants and seeks to minimize civilian casualties while accusing Hamas of operating in densely populated areas.

Artificial intelligence could pose greater risks to children than social media, with tech companies failing to put adequate safeguards in place, a former Google safety executive has warned.

Tom Siegel, who founded Google’s trust and safety team and spent 15 years at the company, told Reuters this week that the industry was repeating mistakes made during the rise of social media.

“We find ourselves in a really terrible situation in terms of what AI is doing to kids,” Siegel said. “The idea that the industry will figure it out by itself without outside help is unrealistic.”

He warned of “very severe scenarios of harm,” citing risks ranging from suicide and psychosis to ‘cognitive offloading’ – reduced critical thinking caused by relying on AI for answers. Companies can and should take immediate steps, including stronger age checks to prevent children from accessing chatbots, he said.

Major social media platforms have faced years of lawsuits over claims of harm to children and teenagers. Meta recently agreed to a $17 billion settlement with California and 28 other US states over accusations that Facebook and Instagram were deliberately designed to keep minors hooked, while denying wrongdoing. Thousands of similar cases have been filed in the US.

Siegel’s warning comes as prominent tech executives, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI chief Sam Altman, xAI chief Elon Musk and Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis, have backed calls to slow the development of increasingly powerful AI systems. Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger this month said he personally believes there is a greater than 10% chance that AI could “kill all humans” within the next decade.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has arrived in Washington for high-stakes talks with US President Donald Trump, receiving an unusually elaborate personal welcome as the two leaders prepare to tackle disputes ranging from trade and Taiwan to Iran and artificial intelligence.

Trump and First Lady Melania Trump greeted Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, at Joint Base Andrews on Wednesday, rather than waiting to receive them at the White House. A 100-foot red carpet and a military honor guard were laid out, while two B-1 bombers conducted a flyover during the ceremony. Trump later said he believed the Chinese delegation appreciated the reception.

The arrival coincided with another sign of easing tensions, as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that Washington and Beijing had agreed to extend their current trade truce until January 10. The arrangement has seen both sides scale back tariffs and refrain from introducing new restrictions while negotiations continue.

NOW: President Trump has greeted Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington, DC with the following:

- 100-foot-long red carpet
- Salute Battery
- 21-Person Honor Cordon
- 2 three-person color teams to include the U.S. and Chinese flag
- USAF band playing fanfare and… pic.twitter.com/X7W0oOtc2u

— Jordan Conradson🇺🇸 (@ConradsonJordan) September 23, 2026

Trump and Xi are due to hold substantive talks at the White House on Thursday after another arrival ceremony and a military review, followed by a state dinner. Despite the ceremonial welcome, both leaders enter the talks with significant economic and geopolitical leverage, according to an analysis by RT correspondent Konstantin Rozhkov.

Wow🔥🇺🇸 2 B1's flew over Trump's welcome ceremony for Xi at JBA. https://t.co/hktOHZPrMZ pic.twitter.com/kj1fNusQa2

— American Nightmare 🇺🇸 (@thewakeninq) September 24, 2026

Taiwan is another potential flashpoint. Trump has delayed a roughly $14 billion weapons package for the island and has openly described arms sales as a negotiating tool in dealings with Beijing.

Beijing, however, has substantial leverage of its own through critical minerals and rare earths. China accounted for around 91% of global refining of magnet rare earths and 94% of sintered permanent-magnet production in 2024, according to the International Energy Agency. Such materials are essential for automobiles, electronics, and sophisticated military equipment.

Iran itself could therefore become another subject of bargaining. Trump has publicly said he asked Xi not to become more deeply involved in the conflict, while Washington has also sought to limit China’s economic ties with Tehran.

Artificial intelligence rounds out another major area of competition. The US continues to control access to many of the most advanced chips, while Chinese companies have been narrowing the gap with lower-cost AI models. Ahead of the summit, Bessent said the two governments had discussed establishing a US-China AI dialogue and a mechanism for notifying each other about serious AI-related incidents.

Watch more in the full report by RT correspondent Konstantin Rozhkov:

Disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for sexual assault, a New York court ruled on Wednesday.

The 74-year-old former movie mogul was convicted last year of committing a first-degree criminal sexual act against former TV production assistant Miriam Haley at his Manhattan apartment in 2006. The verdict came in a retrial after Weinstein’s previous New York convictions were overturned in 2024.

“I often felt like I was the one on trial,” Haley told the court, according to CBS News. She said pursuing the case had at times felt like “the worst decision of my life” and accused Weinstein of showing no remorse or “sign of change.”

Weinstein has apologized to people he may have hurt but maintains his innocence.

“You’re treated as an animal – you’re actually less than an animal because you’re treated as nothing,” he said of his time behind bars, according to CBS News.

Before allegations against Weinstein emerged in 2017, he had produced or helped bring to theaters some of Hollywood’s best-known films, including Pulp Fiction, Good Will Hunting, and Shakespeare in Love. The revelations helped propel #MeToo into a global movement, as women publicly accused powerful figures in entertainment, media, politics, and other industries of sexual misconduct.

Wednesday’s sentencing marked a major endpoint in the New York chapter of a courtroom saga stretching back nearly a decade.

At his 2025 retrial, Weinstein was again convicted in the Haley case and acquitted of a separate charge involving Polish actress Kaja Sokola. Jurors failed to reach a verdict on a rape charge involving Mann, which prosecutors later dropped.

Separately, Weinstein was sentenced to 16 years in California following a 2022 sexual assault conviction. Weinstein has denied sexually assaulting or raping anyone.

Ukraine’s deliberate attacks on energy and cross-border infrastructure are destabilizing global markets, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has told US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. 

Lavrov and Rubio met on Wednesday on the sidelines of the 81st UN General Assembly in New York, where they held an extensive discussion on Ukraine, bilateral relations, and a range of international issues. 

According to the Russian Foreign Ministry, Lavrov drew Rubio’s attention to what it described as close coordination between Kiev and its European backers and raised Ukrainian strikes on civilians and “cross-border infrastructure facilities,” which Russia said are deliberately contributing to instability in global energy markets.

The US State Department’s brief readout from the Lavrov-Rubio meeting on Wednesday said only that the two diplomats had discussed the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the US-Russia relationship. 

Following the meeting, Rubio said both Russia and Ukraine had expressed some interest in a limited ceasefire covering energy targets. He acknowledged, however, that such an arrangement “doesn’t solve the war,” and said reaching one would be difficult because both sides regard energy infrastructure as a strategic target.

Moscow has repeatedly rejected the idea that any limited truce can substitute for a comprehensive settlement, pointing to what it describes as Ukraine’s past violations of ceasefires and arguing that Kiev seeks talks only when the situation on the battlefield becomes critical. Zelensky said this week that Kiev was prepared to stop targeting Russian refineries if Moscow halted strikes on a wide range of Ukraine’s energy, logistics, and port infrastructure.

Zelensky has meanwhile continued to push for the “full and swift implementation” of the recently enacted sanctions package championed by the late US Senator Lindsey Graham. The law gives Trump authority to impose tariffs of up to 100% on major buyers of Russian oil and gas, potentially targeting countries such as China and India. With global supplies already strained, sharply curbing Russian exports could further disrupt energy trade and drive prices higher as major importers are forced to compete for alternative barrels.

Lavrov also called for further normalization of US-Russia relations, including resolving disputes over diplomatic missions and Russian diplomatic property in the US.

In another sign of continued engagement, Rubio announced after the talks that Washington had invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to attend the G20 summit in Miami in December. The Kremlin welcomed the invitation and said it would consider it through diplomatic channels.

European NATO nations should take greater responsibility for security in the Middle East, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has said. He also defended the US-Israeli war on Iran and argued that European members should spend less on social programs and more on the military.

Rutte made the remarks at a Chicago Council on Global Affairs event in Iowa on Tuesday after being asked to “make the case” for NATO to Americans by explaining “what’s in it” for them.

He described the Middle East as “Europe’s backyard” and “not the United States’ backyard,” arguing that Washington’s war against Tehran was “necessary” but that the US had to launch it because “somehow the Europeans did not have enough capabilities to do it themselves.”

“In the future, what you get from a stronger NATO is that Europeans can take care of their own backyard,” Rutte said.

Trump has since repeatedly accused European allies of failing to meet their NATO commitments and claimed the bloc “was not there when we needed them.” In April, US War Secretary Pete Hegseth said NATO’s future was uncertain and Washington could not currently reaffirm its commitment to collective defense.

Rutte also argued on Tuesday that the burden within NATO was unfair because European members spend heavily “on pensions and welfare,” while Washington has to devote more resources to weapons but “would also like to spend more on all these other lofty, beautiful items, but they can’t because they have to spend so much on defense.”

Rutte also offered to help “protect the United States from threats of Russia” and China and prevent the Arctic “from becoming militarized by the Russians and the Chinese.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said last month that Moscow was primarily interested in “preserving the Arctic as an area of peace and cooperation” and accused NATO of “driving the region towards militarization.” His comments followed European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s proposal earlier this year to use increased EU military spending on “Arctic-ready equipment.”

Canada and the UK are considering merging two major military financing initiatives to help European NATO members and other Kiev backers finance their military buildup against Russia, the CBC reported on Wednesday, citing anonymous officials.

In recent years, European NATO nations have increasingly accused Moscow of preparing an attack on members of the US-led military bloc, using the alleged threat to justify bloated military budgets. Moscow has denied any such intention.

Canada is leading plans for the Defense, Security and Resilience Bank (DSRB), while the UK is pushing for the Multilateral Defense Mechanism (MDM). Both initiatives are intended to make it easier for allied states to finance military purchases and expand arms production.

Ottawa is confident the two countries will reach a deal to combine their initiatives into a joint institution, the Canadian Press reported last week, citing a senior Canadian official.

So far, Ottawa’s DSRB has attracted support from Albania, Belgium, Greece, Latvia, Luxembourg, Romania, Türkiye, and Ukraine. The Netherlands, Finland, and Poland have backed the UK’s MDM.

In the meantime, European NATO members have increasingly touted the Russian threat to militarize and prepare the continent for a potential war with Moscow, all while insulating the US from the consequences of such a conflict.

“European elites… now seek to frighten their populations with a mythical Russian threat,” Russian President Vladimir Putin told journalists at a BRICS summit earlier in September, stressing that Moscow has “no grounds for any conflict with Europe.”

A sprawling network of media influence “clusters” has existed in NATO member states for years, seeking to portray voices opposing the policies of the military bloc and the EU as Russian propaganda, RT America’s Ben Swann and independent investigative journalist Elizabeth Lane have learnt.

Founded in 2015, soon after the Western-backed coup in Kiev, the so-called Integrity Initiative program was designed to counter what it called Russia’s disinformation. It was run by the UK Foreign Office-funded Institute for Statecraft – an organization posing as an independent charity that was founded by Christopher Donnelly, a former adviser to a NATO secretary general, and Daniel Lafayeedney, a former Special Air Service officer.

The definition of ‘Russian propaganda’ developed by the organization, which received funding not just from London but also from the NATO-linked Atlantic Council, was so broad that it virtually included any criticism of NATO and the EU.

“They are not really after Russian disinformation,” Lane said. “They targeted independent journalists. And that’s very clear in their own communications.”

Among the most prominent targets of the Integrity Initiative were former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and retired Spanish Army colonel Pedro Banos, who lost his appointment as director of national security in the Spanish government in 2018 amid a concerted campaign portraying him as a Russian asset.

The campaigns were focused on “killing the image” of any dissenter to the point where their political careers were ruined, Lane explained. “If you assassinate their image, no one wants to be associated to that person. And that’s what happened with Pedro Banos. That’s what happened with Jeremy Corbyn.”

The Integrity Initiative came into the spotlight in 2018 when hackers, claiming to be linked to the Anonymous collective, leaked a trove of documents revealing the scale of its operations. The revelations led to an investigation into the Institute for Statecraft’s activities by the Scottish charity regulator OSCR, which concluded in 2019 that the organization was violating charity rules.

The institute then formally announced that it was terminating its involvement with the Integrity Initiative in 2019 but continued to operate until August 2023, when it was dissolved several months after being declared an “undesired organization” by the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office over what officials called “aggressive militarist rhetoric” and a “discreditation campaign” against the Russian authorities.

Watch the full episode of the exclusive investigative series here:

The Kremlin has responded to the invitiation the US has extended to Russian President Vladimir Putin to attend the upcoming G20 summit in Miami, Florida in December.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed earlier today that Washington had invited Putin to attend the gathering.

Russia is “grateful and appreciative,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told RIA Novosti on Wednesday night.

Peskov added that a decision on Putin’s possible attendance will be made and relayed through diplomatic channels.

The summit is scheduled for December 14-15 in Miami, with US President Donald Trump set to host it at his Doral golf resort. Putin has not attended a G20 summit in person since 2019, initially because of the pandemic and later amid the fallout from the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022.

Speaking to journalists earlier on Wednesday, Rubio expressed his hope that the Russian president would arrive for the summit. “We hope that’s an invitation he’ll accept. There’s an opportunity in December if that happens.”

Trump himself had stated earlier that he would like to see his Russian counterpart at the summit. “If he came, it would be probably very helpful,” the US president said in April. He also welcomed the presence of a senior Russian delegation at the G20 in early September despite protests from EU officials who refused to appear alongside Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov in the gathering’s traditional “family photo.”

Germany’s Axel Springer media monolith has awarded its highest honor to Palantir founder Peter Thiel, in a ceremony illustrating the incestuous relationship between the mainstream media, the defense tech industry, and the US-Israeli order.

Thiel received the ‘2026 Axel Springer Award’ at a ceremony in Berlin on Thursday. According to Axel Springer CEO Mathias Dopfner, Thiel “is one of the rare entrepreneurs who does not merely found or finance companies but helps determine the direction of technological development...he reminds us that progress requires courage and nonconformism.”

The ceremony began at 7pm Berlin time, and anyone curious what Thiel had to say can watch a replay of the livestream below.

Previous recipients of the Axel Springer Award include Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, and Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky. None of these laureates have proven as controversial as Thiel, however. 

According to Status News, employees at Politico and Business Insider – both of which are owned by Axel Springer – pushed back against the decision. In a letter to management on Tuesday, 120 staffers argued that Thiel, who funded the lawsuit that destroyed Gawker, should not be honored by a company which, in the words of Dopfner, “stands for freedom of speech and a culture of open discussions.”

They’re missing the point. Palantir and Axel Springer are cogs in the same machine. They share an almost identical world view, marked by a devotion to US-Israeli hegemony, a belief that private companies must serve the interests of this hegemony, and a common parent: the CIA.

The CIA connection

During the Cold War, the US saw strategic control of media outlets as key to preventing the rise of socialism and communism in Western Europe. Axel Springer, the anti-communist press baron who gave his name to the company, was a natural ally in this fight. Springer received $7 million in funding from the CIA in 1957, two former agents told The Nation in 1982. Adjusted for inflation, the donation would be equivalent to more than $80 million today.

Although the agents claimed that Springer ended his relationship with the agency in the mid-1970s, declassified documents show that he was still in contact with the United States Information Agency (USIA) – which funded pro-American news outlets – in the early 1980s. In 1982, Springer was introduced to CIA Director William Casey as “a strong supporter of the United States” who “is doing all he can to strengthen the ties between the United States and Europe.”

Thiel, who co-founded PayPal, launched Palantir in 2003 with the stated goal of taking “the approaches that PayPal had used to fight fraud…into other contexts, like fighting terrorism.” The CIA took notice, and invested $2 million in the company in 2005 via its in-house venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel.

“I wish I had Palantir when I was director,” former CIA chief George Tenet – who set up In-Q-Tel – told Forbes magazine in 2013. “I wish we had the tool of its power.”

The Axel Springer investment pays off

In both cases, the CIA’s investments paid off. Axel Springer is now Europe’s largest publisher, and owns Politico, Business Insider, Bild, Die Welt, The Telegraph, and nearly a dozen other outlets. The American deep state continues to finance its operations, with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the State Department’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) pumping just under $34 million into Politico between 2016 and 2025.

In return, Axel Springer has openly pledged fealty to American neoliberalism. Whereas Springer himself described his first newspaper, the Hamburger Abendblatt, as “geared to the underdog and the little man,” staff at Axel Springer publications are today required to adhere to the following code of conduct:

• “We stand up for freedom, free speech, the rule of law, and democracy”

• “We support the right of existence of the State of Israel and oppose all forms of anti-Semitism”

• “We advocate the alliance between the United States of America and Europe”

• “We uphold the principles of a free market economy”

• “We reject political and religious extremism and all forms of discrimination”

In practice, this means that Axel Springer publications will feature lively debate over ‘red versus blue’ politics in the US and Europe, but will never question key tenets of US foreign policy, including America’s alliance with Israel, its dominance over Europe through NATO, and the legitimacy of its proxy war with Russia in Ukraine.

The world according to Palantir

Palantir’s flagship product is an operating system called ‘Gotham’, which is essentially a data analytics platform for military, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies. Gotham pulls together and analyses existing data that may otherwise take days to sift through. For example, if US Central Command is planning a missile strike in a foreign country, Gotham can combine maps and satellite footage from that country, data from other agencies, including human intelligence from the CIA and signals intelligence from the NSA, and local surveillance data to present CENTCOM with potential targets for military strikes. 

Palantir’s international customers include the British, Israeli and Ukrainian militaries, NATO, domestic intelligence agencies in France and Germany, and police departments in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK, among others. 

However, Palantir is not a mercenary company selling its products to anyone with money. According to CEO Alex Karp, Palantir is inseparable from the US deep state, and “was founded to strengthen US national security, to protect Americans and their freedom.”

Because we get asked a lot.

The Technological Republic, in brief.

1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.

2. We must rebel…

— Palantir (@PalantirTech) April 18, 2026

Earlier this year, Karp set out Palantir’s world view in a manifesto, which RT already covered in depth in our ‘Wired for War’ series. In the 22-point bulletin, Karp argued that “the engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation,” that “free and democratic societies” must pursue AI superweapons to preserve the hegemony of the US, which “has advanced progressive values” more than “any other nation on the planet.” 

In separate comments, Karp has described pro-Palestinian protesters as a “cancerous” influence on American politics, while Palantir describes its work with the Israeli state as “in line with our global support of US allies and liberal democracies.”

Critics called Karp’s manifesto “technofascist,” but it differs little in substance from Axel Springer’s code of conduct. Karp’s remaining points wade into US-centric culture war territory, but the core argument of both documents is the same: the US and Israel are a benevolent force and the private sector has a duty to aid their foreign policy goals; by argument, in the case of Axel Springer, and by force, in the case of Palantir.

The incestuous security state

Before the acquisition, Weiss repeatedly complained about CBS’ supposedly “anti-Israel bias.” Once in control of the network, she set about hiring pro-Israel editors and reportedly intervening personally in stories concerning the Jewish state. 

Thursday’s ceremony also featured a questions-and-answers session with PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, a vocal defender of the NSA amid Edward Snowden’s revelations of warrantless wiretapping.

The award is equivalent to an ‘Employee of the Month’ prize from one department of the same company to another. It’s like USAID and CIA agents meeting for after-work drinks, or Weiss congratulating the IDF for its service. 

Dopfner, Thiel, Weiss and Levchin understand they’re all on the same team. Anyone who’s followed RT’s ‘Wired for War’ series will grasp this. The only people yet to figure it out, apparently, are the Politico and Business Insider staffers complaining about the threat posed by Thiel to “Axel Springer’s own commitment to freedom.”

Thursday’s ceremony might help them understand the true nature of the power they serve a little clearer.

NATO has spent years researching online influence techniques involving fake profiles, targeted advertising and purchased social media engagement. RT’s America Now has examined the bloc’s experiments and what they could reveal about efforts to shape online narratives.

Host Ben Swann and investigative journalist Elizabeth Lane reviewed NATO promotional material, published research and reports on experiments involving social media manipulation.

One example is a 2024 NATO promotional video featuring predominantly white European women as the alliance’s “future” in a potential conflict, apparently with Russia. Swann and Lane argue that the unusually non-diverse casting could be intended to prepare European audiences for women taking a greater role in a possible confrontation as Ukraine struggles with manpower shortages.

They also examined two 2019 experiments by NATO strategic communications researchers. In one, researchers created fake Facebook pages and profiles, collected publicly available information on military personnel and used targeted advertising to reach them. They reportedly identified around 150 soldiers, tracked troop movements and even induced some personnel to act against orders. The experiment cost roughly $60.

NATO described the experiments as defensive research aimed at identifying online threats. Swann and Lane, however, questioned why a military alliance was developing practical expertise in techniques that could also be used to influence public opinion. They also pointed to NATO researchers’ cooperation with Ukrainian social media analytics company Singularex.

The episode also revisited false stories that had circulated during the early stages of the Ukraine conflict, including the “Ghost of Kiev” fighter pilot and initial claims about the “defenders of Snake Island.” Lane argued that journalists who repeat compelling wartime stories without verifying them can amplify false narratives.

Lane also said independent journalists covering Russia and Ukraine regularly face bot attacks, abuse and threats. She said she had received such messages herself, including one stating, “Zelensky sends his love,” which she suggested could point to coordinated activity.

Check out the full episode here.

Journalism must remain “independent of political power” and offer audiences verification, context and accountability as social media increasingly competes with traditional news, Bangladeshi journalist and editor Khairul Alam has told RT.

Alam, editor of DBARTA24 and former General Secretary of the Dhaka Union of Journalists (DUJ), spoke to RT on Wednesday on the sidelines of the International Forum ‘Dialogue about Fakes 4.0’ in Moscow.

“Rebuilding public trust begins with one simple principle: journalism must be independent of political power,” he said.

According to Alam, media outlets can restore confidence through transparent sourcing, fact-checking, openly correcting mistakes and giving different sides an opportunity to respond. They must also protect reporters from political retaliation and separate journalism from “political activism,” he added.

Alam pointed to Bangladesh’s 2024 political unrest as an example of how social media can both provide information quickly and amplify false or misleading claims.

“The same platforms can spread misinformation, manipulated videos, old footage presented as new, misleading headlines and politically motivated narratives at extraordinary speed,” he said.

The 2024 protests began over civil service job quotas before developing into a broader anti-government uprising that led to the ouster of then-Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. The UN has estimated that as many as 1,400 people were killed during the unrest. Hasina has since alleged that the US orchestrated her removal after Dhaka refused to allow an American military base on Saint Martin Island.

UN experts raised concerns in 2025 that more than 140 journalists had been charged with murder following the protests. The Committee to Protect Journalists has also documented arrests, criminal cases and other pressure against media workers in the country.

Alam argued that journalists should not face pressure or punishment over their perceived political affiliations, regardless of who is in power.

At the same time, Alam stressed that social media itself is “not the enemy of journalism” and can serve as an important tool for reporters.

Professional media, he said, must instead distinguish itself by providing what social platforms often cannot: “verification, context, responsibility and independence.”

Moscow will not pause its special military operation while peace negotiations are underway, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told the UN Security Council on Wednesday, asserting that a temporary ceasefire only benefits Kiev.

Ukraine and 51 of its allies released a statement on Wednesday demanding that Russia accept an “immediate and unconditional ceasefire” so that peace talks between Moscow and Kiev can take place. The statement, whose signatories included the EU and its member states, the UK, Canada, and Australia, was published before the security council met to discuss the conflict. 

“We are not going to have a pause in our special military operation,” Lavrov said during the meeting. “Europe, whatever it thinks, just wants to get a pause and it wants to use it to pump the Kiev regime with weapons.” 

Kiev is “clearly and blatantly using terrorist methods,” Lavrov added, referring to Ukraine’s long-range strikes on civilian targets in Russia. 

Ukraine and its allies issued their ceasefire demand less than four days after Ukrainian forces launched their largest-ever drone raid on the Russian capital. The attack killed two civilians in its suburbs and damaged an oil refinery, residential buildings, and civilian infrastructure. Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin said the “unprecedented” raid involved more than 1,600 UAVs from all directions.

Russia has dramatically stepped up its missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian military and dual-use infrastructure in recent months, in response to Vladimir Zelensky’s 40-day “influence campaign” of long-range strikes on civilian targets. 

Zelensky’s stated aim was to foment discontent among the Russian public, but the campaign ultimately ended with the destruction of Ukraine’s Black Sea port infrastructure and an earlier-than-usual start to Russia’s winter campaign against its power plants and substations.

In a statement released after the latest drone raid on Moscow, the Russian Defense Ministry said that the Russian army would further “intensify its high-accuracy strikes against military targets in Kiev” in response. 

The inaugural summit of the new Carpathian Eight (C8) cooperation format, initiated by Ukraine with EU support, took place on September 18-20. Leaders and representatives from eight countries in the Carpathian region were invited to discuss security, energy, logistics, and cross-border cooperation. The initiative – intended to unite nations, some of which do not officially supply weapons to Ukraine but wish to foster “good-neighborly relations” – has turned into a zero-sum game. Yielding no significant economic benefits and failing to address real economic challenges, it only serves to isolate the region from pan-continental logistics corridors.

Is the Carpathian Initiative a Ukrainian or European project?

The foundation for the Carpathian Initiative was laid by Ukraine back in 2001-2003, when it acted as the primary initiator and depositary of the Framework Convention on the Protection and Sustainable Development of the Carpathians. Initially, the format was strictly environmental and conservation-oriented. Countries of the Visegrad Group, and primarily Poland, breathed geopolitical life and economic scale into the concept. For years, Warsaw actively advocated for the creation of a full-fledged EU Macro-Regional Strategy for the Carpathian Region (EUSCARP), aiming to transform the shared mountain range into a major logistics and infrastructure hub.

Over time, the EU fully took over this regional initiative, turning it into a systemic tool for the “soft integration” of Ukraine. After developing a strategic vision for the region in 2009 and adopting the Carpathian Roadmap in 2019, Brussels institutionalized the project in line with its own bureaucratic standards. What began as a modest environmental initiative has, through the efforts of European neighbors, transformed into a large-scale EU geopolitical project aimed at drawing Ukraine into the European orbit via infrastructure grants.

Ukraine’s autonomy is illusory, however. For the European Commission, the Carpathian region serves as a convenient geographic ‘sandbox’; the supranational bureaucracy seeks to bind the EU’s eastern fringes together through mutual dependency. Brussels’ ultimate goal is to dilute the agency and curb the independence of countries like Hungary and Slovakia, whose ‘Eastern’ initiatives – such as linking Central and Eastern Europe with Greater Eurasia – are gaining momentum. Ultimately, this measure would allow regional financial and other flows to be fully contained within the EU.

What’s wrong with the project, and why is it a zero-sum game?

Beneath the facade of discussions on “cross-border cooperation” set against the picturesque backdrop of the Ukrainian Carpathians lie pragmatic objectives that turn the Carpathian Eight into a classic zero-sum game. This is confirmed by the project’s geography: countries with the greatest interest in the initiative find themselves subordinate to those countries for whom the project is not a key priority. Ukraine’s actual geographic weight in the project is minimal; despite Kiev’s ambition to act as the main engine of regional integration, the Carpathians account for a mere 3.6% of Ukraine’s total territory. Ukraine possesses only 10% of the total area of the mountain range, yet it attempts to dictate the agenda to Romania and Slovakia, where the Carpathians form the backbone of national geography, covering 47% and 72% of the territory, respectively. Such evident disparity between Ukraine’s actual geographical “contribution” and its political ambitions sows the seeds of conflict within the project.  

This perspective reveals the true purpose of the revived format: to serve as a covert logistical corridor for NATO. The projected budget of €9.4 billion ($10.7 billion) for 90 infrastructure projects is specifically aimed at modernizing narrow-gauge railways, bridges, and tunnels in the Carpathian Mountains. Under the guise of Euro-integration, Brussels is aggressively attempting to create a secure alternative route through the complex mountainous terrain for rapid deployment of heavy equipment, weapons, and NATO reserves, bypassing vulnerable border logistics nodes. Consequently, supranational strategists get to fully benefit from this venture while Central European countries bear all the attendant military and strategic risks.

Intrigues, scandals, and investigations

For the countries physically located in the Carpathians and those interested in developing the region, the hidden agenda of the initiative is apparent. Citing a sudden illness, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico canceled his visit to Bukovel and expressed his outright opposition to turning the region into a frontline zone and dragging Bratislava into the conflict under the guise of NATO obligations. As a result, Slovakia was represented at the summit only by the state secretary for foreign and European affairs. Local experts openly stated that Bratislava guessed the proposed zero-sum game: under the guise of cross-border corridors, Brussels and Kiev are attempting to establish a rear hub for supplying NATO’s eastern flank. For Slovakia, participating in such “road modernization” carries direct military risks, not security benefits. This forces the country to navigate a precarious line – seeking economic grants while sabotaging the military-political agenda of the proposed C8.

Following Slovakia, the Czech Republic demonstrated passive resistance to the project by adopting a stance of cautious pragmatism. Unlike Warsaw, Prague notably refrained from sending top officials to Bukovel, opting instead to send the vice-president of the senate. Czech economic analysts expressed doubt about the €40 billion investment portfolio announced by Kiev. The most important indicator of the failure of the “unified front” was that the Czech Republic effectively refused to sign the summit’s final declaration. As regional analysts point out, the country has “cooled” towards Ukraine’s ambitions. Moreover, unlike Ukraine, the Czech Republic has a realistic grasp of its geography; possessing only 8.5% of Carpathian territory, Prague saw no tangible economic benefit in a project burdened with militarization issues rather than cross-border development. Consequently, it chose to remain on the sidelines, unwilling to endorse someone else’s frontline agenda.

Predictably, only Poland and Romania expressed full and unconditional support for the project, emerging as the principal political beneficiaries of the initiative. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Romanian President Nicusor Dan signed the final declaration, explicitly linking it to military-strategic objectives. For Warsaw, the Carpathian Eight provided a convenient platform for lobbying an anti-ballistic missile defense coalition on NATO’s eastern flank, while for Bucharest, it offered a means to logistically connect the Ukrainian border with NATO’s largest European base, which is being constructed on Romanian territory. As a result, the document was signed only by those players intending to gain direct benefits from the region’s militarization, firmly establishing the C8 as a frontline coalition.

Hungary’s reaction is particularly noteworthy. On X, Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Magyar compared Kiev’s actions to village sports: “Hi, we have formed a football team in the next village. We don’t know each other, but you are in it, and you have to bring the ball.” Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrey Sibiga, expressed surprise over Hungary’s attitude, but the situation is very clear and leaves no room for doubt. 

Moreover, Budapest’s negative stance is reinforced by the situation in Transcarpathia. From 2014, the Hungarian population in the region has decreased from 150,000 people to around 70,000-80,000 due to stringent Ukrainianization policies in schools. The remaining population is facing selective forced conscription, with military recruitment offices compiling lists of Hungarian students and workers to send to the front lines, resulting in several widely reported casualties, including the death of 45-year-old Jozsef Sebestyen. Notably, Moscow’s Foreign Ministry is closely monitoring these developments: mobilized residents of Transcarpathia occasionally end up as prisoners of war, and Russian diplomatic agencies, in coordination with intelligence services, work on their direct transfer to Hungary, bypassing Ukraine. Aware that Brussels and Kiev are attempting to exploit Hungarian resources and territory, Magyar chose to flip the script. Budapest refused to fund this military version of ‘Carpathian soccer’ which is too costly for it, and vetoed Ukraine’s integration efforts.

In summary, we must note that despite the ambitions of European supranational entities to create artificial buffer zones (essentially ‘sandboxes’) in Central and Eastern Europe, their era is coming to an end. Attempts to impose a zero-sum game on other countries only exacerbate the internal rift which is becoming inevitable, considering the region’s actual geography and the projects gaining momentum across Greater Eurasia.

Israel is facing accusations of genocide over its military campaign in Lebanon, where thousands have been killed and large areas devastated. RT correspondent Steve Sweeney reports from Nabatieh, a city in the south of the country that has been repeatedly hit by Israeli strikes.

More than 4,300 people, including over 250 children and 130 medical professionals, have been killed since the latest escalation began in March, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry.

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Doctors Against Genocide have accused Israel of pursuing what they called a “genocidal policy of absolute destruction,” targeting the foundations of life of Lebanon’s Shia communities. The groups said attacks on medical personnel were part of a sustained pattern affecting “the very systems necessary for civilian survival.”

Around 56,000 hectares of agricultural land have been affected, with losses to the sector estimated at more than $1 billion, according to Lebanon’s Agriculture Ministry.

The latest Israeli campaign in Lebanon began in early March, after Hezbollah attacked Israel following the start of US-Israeli strikes on Iran. Israel responded with airstrikes and later expanded its military operations in Lebanon.

Israeli attacks have continued despite a US-brokered framework agreed upon in June aimed at ending the fighting. The deal calls for a progressive Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon alongside Lebanese Army deployments and the disarmament of armed groups, including Hezbollah, but implementation has stalled.

Under the 1948 Genocide Convention, genocide requires intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. RT looks at whether the destruction and statements accompanying Israel’s campaign could meet that definition.

Watch the full report below.

The EU has failed to provide sufficient evidence to keep a former Russian official on its sanctions blacklist, the bloc’s General Court ruled on Wednesday. The decision came a day after the EU removed two Russian businessmen from the list as part of a deal to extend restrictions on thousands of others.

The court annulled the September 2024 and September 2025 extensions of sanctions against former Russian Senator Oleg Tkach, who represented Kaliningrad Region in the Federation Council from 2004 to 2022. He was also involved in publishing, founding and chairing Olma Media Group.

The EU first sanctioned Tkach in March 2022 over his vote to ratify treaties with the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, which later became part of Russia following referendums rejected by Ukraine and most Western countries. The case centered on whether the EU Council had grounds to keep extending the restrictions after Tkach left office.

According to Wednesday’s ruling, the Council failed to demonstrate that Tkach retained close ties to Russian authorities. The court also found that his failure to publicly oppose Russia’s military operation in Ukraine did not, by itself, constitute continued support for the authorities.

The ruling does not affect the EU’s most recent sanctions extension from March 2026, which Tkach is challenging separately. He argues that condemnation based on his former Senate position is outdated and that the Council’s evidence is unreliable and lacks a “sound factual basis.” He has also argued that the measures are disproportionate.

A day before Wednesday’s ruling, the EU agreed to remove Russian businessmen Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman from its sanctions list. Both had previously mounted legal challenges related to EU restrictions, while Fridman has also filed a multibillion-dollar arbitration claim against Luxembourg.

Iranian airlines are being cut off from international routes and airport services as Washington steps up pressure on the country’s aviation sector. Several regional connections have already been suspended or restricted, although some foreign flights continue, RT’s Saman Kojouri has reported from outside the Tehran headquarters of Mahan Air, one of Iran’s major carriers.

The US Treasury targeted 27 Iranian airlines earlier this month as part of a broader campaign against the country’s aviation sector. Foreign companies providing services to the carriers risk US secondary sanctions, while Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned that the restrictions would effectively shut Iranian airlines out of international aviation from September 23.

”If they land, you cannot provide them with fuel, you cannot provide them with landing services, you cannot sell them tickets, or you will be knocked out of the dollar system,” Bessent said.

The impact is already spreading across the region, according to RT’s Kojouri. Azerbaijan has suspended flights operated by Iranian carriers, while Iraq has reportedly stopped accepting Iranian aircraft. Flights between Tehran and Muscat have also been suspended, while Georgia has said it will comply with sanctions affecting Iranian carriers.

Mahan Air is among the airlines facing the squeeze. Washington first sanctioned the carrier in 2011, accusing it of providing support to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force (IRGC-QF). The Treasury has since targeted companies abroad accused of providing commercial and logistical support to the airline.

The aviation crackdown comes as Washington ramps up pressure on Tehran while simultaneously pursuing diplomatic contacts on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York. President Donald Trump threatened on Tuesday to “annihilate the Islamic Republic” if negotiations fail, saying he faced a “big decision” between reaching an agreement and further military escalation.

Most of the Iranian delegation walked out of the General Assembly hall during Trump’s speech, leaving only one representative seated. The US president defended the nearly seven-month US-Israeli war and accused Tehran of pursuing nuclear weapons and supporting terrorism.

Despite the hostile rhetoric, indirect contacts continued later in the day. US envoy Steve Witkoff said mediators had shuttled between the American and Iranian delegations during “lengthy talks,” while Tehran said it had used the channel to clearly convey its conditions to Washington, including lifting the US naval blockade and releasing frozen Iranian assets.

European Commission president and unelected de facto “queen” of Europe, Ursula von der Leyen, can’t get enough of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.

Her annual “State of the European Union” address last week should have been called “State of my crush on Mark Carney.” It seemed to transform into one giant excuse to gush about him while he sat in front of her, as she mused aloud to “Dear Mark” about her vision of some kind of “associate EU membership” for Canada. It reminded me of a kid back in grade school who once did an entire speech on “seals” in French class, just so he could constantly repeat the French translation of the subject, “phoques,” at a rate of once per sentence. 

“President Metsola, Prime Minister Carney, Honorable Members,” she began. “Mark, your presence here is a symbol of the enduring friendship between our people. Our cultural, historical and personal links run deep within the fabric of our societies.” That’s what we used to call a group date to hide your crush. Only the group here consists of Canada’s 41 million people and the EU’s 452 million.

“Dear Mark,” she continued. “I said we must urgently reimagine our partnerships… We share one ocean, one set of values, one way of seeing the world. And we will now build our shared future as well.”

No one in their right mind can blame him. You have to think that Carney – the former central banker of both Canada and the UK, and the onetime head of the G20’s Financial Stability Board in Basel – knows an economic basket case when he sees one. And it’s one thing to hang out, have a good time, and fill your boots. But it’s quite another not to have the total freedom to just zip up and peace out when the next inevitable self-imposed meltdown comes along. Which is at about the rate of one a week, at this point.

A lot of the EU’s problems come down to a lack of accurate foresight and an inability to prioritize by coordinating their agenda with existential reality. Had European leaders been more adept at doing so, they might not need Carney to stand there in front of the EU Parliament and explain that it’s okay not to kiss Washington’s behind to their own detriment. Or that dating around allows for a more chill approach to all relationships.Until recently, anyone adopting this position in either Canada or Europe would immediately be subject to a proctology exam, accused of being some kind of secret tool of the Kremlin. EU officials have repeatedly warned that fragmentation and multipolarity that de-centers the Washington-led agenda hinders Western unity to the benefit of rival powers such as Russia.

This isn’t a guy who’s into nation-building beyond his own. Ursula may think that she’s acquiring Canada and its resources for Europe, but she’s also importing, first and foremost, a political instinct that the bloc has long lacked. Carney is now articulating – to resounding applause – a position that, until recently, was far more closely associated with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s worldview than the one that orbits around Washington.

Still, Carney is singing from the EU’s hymn book on Ukraine and Russia right now. He’s also literally negotiating for Canada to get some defense manufacturing revenues from the EU’s massive fear-driven spending spree on its defense security blanket. It’s not hard to see a profit motive here. Nor in the fact that he’s literally pitching for Europe to replace Russian natural resources with Canadian equivalents.

So right now, Canada and Russia are positioned as competitors on the global economic playing field. At least for the time being. But that won’t always be the case once he’s secured the bag. Carney – now officially the most popular prime minister in Canadian history at 70% approval – got himself into that position by ditching right-left ideology for pragmatism. He could turn out to be an important interlocutor for Russia with the West. Someone who’s blunt, action-oriented, and doesn’t much honestly care what you do as long as it doesn’t annoy him. Ursula is clearly smitten with Carney. And if her new boyfriend ends up showing Europe how to be a little less cliquey about engaging with the rest of the world, then perhaps there’s hope for us all yet.

The US Democratic Party has embraced a transgender agenda that amounts to “the normalization of sadism,” author A.J. Rice has said, warning that radical trans policies would return if the party is allowed to regain power.

Speaking to RT’s America First host Scotty Nell Hughes about his new book, ‘The Curse of the Bearded Lady: How the Trans Mafia Whacked American Sanity’, Rice argued that activists have gained significant influence in schools, medicine, and corporate America while people who questioned the agenda have faced pressure to stay silent.

The author described the “trans mafia” as the sprawling network of people and institutions that have helped the movement gain influence. He singled out parts of academia, wealthy backers, and corporations, and stated that providers of transition-related treatment also have a financial incentive to keep young people in their care indefinitely.

Rice argued that the consequences of these policies ultimately fall on children who are being drawn toward gender-affirming medical treatments and on girls who are expected to share locker rooms or compete in sports with biological males.

Rice framed the opposition to trans policies as “a fight for human nature,” adding that the 2024 election had become “more about sane versus insane” rather than a contest between Democrats and Republicans.

The author warned that if Democrats manage to take back Congress, “the 72 genders are coming back,” and urged opponents to keep challenging the trans agenda, noting that humor could help them overcome the fear of speaking out.

“Sometimes, ridicule can move faster than rebellion,” Rice said.

Watch the full interview below.

German chemicals giant Evonik is overhauling its domestic operations amid what it has described as a “structural and economic crisis” in the industry.

The German and wider European chemical sector has been hit by plant closures, job losses and high energy costs following the loss of cheap Russian supplies; the US-Israeli war with Iran has added new pressure.

The measures, announced on Tuesday, include site closures, job cuts and a reshaping of Evonik’s six main German plants, even as the company considers increasing investment in Asia and the Americas, where it sees “good opportunities for growth.”

Evonik’s plans to eliminate 2,150 jobs in Germany through 2029 have drawn criticism from industrial policy spokesman for the opposition Left Party (Die Linke) Mirze Edis, who called the cuts “a damning indictment” of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Economy Minister Katharina Reiche.

“Their inaction regarding chemical industry sites has now become a nationwide economic risk,” Edis said.

Germany’s chemical sector has been among the hardest hit by the country’s energy problems. Berlin moved to end its dependence on Russian energy following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022 and turned to alternative suppliers, leaving energy-intensive manufacturers facing substantially higher costs.

Evonik said at the time that it consumed around 15 terawatt-hours of natural gas annually, more than a third of it in Germany, and warned that losing Russian supplies could “seriously jeopardize chemical production” in the country.

The war with Iran and disruption to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz have added to the pressure this year. While Germany gets most of its LNG from the US rather than the Persian Gulf, the de facto closure of the strait disrupted flows accounting for almost 20% of the global LNG supply, tightening the market and driving up European prices.

The crisis extends beyond Germany. Permanent chemical plant closures across Europe have surged sixfold from pre-2022 levels amid high energy costs, weak demand and cheaper overseas competition, according to the European Chemical Industry Council (Cefic).

A 49-year-old Jewish settler who lives in the occupied West Bank was conscripted into the Ukrainian military after traveling to the country for a religious pilgrimage, Israeli media have reported.

The resident of the ultra-Orthodox Beiter Illit settlement was among thousands of Hasidic Jews who traveled to Uman in Ukraine to mark the Jewish New Year and visit the grave of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, who founded the Breslov Hasidic movement more than two centuries ago.

The Jerusalem Post identified the man as Jonathan Karlinsky Mashak, reportedly born in Soviet Ukraine before emigrating to Israel around 14 years ago. He attracted the attention of Ukrainian border officers by speaking fluent Ukrainian.

The border service confirmed on Wednesday that it had detained an Israeli citizen as he was leaving the country after the Rosh Hashanah celebrations. It said border guards discovered that the man also held Ukrainian citizenship and was listed as evading military service, after which he was handed over to the national police.

Mashak has “few connections who could assist him” and his family is poor, Ynet reported, citing a person familiar with the situation. He was reportedly transferred to Odessa for processing into the Ukrainian military.

“He has traveled to Uman for years, even after the war began, and he was never stopped. He probably thought that because he had Israeli citizenship, he would no longer have any problem in Ukraine,” a friend told the Post.

For years, Ukraine did not recognize dual citizenship. Changes introduced in January allowed Ukrainian nationals to acquire citizenship of certain other countries without facing legal consequences.

Israel is not among the countries covered by the new rules. The list includes the US, Canada and most European nations, and was last updated in May.

Russia remains India’s largest crude supplier despite a second consecutive monthly decline in purchases, with September imports tracking at around 1.9 million barrels per day, according to commodity analytics firm Kpler.

Russian shipments reached a record 2.8 million barrels per day in July, before falling to around 2.1 million in August – a drop of about 25% on Kpler’s figures. India’s overall crude imports also fell nearly 8% during August to around 4.6 million barrels per day, showing the slowdown was not limited to Russian supplies.

The August pullback followed several months of heavy buying by Indian refiners as they sought to protect supplies amid disruptions linked to the conflict in the Middle East. Scheduled refinery maintenance and lower availability of Russian crude also contributed to the decline, while stronger competition from Chinese refiners reduced the number of Russian barrels available to India.

Russian supplies had surged earlier in the summer, rising 39% from May to 2.61 million barrels per day in June and accounting for 52.4% of India’s crude imports. Purchases then climbed further to the July record.

The decline is expected to continue in September, but at a slower pace. Preliminary Kpler data show Russian imports about 9.5% below August levels, a softer fall than the July-August correction.

In recent months, there’s been a distinct sense of ‘historical déjà vu’ – from Germany’s interest in long-range missiles to the development of hypersonic missile technologies in Japan. The first question that comes to mind is whether revanchism is emerging more than 80 years after the defeat of the fascists and militarists in WWII. However, this question is quite complicated, so for now, we will focus on a more practical issue: Japan’s military-technical buildup. Below, we will attempt to assess the significance of this shift in Japan’s strike capabilities and understand the direction in which the country is heading.

By the end of the 20th century, Japan had become one of the strongest and most loyal allies of the US in the Pacific region. The Japan Self-Defense Forces are equipped with American aircraft, missiles, interceptors, and other weapons. Japan is the first and to date the only country in the world to manufacture Patriot surface-to-air missiles under license, and it is the first foreign recipient of Tomahawk subsonic cruise missiles.

On July 29, 2026, the first test launches of Tomahawk cruise missiles were conducted in the Pacific Ocean from the Kongo-class guided-missile destroyer JS Chokai, equipped with the Aegis system. These tests mark the beginning of the Japanese Navy’s adoption of American long-range cruise missiles. The program to acquire these missiles is quite ambitious: Japan plans to equip four additional Aegis-capable destroyers – JS Kirishima, JS Haguro, JS Myoko, and JS Atago—with these state-of-the-art missiles, with the long-term goal of upgrading all other destroyers of this class. In total, the acquisition of 400 missiles (Block IV and Block V variants) is planned by the end of the 2027 fiscal year. This arsenal significantly alters the capabilities of the Japanese Navy, given that such cruise missiles can strike targets at ranges of up to 1,600 km. Furthermore, this is merely an interim solution pending the adoption of domestically developed missiles with similar or superior specifications.

One of the major initiatives is the project to develop a submarine-launched hypersonic missile capable of striking land-based targets. The missile is expected to be versatile, capable of being deployed from both Japanese Navy submarines and surface ships. Japan justifies the deployment of such missiles on submarines by citing the need for retaliatory strike capabilities in the event of an external attack. Naturally, Japan is pointing to the growing capabilities of China’s navy and missile forces. For its part, China is also actively enhancing its capabilities in light of a possible confrontation with the US and Japan. 

While the hypersonic missile project is currently in the preliminary design phase, it draws upon Japan’s existing experience in developing various types of missiles and submarine-based vertical launch systems, as well as ambitious programs to build new missile-equipped vessels and, eventually, nuclear-powered submarines. In 2023, the Japanese Ministry of Defense signed a contract with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries for the development of a submarine-launched guided missile; a separate official program launched that same year is focused on developing an indigenous hypersonic guided missile; the work is set to continue through 2031. These programs are essentially aimed at creating preliminary designs for future missiles and developing hypersonic technologies in general; however, following the research phase, Japan will move on to developing specific missile models. The potential for this already exists.

What about launch platforms? Currently, the Japanese Navy operates several Aegis-equipped destroyers and non-nuclear submarines; they could carry a limited number of missiles. However, this would not be sufficient for mass deployment. 

And what about nuclear-powered submarines? Recently, Japan’s Ministry of Defense officially included nuclear-powered submarines in its defense posture review, paving the way for Tokyo to assess the feasibility of building such vessels alongside its conventional fleet. Strict restrictions on the military use of nuclear energy had previously been in place in Japan, but in regard to submarines, this particular constraint is now being quietly lifted.

Naturally, such a move would logically expand Japan’s underwater operations in the Western Pacific; from a shipbuilding perspective, Japan certainly has the capacity for it. Nuclear propulsion would allow Japanese submarines to remain submerged for virtually unlimited periods, effectively neutralizing potential Chinese undersea superiority. The US would, of course, be Japan’s primary industrial partner in this endeavor, though the UK or France could also share their expertise in nuclear submarine construction. Following Japan’s lead, South Korea is also considering the development of nuclear submarines. While Japan blames China, South Korea cites the threat of North Korea. In both cases, it looks like the arms industry lobby is actively seeking an outlet for its manufacturing capacity.

Therefore, by the 2040s-2050s, the capabilities of the Japanese armed forces could change beyond recognition. Japan could possess nuclear-powered submarines, a missile-armed fleet, a modern air force, ground-launched and subsonic long-range hypersonic and cruise missiles.

Finally, experts believe that, if necessary, Japan could quickly produce nuclear weapons. This would take only a few months. The country possesses a highly developed nuclear industry and nuclear energy sector – with stockpiles of plutonium and other materials, as well as all the requisite technologies. Japan also has nuclear weapons delivery systems at its disposal. In short, all the prerequisites are in place, though strict constitutional constraints currently remain in effect. However, if one threshold is crossed and the decision to build nuclear submarines is made, one might expect this nuclear trend to continue in the direction of classified research and weapons development. A highly advanced nation like Japan could develop nuclear weapons quickly and covertly.

That’s the ‘samurai sword’ slowly but surely emerging from the East. How should we react to it? Sound the alarm and deploy weapons, or call for peace and dispatch ballet troupes? Perhaps, both. Let’s hope that we’ll never have to use the weapons, but be prepared just in case; as for ballet, it’s always a good idea.

The question of slavery and reparations has recently returned to the center of international debate, particularly in Africa and the Caribbean. The conference held in Ghana on reparations for the transatlantic slave trade and slavery, as well as the petition filed by a Jamaican delegation to the British king, engaged in the struggle for historical recognition. The debate has also been brought into sharper focus by an investigation published by The Guardian, which examined the involvement of the British monarchy in the system of slavery and the historical links between the Crown and the trafficking of Africans.

Taken together, the developments raise a fundamental question: How can the British monarchy and the British state genuinely address a past in which the Crown was directly connected to the economic and political structures of slavery?

There are symbols that, on their own, encapsulate centuries of history. A crown branded with a red-hot iron onto the skin of an enslaved human being is one of them. It was a real, documented practice carried out by the South Sea Company, directly supported by the British monarchy during the reign of Queen Anne.

The monarchy as a shareholder

History often portrays the transatlantic slave trade as an impersonal economic phenomenon, driven by commercial companies, far removed from political power. The reality is very different though. The Royal African Company, one of the most important slave-trading companies in British history, was directly led by James, Duke of York, who would later become King James II. Under his leadership, the company forcibly transported at least 150,000 Africans across the Atlantic.

Around 13,000 investors in the British slave trade have been identified, more than 10,500 of whom now have detailed biographical information. They include members of parliament, merchants, more than a thousand women from the aristocracy and bourgeoisie, as well as members of the royal family itself.

In total, the British slave trade forcibly removed more than 3 million Africans from their homeland and sent them to plantations in the Americas and the Caribbean, a figure that conveys the true human cost of the prosperity created by British colonialism.

In the face of these facts, the official response of the contemporary monarchy remains, at best, cautious. King Charles III has described slavery as an “atrocious tragedy” and expressed support for historical research into the links between the monarchy and the slave trade. This is a symbolic gesture, and it marks a departure from decades of near-total silence on the subject.

However, a cold fact remains: To date, no official apology has been issued by the British government, and no serious discussion of possible reparations has been initiated at the state level.

The calculated caution is not unique to the United Kingdom, but it takes on particular significance there because it is precisely the monarchy, an institution supposedly embodying the continuity and unity of the nation, that is directly implicated by the historical evidence. Acknowledging “links” with slavery, as current royal communications do, is one thing. Acknowledging direct responsibility, with all the political, moral, and financial consequences that this entails, is another. Between the two lies the space in which the struggle over Britain’s colonial memory has been unfolding for years.

From the Koh-i-Noor to the Benin Bronzes

This unease can also be seen in the objects that the monarchy continues to possess. The Koh-i-Noor, the colossal diamond taken from the Indian subcontinent during the colonial era, is the most emblematic example. At her coronation in 2023, Queen Camilla chose not to wear the Queen Mother’s crown in which the stone is set, a choice apparently dictated by diplomatic caution rather than by any fundamental reconsideration, since the diamond remains preserved, as if nothing had happened, among the royal jewels.

In both cases, the British position remains the same: Discuss, study, postpone – but do not return. These objects are material evidence of an organized system of looting, which official diplomacy continues to treat as a secondary issue.

This British debate is part of a much broader movement, driven for years by countries and peoples that directly experienced the slave trade and colonialism. Jamaica’s recent demand for reparations from the British government is one example among many, as are similar claims advanced by several African and Caribbean nations through international institutions and Pan-African forums.

These demands raise a very concrete question of the moral and material debt created by centuries of exploitation, a debt that the direct heirs of this system continue largely to evade.

The origins of the current wealth

One obvious fact, too often minimized, must be recalled here: The wealth accumulated by the British monarchy and by a large part of its aristocracy was not created in a vacuum. To a significant extent, it rests on forced labor, deportation, and the suffering of millions of human beings torn from the African continent. To celebrate royal heritage – its crowns, diamonds, and palaces – without clearly naming this origin is to erase an essential part of history.

Acknowledging “links” with slavery without drawing any concrete consequences turns a crime against humanity into a page of history accessible in archives. Words of compassion, however sincere, do not replace official apologies, reparations, or the restitution of looted cultural property.

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) South Africa’s Black Rhino Range Expansion Program (BRREP) has successfully translocated 20 black rhinos from KwaZulu-Natal to Botswana.

The rhinos were moved in early September in a cross-border conservation operation involving two 36-hour road trips to a remote and secure location where the animals can breed and establish a new population.

The translocation effectively doubles Botswana’s black rhino population. The International Rhino Foundation estimates that about 25 black rhinos remained in the country following years of poaching pressure, particularly in the Okavango Delta region.

The 20 rhinos were captured in KwaZulu-Natal in early June and held in a boma during a quarantine period before being transported to their new home. According to BRREP leader Jeff Cooke, all 20 animals have arrived safely and are settling in well.

Cooke said finding areas large enough with suitable habitat for black rhinos is becoming increasingly difficult, prompting the programme to expand its operations across national borders.

”These newly translocated populations serve as incubators for the broader continental species recovery programme,” he said, adding that they could support further local range expansion in other black rhino range states.

WWF South Africa CEO Dr Morné du Plessis thanked the South African and Botswanan governments, Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife, funding and donor partners, and the recipient site owners for their role in the operation.

First published by IOL