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This story originally appeared in Mondoweiss on Sep. 11, 2026. It is shared here with permission.

This week marks the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

The United States has experienced much political and social upheaval since then, but the subsequent “War on Terror” paved the way for our current moment, and there are booming echoes of the era all around us.

Once again, the United States is waging a disastrous war in the Middle East with no discernible end in sight. Islamophobic rallies targeting NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani conjure up memories of the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy. The government designates activist and advocacy organizations as terrorists. The Guantánamo Bay detention camp remains open. In fact, a legal immigrant was just sent there.

CBS reveals that the Taliban seized roughly $7 billion worth of American-purchased military hardware after the United States officially lost that war 5 years ago.

“Taliban fighters patrol in armored vehicles once supplied to Afghan forces, wearing American tactical gear and carrying American weapons,” reads the report. “CBS News saw one Humvee in the Afghan capital still adorned with a faded Green Bay Packers decal — a remnant from its past operators.”

The small number of Americans who opposed that war were either dismissed or attacked. So too were those who warned that the Bush administration’s overreach would result in disaster.

“The civil libertarians were mostly ignored, and as one new threat followed another — Iraq, ISIS, ‘lone wolves’ — the president’s reach continued to grow. Across the Bush and Obama administrations, the commander in chief was given, or simply took, new powers to prosecute, shut down and seize the assets of alleged terrorist groups and their supporters,” writes Radley Balko in the New York Times. “With the arrival of armed drones, the president assumed the right to remotely assassinate anyone, anywhere outside U.S. borders, at any time, including American citizens.”

“If the ratcheting diminishment of our liberties came slowly and sometimes without much outcry under Presidents Bush, Obama and Joe Biden, the consequences of all those years of expanded presidential power are plainly visible now,” he continues. “Mr. Trump is using every authority we have given the president since Sept. 11, 2001, and some we haven’t, in ways the civil libertarians had tried to warn us about at the start.”

One of the major differences between the current war on Iran and Bush’s war on Iraq is that a sizable chunk of the population fell for the administration’s lies back then. The polling shows that’s not the case this time around, and, despite information from the region being consistently repressed, there seems to be a growing understanding that the United States military is losing quite badly.

They say Americans don’t vote based on foreign policy, but that isn’t exactly true. Many people voted for Obama over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primary because he opposed the Iraq War. People voted for Trump because he claimed he wouldn’t launch any new wars. It’s quite obvious that Kamala Harris’s connection to Israel’s genocide hurt her at the polls.

Whether or not this typically translates into policy shifts is a separate debate.

Obama’s election effectively killed the domestic antiwar movement, and he launched the largest assassination campaign in world history. Trump’s rhetoric predictably turned out to be nonsense. The Democratic Party’s establishment certainly didn’t rethink its Israel policy as a result of the Harris loss.

This is all to say that the war in Iran, which the administration now says might last through 2029, could help propel the Democrats back into power during the midterms, but will that actually result in a foreign policy reset?

In recent weeks, Democratic leaders and presidential hopefuls have directed their anger toward Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, hoping to quash the party’s left flank before the 2028 nomination process. For them, it’s an existential battle that transcends the question of which party may or may not control Congress at any given time and there’s no broader discussion about reversing our current course beyond removing Trump from office.

Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, was recently attacked for an old 9/11 tweet in which he expressed sympathy for those who died on that day and those who were killed in the wars after.

“Today, I mourn the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my faith,” it read. “Tomorrow, I’ll mourn ~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my country.”

According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, an additional 3.6-3.8 million people have died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, which brings the overall death toll to at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting.

25 years after 9/11, the American Empire is undoubtedly in decline, but its demise seemingly remains far off, and we’ve yet to collectively reckon with its ongoing crimes.

Iran accused the US and its European allies of misusing the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for their own narrow geopolitical objectives, eroding its credibility and paving the way for the ultimate collapse of the international non-proliferation regime.

The Islamic Republic’s response on Wednesday, September 9, followed the adoption of a resolution by the IAEA Board of Governors, which accused it of non-compliance with its safeguard regulations and referred Iran to the UN Security Council for further action.

The resolution, drafted jointly by the US, the UK, France, and Germany was adopted. A majority of 23 countries voted in favor and eight others abstained. China, Russia, and Niger voted against the resolution.

Thanks to the resolution, for which the US and its European allies lobbied aggressively, forcing several countries to vote in favor, Iran has been referred to the UNSC for the first time in over 20 years.

The resolution asks Iran to immediately start complying with IAEA regulations and resume inspections of its nuclear facilities, with the IAEA chief Rafael Grossi expressing concerns about lack of clarity about the fate of Iran’s enriched uranium and the conditions of its nuclear facilities since the beginning of the war.

Iran has denied any violation of the IAEA safeguards, pointing out that regular inspections of its nuclear facilities were suspended after the IAEA withdrew its inspectors due to safety concerns during the 12 days of US-Israeli bombings in June 2025.

Read more: How the US & Israel used Rafael Grossi to hijack the IAEA and start a war on Iran

Iran has also claimed that the IAEA demands for the immediate resumption of inspections to its nuclear sites and expecting the implementation of normal safeguards amidst the ongoing war is “materially impractical” and “irrational.”

It also accused the IAEA of failing to do its work properly and exposing without any need “highly confidential information regarding the nature and whereabouts of Iran’s nuclear stockpiles” without prior consent, Press TV reported.

Political resolution 

Iran accused that the resolution is politically motivated and biased. It further described it as yet another attempt by the US and Israel to force Iran’s “surrender” after failing to achieve anything through military means in the last year.

It questioned the US authority to sponsor such a resolution when it has repeatedly used force against Iran, in complete violation of previous IAEA resolutions calling for “diplomatic solutions” to its nuclear issue.

“Not only did they ignore all efforts for a diplomatic solution, but they also bombed peaceful, safeguarded nuclear sites, violated basic principles of international law, and the UN Charter, brutally committed war crimes, and killed thousands of civilians, including 168 children at a primary school and guests at a wedding,” Iran’s mission in Vienna said in a statement on Wednesday.

“They attack Iran’s nuclear facilities under the IAEA safeguards, disrupt the normal verification process, and then use that very disruption as a pretext for adopting a resolution” against Iran, Kazem Gharibabadi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister said in a post on X on Wednesday. 

Gharibabadi also dismissed any possibility of further action on the resolution in the UNSC as two permanent members, Russia and China, have opposed its adoption.

A joint statement issued by Russia and China after the vote on the resolution in the IAEA BOG called the resolution “irrelevant” and a pressure tactic designed to undermine the cooperation between Iran and the IAEA.

Underlining the absence of a reference to the ongoing US aggression against Iran, Russia and China maintained that it amounts to ignoring the “root cause and principle factor underlying the current situation.”

In this edition:
ㆍBefore/after
ㆍMany/one
ㆍAthlete/human
ㆍSilent/spoken
ㆍGame/mystery

From L to R: WCO Secretary General Ian Saunders and President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev Photo credit: Akorda.
Kazakhstan is stepping up its partnership with the World Customs Organization (WCO) as part of a broader strategy to strengthen the country’s position as a key Eurasian transit hub. But while digital customs reforms could significantly reduce trade costs and border delays, experts say their long-term economic payoff will ultimately depend on infrastructure, regional coordination and the changing geography of global trade, writes Ayana BirbayevaI.

The topic came into focus during a series of high-level meetings in Astana between President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, Prime Minister Olzhas Bektenov and WCO Secretary General Ian Saunders on Sept. 8. During the meeting, Tokayev said Kazakhstan is consistently developing a “smart border” model by introducing digital solutions to optimize customs procedures and improve freight transit across Eurasia. Saunders praised Kazakhstan’s progress in customs modernization and its growing role in developing the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (TITR), also known as the Middle Corridor.

Customs modernization becomes part of a wider logistics strategy
Beyond the diplomatic symbolism, the meetings reflect a longer-term economic objective: transforming Kazakhstan from a transit country into an internationally competitive logistics platform. Speaking in the meeting, Bektenov emphasized that resilient transcontinental trade has become one of the key drivers of Kazakhstan’s economic development. He noted that the WCO’s 2025–2028 strategic plan, Data-Driven Customs for a Connected World, closely aligns with Kazakhstan’s own digital reform agenda.

A central element of that strategy is the rollout of KEDEN, a unified customs system integrating declarations, transit procedures and border controls, alongside the Smart Cargo platform, which combines transport services, electronic permits and cargo tracking into a single digital ecosystem. According to official data, 14.6 million tons of transit cargo passed through Kazakhstan during the first seven months of the year. Freight volumes along the Middle Corridor reached approximately 350,000 tons, with around 24,000 vehicles using the route. Why digital borders matter Farkhad Kassenov, head of the A+ Analytics research center, political scientist and international relations expert, notes that cooperation with the WCO should be viewed not as an isolated initiative but as one stage of Kazakhstan’s much broader transport and logistics strategy.

“Kazakhstan has been systematically synchronizing customs procedures, tariffs and border regulations with the countries participating in the Middle Corridor. This cooperation with the WCO is one of the stages of that much larger project,” Kassenov told The Astana Times. The Middle Corridor has gained strategic importance as trade between China and Europe increasingly seeks alternatives to traditional northern routes passing through Russia. At the same time, Kazakhstan is also positioning itself within the developing North–South corridor, despite temporary disruptions caused by conflicts affecting the Middle East and maritime trade. According to Kassenov, removing bureaucratic barriers may prove almost as valuable as building new infrastructure.

“Digitalization can increase the speed of cargo movement by roughly 30% while simultaneously reducing logistics costs. When paperwork is synchronized and businesses use a single digital window, goods spend less time waiting at borders or in dry ports,” he said. Digital gains cannot replace physical infrastructure Yet customs reform alone will not solve every bottleneck. Kassenov notes that the Middle Corridor still faces structural constraints that digital systems cannot eliminate, including different railway gauges between China, Kazakhstan and Europe, as well as the natural limitations of crossing the Caspian Sea. “There are real physical barriers. Different railway gauges require cargo transfers, while navigation across the Caspian is limited during storms and seasonal ice. Digitalization improves efficiency, but it must be accompanied by major investment in transport infrastructure,” he said. Kazakhstan has already begun expanding ports in Aktau and Kuryk, while negotiations continue with Azerbaijan, Türkiye and China on improving rail connectivity across the corridor.

A changing geopolitical map of trade The renewed attention to Kazakhstan’s transit role is also being driven by geopolitical shifts beyond Central Asia. According to Kassenov, growing strategic competition between China and the United States has increased Beijing’s interest in secure overland trade routes. “The Middle Corridor was once viewed as an alternative route. By the end of this decade, it may become one of the principal land connections between East and West,” he said. That evolution creates opportunities extending beyond transit fees. Kazakhstan is seeking to develop domestic manufacturing, processing industries and exports of higher value-added products, including critical minerals and industrial goods, that can move along the same logistics network. A customs dilemma inside the EAEU At the same time, Kazakhstan’s customs policy faces another question that is less visible in discussions about digitalization: whether the existing distribution of import customs duties within the Eurasian Economic Union reflects the current structure of regional trade. Aidar Kurmashev, head of the Asian Studies Department at the Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies, recently highlighted the issue in his Telegram channel.

According to him, under the EAEU system, duties collected on imports from outside the union are distributed among the five member states according to predetermined shares. Kazakhstan’s share is 6.955%, compared with 85.065% for Russia, regardless of where the duties are actually collected. “After 2022, trade flows changed significantly, the role of Kazakhstan in trade with China and other directions of foreign imports increased, while our share remained 6.955%,” Kurmashev wrote. He argued that the issue raises a broader question about whether the formula still corresponds to the current structure of trade within the EAEU. “If Kazakhstan previously benefited from the system, but now has been losing hundreds of billions of tenge for the third consecutive year, perhaps it is time to at least recalculate the economics of the existing mechanism,” Kurmashev said, highlighting that the figures refer specifically to distributed import customs duties and do not include import VAT. Trade routes are changing faster than institutions The EAEU perspective illustrates a broader challenge facing Kazakhstan as it tries to reposition itself within changing Eurasian trade networks.

The geography of imports and transit has shifted since 2022, while Kazakhstan is simultaneously trying to deepen direct trade links with China, expand the Middle Corridor and strengthen its position as a logistics hub between Asia and Europe. That makes customs policy increasingly relevant not only as an administrative function but as an element of economic strategy. Digitalization can make the movement of goods faster and more predictable. International standards can improve interoperability. Infrastructure investment can remove physical bottlenecks. But the economic payoff ultimately depends on whether these elements develop together. As Kassenov put it, the Middle Corridor is moving from being an alternative route from the global lens toward becoming a potentially central Eurasian connection. 

Work at a specialized underground weapons test site in New Mexico, contracted earlier this year, was linked to planning for a potential new operation targeting Iranian nuclear facilities, according to a report from CNN. The U.S. military has notably left Iran’s hardest-to-reach site under Pickaxe Mountain untouched so far, but President Donald Trump and other U.S. officials have been openly talking about striking it.

On February 27, the day before U.S. and Israeli forces launched their initial wave of strikes on Iran, the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) quietly announced it had awarded a sole-source deal to Pate Construction Co., Inc., for new construction at the so-called Alternate Seismic Hardrock in Situ Test (ALT-SHIST) site. The work was needed to support an upcoming classified live-fire test. ALT-SHIST is situated within the White Sands Missile Range (WSMR), a sprawling U.S. Army-managed complex in New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto desert basin. DTRA is a relatively small and obscure organization that plays a leading role in U.S. military efforts to develop new and improved ways to respond to Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) threats.

WSMR and DTRA have come up in discussions about strikes on Iran in the past. The U.S. military’s heaviest conventional air-dropped weapon, the 30,000-pound-class GBU-57/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) bunker buster bomb, has been extensively tested at multiple sites there in the past. DTRA was also directly involved in its initial development. MOPs made their combat debut during U.S. strikes last year on underground Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordow and Natanz as part of Operation Midnight Hammer. The possibility has been raised that a different site within WSMR may have been used to test the plan of attack against Fordow, which involved two ventilation shafts being hit with six GBU-57/Bs each. The bombs were dropped in rapid succession, with each one burrowing deeper and deeper into the facility below. WSMR also happens to contain the site of the first atomic bomb test in 1945.

“The plans for the test [at ALT-SHIST] were connected to the Iran war,” CNN said in its story, published yesterday, citing unnamed sources “familiar with the matter.” Beyond that, the planned testing was tied to a “need to develop a way to target Iran’s deepest-buried underground facilities and, likely, simulate U.S. strikes against specific nuclear facilities.”

CNN said it was unable to independently verify whether or not the test in question had occurred.

A formal justification for the sole-source contract to Pate Construction that DTRA released in February did not mention Iran or elaborate on the need for the new testing at ALT-SHIST, but stressed there was an urgent requirement critical to U.S. national security.

“The services required are the immediate and mission-critical enabling services for a ‘real-world’ national security ordinance [sic; ordnance] test. This is not routine construction; it is the highly specialized remediation and operational preparation of a unique, subterranean test facility at White Sands Missile Range (WSMR),” according to the justification document, which DTRA officials had approved on February 24. “The work is a critical path dependency for a live-fire test designed to validate classified capabilities against rapidly emerging threats.”

“As the incumbent contractor for over a decade, Pate Construction Co., Inc. possesses unparalleled and non-transferable tacit knowledge of this specific subterranean test facility. This is a unique Government structure with complex geological and security considerations, and Pate Construction Co., Inc.’s direct, hands-on experience is a tangible asset that no other source possesses,” the document adds. “Pate Construction Co., Inc. is the only contractor that
currently maintains a fully mobilized presence at WSMR with the specific heavy equipment and security-cleared operators required.”

CNN‘s piece says apparent work at ALT-SHIST was visible in satellite imagery of the site between mid-February and mid-March, but the outlet said it was unable to confirm whether or not this was related to the contract with Pate Construction.

ALT-SHIST is an active test site, and any work observed there earlier this year could well have been linked to other projects. For instance, additional publicly available DTRA contracting documents offer details about planned work on a specific part of the ALT-SHIST site, called Tunnel 7, tracing back to last year, as part of a project nicknamed Millstone Willemite 6 (MW-6).

“This task requires the construction contractor to repair and address the damage to Tunnel 7 caused by prior incidents, in accordance with government-provided designs, specifications, and other contract documents,” according to one contracting document dated September 15, 2025. “The contractor will also be responsible for providing support during testing activities, as well as safing after each test and general support between tests. All tunnel construction must be completed by 15 June 2027.”

“The contractor shall repair a D-shape tunnel and overburden using the D-shape of 20 feet depth and width, inside the tunnel. The contractor shall remove and repair any damage to the ribs, crown, and invert to Tunnel 7,” that same document continues. “After the repair of Tunnel 7, the contractor shall provide general construction support to instrument the tunnel in preparation for testing and then safe the tunnel for re-entry post-testing.”

The schedule for the MW-6-related work indicates that it is separate from what Pate Construction was hired to do at the site back in February.

ALT-SHIST, which was first established in 1995, is also not the only site DTRA makes use of within WSMR. As its name indicates, it is an alternate to the original SHIST site, use of which began in 1993.

“There was a small addition made to the SHIST site, but that area has been heavily used since 2007,” according to an environmental impact study the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) completed in 2015. “The granite bedrock at these sites has been fractured and damaged by extensive testing. There are no existing granite areas adjacent to those sites where similar testing can be performed.”

USACE conducted that study in support of the establishment of a new test site at WSMR, simply called the Granite Test Site, to succeed the original SHIST. The Granite Test Site is now in use. There are many more sites within the range complex designed to simulate underground and otherwise hardened targets. This is also just one aspect of the wide array of testing that occurs on a daily basis at WSMR.

However, the presence of large areas of undisturbed granite is a key factor here, as that is particularly relevant for testing weapons designed to penetrate into extremely deeply buried facilities. CNN‘s piece yesterday noted that Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain site is built underneath a granite mountain.

“The mountain in White Sands, they specifically picked mountainous areas that were solid rock, and they used state-of-the-art tunneling technology to make the kind of cavities in the mountain that you would put this kind of [Iranian nuclear] facility in,” Gary Stradling, a retired scientist who previously worked for the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), told TWZ in an interview last year. “I think that there is a lot of work that DOD has done in these kinds of facilities that is highly classified, and I couldn’t talk to you about it. This is very sophisticated work. It is not casual, and it’s not speculative. These are real experts who are doing the work. Careful, technical, quantitative work to be able to deliver this kind of war-fighting capability to the services.”

TWZ spoke to Stradling, who did work tied to earth-penetrating munitions at various points during his lengthy career, in the wake of Operation Midnight Hammer.

The U.S. military notably did not strike Pickaxe Mountain, which is situated immediately to the southwest of Iran’s nuclear facility at Natanz, during Operation Midnight Hammer. The site also went untouched by Israel during last year’s 12 Day War. American and Israeli forces did not target it during major combat operations earlier this year, either. All of this underscores the targeting challenge the site presents, even for strikes using MOPs, which TWZ explored in detail earlier this year and that has continued to make it a point of particular discussion.

CNN‘s report yesterday was primarily focused on a new assessment of ongoing construction at Pickaxe Mountain from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think tank in Washington, D.C.

Satellite “images reveal more road activity at Pickaxe Mountain in 2026 than at any point in the site’s history,” according to a report CSIS published yesterday. “There is a clear surge in construction activity in 2026 that corresponds to the raising and hardening of the portal accesses, paving of the internal road network, reinforcement around access areas, and the flattening and removal of excavation spoil.”

“This assessment can neither refute nor substantiate the Israeli intelligence claim that Iran moved centrifuges into Pickaxe Mountain,” CSIS’s report also noted. “The continuous construction, the absence of an increased internal security posture, and the lack of observed nonconstruction vehicles and equipment suggest the underground facility is not yet capable of enrichment work, if that is the intended purpose. Further analysis of daily activity would be needed to establish the site’s pattern of life beyond its current construction footprint.”

This is in line with TWZ‘s own previous reporting on Pickaxe Mountain back in July, when there were already signs of growing activity following the establishment of a shaky ceasefire between the United States and Iran the preceding month. As we wrote at that time:

“As with the strikes on Fordow, multiple bombs could be dropped on the same impact point to try to penetrate further down into Pickaxe Mountain. Whether there might be similar ventilation shafts or other weak points that could be exploited at Pickaxe Mountain is unknown. …”

“A strike ‘right in the front door’ on the tunnel entrances at Pickaxe Mountain would be another option to at least hamper access to the facility inside for a time. This could be combined with strikes aimed at sections of the tunnel networks that run deeper inside the facility, but that are still close enough to the surface to be reachable by available conventional munitions. For instance, MOPs may not be able to hit the main cavern areas, but they could possibly hit certain tunnels that might lead to them.”

“Even a combined strike on entrances and shallow tunnels at Pickaxe Mountain could still present certain challenges. Firm intelligence on exactly where the tunnels snake under the mountain could be limited, making it difficult to select the best impact points. This is exactly why the U.S. military has been investing heavily in advanced, void-sensing fuzes for MOP and other bunker buster bombs for decades now. These fuzes detect when a munition has penetrated into a sufficiently large space, such as a room or tunnel in an underground facility, to help maximize damage. Fuzes that can effectively ‘count’ floors also help to ensure the munition has burrowed sufficiently deep before detonating.”

…

“…the U.S. military could conduct follow-on strikes on the entry points at Pickaxe Mountain to disrupt any attempt to regain access, as well.”

“Destroying Pickaxe Mountain will be a scientific and targeting challenge,” CSIS also noted in its report yesterday. “It is an underground fortress buttressed by granite. It is one of the only facilities in Iran’s nuclear program that the United States has not yet struck. Structurally degrading Pickaxe Mountain requires more than just kinetic force – it takes actionable high-confidence intelligence and sophisticated mathematical modeling.”

With all this in mind, it is not at all hard to imagine how new testing at ALT-SHIST, as well as other sites, would be essential for exploring additional options for striking Pickaxe Mountain and/or other deeply-buried targets in Iran using MOPs and/or other munitions.

It’s also worth noting here that GBU-57/Bs are understood to be in relatively short supply, though it is unknown how many of them are currently in inventory. Furthermore, the U.S. Air Force’s B-2 Spirit bombers are currently the only aircraft certified to employ the huge MOPs operationally. There was a report in 2024 that prime contractor Boeing was working to expand its capacity to produce these bombs. A MOP successor, the GBU-76/B Next Generation Penetrator (NGP), is in development now, but prototyping work is expected to run through the end of Fiscal Year 2028.

President Donald Trump certainly has raised the prospect of a strike on Pickaxe Mountain publicly on several occasions since July. He has also repeatedly said that the site is being persistently surveilled, particularly from space.

“There’s another place called Pickaxe Mountain, another nice place. We may have to give them a shot there, too, because someone said there was a little movement at the site,” Trump said yesterday during a speech at a convention the Republican Party is hosting in Dallas, Texas, ahead of this year’s midterm elections. “We don’t need much. We see everything, you know, because of Space Force.”

“We may hit Pickaxe [Mountain] very soon,” the President also said while speaking to reporters at the White House last Friday.

Whether growing activity at Pickaxe Mountain finally prompts a U.S. strike at the site, either alone or as part of a larger operation, remains to be seen. If and when such a mission is launched, past and future testing at sites like ALT-SHIST in New Mexico will all but certainly have played an important part.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

The post Work At Underground Test Site A New Indicator Of Possible Strikes On Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain Bunker appeared first on TWZ.

The Iranian-backed Houthi rebels have captured Mokha – a key Red Sea port in southwestern Yemen near the Bab al-Mandab (BAM) Strait. There are also reports they seized two islands located in the Red Sea shipping lanes. These moves against the Saudi Arabian-backed forces that previously held these areas could further cement the Houthis’ control over the narrow chokepoint to the Gulf of Aden, where the group has already imposed a blockade on Saudi oil exports.

The Houthis’ drive to control the BAM has been emboldened by the U.S. being stretched thin in its ongoing fight against Iran. Combined with Tehran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz, this threatens to add to the Islamic Republic’s command over the flow of oil from the Middle East. It is a maximum pressure campaign on the U.S. and global markets, something we have predicted for years. Amid all this activity, the per-barrel price of Brent Crude is well over the $100 mark now.

The rapid advance on Mokha was planned and backed by Iran, according to the leader of Saudi-backed forces that retreated from Mokha, which is about 50 miles north of the BAM. It took place as Tehran has taken a more belligerent stance in the region that has seen it reportedly damage U.S. aircraft in a recent attack on Jordan earlier this week and get closer to striking U.S. Navy warships with ballistic missiles.

“The Joint Forces have formed a command center south of the city of Mokha, following Houthi breakthroughs across various combat axes under heavy fire, in which the Houthis used various types of weapons,” Deputy Chairman of the Presidential Leadership Council (PLC), Lt. Gen. Tareq Saleh, said in his acknowledgment that his forces lost the port. The PLC was created in 2022 to represent the internationally recognized government of Yemen.

“The armed forces on the West Coast — the National Resistance, the Giants [Brigades], and the Homeland Shield — in addition to units of the Taiz axis west of the governorate, have paid a heavy price, martyrs and wounded, over the past days as they confronted the Houthi attack, which was planned by Iran, supported by it, and carried out with the participation of its various proxies/tools.”

“Thanks to God, our armed forces were able to repel an enemy combat formation a short time ago in the province of Taiz, forcing it to withdraw,” Houthi spokesman Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree proclaimed. “This was achieved by targeting it with a number of locally manufactured surface-to-air missiles.”

Videos have emerged showing Houthi forces inside Mokha and its airport and a large amount of equipment being seized.

Even before the capture of Mokha, the rebel group held the BAM under threat with its array of drones and missiles, some of which it launched from deeper in Yemen. In fact, the group became the first to fire anti-ship ballistic missiles (ASBM) at vessels during its campaign against Red Sea shipping.

Mokha, however, provides a potential new surveillance and launching point for the Houthis to deploy mines as well as aerial drones and uncrewed surface vessels (USVs) they can use to attack shipping. As we have reported previously, the rebel group pioneered the operational use of some of these weapons.

The Houthis “are determined to control the ports in order to use booby-trapped boats from areas close to shipping lanes,” Col. Abdul Basit Al-Baher, a Yemeni army officer and military analyst, told Arab News last month as the rebels were pushing closer to the port.

You can see video and images of a Houthi USV that struck the Greek-owned ship Tutor in the Red Sea in 2024 below.

In addition to Mokha, the Houthis also reportedly captured two important islands that could also add to its control over shipping through the strait. However, TWZ cannot independently confirm this.

There are claims that the Houthis seized Perim Island, which sits right in the middle of the BAM. In 2021, satellite images we obtained showed completion of a new, approximately 6,150-foot-long runway on the island as well as hangars and other facilities. The installation was supposedly meant primarily to support drone operations and was built by the United Arab Emirates.

This strategically located island sits in the narrowest part of the BAM, less than two miles west of Yemen and about 13 miles east of Djibouti, giving the Houthis a commanding presence at the mouth of the Red Sea.

Zuqar Island, which was also reportedly captured, sits in the middle of the Red Sea about 80 miles north of Perim Island. In the custody of the Yemeni government since 1998, it was being “used by government forces to track shipping traffic, monitor movements by Houthi rebels and stop weapons smuggling in the Red Sea,” according to The National.

Last year, images emerged of construction of a runway on the island.

It is unclear who built this island runway, though there have been indications that it could have been the United Arab Emirates once again.

Zuqar Island sits about 7 km east of the northbound shipping lane in the Red Sea. Control over these two islands could allow the Houthis to mirror the pattern Iran established in the Strait of Hormuz by directing traffic to pass through a narrow passage between Qeshm and Larak islands.

The conflict between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis grew out of a civil war in Yemen that erupted in 2014. It expanded a year later when a Saudi-led coalition joined forces with the government ousted by the Houthis and raged on until the parties reached a tenuous ceasefire in 2022. The Saudis held off on getting involved in the recent Red Sea conflict which saw the U.S. and coalition warships duking it out with the Houthis, and eventually led to a U.S.-led air campaign over Yemen. Tensions, however, reignited after that conflict ended when the Houthis joined the U.S.-Iran conflict on the side of their major supporter. In addition to the aforementioned blockade, the Houthis began striking Saudi refineries.

The Houthis already control the port of Hodeidah, about 100 miles to the north. Capturing Mokha and the two islands extends their reach even closer to the BAM. 

In the wake of the Houthi blockade imposed in July, traffic in the BAM fell by 15%, according to Lloyd’s List Intelligence.

“On average, 273 ships sailed through the chokepoint each week between 27 July and 23 August,” the organization reported. “The naval ban on Saudi Arabia came into effect on 20 July, and the weekly average in the run up date was 319. Still, traffic remains above volumes seen before the crisis in the Middle East Gulf that led to a flurry of activity in the Red Sea as Saudi oil was redirected to Yanbu.”

As we have explained in the past, Saudi Arabia has diverted millions of barrels of oil per day through pipelines to its Yanbu port on the Red Sea in an effort to minimize the energy shortages due to the hostilities near the Persian Gulf.

The biggest impact of the blockade, Lloyd’s List Intelligence notes, is that it is driving up the cost to deliver oil by forcing traffic north through the Suez Canal, “extending voyage times and tying up capacity. In the Middle East, rising use of Hormuz shuttle tankers and multiple STS transfers is creating delays and increasing vessel utilization. Combined, these rising inefficiencies have led to the third VLCC spot-rate spike since the beginning of the crisis in the Middle East Gulf.” 

The Houthi strikes on Saudi’s oil infrastructure, including a Houthi missile and drone attack against the Saudi Aramco refinery at Jazan on the Red Sea earlier this week, add a further dilemma for Riyadh, making it harder to get its product to points of shipment.

Video of of the aftermath of those strikes, which you can see below, emerged on social media.

All this is raising the specter of the U.S. having to get as involved as it did during the previous Houthi campaign against shipping that ended last September, which could pull resources away from Iranian-focused operations, if supporting such an operation is even possible at all at this point. The Navy, and other key elements of the U.S. military, is overstretched and worn down by continuous deployments for many months leading up to Venezuela and then Iran, and now six months after Operation Epic Fury.

U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf are under increasing pressure as tensions with Iran continue to simmer. On Tuesday, several U.S. Air Force jets were damaged in an Iranian missile barrage on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, according to CBS News. An A-10 Thunderbolt II close support jet lost a wing and about eight F-15E Strike Eagle multi-role fighters were slightly damaged and returned to service, the network noted.

There is also a report that Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao said Iranian forces “blew the hell out of Bahrain” where the U.S. military has a number of key facilities, including the headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet. The country has been the subject of frequent Iranian barrages since the U.S. and Israel first attacked on Feb. 28.

Cao’s assessment matches what we have seen and heard prior to his comments and raises anew the question of whether the U.S. will return to Bahrain and other bases in the region heavily attacked by Iran.

On the sea, Iranian missiles are getting closer to hitting U.S. Navy warships, the Wall Street Journal reported.

“At least three times in the past week, Iranian forces have launched missiles at American warships, including an aircraft carrier, taking direct aim at the U.S. Navy in a way it hasn’t done since the start of the war,” the newspaper noted. “The attempted strikes on warships have led to much closer calls than previous attempts, with Iran using maneuverable warheads, people familiar with the attacks said.”

Amid this activity, traffic through the Strait remains suppressed.

“Vessel transits via the Strait of Hormuz fell on Wednesday to seven from 12 ​the previous day, preliminary ship-tracking data showed on Thursday, with ‌levels also below the 10-day average of 14,” Reuters reported. “Out of these seven ships, four vessels exited and three entered, according to the data.”

However, an exact figure is hard to come by. Some vessels could be sailing through the ​waterway with their transponders turned off and would not be counted ​toward the totals, the outlet added.

As it is, oil prices are skyrocketing. As of noon Thursday, the per barrel price of Brent Crude exceeded $107, the highest price since July when it fell to just over $77 per barrel, according to OilPrice.com.

It will take some time before we get a better picture of how the Houthi seizure of the port of Mokha, and possibly Perim and Zuqar islands, will affect the global economy due to rising oil prices, either through reduced supply, increased cost of delivery or some combination of the two. With no end in sight to the U.S. conflict with Iran that helped to drive these actions, the Yemeni rebel group has incentives to inflict economic pain wherever it can.

Contact the author: howard@twz.com

The post Houthis’ Stranglehold On Strategic Bab Al-Mandab Strait Grows Stronger appeared first on TWZ.

A major new investment commitment announced during President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s (pictured) state visit to Berlin signals a deeper economic relationship between two countries looking for reliable partners in an increasingly uncertain world.

The United Arab Emirates has announced plans to invest an additional €40 billion in Germany, one of the most substantial signals yet that the economic relationship between Europe’s largest industrial economy and the Gulf state is entering a new phase.

The commitment, announced during President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s state visit to Germany, will target sectors including industry, advanced technology, artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure and energy. Of the total, €10 billion is set to be invested in the German state of Bavaria.

The headline figure is striking. But its significance goes well beyond the amount involved.

The UAE has already invested around €34 billion in Germany. The new commitment therefore represents not simply another large capital allocation, but an attempt to deepen a relationship increasingly built around the industries and technologies that both countries see as central to their future competitiveness.

As Dr Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology and Envoy of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Germany, put it: “The UAE invests for the long term and builds partnerships that endure.”

For Germany, the fresh injection of long-term capital arrives at an important moment.

The country has formidable strengths in engineering, manufacturing, chemicals, industrial technology and applied research. Yet maintaining that industrial position is becoming ever-more expensive. Artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure, advanced manufacturing, energy systems and industrial decarbonisation all require substantial investment at a time when German companies are also confronting higher costs, geopolitical uncertainty and growing international competition.

The UAE brings a different set of strengths: investment capacity, energy expertise, digital infrastructure and commercial connections across the Gulf, Asia and Africa. The logic of the partnership is therefore not simply that one country has money while the other needs investment. It is that their economic capabilities are increasingly complementary.

This synergy is reflected in the sectors identified for the new commitment. Rather than focusing narrowly on established assets, the investment is intended to support areas expected to shape industrial competitiveness over the coming decades.

Al Jaber said the intention was to support “the industries, technologies and skilled jobs that will drive future growth and competitiveness”, while strengthening energy security and supply chains and helping German companies continue to grow internationally.

That last point matters because the relationship works in both directions.

Germany gives Emirati investors access to one of the world’s deepest industrial and technological ecosystems. German companies, meanwhile, increasingly see the UAE not simply as a domestic market but as a platform from which to reach faster-growing economies across the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

The two countries’ economic relationship has already strengthened significantly in recent years, with a number of notable examples of cooperation. Emirati investment has reached sectors including chemicals and offshore wind, while leading German companies have become increasingly embedded in the UAE economy, with bilateral trade worth more than €13 billion last year, an increase of 15% compared to the previous year.

The new €40 billion investment marks a significant new phase of this deepening relationship, and the timing of the announcement also gives it a wider geopolitical significance.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier captured the mood during the state visit when he observed that “the world has become a more turbulent place; old certainties are crumbling.” Against that backdrop, he argued that reliable and rational partners mattered more than ever, telling Sheikh Mohamed: “Germany is that kind of partner for you; you are that kind of partner for us.”

Those comments go to the heart of why Germany and the UAE’s economic relationship now matters far beyond the balance sheet.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exposed the risks created by concentrated energy dependencies for Germany and countless other countries in Europe and around the world. Conflict in the Middle East has again demonstrated the vulnerability of trade routes, energy markets and supply chains. Global competition over AI and other critical technologies has made industrial capacity a highly strategic question as well as an economic one.

Both Germany and the UAE have reasons to diversify their partnerships in response.

Germany needs capital, energy relationships, technology partnerships and access to growing markets. The UAE is seeking to diversify an economy historically built around hydrocarbons while deepening its position in advanced technology, industry and global investment.

The €40 billion investment is a powerful statement of intent and a reaffirmation of a long-standing partnership between the two countries that could transform their industrial and technological strategies for years to come.

“I don’t understand enjoying something without caring about it,” Andre Agassi tells Lizzy Goodman midway through her thoughtful character study. Goodman shadows the former tennis great as he tries to get comfortable in his pickleball years, detailing the dynamic interplay of Agassi’s moods: Fun Andre, Philosopher Andre, Dark Andre. Many of the best athlete profiles extend the narrative of a legend beyond the court, making more complicated human meaning once a subject has set the game aside. Here, Goodman and Agassi achieve a gratifying volley, the journalist turning over the athlete’s challenging interiority and sending it back to him to consider.

The made-for-TV version of the Andre 2.0 story might go something like this: A retired, middle-aged tennis great takes up a goofily named, hugely popular new sport and is finally able to exorcise the demons that haunted him throughout his tennis career. This seemed to be the story Agassi was beginning to tell after the watch event, as he sat on an ottoman at the bar of his hotel, holding a dry Belvedere martini with extra olives. He talked about his love of pickle, how it challenged him mentally, how suited his body felt to its movements. He shifted around in his seat, trying to keep his perpetually embattled back from seizing up. “I was on a tennis court today,” he said. “What the [expletive] was I doing on a tennis court?”

But it became apparent, over the months that followed, that it would take more than a new sport to resolve the central question that all three of Agassi’s personas have been wrestling with for a long, long time. He summarized it, wryly, as he ordered another cocktail: “Why do I end up doing so many things that I actually don’t want to do?”

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In 1792 Paris, a “north-going astronomer,” Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre, set forth for Dunkerque, France, while a “south-going astronomer,” Pierre-François-André Méchain, made his way to Barcelona, Spain. As leaders of the meridian expedition, their modest ambition was to measure the world. They would use a new measure to be called the meter. “The meter would be eternal because it had been taken from the earth, which was itself eternal. And the meter would belong equally to all the people of the world, just as the earth belonged equally to them all.” 

If a nonfiction book opens with a map and a list of dramatis personae, make some coffee and settle in. Such is the case with historian Ken Alder’s The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error that Transformed the World—the story of the birth of the metric system amid the ferment of the French Revolution. It’s a thriller.

We start with our bodies, measuring height and weight and life. We want to know what health is, what beauty and pain and performance look like. We weigh our brains for intelligence, ability, sickness, happiness. We fight about race and politics, sex and money, images and words. We stalk the planet, its history and geography, biology and chemistry. We wrestle with space-time, its mathematics and paradoxes. We have no idea what to do about consciousness. And then there’s the small matter of love. We are obsessed and we cannot stop. 

At its heart, measurement is a utopian undertaking, one that aims to make perfect sense of the world. But at every turn, it runs up against the real world, and every so often, our understanding of reality itself. We know that the act of measuring changes what is measured. Might it be changing us measurers, too? 

Welcome to a reading list about measurement—not only as techne, art or craft, but as episteme, knowledge, its conquests and collapses, and what it really gives and takes away.

Medical Benchmarks and the Myth of the Universal Patient (Manvir Singh, The New Yorker, March 2025)

Indian kids tended to be small, curious, energetic as babies, growing up lean, active, rudely healthy. (I use the past tense because I’m not sure whether this is as true now as it was when I was little.) And yet, our parents thought us skinny and tried to feed us all the time. Was that a normal parental thing for the times, and if not, where did they get the idea that something needed to be fixed?

Universal standards have a way of making us feel competent and good, like, get your blood pressure down to 120/80 and you’ll be all right. But as Singh, a Harvard-trained anthropologist, points out: “Pretending that differences don’t exist doesn’t make them disappear; it only drives practitioners to rely on flawed intuitions.” 

Citing case after case of medical benchmarks—too little, too much, too sideways—across the world, Singh calls for a system altogether more nuanced and considerate than the current “myth of the universal patient”—something that won’t cause actual harm, something that will help us see the real humans behind the data.

When my daughter was ten-and-a-half months old, she qualified as “wasted,” which unicef describes as “the most immediate, visible and life-threatening form of malnutrition.” My wife and I had been trying hard to keep her weight up, and the classification felt like a pronouncement of failure. Her birth weight had been on the lower end of the scale but nothing alarming: six pounds, two ounces. She appeared as a dot on a chart in which colored curves traced optimal growth; fifteenth percentile, we were told. She took well to breast-feeding and, within a month, had jumped to the twentieth percentile, then to the twenty-sixth. We proudly anticipated that her numbers would steadily climb. Then she fell behind again. At four months, she was in the twelfth percentile. At nine-and-a-half, she was below the fifth.

Our pediatrician was worried. Ease off the lentils and vegetable smoothies, we were warned; we needed to get more calories into our babe. Ghee, peanut butter—we were to drench her food in these and other fats and wash them down with breast milk and formula. And that’s what we did. When we came back a month later, though, we learned that she had dropped further—and crossed into “wasted” territory.

The Broad, Ragged Cut (Elizabeth Svoboda, Aeon, December 2018)

Have you ever taken an IQ test? How about an aptitude test for studies or a psychometric test for work? How about an online quiz?

“You were supposed to be there already. Didn’t the tests show you had a head start?” Svoboda, labelled a “gifted” child in the ’80s and dealing with its fallout in her adult life, unpacks the deeply problematic, yet starry, history of testing. She looks at Stanford-Binet, Army Alpha, SAT, and others—all ways to measure human potential. Intelligence and aptitude tests, “binary stars circling in the same orbit,” Svoboda says, seem to be asking and answering: Who deserves a chance, and who doesn’t? Who is worthy, and who isn’t? 

For the American psychologist Lewis Terman, who devised the Stanford-Binet IQ test, the birth of a gifted child was like the birth of a star. In the name of illuminating what he saw as a void, Terman sought out the stars that burned brightest. “The school has no more important task than to foster the development of the mentally gifted,” the researcher at Stanford University in California told attendees at a meeting in San Francisco. “Our chances of survival . . . may well depend upon the discovery and utilisation of highly superior abilities of every kind.” To further this mission, Terman urged hundreds of children all over California to sit for his newly developed intelligence test in the 1920s. Intending to prove his theory that high IQs predicted life success, he sorted the highest scorers into a group of 1,521 children (called his “Termites”) that he would follow and document throughout their lives.

Fracking Eyeballs (D. Graham Burnett, Asterisk, October 2023)

In hydraulics, pumping high-pressure fluid into a well causes rock to crack and oil and gas to come pouring in. This is called fracturing, or fracking. Burnett, a Princeton historian of science and part of a scholar-artist-activist collective called Friends of Attention, has adapted this term to refer to an insidious property of the attention economy. “Fracking eyeballs” refers to applying psychological and advertising techniques under pressure to bait and extract monetary value from human attention. (I don’t know how they live with this mental image all the time, though.) 

This essay, opening at a 1925 Harlem shop window with a “puzzling totem face” and crammed with historical anecdote and detail, comes from the magazine’s Issue 04: Measurement. Do check out the whole  issue: “How do you measure seeing god? Does testing vaccines need to take so long? Outlining poverty. Asking better questions. The origins of the ad economy. Can we really say how smart AIs are? Domestic violence during lockdown. Sex, drugs, and colonoscopies. Our most pedantic issue yet.”

See also Burnett’s Public Domain Review essay, “Cybernetic Attention,” where he pursues the “pre-history of the laboratory research that has relentlessly worked to slice and dice the attentional powers of human beings.”

In Nixon’s earliest experiments, he would hide in an observation booth, accompanied by a metronome beating half seconds, and then watch closely as two ads were revealed to a seated subject. Ticking his pencil along the rungs of a fascinating little ladder-pad with each beat of the metronome (marking the left side when the eyes were to the left; marking the right side when the eyes were to the right), Nixon created a graphical record of the subject’s visual encounter with the two stimuli. 

If you were advertising a car, was it better to show a picture of a car, or of a pretty woman? If one was selling shirt collars, was it better to do so under the headline “Murder!” or the headline “Quality Shirt Collars”? To make a long story short (and to skip over the proto-pataphysical techniques by which Nixon established what we might call a “science of irrelevancy”), Nixon found that “irrelevant illustrations do attract more attention and hold interest longer than do relevant ones.” Which is to say: systematically doing violence to sense raised revenue. This could be proven in his laboratory. Would it be wrong to say that we live, in many respects, in the world evolved from that finding? 

The Anthropometric Detective and His Racial Clues (Ava Kofman, The Public Domain Review, February 2016)

In 1901, Scotland Yard started using fingerprints to solve crime. They weren’t the pioneers. Sherlock Holmes had gotten there first in The Sign of Four, already examining under his magnifying glass, in 1890, what appeared to Dr. Watson as “mere shapeless smudges of dust.” While the fictional Holmes was publishing his fictional monographs in fictional journals, “gentleman scientist” (self-funded and without institutional affiliations) Francis Galton was working on the same thing for real. The era was primed for this kind of work across disciplines and professions—finding and interpreting “clues unnoticed by others.”

And while Holmes was trying to catch bad guys, Galton came up with a malign plan. What if you could use fingerprints as “tiny fossil records, providing evidence of the genealogy, personality, criminality, and perhaps even destiny of individuals and groups”? No more varicolored bad guys, only “a political program of selective breeding to improve, in his view, the human race.” 

Empire, race, and “science”—eugenics.

In 1888, a reporter from the Pall Mall Gazette paid a visit to Galton’s Anthropometric Laboratory in London, where instruments developed by Galton measured the physical and mental characteristics—from keenness of hearing to breathing power—of over 10,000 people. The resulting article, titled “A Morning With the Anthropometric Detectives,” described Galton’s laboratory as a world of “order and precision, and tests of the nicest accuracy.” “Dumb though they are,” Galton told the reporter, “what splendid detectives our instruments might prove.” “Splendid detectives!” the reporter exclaimed, “I am not, I hope, in a department of the Criminal Investigation Department, unconsciously yielding convincing proofs of personal identity with some scoundrel hitherto unhung.”

The comparison to detection in the article’s title is no accident: the scientific development of medical and anthropometric instruments like Galton’s coincided with the rise of the detective novel, a genre which, in the words of the literary scholar Ronald Thomas, was “preoccupied with the professional monitoring and identification of bodies.” Fears of mistaken identity and unconscious slips were crystallized in the literature of detection but emerged from a broad range of hermeneutic practices across the era, at a time in which those in power considered the borders of empire and boundaries of racial identity to be insecure.

John Wheeler Saw the Tear in Reality (Amanda Gefter, Quanta Magazine, September 2024)

“What happens when you get to the end of things?” This was the question that had held John Wheeler in thrall all his life. A student of Niels Bohr and friend of Albert Einstein who counted Richard Feynman among his own students, Wheeler was a rare soul—a below-the-radar legend, a “physicist’s physicist” who really wanted physics for the people. And throughout his storied career, he kept journals. 

We learned in school that gravity is a force that pulls objects together. 

Einstein’s theory of general relativity came along and said, well, it’s actually that matter and energy can curve space-time, and that curving is gravity. Wheeler wondered, what if gravity could act on itself, endlessly contorting space-time, and that was what matter itself was . . . warped space-time? But reality had a problem. “The fabric of space-time, at its smallest scales, was loosely woven, chewed by moths, too flimsy to bear the weight of the world. Yet here is the universe. It must be made of something.” What?

A clue: At the end of Alder’s meter book, he quotes Protagoras, a pre-Socratic philosopher: “Man is the measure of all things.”

It dawned on Wheeler that when space and time went, taking the rest of physics with them, there was something left. “With law going and chaos arriving, one principle remains,” Wheeler wrote. “The quantum principle.” Quantum mechanics, he wrote, “destroys the concept of the world as ‘sitting out there,’ with the observer safely separated from it by a 20 centimeter slab of plate glass. Even to observe so miniscule an object as an electron, he must shatter the glass. He must reach in. . . . The universe will never afterwards be the same. To describe what has happened, one has to cross out that old word ‘observer’ and put in its place the new word ‘participator.’ In some strange sense the universe is a participatory universe.”

It was officially the wildest idea he’d had yet. A universe made not of matter, not of space-time, not of stuff at all, but of our choices. It wasn’t what he’d hoped to find; the physics had led him there. He’d pried up space-time, peered beneath, and found himself staring, to his bewilderment, at a mirror. “One finds himself in desperation asking if the structure, rather than terminating in some smallest object or in some most basic field, or going on and on, does not lead back in the end to the observer.”

The Mythology of Conscious AI (Anil Seth, Noēma, January 2026)

Decades ago, the philosopher David Chalmers came up with a distinction that has since become a popular touchstone in consciousness circles—the easy problem vs. the hard problem. The “easy problem” deals with the physical brain and how its functions and processes create perception, cognition, behavior, etc. The “hard problem” is why such phenomena should be connected to internal, subjective consciousness in the first place. This “explanatory gap” takes a scientific problem into the realm of philosophy. In the sidenote essay, Seth sidesteps the hard problem for what he calls the “real problem”—accounting for “the properties of consciousness in terms of biological mechanisms.” Measuring consciousness, in effect.

In the 10 years that separate the two essays, much has happened, the main event being the astonishing evolution of artificial intelligence. And now we have an unreal problem. In this Berggruen Prize-winning essay, the neuroscientist discusses the possibility of consciousness in AI. But as he says: “The future history of AI is not yet written.”

Intelligence and consciousness are different things. Intelligence is mainly about doing: solving a crossword puzzle, assembling some furniture, navigating a tricky family situation, walking to the shop—all involve intelligent behavior of some kind. A useful general definition of intelligence is the ability to achieve complex goals by flexible means. There are many other definitions out there, but they all emphasize the functional capacities of a system: the ability to transform inputs into outputs, to get things done. 

Consciousness, in contrast to intelligence, is mostly about being. Half a century ago, the philosopher Thomas Nagel famously offered that “an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something it is like to be that organism.” Consciousness is the difference between normal wakefulness and the oblivion of deep general anesthesia. It is the experiential aspect of brain function and especially of perception: the colors, shapes, tastes, emotions, thoughts and more, that give our lives texture and meaning. The blueness of the sky on a clear day. The bitter tang and headrush of your first coffee.

Exhalation (Ted Chiang, Lightspeed, April 2014)

Chiang points to two sources of inspiration in his story note: “The Electric Ant,” a Philip K. Dick story in which a man visits a doctor, only to be told that he’s a robot, and proceeds to open himself up to look at his own inner workings, and The Emperor’s New Mind, a book by mathematician Roger Penrose, in which a chapter discusses the concept of entropy. He’s struck by Penrose’s notion that we’re “consuming order and generating disorder,” and that we, given the laws of thermodynamics, “live by increasing the disorder of the universe.” 

In a young world of mechanical beings where “death is uncommon,” an anatomist performs exquisite auto-dissection—an extreme act of analysis to discover what sustains life and what, therefore, can end it in a “fatal equilibrium.” 

This Hugo and Locus-winning story reminds me, in its ending, of something Ursula K. Le Guin says in The Language of the Night: “Only the individual can get up and go to the window, and draw back the curtains, and look out into the dark. Sometimes it takes considerable courage to do that. When you open curtains you don’t know what may be out there in the night. Maybe starlight; maybe dragons; maybe the secret police. Maybe the grace of God; maybe the horror of death. They’re all there. For all of us.”

At first the other anatomists did not believe me when I told them what I had discovered, but in the months that followed my initial auto-dissection, more and more of them became convinced. More examinations of people’s brains were performed, more measurements of atmospheric pressure were taken, and the results were all found to confirm my claims. The background air pressure of our universe was indeed increasing, and slowing our thoughts as a result.

There was widespread panic in the days after the truth first became widely known, as people contemplated for the first time the idea that death was inevitable. Many called for the strict curtailment of activities in order to minimize the thickening of our atmosphere; accusations of wasted air escalated into furious brawls and, in some districts, deaths. It was the shame of having caused these deaths, together with the reminder that it would be many centuries yet before our atmosphere’s pressure became equal to that of the reservoir underground, that caused the panic to subside. We are not sure precisely how many centuries it will take; additional measurements and calculations are being performed and debated. In the meantime, there is much discussion over how we should spend the time that remains to us.

Kanya Kanchana is a writer from India.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

The EU welcomes Cambodia’s decision to join the Multi-party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement (MPIA) for WTO members, contributing to efforts to uphold a rules-based multilateral trading system. 

With Cambodia’s participation, the MPIA now covers 62 World Trade Organization (WTO) members and 60.4% of world trade.  

The MPIA brings together participants from all continents and at different levels of development, united by a shared commitment to upholding the rules-based trading system. 

The MPIA preserves the right to appeal in trade disputes among participating WTO members, at a time when the WTO’s Appellate Body remains non-functioning. It helps ensure that disputes can continue to be resolved in an orderly and binding manner, avoiding appeals 'into the void'. 

“I welcome Cambodia to the MPIA. The arrangement plays an important role in upholding the rules-based trading system. Each new participant helps reinforce the predictability, stability and credibility of global trade rules. I encourage other WTO members to join the MPIA,” said EU Trade and Economic Security Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič. 

Background 

The MPIA was established in 2020 and has proven its effectiveness in many WTO disputes.  

Under the MPIA, appeals are heard by arbitrators randomly selected from a pool of 10 standing appeal arbitrators set up by the participating WTO members. These arbitrators are persons of recognised authority, with demonstrated expertise in law, international trade and WTO agreements.  

The MPIA is open to all WTO members as a practical tool for appeal arbitration, pending the restoration of a reformed and fully functioning WTO dispute settlement system. 

As of 1 June 2025, the MPIA has an updated pool of appeal arbitrators to ensure that appeals continue to be heard by independent arbitrators of the highest calibre. 

At the WTO Ministerial Conference that took place earlier this year, MPIA ministers stressed the importance of the MPIA for the security and predictability of the multilateral trading system.  

The current MPIA participants are Australia, Barbados, Benin, Brazil, Cambodia, Canada, China, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, the European Union (and its Member States), Guatemala, Hong Kong (China), Iceland, Japan, Liechtenstein, Macao (China), Malaysia, Mexico, Moldova, Montenegro, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, the Philippines, Singapore, Switzerland, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, Uruguay and Vietnam.

More information

MC14: Supporting the rules-based multilateral trading system: the role of the MPIA

Mary Austin was the woman behind Freddie Mercury, quietly supporting him for decades, from their intense early romance to the long years they remained close friends after accepting that he was gay. The vast legacy he left her—his home, much of his fortune, and his most personal belongings—has been a mixed blessing that she has spent her life trying to navigate with loyalty and discretion. As Simon Hattenstone explores Austin’s life in this interview, the unresolved emotion of the shared past with Mercury is still palpable.

Did the piano change him? “Yes, there was much more purposeful energy. He would sit at the piano, play the odd key, hum a bit and he looked very happy. Transported.” By now they were spending less time together. When she was working at Biba, he would often be sleeping. When she returned home, he would be preparing for a gig.

They’d been living together for four years when Mercury said he had something to tell her. He struggled to get the words out. He said, ‘I think I’m bisexual.’ I said ‘No, Freddie, I think you’re gay.’” He didn’t argue. Was that a huge upset? “No, it was a huge relief, because I wasn’t sure whether we were travelling in the same direction any more. Some time earlier I saw a dress and thought, that would be a really nice wedding dress. I asked Freddie, is it worth me buying it, and he looked at me and shook his head. So I knew from there on …”

The European Commission wants to cut the EU’s public procurement rulebook from around 900 pages to 200, in a sweeping reform that aims to simplify tendering while giving governments greater scope to favour European economic and security interests, writes Catherine Feore.

Executive Vice-President Stéphane Séjourné held up the existing body of rules alongside its much slimmer replacement, to illustrate his point. 

“These here are the European rules which currently govern public procurement in Europe: 900 pages,” he said. “And this is what we are proposing today… down to 200 pages.”

The proposed Public Procurement Act would replace three EU procurement directives with a single regulation, with a view to simplifying procurement provisions spread across 26 sectoral laws and cutting the number of procedures from five to three.

The Commission estimates the changes could save businesses and public authorities €650 million a year in administrative costs.

The reform matters because of Europe’s massive purchasing power involved. EU public procurement exceeds €2.5 trillion annually, around 15% of EU GDP, covering everything from trains and hospitals to energy infrastructure, schools and IT systems.

From lowest price to strategic purchasing

The proposal is not just about cutting red tape. Brussels wants governments to use their purchasing power more strategically.

The Best Price-Quality Ratio would become the standard method for awarding contracts, with quality normally accounting for at least 30% of the assessment and 50% for labour-intensive contracts. Authorities could consider environmental and social performance, innovation, security and resilience alongside price.

The commitment to a so-called European preference has been tempered by the EU’s international commitments, but access can be restricted when a country doesn’t reciprocate market access. Restrictions could also be imposed where reliance on foreign suppliers creates security-of-supply dependencies or threatens EU economic security.

“European public money should, wherever possible, create jobs, investment and opportunities in Europe rather than filling the order books of our competitors,” Séjourné said.

Five procurement procedures would become three: open, dynamic and innovation procedures. Each would allow negotiation between buyers and bidders.

The Commission also plans an integrated EU digital procurement marketplace connecting national e-procurement platforms. A company registered through one connected system should be able to bid elsewhere in Europe without repeatedly submitting the same documentation. This is intended to reduce bureaucracy and tackle one of the current system's weaknesses: too little competition, particularly from SMEs and companies bidding across borders.

National, regional and local priorities may appreciate this flexibility in theory, but constrained budgets often mean that price will remain the bottom line for many. This legislation offers greater freedom in determining needs, but it remains to be seen what its impact will be.

PHOTO CREDIT: European Commission Executive Vice-President Stéphane Séjourné says the rules reduced from 900 pages to 200 pages © European Union

Classes are over at Madrid’s Complutense University, and the corridors of the Faculty of Physical Sciences are nearly empty. But Héctor Socas, 53, a researcher at Spain’s Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands, is spending part of an early summer morning in a meeting of the international AtLAST consortium, which is promoting the construction of a major radio telescope in Chile. Socas also directs the European Solar Telescope Foundation, one of Spain’s most ambitious astronomy projects.

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The election of Mahnaz Maimanat (pictured) to lead the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran highlights more than three decades of continuous female leadership within one of Iran’s principal organised opposition movements. An important development has taken place within the Iranian democratic opposition. On 6 September, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK), the principal organized component of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), elected Mahnaz Maimanat as its new Secretary-General, at the beginning of the organisation’s 62nd year.

The election took place through three successive rounds involving PMOI members in seven countries — France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Albania. In the first round, Maimanat received 56% of the votes, ahead of Badri Pourtabbakh and Narges Azdanlou. The position is for a two-year term and may be renewed by the PMOI’s Central Council. Born in Tehran in 1959, Maimanat has spent most of her adult life in the movement.

She became acquainted with the PMOI as a university student and participated in demonstrations against the Shah’s dictatorship. She joined the organization following the 1979 revolution and went on to assume a succession of senior responsibilities: she became a member of the Executive Committee in 1989, the Leadership Council in 1993, the Central Council in 2014, and co-Secretary-General in 2021. Her personal history also reflects the heavy price paid by many PMOI families under the clerical regime. Her mother, Akhtar Mowlavi, a teacher, was killed by the Revolutionary Guards in 1988.

One of her brothers, Massoud, was executed in Evin Prison at the age of 19 after months of imprisonment and torture. Another brother, Mahmoud, an architecture student, was executed during the 1988 massacre of political prisoners. The significance of the election, however, goes well beyond a change of office-holder. Mahnaz Maimanat is the tenth woman to serve as Secretary-General of the PMOI. Maryam Rajavi became the first woman to hold the organisation’s top leadership position in 1989, and for more than three decades every PMOI Secretary-General has been a woman.

Eight women succeeded Mrs Rajavi before Maimanat. This is particularly significant in the Iranian context. Within the PMOI, women’s leadership is not simply a matter of ceremonial representation or political imagery. Its female Secretaries-General have exercised real executive and organisational authority, often during extraordinarily difficult periods involving clandestine activity inside Iran, severe repression, imprisonment and executions, attacks on PMOI members, displacement from Iraq and the subsequent rebuilding of the organisation.

After assuming responsibility for leading the National Council of Resistance of Iran in 1993, Maryam Rajavi ceased to hold a formal organisational position within the PMOI. Nevertheless, she remains the most prominent political figure of the Iranian Resistance and, for many Iranians, particularly women, has become a symbol of resistance to religious fundamentalism and a pioneer of women’s equality and political leadership. This model of female leadership has also had important consequences inside Iran. Women have increasingly assumed leading responsibilities within the PMOI’s underground Resistance Units, which the movement says have played an active role in successive uprisings against the regime, including the nationwide protests of January 2026.

For young Iranian women confronting compulsory veiling, institutional discrimination and a political system that treats women as second-class citizens, the sight of women exercising genuine authority within an organised opposition movement carries considerable political and cultural significance. It also helps explain the intensity of the attacks directed against the PMOI’s leadership by the Iranian regime and, increasingly, by hardline monarchist circles. Both have devoted considerable efforts to portraying the PMOI, and particularly its female leadership, as illegitimate.

Yet the central issue is that the PMOI remains a highly organised democratic opposition movement with an extensive network inside Iran and therefore represents a serious challenge to the survival of the ruling theocracy. The election of its tenth female Secretary-General should therefore be viewed in a broader perspective. It represents more than three decades of continuous female leadership and constitutes a profound ideological and cultural challenge to Islamic fundamentalism: not simply women demanding equality, but women assuming responsibility, exercising authority and leading an organised struggle against a system built upon their discrimination and subordination.