A contentious civilian nuclear agreement between the US and Saudi Arabia has ignited a sharp debate over Middle Eastern security, laying bare the escalating friction between American nonproliferation objectives and the kingdom’s strategic ambitions. This month, The Washington Post reported that a classified US intelligence assessment shared with Congress found that Saudi Arabia has not […]
When Bangladeshi Prime Minister Tarique Rahman addressed the United Nations General Assembly for the first time on Thursday (September 24), he became the third member of his immediate family to speak from the UN podium. His father, President Ziaur Rahman, addressed the General Assembly in 1980, speaking on self-reliance and regional cooperation. His mother, Khaleda […]
There are film projects that do not arise from a rigid outline but from years of sediment and personal crossroads. For Gael García Bernal, 47, Hombre al agua, his latest feature which he co-wrote, directed and stars in, took more than 15 years to take its final shape, having been seeded at the exact moment he became a father.
Α 50-year-old high school principal suffered a cardiac arrest outside the school in Ilioupoli suburb of eastern Athens during the heavy rain- and thunderstorm hitting the area on Tuesday. Initial reports suggest the cardiac arrest was caused by lightning. Passersby who saw the woman collapsing on the street outside the school immediately called for help […]
What does it mean to live in a disappearing place? For Pioneer Works’ Broadcast, Brad Bolman, a professor of history and environmental studies at Tulane University, writes about New Orleans, the shifting borders between land and sea, and the political and economic forces that continue to shape the city’s fate in a time of climate catastrophe.
If Los Angeles is the city that has been imaginatively destroyed again and again in film and TV, as Thom Andersen argues in Los Angeles Plays Itself, New Orleans is the one that has been destroyed countless times in reality. We have survived worse and rebuilt before, many insisted. We’re staying.
It was a reaction as understandable emotionally as it was disconnected from environmental reality. But that gap is a feature of life in the Crescent City. As I watched my first Mardi Gras parade this spring, junk falling in never-ending torrents from brightly decorated floats, a friend sympathetically interjected, “This must be driving you crazy.” What they meant was that as someone who teaches about environmental history but isn’t from here, I must be especially affected by the throwaway culture of the city’s most famous fête and its tons and tons of plastic beads, made from the same fossil fuels that are causing sea levels to rise around us.
What film brought them together? 'Jamón, jamón' (1992), directed by Bigas Luna. But their romance did not truly begin until 15 years later, during the filming of 'Vicky Cristina Barcelona,' with Woody Allen and Scarlett Johansson as unlikely witnesses.
What happened next? The second chance worked. They married in 2010 and are now parents of two children.
And now? They are sharing the screen once again in 'Bunker,' which has just premiered at the Venice Film Festival.
What film brought them together? 'Vanilla Sky' (2001), the Hollywood remake of Alejandro Amenábar's 'Abre los ojos.' (Open Your Eyes).
What happened next? The two embarked on a relationship that lasted about three years before ending in 2004.
Why did they split? A combination of intense media scrutiny, conflicting schedules and religious differences. Cruise is a devoted member of the Church of Scientology, while Cruz did not share his commitment to the faith.
Who are they? Penélope Cruz and Matthew McConaughey.
What film brought them together? The adventure movie 'Sahara' (2005), where they met shortly after Cruz's relationship with Tom Cruise had ended.
What happened next? Their on-screen chemistry quickly turned into a real-life romance.
How long did it last? Just over a year. They split in 2006, citing the distance between them and the demands of their respective careers as the main reasons for the breakup.
What film brought them together? 'Days of Thunder' (1990), in which they played a race-car driver and a doctor who fall in love.
What happened next? They married later that year, adopted two children and became one of Hollywood's most famous couples. Their marriage lasted a decade before they separated in 2001 and finalized their divorce later that year.
Why did they split? Kidman later spoke about living in the shadow of her husband's fame. Media reports and subsequent accounts also pointed to several factors behind the breakup, including the couple's demanding careers and Cruise's deep involvement with the Church of Scientology.
What film brought them together? 'Spider-Man: Homecoming' (2017), in which they played Peter Parker and MJ.
What happened next? The chemistry between their characters eventually carried over into real life, though they did not publicly confirm their relationship until 2021.
And then? They got engaged in 2025 and married in a secret ceremony this year, with no wedding photos or details of the bride's dress leaked so far. They have also reunited on screen in the latest Spider-Man film, which has become another major box-office success.
What film brought them together? 'Mr. & Mrs. Smith' (2005), in which they played a married pair of assassins unaware of each other's true identity.
What happened next? Pitt separated from Jennifer Aniston and began a relationship with Jolie. Together they built one of Hollywood's most famous families, raising six children, three biological and three adopted.
And then? They married in 2014 but split two years later, setting off a long and bitter legal battle that was finally resolved years later. Many of their children have since distanced themselves from their father, with several choosing to drop the Pitt surname.
What film brought them together? 'Se7en' (1995), David Fincher's thriller in which Paltrow played the wife of the detective portrayed by Pitt.
What happened next? Paltrow has said it was close to love at first sight. The couple became one of Hollywood's most glamorous pairings and even got engaged.
Why did they split? Their careers were just taking off and, by their own account, they were too young for such a serious commitment. They ended their relationship in 1997. Nearly three decades later, Paltrow still speaks warmly of Pitt and considers him a good friend.
Who are they? Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
What film brought them together? 'Cleopatra' (1963), in which Taylor played the Egyptian queen and Burton portrayed Mark Antony.
What happened next? Their off-screen romance proved every bit as dramatic as the film itself. Both were married when the relationship began, sparking one of Hollywood's most notorious scandals. They divorced their respective spouses and married in 1964.
And then? After a decade together, they divorced in 1974, remarried the following year and divorced again in 1976. Their relationship was defined by passion, volatility and an enduring professional bond. Over the years, they appeared together in more than a 11 films.
What film brought them together? 'The Notebook' (2004), in which they played Noah and Allie, lovers separated by circumstance who eventually reunite in one of the most beloved screen romances of the 21st century.
What happened next? Despite reportedly clashing during filming, complete with arguments and tensions on set, the two eventually grew close. As the saying goes, there's a fine line between love and hate, and they crossed it in the opposite direction.
And then? They began dating in 2005, became one of Hollywood's most popular young couples and ultimately ended their relationship in 2007.
What film brought them together? 'The Place Beyond the Pines' (2012), in which they played former lovers who reconnect after he discovers he is the father of her child.
What happened next? They began dating during filming and, more than a decade later, are still together. They married in secret, have two daughters and have built one of Hollywood's most enduring and private relationships, rarely appearing together in public.
Who are they? Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart.
What film brought them together? 'Twilight' (2008), the defining young-adult phenomenon of its generation, in which they played star-crossed teenage lovers Edward Cullen and Bella Swan.
What happened next? They were together for more than four years before photographs emerged of Stewart kissing director Rupert Sanders, triggering a crisis that ultimately ended the relationship. The couple briefly reconciled, but split for good in 2013.
What film brought them together? 'Green Lantern' (2011), a superhero blockbuster that may have disappointed at the box office but proved far more successful as a matchmaker.
What happened next? They began dating shortly after filming, married in 2012 and have since become one of Hollywood's most enduring couples. They have four children and are famous for turning social media into a friendly battleground of marital teasing and one-upmanship.
Who are they? Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander.
What film brought them together? 'The Light Between Oceans,' which began filming in 2014. They played a married couple living in a lighthouse whose lives are transformed after they find a baby.
What happened next? They married in a small, private ceremony in Ibiza in 2017 and have two children. More than a decade after meeting, they are still together and continue to keep their family life largely out of the spotlight.
What film brought them together? 'To Have and Have Not' (1944), which marked Bacall's film debut at the age of 19.
What happened next? Neither their age gap, he was 44, nor Bogart's marriage prevented them from falling in love during filming. Bogart eventually divorced his wife, and the two married in 1945. They remained together until his death in 1957 and had two children.
What series brought them together? 'The Americans,' in which they played Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, a married couple of Soviet spies living undercover in the United States.
What happened next? The chemistry between Philip and Elizabeth did not stay on screen. Rhys and Russell began a relationship in 2013 and have a son together, though they have never married.
What's the twist? Rhys had actually tried to ask Russell out years earlier, but she turned him down the first time around.
What film brought them together? 'Dream House' (2011), in which they played a married couple.
What happened next? The two had known each other for years, but their relationship began during filming. They married later that year in a private ceremony in New York attended by just four guests. They are still together and have a daughter
What series brought them together? 'Game of Thrones,' in which they played Jon Snow and Ygritte, lovers destined for one of the show's most tragic romances.
What happened next? Their on-screen relationship blossomed into a real-life one. They married in Scotland in 2018 at Leslie's family castle and have two children together.
What series brought them together? 'Fargo,' whose second season cast them as a married couple caught up in a criminal conspiracy.
What happened next? They got engaged a year after they started dating and have two children together. They eventually married in 2022 and later reunited on screen in 'The Power of the Dog,' earning Oscar nominations for their performances.
What film brought them together? 'Volunteers' (1985), in which they starred together after first meeting a few years earlier on the television series 'Bosom Buddies.'
What happened next? That second collaboration cemented a relationship that has endured ever since. They married in 1988, have two children and are considered one of Hollywood's longest-lasting and most stable couples.
Who are they? Ewan McGregor and Mary Elizabeth Winstead.
What series brought them together? 'Fargo.' In the third season, filmed in 2016, McGregor played twin brothers, while Winstead portrayed the fiancée of one of them.
What happened next? Both were in relationships when they fell in love. Winstead was married to director Riley Stearns, while McGregor had been married to Eve Mavrakis for 22 years and had four daughters with her. They ended their respective marriages, welcomed a son in 2021 and married in 2022.
What film brought them together? 'Brokeback Mountain' (2005). Their co-star Jake Gyllenhaal has said that there were already “sparks” between them during the very first table read.
What happened next? They shared a brief but intense romance. Within months of meeting, they were engaged and expecting their only child together, a daughter named Matilda. After three years, they announced their separation in September 2007, just a few months before the death of Ledger, who would go on to earn acclaim for his portrayal of the Joker in 'The Dark Knight.'
What film brought them together? 'The Oranges' (2011), a largely forgettable comedy that paired two of the biggest stars of 2000s television.
What happened next? Brody was in a relationship at the time, so their connection did not develop immediately. Two years later, they got together, married in 2014 and are now parents of two children.
What film brought them together? 'Gigli,' a film widely regarded as one of Hollywood's most notorious flops and a major box-office failure.
What happened next? Perhaps the better question is: what didn't happen? Lopez divorced her second husband, dancer Cris Judd, to be with Affleck. The media frenzy surrounding the couple was so intense that they became known simply as “Bennifer.” They got engaged, called off their wedding just days before it was due to take place and eventually went their separate ways, moving on with Marc Anthony and Jennifer Garner, respectively.
And then? Nearly two decades later, in 2021, they reunited and finally made it down the aisle. But their second chance lasted less than three years. The question now is whether there will ever be a third.
What film brought them together? 'Daredevil' (2003), although they had first met a couple of years earlier while filming 'Pearl Harbor.'
What happened next? Both were in relationships during the making of 'Daredevil.' Garner was married to actor Scott Foley, while Affleck was engaged to Jennifer Lopez. Their romance began later, and they married in 2005.
And then? They had three children and remained together for a decade before announcing their separation in 2015. Despite the breakup, they have maintained a close friendship, and Garner has publicly supported Affleck through his struggles with alcoholism.
What film brought them together? 'Gattaca' (1997), now considered a classic of 1990s science fiction.
What happened next? They became one of Hollywood's coolest couples and had two children, Maya, now a successful actress in her own right, and Levon.
And then? They announced their separation in 2003 amid persistent rumors that Hawke had been unfaithful with the family's nanny. The actor denied those claims and later described the episode as “humiliating.”
What series brought them together? The psychological thriller 'Gypsy,' which failed to earn a second season renewal from Netflix.
What happened next? The marriage they portrayed on screen eventually became a reality off screen. In 2023, they made their relationship official with an intimate civil wedding in New York, and a year later they said “I do” again in Mexico.
And then? Together they have raised the two children from Watts's previous relationship with actor Liev Schreiber. Their younger child, Kai, 17, took her first steps as a model this autumn, appearing alongside her mother in a campaign for the fashion label Simkhai.
What film brought them together? 'Sweet Girl' (2021), in which they played a married couple.
What happened next? Their relationship appears to have begun during or after filming, although at the time Momoa was coming to the end of his relationship with Lisa Bonet, with whom he had spent nearly 17 years and shares two children.
And then? The split was not made public until 2022, and their divorce was finalized in 2024. That same year, Momoa confirmed his relationship with Arjona.
What film brought them together? 'Changeland,' a low-budget comedy.
What happened next? The former child star and the Disney Channel actress traveled to Thailand to do the film's director a favor, only to stay for weeks as their romance began to blossom.
And then? They are now parents of two sons and have become one of Hollywood's most unexpectedly enduring, beloved and closely watched couples.
What film brought them together? 'The Amazing Spider-Man' (2012). Like the characters they played on screen, Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy, they fell in love.
What happened next? They were together for four years and went on to star in a second Spider-Man film before eventually going their separate ways. Today, Stone has a daughter with director Dave McCary, while Garfield is in a relationship with actress Monica Barbaro.
What film brought them together? 'The Last Song' (2010), a teen romance that marked Cyrus's bid to move beyond her Hannah Montana image.
What happened next? What followed was a decade-long on-again, off-again relationship, marked by breakups and reconciliations. They eventually married, just days after losing their home in a wildfire.
And then? The marriage did not last. Amid speculation about infidelity and other strains on the relationship, the couple divorced. Cyrus later released the global hit 'Flowers,' a song widely interpreted as containing references to Hemsworth, and one that earned her the first Grammy Award of her career.
What series brought them together? 'Stranger Things,' in which they play Nancy Wheeler and Jonathan Byers, two teenagers who fall in love while trying to protect their younger siblings from the forces of evil.
What happened next? They met while filming the first season, when their characters were not yet a couple, and rumors of a romance began circulating the following year.
And then? They made their relationship red-carpet official in 2017. Nearly a decade later, reports of a possible split have surfaced in several media outlets, though neither actor has confirmed them.
Government spokesman Pavlos Marinakis triggered an outrage when he proposed that the “unemployment benefits” should last just two months in order to force jobless to take up a work. According to Greek legislation, the unemployment benefit of 526 euros per month increased by 10% for each child runs for maximum 12 months provided that the […]
Top Left image: Yemen army – Source, Top Right image Yemen military illustration – Source, Bottom Left image Saudi Mohammed bin Salman with Jeffrey Epstein – source: The Epstein Files, Bottom Right image Saudi Mohammed bin Salman with Donald Trump in the White House – Source.
by Brian Shilhavy Health Impact News
The Iran War drastically changed at the end of last week, as Yemen’s Ansarullah-led Armed Forces (Houthis) took control of the country’s western coastline, capturing key positions overlooking the Bab al-Mandab Strait, including the coastal city of Mokha and strategic islands in and around the waterway, and they are now effectively controlling traffic in the Red Sea.
As far as I can tell, this was a complete surprise to everyone, especially to Saudi Arabia and the United States.
It forced the U.S. corporate media to report this, and it dominated the news stream until the fake “AI is going to destroy humanity if we don’t do something about it” narrative took control of the news stream this past weekend.
Saudi Arabia, who has been at war with Yemen since 2014 with the help of the U.S. and using U.S. military weapons, was forced to shut down their East-West oil pipeline, which was allowing Saudi Arabia to bypass the Strait of Hormuz to be able to get oil out of their country.
This pipeline in Saudi Arabia reportedly transports about 4% to 5% of the global oil supply.
Saudi Arabia is now in panic mode, and has reportedly pleaded with the U.S. to help them and start bombing the Yemen forces who have taken control of the Red Sea.
However, it appears that Saudi Arabia never got the memo about one of Trump’s objectives in the Iran War, which was to let Iran destroy the Gulf Nations’ ability to control oil prices through OPEC, while at the same time seizing Venezuela oil amid plans to make America the center of oil sales around the world.
Trump’s response to Saudi Arabia: sorry, you’re on your own.
Scoop: MBS urged Trump to strike Houthis amid Red Sea threat
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) called President Trump twice Thursday, urging him to launch strikes against the Houthis as the Iran-backed group closed in on a vital Red Sea chokepoint, two U.S. officials told Axios.
Trump declined, and U.S. officials stressed the administration has no plans to intervene directly against the Houthis for now.
Of course, even if the U.S. did want to stop Yemen’s military and protect Saudi Arabia’s interests, it is doubtful that they would even be able to do so, given the depletion of their weapons and military assets as Iran continues to control the Strait of Hormuz.
This very well could be the demise of Saudi Arabia.
And if the Yemen takeover of the Red Sea turns the tide overall in the war against Iran, what will the Evangelical Christians do who are so positive that this war was sanctioned by God, and was to hasten the return of Jesus Christ?
Could this also be the start of the decline of Christian Zionism as well when they realize that the U.S. cannot defeat Iran and force the return of Jesus Christ after all?
The U.S. and Saudi Arabia’s War Against Yemen for Over a Decade – The Genocide that Has Been Overshadowed by the Palestinian Genocide
While estimates of how many people have died in the Yemen conflict with Saudi Arabia, including children, most of whom have died from starvation due to the U.S.-Saudi blockade on their ports, varies, the number is significant, and probably rivals the number of people killed among the Israeli Palestinians, as well as the number of dead Lebanese people killed by the U.S. and Israel.
This was published in 2018, and the situation is obviously far worse today.
YEMEN: 85,000 CHILDREN MAY HAVE DIED FROM STARVATION SINCE START OF WAR
Using data compiled by the UN, Save the Children evaluated mortality rates for untreated cases of Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM) in children under five years. Using a conservative estimate, the humanitarian aid agency discovered that approximately 84,701 children with SAM may have died between April 2015 and October 2018.[i]
After almost four years since the brutal conflict in Yemen escalated the UN says that up to 14 million people are at risk of famine. That number has increased dramatically since the Saudi and Emirati-led coalition imposed a month-long blockade of Yemen just over a year ago.[ii]
Since then, commercial imports of food through Hodeidah port have reduced by more than 55,000 metric tonnes a month. That’s enough to meet the needs of 4.4 million people, including 2.2 million children[iii]. Any further decline in imports could likely lead directly to famine.
Barak Obama with Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia in 2016. Source.
Like so many other stories of unrest in the Middle East, the one in Yemen follows an all-too-familiar path that I am sure ultimately leads back to the U.S. and the “intelligence” agencies like the CIA and Mossad who control world politics ensuring that candidates friendly to the Zionist Epstein agenda rise to power.
The rationale, as it has been used so many times, was to overthrow “dictatorships” and alleged “ruthless” rulers who had ruled for long period of times and replace them with “pro-democracy” leaders, and always ending in disaster for the local populations.
It was this same rationale that took down leaders such as Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and even more recently Bashar al-Assad in Syria, all of whom were replaced by pro-Western leaders aligned with the U.S. (and by proxy, Israel).
What most Americans do not realize, is that while these “ruthless dictators” were portrayed as evil by the U.S., they were very popular in their own countries, and most of them were even elected in landslides, while the U.S. declared those elections “rigged.”
Imagine the U.S. with their highly ethical election system (sarcasm) dictating to foreign governments whether their elections were “fair” or not.
During the “Arab Spring” in 2012, Ali Abdullah Saleh, the first elected president of the Republic of Yemen, suffered the same fate, and was forced from office and replaced with the pro-U.S. candidate Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi.
When the Houthis struck back at the U.S. puppet regime, the U.S. had no problems with uniting with local groups in the area opposed to the Houthis, but had officially been branded as “terrorist” groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda.
It is very similar to what recently happened in Syria, where a former member of al-Qaeda, the group who allegedly bombed the World Trade Center towers in New York under the leadership of Osama bin Laden, was chosen by the U.S. to lead Syria today, Ahmed al-Sharaa.
But these factions in Yemen were not strong enough to fight back against the Houthis, so starting with President Obama, the U.S. got involved to prop up their puppet government in Yemen.
First U.S. Citizens Ever Executed without a Judge, Jury, or Trial Happened in Yemen
The country of Yemen has the unique distinction of being the first country where U.S. citizens were executed by drone strikes by their own government, with no judge, jury, or trial.
President Barak Obama was the first U.S. President known to authorize a drone strike on a U.S. citizen, Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki, a 16-year-old boy who was in Yemen and whose father was linked to al-Qaeda.
This was headline news back in the day.
Nawar al-Awlaki, eight-year-old American girl executed by a drone strike in Yemen ordered by President Trump. Image source.
When Trump succeeded Obama and took office in 2017, he proceeded to do the same thing, by ordering a drone strike in Yemen that killed Nawar al-Awlaki, an eight-year-old American girl and the daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki. The 16-year-old U.S. citizen killed by Obama was her brother. (Source.)
Will Saudi Arabia’s Leader Survive the Yemen Uprising?
Since I lived in Saudi Arabia for several years and was a professor at one of their top universities back in the 1990s, I will offer my own opinion on the current leader of Saudi Arabia, which you will be hard-pressed to find from any other western journalist, the Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud (MBS).
MBS was quite young when he came into power, and he reportedly earned a law degree from King Saud University in Riyadh, allegedly finishing second in his class.
I have heard Muslim commentators mention that due to his being educated in Saudi Arabia, rather than going to a Western university, that MBS was better suited and trained to rule Saudi Arabia and not as prone to Western influence.
I strongly disagree.
Back in the day when I was teaching English at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, located in Dhahran, right next to the Aramco oil compound, it was well-known among the faculty back then that if any member of the Al-Saud family came to study at the University and had to complete their first year learning English, that they had basically flunked the English test needed to attend one of the top universities in the U.S. or the UK.
They were not among the “cream of the crop” among Saudi high school students. We had one or two come through during my tenure there, and they were mostly viewed as seeing themselves as “privileged” due to being part of the Al-Saud family, and not very good students at all, preferring instead to go out partying in the desert with their expensive Range Rovers.
So when I read that MBS graduated “second” in his class, I wondered why he did not graduate first, being a member of the Royal family. My best guess is that someone in the Al-Saud family higher up the ladder must have beat him out at the time.
But the true intellectuals and leaders among Saudis probably all graduated from Ivy League schools in the U.S., or from the top universities in the UK.
And of course, MBS is clearly a puppet who has served, first Obama, and now most recently has served as Trump’s lap dog, in my opinion.
So he is hardly against Western culture, even though he was educated in Saudi Arabia.
His rise in power within the Al-Saud dynasty coincided with Donald Trump’s first term (coincidence?).
Mohammed was appointed crown prince on 21 June 2017, following the King’s decision to depose Muhammad bin Nayef and make his own son the heir to the throne.
On the day bin Salman became crown prince, US president Donald Trump called to congratulate him.
Trump and Mohammed pledged “close cooperation” on security and economic issues and discussed the need to cut off support for terrorism, the diplomatic dispute with Qatar, and the push for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
Mohammed told The Washington Post in April 2017 that without America’s cultural influence on Saudi Arabia, “we would have ended up like North Korea.”
In May 2017, Mohammed launched a purge against competing Saudi business and political elites in an anti-corruption campaign.
On 4 November 2017, the Saudi press announced the arrest of the Saudi prince and billionaire Al-Waleed bin Talal, a frequent English-language news commentator and a major shareholder in Citi, News Corp and Twitter, as well as over 40 princes and government ministers on corruption and money laundering charges.
Others arrested or fired in the purge included Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah, head of the Saudi Arabian National Guard; Minister of Economy and Planning Adel Fakeih; and the commander of the Royal Saudi Navy, Admiral Abdullah bin Sultan bin Mohammed Al-Sultan.
Those arrested in the Ritz Carlton were the subject of what became called “the night of beating”. Most were beaten, and some were tied to walls in stress positions as part of torture by Saudi agents.
The detainees were threatened with blackmail.
Detainees were denied sleep, had their heads covered, and were beaten.[50] Seventeen had to be hospitalised.[50] After many days, the remaining detainees were moved to Al-Ha’ir Prison, while some released are banned from travelling abroad.
The purge helped centralise political powers in the hands of bin Salman and undermine the pre-existing structure of consensus-based governance among Saudi elites.
The arrests resulted in the final sidelining of the faction of King Abdullah, and bin Salman’s consolidation of control of all three branches of the security forces. It also cemented bin Salman’s supremacy over business elites in Saudi Arabia and resulted in a mass seizure of assets by the bin Salman regime.
Trump expressed support for the move, tweeting
“Some of those they are harshly treating have been ‘milking’ their country for years!“
Trump seemingly worked hard in an effort to turn MBS into a full-fledged Zionist and support Israel, but MBS stated that if he did not support the Palestinian right to have their own homeland, his own people would stone him to death.
In 2018, (MBS) voiced his support for a Jewish homeland of Israel, the first time that a senior Saudi royal has expressed such sentiments publicly.
In 2020, Mohammed met with Netanyahu and Israeli head of the Mossad Yosi Cohen in Neom. The United States had been pushing for Israel’s normalisation for some years, calling (in this context) the Abraham Accords the “deal of the century”, but Riyadh rejected reports of progress.
In 2023, there were ongoing U.S. lead negotiations to establish diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Mohammed also said that his country was moving steadily closer to normalising relations with Israel as part of the Abraham Accords.
Amid the Gaza war, according to reporting by The Atlantic, Mohammed told U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in January 2024 that he was open to Saudi normalisation with Israel, adding,
“Do I care personally about the Palestinian issue? I don’t, but my people do.”
Surveys in the early stages of the Gaza war showed that over 90 percent of Saudis citizens believed that the Arab states should break off their relations with Israel.
In August 2024, Mohammad discussed his fears of facing assassination due to his support for establishing and normalising Saudi-Israel ties, and the threats he received. He believed for any deal, it was important to include a true path to the State of Palestine.
As I reported back in June of 2024, Saudi Arabia made the historical move to not renew an 80-year-old agreement with the United States that established the U.S. Dollar as the world currency to purchase Saudi oil, in return for U.S. military protection.
They saw the handwriting on the wall, apparently, and wanted to be able to sell oil to China in their own currency, the Yuan. See:
This, more than anything, could be the primary reason why the U.S. will not participate in helping them fight back against the Houthis anymore.
And one of the biggest reasons why I believe that MBS may not survive much longer, is because Saudi Arabia has taken most of their $billions made from oil profits during the past few years and invested it in AI technology, in what will probably be the largest financial bubble to burst in the history of the modern era.
We could very well be watching the last stages of the Epstein financial empire crumbling right before our eyes.
This article was written by Human Superior Intelligence (HSI)
See Also:
Understand the Times We are Currently Living Through
Anduril’s YFQ-44A Fury Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) has already flown in formation alongside F-35 fighters during U.S. Air Force testing, company executives have revealed, offering the clearest indication yet that live manned-unmanned teaming work with the fifth-generation fighter is underway.
The disclosure came during a briefing by Anduril executives Jason Levin, senior vice president for Air Dominance and Strike, and Erin Simpson, vice president for Strategy for Air Dominance and Strike, at the Air & Space Forces Air, Space and Cyber Symposium that TWZ is attending. The executives said the Fury flew alongside F-35s during a July exercise conducted with the Air Force’s Experimental Operations Unit (EOU) at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada. You can read more about that event in our past reporting here.
A YFQ-44A Fury assigned to the Collaborative Combat Aircraft Experimental Operations Unit taxis toward a sunshade at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada, July 20, 2026. U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Renee Blundon Senior Airman Renee Blundon
“We’ve already started flying in formation alongside crewed. I can even say fifth-gen fighters. F-35,” Levin said.
The testing is an important step toward the Air Force’s broader vision for its Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, in which relatively inexpensive autonomous aircraft are intended to operate alongside and support crewed fighters in contested airspace.
The executives stressed, however, that the F-35 was not yet controlling the Fury during those flights.
“But they’re not controlling it from the crewed fighter yet,” Levin said. “Not yet.”
Instead, the July testing involved Fury operating under its Mission Autonomy system while sharing airspace with crewed fighters, other CCAs, and other aircraft. Anduril says Air Force personnel were able to operate the autonomy system without Anduril personnel directly running the aircraft, although company personnel remained on site in a supporting role.
The company described the progression toward direct manned-unmanned teaming as a “crawl, run, build-up” process.
Anduril says it has already begun work on what it calls “quarterback integration,” referring to the ability for a crewed aircraft to direct or task autonomous aircraft. That work has been conducted in hardware-in-the-loop and software-in-the-loop environments as well as on the Fury itself.
“Most of those events will be coming up here in a matter of weeks or months,” Levin said when asked about the timeline for the first quarterback integration with Fury.
Asked whether those events would involve live flying, the answer was unequivocal: “Yes.”
A YFQ-44A undergoes an undated captive carry test at a California test location. This test phase uses inert munitions to methodically validate weapons integration, structural performance and safety, ensuring the platform can safely carry external stores. Courtesy photo via U.S. Air Force Secretary of the Air Force Publi
Exactly how an F-35 would control Fury remains part of that ongoing development effort. The executives pointed to work involving integration of the appropriate human-machine interfaces, primarily including tablet-based control from the crewed fighter, at least at first.
The distinction between flying alongside an F-35 and being controlled by an F-35 is important. The former demonstrates that Fury’s aircraft and autonomy systems can operate safely in the same battlespace as a fifth-generation fighter. The latter would represent a much more significant demonstration of the operational concept behind CCAs: allowing a single crewed fighter to employ and manage additional autonomous aircraft as part of a larger force.
Anduril’s July testing went beyond simple formation flying. The company said Fury was conducting Mission Autonomy flights using live sensor data and was operating in airspace shared with crewed fighters and other CCAs. Air Force operators reportedly conducted both relatively basic route and pattern work and more representative tactical scenarios.
The Fury’s work with the Air Force’s Experimental Operations Unit has progressed through two increasingly ambitious phases. During the first exercise in April at Edwards Air Force Base, Air Force personnel were trained to operate the aircraft and were able to launch and recover it using Anduril’s compact Menace-T setup, essentially a pair of ruggedized cases and a laptop rather than a conventional ground-control station.
By the second exercise, conducted at Creech in July, the Air Force had reduced the manpower and infrastructure required further. A single EOU operator could launch and recover the aircraft after only hours of training, while Air Force personnel independently operated Fury’s Mission Autonomy. The aircraft also flew in airspace shared with other CCAs, while the exercise demonstrated disaggregated operations and a rapid “hot reload” in which two operators replaced an AIM-120 AMRAAM with the engine running, reducing the turnaround between sorties to single-digit minutes.
A U.S. airman assigned to the Collaborative Combat Aircraft Experimental Operations Unit loads an inert missile onto a YFQ-44A Fury aircraft at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada, July 20, 2026. U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Renee Blundon Senior Airman Renee Blundon
The July exercise also included a live weapons demonstration that Anduril characterized as a complete end-to-end kill chain rather than simply a captive-carry or basic weapons-release test. The Fury launched from Edwards with a single operator and received a track generated by an external source over a beyond-line-of-sight connection. That track was ingested by Anduril’s Lattice AI-infused autonomy software system, after which the operator tasked the aircraft to engage. Fury then launched an AIM-120 AMRAAM and guided the weapon to the target. Anduril described the test as demonstrating the complete kill chain from offboard targeting information, through the aircraft’s mission systems and operator tasking, to an actual air-to-air weapons engagement.
New test footage: first missile shot from YFQ-44A.
YFQ-44A executed an end-to-end, beyond-line-of-sight strike against a simulated target.
On the weapons side, the production FQ-44 is being designed around four external hardpoints, allowing it to carry four AIM-120 AMRAAMs for the Air Force’s primary air-to-air mission set. Currently, the demonstration aircraft can carry two. Regardless, the company is also pursuing a much broader weapons portfolio for Fury. Executives said they have already begun integration and fit checks for 500-pound guided bombs, Small Diameter Bombs, low-cost cruise missiles — including Anduril’s Barracuda 500 offering — other air-to-air weapons, rocket pods and targeting pods. Those integrations are intended to give Fury options beyond air-to-air combat, including counter-drone, counter-cruise-missile and air-to-ground/air-surface strike missions. Anduril stressed that these are currently integration and engineering efforts rather than claims that all of those weapons have been flight-tested from Fury. The company also said additional sensors, such as a targeting pod, could be added for some of those missions.
The executives acknowledged that some of the more advanced tactical capabilities remain under development and are being explored extensively in simulation. Those efforts include areas such as sensor fusion, track discrimination and tactical engagements.
A U.S. Air Force YFQ-44A Fury takes off for a mission flight during an Agile Combat Employment exercise at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada, July 21, 2026. U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Kristal Munguia Staff Sgt. Kristal Munguia
The ultimate objective is an aircraft that does not require a large ground-control infrastructure or a dedicated operator for every individual sortie. As previously noted, during the July exercise, Anduril says a single Air Force operator was able to launch and recover a Fury after only hours of training, while other Air Force personnel operated the aircraft’s Mission Autonomy functions.
That same exercise also demonstrated what Anduril described as “disaggregated operations,” with personnel at multiple locations able to operate the same aircraft. The concept is intended to support an Agile Combat Employment-style approach in which CCAs can be dispersed across multiple operating locations rather than relying on a single large ground footprint.
The company has since delivered a Fury aircraft to the Air Force’s EOU at Creech, making it the first CCA to be permanently delivered to the unit, according to Anduril. The service is now flying the aircraft multiple times a day with what the company said is a very limited Anduril presence.
A YFQ-44A production-representative test vehicle is staged in a testing chamber at Costa Mesa, California. Courtesy photo via U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Gustavo Castillo
Meanwhile, Anduril says assembly of Fury airframes has already begun at its Arsenal facility, with production aircraft expected to begin coming off the line early next year. The company says it has built the facility and supply chain around a potential production rate of 150 aircraft per year, although that figure is a planned capacity rather than an existing Air Force order. Anduril executives said the company has already advanced procurement of long-lead items and worked with its Tier 1, 2 and 3 suppliers to support that rate, while also examining additional production lines. They emphasized that the current Air Force pricing is based on a substantially lower annual buy than 150 aircraft, but said the Fury’s unit cost is well below $20 million at the quantities currently contemplated. The company also says the production line is designed for relatively rapid reconfiguration, allowing capacity to be shifted between products in weeks rather than the months or years associated with more traditional aircraft production facilities.
Earlier this year, the Air Force awarded contracts for the production of FQ-44A Fury and General Atomics FQ-42A Dark Merlin drones — the latter has now been formally named Vengeance. This sets the service up to operate a split initial fleet of CCAs. As you can read about here, the Air Force is now aiming to have at least 500 CCA in service by 2032, a substantial step up from earlier plans, with the USAF having previously talked about acquiring “over” 150 of these drones by the end of the decade. The 500 target will likely include upcoming increment two CCAs, as well, the requirements of which the Air Force is still working on.
For Anduril, the next major milestone should go far beyond simply putting a Fury and an F-35 in the same formation, demonstrating that a crewed fifth-generation fighter can actually command and employ the autonomous aircraft as part of a live mission.
If Anduril’s timeline holds, that testing could begin relatively soon.
In our relentlessly optimized world, Justin Neuman calls for more nothing. More time for both adults and kids to engage in free, unstructured play. More opportunities to play games without competition or scoring. More chances to do things without needing to produce outputs or achieve goals. More “transitional spaces” through which we can practice, imagine, and think.
For years, I’ve commuted on foot from Grand Central Station to 14th Street, 30 blocks, give or take. I told myself it was exercise, or that I was saving the subway fare, or that I liked the air. But the truth is I was thinking. Or rather, I was letting thinking happen. The lecture I couldn’t outline at my desk would assemble itself somewhere around 34th Street, the important points falling into sequence with my footfalls, the argument clarifying as if the motion itself were doing the editing. I wasn’t working on the lecture. I was walking in it, the way my kids were playing in Catan.
Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works advanced projects division has shared all new information about its stealthy Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) type drone design named Vectis, which it first unveiled a year ago. One of the most intriguing details is the true nature of its air inlet configuration, pointing to the premium on survivability the Skunk Works has placed on its CCA offering, especially when compared to other CCA designs.
Vectis has a far more exotic, deeply recessed “submerged” top-mounted air intake than was originally disclosed when Vectis first came out of the shadows. This further underscores the heavy emphasis Skunk Works says it has been placing on its CCA’s ability to stay undetected and live to fight another day. Vectis is also the first tailless CCA design we have seen from a U.S. manufacturer.
An updated view of Vectis. Lockheed Martin Skunk Works Lockheed Martin
Ron Fehlen, Lockheed Martin Vice President and General Manager of Skunk Works, gave TWZ and other outlets an update on Vectis last week ahead of today’s start of the Air & Space Forces Association’s 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference. Skunk Works says work on constructing the first prototype of Vectis – a word that means lever or pole in Latin, and that Lockheed Martin has said reflects the ‘leverage’ the drone offers – is underway now. The goal is to have it flying by the end of next year. There are already plans to build four more prototypes using internal funding.
Check out the Skunk Works’ new Vectis video below:
Source: Lockheed Martin
“It is designed, as you can likely see, to be both survivable and affordable and flexible across the range of missions that our customers need, have needed, and continue to need into the future,” Fehlen said by way of introduction. “The technical specs, as you can imagine, are designed to meet and, in some cases, exceed the customer sets that we are working with and their requirements and their mission needs.”
The basic core of the single-engine Vectis that we have seen now is largely unchanged from what had been shown at the time of the unveiling last year. It is still a tailless drone that has a lambda wing planform and air intake mounted on top of the central part of the fuselage, as well as a prominent chine line around the forward end and a shovel-like shape to its nose. New renderings do show revised positions for various conformal antennas and/or sensor apertures around the central fuselage. These are all established features of low-observable (stealthy) aircraft designs.
Skunk Works’ Fehlen also shared last week that Vectis is approximately 34 feet long and has a wingspan of around 38 feet. As a comparison, the Navy’s two-seat primary jet trainer, the T-45 Goshawk, is roughly 39 feet long by 30 feet wide.
The biggest new detail, as mentioned, is the shaping and position of Vectis’ air inlet. Fehlen stressed that this is actually not a new feature, and has “been a part of the design since the beginning,” but was not reflected in previously released renderings and scale models.
Another newly released rendering of Vectis showing the submerged intake. Lockheed Martin Skunk Works
The intake was depicted in the past as having a relatively straightforward configuration. It did appear to have a saw-tooth leading edge, another indication of stealthy design considerations. The visuals we have now show the intake is deeply recessed into the top of the fuselage, sitting behind a downward-sloping v-shaped channel.
A rendering of Vectis that Lockheed Martin released last year that did not depict the submerged intake. Lockheed MartinSkunk Works
Vectis doesn’t have a fully flush-mounted inlet, like what is found on Boeing’s MQ-25 Stingray tanker drone, among other designs, but it is close to it, very loosely similar to what’s found on the B-21. The rear is slightly raised above the v-like pocket where air flows down into the intake. Flush or near-flush intakes offer particular benefits when it comes to low-observability (stealthiness) and aerodynamic efficiency, but are also notoriously problematic, especially in certain flight regimes, as you can read more about here. This is even worse for high-performance aircraft that have a wide operating envelope and have to maneuver at higher angles of attack. The CCA would likely fit into this category, at least to a degree.
When it comes to Vectis, “there’s a lot of different reasons behind it [choosing this submerged intake configuration], but I’ll pick up on a couple here for you,” Skunk Works’ Fehlen explained. “The first is it reduces that frontal drag. So, anything sticking out in the wind, as many – as all of you know, I’m sure, creates drag on the aircraft itself. So, if you want better performance from a range, et cetera, then you need to be able to reduce that drag, and that’s an example.”
“It’s also interesting to me, particularly as the Air Force speaks about Agile Combat Employment, the ACE concept, as you’re aware. There is an advantage to having an inlet on the top of the aircraft if you’re out in more austere environments and you’re concerned about FOD [foreign object debris] pickup off of a runway,” he added.
Another newly released rendering offering a different perspective on the submerged intake. Lockheed Martin Skunk Works
Fehlen also confirmed that the inlet’s design has to do with survivability, but did not elaborate in any detail, which is unsurprising considering the sensitivities of such design elements. The original Vectis promotional video Lockheed Martin put out last year, seen below, showed an S-shaped duct behind the air intake and exhaust shrouding, which are features designed to further reduce a platform’s signature.
In terms of performance, Lockheed Martin has yet to share any hard specifications it is targeting for Vectis, or disclose details about the engine the design will use. Fehlen did also highlight the drag-reducing performance advantages of the drone’s tailless design, including for maximizing range.
Details about what other capabilities Vectis might have are still limited. Fehlen noted that the design is expected to be capable of both air-to-air and air-to-ground mission sets. In a new computer-generated promotional video, seen earlier in this story, the drones are depicted launching what look to be AIM-120 Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missiles (AMRAAM) and GBU-53/B Small Diameter Bomb II (SDB II) glide bombs, also known as StormBreakers. The AIM-120 has already emerged as something of a default initial weapon for Western CCA-type drones. The video also confirms Vectis has an internal bay that is able to accommodate at least two munitions, likely the size to accommodate medium-range air-to-air missiles.
Captures from Lockheed Martin’s new Vectis promotional video depicting the drones launching what looks to be an AIM-120 missile, at left, and a pair of GBU-53/B SDB IIs, at right. Lockheed Martin capturesA rendering of Vectis with its elongated internal bay open from the new promotional video. Note the AIM-120 in the background. Lockheed Martin captureAnother screen capture from the new Vectis promotional video showing two munitions loaded inside the drone’s internal bay. Lockheed Martin capture
In addition, the video shows Vectis as having a traditional electro-optical/infrared sensor turret behind a stealthy faceted enclosure under the nose. When the drone was first unveiled last year, TWZ noted that it could carry a variety of sensors, including compact radars and/or infrared search and track (IRST) systems, which would be particularly relevant in the air-to-air role.
The sensor turret inside the stealthy faceted enclosure as seen in the new Vectis promotional video. Lockheed Martin capture
During the press call, Skunk Works’ Fehlen reiterated that Vectis is being designed with an eye toward modularity and open-architecture systems. This, in turn, will make it easier to integrate new and improved capabilities and functionality down the line. Open architecture is at the heart of every CCA offering we are aware of at this time.
Fehlen further highlighted Lockheed Martin’s extensive work to date on advanced autonomy packages and crewed-uncrewed teaming capabilities. This includes the development of the Multi Domain Combat System (MDCX), an “autonomy platform” that is already central to the U.S. Navy’s plans for the carrier-based MQ-25 Stingray. The head of Skunk Works also explicitly called attention to autonomous air intercept testing conducted in cooperation with the Air Force earlier this year using the unique X-62A test jet, and said that work is feeding into Vectis’ development.
The X-62A test jet seen during the autonomous air intercept testing earlier this year. USAF
On top of all this, Lockheed Martin is already actively laying the groundwork for the U.S. Air Force’s F-22 and F-35 fighters to control future CCA drones, via in-cockpit touchscreen-type user interfaces, likely involving tablets, at least at first.
The new Vectis promotional video also shows a traditional ground control station being used to direct the drones, but with the phrase “managed from anywhere” on the screens, as seen below. Fehlen did say that any specific requirements for autonomy, command and control, and other operational capabilities would be up to individual customers, and that third-party vendors could be involved.
Lockheed Martin
Beyond Vectis’ design and expected capacities, Fehlen touted the speed at which work on the first physical prototype is progressing, and highlighted the use of digital design techniques and advanced manufacturing processes.
“This team, when kicked off, took a design on a napkin, which we will likely frame one day in my office … two months later, they were in the wind tunnel validating the design,” he said. “So, in under two months, we’re already getting in the wind tunnel straight from off of a napkin. We had the first digital build in six months, and the first part release in eight months. So it gives you a touch of a sense for exactly how fast we’re moving.”
“This aircraft was designed in a fully integrated digital environment,” he added. “Really, it’s creating that unbroken digital thread from the design all the way through sustainment.”
“We’ve used advanced design and manufacturing processes developed for many years under our own internal investment … for other Skunk Works programs, we’ve pulled that into this, of course, to continue to advance our manufacturing as well as the advanced design capability,” Fehlen continued. “They’re using real production processes.”
A central fuselage part of the first Vectis prototype now under construction. Lockheed Martin Skunk Works
The Skunk Works boss stressed that this approach offers advantages not just for accelerating development and prototype, but also for reducing costs and positioning Vectis to enter full-scale production.
“It gives you the reliance and the confidence as you continue to move forward that you’re ready to off and build these things because you’re using those real production processes,” he explained. “An example of that is a technique that we call minimal tooling determinant assembly. It’s a technique that really enables an increased level of affordability and speed through really reducing the amount of touch labor required and increasing the first pass yield. We’ve seen, in many cases, an 80 percent reduction in labor hours to build up the aircraft itself.”
Part of one of the wings for the first Vectis prototype. Lockheed Martin Skunk Works
Fehlen made an indirect reference to flat-pack furniture from IKEA to provide additional context, in extremely general layman’s terms, about what this technique offers.
“That’s what we’re talking about, that idea that it can come together very quickly, limited touch, and limited error. We constrain that to reduce the number of labor hours, which is not just a cost implication, but also buoys the speed and how fast we’re going to be able to produce them,” he said. “You can imagine, as well, there’s a lot of simplification that goes into this. We have significantly reduced the part count. Again, back to simplify the build so that you can have a positive impact on speed and affordability, not new techniques, but we’ve applied them here with vigor to ensure that we are getting to the cost point that the services and our customers need in order to make this system effective.”
Another element of the first Vectis prototype, which is now being built. Lockheed Martin Skunk Works
In terms of actual unit cost, “we’re always looking at, and, of course, we’re targeting to be [at] the CCA competitive price, so we’re very cognizant of it and make trades associated with that,” according to Fehlen. Vectis is “focused more on the CCA side of the house, and obviously the price points that are highly relevant in that regime, and then, of course, making trades along the way, and to make sure that we can meet it.”
The head of Skunk Works was responding here specifically to a question that mentioned the Air Force’s target of a roughly $20 million unit price for drones acquired under the first phase, or Increment 1, of its CCA program once full-scale production is achieved. The service announced in June that it was ordering fleets of both of the Increment 1 designs now in development, General Atomics’ FQ-42A Dark Merlin and Anduril’s FQ-44A Fury. The Air Force has plans for at least one more increment to this program, and has said in the past that it could pursue lower-cost (and less exquisite) designs.
A trio of YFQ-42A Dark Merlin prototypes. GA-ASIA YFQ-44A Fury prototype with an inert AIM-120 missile under its wing. USAF
“While not discussing suppliers, you can imagine we are ensuring that all of the decisions we make in the development and then the build out of these aircraft are designed around achieving that competitive cost point, while at the same time maximizing the amount of capability,” Fehlen added. “Those are the things that our customers are looking for, and we put it in a survivable solution.”
“There are some [companies] that are really going down the attritable [route], which defines a different price point than the CCA community has been targeting,” he also noted. Attritable designs are “quite a bit less from a cost point perspective and often from a capability perspective.”
With this in mind, there are still larger questions about where exactly Vectis may fit into U.S. military CCA plans, as well as those emerging from allied and partner air arms globally. Skunk Works has said in the past that it was eliminated from the Air Force’s CCA Increment 1 competition because it put forward a very stealthy “gold-plated” design that was not what the service wanted. Lockheed Martin had also indicated that its view of the capability/cost balance on new CCA-type designs had subsequently shifted very much in the opposite direction. Though it is still not entirely clear, what we’ve learned about Vectis in the past year would seem to signal that the pendulum at Skunk Works has swung back the other way again, at least to a degree.
As an interesting point of comparison, Northrop Grumman had also entered a higher-end design for the Increment 1 competition. In the wake of that loss, the company produced a much more familiar CCA design with a more traditional planform, which is now known as the YFQ-48A Talon Blue.
It’s also worth noting here that Skunk Works had publicly shared a future crewed-uncrewed teaming vision that included multiple tiers of drones back in 2022. This ranged from a cruise missile-like design the company now calls the Common Multi-Mission Truck (CMMT) all the way up to a concept for what could have been a very low-observable (stealthy) and highly autonomous flying wing uncrewed combat air vehicle (UCAV).
“We listen closely to our customers to deeply understand the operational environment and use those insights and our own analysis to inform the diverse solutions we develop for different mission sets,” Lockheed Martin told TWZ directly after the press call last week in response to a follow-up question about whether the 2022 vision was still relevant and if Vectis had supplanted the upper-tier concept shown at that time. “We continue to evaluate a range of crewed and uncrewed concepts against evolving customer needs.”
“Lockheed Martin Vectis addresses a warfighter need for a survivable, flexible and multi-mission capability, both domestically and internationally,” the company added in its statement. “We’re leaning into that demand, making strategic investments to accelerate Vectis’ progress and maturity and to deliver the capabilities our nation and allies need.”
A screen capture from a more recent Lockheed Martin video showing renderings of various different drone designs, including Vectis (at lower left), the CMMT (at upper right), and the stealthy flying-wing (at lower right). Lockheed Martin capture
Lockheed Martin and a host of other companies globally are being presented with a clearly expanding CCA market, but there is also still obvious interest in higher-tier UCAVs. China, in particular, has positioned itself as the current leader in the stealthy flying wing UCAV space, as well as a dominant actor in advanced combat drone developments more generally speaking. Russia, India, Turkey, and France continue to pursue flying wing UCAVs, as well. That being said, Skunk Works’ Vectis is arguably the closest we have seen to a low-observable UCAV to come out of recent CCA developments.
Regardless, Skunk Works is confident that there is a place for Vectis, together with autonomy and other capabilities it is developing, domestically and internationally, in this future uncrewed air combat ecosystem. It “is a survivable autonomous multi-mission platform, which we believe is the solution needed within today’s operational environment and into the future,” Fehlen said last week.
Skunk Works is committed to “delivering what’s next across … airframes, open architectures, to include artificial intelligence and autonomy, and then crewed-uncrewed integration,” he added. “Make no mistake, it will take advancements across all these areas to get to where our customers are going. We look at the full picture. Vectis is a holistic weapon system from our perspective.”
Altogether, “it’s an urgent need. We know that. We can hear it.”
UPDATE: 3:10 pm EDT
We now have a photo of the full sized Vectis mockup on the floor or Air, Space, Cyber 2026:
“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?”
Longreads has published hundreds of original stories—personal essays, reported features, reading lists, and more—and more than 14,000 editor’s picks. And they’re all funded by readers like you. Become a member today.
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.”
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.
“In 1730, the influential physician Bernard Mandeville recalled a patient asking his doctor whether he was tired of hearing ‘so tedious a Tale’ of pain. His physician gently murmured: ‘Your Story is so diverting that I take abundance of delight in it, and your Ingenious way of telling it, gives me a greater insight into your Distemper, than you imagine.’” Now if you can get a doctor to listen to you for five undistracted minutes, count yourself lucky. Joanna Bourke takes stock of pain and its vocabulary for Aeon: “Our Anaesthetic Times.”
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.
“There are two kinds of people in the world: people who think there are two kinds of people in the world and people who don’t.” Science or self-help? Louis Menand assesses “society’s people-sorting operations” for The New Yorker: “What Personality Tests Really Deliver.”
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.
“Why Netflix looks like that.” Will Tavlin investigates what goes on behind the scenes at the streaming behemoth for n+1: “Casual Viewing.”
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?
“Correlation, one of the most used and least understood concepts in statistics, is easy to mistake for causation because it was made that way intentionally; it’s precisely because of its potential to be misunderstood that it remains so popular. . . . The eugenics movement was built out of correlations.” Read about its history and current state of affairs in this Los Angeles Review of Books essay by Aubrey Clayton for the Legacies of Eugenics series: “The ‘Correlation’ Between Statistics and Eugenics.”
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.
“Experiments that test physics and philosophy as ‘a single whole’ may be our only route to surefire knowledge about the universe.” Seeing as the lines between them have already been “blurred beyond repair,” here’s another essay by Amanda Gefter for Quanta Magazine: “‘Metaphysical Experiments’ Probe Our Hidden Assumptions About Reality.”
“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 hard problem of consciousness is a distraction from the real one.” For a clearer picture of the fundamentals according to Seth, read his earlier essay for Aeon: “The Real Problem.”
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.
“In the space between the hands-on, physical reality of experimental science and the structured narratives fit for printed journals, sits a special genre of scientific writing: lab notebooks. They are the closest witness to ‘science in the making.’” Ulkar Aghayeva writes a lavishly illustrated essay for Asimov Press: “A Brief History of Lab Notebooks.”
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.
Human remains hidden in a plastic bag were discovered near a sports stadium in Kypseli district of central Athens at noon on Tuesday, September 8, 2026. According to initial information, it was a child who found a human skull and bones near the Alepotrypa (Fox Hole) stadium. The children of a local football club were […]
The body of a 90-year-old woman was found covered in sheets and hidden in the basement of a house in Marathonas village in eastern Attica on Friday. The woman’s daughter and grandson have been arrested. The woman’s death was not registered with the authorities and the daughter allegedly kept receiving her mother’s pension for about […]
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