The apparent attempted hijacking of a Flydubai flight carrying 170 mostly Israeli passengers was another reminder to Israelis of the constant threat of terror and war. Only the bravery of the chief pilot and passengers prevented a major disaster. A few hours earlier, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a video warning of attempts to harm […]
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Taiwan’s new American-made F-16V Block 70 jets deliver much-needed breathing room against daily Chinese gray-zone coercion, yet surging Chinese stealth numbers and cratered runway risks mean their wartime utility would be sharply contested. Taiwan received its first two new-build Lockheed Martin F-16V Block 70 fighter jets, touching down on October 2 at Taitung’s Chihhang Air […]
The post New F-16s buy Taiwan time and space against China’s air coercion appeared first on Asia Times.
The Cradle | October 2, 2026
The crew of the Iranian frigate Dena informed a US warship that their vessel was unarmed during their final exchanges before a US submarine launched a torpedo and sank it off the coast of Sri Lanka on 4 March, killing 104 sailors, according to an audio recording cited by an Iranian judiciary official.
“We are not military, we are not armed, and we have come for training,” the crew said in the recording.
The Moudge-class frigate was sailing home from the International Fleet Review 2026, an India-hosted naval exercise Iran had been officially invited to attend, when the USS Charlotte struck it with a Mark 48 torpedo in international waters some 19 nautical miles off Galle, killing 104 of the 136 sailors on board and wounding the remaining 32.
Hassan Abdollianpour, who heads Iran’s Center for Lawyers of the Judiciary, said the recording also captures the frigate’s contact with Sri Lanka’s shipping and ports authorities, who backed the crew’s account that the ship was on a training mission.
Abdollianpour said international law obliged that aid be given to those aboard, even after the ship had been targeted.
“Not only was no assistance provided, but a second attack was also carried out,” he said.
He added that securing the recording, which took extensive efforts and has since featured in a documentary, was key to building an accurate legal case over the criminal attack.
Abdollianpour said the case of the Dena’s slain sailors is being pursued “firmly and decisively,” with his center compiling extensive documentation for domestic and international proceedings.
Nearly 19,000 experts have produced around 130,000 pages of assessments on wartime incidents and damages, he said, meant to serve as standardized evidence before international courts and legal bodies.
In March, Iran’s Judiciary Chief Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei condemned the deadly US strike as a violation of every international convention, maritime law above all, and vowed that Tehran would “certainly and seriously” prosecute Washington for its “outrageous crimes.”
In July, India tested two new interceptors meant to destroy missiles at ranges up to 5,000 kilometers, the latest step toward one of the few layered missile shields in the world. New Delhi calls the program defensive. But a neighboring rival rarely sees a shield that way. India’s expanding defenses could embolden its leaders in […]
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Lies are Unbekoming | October 2, 2026
The genes the field promised were never there.
The genetic story of disease is a cover story.
The twenty-first century runs on it. Paediatric clinics. Cancer centres. Forensic laboratories. Family-planning counsel. It is used to explain illness, to assign blame, to foreclose questions. It protects the industries whose products and practices are what actually caused the harm.
It isn’t true.
In 2010, Jonathan Latham and Allison Wilson looked at over seven hundred genome-wide association studies covering some eighty common diseases. The genes the field had promised were not there. The field invented a term, “missing heritability”, to explain the absence, and has quietly worked to bury the finding ever since.
The Genetic Deception is a book about what Latham and Wilson found. What the field did with it. And what the public was told instead.
The Genetic Deception
How a Failed Science Conceals the Real Causes of Disease
Second Edition, revised and expanded. 406 pages, paperback.
Across nineteen chapters and six appendices, the book works through the conditions where the genetic framework collapses on inspection. Cystic fibrosis, where the environmental trigger is omitted. Down’s syndrome, where the toxic exposures are known but not acknowledged. Dravet syndrome, where vaccine injury is renamed as inherited fate. BRCA. FH. Alpha-1. The forensic DNA story the public has never been told.
Long-form interviews with Jamie Andrews and Leon Karmameleon of the Telestai Network. Close engagement with the work of Dr Thomas Cowan, Elizabeth Nickson, and Latham and Wilson. A resource library at the back. An appendix on what to say when the doctor says “it’s genetic.”
What the book exposes is a procedure. A procedure for converting environmental injury, pharmaceutical damage, and industrial poisoning into inherited destiny. The procedure works on the patient. It works on the doctor. It works because most people who encounter it have never been shown what it conceals.
New in the Second Edition:
Three chapters not in the digital edition. The first is a long treatment of cystic fibrosis, the textbook example of a single-gene disease and the case that falls apart hardest on inspection. The second catalogues ten of the conditions currently labelled “genetic” and shows, one by one, what the label forecloses. The third asks where family resemblance actually comes from if not from genes, and what the Human Genome Project’s failure means for the question.
Expanded appendices, including an expanded vocabulary for the terms the framework uses to protect itself. New Notes and Sources across nine chapters, cited to the primary literature rather than to the field’s own summaries.
A full back-of-book index covering the people, institutions, conditions, and concepts named in the book, cross-referenced so the paperback works as a reference and not just a read-through. Any term the reader has seen in a clinic or in a news article — missing heritability, Dravet, CFTR, BRCA — can be looked up and traced to every place the book addresses it.
Table of Contents
Appendix 1: The Vocabulary of Genetic Deception
Appendix 2: What to Say When the Doctor Says “It’s Genetic”
Appendix 3: The Four Real Causes
Appendix 4: The Conditions Currently Labelled “Genetic”
Appendix 5: The Eugenics Continuity
Appendix 6: The Curated Resource Library
Index
Who this book is for:
The reader who has watched a diagnosis arrive in their family and sensed that the explanation did not fit. The reader who wants to know what the research actually says instead of what the press release claims. The reader who is ready to ask what happened to the person before they were handed the gene.
The digital only first edition went out in May. The paperback — Second Edition, revised and expanded — is now live.
The war between the United States and Iran is no longer just a confrontation between Washington and Tehran. A second contest is taking shape alongside and behind it. China is not fighting the United States directly, but its economic, technological and diplomatic links to Iran are complicating Washington’s strategy and ability to win the conflict. […]
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The artificial intelligence (AI) race between the United States and China has accelerated in model protection, supply chains and talent controls, even as the two nations’ leaders agreed last week to open a new dialogue on AI safety. A string of moves announced or uncovered this week shows that both sides are now guarding their […]
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The U.S. government set off conventional explosives inside a tunnel deep in the Nevada desert this week in a test designed to replicate a so-called “decoupled” nuclear detonation. Data collected is now being used to help improve methods for detecting this kind of nuclear testing. Just earlier this year, American authorities accused China of using decoupling to conceal new nuclear tests despite the country’s stated moratorium on such activities.
The test, which involved the use of chemical high-explosives and radiotracers, was conducted yesterday inside P Tunnel in Area 12 of the Nevada National Security Site (NNSA), according to a press release from the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The NNSS, which is situated within the boundaries of the U.S. Air Force’s Nevada Test and Training Range (NTTR), is used for a wide variety of testing purposes today. An agency under the Department of Energy, NNSA’s main jobs are to oversee the development and production of nuclear weapons, as well as manage America’s nuclear deterrent stockpile.
“This experiment is especially focused on further enhancing the U.S. capabilities to detect a ‘decoupled’ explosion,” per NNSA’s release. “Data collected from the experiment will be used to validate scientific models and refine algorithms that are critical to U.S. nuclear explosion detection efforts.”
“Just as a stealth aircraft looks smaller on radar, decoupling can greatly muffle the signals detected by nuclear detection sensors, making a large explosion appear smaller,” the release explains. “In a conventional, or ‘coupled,’ underground nuclear test, a device is placed deep in a hole in close contact with the rock, allowing much of the explosion’s shockwave to reach sensors. In a decoupled test, by contrast, the device is detonated inside a large underground chamber, substantially reducing the explosion’s seismic signature.”
“In this experiment, researchers gathered measurements using a broad suite of advanced sensors, including accelerometers, seismometers, infrasound sensors, electromagnetic sensors, chemical and radiotracer samplers, and meteorological sensors,” it adds. ”Together, these measurements will improve scientists’ understanding of the signatures produced by underground explosions and strengthen the United States’ ability to detect and characterize nuclear explosive events.”
The U.S. already maintains a U.S. Atomic Energy Detection Systems (USAEDS) network, which is overseen by the U.S. Air Force Technical Applications Center (AFTAC). USAEDS is made up of more than 3,600 sensors positioned around the world. USAEDS is also tied in with the International Monitoring System (IMS), which is managed by the organization responsible for overseeing the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT). AFTAC also supports the mission to monitor for potential nuclear testing globally using a fleet of specially configured WC-135R Constant Phoenix aircraft. In addition, those planes are used to help keep watch for unusual spikes in atmospheric radiation that could point to nuclear or radiological accidents or other incidents leading to the spread of potentially dangerous radioactive material.
With regard to the USAEDS network specifically, “once a disturbance is detected underground, underwater, in the atmosphere or in space, the event is analyzed for nuclear identification, and the findings are reported to command authorities,” according to AFTAC’s website.
As mentioned, the U.S. government has accused its Chinese counterparts of using decoupling to conceal new nuclear testing, and NNSA’s press release draws explicit attention to these allegations. At the annual Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, Switzerland, in February, Thomas DiNanno, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, said that China had conducted at least one such test at Lop Nur on June 22, 2020. The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) subsequently said the IMS had not detected an event matching that description at that location on that date. For its part, the Chinese government has denied the accusation.
The social media posts below include satellite imagery showing activity at Lop Nur that could point to new nuclear testing activities in recent years.
参考
— KAROTASU (@type36512) May 24, 2026
Satellite Imagery Analysis of China’s Alleged 2020 Nuclear Test at Lop Nurhttps://t.co/aafvU5Szh7
CSIS 20260213
ROLES SAT ANALYSIS No.7 中国に核実験実施の動き ー Lop Nur核実験場の画像分析 ーhttps://t.co/n66yYk0hLg
ROLES 20250522
While China is a signatory to the CTBT, the country has never ratified it. The Chinese government last acknowledged a critical-level nuclear test in 1996, after which a self-imposed moratorium was put in place, at least publicly. As an aside, the United States has also signed, but never ratified, the CTBT, and has a similar self-imposed moratorium on nuclear testing since 1992. It is worth noting that the treaty does not ban so-called sub-critical testing, which involves fissile material, but does not result in a full-fledged nuclear reaction.
Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration has been holding new talks with the Chinese government regarding various aspects of the country’s massively and rapidly expanding nuclear arsenal, including the testing allegations. That story immediately preceded a state visit by China’s President Xi Jinping to Washington, D.C., to meet with Trump.
“The discussions between American and Chinese officials have centered on measures to reduce nuclear risks and haven’t been aimed at negotiating a formal arms-control pact, an effort Beijing has sharply rebuffed in the past,” according to that report. “The Trump administration has begun to highlight the possibility of implementing new verification measures.”
“Independent experts say seismic instruments might be placed on or near test sites,” The Journal‘s story also noted. “Another possibility, which was floated during the Biden administration, is to install radiation-detection equipment at test sites.”
NNSA’s announcement about the test at the Nevada National Security Site is certainly an example of the development underway already of new means of verification that could be deployed at sites around the world.
The United States has separately accused Russia of conducting lower-yield nuclear testing in secret in the past. Russia is a signatory to the CTBT and had previously ratified it. In 2023, President Vladimir Putin revoked that ratification in line with the provisions of a law passed by the country’s parliament, or Duma.
President Trump has also floated the idea of the resumption of U.S. nuclear testing in response to Russian and Chinese activities, though other U.S. officials have downplayed the possibility of doing so. The United States is otherwise in the midst of a huge nuclear modernization effort that impacts the air, sea, and land-based legs of the deterrent triad. American authorities are also now pursuing these efforts in an environment fully unbounded by relevant arms control agreements following the sunset of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) earlier this year.
The Russian government has said it is ready to conduct new nuclear tests if the United States pursues this course of action. The last official nuclear test in Russia came in 1990 right before the fall of the Soviet Union.
“It takes nuclear expertise to detect nuclear activities and experiments like these [to] ensure America remains unmatched in detection,” NNSA Administrator Brandon Williams said in a statement yesterday in light of the test in Nevada. “The Trump Administration has made it clear that the United States will lead from a position of strength. You cannot evade American innovation. With this experiment, we are sending a clear message: under this administration, America will never be outmatched.”
Contact the author: joe@twz.com
The post U.S. Mimics “Decoupled” Nuclear Detonation By Blowing Up A Tunnel Conventionally appeared first on TWZ.
For years, Pakistan’s claim that the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan operates from sanctuaries inside Afghanistan produced a familiar exchange: Islamabad accused, Kabul denied, and each new militant attack triggered another round of recrimination. That pattern is becoming harder to sustain. The sanctuary dispute can now be tested against a growing body of evidence rather than competing claims […]
The post Afghanistan’s TTP sanctuary is becoming harder to deny appeared first on Asia Times.
On September 30, the last American and coalition troops flew out of Erbil Air Base, and the Pentagon declared an “orderly departure.” The White House called it a victory. President Trump, never one for understatement, described the whole enterprise as “a very expensive excursion into Hell.” For once, the hyperbole is closer to the truth […]
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