Republicans and Democrats, both patients and politicians, seem united in their disdain for the healthcare companies known as pharmacy benefit managers. Tennessee and Arkansas are regulating them now.
(Image credit: Earl Neikirk)
Germany and California parade as climate superpowers – yet both import energy, destroy industry and hand supply chains to Beijing. Western virtue, says Tilak Doshi, is made in Chinese coal-fired factories.
The post Beijing’s Useful Idiots: Germany, California and the Green Road to Chinese Supremacy appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
No dia 7 de setembro, um colono foi ferido com arma branca no norte da Cisjordânia ocupada. O ministro israelita da Defesa, Israël Katz, ameaçou então a Autoridade Palestiniana com uma «guerra total» se viesse a acontecer um ataque de grande dimensão contra o exército ou um colonato. «Na eventualidade de (…) ficarmos a saber com certeza que eles se preparassem para lançar um ataque “terrorista” semelhante ao de 7 de outubro [de 2023] contra as forças da “Tsahal” e a população judaica das (…)
- 2026/10 / Ataques a aldeias e assédio à populaçãoCOLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - The Secretary of Defense will visit Colorado Springs over the weekend.
According to the Department of Defense, Pete Hegseth will visit Colorado Springs on Saturday as a part of his Send Me Tour.
In a press release, officials said Hegseth will deliver an address to 3,500 cadets, and will also administer the oath of enlistment to new recruits at the Air Force vs. Navy game.
The game is set to kick off at 10:00 a.m. at Falcon Stadium.
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The New York Times and the rest of the legacy media are in mourning after President Trump axed Biden's pro-EV fuel economy standards. But real fuel efficiency shouldn't need a mandate, says Dr Tilak Doshi.
The post Legacy Media Weep as Trump Axes Biden’s Fuel Economy Diktat appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
The Houthi takeover of parts of the Red Sea gives the armed group a new platform to challenge global shipping. The group has taken over the port of Mocha, the island of Mayyun, and the Zuqar and Hanish archipelago about 160km north of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. These areas were previously controlled by Yemeni government […]
The post African Red Sea states’s risks grow as Houthi rebels expand reach appeared first on Asia Times.
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The Supreme Court of the Komi Republic has sentenced philosopher Nikolay Zyuzev to seven years in a strict-regime penal colony on treason charges. Zyuzev, who holds both Russian and Canadian citizenship, is one of the best-known scholars of the legacy of the Russian-American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin. He left Russia after the war began, but in the summer of 2025 he returned to his native village in Komi [a republic in northwestern Russia — T-invariant], where he was arrested. According to the FSB, the scholar was training leaders of national liberation movements among Russia’s small Indigenous peoples and receiving funding for his project from foreign organizations. T-invariant looks at what Zyuzev worked on, why he kept coming back to Russia, and what his friends and colleagues make of the treason charges.
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A Classic Liberal
In the summer of 2025, philosophy professor Nikolay Zyuzev traveled from Europe to his native village of Podyelsk in Komi to visit relatives. And then he vanished.
“After the war started, he left Russia, just like I did. Sometimes he came to see me in Europe. I was expecting him again in the fall of 2025. But that summer he went to Russia, even though we begged him not to. There was no way he wasn’t going — his relatives were waiting for him. I guess he figured he’d get away with it, that they wouldn’t touch him. He left. And one day he just stopped responding,” Zyuzev’s friend and former student Alexander (his name has been changed at his request) told T-invariant.
For about a month, there was no word from him. His relatives refused to talk, and his acquaintances had no idea what had happened to him.
“I started sounding the alarm. Mutual friends said he was probably off fishing in his village again. Then one night I snapped, grabbed my laptop, and did a little investigating. On a Komi court website, I found a record showing that his pretrial detention had been extended. So it turned out they’d taken him even earlier, sometime around the middle of the summer,” Alexander says.
The court record didn’t say why Zyuzev had been detained. In September 2025, the website of the Supreme Court of the Komi Republic posted a notice that a criminal case had been opened against the scholar under Article 275.1 of the Russian Criminal Code, “Confidential cooperation with a foreign state or an international or foreign organization.” As Komi Daily reported, investigators searched Zyuzev’s house in the village of Podyelsk, in the Kortkerossky District, in the summer of 2025.
Zyuzev spent more than a year in pretrial detention. According to Alexander, his cell had a refrigerator, and he was taken out for an hour-long walk every day. In his free time, he read books from the prison library and solved chess problems. At the same time, Alexander says, the scholar went through bouts of depression brought on by loneliness and uncertainty. On June 10, 2026, Zyuzev marked his 70th birthday in his cell.
“We write to each other — I’ve gotten five letters so far. He’s in a fighting mood, though one letter was pretty sad. He jokingly calls his imprisonment a cultural-studies expedition to pretrial detention,” Alexander says.
His friends still can’t understand why the scholar decided to go back to Russia. His former colleague, journalist Nikolai Vokuev, has a guess: “I suspect he thought nobody was particularly interested in him and that he could spend the summer in his village. Besides, he’d frankly grown tired of other countries. He complained that he didn’t like the climate in Canada and that things there generally weren’t much to his liking. So he went to do some fishing and spend the summer in his village. And yet back in 2020, he was the one who strongly urged me to leave Russia — he said you can’t stay here. And then he went back himself. I don’t understand why he did it. After all his English-language publications, where he openly condemned the war and the regime’s policies in general, how could he take a risk like that? And whether he was even aware of the risk, I can’t say.”
Nikolay Zyuzev holds a Doctor of Sciences degree in philosophy [Russia’s higher doctorate, above the Candidate of Sciences — T-invariant]. Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he taught at the Komi State Pedagogical Institute, Syktyvkar State University, and Ukhta State Technical University, where he chaired the philosophy department. Much of Zyuzev’s scholarship is devoted to the legacy of the Russian-American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin. Like Zyuzev, Sorokin was ethnically Komi. After the 1917 revolution, he opposed Bolshevik policies, and in 1922 he was expelled from the country. Sorokin later moved to the United States and founded Harvard University’s sociology department. Zyuzev wrote both his Candidate and Doctor of Sciences dissertations on Sorokin’s legacy and published several books about him. Two of them, Pitirim Aleksandrovich Sorokin and Pitirim Sorokin: Teachings and Life, came out in Syktyvkar in 2019.
In 2005–2006, Zyuzev was a visiting professor at Harvard University, where he gathered material for his book Pitirim Sorokin’s Roller Coaster. “In America, Sorokin started almost from scratch and fairly quickly ended up at Harvard — and that ‘roller coaster’ is exactly what Nikolay Zyuzev studied,” Alexei, a historian who specializes in the history of the Russian scholarly emigration, told T-invariant (his last name is withheld at his request).
In 2009, Zyuzev moved to Canada, where he taught at Massey College at the University of Toronto, and in 2015 he became a Canadian citizen. That same year, he returned to Komi and resumed teaching at Syktyvkar University.
“Nikolay was my professor when I was doing my master’s at Syktyvkar State University. An amazing teacher, one of those people who make you want to learn — he got me hooked on the humanities right away. His liberal views were close to mine — a classic liberal,” Alexander recalls.
The FSB’s Show-and-Tell Video
After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Zyuzev left the country. Even so, he kept returning to his native village of Podyelsk from time to time. According to people who know him, Zyuzev missed home and the chance to teach in his native language.
“Nikolay speaks, teaches, and writes beautifully in English — he has no problems with it whatsoever. But I know from my own experience, having lived in Germany for more than 30 years: you can feel completely at ease in a foreign language, like a fish in water. And yet that cozy, at-home feeling you get when you speak your native language may simply not be there in another language,” Gasan Guseinov, a professor at the Free University [founded in 2020 by academics forced out of Russian universities — T-invariant] and a Doctor of Sciences in philology, told T-invariant. “Pitirim Sorokin reflected on his emigration, wrote a great deal about it, and was a bilingual Komi-Russian person. And although he was completely integrated into American life, he never became trilingual, even though he wrote in English. Nikolay sensed this. On the one hand, it’s a very personal topic, and on the other, a politically charged one these days.”
On September 16, 2026, news broke that the Supreme Court of the Komi Republic had sentenced Zyuzev to seven years in a strict-regime penal colony. By then, the charge had been reclassified as high treason. Media outlets cited the FSB’s Public Relations Center, which said the scholar had been “training leaders of movements for the liberation of Russia’s small peoples and developing a project directed against Russia’s sovereignty,” with funding from foreign foundations and organizations designated as undesirable in Russia. According to the FSB, the defendant pleaded guilty. In a video released by the FSB, Zyuzev says he originally planned to create an educational website for teaching the humanities, but European sponsors showed no interest in the project. What interested them far more, Zyuzev said in the FSB video, was “spreading false information about what is happening in Russia, inciting interethnic hatred, criticizing the policies of the Russian authorities, and destabilizing Russia as a whole by developing national movements.”
“In the video, he mentions that he wanted to do an educational project — we corresponded about that too, but it didn’t work out. What he says after that is obviously a script written by ‘Comrade Major’ [a sardonic nickname for a security-service officer — T-invariant]. Those aren’t his words, you can tell — all that stuff about him supposedly wanting to destabilize the country and so on. That’s just not how he puts things,” Vokuev says.
According to the FSB, Zyuzev received a total of €2 million from 12 foreign organizations. They reportedly included German, Czech, Swedish, French, and British foundations designated as undesirable in Russia.
“Anyone who knows what life is like for people like us abroad these days understands that the grant amounts attributed to him in the indictment are absolutely astronomical — seven figures, literally the budget of an entire research center. It’s a bit like those confessions from the 1930s about a tunnel that people from Central Asia were supposedly going to dig to India or Japan to hand over secret information about the Soviet state’s defenses. Utterly unbelievable nonsense. And there were lawyers, even defense attorneys, who added all this to the case file, sat through it, and raised no objections,” Alexei notes.
“It’s a show-and-tell video about what great guys we are, what a fine job we’re doing. Here’s this terrible professor, a Canadian citizen: look, he’s got euros, he’s got a Canadian passport, while you’re living here in poverty, and they’re over there in their Canada trying to destroy our great Russia. Somebody’s getting another star on his shoulder boards for this,” Alexander says. “They say he received two million euros. That’s laughable. I wouldn’t call him a poor man, but his finances are clearly not those of someone who’s received two million euros in grants. I don’t buy it.”
Small Peoples Tearing Russia Apart
According to Zyuzev’s colleagues, preserving the languages and cultures of Indigenous peoples has always been important to him.
“His project may have been aimed, roughly speaking, at developing regional identity, supporting the Komi language, supporting small peoples. But to the FSB, that doesn’t sound so impressive. Whereas training separatist squads… Sorry, but that makes it sound like they caught some foreign superspy engaged in subversion. I think that even if the project was about developing national identity and preserving these peoples’ languages and cultures, the FSB simply recut it into its own propaganda,” Alexander says.
According to Nikolai Vokuev, after the full-scale war in Ukraine began, the situation of Indigenous peoples started getting noticeably more attention in Komi.
“When the war started, this became a common theme. A kind of wave took off, a realization that this war is also a war against the Indigenous peoples who live in Russia. In that context, there was a lot of talk about the Buryats, who were being sent to the front en masse. I work for Komi Daily. Once, for an anniversary of the start of the war, we did a story trying to figure out how many people from different Komi municipalities had been killed. And we concluded that, proportionally, more people were sent from the villages where Komi is predominantly spoken. In other words, the war hits Komi speakers wildly out of proportion,” Vokuev notes.
Vokuev suspects that Zyuzev’s interest in the situation of Indigenous peoples may have been one of the reasons he came to the FSB’s attention:
“Here’s the thing — separatism. That’s what the FSB guys love. It’s what lets them build nice careers and show how hard they’re working. They didn’t want to pass up a chance like that. They don’t have to make anything up. Here you go, a case — attempts to break up the country. And their worries probably aren’t groundless. Starting in 2020, people began rethinking their relationship with Moscow. The Shies affair had a big influence on that [mass protests against the construction of a landfill at Shies station in Arkhangelsk Oblast that began in 2018 — T-invariant]. And you could easily hear people arguing that Moscow’s policy is a colonial policy. In the 2010s, that was an extremely marginal view, but after Shies, that’s exactly how people came to see their relationship with Moscow. So I think the FSB sank its tentacles into this for a reason.”
“Komi is going through total Russification, of course. Under the republic’s constitution, we have two state languages — Russian and Komi. But there was a case where a young guy was detained at a rally in support of Navalny, back in what were, relatively speaking, less bloodthirsty times. And he tried to speak Komi in court. The judge answered him pretty rudely, something like: you went to a Russian school, what is this circus? But where else am I supposed to speak Komi, if not in Komi?” Alexander recalls.
Guseinov believes the Zyuzev case poses a threat to all scholars who work on the languages of small peoples.
“When the Soviet Union was being built, the Bolsheviks destroyed the independence of small nations, from Georgia to Tuva. But back then, the official ideology was one of bilingualism: the national language plus Russian. Russian scholars worked on the so-called young written languages. That is, languages were given writing systems, then they got their own writers, some publishing houses, films were made. These languages were built up and even brought back to life. And in nine cases out of ten, this was done artificially — in the sense that the language wouldn’t have survived on its own; it needed help, it needed education. Then the Soviet Union collapsed, and that official doctrine fell apart too. And suddenly, overnight, in 2018, people are told that small languages are of no use to anyone [that year, Russia amended its education law to make the study of the national republics’ languages optional — T-invariant]. And when someone like Nikolay Zyuzev swims against the current and comes back home to educate people, to work on his own language, they throw him in prison for God knows what,” Guseinov notes.
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What May Have Caught the FSB’s Attention
According to Alexei, regional security services began taking an interest in humanities scholars long before the full-scale war in Ukraine: “The first talk I remember about local security officials in the regions actively calling humanities scholars in for ‘chats’ and narrowing their eyes knowingly whenever international research collaboration came up goes back to around 2007–2008. You’d think these were just distant clouds on the horizon, but it had already started: who are you working for, guys, whose money is paying for your publications — come on, let’s just have a little talk. This had been rolling through the regions for a long time and clearly started earlier than in Moscow and St. Petersburg. And it was aimed specifically at humanities scholars — historians, ethnologists, and sociologists.”
Zyuzev had laid out his views on the situation of the Komi people and on relations between Russia’s regions and the federal center in public. In January 2023, the Canadian current affairs magazine Maclean’s published a first-person account by Zyuzev, “I fled Putin’s Russia for Canada. It opened my eyes,” as told to journalist Adnan Khan. The piece also features in the FSB video about the Zyuzev case. In it, the scholar explained why he had left Russia, criticized Vladimir Putin’s policies, and wrote about the war in Chechnya and the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya.
“Politkovskaya’s murder was a warning to dissidents, and the crushing of the Chechen uprising was a warning to members of Russia’s Indigenous and ethnic minorities. I was both. I’m from the Komi minority, a Finno-Ugric people whose own republic, with a population of nearly one million, lies 1,000 kilometres northeast of Moscow. The Komi people have a distinct language and culture dating back at least two millennia, but under Putin’s rule, we face cultural and linguistic extinction. Like all of Russia’s nearly two dozen republics and four autonomous districts, the Komi Republic is supposed to have some degree of autonomy; in practice, it has none,” Zyuzev wrote.
In the same essay, Zyuzev recounted that in 2015 he was offered the chance to head a new research center at Syktyvkar State University. By then his daughter was already in her teens, his marriage had fallen apart, and he had failed to find an academic position in Canada — so the scholar decided to go back to Russia. According to him, the center’s mission was to build ties with scholars in Europe, North America, and other parts of the world. “So in the fall of 2021, I approached two friends—one a sociologist and retired politician, the other a linguist studying the Komi language — and brought to them a radical new idea: to establish an online Finno-Ugric University. It would offer high-quality social sciences education to Komi youth, help them think more critically and, importantly, raise awareness about the injustices suffered by the Komi people.” Zyuzev wrote.
According to Zyuzev, businessman Leonid Zilberg invited him to work with the outlet 7×7. After the war began, the project’s team left Russia and relocated to Lithuania. In May 2022, Zyuzev also moved to Vilnius and began looking for funding for the Indigenous Russia Information and Education Center.
“We sense an opportunity in the aftermath of Putin’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine: Indigenous peoples have been disproportionately affected by the war, both on the battlefield and as conscripts to Russia’s army. Minority groups in the republics are waking anew to the threat the Kremlin poses. Our hope is that demands for decolonization will become stronger, and the Kremlin will lose its grip on the republics. There may be a rare window of opportunity now to change the conversation in Russia — one we can’t waste,” Zyuzev argued. In closing, he wrote: “The only way to course-correct now is to repudiate Putin’s vision, and to embrace the diversity and vitality of [Russia’s] many peoples.”
“And the real tragedy is precisely that he, in the grip of a deep love for his homeland, came back to his part of the world to educate and enlighten. And now these brutes are pinning God knows what on him. Because the way they see it: we’ve got our own life here, everything’s under control, we don’t give a damn about this Komi language. And you’re just spoiled rotten. You went off to the West, picked up some ideas there, came back, and now you’re trying to lecture us — well, we’ll put you in your place, you lousy intellectual. It’s a kind of revenge for their own indifference, for their own wretchedness. Nikolay came back to a country that had already turned thoroughly fascist, where it was clear they would do something to him, some vile thing. Living under the rule of law had spoiled him. He couldn’t imagine they could do something like this to him. That’s the kind of naivety it was,” Guseinov emphasizes.
[[socialnetworks]]
Zyuzev’s arrest came shortly before searches at Syktyvkar’s Revolt Center, an independent cultural space whose founders included Leonid Zilberg. In the summer of 2025, the center was designated a “foreign agent” and shut down, and one of its founders, Pavel Andreev, was later charged with treason. However, according to Andreev, Zyuzev had no connection to the Revolt Center team and had only spoken at its venue a few times.
Zyuzev’s friends are now trying to draw the international academic community’s attention to his case. “Right now we’re looking for prominent Canadian sociologists and philosophers who could bring the Zyuzev case to the attention of politicians. Maybe, with Canada moving closer to Europe, they’ll take an interest,” Alexander says.
Zyuzev is not the only Russian humanities scholar to receive a long sentence in a criminal case in recent years. Among others, sociologist and political scientistBoris Kagarlitsky, convicted under the law against justifying terrorism, is serving time in a penal colony.
“Quite a few people I know are in prison right now. Boris Kagarlitsky, whom I’ve known since childhood — we lived in the same building. It’s absurd. These are people who are in prison for being smart. That’s the tragedy. It’s the same kind of persecution we saw in the ’30s, the ’40s, and the ’50s: oh, you think you’re too smart — well, here’s what you get. Sociology is a science that makes it possible to improve society. Or to destroy it, if it gets snuffed out. And we’re watching the second process. These cretins don’t even understand what Nikolay Zyuzev’s work is about. They simply don’t understand what intellectual work is for. Because their brains just don’t work. What works are their jaws, which chew people up. And what’s especially painful with Nikolay is that no voice coming from the West, or that could come from there, from Canada, say, will ever reach his jailers’ ears. Maybe there will be some kind of prisoner swaps. There’s no other way he’ll be freed,” Guseinov says.
Alexei also sees the Zyuzev case as a warning to other scholars working on politically sensitive topics:
“Right now, any Tatar, Karelian, or Bashkir historian or ethnologist, say, who back in the 2010s traveled freely to Turkey or Finland, studied figures from the Civil War era and the emigration, and, God forbid, worked with some Germans on sensitive topics like wartime collaborationism, I think, feels like they’re in the crosshairs. For them, the Zyuzev case is an unmistakable signal that anything and everything can be held against them, now and in the future. It seems to me the goal right now is clearly to intimidate scholars. I hope there were no informers involved in the Zyuzev case. But in other fields, unfortunately, they may turn up: self-appointed guardians and pseudo-patriots from within the scholarly community itself.”
“The only thing we can count on is that scholars with an instinct for self-preservation, and people who would like their children to become scholars, will simply leave. Mobility today is completely different from what it was in the 20th century. People are highly mobile and can cross borders relatively easily. And if we prepare for this kind of movement, then young people, at least, can and should be taken out of the Russian Federation — so they can get a normal education and integrate into a more or less humane society,” Guseinov concludes.
The post An Expedition to Prison: Why Philosopher Nikolay Zyuzev Was Sentenced to Seven Years appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.
We, the members of the Russian-American Science Association (RASA), strongly condemn the drone attack on the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine which caused serious damage and, according to reports, resulted in casualties.
Even against the background of the years-long and devastating war, an attack on a national academy of sciences is particularly horrifying. We express our solidarity with the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and with our Ukrainian colleagues, and we extend our deepest condolences to the families and colleagues of those who were killed.
[[socialnetworks]]
Scientific institutions are part of the shared heritage of humanity. They are places where knowledge is created, preserved, and transmitted across generations and across national borders.
The international scientific community has a responsibility to uphold the principles of protecting human life, scientific freedom, international cooperation, and respect for institutions devoted to the pursuit of knowledge.
We reaffirm our commitment to the protection of science as a sphere of international cooperation and human progress, even in times of war.
The post Statement of the Russian-American Science Association in Support of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.
Le 7 septembre, un colon a été blessé à l'arme blanche dans le nord de la Cisjordanie occupée. Le ministre israélien de la défense, M. Israël Katz, a alors menacé l'Autorité palestinienne d'une « guerre totale » si une attaque de grande ampleur venait à se produire contre l'armée ou une colonie. « Dans l'éventualité où (…) nous apprendrions avec certitude qu'ils s'apprêteraient à lancer une attaque “terroriste'' similaire à celle du 7 octobre [2023] contre les forces de “Tsahal'' et la population juive des implantations [nom officiel donné aux colonies], le premier ministre Benyamin Netanyahou et moi-même avons donné pour instruction à l'armée de se préparer à une guerre totale contre les dirigeants et les mécanismes de l'Autorité palestinienne », a ainsi déclaré le ministre, en ajoutant que, sous cette hypothèse, les représailles comprendraient aussi l'« assassinat de personnalités de premier plan » et l'« évacuation des habitants de villes ou de villages d'où des activités “terroristes” sont menées » (AFP, 7 septembre 2026).
L'inquiétude des Palestiniens s'est aggravée deux semaines plus tard après qu'un colon a été tué par balle à quelques heures de la fête de Yom Kippour. Israël a alors été placé en état d'alerte maximale, et l'armée a annoncé le renforcement de ses troupes. « Ils n'attendent qu'une occasion pour transformer la Cisjordanie en Gaza », nous confie un cadre de l'Autorité palestinienne craignant qu'un acte isolé contre une colonie — scénario maintes fois évoqué depuis les attaques du Hamas le 7 octobre 2023 — n'embrase la situation. Pour lui, les Israéliens ne s'attaqueraient pas forcément à toutes les villes en même temps, mais en viseraient une en particulier afin de la vider de ses habitants. Laquelle ? « Je crains beaucoup pour Jénine ou Naplouse, mais Ramallah et surtout Al-Khalil [Hébron] ne sont pas à l'abri. »
Quoi qu'il en soit, de nombreux habitants de Cisjordanie ont retrouvé des réflexes qui remontent aux deux Intifadas en stockant de l'eau et des denrées de première nécessité dans la perspective de combats, de bouclages empêchant les déplacements ou de longs couvre-feux imposés par l'armée à la population.
C'est dans ce contexte que l'Autorité palestinienne, présidée par M. Mahmoud Abbas, prépare les élections législatives du 28 novembre prochain. Ce scrutin, le premier depuis 2006, est censé avoir lieu en Cisjordanie, à Jérusalem-Est et dans la bande de Gaza. Pour mémoire, le Conseil législatif palestinien (CLP), qui fait office de Parlement, ne s'est plus réuni depuis 2007. Le Hamas a fait savoir qu'il participera à ces élections et qu'il tentera de former une large coalition afin de battre le Fatah, la formation de M. Abbas. Nombre d'observateurs estiment que le scénario de 2021 pourrait bien se reproduire avec une annulation sine die du scrutin, cette fois en raison des tensions en Cisjordanie et la situation à Gaza. La tenue de l'élection présidentielle annoncée pour 2027 — la première depuis 2005 — paraît quant à elle des plus improbables.
Two American charities recently announced a new fund to fight forest fires. They want to raise US$100 million to help countries find fires faster and put them out sooner. But the fund, announced at the UN General Assembly, is limited to South America, home to the Amazon rainforest. Southeast Asia is left out, and so […]
The post Indonesia should have a seat at new forest firefighting fund appeared first on Asia Times.
At the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi, Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed that China take the lead in establishing a BRICS AI open-source community. His proposal envisaged cooperation in developing and applying large language models, conducting AI training and seminars and constructing a more open AI ecosystem. He also called for a broader international […]
The post In BRICS open-source AI, China and India will make a good team appeared first on Asia Times.
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This story is a part of the weekly newsletter about security, defence, and tech in the eastern flank of Nato, How we cee it.
Over the past few weeks, a new wave of fear has engulfed Europe. A number of intelligence and government officials have spoken out, saying Russia could possibly attack a Nato country within months, not years.
On 18 September, Polish prime minister Donald Tusk warned that Russia is planning hybrid strikes with drones or rockets on European countries that support Ukraine, such as Poland.
Two days later, Czech intelligence chief Michal Koudelka told the Guardian that, as well as increased drone activity, a small-scale invasion of Nato territory bordering Russia could be part of the Kremlin’s plans.
Then, last Thursday, Denmark’s defence intelligence service said that Russia is likely to intensify its hybrid war against the West in the coming months, with more frequent attacks against Nato countries.
On the same day, speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Poland’s foreign minister Radosław Sikorski said, according to TVP World: “We are receiving information … that Russia is preparing something big this year.”
This is not the first time a wave of comments like this has appeared. A similar situation arose last year, when various officials in Europe took turns escalating their rhetoric about the Russian threat.
It is possible that they are speaking out again because new information has surfaced within the intelligence community. The communication goal could be letting Russia know that they know. Much like CIA director John Ratcliffe’s visit to Moscow last month, this could be an effort to make sure Russia doesn’t miscalculate.
The warnings also come in a different context from last year, when the Baltic countries were sounding the alarm. Russia has noticeably been turning up the temperature of its activity around Europe.
Back in July, a cruise missile crashed in Poland. According to experts, it was not a misguided missile, but one deliberately aimed at Poland. Then, in early August, a drone carrying an explosive device was discovered at Leipzig/Halle Airport in eastern Germany, close to Ukrainian cargo planes.
Germany’s interior minister Alexander Dobrindt said the Leipzig airport attack followed the “well-established pattern of Russian hybrid operations in Europe,” the BBC reported.
According to German investigators, who spoke to Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the incident was also connected to other events, such as an attempted arson attack on a drone manufacturer in eastern Slovakia, and an arson attack in Munich on September 3, when several incendiary devices were thrown from a passing car onto a construction site near the headquarters of defence firms Rohde & Schwarz and Helsing.
In fact, there have been so many different incidents recently that the semi-regular drone incursions into Romania and the Baltics have become almost normalised and struggle to make headlines anymore.
Scenarios of where Russia could take its hybrid attacks next are as abundant as onlookers’ creativity allows. They range from small attacks on factories, through the seizure of a small piece of land by an elite drone unit, all the way to the capture of the Suwałki corridor – a strategic piece of land between the Baltic states and mainland Europe.
Most recently, the CIA warned that while all eyes had so far been on the Baltics, Russia may be preparing a drone strike against Spain, France, and Italy.
According to Marko Mihkelson, chairman of the Estonian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, the snowball of speculation about an imminent Russian attack on Europe is gathering pace.
But as he sees it, isolated facts are being mixed with wishful thinking, worst-case scenarios and, at times, little more than the need to grab attention.
As he wrote in an opinion piece for the Estonian news agency ERR: “Russia understands that it can confuse and paralyse us through information operations alone. Constant speculation about the Baltic states and Poland risks creating the impression that this is primarily a problem for two or three countries on Russia’s doorstep, while the rest of Europe can somehow remain untouched.”
According to Mihkelson, Russia’s campaign against the West would not necessarily begin with a conventional attack.
It could start by undermining Nato from within: interfering in elections, amplifying polarising narratives, exploiting political divisions, and spreading fear. It could seek to isolate Ukraine by limiting Western support, and then test Nato’s willingness to stand together.
As for worries that Russia will attempt to grab land from the Baltics or Poland, there are no significant material or military changes to note along the borders.
Belarus did hold a four-day military exercise near its border with the Suwałki corridor in mid-September, but that is nothing close to the signals we were getting from Russia just before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Back then, physical military infrastructure was being constructed ahead of the attack.
There are also no significant changes in the Russian military’s posture to launch a land attack against the Baltics.
Estonian government officials confirm this. According to Estonia’s minister of defence, Martin Herem, its assessment of the Russian threat remains unchanged.
That means Russia’s main effort remains focused on its war in Ukraine, and neither Estonia, Denmark, nor other Nato allies currently see a threat requiring raised military readiness.
Military experts in Lithuania also see no signs of new escalation. This doesn’t mean Russia won’t continue to be dangerous. It means that Russia has been engaged in provocations against Nato countries for years already, and similar behaviour will continue.
“No one is currently planning to conquer us – not at this moment, nor this year. In this case, specific, very precise attacks or provocations are more likely, designed not so much to cause physical damage as to sow serious panic in people’s minds,” Deividas Šlekys, a professor at Vilnius University’s Institute of Political Science and International Relations, told the Lithuanian wire LRT on Monday (28 September).
And so, while last autumn it was the Baltic states sounding the alarm about a potential Russian attack, now their officials are looking to calm the panic about their aggressive neighbour.
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Sep. 28, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
The White House recycled material from President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign for a new taxpayer-funded ad that aired nationwide this past weekend, just weeks before the high-stakes November midterms.
The 30-second black-and-white ad features Trump walking down a hallway to audio of him vowing to “demolish the deep state” and “expel the warmongers from our government,” even as the president wages an illegal and deeply unpopular war on Iran that has killed thousands and driven up prices at home and around the world. During the final 10 seconds of the ad, white text appears at the bottom of the screen stating, “Paid for by the US government.”
The ad is just the latest taxpayer-funded, explicitly pro-Trump spot that the White House has launched in recent days, prompting alarm from lawmakers and government watchdog organizations who say the administration is using public funds to flood airwaves with the president’s campaign ads shortly before an election.
Watch the newly aired ad:
The U.S. Government is up on TV with this spot —
— Medium Buying (@MediumBuying) September 27, 2026
It aired nationally on FOX yesterday during Illinois at #7 Ohio State and also during Fox News Sunday this morning pic.twitter.com/8PP9FPzUZk
Richard Painter, who served as the White House’s chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, said the taxpayer-funded campaign ads “could be an impeachable offense,” noting that “Congress has expressly prohibited government-sponsored political propaganda, which is dangerous for democracy.”
The federal government appears to have spent more than $1 million on pro-Trump ads in recent days, The New York Times reported on Sunday, citing an estimate from AdImpact.
Last week, as Common Dreams reported, the White House launched a taxpayer-funded ad in which Trump declares that “America will never be a communist country” and promotes tax cuts he signed into law, delivering a massive windfall to the rich and large corporations.
Norm Eisen, former White House special counsel for ethics and government reform, told the Times on Sunday that “the president and his administration have gone from breaking the law to trampling it.”
“The prior ad was bad enough,” said Eisen, “but this one openly repurposes prior political conduct.”
US Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) wrote on social media that Republicans shouldn’t be taken seriously when they claim to care about “waste, fraud, and abuse” as the president and leader of their party runs campaign ads with taxpayer money.
“What a cult this party has become,” Murphy added.
Climate Week NYC is packing its tent after another week of green grandstanding, empty promises and soaring energy bills, says Dr Tilak Doshi. Same circus, same clowns, same time next year.
The post New York’s Climate Circus: Same Clowns, Emptier Promises appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
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