Britain is heading towards blackouts because of its overreliance on renewables, says energy expert Richard Lyon, who explains how Britain's power grid works and why Net Zero is making it vulnerable to severe outages.
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Kenya wants five of its citizens captured fighting for Russia in Ukraine to be treated as victims of human trafficking rather than prisoners of war, Foreign Affairs Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi told Kenyan lawmakers on 8 October, Bloomberg reported. Botswana is also seeking a citizen's return.
In 2025, Ukrainian ambassador Ivan Kholostenko called Russia's role in Africa neocolonialism. As Africa Corps troops prop up friendly regimes, the Kremlin is carrying out "a typical colonial practice of resource extraction," taking gold, diamonds, bauxite, and uranium, according to Ukraine's Foreign Intelligence. Russia also uses the continent as a recruiting ground for its war: nearly 500 Africans have died fighting for Russia, Ukraine says.
Kenya is negotiating to bring the five men home, and President William Ruto has raised the matter with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Mudavadi told the Senate. One has been held since November 2025, the others since March and April. The youngest is 23, Bloomberg reported. Kenya's honorary consul found them held in humane conditions at the Zakhid-1 camp, with access to medical care, the government said. Ukraine also holds the remains of four Kenyans.
African governments say some of their citizens went to Russia for promised work as drivers, security guards, or cooks and were then forced into military service. The Kenyans "report having been recruited under false promises of employment," Mudavadi said.
"The circumstances of their recruitment and conscription are consistent with trafficking in persons," he said.
Ukraine's POW authority sees most foreign recruits differently. "The main motive for most of these mercenaries is financial gain," Dmytro Usov, secretary of Ukraine's Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, said in November 2025, while stressing that many had ended up in Russia's army through fraud or coercion.
Ukraine holds that prisoners of war go home through exchanges, but Russia has never asked to trade for any foreign fighter except North Koreans, the headquarters said in May, adding it may consider other solutions if diplomats and lawyers find one.
Russia has recruited more than 28,000 foreigners from 135 countries, and more than 5,000 have been killed, a Ukrainian government website cited by Bloomberg says. Ukraine holds at least 213 foreign prisoners of war, not counting Russians and North Koreans, 37 of them African, according to documents Bloomberg saw. Russian dictator Vladimir Putin claimed on 3 September that people are "coming forward voluntarily and signing contracts."
Kenya's government counts 354 citizens linked to the war: 84 killed or missing, 34 hospitalized in Russia, and 62 repatriated. Petitioners told senators that 841 Kenyans remain unaccounted for. Mudavadi said his March visit to Moscow put Kenya on a Russian recruitment "stop list," with no new Kenyans enlisted since.
In August, Botswana stopped eight citizens from joining the Russian military at airports in Botswana, South Africa, and Ethiopia, Bloomberg reported.
Ghana accused Russia of luring its citizens into the war the same month, after Kenya and South Africa. The European Parliament said in March that Russia strips African recruits of their documents. Ukraine, meanwhile, is drafting its first Africa strategy.
Eight million properties in Britain are at risk of flooding by mid-century due to climate change, the Environment Agency has claimed. That's a quarter of the total. It's completely preposterous, says Paul Homewood.
The post Eight Million Properties at Risk of Flooding by Mid-Century, Claims Environment Agency appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
Andy Burnham's vision of the "common good" – with Net Zero at its heart – is just reheated Fabian socialism, says Dr Tilak Doshi – and the fingerprints of Left-wing economist Mariana Mazzucato are all over it.
The post Burnham’s “Common Good” is Reheated Fabian Socialism appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
For decades, the Indonesia Stock Exchange has run like a members’ club, where the brokers who trade on the IDX also own it. But that cozy arrangement is about to end under an amended financial sector law that requires the exchange to demutualize. The Financial Services Authority, or OJK, has issued a new regulation on […]
The post Indonesia’s bourse rebuild is really a monetary policy story appeared first on Asia Times.
Climate alarmism propaganda about the collapse of the Gulf Stream has made it into the Telegraph thanks to the new owners recycling the work of Politico's Zia Weise. Is this a sign of things to come, asks Ben Pile.
The post Climate Alarmist Propaganda Comes to the Telegraph appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
A quarter-century ago, after a deadly terrorist attack raised fiery explosions from the World Trade Center buildings, the US Department of Homeland Security introduced a color-coded advisory system, under which orange signified “High Risk of Terrorist Activities.” For many people, including Dushko Petrovich Córdova, “this ambient, lingering orange signaled that emergency was continuous, a new way of living.” Ours is a world of prison jumpsuits and Home Depot, leaders with an affinity for fake tans and “aptitude for the orange of perpetual crisis,” public health maps of infection rates painted various shades of orange to mark severity, a sky dyed orange by wildfire smoke. We are inundated by the color; it feels, at times, inescapable. Is it really? Follow Córdova to the brilliant end of this stunner.
Once, in the late ’90s, a few years before the dawn of the orange era, I found myself in Montreal for a friend’s wedding. There was a wildfire nearby, and I remember trying to capture the eerie effect of the atmosphere turning orange with the disposable cameras that had been handed out to all the guests. The resulting pictures looked underexposed and nothing more, the otherworldly orange haze rendered mostly regular gray.
So, decades later, in 2023, when photos of smoke from yet another Canadian wildfire began to appear on social media, I was surprised by how well digital photography had captured what had proved so elusive in the late disposable-camera era. The best civilian shot I saw was of the scenery through a window. The cool interior lighting framed the orangeness outside, in the same way that you might frame a sunset, except that instead of a bright band of orange light at the horizon, this orange was everywhere, pressing at all the edges of the window frame and probably trying to get in through the cracks. In another image I saw a gray cat sitting on a windowsill, apparently unperturbed by the wide expanse of horror just behind it.
Carbon Brief claims that wind and solar power saved the UK from gas imports worth £5.9bn during the Hormuz crisis. Not mentioned, says Paul Homewood, is that the wind and solar power cost more.
The post Carbon Brief’s Con Trick appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
Restoring the grid after a nationwide outage could take as long as two weeks, says Kathryn Porter. So you need to be prepared. Here’s what every household needs – from torches to generators and keeping warm safely.
The post How to Prepare for a Blackout appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
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.
The Bishop of Leeds is urging Catholics to 'live simply' to protect the planet. But why are bishops banging on about climate change when they're supposed to be saving souls? asks Roger Watson.
The post Saving the Planet, One Pastoral Letter at a Time appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
No one knows how the US Supreme Court will rule in Suncor v. Boulder, the case that will kick off the court’s fall term next week and will likely decide whether the city and county of Boulder, Colorado, will be able to put oil giants ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy on trial for deceiving the public for decades about the climate harms of fossil […]
The post Big Oil fears the evidence of its deliberate climate lies appeared first on Asia Times.
So, this is Andy Burnham's solution to soaring energy prices: nationalisation and relitigating the 1970s. It's just a shame, says Ben Pile, that energy was far cheaper under Thatcher than in our Net Zero era.
The post Political Spite Won’t Keep the Lights On appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
In this tense, riveting first-person excerpt from his new book This Cursed Beautiful Land: A Russian Story, Evan Gershkovich recounts the harrowing months he spent as a prisoner in Russia, leading up to his eventual release in a complex, multi-country prisoner exchange. Even in the darkness, Gershkovich offers rays of light: care packages from friends, letters by the hundred, and a cautiously blossoming love with a friend in Berlin. We may know the ending, but the details of these days reveal what it takes to get there.
A few hours after my arrival, I heard a cart rolling down the hallway. A guard opened a kormushka — a feeder window in the door about the size of a human head. A man in a chef’s uniform filled my bowl with porridge, placed a piece of rancid-smelling boiled fish on my plate and gave me some weak tea. The reality of my new surroundings slammed into me.
Thoughts ricocheted inside my head. Earlier in the day I’d had a comforting one: they’ve taken me for a swap, I told myself. That’s all this is.
Now, curled up on the bed in my 12ft by 8ft cell, knees pulled to my chest, I thought, what if the FSB really does think I’m a spy and wants to make an example out of me? Maybe they don’t want to swap me at all. Maybe I really will spend 20 years here.
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.
In summer 2023 Dr Colin M. Barron published a book, I Will Never Buy an Electric Car, in which he set out all the shortcomings of EVs. Now, three years later, he says the case has only got worse.
The post Why I Will Still Never Buy an Electric Car appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
At the UN last week, Ed Miliband shared details of a secret "damning" climate spy report. Ben Pile points out that a similar secret report appeared 22 years ago – and not one of its apocalyptic predictions came true.
The post Spies and Their Climate Lies appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
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.
The 2026 Planetary Health Check – which claims seven "planetary boundaries" are now breached – is the latest report from the doomsters that is wholly detached from the facts, says Tilak Doshi.
The post Doom Never Goes Out of Fashion: The Problem With the “Planetary Health Check” appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
Five months after the IPCC ruled that the infamous RCP8.5 doomsday climate scenario was "implausible", the Met Office is still whipping up unjustified Net-Zero convenient fear, says Chris Morrison.
The post “Implausible” Met Office UK Climate Projections Still Whipping up Unjustified Net Zero-Convenient Fear appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
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