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In 'Blockers,' Michael Lewis highlights government workers who resisted DOGE

Elon Musk has donated more than $365 million to support Republicans in the midterm elections. Musk's influence on the federal government is the focus of "Blockers," a new book by Michael Lewis. Lisa Desjardins sat down with Lewis to discuss Musk's time leading DOGE and the federal workers who found themselves in its crosshairs.

Fears that Ukraine will lose Starlink are back after Musk backed Trump against Zelenskyy. Adviser says profit makes cutoff unlikely

11 October 2026 at 20:10

SpaceX will not cut Ukraine off from Starlink satellite communications, Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov, presidential adviser on defense technology, says. The reason is that the company could lose a large share of its revenue.

Ukraine’s troops and drones lean heavily on Starlink, a network Kyiv neither owns nor controls, and Elon Musk has used that control against it before. The latest shutdown fears spread after Elon Musk supported US President Donald Trump's criticism of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

    “Not a year goes by without it coming up again: ‘They’ll cut off our Starlink.’ The enemy’s Telegram channels fuel these rumors. We have good and stable partner relations with SpaceX,” Flash writes.

    Musk is first of all a businessman, and Ukraine brings SpaceX significant profit, so he is sure no one will switch Starlink off in Ukraine, Flash said. Unexpected moves are possible, he added, but of a different kind, such as turning Starlink on for Russia inside its own territory.

    The rumors come amid real US pressure

    The fears did not appear in a vacuum. After Trump allowed Russian diesel back to US markets, talk spread of "sanctions" on Ukraine if it keeps hitting the Russian refineries that fund Moscow, with the Financial Times reporting, citing European officials, that Trump’s administration has threatened to halt the mechanism for buying US weapons for Ukraine, known as PURL.

    Axios has also reported, citing a Ukrainian and an American official, that Washington has threatened to stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine if it continues striking Russian refineries.

    Ukraine is building a backup

    The scare feeds a longer effort to reduce dependence. Ukraine is working on a satellite system of its own, something similar to Starlink but beyond Musk’s control, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on 4 October.

    The timing is the reason, he said: some states will share the technology with Russia late this year or early next, and the Chinese are among them. Moscow is already fielding its own Starlink-style constellation, Rassvet, though for now it reaches Ukraine only in brief passes.

    The AI labor apocalypse is on hold (for now)

    11 October 2026 at 05:00

    There are three versions of Saint John’s Book of the Apocalypse, a text that never loses relevance and now seems to presage the impacts of artificial intelligence (AI).

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    © Josh Edelson (AP Photo/Josh Edelson)

    A protest against AI outside the OpenAI DevDay 2026 conference in San Francisco on September 29.

    The Great Debate About Whether the Radical Right or the Lunatic Left is “Normal”

    10 October 2026 at 11:00

    We're in the middle of a vast argument about what is normal, says Prof James Alexander. Is Elon Musk right that what is now called 'far Right' was normal 10 minutes ago, or should we be listening to the 'lunatic Left'?

    The post The Great Debate About Whether the Radical Right or the Lunatic Left is “Normal” appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

    The dark side of Starship’s success: Musk sidelines NASA in his bid to dominate space

    5 October 2026 at 12:13

    Elon Musk is stepping on the gas with Starship. His flagship spacecraft, the largest ever built, entered orbit for the first time on Monday, and his space company, SpaceX, has already received approval from the U.S. federal government to accelerate the current testing phase and launch it twice more in October if it wishes.

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    © SpaceX

    Image of the Starship S41 as it fired its engines to enter Earth orbit, 25 minutes after its launch from Starbase on September 28.

    AI’s top leaders, like children afraid of a bully

    4 October 2026 at 05:00

    “This guy is a monster,” Donald Trump said in front of Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive. “And nobody knows him. What a great life! To be a monster and not have to go through this,” Trump continued, pointing at the reporters who follow him everywhere. Pichai stood beside him, waiting to speak with an expression of resigned disbelief. Before the exchange ended, Trump joked about his Indian name: “Sundarrrrr is his name.” When Pichai finally spoke, he tried to play it down: “Hopefully, that will be a better tagline than ‘I’m a monster,’” he said.

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    © Alex Brandon (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

    President Donald Trump and Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg listen to Dario Amodei on the White House lawn this Tuesday.

    The bursting of the Cristiano Ronaldo bubble

    2 October 2026 at 19:03

    On December 6, 2022, hours before facing Switzerland in the last 16 of the Qatar World Cup, Portugal coach Fernando Santos summoned Cristiano Ronaldo to his room at the team hotel. “I explained to him that he would not start that night because he lacked match rhythm, and he took it badly,” the coach recalled. It was the trigger for a crisis that four years later still consumes time and energy at a federation that has failed to promote an extraordinary generation of talent without subordinating it to the contradiction of playing for a footballer who achieved greatness thanks to his dynamism but is now 41 and has long struggled to move around the field.

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    © PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA (AFP)

    Cristiano Ronaldo during the game against Wales on September 24.

    Hegseth taps three to lead ‘Future of Warfare’ project

    1 October 2026 at 19:26

    US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Wednesday that three men will help lead a new Pentagon project on the “future of warfare,” even as he moves to eliminate hundreds of senior armed service leadership position, including many generals and admirals. Hegseth unveiled Project Meridian during his “State of the Force” address at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. The 120-day […]

    The post Hegseth taps three to lead ‘Future of Warfare’ project appeared first on Asia Times.

    AI’s apparent danger is its best selling point

    1 October 2026 at 09:56

    Just weeks before its scheduled November IPO, Anthropic is facing growing attention over the potential dangers of its technology. The resignation of former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon on September 8, who wrote on X that AI could “kill us all by the end of the decade,” preceded the company’s threat report on September 10. According […]

    The post AI’s apparent danger is its best selling point appeared first on Asia Times.

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