As the US turned 251, a familiar ritual repeated this year as American politicians lined up to toast the Navy with patriotic messages and, interestingly, images of Indian and Russian warships.

The US Navy celebrates its birthday every year on October 13, marking the day the Second Continental Congress authorized the outfitting of two armed vessels to intercept British supply ships during the American Revolution—the decision that created the Continental Navy, a force that eventually grew into the United States Navy.

As US Navy birthday wishes poured in on October 13, several US lawmakers joined the rush to pay their homage, resulting in a series of social media misfires.

For instance, Georgia Governor Brian P. Kemp posted a message with an image of three sleek gray warships steaming in formation.

At first glance, the post seems routine, but a closer look reveals the warships are Indian Navy vessels, as Dave Brown, the Deputy Washington Bureau Chief at The Wall Street Journal, and military observers pointed out.

The ships have since been identified as INS Godavari, INS Brahmaputra, and INS Beas, although a community note on Kemp’s post flags them as Kolkata-class guided-missile destroyers.

Despite criticism, Kemp has not taken down the post.

Another lawmaker, Ohio State Representative Mike Dovilla, paid his respects on X, saying: “Happy Birthday, U.S. Navy. I am proud of my service in naval intelligence and grateful to all who serve our nation with honor, courage, and commitment. To our sailors, veterans, and their families, thank you.”

Interestingly, though, Dovilla used an image of a Russian warship instead of a US one, a move that drew scrutiny, given that the lawmaker is a Navy Reserve commander and has previously served as a lieutenant commander in the Navy.

Dovilla deleted the post after observers pointed out the error.

Meanwhile, San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria posted images of what has been identified as the Soviet-era cruiser Mikhail Kutuzov, now a museum ship based in Novorossiysk, Russia.

To make matters worse, Gloria wrote: “San Diego is a proud military town. Sailors and their families are a part of the fabric of our community. For 251 years, sailors have answered our nation’s call with courage,” further emphasizing his ignorance.

In another goof-up, the Republican-aligned think tank Freedom Caucus Foundation jumped on the bandwagon of errors by using a picture of the Indian Navy ship INS Trikand. 

A Mistake That Keeps Repeating 

In 2025, the US Navy’s SEAL Museum posted an image of a Russian missile cruiser to mark the US Navy’s 250th birthday. Meanwhile, several elected representatives and public accounts used images of Indian and Russian Navy warships to mark the service’s birthday.

Representative Kyle Donahue, Representative Arvind Venkat, and Representative Andy Harris used images of Indian warships in their posts, while Senator Jim Boyd used an image of a Russian battleship cruiser to pay tribute to the US Navy for its birthday.

These are just a few of the many social media faux pas that were flagged last year.

Similarly, in 2023, Representative Cory Mills and Representative David Trone’s birthday greetings featured images of a Russian warship. On the other hand, the SEAL Legacy Foundation, which supports families of wounded and fallen United States Navy SEALs, used a Russian ship to mark the occasion, whereas the official X page of Homeland Security used the image depicting a Canadian frigate. 

Things weren’t much different in 2021, when Senator Jim Risch published a heartfelt wish for the USN’s birthday, but used a photo of what was later identified as a Pattani-class offshore patrol vessel belonging to the Royal Thai Navy, potentially built by China.

While ship identification may not be a strong suit for many in the United States, it is not much different for combat aircraft.

In a major embarrassment last year, the Pentagon’s Joint Program Office  (JPO) posted an image of the Chinese J-35A stealth fighter instead of the US F-35 Joint Strike Fighter in a Veterans Day homage post. “Today, and every day, we thank all Veterans and those currently serving for their service and sacrifice,” the Pentagon official’s post stated. However, the office took the post down as criticism mounted over the bizarre mistake.

In 2023, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna—an Air Force (USAF) veteran herself—posted birthday graphics for the US Air Force (USAF) on X and Instagram that used silhouettes of Russian MiG-29 fighters. Air Force historians and defense analysts immediately flagged the image, after which the politician took it down and blamed a junior staffer for the error.

In 2021, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi made a similar error when she congratulated the US Air Force Reserve Command on its birthday with a graphic showing Russian Su-34 Fullback strike aircraft. “Happy 73rd Birthday to the @USAFReserve! Thankful for all the reservists who are constantly on the ready to serve our nation,” Hyde-Smith said on X, along with a graphic showing four Su-34 jets in flight. 

Needless to say, she deleted the post after netizens mocked her for the error.

However, Dr. Rob Lee of King’s College in London, who specializes in war studies, joked at the time that Hyde-Smith’s post was part of the “national pastime of mistaking Russian weapons for our own” among Americans.

In an even more ridiculous mistake in 2021, the official Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) account posted a birthday graphic for the US Air Force that featured silhouettes of Russian Sukhoi Su-27 fighter jets.

Meanwhile, one of the accounts connected to “Operation Inherent Resolve” posted a picture of two US Navy Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornets with best wishes to the air force, creating another embarrassing situation.

Similarly, Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign released a “Support Our Troops”  advertisement accompanied by a photo of Russian MiG-29 fighter jets flying over troops with Kalashnikov-pattern rifles. Unsurprisingly, aviation experts widely mocked it, saying it clearly wasn’t American.

Defense analysts have long noted the mechanics behind these recurring errors. For example, modern warships and fighters share enough visual DNA- gray paint, angular superstructures, and similar radar masts- that non-specialists struggle to tell them apart at a glance.

Staffers working under deadline pressure rarely pause to verify hull numbers or distinctive features, making it a low-stakes but revealing ritual.

• Contact the author at sakshi.tiwari13 (at) outlook.com
• Follow EurAsian Times on Google News

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Amid growing anxieties in Europe over “the Russian threat”, the US Air Force General Alexus Grynkewich, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), has unveiled what he called the alliance’s “Theory of Victory”. 

Though his Polish hosts did not seem fully satisfied, General Grynkewich assured, on October 12, at the “Warsaw Security Forum,” an annual international conference in the Polish capital, that the alliance is ready to defend itself.

Reassuring America’s reliability as an ally and Washington’s firm commitment to NATO’s Article 5, which envisages collective defense, he said that if an adversary is “foolish enough” to strike, the alliance is fully prepared to “fight tonight”.

During a panel discussion titled “Theory of Victory: How Do We Achieve Military Success Against Russia in Deterrence and Defense?” Grynkewich stated that NATO would destroy “anything and everything” that supports an attack on allied territory.

He asserted, “Should the adversary choose to press the attack or commit his reserves, we will break the warfighting system engaged against us.”

In what the experts describe as an unprecedented move to project an absolute ironclad assurance of security to the one billion citizens living under the NATO umbrella, and to send an unmistakable warning of devastating consequences to adversaries, particularly Moscow ( though he did not mention it explicitly), General Grynkewich then went on to clearly articulate key elements of what was hitherto classified as NATO’s “Theory of Victory”.

NATO had developed a well-known “Theory of Victory,” but its elements were not well understood. General Grynkewich revealed them as part of a rigorous three-phase strategic framework: “Block, Blunt, and Break”.

This triad dictates the sequential escalation and synchronization of Allied multi-domain power from the very first moments of aggression.

While Grynkewich did not explicitly mention Russia during his address, his comments clearly targeted Moscow, especially in light of NATO’s 2022 Strategic Concept, which identifies Russia as the most significant and direct threat to allied security.

“My theory of victory is simple: we will block the initial attack. If the attack persists, we will blunt it and prevent enemy advance,” he expla ned. “And if required, we will break the enemy’s forces and the operational warfighting system that is arrayed against us.”

Based on his elaboration, Phase One of Block is the first line of defense. It focuses on an immediate, unyielding denial of territory. If an adversary breaches an allied border, NATO’s forward land forces are trained to deploy instantaneously to halt the invading army directly at the point of contact.

Rather than letting an adversary establish a foothold or capture territory for political leverage, the “Block” phase aims to isolate the initial push. This relies on integrated multi-domain operations, using localized ground units heavily supported by air superiority, naval assets, space surveillance, and active cyber capabilities to immediately close the operational window on the attacker.

If an offensive survives the initial blocking force and persists, NATO transitions to the “Blunt” phase.

The goal shifts from containment to actively stripping the enemy of operational momentum and initiative. To achieve this, the alliance leverages highly advanced technological systems. Grynkewich highlighted the deployment of massive sensor networks, autonomous combat systems, and AI-driven multi-domain targeting to completely suppress the enemy’s ability to coordinate large-scale maneuvers or advance deeper into allied territory.

The final, most severe component of the strategy is the mandate to “Break” the adversary. If an aggressor refuses to cease hostilities or attempts to mobilize its strategic reserves, NATO will launch massive, far-reaching retaliatory actions. Grynkewich explicitly stated that this phase extends far beyond the physical front lines of the immediate conflict. NATO will target and destroy the entire overarching warfighting framework arrayed against it.

This means systematically dismantling command-and-control centers; physical supply and logistics networks; replenishment warehouses; communications arrays; and anything else sustaining the offensive force.

However, Grynkewich carefully balanced aggressive deterrence with diplomatic clarity, noting that NATO did not view a direct military conflict with Russia as imminent or inevitable. Instead, he stressed that the most effective tool for preserving peace is maintaining absolute readiness for war while keeping communication channels open to prevent miscalculations.

This updated strategy appears to draw directly on critical lessons from contemporary battlefields in Ukraine and the Middle East. It explicitly moves away from relying solely on hyper-expensive, exquisite military hardware. Instead, NATO is prioritizing a hybrid mix of technological enablers that pairs high-end precision weapons with large numbers of cheaper, scalable systems like attritable drones and counter-UAS platforms to overwhelm an adversary’s defenses effectively.

General Grynkewich reportedly emphasized three things in this regard: 

First is the “Eastern Flank Deterrence Initiative (EFD),” which serves as the deployment vehicle for a vast network of low-cost, expendable drones and minimally crewed or fully autonomous reconnaissance and strike systems.

Second is “AI-Powered Targeting,” which uses artificial intelligence to sift through vast data streams generated by advanced sensors, satellite arrays, and cyber intelligence. By shortening the sensor-to-shooter loop, AI-enabled networks identify, categorize, and assign targets to artillery, missile systems, or loitering munitions in real time, long before human staff could process the raw coordinates.

Third is the “System Layering” strategy, which does not replace heavy conventional hardware such as main battle tanks or fifth-generation fighter jets but rather insulates them. Cheap, modular drone walls absorb the weight of initial saturation attacks, counter enemy mass, and clear pathways, preserving high-end kinetic platforms for decisive operations against hardened infrastructure.

Overall, the emphasis on sensors, autonomous systems, precision weapons, and integrated land, air, sea, space, and cyber capabilities recognizes that contemporary combat depends as much on information, networks, and logistics as on troop numbers.

The idea is that NATO must exploit technological advantages while producing affordable systems in sufficient quantities.

NATO has periodically revised its strategies, keeping technological developments and threat environments in mind.

During the Cold War, the alliance relied primarily on what it called “forward defense” and “flexible response.”  The forward defense strategy supposedly committed NATO to hold the inner-German border and assumed a possible retreat across deep defensive lines before counter-attacking.

The Flexible Response strategy relied heavily on the explicit threat of nuclear escalation in the theater to offset Warsaw Pact forces’ conventional numerical superiority.

After the end of the Cold War and disintegration of the Soviet Union,  NATO was said to have adopted an expeditionary, crisis-management model. In this model, deterrence was linked to political goodwill, and force structures were optimized for out-of-area counter-insurgency campaigns.

This resulted in a lean force model with thin ammunition reserves and a lack of the rapid forward mobilization needed for high-intensity, continent-scale conventional combat.

Against this background, the “Theory of Victory” is said to address post-Cold War vulnerabilities by institutionalizing a modern denial posture. It replaces reliance on early tactical nuclear escalation with conventional, technology-driven mass.

Apparently,  it abandons the concept of “liberation after occupation,” acknowledging that the civilian cost and physical destruction associated with liberating occupied territory are strategically unacceptable in the modern geopolitical environment.

Instead, it shows the capacity to neutralize an incursion early and convince potential adversaries that the cost of an attack will always outweigh any conceivable strategic gain.

Finally, by linking it to Article 5, NATO’s latest concept displays elements of calculated “strategic ambiguity”; it is id. NATO will not publicly define the exact point at which an attack would trigger its collective-defense clause, as doing so would help adversaries calculate how far they can escalate without provoking an allied response.

The ambiguity is designed to complicate enemy calculations, ensuring that hybrid operations, gray-zone provocations, or minor border incursions carry the unpredictable risk of drawing a full, multi-domain response from the alliance.

While the reactions of America’s major European NATO allies to General Grynkewich were not available at the time of writing, it is fair to guess they were reassured that Washington is prepared to fight if attacked.

However, erstwhile Warsaw Pact member and now Russia’s biggest critic, Poland, which has joined NATO, does not seem fully satisfied. Reports quoting the Polish weekly “Polityka” question the fundamental premise of NATO’s military strategy: preventing an adversary from achieving its goals, rather than launching an offensive campaign to destroy a foreign military power fully.

This perspective, detailed by defense analyst Marek Świerczyński, unpacks the structural reality behind General Alexus Grynkewich’s “Theory of Victory” speech.

He argues that beyond NATO’s institutional focus on calculated deterrence, escalation control, and defending its current borders, the alliance should fight deep inside Russia, without crossing the border, to crush the Russian military as a whole (through missile and drone firepower).

But then, this is a limited view. Overall, General Grynkewich seems to reflect that current NATO thinking is to de-escalate with Russia, not to defeat it strategically or to change its regime. The core objective of the Theory of Victory strategy is strictly containment, deterrence, and risk management.

In that sense, the name of the theory may be a little misleading.

• Author and veteran journalist Prakash Nanda is Chairman of the Editorial Board of the EurAsian Times and has been commenting on politics, foreign policy, and strategic affairs for nearly three decades. He is a former National Fellow of the Indian Council for Historical Research and a recipient of the Seoul Peace Prize Scholarship.
• The author can be reached at prakash.nanda (at) hotmail.com

The post Top USAF General Reveals NATO Plan to Fight Russia — But it is Designed for Containment, Not Decisive Defeat appeared first on EURASIAN TIMES.

European Commission declined to comment on reported disruption to Starlink’s services in Ukraine

• Ukrainian soldiers have access to Starlink satellite internet restricted

Rutte gets asked “is Russia foolish enough to consider attacking any of Nato countries?”

He says “we don’t think so” and that there is “no imminent threat against Nato territory,” but stresses that “if we see a build up, we will react to it.”

“We will never, ever mount a attack towards anyone else because that is not in our interest. We are a defensive alliance.”

“But here’s the main thing: we are stronger. Russia is not in a good place. These hybrid attacks, whatever it is, are a sign of weakness. What they allow us to do is to talk about it the whole day and to be rattled and to have press conferences on it. We’re not going to do that. We will react where we need to react.”

Have we passed peak oil – are fossil fuels running out? Richard Lyon says yes, and the transition to 'renewables' is making it worse. But peak oil is a myth, says Tilak Doshi, as he reviews Lyon's book The Energy Trap.

The post Are Fossil Fuels Running Out? appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

On October 10, thousands of Ecuadorians took to the streets to protest against the government of right-wing President Daniel Noboa. The demonstration was organized by the Autonomous Front of Organized Resistance (FARO) under the slogan “Government vs. People.”

Saturday’s demonstration followed a protest on October 8, organized by labor unions also in Quito, to protest the security, energy, health, and employment crises facing the country. They also protested government cuts to education and health care, as well as alleged mistreatment of workers, according to Edwin Bedoya, president of the United Workers’ Front (FUT).

For its part, the October 10 demonstration – which consisted mainly of high school and college students – set out from the Central University and marched through Quito. Slogans such as “If the people have no peace, neither does the government” and “Out with Noboa, out with him!” were heard along the streets occupied by the demonstrators.

The president of the Catholic University Student Federation, Jatari Ulcuango, told protesters: “Four years ago, this government promised us electricity; two years ago, too – and now the blackouts have returned. Two months ago, the government told us it would provide us with medicine, and yet we’re only receiving 60% of the supply. They’re taking us for fools.”

He added: “We’re dying outside the hospitals. Criminals are kidnapping us, murdering us, and robbing us. That’s why we’ve come out this morning. They plan to dismantle public institutions to force us to hire private security. Who has gotten rich off the health crisis? The private healthcare sector, while the people are getting poorer and poorer.”

The peaceful march headed back to the Central University, where the students gathered. Later, the students reported on social media that they had been harassed and repressed by the police, who had accompanied the entire march.

Likewise, several media outlets reported that the police were aggressive toward them. This was reported by the outlet La Barra Espaciadora, which released a video showing police officers pushing journalists.

TeleSur journalist Elena Rodríguez also reported that law enforcement officers broke the microphone she was using and struck her on the head: “I’m sick and tired of having to recount, time and time again, police attacks against the press. Today, while I was trying to document the violence with which officers were beating young protesters, I was struck on the head from behind with a baton. I turned around, showed my Telesur microphone to identify myself as a journalist, and the response was another baton strike that ended up breaking it.”

She added: “If they think that by beating me up they’re going to get me to stop documenting police brutality, to put my microphone away, or to back off several blocks so I can report from a place where I won’t be a nuisance, they’re wrong. It is not we journalists who should distance ourselves from the events. It is the police who must stop attacking us. The right to report cannot be negotiated at the point of a baton.”

The protests are taking place against the backdrop of a widespread crisis in the country, which includes the worst security crisis in its history (tens of thousands of deaths due to violence between drug trafficking gangs), a very serious health crisis (a lack of supplies and medicines in the public health system), and other major crises such as those in education, public investment, and employment.

Local elections will be held in November, which will reveal the extent of support – or lack thereof – for President Noboa and his neoliberal government agenda, which aligns with the hemispheric security strategy led by the Trump administration.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy sat down for an interview with NPR at a time of renewed tensions with the White House.

(Image credit: Svet Jacqueline for NPR)

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy sat down for an interview with NPR at a time of renewed tensions with the White House.

(Image credit: Svet Jacqueline for NPR)

September brought a flurry of developments in the use of AI in mathematics. The biggest, though far from the only one, was OpenAI’s publication of a solution to the Millennium Prize Problem concerning the Navier–Stokes equations. The announcement set off a heated debate about AI’s impact on the future of science. T-invariant looks at OpenAI’s result and the events that followed it (spoiler: mathematics has changed, and it was AI that changed it).

Top news on scientists’ work and experiences during the war, along with videos and infographics — subscribe to the T-invariant Telegram channel to stay updated.

On September 8, OpenAI published a press release titled “On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem.” It announced that an internal company model (not yet released and more powerful than GPT-6 Astra) had solved one of the Millennium Prize Problems posed by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000. OpenAI’s proof was linked right below the headline: a paper in conventional mathematical notation and a formal proof in the Lean language. The company said it would not claim the Clay Institute’s $1 million prize.

The press release refers to work on the Euler equations (a problem closely related to the Navier–Stokes problem; more on it below) by mathematicians Levent Alpöge (an Anthropic employee) and Tristan Buckmaster (a professor of mathematics at New York University). OpenAI acknowledged that it turned its attention to the Navier–Stokes problem on September 1, after hearing rumors that two Millennium Problems had been solved. Building on a theory that mathematicians had developed over nearly two centuries, OpenAI then solved the Millennium Problem in 88 hours using 10,000 agents. Another 17 hours went into formalizing the proof in Lean, which confirmed that it was correct.

The image shows a local incompressible flow. Orange indicates faster angular rotation, turquoise slower rotation. The circulation speed depends on the radius. The trajectories show inward spiraling motion and axial stretching. Illustration: OpenAI

OpenAI’s result drew enormous attention, not only from mathematicians but from the broader public. Today, nearly every educated person has heard of the Clay Prize. That’s not because non-specialists have a deep grasp of the Millennium Problems, but because of the scandal surrounding the first problem on the Clay list to be solved (there are seven in all): the Poincaré conjecture. In 2010, the $1 million prize was awarded to Grigori Perelman, who turned it down. Perelman explained that he disagreed with the decision to give the award to him alone: in his view, the American mathematician Richard Hamilton had contributed just as much to the proof. So no one received the Clay Prize that time. It looks like no one will collect the prize for the second Millennium Problem either.

The other reason for the extraordinary buzz around OpenAI’s proof is far more topical. All sorts of people are asking: “If AI can really solve problems of incredible difficulty at the very frontier of mathematics, does that mean artificial intelligence has beaten humans — and that first programmers and now even top-tier mathematicians are no longer needed?” To begin answering that question, we need at least a rough idea of what the Navier–Stokes equations are and what kind of solution OpenAI found.

A Cup of Tea and the Navier–Stokes Equations

Picture an ordinary cup of tea. You pick up a teaspoon and start stirring. If you move the spoon in circles, a funnel (a vortex) forms in the cup. Stop stirring, and the funnel quickly smooths out. Let’s use this simple example to formulate the Navier–Stokes problem.

The spoon is an external force acting on the liquid. As long as you keep stirring (the external force is acting), the funnel holds; if you take the spoon out (the force drops to zero), the funnel keeps spinning for a while under its own momentum and then smooths out. What smooths it out is internal friction, or viscosity. Different liquids have different viscosities: water, for instance, is far less viscous than honey. In honey, it is harder to produce even a small funnel (you need to apply a large external force).

The Navier–Stokes equations are essentially Newton’s second law for an incompressible viscous fluid. The French mathematician Claude-Louis Navier proposed the first version of the equations back in 1822 — more than 200 years ago. The most convincing derivation was given by the British mathematician George Stokes in an 1845 paper. The Navier–Stokes equations worked beautifully, and they still do. But mathematicians are always interested in limits: when does a model start to break down? Newtonian mechanics, for example, starts to “glitch” in applications as familiar as the navigation app on your phone. The model has to be rebuilt, or GPS won’t work. Today’s navigation systems account for both the satellites’ velocity and the difference in gravity between the Earth’s surface and orbit; here, it is not Newton’s laws that apply, but relativity (both special and general).

For the Navier–Stokes equations, the limit of applicability is the possibility of a “blowup”: can the fluid’s velocity become “infinite” in finite time under a finite external force? That would mean the model breaks down under such conditions. This is the Millennium Problem.

OpenAI says: yes, it can. We’ll begin our discussion of the problem with the Euler equations. They describe an ideal incompressible fluid — that is, a fluid with no viscosity. If you stir such a fluid with a spoon, the funnel will never smooth out (here we ignore friction against the walls of the cup). There are two problems for the Euler equations: one with an external force and one without.

These problems ask the same question as the Navier–Stokes problem: can you stir the tea so cleverly that the funnel behaves in a completely unusual way — speeding up until its rotation becomes infinitely fast? It all began with a solution to the Euler equations with external forcing. Alpöge and Buckmaster reported that they had solved this problem. They showed that the force acting on an ideal fluid can be chosen so that the fluid “blows up”: the vortex reaches infinite speed even though both the applied force and the time are finite. Buckmaster used an internal Anthropic model to find the solution, but for the previous two months he had been working with OpenAI Codex. This is what raised suspicions that OpenAI had “peeked” at the solution, though the company insists nothing of the sort happened. But by the company’s own admission, the rumor that a solution to one of the open problems on the Clay Institute’s list (no one knew which) might have been found was what set things in motion: a huge multi-agent system was launched, with AI agents working intensively alongside a team of OpenAI mathematicians and engineers.

At first, the team tried to tackle every variant of every open Millennium Problem at once, along with simpler related problems. The first to give way was the Euler problem without external forcing. Can the initial conditions (the velocity distribution) be chosen so that even after we take the spoon out of the cup, the vortex keeps spinning up on its own until it reaches infinite speed? One group of agents solved this Euler problem: they found an ingenious initial velocity distribution such that, even after the external force stopped acting (we took the spoon out), the vortex spun up to infinite speed. Once this very hard problem was solved, all resources were thrown at the Navier–Stokes equations — which, unlike the Euler equations, describe a viscous fluid. Finding a force that, in finite time, produces a vortex with infinite speed in a viscous fluid is much harder: viscosity smooths the vortex out and damps it.

OpenAI was deliberately going after the Millennium Problem itself: the Navier–Stokes equations with an external force and viscosity. These are, in fact, perfectly normal physical conditions — but the solution it found was, to put it mildly, “abnormal.” OpenAI did solve the Millennium Problem, fair and square, but mathematicians had hoped for something different from the proof. They expected not an elaborate counterexample, but a deeper understanding of turbulence. Many were disappointed.

Under the terms of the Millennium Problem, the external force acting on the fluid must be “infinitely smooth” (the function itself and all its derivatives must be differentiable). OpenAI’s agents assembled this force literally piece by piece, like a jigsaw puzzle. The pieces were fitted together so precisely that they stretched and twisted the vortex; each piece depended on scale, and together they formed an infinitely smooth forcing. Mathematicians had tried many times to solve this problem, but no human can hold in their head, let alone write down, a vast number of different conditions that constantly have to be readjusted. The AI agents pulled it off.

But one more version of the Millennium Problem remains: the Navier–Stokes equations without an external force. What happens then? Can you set a viscous fluid spinning, take the spoon out, and simply watch the vortex accelerate to infinite speed? (Recall that for an ideal fluid, the AI agents did solve this problem.) Mathematicians expected the solution with external forcing to provide a clue to this even harder problem. But the unforced Navier–Stokes problem has held out. It remains open to this day.

The Fields Medalists’ Statement

On September 11 (three days after OpenAI’s press release), a group of Fields Medalists (the Fields Medal is the most prestigious award in mathematics) signed an open letter titled “A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics.”. To date, 28 people have signed it. Among them are leading authorities from every generation: the patriarch Pierre Deligne (who received the medal in 1978), Terence Tao (2006), and rising stars Peter Scholze (2018) and Maryna Viazovska (2022). Six mathematicians trained in the Soviet and Russian mathematical school also signed: Vladimir Drinfeld, Maxim Kontsevich, Grigory Margulis, Andrei Okounkov, Stanislav Smirnov, and Efim Zelmanov (none of whom works in Russia today). The 28 signatories make up more than half of all living Fields Medalists. A collective statement like this is unprecedented.

What alarmed them? The laureates’ manifesto identifies several threats. The first and most important: AI companies are using famous problems as benchmarks. Their message is: look what we can do — buy our tokens, and you can do it too. But the goal of mathematics is not a “true/false” answer plus a thousand pages of unreadable proof code, even if that code is correct. Mathematics seeks to understand the world, and answers like these are more likely to close off paths than to deliver new understanding. Second, with results being published in such a rush, questions of authorship and plagiarism are bound to arise. The prospect of machines being trained on their conjectures and ideas is pushing mathematicians to hide their results: they are afraid to discuss ideas on social media and won’t even present unfinished work at conferences. And that is very bad: science is a collective enterprise. Third, mathematics lives through its students, who grow by solving hard problems. If a neural network does this quickly and incomprehensibly, the human chain of passing on knowledge and training new scientists will simply break.

But here’s the question: can this process be stopped, and should it be? Opinions differ.

[[socialnetworks]]

On September 21, an advisory group on the use of AI in mathematics was set up at the Institute for Advanced Study in collaboration with OpenAI. It includes nine prominent mathematicians, among them Fields Medalists Timothy Gowers, Edward Witten, and — rather surprisingly — Martin Hairer, who had signed the “Severe Misalignment” letter along with his colleagues. In effect, there is no hard line between mathematicians who are betting on AI methods and those who hold more traditional views. Terence Tao is a vivid example: he is trying to slow AI companies down a little, while also making extensive use of AI methods in his own work.

How to Read 166 Pages of Unreadable Text Overnight

On September 4, Anthropic issued a press release announcing: “We are sharing the first complete computer-checked proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. Claude worked largely autonomously over 11 days to write the proof in the Lean programming language.” Claude wrote Lean programs to check a proof that built on the Wiles–Taylor result. And Lean confirmed that the proof was correct. In fact, for mathematics, this result may be even more important than the puzzle OpenAI put together. You no longer have to take the author’s word for it, rely on authority and collective consensus, or check every step yourself. Let Lean do it.

Here’s a historical example. Vladimir Arnold recalled getting to know the eminent mathematician René Thom (Fields Medalist, 1958): “And indeed, in 1965 it was Thom I became closest friends with. The only trouble was that I simply could not understand his theorem from the paper ‘Topological Models in Biology,’ where he laid the foundations of catastrophe theory. For a couple of decades, Thom gave me the same perfectly clear answer to my questions about this theorem: ‘There will always be fools to find proofs for our theorems.’ In the end, I asked my graduate student B. A. Khesin to sort the matter out, and he discovered that the theorem Thom had announced many decades earlier was false. Specifically, Thom claimed that the number of ‘elementary catastrophes’ … is seven (for the four parameters of our space-time). It turned out, however, that this ‘number of Thom’s catastrophes’ cannot be less than 13 (and, what’s more, no one knows to this day whether their number is even finite, or whether there are infinitely many different catastrophes).”

For “a couple of decades,” no “fool” turned up to check René Thom’s result. And this is not an isolated case. Today, Lean could handle such a task — and it certainly wouldn’t need “a couple of decades.”

It would be completely unfair to say that OpenAI “didn’t do anything — it just unleashed a swarm of agents on the problem.” OpenAI’s mathematicians and engineers conducted a huge orchestra of AI agents that searched for those very puzzle pieces, formulated hypotheses, checked them with Lean, discarded the false ones, used the correct ones — and all the while communicated both with each other and with humans. Setting up a system like that and getting it to work is an outstanding achievement.

On September 17, three mathematicians who are well-known experts on the Navier–Stokes equations published a paper that placed OpenAI’s proof within the broader development of fluid dynamics. Peter Constantin, Mihaela Ignatova, and Vlad Vicol proved that the type of blowup OpenAI constructed is impossible when there is no forcing (or when the forcing is analytic). Whether a blowup of some other form is possible is still unknown, but the way OpenAI assembled its puzzle won’t work there.

But perhaps even more interesting than the result is how the mathematicians worked. They had nine days to prepare and release the preprint. And it isn’t a short preprint, either: 34 pages. Of course, they had a great deal of prior work to draw on, but the speed is simply astonishing. In the paper itself, they describe how it came together.

The mathematicians used publicly available versions of Claude (Opus 5 and Fable 5.1 in Claude Code) and ChatGPT (Sol and Astra in Codex). They write: “By far the heaviest use of these AI systems was in deciphering the statements of the OpenAI paper. Claude and ChatGPT were used to analyze that manuscript, and over the course of several interactive sessions the main properties of the solutions in the OpenAI construction were extracted… These properties were subsequently cross-checked against the publicly available PDF version of and the Lean code released by OpenAI.”

Once the mathematicians understood what OpenAI had done, they turned to their own work. First, they gave the AI agents their published papers and handed them a draft of the new paper containing the main theorem. Claude and ChatGPT were used to turn this draft into a manuscript with complete proofs of every statement. The text was then reworked in Claude Code under the authors’ direct guidance and supervision; this process involved not only stylistic editing but also checking every mathematical calculation. The mathematicians write: “Every suggestion, computation, and reference produced by the AI systems was independently verified and, where necessary, corrected or reformulated by the authors, who take full responsibility for the manuscript as it is presently written.”

Doing all this work without AI in such a short time would have been impossible. The 166-page paper written by OpenAI’s agents really is unreadable — but unreadable for humans; for AI, it is a perfectly accessible text. In other words, human mathematicians were not cut out of writing the paper. On the contrary, their work sped up many times over.

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Vladimir Voevodsky’s Program

In 2012, Fields Medalist Vladimir Voevodsky said in an interview: “Pure mathematics works with models of a high level of abstraction and low complexity (mathematicians like to call this low complexity elegance). Applied mathematics works with models that are more concrete but highly complex (many variables, equations, and so on). Interesting applications of the ideas of modern pure mathematics most likely lie in the domain of high abstraction and high complexity. This domain is practically inaccessible today, largely because of the human brain’s limited ability to work with such models. Once we learn to use computers to work with abstract mathematical objects, this problem will gradually fade into the background, and interesting applications of the ideas of today’s abstract mathematics will emerge.”

The 166-page proof built by 10,000 agents falls squarely within that domain of “high abstraction and high complexity” the human brain cannot handle. Yet Peter Constantin and his colleagues managed it with the help of AI. In the same interview, Voevodsky estimated how long it would take to formalize his own proof of the Milnor conjecture in the Coq system as it existed in 2012: about 3–4 years. Formalizing OpenAI’s proof took 17 hours.

In 2012, Voevodsky’s words sounded like science fiction. Today, this is routine work. His intuition was absolutely right, and one can only regret that Voevodsky did not live to see his program come to life.

The Unsettling September of 2026

September 2026 will be remembered by more than just mathematicians. Something profoundly important happened in those few short weeks. For now, it is hard even to gauge the consequences. But a few things can be said.

René Thom brushed it off: “There will always be fools to find proofs for our theorems.” September 2026 showed that such “fools” have indeed turned up — and they work faster and more reliably than humans: they find a construction in 88 hours and verify it in 17. But Thom had good reason to be confident: he was looking not for proofs, but for understanding. And this is where machines cannot yet replace humans. Constantin, Ignatova, and Vicol needed just nine days to figure out what OpenAI’s 166-page puzzle really is and where its limits lie. Perhaps this is what the new mathematics will look like: machines find and verify, humans understand.

Before September 2026, mathematicians asked: will AI be able to solve the great problems? Now the question is different: will humans always be able to understand those solutions? For now, they can — but with AI’s help, too.

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The post The Millennium Puzzle: The Navier–Stokes Equations and the Unsettling September of 2026 appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.

This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Oct. 13, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

US Rep. Ilhan Omar on Monday forcefully condemned the Department of Homeland Security’s raid on her Washington, DC home as part of a broader effort to weaponize federal law enforcement against progressives who oppose President Donald Trump’s agenda.

“This is part of the fascist playbook to rile up Trump’s die-hard supporters and give them a big distraction in advance of the midterms,” Omar (D-Minn.) wrote in an email distributed by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee hours after the raid. “With this obviously political investigation, Trump is telling his voters: ‘Ignore the price of gas, ignore the war in Iran, ignore that you’re losing your healthcare—we want you to get angry about this instead.’”

The email followed a statement issued by Omar’s office saying that the congresswoman “has done nothing wrong” and condemning the raid as “an outrageous abuse of power.”

“For a decade, Donald Trump has relentlessly targeted Congresswoman Ilhan Omar with inflammatory rhetoric, repeatedly putting a target on her back,” the statement read. “Now, those attacks have escalated to a pointless federal raid.”

The Trump Justice Department said the raid, executed by the investigative arm of DHS, was “part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation.” Trump administration officials are reportedly probing whether Omar, who entered the US as a child refugee from Somalia and became a citizen in 2000, is in the country illegally. CBS News reported that the investigation centers on paperwork completed by Omar’s late father when she was a child.

Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday that he has “nothing to do with” the Omar investigation while attacking her as a “terrible person.” Omar and the Somali American community in Minnesota have been frequent targets of the president’s bigoted attacks, and Trump has called for the Democratic lawmaker to be jailed or deported.

“For ten years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns. This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation. I will not be silenced,” Omar wrote in a social media post on Monday.

In the campaign email, Omar called the federal investigation a “sham” and “further proof” that Trump is “willing to use the power of the federal government to try to intimidate and silence anyone who stands up to him.”

“It’s up to us to make sure it doesn’t work,” Omar added.

The raid on Omar’s home drew widespread condemnation, including from top Democrats in Congress. The leadership of the House Democratic caucus issued a statement calling the raid a “deeply disturbing” act that “raises serious questions about the continued corrupt weaponization of the federal government against Donald Trump’s adversaries.”

Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.) denounced the raid as “fascism in the extreme.”

“Trump is weaponizing the federal government to escalate his racist attacks against Rep. Omar, undermine her ahead of the midterms, and distract from his failures as president,” Kamlager-Dove added.

Ukraine’s president says his country has halted strikes on Russian oil refineries for two days after Trump’s energy ceasefire announcement

On frozen Russian assets, Poland’s Sikorski says the use of frozen Russian assets is “a complicated issue,” but takes a very clear stance in response to any suggestion of releasing them back to Russia.

“We are working on it, but there is also some rumours that some people are expecting these assets to be released back to Russia.

I don’t think I’m speaking just for myself in saying: over our dead bodies.”

“Russia right now is not ready for ceasefire, but still, this only can encourage us to stay with Ukraine and to, strengthen, the pressure on Russia and always be ready for conversations, but and also especially for, for ceasefire negotiations.

But, until this doesn’t happen, we are with Ukraine. We are with the president the German government is is backing the Ukrainian government and the president, completely. He is the person to lead Ukraine, and we are with him.”

In accordance with the Regulations of the George Gamow® Award, established by the Russian American Science Association (RASA-America) in honor of the distinguished Russian American physicist Professor Georgy Antonovich Gamow (1904–1968), and to recognize members of the Russian-speaking scientific diaspora for outstanding achievements widely acknowledged by the scientific community, the 2026 G.A. Gamow Prize is awarded to Natalia Berloff and Mikhail N. Epstein.

Natalia Berloff, professor at the Cambridge University “For her groundbreaking contributions to quantum hydrodynamics and physics-inspired computing, and for her extraordinary breadth of interdisciplinary research connecting fundamental theoretical advances with experimental realizability and technological potential across the logistics, fintech, pharmaceutical, and data management sectors.”

Mikhail Epstein, professor at Emory University “For his pioneering contributions to the study of Russian postmodernism and conceptualism, significant advances in the philosophy and literary theory, construction of alternative concepts and propositions to multiple symbolic systems and theoretical models; and for his role as a public intellectual and advocate for the humanities and their transformative potential, articulating a vision of scholarship as a creative and forward-looking process.” 

“Gamow wrote that “it took less than an hour to make the atoms”. Nature solved an enormous many-body problem in an hour without executing a single instruction: the physics was the algorithm. Physics-inspired computing takes this literally. We write a hard optimization problem as the energy of a network of interacting spins, build that network out of real physics, condensates, coupled lasers, oscillators, and let it relax toward its lowest-energy state. Reading off that state reads off a solution: what a digital computer does by search, the hardware does by simply evolving. I thank the RASA and the Award Committee for this recognition, and I hope it draws more physicists, mathematicians and engineers into the question of how to make physics compute,” notes Natalia Berloff.

“The Gamow Award holds special significance for me. George Gamow embodied the kind of intellectual daring that bridges disciplines and crosses borders—a physicist whose thought ranged from the origins of the universe to the code of life, and who never lost the playful curiosity that makes science kin to the humanities. I see this award as a sign that the boundary between the sciences and the humanities is becoming ever more permeable—and that the humanities, no less than the sciences, can be a creative and world-transforming force,” Mikhail Epstein added.

Natalia Berloff is Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics and a Fellow of Jesus College. Born in Orenburg, she graduated from Lomonosov Moscow State University and received her Ph.D. from Florida State University. After research and faculty positions at the University of California, Los Angeles, she joined Cambridge in 2002. She has been Director of Photonics at Skoltech (2013-2016) and a visiting researcher at Microsoft (2021-2023). Berloff’s research concerns coherence in non-equilibrium quantum systems: superfluids and Bose-Einstein condensates of atoms, excitons and polaritons. Her group was among the first to propose polariton condensates and other optical systems as physical simulators and optimizers, and now develops physics-inspired computing, from Ising and XY machines to neuromorphic architectures and analog platforms for artificial intelligence. Her honors include an NIH/NHGRI Career Development Award and the Pilkington Prize. She leads the π-computing group, co-directs the UK Multidisciplinary Neuromorphic Center (NeuroSYNC) and chairs the American Physical Society’s Committee on International Freedom of Scientists.

Mikhail N. Epstein is a Russian-American philosopher, cultural theorist, and literary scholar—one of the founding theorists of Russian postmodernism. The unifying impulse of his work is the expansion of the thinkable: where scholarship usually describes what exists, Epstein constructs alternatives to prevailing theories and sign systems—possible philosophies, new disciplines, genres, concepts, and words. His work has given rise to the philosophy of the possible, transculture, and the transformative humanities—scholarship as a creative, world-changing force. In recent years he has been developing a philosophy of artificial intelligence as a new stage in the evolution of thought.

Educated at Moscow State University, Epstein moved to the United States in 1990. He is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor Emeritus of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University. He is the author of 50 books and numerous articles, translated into 26 languages. His honors include the Andrei Bely Prize (1991), the Liberty Prize (New York, 2000), and the MLA Scaglione Prize for the best book in Slavic studies (2023).

The award ceremony will take place as part of the 17th annual conference of the Russian American Science Association (RASA), which will take place on November 7-8,2026, at the Simpson Querrey Biomedical Research Center, Northwestern University (Chicago, Illinois) and will honor Andrei Sakharov – a brilliant physicist, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and an enduring symbol of intellectual courage and integrity.

The RASA award has been established in 2015 in memory of Georgy Antonovich Gamow, an outstanding representative of the scientific diaspora, an influential Soviet and American theoretical physicist, astrophysicist and popularizer of science. Chemist Anna Krylov and historian Mikhail Yampolsky are its 2025’s laureates.

The post Natalia Berloff and Mikhail Epstein are the new George Gamow award laureates appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.

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On October 25, Brazilians will return to the polls to choose between President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who was sentenced to 27 years in prison for his role in an attempted coup. The first round gave Flávio 47% of valid votes against Lula’s 45%, revealing the enduring strength of the far right four years after its electoral defeat. The runoff takes place as Donald Trump seeks to restore US domination over Latin America, with Brazil emerging as a consequential battleground in Washington’s campaign to contain China’s growing relations with the region.

Read more: Why did Brazil’s far right win the first round?

Over the past two decades, Brazil and China have built a political partnership that has expanded the space for independent action among countries of the Global South. Under Lula and Xi Jinping, this relationship has deepened through cooperation in industrial development, infrastructure, science, and technology. The election will determine whether this project advances or Brazil’s international orientation is subordinated to Washington’s renewed Monroe Doctrine as part of the continent’s rightward shift.

Read more: Brazil’s angry tide and the struggles ahead

Since Lula’s return to the presidency in 2023, the two governments have connected Chinese cooperation with Brazil’s development programs, including Nova Indústria Brasil, the Growth Acceleration Program (PAC), and the Ecological Transformation Plan. Lula’s May 2025 visit to Beijing produced 36 agreements covering infrastructure, finance, artificial intelligence, public health, and industrial cooperation. Behind these agreements is a long-standing challenge: overcoming Brazil’s dependent position in the international division of labor, where commodity exports continue to outweigh advanced industrial and technological development.

This cooperation has also reached Brazilian popular movements. Through the International Association for Popular Cooperation (Baobab), Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) and other organizations have worked with Chinese institutions on agricultural mechanization, bioinputs, and digital technologies for family farming. These initiatives include the Digital Family Farming and Agroecology Laboratory and IARAA, an artificial intelligence project for agroecology and agrarian reform developed by Brazilian popular movements using Chinese open-source models. In a countryside marked by extreme concentrations of land, machinery, and capital, such cooperation offers new tools to peasant organizations fighting for agrarian reform and the production of healthy food.

Brazil’s relationship with China also reveals the different class interests at work in the country, with contradictions particularly visible in the countryside. Massive exports of soybeans, meat, and minerals have continued under both Bolsonaro and Lula, but their governments have pursued very different political relationships with Beijing. While Jair Bolsonaro attacked China and aligned himself with Washington, Lula has sought to deepen strategic cooperation, including in industrial development, technology, and agrarian reform. Flávio Bolsonaro now promises an “economically pragmatic” relationship with China while cultivating close ties with Trump. For sectors of Brazil’s ruling classes that profit from commodity exports, continuing to sell to China while embracing Washington’s political agenda presents little contradiction. For Brazil’s efforts to rebuild its industry and develop technological sovereignty, the consequences are far greater.

The return of the Monroe Doctrine

Washington’s ambitions were made explicit in its November 2025 National Security Strategy, which announced a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, seeking to restore US pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere and deny outside powers control over strategic resources and infrastructure. Five days later, China published its third Latin America policy paper, reaffirming sovereignty, non-interference, regional integration, technological cooperation, and support for the region as a Zone of Peace. The two documents reveal fundamentally different approaches to the political future of the continent.

Brazil’s position is decisive. As Latin America’s largest economy, a founding BRICS member, and a leading participant in Mercosur, it possesses industrial, scientific, and political capacities that could strengthen independent development across Latin America and beyond.

The emergence of a new technological era makes this struggle particularly consequential. Brazil is among the few countries of the Global South capable of pursuing digital and technological sovereignty that could benefit its neighbors and parts of Africa. Its roughly 23% share of global rare earth reserves is an important starting point, but control over minerals alone is insufficient. The greater challenge is developing the capacity to process them, manufacture advanced components, and build the digital infrastructure, artificial intelligence systems, and technologies that will shape future production.

Flávio has made his orientation clear. Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in the United States in March 2026, he offered Brazil as the “solution” to Washington’s dependence on China for critical minerals, explicitly linking rare earths to artificial intelligence and US military superiority. Chinese economic reporting has also described proposals from his team to exclude China from rare-earth supply chains. Rather than using Brazil’s resources to develop its own industrial and technological capacities, this agenda would place them at the service of US technological and military power.

The same political orientation extends to digital sovereignty. In July 2026, Flávio’s campaign submitted proposals to US trade authorities that included preventing Brazil’s Pix payment system from connecting to non-Western international payment networks and loosening commitments within Mercosur. These proposals converge with a wider US campaign involving tariffs, digital regulation, strategic minerals, and attempts to influence Brazil’s electoral process. Meanwhile, Washington’s January 2026 bombing on Venezuela and kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores demonstrated how far it is prepared to go to impose its will on the continent.

BRICS and the struggle for an independent foreign policy

Brazil, particularly under Lula, has helped build institutions through which countries of the Global South can reduce their dependence on Western-dominated structures. At the July 2025 BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro, the group advanced cooperation on development finance, local-currency transactions, and international institutional reform. The New Development Bank, headed by former Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, is an important expression of this effort.

The BRICS cannot automatically overcome economic dependency or guarantee sovereignty for working people. Yet its expansion offers greater room for independent development, provided that participating governments have the political commitment to use these possibilities.

Brazil’s history reveals how difficult that independence has been to defend. In 1961, vice-president João Goulart became the first high-ranking representative of a Latin American government to visit the People’s Republic of China, meeting Mao Zedong when revolutionary China remained diplomatically isolated and subjected to US sanctions. Three years later, Goulart was overthrown in a US-backed civil-military coup that inaugurated a 21-year dictatorship. The early history of China–Brazil friendship was inseparable from struggles over national sovereignty, agrarian reform, and the forces determined to suppress them.

The international material conditions for South–South cooperation are considerably more favorable today, but political direction remains decisive. Jair Bolsonaro hosted the 2019 BRICS summit in Brasília while pursuing close alignment with Washington. A government can weaken institutions from within by abandoning the commitments that give them political substance.

The far right’s resurgence also reflects the enduring power of Brazil’s own ruling classes. Bolsonarismo has a domestic base among sections of agribusiness, finance, the security apparatus, militias, conservative religious networks, and major media. These forces, whose electoral and institutional advances have continued, were strengthened by the 2016 parliamentary coup against Dilma Rousseff and the judicial persecution of Lula. They possess their own organizations, material interests, and sources of power, which do not disappear when an election is lost. Their economic dependence on Chinese markets has not prevented their support for Washington’s political agenda.

Beyond the election

Beijing has followed the Brazilian election closely, reflecting the importance of the political relationship built between Lula and Xi over years of cooperation. In July, Xi reaffirmed China’s support for Brazil against external interference during a conversation with Lula, which also covered cooperation in artificial intelligence, satellites, mineral processing, and relations between China and Mercosur. In September, Foreign Minister Wang Yi received Lula’s adviser and former foreign minister Celso Amorim in Beijing, reaffirming the bilateral strategic partnership.

China’s principle of non-interference means that the choice of Brazil’s government belongs to the Brazilian people, but Beijing’s diplomatic restraint should not be confused with an absence of political interests or an assumption that all governments would pursue the same relationship. Chinese analysts have described the possible outlook under Flávio as one of “cold politics, hot economics”: commodity trade would likely continue, but the political relationship and cooperation in strategic sectors could deteriorate. The experience of Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency has already shown the limits of commercial interests in sustaining a broader political partnership.

For the Brazilian people, the consequences extend well beyond foreign policy. The election will also shape the struggles over labor rights, public services, agrarian reform, and the defence of democratic space. Brazil’s renewed role in South–South cooperation under Lula has opened possibilities for a development project that responds to the needs of its working people, but realizing those possibilities depends on the political and social forces capable of carrying it forward.

The Brazilian people have fought through dictatorship, neoliberal restructuring, parliamentary coups, and the rise of the far right to defend their political and social gains. This election is another moment in that longer struggle, now unfolding amid renewed US imperial intervention and a transformation of the world’s technological foundations. The future of China–Brazil cooperation will depend on the capacity of organized popular forces to build a sovereign national project and turn international cooperation into lasting changes in people’s lives.

Tings Chak 翟庭君 is the Asia Co-Coordinator of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Researchand an editor of the international edition of Wenhua Zongheng: A Journal of Contemporary Chinese Thought.

The global defense industry appears to be entering a period of structural transformation, driven by rising military spending, technological change, and increasing private-capital involvement.

The “Aerospace & Defense M&A Report 2026: Deal Activity, Market Trends and Outlook,” published by Ropes & Gray LLP  on October 7, 2026, says that Aerospace and Defense Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A), Private Equity (PE), and Venture Capital (VC) funding are likely to expand further, showing that 2026 is on track to be one of “the strongest deal-making years” on record.

The report highlights that Defense Tech/Services is the fastest-growing segment at a 22% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR), followed by Aerospace at 16% CAGR; Aircraft Manufacturers, Parts & Components at 14% CAGR; and Air, Land, & Sea Defense at 9% CAGR.

The report argues that the growth is not simply a temporary response to international conflicts. Governments are rebuilding industrial capacity, replenishing weapons inventories, strengthening supply chains, and accelerating the development of advanced military technologies.

In the United States, the largest market, proposed increases in defense resources, procurement reforms, longer-term contracts, and financial support for defense technology companies aim to attract private capital and expand manufacturing capacity.

In Europe, the EU’s Security Action for Europe initiative aims to mobilize about €800 billion in defense-related investment through national fiscal flexibility, loans, and related financing support.

Germany’s increased spending and procurement reforms can accelerate equipment acquisition and industrial expansion. Collectively, these policies are reshaping the geography of defense investment in Europe.

In fact, the report says that  Europe has emerged as a major driver of new activity. “Europe has become a primary engine of deal flow, not a secondary market. Rising national budgets and new EU-wide financing mechanisms are reshaping where capital is being deployed as well as dictating deployment speed”, it says. NATO’s higher spending ambitions, European rearmament and new financing arrangements are encouraging companies to expand, consolidate and acquire specialist capabilities.

Meanwhile, the Indo-Pacific is undergoing a rapid, structural alignment driven by what regional planners call a “contested era.”

China is consolidating its domestic defense industry, though restrictions on cross-border investment limit Western investors’ access. Japan is rapidly reshaping its defense posture and adapting to an environment where the traditional binary definitions of “peacetime” and “wartime” have effectively blurred.

In this era of continuous competition, the report says Japan has elevated allied burden-sharing to its foundational organizing principle.

This shift is most visible in the digital domain. With the operationalization of Japan’s Active Cyber Defense Oversight Commission, Tokyo has adopted a proactive cyber defense strategy. By implementing legal public-private threat reporting and neutralized-access protocols, Japan is signaling a willingness to legally counter and neutralize state-sponsored infrastructure targeting before cyber assaults can cripple critical domestic networks.

One of the report’s most important observations is that defense investment is increasingly a private-equity story. Private-equity firms are acquiring established manufacturers, selling businesses to strategic buyers and building larger companies through additional acquisitions. Venture capital is also financing newer businesses developing military technologies.

Among the ten largest transactions listed for 2026 up to September 30 was GE Aerospace’s $11.8 billion acquisition of Consolidated Precision Products. Other major deals involved aerospace leasing, maritime defense, aircraft components, and specialist detection technologies.

Dubai Aerospace Enterprise bought Macquarie Airfinance for $9.0 billion in what was a leasing consolidation. In a move that signals European rearmament, land-defense scaling, and main-battle tank production, KfW Group (German State Bank) is backing KNDS [Franco-German tank maker Krauss-Maffei Wegmann + Nexter] with $7.8 billion.

In other words, private investors are no longer confined to peripheral suppliers. They are becoming key participants in the industrial ecosystem that supports national defense.

Significantly, the traditional reliance on a handful of legacy prime contractors is giving way to an ecosystem heavily backed by private equity and venture capital.

The private sector is now driving global defense deal-making as it pivots toward software-defined defense, autonomy, and next-generation platforms.

The report shows how defense technology is changing the industry’s center of gravity. Although aerospace and defense remains one of the most active and strategically complex sectors for private capital deployment, software-defined defense, autonomy, and next-generation platforms are pulling ahead as the fastest-growing corner of the market.

Investors are particularly interested in artificial intelligence and software-defined defense systems; autonomous platforms, including unmanned aircraft and maritime systems; counter-drone and missile-defense capabilities; space infrastructure and surveillance; and specialist electronics, communications, and mission-critical components.

However, while these technologies can drive rapid growth, they also carry risks due to restrictive policies in the US and Europe. The report notes that regulatory compliance is becoming a structural hurdle rather than an afterthought.

In the United States, the largest market by transaction value, more national security vetting—including CFIUS (Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States) and FOCI (Foreign Ownership, Control, or Influence) mitigation—is becoming foundational to ensuring a clean exit.

In other words, the global defense landscape seems to be marked by a distinct paradox.

On the one hand, geopolitical threat vectors are accelerating at breakneck speed. On the other hand, the financial and regulatory machinery needed to field next-generation capabilities faces structural friction.

As a result, companies may depend heavily on a single government customer, handle classified information, or face restrictions on intellectual property developed under government contracts. Cybersecurity compliance and access to sensitive facilities can also complicate acquisitions.

In the United States, the CFIUS can scrutinize foreign investment for national-security risks. FOCI can also affect access to classified work and sensitive facilities.

Similarly, European foreign-investment screening is marked with many complexities. Even businesses that are not conventional arms manufacturers may face scrutiny if they supply strategically important electronics, software, communications or other dual-use technologies.

Commercial risks matter too. Fixed-price government contracts can leave manufacturers exposed when costs rise unexpectedly. Buyers must therefore examine contract liabilities, working capital, supply-chain resilience, workforce retention and the restrictions that could affect a future sale, the report advises.

The report’s overall conclusion, therefore, is that while defense investment opportunities are expanding,  success increasingly depends on technological relevance, reliable industrial execution, regulatory compliance and the ability to navigate national-security restrictions throughout the ownership cycle.

What lessons could India draw from the trends above?

For India, the report is particularly relevant because it highlights a shift in how advanced military capabilities are developed and financed. The implications extend beyond aircraft, missiles, and ships to defense electronics, artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, space technology, supply chains, and foreign investment.

India’s first opportunity is to integrate more deeply into international aerospace and defense supply chains. As Western manufacturers expand production and diversify their suppliers, Indian companies could become more important producers of precision components, avionics, electronics, aerospace structures, and maintenance services.

The most instructive lesson may come from GE Aerospace’s September 8, 2026 acquisition of Consolidated Precision Products (CPP). Experts say that it was a paradigm shift in aerospace and heavy industrial manufacturing. For decades, aerospace primes aggressively outsourced manufacturing to optimize their balance sheets, shifting capital-expenditure risks onto multi-tiered supply chains.

But years of systemic, compounding engine delays—magnified by the Pratt & Whitney GTF powder metal crisis and Boeing’s structural manufacturing gridlock — exposed a fatal flaw: primes (like GE) outsourced execution, but they could never outsource the risk.

Therefore, GE Aerospace decided to buy the absolute bottleneck of jet engine production: structural castings and complex airfoils. Its deal with private equity firms Warburg Pincus and Berkshire Partners is meant to address persistent, industry-wide shortages of critical engine parts and airfoils. In other words, GE bought the supply chain to control the delivery.

For India, this implies that beyond focusing on “Make in India” as screwdriver assembly, it should also consider “Own the Supply Chain.”

Second, as defense technology gains primacy, expanding AI-enabled systems, autonomous platforms, counter-drone technology, advanced sensors, and space infrastructure could be more relevant for India than producing isolated components.

Some experts argue that because European primes are cash-rich and seeking low-cost engineering, they would prefer a JV with India to meet capacity needs.

Lastly, as the Ropes & Gray LLP  report illustrates, private equity and venture capital can help consolidate fragmented industries, finance expansion, and support specialized technology businesses. India could adapt this approach to build stronger domestic defense suppliers.

• Author and veteran journalist Prakash Nanda is Chairman of the Editorial Board of the EurAsian Times and has been commenting on politics, foreign policy, and strategic affairs for nearly three decades. He is a former National Fellow of the Indian Council for Historical Research and a recipient of the Seoul Peace Prize Scholarship.
• The author can be reached at prakash.nanda (at) hotmail.com

The post Europe Is Rearming — and U.S. Wall Street is Writing the Checks, Including GE’s Nearly $12 Billion Deal appeared first on EURASIAN TIMES.

As Kevin Rees is jailed for 15 years for blowing up a Ulez camera with a homemade bomb, Dr Tilak Doshi looks at why London's anti-motorist money-making 'clean air' scheme is so widely hated.

The post There’s a Reason Ulez is So Hated appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

An Ecuadorian judge ordered the immediate release of nearly 30 fishermen whose two boats were destroyed by the US military in the Pacific Ocean. The Ecuadorian prosecutor’s office had charged them with alleged illegal activities.

The sequence of events is telling.

In two separate instances between late August and early September, the fishing boats Conquista II and María Candelaria were boarded by US military forces while on the high seas. The US forces, after transferring the fishermen to other vessels, destroyed and sank their boats.

The fishermen’s families quickly reported that they had lost communication with their loved ones. Only after prolonged uncertainty were the crew members handed over at Ecuadorian ports and placed under the control of Ecuadorian authorities.

In other words, the crew members were not charged with any crime before their vessels were destroyed, but rather afterward. This move has drawn heavy criticism from criminal defense attorneys (who argue that these actions violate due process) and caused anxiety among Ecuadorian fishermen, who have expressed their fear of fishing on the high seas and suffering the same fate as their compatriots. Several other boats have been intercepted and sunk in the Pacific by US forces in recent months, only increasing fears about transiting there at all.

The US military, for its part, claims that the destroyed vessels serve as fuel refueling points for other boats involved in drug trafficking. Under this strategy, US Southern Command intercepted at least eight Ecuadorian vessels between August and September 2026.

Foreign military actions on Ecuadorian soil have been defended by the government of right-wing President Daniel Noboa, who has aligned himself with Donald Trump’s hemispheric security policy embodied in the Shield of the Americas. During a recent visit to the South American country, Marco Rubio defended the military operations as necessary to dismantle drug trafficking routes.

But why destroy a vessel that has already been evacuated of its crew? 

Defense Minister Giancarlo Loffredo, who defends US military operations against Ecuadorian fishermen based on alleged “prior intelligence,” said that destroying a vessel that has already been evacuated of its crew is justified because it is too risky to tow the vessels to shore. He also said that seizing the fuel on board is dangerous.

However, the minister’s justifications have not convinced everyone. Human Rights Watch stated that both the United States and Ecuador must present evidence justifying the destruction of the vessels: “Of the detained crew members, 90 are facing criminal investigations in Ecuador, 56 were released because Ecuadorian judges ruled that their detention was illegal, and another 14 were not brought before a judge.”

In addition, Juanita Goebertus, director of the Americas division at Human Rights Watch, said: “Intercepting fuel trafficking at sea can be an important step in stopping criminal groups, but that does not give security forces the right to detain people without evidence, destroy their boats, and commit abuses.”

The fact is that the Ecuadorian fishermen deny any involvement in the crimes of which they are accused. For now, the Ecuadorian courts have ruled in favor of nearly 30 fishermen from the Montecristi and the Don Rufo, stating that the prosecution failed to present evidence to support its accusations. With them, the total number of acquitted crew members stands at 56. Another 32 fishermen are on probation while investigations into alleged criminal association continue.