Exclusives

Russia is losing the Black Sea grain war it started. Its answer is to sink civilian ships off Romania and Bulgaria. The burning ships off Romania and Bulgaria are the latest round of a contest Ukraine opened this summer, when it began choking Russia’s own Black Sea exports

Military

Zelenskyy’s warning that Russian airspace is becoming dangerous is proving true: Russia temporarily restricted operations at 27 airports amid a massive drone attack. Russia later lifted the restrictions, but Russian airports continued to experience flight disruptions as they resumed arrivals and departures.

Ukraine makes its anti-drone road nets a national standard in a new strategy for defensive lines through 2028. It has already strung over more than 1,000 kilometers of road. FPV drones hunt anything moving near the front, so Kyiv is codifying the protection solutions.

Ukraine’s military now orders supplies based on real front-line data, not guesswork, lawmaker says. Shift comes under new commander-in-chief. Ukraine’s new commander-in-chief, Drapatyi, is centering the army on soldiers’ lives and real front-line needs, a lawmaker believes.

Ukraine’s shell factories outpace state orders, arms company chief says: Kyiv spent five months buying from them this year, leaving six to produce. Private plants were built under Russian fire with no state investment, says the head of Ukrainian defense maker Ukrainian Armor.

“Operation to strike Russian targets deep in swamps continues”: Ukrainian Commander Madiar says his unit hits 7,306 Russian troops in first half of October, up 59% on August. The pace held through weather that usually grounds drones, says Robert “Madiar” Brovdi, who calls the trend the opposite of de-escalation.

Intelligence and technology

Musk pushed Trump to slow Starlink in Ukraine, weakening air defenses as Russian drones attacked cities – The Telegraph. The restrictions reportedly forced some Ukrainian drone missions to be called off and made it harder to intercept Russian jet-powered drones attacking cities.

White House ordered limits on Ukraine’s military satellite service — Reuters. Who made the decision remains unclear. Germany has questions for Washington, while the UK reports that Starlink access has been restored following assurances to its defense secretary.

Posting strike videos online may help Russia tune its drones’ optical targeting. Moscow now pays people to film hits, Ukrainian adviser warns. Russia is collecting footage of its Geran attack drones hitting Ukraine, probably to test the optical target-recognition systems that guide them in their final seconds.

Ukraine’s hobbit-named robot fired on targets up to 1.3 km away in a demo for border guards. First reported carrying a wounded soldier, Ukraine’s Frodo robot has now fired for a border guard brigade—built, its maker says, to hit and run.

Musk pointed at the US military over Ukraine’s satellite limits. Now a US official says the administration had nothing to do with them. Ukraine’s Defense Ministry says it is in talks with partners and SpaceX to maintain stable service and prevent sudden restrictions on satellite services used by its military.

International

Belgium triples planned F-16 deliveries to Ukraine, pledges 10 jets by year-end. Prime Minister Bart De Wever announced the expanded commitment during talks with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Brussels, as Ukraine seeks more aircraft and ammunition to counter Russian attacks.

Poland provided secret military aid to Ukraine, Zelenskyy hints amid air defense shortages. Ukraine’s president thanked Warsaw for undisclosed assistance and 20 mm ammunition as Russian drone and missile attacks strain Ukrainian air defenses and Europe faces greater pressure to fill gaps in US support.

22 House lawmakers press Trump to implement Russia sanctions law. Diesel deal draws bipartisan backlash. The lawmakers argue that using the law’s sanctions and tariff powers would force Russian President Vladimir Putin to take peace talks seriously.

Romania finally holds Russia responsible for the drone attacks on ships off its coast, and wants a joint NATO command for the Black Sea. The NATO states on the sea would take turns leading it, with Romania ready to host it from 2028.

EU fast-tracks merger of three European firms into one SpaceX rival. It wants to end reliance on US satellites that failed Ukraine this week. The EU plans to fast-track antitrust approval for Project Bromo, a satellite venture.

Trump calls Ukraine’s renewed refinery strikes “a disgrace” after Russia’s 39-missile strike on its energy sites. The president called Zelenskyy “P.T. Barnum” and said Biden armed Ukraine for free.

Ukraine and Japan plan prefabricated backup crossings for Kyiv’s bridges: 720 meters of structures already delivered. The fifth phase of the Emergency Recovery Program, recently signed by the two countries, allocates $15 million for Ukraine’s infrastructure needs.

Two tankers burn off Romania’s Sulina as Bulgaria says it lacks proof Russia is behind the Black Sea ship attacks. Seven crew members of a San Marino-flagged chemical tanker were still missing hours after it caught fire at anchor off the mouth of the Danube.

Humanitarian and social impact

Russia pushes its drone war into Volyn Oblast on NATO border, cutting power to 370,000 as strikes creep toward EU. Moscow struck a region bordering Poland the same week it hit the central Kirovohrad Oblast hardest ever, exploiting a Starlink cap on Ukraine’s defenses.

One Ukraine out-produced third of EU’s steel. Russian strikes have now cut its output to zero. The 150-year-old industry made nothing last month after missiles wrecked almost every working blast furnace since August.

Russian drone cuts down unique energy line tower over Dnipro River in Kyiv. It can’t be rebuilt, and world is queuing for more power equipment. Ukraine’s grid operator Ukrenergo is already starting work on workarounds, but calls drones that cut down towers a new challenge.

Russia’s largest drone attack on Kirovohrad Oblast since the full-scale invasion kills three in Kropyvnytskyi. Drones struck critical infrastructure, transport companies, logistics sites, and homes across the central Ukrainian oblast, with its capital taking most of the damage.

On Monday she sat in her cousin’s Kyiv apartment, and by Wednesday a Russian strike had left a hole where the window was. Her cousin, his girlfriend, and an aunt survived inside, and rescuers lifted them out 15 minutes after the blast.

A Russian drone damaged Cosmogony, Ukraine’s largest painting, in the section depicting the future. Its artist spent nearly two years creating it. The museum is weighing whether to restore the burned section or keep the fire’s traces as a reminder of the war.

Political and legal developments

Hungary held $82 million in cash and gold from Ukraine for months. Now, it faces torture complaints in Europe’s top court. Hungarian forces stopped two Oschadbank vehicles in March, carrying cash and gold from Austria to Ukraine.

Ukraine detains a gas station worker and a Telegram commenter suspected of scouting targets for Russian strikes. One was allegedly reached through a former classmate in Russia, and the other allegedly took orders from a female handler there.

After Trump, Musk tells Ukraine’s president to go. Zelenskyy says he won’t resign and will never accept Ukrainian land as Russian. The Ukrainian leader told British broadcaster Piers Morgan that this refusal is why some “big guys” want him replaced.

Read our previous daily review here.

Jeffrey Miller’s newest novel, The Tree at Panmunjom, begins in the summer of 1976, as a soldier fresh out of basic training named Bill Davis arrives in South Korea and finds himself assigned to Camp Kitty Hawk just before serving a tense 24-hour shift at the nearby Demilitarized Zone’s Joint Security Area.  On arrival at […]

The post The Tree at Panmunjom vividly revisits 1976 tensions appeared first on Asia Times.

Colloidal Silver — First Edition, 2026, Paperback

Lies are Unbekoming | October 16, 2026

Silver was medicine. Not alternative medicine. Not folk medicine. Medicine. In surgery. In obstetrics. In the burn ward. In water treatment. In the household medicine chest. Every physician before 1938 knew this.

By the 1870s, silver nitrate was standard in surgical wound care across the leading hospitals of Britain, Germany, and the United States. Colloidal silver preparations — Collargol, Argyrol, Protargol — entered European and American practice through the 1890s and early 1900s and became standard antiseptics in military field medicine. By the time Fleming grew his first penicillin mould in 1928, silver was the first-line antimicrobial of the Western pharmacopoeia. The Lancet and the British Medical Journal carried the clinical reports in volume. The practice ran continuously through the Victorian era, the Edwardian era, the First World War, the interwar period. By 1980, almost all of it was gone.

What has not been treated at book length, until now, is how a four-thousand-year clinical record disappeared from mainstream medicine within four decades of the Flexner Report — and what the honest account of silver looks like once that record is reassembled.

Colloidal Silver reconstructs the pre-1938 record from The Lancet, the British Medical Journal, and the primary literature of the era; recovers Robert Becker’s bioelectric framework from the regeneration research the pharmaceutical model buried; and places silver inside a practical terrain-paradigm guide to its current place — in water, on the body, inside the body, and in the chronic conditions where antibiotics have failed.

Honest about argyria. Honest about what silver cannot do. Honest about the dependency trap.

That is why the book has ten appendices. 295 pages, thirteen chapters, ten appendices. The practical use chapters are grounded in a reference apparatus — a Pre-1938 Condition Index with two hundred and forty entries, an Argyria File, resources, commercial products, modern case accounts, cleansing responses, children and vulnerable populations. The whole picture, in one place.

The seed idea, and the person who planted it

The frame that lets this book say what silver is actually doing came from Robert Becker. Becker was the orthopaedic surgeon at Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse and the Syracuse VA whose electrical regeneration research in the 1960s and 70s named something no one else was willing to name at the time: silver is not just an antimicrobial. It is a bioelectric agent. His silver-electrode experiments regrew tissue in animals that mainstream medicine said was non-regenerable. His book The Body Electric (1985) is the full account.

Becker is the frame that lets Colloidal Silver explain what silver is actually doing — not just “killing bacteria,” but acting on the bioelectric field the pharmaceutical model has no vocabulary for. His regeneration research was systematically defunded through the 1980s because an element on the periodic table has no business plan. Chapter 6 of this book rebuilds the Becker framework from the primary research he published before the funding stopped.

The debt is foundational, and belongs at the top of the post.

What the book shows

Part One: The Disappearance. What silver did in Western medicine for a century before 1938, and how it vanished. The surgical wound-care tradition and the pre-antibiotic clinical record. The Lancet and BMJ as the primary archive. The Flexner Report of 1910, funded by Carnegie and Rockefeller, which restructured American medical education around the pharmaceutical model and killed silver’s institutional base inside a generation. The Streetlight Effect — why the questions silver could answer stopped being asked once the funding model changed. The first section is the recovered history, put together in one place for the first time.

Part Two: What Silver Is and What It Isn’t. Why the germ theory story fails as a complete account of infection. The terrain paradigm as the actual working frame of pre-1938 medicine, before Pasteur-only orthodoxy was institutionalised. What silver actually does at the cellular level — Becker’s bioelectric framework in full — and what the pharmaceutical model has to keep denying for the current therapeutic approach to continue to work.

Part Three: Practical Use. Three parallel chapters: silver and water, silver on the body, silver inside the body. Preparation. Dosing. What distinguishes clinically useful colloidal silver from the commercial product that gets sold as a tonic. What forms work for what conditions. The practical heart of the book.

Part Four: The Honest Account. Argyria and the historical silver compounds — the condition that gets used to end every conversation about silver, correctly identified so it stops ending the conversation. When antibiotics have failed and silver is the one tool still working. What silver cannot do. The place of silver in a terrain approach — not as a replacement for anything, not as a cure-all, as one tool returned to the shelf, with its evidence intact.

What is at the back

Ten appendices. Home Production of Colloidal Silver — equipment, concentration, safety. Dosing and Administration. The Pre-1938 Condition Index, two hundred and forty entries from the primary literature, condition by condition, source by source. The Argyria File — every documented case the research could identify and the circumstances that produced it. Resources and Further Reading. Commercial Products. Modern Case Accounts. Silver in the Broader Landscape of Recovered Remedies. Understanding Cleansing Responses. Children, Pregnancy, and Vulnerable Populations.

Full back-of-book index. Everything cross-referenced.

Who this book is for

If you have been reading me on Substack for a while and you have been waiting for the one book on silver that holds the pre-1938 record, the Becker framework, and the practical use together, this is that book.

If you are new, start here. You do not need to have read anything else to follow it.

If someone you love is still working through chronic infection, long-course antibiotic damage, or the dependency trap of pharmaceutical-only medicine, this is the one volume I would send.

Colloidal Silver: The Silver That Medicine Dropped

The companion piece: No Autoimmunity

If Colloidal Silver traces how one of the pre-1938 tools was dropped, No Autoimmunity takes apart the diagnostic category that was invented to explain what medicine has done to the body in the years since.

The current chronic-illness landscape — type 1 diabetes, juvenile arthritis, pediatric multiple sclerosis, thyroid disease, atopic dermatitis, food anaphylaxis — is routinely labelled “autoimmune.” The word places the fault inside the patient. The body is said to have malfunctioned, failed to tell self from non-self, started attacking itself.

The body did not do any of that. The body responded to what has been injected past every barrier it has to filter foreign material. The mechanism was named more than a hundred years ago, confirmed experimentally through the twentieth century, and relabelled only when the original vocabulary stopped suiting the business model. No Autoimmunity is the full account.

Readers who want the pre-1938 pharmacopoeia restored, tool by tool, should read Colloidal Silver. Readers who want the “autoimmune” label dismantled should read No Autoimmunity. The two sit together on the shelf, and the pair reinforces.

No Autoimmunity

• I flew on a "boutique" Taiwanese airline called Starlux, and it blew me away.
• The seat was like a private pod, and the food was some of the best I've ever had.
• The crew seemed rushed during boarding, but were impeccable inflight.

I'm a regular business-class traveler, having flown on dozens of airlines and hundreds of thousands of miles over the years.

I often get asked the same question: What's the best business-class seat you've ever flown in?

It's not the usual fan favorites of Singapore Airlines or Emirates. It's Starlux Airlines, a Taiwanese carrier many Americans have never heard of.

Starlux first flew in January 2020 and bills itself as a "boutique" international airline that operates nonstop flights from Taipei to several US cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle.

My flight was on an Airbus A350-900 from Taipei to San Francisco, a nearly 12-hour overnight flight. It was the second leg of a trip that started in Kuala Lumpur, and the entire itinerary cost 85,000 Alaska Airlines miles.

The cash fare on this route ranges from $2,600 to over $5,000, depending on the season, so the points redemption — Alaska is a Starlux partner — was a very good deal. And the experience blew me away.

The whole idea from the beginning was to build a luxury airline from nothing with meticulous attention to detail and an emphasis on the small stuff.

After flying Starlux, those minor details made all the difference. Here's what my flight was like and why I'd easily book again.

The seat felt like a private suite

Every seat in Starlux's business class opens straight into the aisle, and every one has a sliding door. The cabin is decorated with faux marble finishes and shiny black panels. It honestly looks more like a boutique hotel lobby than the inside a plane.

This extreme attention to detail is what sold me most.

My favorite example: there's a little gap under the storage cabinet door, so you can leave a charging cable running out of it with the door closed. Exploring the seat illuminated several thoughtful design choices. The pod felt deliberate in a way some brand-new airline seats just aren't.

Some people call business class doors a gimmick, mostly because they don't go all the way up. I loved mine anyway. Once the seat was flat and the door was shut, it felt like my own little room, further emphasized by the warm mood lighting, pristine leather accents, and large seat walls.

A flight attendant handed me pajamas before we'd even pushed back, so I changed right away.

After dinner, the crew made up my bed with a thick mattress pad and one of the softest blankets I've ever been given on a plane.

The footwell angles inward slightly, which makes it feel a bit tight when you're lying flat, but I slept well regardless. On an overnight flight this long, that's what matters most.

The food was some of the best I've had in the air

Dinner is where Starlux left every other business-class flight behind.

It started with warm, fluffy garlic bread, which felt out of place alongside the Asian meal, but I was thrilled to see it. When the flight attendant came to clear my appetizer, she asked if I'd like more bread, to which I obviously said yes.

Then a creamy miso mushroom soup showed up, and I'm not exaggerating when I say it's one of the best things I've eaten on a plane. It was rich and savory, the kind of thing I can still taste if I think about it today.

The main was beef with fried rice, which was flavorful and cooked to perfection.

Dessert was Italian gelato that was actually soft enough to eat straight away, which basically never happens with ice cream at 38,000 feet.

Breakfast before landing: waffles with figs were also notable. One of the few airline breakfasts I'd happily order again.

All of the food served looked as good as it tasted. Every course was properly plated, the flight attendant talked me through each dish, and she reset my table between courses without me noticing.

The crew truly elevated the experience

Starlux isn't perfect, and the first 20 minutes of my flight proved it. Pre-flight service felt as if the crew was simply going through the motions rather than trying to create a good experience.

But when the meal service started, it was like a switch flipped.

One flight attendant greeted me by name and knelt down next to my seat to take my order. At one point, my seatbelt locked up while I was reaching for my amenity kit; she saw it happen and handed me the kit before I'd said a word.

My main course came out a few minutes late, and she apologized profusely for it, which she really didn't need to do, but it tells you what standard this crew holds itself to.

By the time dinner was over, even the crew members who'd seemed checked out at first were warm and attentive. When I woke up and asked for tea, it was there almost immediately, with lemon and sugar on the side.

I love how fun Starlux is

The other thing I love about Starlux is that it doesn't take itself too seriously.

There's a space theme running through the whole airline, from the Galactic Lounge in Taipei to the COSMILE loyalty program. Since 2024, it's been working with Peanuts, so Snoopy turns up on themed flights and merch.

On my flight, the entertainment screen displayed a Snoopy welcome for me, and I still carry my things in a Starlux Snoopy tote bag.

Even the toilet paper is custom printed with a runway design. All of these things make the airline feel like it's enjoying itself.

Starlux got the three things that actually matter right: the seat, the food, and the crew. And it did it with a sense of fun that a lot of the big-name carriers have somehow lost along the way.

I've flown business class on dozens of airlines, including some of the world's most famous seats. If you're flying between the West Coast and Asia, I'd book Starlux.

Starlux did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Exclusives

Russia is back at Dobropillia a year after it failed there. Now it’s the southern jaw of a pincer on Donbas’s last big free cities. This time Russia brought another army, and Dobropillia’s defenders have until the leaves fall to stop it.

Military

Ukraine’s military now orders supplies based on real front-line data, not guesswork, lawmaker says. Shift comes under new commander-in-chief. Ukraine’s new commander-in-chief, Drapatyi, is centering the army on soldiers’ lives and real front-line needs, a lawmaker believes.

“Operation to strike Russian targets deep in swamps continues”: Ukrainian Commander Madiar says his unit hits 7,306 Russian troops in first half of October, up 59% on August. The pace held through weather that usually grounds drones, says Robert “Madiar” Brovdi, who calls the trend the opposite of de-escalation.

Ukraine’s Navy says it hit six Su-34 bombers at a Russian airbase with Neptune missiles—the jets that drop glide bombs on Ukrainian towns (updated). Footage from Borisoglebsk showed a large fire at the base after Russian officials declared a missile alert, though the damage has not been independently confirmed.

Ukraine is going back to hitting Russian oil after its Trump-pressured pause, during which Kyiv got no US warnings of incoming ballistic missiles. The pause was meant to seal a US-announced energy truce, but Russia kept hitting power plants while Ukraine lost early warnings and drone connectivity.

To scale up air defense without straining the front, Ukraine enlists business. In under year nearly 100 companies have joined, their crews downing 60-plus targets. The crews fight under Air Force commands, using interceptor drones and automated turrets.

Intelligence and technology

Posting strike videos online may help Russia tune its drones’ optical targeting. Moscow now pays people to film hits, Ukrainian adviser warns. Russia is collecting footage of its Geran attack drones hitting Ukraine, probably to test the optical target-recognition systems that guide them in their final seconds.

Ukraine’s shell factories outpace state orders, arms company chief says: Kyiv spent five months buying from them this year, leaving six to produce. Private plants were built under Russian fire with no state investment, says the head of Ukrainian defense maker Ukrainian Armor

Ukraine’s hobbit-named robot fired on targets up to 1.3 km away in a demo for border guards. First reported carrying a wounded soldier, Ukraine’s Frodo robot has now fired for a border guard brigade—built, its maker says, to hit and run.

Musk pointed at the US military over Ukraine’s satellite limits. Now a US official says the administration had nothing to do with them. Ukraine’s Defense Ministry says it is in talks with partners and SpaceX to maintain stable service and prevent sudden restrictions on satellite services used by its military.

International

Ukraine and Japan plan prefabricated backup crossings for Kyiv’s bridges: 720 meters of structures already delivered. The fifth phase of the Emergency Recovery Program, recently signed by the two countries, allocates $15 million for Ukraine’s infrastructure needs.

After Trump, Musk tells Ukraine’s president to go. Zelenskyy says he won’t resign and will never accept Ukrainian land as Russian. The Ukrainian leader told British broadcaster Piers Morgan that this refusal is why some “big guys” want him replaced.

US weighs relief for sanctioned shadow fleet tankers, days after freeing Russian diesel. Officials say only unsanctioned oil would sail, but Reuters says Trump’s diesel push could pressure them to let Russian fuel aboard.

Ukraine’s war budget has $52 billion hole, and army needs $45 billion more on top. The West won’t send Ukraine the billions it needs until Kyiv delivers the reforms it promised.

Humanitarian and social impact

Russian drone cuts down unique energy line tower over Dnipro River in Kyiv. It can’t be rebuilt, and world is queuing for more power equipment. Ukraine’s grid operator Ukrenergo is already starting work on workarounds, but calls drones that cut down towers a new challenge.

Two tankers burn off Romania’s Sulina as Bulgaria says it lacks proof Russia is behind the Black Sea ship attacks. Seven crew members of a San Marino-flagged chemical tanker were still missing hours after it caught fire at anchor off the mouth of the Danube.

Russia’s largest drone attack on Kirovohrad Oblast since the full-scale invasion kills three in Kropyvnytskyi. Drones struck critical infrastructure, transport companies, logistics sites, and homes across the central Ukrainian oblast, with its capital taking most of the damage.

On Monday she sat in her cousin’s Kyiv apartment, and by Wednesday a Russian strike had left a hole where the window was. Her cousin, his girlfriend, and an aunt survived inside, and rescuers lifted them out 15 minutes after the blast.

A Russian drone damaged Cosmogony, Ukraine’s largest painting, in the section depicting the future. Its artist spent nearly two years creating it. The museum is weighing whether to restore the burned section or keep the fire’s traces as a reminder of the war.

Political and legal developments

Hungary held $82 million in cash and gold from Ukraine for months. Now, it faces torture complaints in Europe’s top court. Hungarian forces stopped two Oschadbank vehicles in March, carrying cash and gold from Austria to Ukraine.

Ukraine detains a gas station worker and a Telegram commenter suspected of scouting targets for Russian strikes. One was allegedly reached through a former classmate in Russia, and the other allegedly took orders from a female handler there.

Ukraine’s anti-corruption bodies, whose independence EU made condition for membership, have clawed back $5.1 million for state budget. Detectives found that a regional branch’s inaction had put millions at risk.

Read our earlier daily review here.