Russia might not have directly interfered in Latvia’s election, but the vote still showed how the Ukraine war was distorting European democracy.
Latvia’s VDD intelligence service did not detect any of Russia’s classic interference tactics in the run-up to Saturday’s (3 October) vote, such as a spike in disinformation, vote buying, or a manufactured security scare.
The centre-right prime minister Andris Kulbergs retained power with 35.8 percent of the vote, even if coalition-building might take a while.
And voters’ concerns included the cost of living and failing healthcare, in what also sounded normal.
But despite the ordinary appearances, Russia’s war in Ukraine still influenced the election in fundamental ways, in a strange new normal for Europe that most of us had hardly imagined just five years ago.
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The actual handover of the BRICS chairmanship from New Delhi to Beijing will take place in three months, but the contours of the group’s near-term agenda can already be identified with reasonable clarity. As BRICS expands and diversifies, the focus of discussions is shifting from symbolic gestures to issues of practical economic integration. Experts identify […]
The Black Sea is a strategic region of key importance for food security, the blue economy, maritime transport, tourism, fisheries, and aquaculture. This was stated by the Bulgarian Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Food, Prof. Dr. Ivan Paligorov, at the opening of the Stakeholder Conference on the Common Maritime Agenda for the Black Sea 2026 […]
Iranian Airlines Face Chronic Difficulties: On September 30, bailiffs boarded a Caspian Airlines Boeing 737—while passengers sat ready for takeoff—and served an order to collect a debt of 3 million euros before the aircraft could depart. The detention occurred just days after US secondary sanctions against the Iranian aviation sector came into effect, halving international […]
How Europe and the U.S. cynically turned Africa into a “cage without bars.” In 1960, remembered in history as the Year of Africa, 17 countries on the continent gained long-awaited political independence. It seemed that the nearly 500-year era of Western European empires had sunk into oblivion. But if you look closely at socioeconomic indicators, […]
The apparent attempted hijacking of a Flydubai flight carrying 170 mostly Israeli passengers was another reminder to Israelis of the constant threat of terror and war. Only the bravery of the chief pilot and passengers prevented a major disaster. A few hours earlier, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a video warning of attempts to harm […]
In February 2026, weeks after Cambodia’s National Assembly approved a draft law to ratify the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), a convention Phnom Penh signed in 1983 but never ratified, Japan unveiled plans to extend Official Security Assistance (OSA) to Cambodia. The announcement did not come out of nowhere and […]
The volume of munitions expended in the course of U.S. operations against Iran this year has been and continues to be a hot topic of discussion, and there has been relatively little official data provided on this front. However, now we know that the F/A-18F Super Hornets of the U.S. Navy’s Strike Fighter Squadron 41 (VFA-41), the “Black Aces,” launched 421 missiles and bombs during their time supporting Operation Epic Fury.
This new insight into VFA-41’s role in the conflict with Iran comes from a photo of a large board listing the squadron’s weapons expenditures during Epic Fury, via Jeff Rojas, who goes by the handle @jro_photography on Instagram. Rojas also shared pictures recently taken of VFA-41’s Super Hornets. The Black Aces were one of the squadrons assigned to the Nimitz class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, which has been on a marathon deploymentsince last year. The carrier only left the Middle East region last month and is now set to formally return home to San Diego, California, within days. Per the Pentagon’s official timeline, Operation Epic Fury began on February 28 and concluded on May 5, though U.S. forces have continued to conduct strikes on Iran, on and off, since then.
One of VFA-41’s F/A-18F Super Hornets spotted recently. Jeff Rojas Jeffrey Rojas
The complete tally of munitions employed as shown on the board, broken down by type, from greatest to fewest, is as follows:
1 GBU-12/B 500-pound-class Paveway II laser-guided precision-guided bomb
The total cost of all of these munitions, using available data from U.S. military budget documents, is very roughly $43,646,000, at least. Unit costs fluctuate regularly due to a variety of factors. Furthermore, the exact price tag for different JDAMs can be somewhat difficult to calculate given how the individual components are budgeted.
The JDAM is really a family of kits that turn standard unguided ‘iron bombs,’ which can vary significantly in the kinds of effects they are designed to produce, into warheads for precision-guided munitions. This is exemplified by the (V)2 and (V)4 subvariants of the GBU-31/B mentioned here, which are built using standard high-explosive and bunker-buster bombs, respectively. No specific subvariants of the GBU-32, GBU-38, or GBU-54 were mentioned in the information provided. Standard JDAMs can also only be employed against static target coordinates. The LJDAM kits add a laser guidance component (akin to what is found on Paveway-series bombs) that enables strikes against moving targets.
A JDAM, as well as a pair of AIM-9Xs, seen under the wing of a VFA-41 Super Hornet in August. NAVCENT
No specific version of AGM-154 is mentioned, either, but the C and C-1 types, which have multi-stage bunker-busting warheads, are the only ones understood to be in service today. Remaining A variants, which were loaded with 145 small bomblets, were removed from U.S. service in 2008 as a result of new guidelines on cluster munitions issued under President George W. Bush. A planned AGM-154B, which would have contained six “smart” Sensor Fuzed Munition bomblets, was never produced. You can read more about the full JSOW family here.
We do not know exactly what targets any of these munitions were employed against. However, a picture that Jeff Rojas grabbed of one of VFA-41’s Super Hornets, seen toward the top of this story and in part below, shows a very interesting broken submarine kill marking, with the added text “Sub Buster.” The jet also has a number of more typical bomb-shaped kill marks.
A close-up look at the broken submarine and other kill marks on one of VFA-41’s Super Hornets. Jeff Rojas Jeffrey Rojas
The video montage in the social media post below includes a clip, starting at 0:13 in the runtime, of a Hellfire missile hitting what looks to be a Ghadir class diesel-electric midget submarine in port.
U.S. forces are degrading the Iranian regime's ability to project power at sea and harass international shipping. For years, Iranian forces have threatened freedom of navigation in waters essential to American, regional and global security and prosperity. pic.twitter.com/gIBN02mowh
It is extremely likely that the AIM-9Xs and AIM-120s were fired at Iranian drones, though they could have been launched at incoming cruise missiles, as well. At the time of writing, there are no known or reported instances of U.S. military jets engaging crewed Iranian aircraft in the course of the conflict to date. In 2024, the Navy carried out a crash program that increased the total number of AIM-9Xs that F/A-18E/Fs could carry per sortie, specifically in response to Houthi drone threats. Super Hornets loaded with nine air-to-air missiles are now referred to as “Murder Hornets.”
It is also important to remember that this is a discussion of the munitions expended by just one Navy strike fighter squadron. Lincoln‘s air wing includes four strike squadrons, three with Super Hornets and one with F-35Cs, as well as units flying other types of aircraft and helicopters. The carrier was just one part of a much larger array of air, naval, and ground forces that participated in Operation Epic Fury and subsequent operations against Iran. For additional context, consider that the entire Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group, including its entire air wing and escorting ships, fired off 770 munitions in total, by the official count, during very active combat operations in and around the Red Sea between November 2023 and June 2024.
VFA-41 Super Hornets seen flying together recently. Jeff Rojas
As such, the tally of munitions launched from VFA-41 Super Hornets offers a very interesting view into that squadron’s contributions to Operation Epic Fury, as well as the full scale and scope of the conflict with Iran.
Special thanks again to Jeff Rojas for sharing the details about VFA-41’s participation in Operation Epic Fury and his pictures with us.
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Oct. 02, 2026.It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
An analysis published Friday by Democracy Docket warned that “tens of thousands” of voters across the US face “risk of disenfranchisement” thanks to actions being taken by the United States Postal Service.
The analysis, written by veteran election reporter Jim Saksa, points to a new USPS policy known as Regional Transportation Optimization (RTO) that “will eliminate evening mail pickups from post offices more than 50 miles away from a regional processing facility, most of which are located in major urban areas.”
For people who live in these areas, ballots sent on Election Day will be postmarked and delivered at least a day later than in previous election years, thus making it ineligible to be included in final election tallies.
“In every state, a day’s delay in delivery means that if mail voters wait until the last day or two before the election to mail their ballot,” Saksa explained, “they could be disenfranchised.”
Saksa reported that this policy is currently active in “about 42.5% of all ZIP codes” in the continental US, and is scheduled to eventually take effect in around 70% of all ZIP codes. No additional ZIP codes are expected to be added between now and election day.
Saksa also said that voters concerned about their ballots not being counted should deliver them in person to their local post office, where they can ask an employee to postmark it.
President Donald Trump has tried for the last several months to use USPS to meddle with states’ mail-in voting systems.
In March, the president signed an executive order that instructed the United States Postal Service to not deliver ballots in any states that have not given the federal government access to their voter lists.
The US Supreme Court last month rejected Trump’s efforts to interfere with mail-in voting, allowing states to continue sending ballots to voters as they’ve done in past elections.
Even with the Supreme Court loss, however, the president’s repeated attacks on voting by mail has had a major impact on the 2026 midterm elections.
An NBC News poll released in September showed that just 23% of Democratic voters said they planned to vote by mail this year, a double-digit drop from 2024 when 34% of Democrats said they were voting by mail.
In an interview with Politico published Thursday, Quentin James, founder and president of The Collective Political Action Committee, said Black voters have been expressing concerns about sending in their ballots for fear that Trump will order USPS to not deliver them.
“I think there’s confusion,” James said. “We know that the president has spent six months talking about changing the rules regarding mail-in voting, and a lot of folks are concerned about their ballot being secure.”
Indivisible co-founder Leah Greenberg also told Politico that her group is “absolutely hearing concern” about the mail voting process this year.
“But more importantly,” Greenberg added, “what we’re hearing is people trying to figure out what they can do and how they can organize locally in order to protect elections.”
Jordan Bardella, a leader of the French far-right National Rally, has denied writing antisemitic messages in 2013, as the race ahead of next May’s presidential elections continues to heat up.
An investigation by the left-leaning outlet Mediapart said on Thursday (1 October) that it could authenticate antisemitic messages from 2013 and attribute them to Bardella.
In the messages, Bardella, an MEP and chair of the far-right Patriots for Europe group, said “all the banks are owned by Jews” and that Israel aims to create a new world order. Earlier media reports also found his secret Twitter account publishing racist content, such as mocking a young Black man who had suffered police violence.
He denied having written the messages, calling the evidence “crude montages” and “obscure screenshots that can easily be manipulated,” he wrote on social media, adding he would sue Mediapart for defamation.
“Either Mediapart is running this operation itself, or it is being manipulated by interested parties,” he has said.
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Andy Burnham plans to pass a law scrapping the triple lock before the next election despite Labour pledging in its 2024 manifesto to keep it intact and the PM himself previously saying it would stay until 2030.
With Democrats leading competitive races and poised to reclaim the House, the American political map is shifting under Trump’s weakening hold, the impending exits of McConnell and Pelosi, and a familiar warning: never count out the party’s talent for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Good riddance to both. The major tectonic plates of […]
In Germany’s recent state elections, voters as young as 16 could cast ballots. The results confirmed a global trend of political division between young women and men.
“On 1 January, we both deleted Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat. And whichever of us would be the first to start watching Reels again or download Instagram would have to eat a slice of rotten cheese,” Greta and Lena told Germany’s Deutschlandfunk radio station.
The 16-year-old girls live in a village in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and chose to delete social media because they had been spending far too much time on it. They often scrolled on TikTok or Instagram late into the night, affecting their performance at school. This summer, however, both reinstalled TikTok for a month. This time without the punishment of a slice of rotten cheese.
They did so for an experiment with journalists from Deutschlandfunk. The journalists wanted to find out what political content the girls would consume through TikTok, the popular Chinese social network, during the peak of the election campaign. Mecklenburg-Vorpommern went to the polls on the third weekend of September. And, as is well known, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) swept the state, just as it had two weeks prior in Saxony-Anhalt.
Greta and Lena, however, were in a markedly different position from their peers in Saxony-Anhalt. For the first time, the north-eastern federal state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern had allowed 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in state elections. Since young people consume much of their news on social media, Greta and Lena immersed themselves in TikTok, one of the networks now most popular among young Europeans.
For the first few minutes, the girls watched a range of non-political videos — recipes, tomato growing and “silly” AI videos. Then, at around the third minute of scrolling, the first political content appeared. First came a video about Erich Honecker, the former East German communist politician. “Why am I seeing so much stuff about the GDR here?” Greta wondered. As she continued scrolling, she came across AfD co-leader Alice Weidel herself.
It was the first moment when the girls began to notice how quickly their initially apolitical feed was changing. “I feel as if it is constantly just AfD,” Greta said later. She added that she had not searched for any such content in advance. Over the following month, the girls kept a diary of their feed and observed how, after political videos, more and more similar content began appearing — not only from the parties themselves, but also from a range of accounts that picked up and further spread their messages.
The experiment confirmed what has been known for some time: TikTok and other networks alongside it can quickly form the political world a young person sees and the views they come to adopt. At the same time, algorithms are accelerating a trend of a political divide between young women and men, which was also reflected in the results of the state elections mentioned above in Germany.
Algorithms exacerbate polarisation
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The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has welcomed a declaration adopted on September 24 that emphasizes climate change adaptation, disaster risk reduction, and resilience-building through improved data, risk assessments, and early warning systems. The declaration acknowledges the role of specialized UN agencies, including the WMO, in coordinating scientific data related to sea-level rise. According to UN […]
Dinosaurs are the celebrities of prehistory: instantly recognizable, endlessly merchandised, and constantly misunderstood. Thanks to movies, outdated museum displays, and “fun facts” passed around like campfire stories, much of what we think we know about these animals doesn’t hold up under closer examination. Did every T. rex roar like a jet engine? Were all dinosaurs […]
Faced with rising great-power suspicions and the challenge of verifying clandestine, cavity-muffled detonations, the US is turning to high-precision subterranean blast experiments in the Nevada desert to strip covert nuclear testing of its technical cover. Last month, the US Department of Energy (DOE) reported that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) conducted an underground, non-nuclear […]
Wars, sanctions and shrinking civic space shape the opening of the General Assembly’s Third Committee The United Nations General Assembly’s principal human-rights committee opened its annual debate with warnings that war, racism, inequality and restrictions on civil society are weakening protections worldwide. Yet the discussion also exposed a deeper political divide: governments agree that the […]
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