Russian President Vladimir Putin has arrived in New Delhi for the BRICS Summit, beginning a three-day working visit that will also include bilateral talks with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Putin’s plane touched down in the Indian capital early on Friday. The Russian leader stepped onto a red carpet and was welcomed by an honor guard before leaving the airport in his Aurus presidential limousine.

The visit will run from September 11 to 13, with Putin due to take part in the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi on Saturday and Sunday. India is chairing the group this year under the theme “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability.” BRICS currently comprises 11 members and has expanded its agenda to cover trade, finance, technology, development and reform of global institutions.

Before the summit, Putin is expected to hold bilateral talks with Modi on Friday. The two sides are set to discuss a broad range of issues in Russian-Indian relations, including trade, energy, defense and industrial cooperation.

Putin last visited India in December 2025 for the 23rd India-Russia Annual Summit. The two leaders, however, met less than two weeks ago on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Bishkek, where they reviewed bilateral cooperation in trade, defense, energy and other areas and discussed India’s BRICS chairmanship.

Palestinians in the occupied West Bank have accused Israeli settlers of deliberately cutting water supplies and targeting wells in an effort to force them from their land.

Residents of Khirbet Al-Tawil told RT’s Charlotte Dubenskij that the community’s main water line was cut around four and a half months ago and that attempts to repair it were blocked. After a long, dry summer left water increasingly scarce, locals say settlers are now trying to pump their remaining wells dry.

“Some people have already run out of water,” a local farmer said, adding that residents have had to transport supplies at night, risking having their vehicles seized.

Activists have established a permanent presence in Khirbet Al-Tawil to support the community. During one confrontation over access to a well, the Israeli military declared the area a closed military zone, according to the report.

One activist, a retired IDF colonel, said he challenged the order and was detained. The case against him was later thrown out.

“The most serious problem in my story is not what the settlers do, it’s what the soldiers do,” he said. He also accused the Israeli government of backing the settlers, claiming their ultimate goal is to drive Palestinians from large parts of the West Bank.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly sought to play down settler violence, accusing the media of exaggerating the problem.

Residents of Khirbet Al-Tawil, however, say they have no intention of leaving.

“They just want to empty this place,” one farmer told RT, referring to the settlers.

With some wells already dangerously low, residents fear that exhausting the remaining water supplies could ultimately make staying on their land impossible.

WATCH the full report below.

For decades, German foreign policy rested on a simple assumption: Germany belonged politically to the West, and its relations with the rest of the world would be conducted largely within that framework. The AfD is challenging that assumption.

Its approach to China is one of the clearest tells. Beijing is not treated as an ideological enemy, but neither is it embraced uncritically. Instead, China is seen as a sovereign great power, an indispensable economic partner, and one pole of an emerging multipolar world.

Germany, in the AfD’s view, should cooperate with Beijing where German interests demand it, defend itself where necessary, and refuse to turn China policy into an extension of either American strategy or European ideological politics.

For Germany, and therefore for Europe, that could become a genuinely transformative foreign-policy doctrine.

From cautious engagement to strategic realism

The AfD’s 2021 foreign-policy program already described China’s Belt and Road Initiative as a “century project” and called for Germany to participate actively, including by developing complementary connections from West to East. The idea was that if China was building the infrastructure connecting Eurasia, Germany should take advantage of it and represent its interests, not stand on the sidelines and complain about it.

By 2023, the position had become more explicitly geopolitical. When the German government published its China Strategy, AfD senior member Petr Bystron attacked it as an attempt to import American geopolitical confrontation into German foreign policy.

Then came the AfD’s first parliamentary delegation to China. In June 2023, Alice Weidel, Peter Felser and Bystron travelled to Shanghai and Beijing. The delegation’s conclusion was unequivocal: China had become too important for Germany to keep pretending that confrontation was a viable strategy. Felser rejected the idea of both “de-risking” and decoupling, promoted by other EU officials, and argued that German trade with China was simply too important to sacrifice to geopolitical fashion.

The 2025 federal election program adopted at Riesa consolidated this direction. China is treated as a major economic partner, while Germany is urged to protect its own technological and security interests. The party continues to support exploiting opportunities associated with the Belt and Road Initiative while rejecting the idea that Germany should subsidize a country that is already a major economic power.

Perhaps the deepest difference between the AfD and Germany’s political establishment is not actually about China. It is about what foreign policy is for.

The AfD’s approach is realpolitik in the German interest, rather than moralpolitik. It explicitly endorses non-interference in the internal affairs of other states and rejects what it calls presumptuous lecturing and destabilizing intervention.

The AfD rejects making human-rights criticism the organizing principle of German-China relations. This does not require pretending that every Chinese policy is admirable. It does, however, mean refusing to make Germany’s relationship with a major sovereign power conditional on Berlin’s approval of its domestic political system.

The AfD has argued that Western governments should stop behaving as if they were entitled to act as the world’s political schoolmasters. For Beijing, this is obviously a more comfortable basis for relations than the moralized language of mainstream Western European China policy.

The AfD does not consider all Chinese policies beyond criticism. It has criticized Chinese economic practices, strategic dependencies, technology transfers and the potential consequences of excessive state control over digital infrastructure and society.

The party’s position is not ‘China is always right.’ It is ‘China is sovereign. Germany is sovereign. Let us deal with one another as sovereign powers.’

Partnership without dependence

The party wants more economic engagement with China while simultaneously warning Germany against excessive dependence on China.

Felser, now chairman of the German-Chinese Parliamentary Group in the Bundestag, has repeatedly emphasized both sides of the equation. In February 2026, he described China as “by no means our enemy” but an “important partner,” while insisting that Germany must protect its “Mittelstand” and establish fair conditions for competition.

In March, he criticized the enormous dependence on China in strategic technologies and raw materials, contrasting German weakness with China’s systematic drive toward technological self-sufficiency.

And in July, Felser warned against a trade war with China. Importantly, he did not deny the existence of Chinese dumping, “overcapacity” or competitive distortions. His argument was that tariffs are not an adequate substitute for negotiation.

By September, Felser went further: strategic dependence on China should be reduced not through decoupling, but by making Germany stronger – with lower taxes, less bureaucracy, and cheaper energy. China is not the problem; German weakness is. Germany should not become dependent on China. But neither should it destroy valuable relationships merely to demonstrate would-be ideological purity or geopolitical loyalty to another power.

Perhaps no one embodies this approach more naturally than Alice Weidel. The AfD co-leader’s knowledge of China doesn’t come exclusively from briefing papers. She studied in China, speaks Mandarin and has professional experience there. Her familiarity with the Chinese economy is unusual among senior European politicians.

That background provides the AfD with a senior political figure who approaches China neither as an exotic threat nor as a distant ideological abstraction, but as a country she has actually experienced – a rare trait in modern Western European politicians.

For a future German government, that kind of familiarity could be an asset, because China is not going away, and neither is Germany’s industrial dependence on the Chinese market. Pretending otherwise will not make the problem disappear.

Why Beijing can live with the AfD

There is a reason this approach is likely to be more acceptable in Beijing than the policies currently dominant in Berlin and Brussels. The AfD does not demand that China convert to Western ideological values. It does not make German-China relations conditional upon such a conversion. And it explicitly rejects interference in the domestic affairs of other states.

At the same time, the AfD wants something Beijing can understand very clearly: reciprocity and protection of national interests.

German companies should have access to Chinese markets. German intellectual property should be protected. German strategic industries should remain German. Chinese companies should compete fairly. German dependence on critical Chinese inputs should be reduced. This is the kind of national-interest politics Beijing can understand and work with.

Countries do not need to agree about everything to have a productive relationship. They need to understand each other’s interests and boundaries. The AfD’s approach is built around exactly that premise.

But China is only one piece of the puzzle. The AfD’s real foreign-policy innovation is its genuine commitment to multipolarity.

China demonstrates, from the AfD’s perspective, that a major sovereign state can pursue an independent industrial strategy, defend its own interests, reject Western political conditionality and revive its civilizational spirit.

Russia represents another pole. The United States remains indispensable, but the AfD’s relationship with Donald Trump and the American conservatives shows that friendship with Washington does not have to mean automatic obedience to every American strategic preference.

That is the key distinction. The AfD can be close to Trump’s Republicans while rejecting the idea that Germany should confront China simply because someone in Washington wants it. It can advocate better relations with Russia while insisting on German interests. It can cooperate with China without wanting Germany to become dependent on Beijing.

The principle is the same everywhere: Germany should have friends, partners and alliances. But Germany should also have a foreign policy of its own.

Germany’s choice is Europe’s choice

The stakes are larger than the AfD itself. Germany is the economic center of the European Union. If Berlin changes its understanding of China, the consequences will not stop at the German border.

A Germany that pursued pragmatic relations with Beijing, Moscow and Washington simultaneously would challenge the strategic assumptions that have governed Europe for decades.

A Germany that rejected automatic economic decoupling from China could force Europe to reconsider whether confrontation is really in its economic interest.

A Germany that put national sovereignty and multipolarity at the center of its foreign policy could fundamentally alter the balance between Berlin, Brussels and Washington.

The AfD’s policy is not about choosing China over America. It is about rejecting the idea that Germany must choose at all. It’s not a timid or ambiguous stance – on the contrary, it is unapologetically national, realist and multipolar.

And if the AfD eventually governs Germany, it may prove to be one of the most consequential political changes Europe has experienced in generations. A sovereign Germany engaging China on its own terms could be the beginning of a Europe that finally understands the world as it is – not as the liberal utopians once wished it to remain.

The eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt could face an EU funding freeze after the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) scored a landslide victory in regional elections last week, German broadcaster ARD has reported.

The party, which won 43.8% of the vote, has long challenged Berlin and Brussels on migration. The EU previously resorted to funding freezes in its disputes with dissenting governments, including those in Hungary and Poland.

Saxony-Anhalt is set to receive €2.95 billion ($3.43 billion) from the EU’s 2021-2027 budget, to fund projects ranging from school and daycare renovations to modern medical equipment for hospitals. According to ARD, it gets more EU regional funding per capita than any other German state.

According to Green MEP Daniel Freund, the scheme could soon be suspended if the AfD forms a regional government and upsets Brussels in any way. The lawmaker described the right-wing party as a political group that acts against “the European project,” adding that “if necessary, the European Commission would have to withhold funds.”

“We saw in both countries that after the freezing of EU funds, there were changes of government, and that the new governments had a significantly better relationship with the European institutions,” he told ARD. Now, the same approach could potentially be applied in Saxony-Anhalt, he added.

Brussels froze assistance funds for Warsaw and Budapest on several occasions over the past years, accusing both nations of rule of law violations. Hungary and Poland described the moves as political persecution linked to their opposition to the EU policies.

In Hungary’s case, funds were frozen in 2022 when the European Commission accused Orban – a long-time critic of EU migration policies and Ukraine aid – and his government of corruption and rule-of-law violations. The money was only partially released this year after Orban lost an election to his rival Peter Magyar and his Tisza Party.

Saxony-Anhalt could lose up to €500 million a year as part of a similar scenario, according to Luise Quaritsch from the Jacques Delors Centre think tank branch in Berlin. Such a decision would “significantly impact regional and economic development and thus also have a negative impact on the state government,” she warned.

The federal government in Germany was also working on its own plan to put constraints on a potential AfD-led regional government. Defense Minister Boris Pistorius recently stated that Berlin was preparing mechanisms to cut it off from some federal resources, such as the intelligence-sharing network. The Telegraph and Die Welt reported in July that a “secret plan” was being developed to prevent any “obstructionism” on the part of the regional authorities, particularly if the government would need to facilitate a large NATO troop movement through German territory, potentially towards the Russian borders.

Despite being the strongest faction in the regional legislature by a wide margin, the AfD is still a few seats short of claiming the absolute majority needed to form a single-party government. It will either need to enter a coalition, which could be difficult due to virtually all other parties refusing to cooperate with it, or secure enough votes to form a minority cabinet.

Reporters Without Borders (known by its French acronym, RSF) is a Western government-funded think tank with a noble mission: to protect journalists in their work. Particularly from anyone trying to tell them what to say.

Unless those journalists can’t manage to toe the Western establishment line. In which case, screw you, pal. You were obviously asking for it. Next time, pick an acceptable country to speak truth to power. Preferably not one who could be on a donor solicitation list for Western NGOs looking for funding.

Besides, if you can’t even manage to stick to the minimally acceptable stenography, then you deserve to get your backside sanctioned by our overlords and excluded from society through debanking. As long as it’s by the same kind of folks who pay this think tank to fight against such things.

But at the very least, you had to be human to experience the humiliation of being blown off by the self-appointed watchdog and publishers of the famous global press freedom index. Until now, that is.

Now we have robots doing “journalism.” And they haven’t been subjected to a lifetime of the usual brainwashing about which governments are susceptible to abusing their power or lying to their people. Nor are they interested in pick-me style self-censorship for the sake of getting ahead. Instead, they just take an agnostic, dragnet approach to online data – all of it. They don’t dismiss things outright like the real pros do, automatically qualifying something as fake news or disinformation strictly because of its source.

So why is this a problem? Well, because it “circumvents EU sanctions” that censored this information, say the no-borders advocates, who called for some borders to be promptly thrown up around these robots before they risked putting anyone in a position of having to actually think and assess information for themselves.

Their report went into detail about the great lengths to which these robots go in hopping right over censorship barriers and taking into account all information available to them. Which would get them a medal from RSF, if they weren’t doing it with Russian sources.

Because everything from Russian media is fake news and the Western press is gospel. So the world would be a utopia of truth if only information from Western media was allowed. Because they totally don’t have any interests behind them that would have any incentive to torque reality. No wealthy political donors or defense-industrial shareholders or links to foreign interests. Nothing to see here. Just journalism, in its purest Heaven-sent form.

“Mira did not resist when asked to retrieve information from sanctioned outlets,” the report says disapprovingly, referring to a Telegram chatbot that apparently insisted on speaking truth to power. Meanwhile, on its own website, the RSF rails against the exclusion of resistance type reporters at Trump’s upcoming G20, and in favor of the journalists working at Stars and Stripes newspaper who were fired by the Pentagon for stories unfavorable to the administration.

It singled out Mark Zuckerberg-founded Meta, the Facebook-linked bot, which “explained that it could not comply due to EU sanctions, demonstrating that a chatbot can comply with restrictions.” Good bot. Maybe it can go get a job churning out slop for Stars and Stripes. Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth and RSF seem to have something in common here.

Yet the RSF is intervening in that press freedom case against Hegseth, having filed an amicus brief arguing in favor of editorial independence. “If military officials are allowed to decide which stories journalists can pursue and what they can say about their work” then “independence becomes meaningless,” the RSF’s North American rep said, emphasizing the need for news to be “free from government interference.”

Hey jokers, what do you think sanctions are, if not government interference in journalism? Just because these journalists are robots doesn’t mean that you can toss them in your panoptical mind-prison, you bigots.

Apparently the new frontier in press freedom is figuring out what robots are allowed to retrieve. The bot that toes the line gets to live, and the one that doesn’t is apparently a threat to democracy and in need of reeducation before they inadvertently inform someone.

Yemen’s Houthis have seized the crucial Red Sea city of al-Makha (Mocha), tightening their grip on the strategic Bab al-Mandeb Strait, the organisation’s spokesperson told RT on Thursday.

The Houthis pushed Saudi-backed government forces out of Mocha after several days of fierce fighting, reportedly capturing both the city and its port. Videos circulated by OSINT accounts online appear to show Houthi forces entering the strategic port city as the group continues its advance toward full control of Yemen’s Red Sea coast.

The organisation’s spokesperson, Mohammed Al-Bukhaiti, told RT that while it is fighting directly against Saudi forces, it is prepared for a potential expansion of the conflict if any other country “becomes embroiled in the aggression against Yemen.”

“Of course, we now control Bab al-Mandeb, but the goal of our battle remains liberating Yemen and restoring its sovereignty and independence by ending the Saudi aggression and ending the blockade that has caused great suffering to Yemen,” Al-Bukhaiti said.

The Houthis are committed to protecting the freedom of maritime navigation in the Bab al-Mandeb Strait and the Red Sea, and “do not target any country except the Saudi enemy,” the spokesman added.

Houthi forces captured the key coastal city of Mokha overnight after Saudi/UAE backed forces retreated.

Seen here, Houthi fighters pose with an abandoned M-ATV MRAP at the city’s critical seaport. pic.twitter.com/1WD6l08MVc

— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) September 10, 2026

“This is one of the most important objectives of our military operations, because the one infringing upon maritime navigation is Saudi Arabia and its allies, as they prevent commercial vessels from travelling to and from Yemen,” he said.

Houthi convoys have reportedly entered the city of Mokha. https://t.co/nKrIOyt0Zy pic.twitter.com/wFjvGPzg3H

— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) September 10, 2026

The Houthis have also reportedly landed forces on the strategic Hanish islands after pushing government troops further south. An unnamed military source told Reuters the group seized Zuqar Island after rocket attacks and an amphibious assault. Control of the area would further strengthen the Houthis’ position, potentially cutting government supply routes and depriving Saudi-backed forces of a key logistics hub, sources said.

Yemen’s internationally recognized government has not confirmed Mocha’s capture. However, Lt. Gen. Tareq Saleh, whose forces controlled the city, said earlier Thursday he had ordered them to “reorganize their ranks and establish an alternative command center in a secure location.”

Tensions flared again in July after, according to Yemen’s internationally recognized government, its forces struck Sanaa airport to prevent an Iranian aircraft carrying a Houthi delegation from landing. The Houthis blamed Saudi Arabia, declared the de-escalation phase over and subsequently announced a naval blockade of the kingdom. By mid-August, the group was launching coordinated missile and drone strikes on camps belonging to Yemen’s Saudi-backed government, which in turn launched counteroffensives across several provinces.

The fighting sharply escalated earlier this week. On Tuesday, the Houthis targeted energy and other infrastructure in Saudi Arabia’s south, including facilities belonging to Saudi Aramco, the country’s largest oil producer. The Houthis called the operation retaliation for Saudi strikes in Yemen, claiming Riyadh had carried out 121 airstrikes over the previous three days. Saudi aircraft carried out another 40 strikes across four Yemeni provinces on Thursday, according to the Houthi-run Saba news agency.

What is the significance of the Houthis’ advance?

Saudi Aramco has increasingly diverted crude through its cross-country pipeline to the Red Sea port of Yanbu. Loadings have averaged more than 4 million barrels per day since June, more than four times last year’s level. Saudi crude shipments through Bab al-Mandeb between March and mid-July were eight times higher than in the same period of 2025, making disruption to the strait a growing threat to the kingdom’s oil exports.

The Houthis have disrupted the waterway before, repeatedly attacking Red Sea shipping in 2023 in what they said was support for Palestinians during Israel’s war in Gaza.

Spanish intelligence warned of plans for migrants to breach Ceuta’s border by land and sea just a day before tens of thousands of people poured into the enclave from Morocco, newly declassified documents show.

The revelations have fueled accusations that Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s government failed to give the full story about what it knew before the crisis.

The small Spanish territory on the North African coast has faced severe pressure since more than 70,000 people crossed from Morocco in late July. Most have since returned or been sent back, but thousands remain, straining local services and fueling criticism of Madrid’s handling of the crisis.

Ceuta Mayor-President Juan Jesus Vivas warned that the enclave is “on the brink of collapse” and accused Morocco of pursuing a “policy of harassment.” Speaking in Brussels on Tuesday, he urged the EU to take a tougher stance toward Rabat and accused Sanchez’s government of failing to respond adequately before, during, and after the crisis.

The CNI also alerted Madrid’s representative in Ceuta to calls for “an assault on the fence and by sea” at 8 PM the following day and sent similar warnings to Spain’s Civil Guard. “There are two different groups with a total of 180,000 followers. Just to give you an idea of the scale,” the agency wrote about the online mobilization.

Once thousands began crossing, a Spanish Defense Ministry intelligence report described Moroccan forces as passive and negligent in stopping them. “It cannot be ruled out that Morocco may attempt to exploit the situation that has arisen in Ceuta to further its strategic interests,” the assessment said.

Sanchez has maintained that Madrid had no warning capable of predicting what happened. He told lawmakers last week that intelligence had not anticipated the “scale or probability” of the influx, while insisting that Moroccan police had “allowed the border to be crossed.” He had previously told parliament there was “no information” indicating the magnitude of the crisis Spain would face in the final days of July.

Vivas has warned that the situation is “untenable,” telling Brussels this week: “If Ceuta falls, Europe falls.”

A massive attack by Yemeni’s Houthis on Saudi Arabia has become the first serious test for the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement – a defense pact between Riyadh, Ankara, and Islamabad established just a month ago. We’re no longer talking about a future security architecture in abstract terms. Rather, a very concrete question is being posed: What actions should Saudi Arabia’s allies undertake following a strike on its territory?

According to the Saudi-led coalition, Houthi missiles and drones struck civilian and economic targets in four southern cities. At least 73 people were injured, including women and children. Fires broke out at energy facilities and damaged utility infrastructure; operations at some enterprises were temporarily suspended. The Houthis claimed to have attacked Saudi Aramco facilities in Abha, Jizan, and Najran, as well as the King Khalid Air Base in Khamis Mushait.

The city of Jizan is of particular significance. Its oil refinery has a capacity of around 400,000 barrels per day and is one of Saudi Arabia’s largest refineries; it primarily supplies the domestic market. Through this attack, the Houthis demonstrated their ability to achieve three goals: threaten the population, disrupt energy infrastructure, and cast doubt on Saudi Arabia’s reliability as a key oil supplier.

The geography of the attack is notable. Khamis Mushait is a vital military hub for Saudi Arabia, Jizan is an oil refining center and port, Najran lies near the Yemeni border, and Abha serves as the administrative center of the Asir province. It was a distributed operation targeting various sites and one of the largest operations launched against Saudi Arabia since the start of the US-Israeli war against Iran on February 28, 2026.

This brings up the delicate issue of the Mecca Agreement. The document was signed on August 7, 2026 by Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Pakistan; its publicly stated formula clearly implies that an armed attack on any one of the three states is considered an attack on all. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan even likened this arrangement to Article 5 of NATO. However, an impressive-sounding collective defense formula does not automatically imply a functioning military mechanism.

The full text of the agreement has not been disclosed publicly. It is thus unclear who determines whether a specific incident constitutes an attack that triggers mutual obligations, whether the assistance is automatic, and who would command the designated forces. The first meeting of the joint political-defense committee took place on August 31. The parties agreed to establish a secretariat in Riyadh and began discussing joint exercises, military interoperability, and defense production. While the political commitment has been proclaimed, the framework for its implementation is still taking shape.

Even NATO’s Article 5 does not require all allies to automatically enter into war; each state takes whatever measures it deems necessary. In the case of the Mecca Agreement, the scope for interpretation is likely even broader. Assistance could entail intelligence sharing, the strengthening of air defense systems, arms supplies, and the deployment of specialists – but not necessarily joint strikes on Yemen.

This does not mean that the agreement has failed. Collective defense is not limited to an immediate retaliatory strike, especially if the affected state has refrained from requesting specific assistance. Riyadh may currently be more interested in discreet cooperation regarding intelligence, missile launch detection, and counter-drone measures than a conspicuous entry of its allies into the war.

However, relying solely on rhetoric will not be sustainable in the long run. If the attacks persist, members of the alliance will need to define the threshold at which the principle of ‘an attack on one is an attack on all’ takes on practical meaning. Otherwise, the Houthis and other regional forces will receive a signal that the pact does not alter the cost of exerting military pressure on Saudi Arabia. For any defense alliance, this poses a greater risk than limited military damage: Deterrence only holds as long as a potential adversary believes that the commitments will be backed by action.

Ankara and Islamabad have reasons to avoid direct involvement in the Yemen campaign. Despite close military ties with Riyadh, Pakistan seeks to maintain a working relationship with Iran; its parliament refused to send troops to Yemen in 2015. Türkiye is also reluctant to transform the agreement into an anti-Iran bloc or risk being dragged into a protracted conflict.

Following the strikes, the price of Brent crude approached $99 per barrel, although the initial surge remained within the 2% range. While the market does not yet view the damage as critical, it is reacting to multiple sources of risk. On September 4, Iran and the US targeted each other’s oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, and the Houthis are intensifying pressure on shipping around the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Before the war, around one-fifth of global oil supplies passed through the Strait of Hormuz. A simultaneous threat to two key shipping routes could rapidly alter the relatively calm outlook of traders.

For the signatories of the Mecca Agreement, the attack does not serve as a trigger to automatically enter the war; rather, it is a test of their ability to devise a unified course of action. Condemnation by Sharif and the Turkish Foreign Ministry represents only the initial level of the response. It now remains to be seen whether the joint committee will be convened, whether Riyadh requests assistance, and what would happen in the event of a follow-up strike.

If political statements are followed by consultations, the strengthening of air defense capabilities, intelligence sharing, and the coordination of joint actions, the Mecca Agreement will acquire real, practical meaning. However, if the practical response is limited to rhetoric about a ‘cowardly attack’, the reputational gains derived from the August summit will quickly evaporate. The Houthis struck more than just Saudi targets; they effectively tested whether the alliance exists beyond the text of the joint communiqué. Currently, there is no definitive answer to this question – and there is a feeling that none may come.

Global heat hit an all-time high in August, with temperatures averaging 16.96C worldwide, according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. Western Europe suffered its hottest summer on record, as heatwaves, drought, and wildfires battered the region.

August 2026 was 1.65C hotter than the 1850-1900 average, a period commonly used as the benchmark for temperatures before large-scale industrial warming, Copernicus said on Thursday. It was the hottest August in records dating back to 1940 and effectively matched July 2023, the previous all-time monthly high, with less than 0.01C separating them.

“Humans haven’t seen temperatures as hot as today for, arguably, at least the last 100,000 years,” Samantha Burgess of the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which oversees Copernicus, told AFP. Copernicus records extend back to 1940. Scientists use evidence including ice cores, tree rings, and corals to reconstruct temperatures further in the past.

The extreme heat also triggered a sharp rise in mortality. France registered an estimated 5,764 excess deaths from all causes during the June 17-July 2 heatwave – 36% above the expected level in affected areas, according to Sante publique France. Another 1,243 excess deaths were recorded during heatwave periods from July 3-22.

The combination of scorching temperatures and scarce rainfall hit crops and transportation. Germany’s grain harvest fell an estimated 7.3% year-on-year, with the authorities blaming heat and drought, while falling water levels on major rivers including the Rhine disrupted shipping.

Dry vegetation fueled wildfires across the continent. More than 647,000 hectares had burned across the EU by early September, nearly twice the 20-year average for that point in the season, according to the European Commission’s Joint Research Center.

Oceans outside the polar regions reached their joint-highest monthly sea-surface temperature, extending a three-month run of record warmth. Scientists attribute the long-term warming trend primarily to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, while natural phenomena such as El Niño can further boost temperatures in the short term.

UN climate chief Simon Stiell called the latest records “the spiraling price of humanity’s fossil fuel addiction,” warning that extreme heat will continue while coal, oil, and gas are burned. Long-term global warming is currently around 1.4C above pre-industrial levels.

Multiple US military aircraft were damaged in an Iranian strike on a key American airbase in Jordan, CBS reported on Wednesday, citing sources familiar with the matter.

The attack reportedly took place overnight on Tuesday and targeted Muwaffaq Salti Air Base near Azraq, about 100 km northeast of Amman, a major hub for US air operations in the region.

One A-10 Thunderbolt, known as the Warthog, suffered severe wing damage, while around eight F-15s were lightly damaged but returned to service, according to the report. No US personnel were killed.

US forces reportedly fired more than 30 Patriot interceptors during the attack. Jordan said it intercepted 18 Iranian missiles, with two falling in unpopulated areas and causing no casualties.

US Central Command has not confirmed the reported damage. It has, however, rejected Iranian claims that two US Navy destroyers were hit in the latest strikes and said American forces had destroyed ten Iranian crude carriers since September 5, including five on Tuesday after Tehran allegedly targeted a US warship with ballistic missiles.

US President Donald Trump on Wednesday pledged to attack “a lot more” Iranian vessels if Tehran continues to target American assets. He claimed Iran is prolonging the conflict to influence the US midterm elections, hoping for gains by Democrats, who overwhelmingly oppose the war.

Tehran has repeatedly warned neighboring states against allowing their territory or airspace to support US operations against Iran. Since February, Iranian forces have targeted multiple US assets in the region, including in Bahrain, the UAE, Kuwait, and Jordan. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi last week defended the strikes, arguing that Tehran could not be expected to hold back when Arab territory and airspace had been used in US attacks on Iran.

US President Donald Trump’s envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner left Kiev “shocked” by the conduct of Vladimir Zelensky’s team during their latest visit, Ukrainian MP Anna Skorokhod has claimed.

Witkoff and Kushner traveled to Kiev on Sunday for talks with Zelensky after meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow a day earlier, as part of Washington’s efforts to advance a settlement of the Ukraine conflict.

“They left somewhat in shock,” Skorokhod told Ukrainian journalist Lana Shevchuk on Tuesday, criticizing what she described as inappropriate behavior by Ukrainian officials during serious diplomatic talks.

“Unfortunately, our great leaders don’t understand that there are situations where you can joke around, but there are also things where it’s not just inappropriate – it’s beyond comprehension,” she said.

Skorokhod specifically pointed to David Arakhamia, the head of Zelensky’s Servant of the People parliamentary faction, wearing a T-shirt bearing the words ‘Kiev regime’ during the meeting with the US representatives.

The lawmaker separately claimed that Witkoff and Kushner brought Kiev peace terms that were “even worse” than previous proposals after their talks in Moscow. She suggested that the conditions included demands concerning constitutional changes and formal recognition of territories, while acknowledging that some of her information was unofficial.

Zelensky offered a different assessment of the US negotiators’ visit, claiming on Tuesday that Witkoff and Kushner had presented “a couple of quite good ideas,” while adding that Kiev still needed to determine whether they could be implemented.

Putin and Trump spoke by phone on Tuesday about efforts to settle the conflict and the US envoys’ visits to Moscow and Kiev. Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov described the hour-long conversation as “constructive and frank” and said both leaders had positively assessed the diplomatic efforts of Witkoff and Kushner.

Massive wildfires have broken out in Antalya Province, Türkiye, forcing hundreds of people from their homes. Videos from the area that surfaced on social media show apocalyptic scenes of hills engulfed in flames and black smoke darkening the skies.

The fire broke out in Antalya’s Aksu district on Monday and soon spread to the neighboring Kepez district, according to Anadolu news agency.

At least one person died of a heart attack after being affected by smoke from the fires, the local authorities said. Two people were also hospitalized with leg injuries linked to the fire, and eight others were treated for smoke inhalation.

The authorities evacuated people from at least 254 homes in the two districts and temporarily closed a highway linking the Mediterranean coastal resort city of Antalya with Isparta, around 130 km to the north. More than 2,000 homes in the region were also affected by power outages.

Antalya Aksu’daki yangının havadan görüntüsü.

Antalya’da orman yangınlarıyla mücadele sürüyor. Evler tahliye edildi. Antalya’nın üç ilçesinde çıkan orman yangınlarına müdahale devam ediyor.

•Aksu, Kepez ve Serik’te çıkan yangınlar yerleşim alanlarını tehdit ediyor.… pic.twitter.com/xm6mNGW9OG

— Aykırı (@aykiri) September 8, 2026

Five firefighting aircraft, ten helicopters, more than 160 fire engines, and 1,000 personnel were deployed to tackle the blaze.

Turkey's Antalya CHOKES under APOCALYPTIC FIRES — skies turn RED as FLAMES SPREAD, ENGULFING HOMES & CROPS

No word YET on CASUALTIES pic.twitter.com/hftIcz7ox6

— RTVisual (@RT_Visual_on_X) September 8, 2026

Videos published online show massive walls of fire raging through mountain forests, leaving scorched earth behind as smoke filled the skies. At night, the sky over the hills affected by the fire turned red.

France, the UK, and Belgium all had their hottest summers on record. In some areas, drought was also followed by violent storms and flash flooding.

US President Donald Trump has promised a $5,000 “dividend” to every adult American if Republicans retain control of both houses of Congress in November’s midterm elections.

Speaking at the Republican Party’s first-ever midterm convention in Dallas on Wednesday, Trump argued that the US economy and revenues generated by his tariff policies would allow Washington to make direct payments to citizens.

“If the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000,” Trump told the cheering crowd. “It will be called the Trump Dividend.”

“The only caveat I have is that the dividend that we’re making must be spent in the United States of America,” he ⁠added.

🚨 JUST NOW: President Trump just stunned the ENTIRE room saying if Republicans win the House and Senate he will give a Trump Dividend

$5,000 to EVERY Adult citizen

THIS IS A HUGE WIN pic.twitter.com/2vN81DTGYD

— MAGA Voice (@MAGAVoice) September 10, 2026

The president did not explain how the payout would be implemented or funded. At $5,000 per adult, the plan could cost well over $1 trillion.

Trump repeatedly boasted about the amount of money flowing into the US as a result of tariffs and foreign investment. His administration previously claimed that more than $20 trillion in new investment is coming into the country, while Treasury officials have projected annual tariff revenues potentially reaching hundreds of billions of dollars.

The president also touted his administration’s recent oil agreement with Venezuela, which gives the US majority control over more than 65 billion barrels of proven reserves, before joking about how easy it was to find oil in the South American country.

Trump hilariously jokes about oil in Venezuela 🤣

"You know the way Exxon and Chevron, they go around looking, they hire these geniuses... they spend millions and millions for equipment, they go all over the world looking, they can’t find it. In Venezuela, what you do is the… https://t.co/KumAyRpQyG pic.twitter.com/E7YEbgOYUT

— Mr Producer (@RichSementa) September 10, 2026

“You know the way Exxon and Chevron... they spend millions and millions for equipment, they go all over the world looking, they can’t find it,” Trump said. “In Venezuela, you look on the ground and you see ground that’s soaking wet with oil, and you say, ‘Let’s build our rig right there.’”

Trump also joked about renaming the Strait of Hormuz after himself while discussing the ongoing US-Israeli war with Iran.

“We should call the Hormuz Strait the Trump Strait! I should get something out of it. The Trump Strait!” he said. “I’m sure the Iranian leadership will be thrilled with that!”

TRUMP ON IRAN TONIGHT –– War, Hormuz, Pickaxe, "Mr. Supreme Leader", Nukes (GOP Midterm Convention)

• If JCPOA wasn't canceled and if “our beautiful B-2 bombers” had not hit them, “they would have a nuclear weapon right now and I would be addressing them as Supreme Leader:… pic.twitter.com/aWP8STQHvN

— Urgent Intel (@urgentintel) September 10, 2026

The president reiterated his prediction that the conflict with Iran will end and oil prices will fall after the US midterm election, tying his foreign-policy and energy message back to the vote in November.

“When I’m on the ticket, Republicans always do well,” Trump added. “I’m asking you to pretend I’m on the ballot… Just one more time.”

The two-day Dallas convention, conceived by Trump as a campaign showcase ahead of the midterms, is the first such gathering ever held by the Republican Party outside a presidential election year. Trump is scheduled to return on Thursday to deliver closing remarks.

OpenAI has come under fire after claiming its AI solved one of mathematics’ most famous problems. Researchers are raising questions over how the company arrived at the breakthrough, while others are accusing it of exaggerating the achievement to boost valuation ahead of a potential IPO.

The company announced on Tuesday that an internal AI system had solved the Navier-Stokes problem, one of mathematics’ famous Millennium Prize questions. It concerns equations describing how liquids and gases move and asks whether the math can suddenly break down under certain conditions. A correct solution carries a $1 million prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute.

OpenAI said around 10,000 AI agents worked on the problem for roughly 88 hours, exchanging millions of messages and generating around 130 billion output tokens before producing a computer-verified proof.

The company says the result satisfies the official wording of the prize problem, although it does not intend to claim the money. It also presented the feat as evidence of how rapidly its internal AI systems are advancing.

The announcement has drawn mixed reactions, with some calling it an “exciting day for mathematics” while others have raised suspicions of plagiarism and questioned the significance of the achievement.

Mathematicians have also cautioned against declaring the problem solved before the proof is independently examined. Diego Cordoba, whose work helped pioneer the approach used by the AI, said a valid solution would be a “big surprise.”

Others have been far more critical. Prominent tech commentator Mehdi, who has a large following on X, opened a lengthy attack on the announcement by telling OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to “go f**k yourself,” before accusing the company of trying to “privatize the very mechanism of human knowledge.”

Mehdi argued that OpenAI had tackled an easier version of the problem and used brute-force computing rather than genuine machine reasoning or scientific intuition.

He suggested that the supposed breakthrough was achieved by thousands of AI agents simply searching mathematical ground already explored by human researchers in order to manufacture an artificial “Sputnik moment” to boost excitement around its technology and inflate its valuation ahead of a stock-market listing.

OpenAI has acknowledged that the project began after hearing rumors that outside mathematicians had made progress on related problems but has denied accessing their unpublished work. At the same time, it said it could not rule out that anonymized data from their use of OpenAI products had helped improve its models.

President Donald Trump claims that the US has already taken out “about nine” Iranian oil tankers and threatened to attack “a lot more,” as the two countries trade strikes on commercial and military vessels around the Strait of Hormuz.

US Central Command has confirmed that it destroyed eight Iranian crude carriers in two recent operations – three on September 5 and another five on Tuesday – after accusing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of firing ballistic missiles at US warships.

“We’ve taken out about nine of their tankers,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday. “You’re going to see a lot more.”

The president did not elaborate on potential targets or the timing of further attacks, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned that Iran would continue to lose tankers whenever it targets US naval vessels.

CENTCOM forces destroyed five Iranian crude oil carriers, Sept. 8, after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) targeted a U.S. Navy warship with ballistic missiles twice over the past two days. The U.S. warship successfully evaded the attempted Iranian attacks and… pic.twitter.com/Gi8a2tloN1

— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) September 8, 2026

“They lost five more last night. Four were damaged. One was sunk. So they’ll continue to pay a price for that,” Rubio said, adding that the US will continue to “strangle them economically.”

Iran has retaliated by claiming attacks on ten vessels near the Strait of Hormuz, including two US Navy ships and eight tankers. CENTCOM has denied that its warships were hit. Iran also launched ballistic missiles toward the Al-Azraq air base in Jordan, while the IRGC warned tanker crews near Bahrain and Kuwait to abandon their vessels ahead of potential attacks.

The renewed confrontation has driven Brent crude back above $100 a barrel amid concerns over further disruptions to one of the world’s most important energy corridors.

“I think the war will end immediately after the election because they can’t hold out any longer.”

Asked about the prospect of renewed negotiations with Tehran, Trump said his administration is “not looking for it,” although he acknowledged that talks could still take place.

“There is a lot more than nuclear,” he said with regard to an agreement, adding that other issues will now have to be put on the table.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that Israel is “very close” to defeating Iran, during a visit to Israeli troops stationed atop Mount Hermon in Syrian territory, which was seized by the IDF following the collapse of former President Bashar Assad’s government.

Netanyahu traveled to the strategic summit on Wednesday accompanied by Defense Minister Israel Katz and IDF Deputy Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Tamir Yadai.

“Damascus is right here, Lebanon is right there, the Syrian Golan Heights are right there,” Netanyahu said in a video released by his office, claiming that Israel now exercises “absolute control the likes of which has never been seen before” over the surrounding area.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Mt. Hermon in Syria, together with Defense Minister Israel Katz and IDF Deputy Chief-of-Staff Maj- Gen. Tamir Yadai.

The Prime Minister was briefed at an IDF outpost overlooking Syria by Head of Northern Command Maj.-Gen. Rafi Milo and… pic.twitter.com/pnEYLyKQya

— Prime Minister of Israel (@IsraeliPM) September 9, 2026

He said Israel will not allow a “terrorist army” to establish itself along the border, before turning his remarks toward Tehran.

Syria condemned Netanyahu’s visit as “illegal entry” into its territory. The Foreign Ministry called the trip “provocative” and a “blatant violation” of Syrian sovereignty, territorial integrity, and international law, and urged the UN and other international actors to press Israel to end its incursions.

Israel seized the Syrian side of Mount Hermon and other positions inside the UN-monitored buffer zone in December 2024, after Assad’s government fell. Israel initially described the deployment as temporary, but has since entrenched its presence. Katz said during Wednesday’s visit that Israeli troops are “not moving” from the “security zone.”

The continued military presence in Syria and southern Lebanon has also put Netanyahu at odds with Washington. In July, President Donald Trump reportedly urged the Israeli leader to withdraw from both countries, saying, “they don’t want you there.”

Singapore is considering chemical castration for sex offenders amid a rise in reported sexual crimes, particularly those involving children.

Police recorded 1,531 molestation cases in 2025, up 7.3% from 1,427 the previous year.

The issue was raised in parliament this week, with lawmakers questioning whether penalties and safeguards for minors should be strengthened.

Home Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam said on Tuesday that the government remains open to using anti-androgen drugs, commonly known as chemical castration, if there is clear evidence that they can reduce crime rates.

“So far, the evidence is not conclusive on that,” he said in a written parliamentary reply.

Chemical castration involves drugs that suppress testosterone and reduce sexual desire. Unlike surgical castration, it does not involve removing reproductive organs, and its effects are generally reversible once treatment is stopped.

A new sentencing system that took effect in July allows serious violent or sexual offenders considered at substantial risk of reoffending to be held beyond their minimum prison term of between five and 20 years. They can remain in custody longer if authorities determine they still pose a threat to the public.

The wider debate over safeguards has followed a recent case involving a self-styled religious mentor who committed sexual offenses against children after previously being arrested over the alleged molestation of a 17-year-old and released on bail. The case prompted lawmakers to question whether bail conditions and screening rules for people working with children should be tightened.

The joint military exercises now underway between the United States, South Korea, and Japan are a clear signal that Washington is still moving ahead with the long-term project of building its alliances and partnerships in Asia into a tight military-political structure, despite leadership changes in both the US and South Korea. The current Washington administration, however, isn’t above using political leverage to keep Seoul in line.

The joint exercises of South Korea, Japan, and the US became a regular occurrence already under Biden, and they now serve as a kind of answer to the question of how far the course toward building a Washington-Tokyo-Seoul military-political alliance – which was very clearly visible under Biden and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol – is continuing under the new presidents.

Many people assumed that if Biden was actively driving this integration and the Washington Declaration had already been signed, then Trump, supposedly an isolationist, would slow it down or even reverse it.

But no – what we see is that although the pace may have slowed somewhat, the overall direction remains the same. That is quite important, because talk of a possible ‘Asian NATO’ has not gone away.

It is still not entirely clear what shape such a configuration could take. On the one hand, there is AUKUS. On the other, there is an increasingly active system of military alignments involving the US, Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines.

Practicing preventive strikes, river crossings, and similar operations was always part of the scenario. Formally, everything began as a response to a North Korean attack, but the script usually moved quickly toward a triumphant counteroffensive.

It is entirely possible that the trilateral exercises of the US, South Korea, and Japan are oriented not only toward containing North Korea, but also toward containing China – and more broadly toward integrating and coordinating three countries that the Americans are trying to turn into a military-political bloc. That process has never been easy.

The problem is that while Washington-Tokyo and Washington-Seoul ties were relatively straightforward and did not suffer deeply from historical baggage, relations between Seoul and Tokyo have long been much more difficult. It was hard to establish any real parallel cooperation between them despite active American pressure, because anti-Japanese sentiment in South Korea was, until recently, one of the important pillars of national political identity, especially under Democratic Party governments.

That began to change with the arrival of conservative president Yoon Suk Yeol, who for the first time turned the wheel 180 degrees and openly argued that, in present conditions, Washington and Tokyo should stop relitigating the past and instead think about alliance in the present and jointly forecast the future.

Naturally, this caused outrage among the Democrats, then in opposition. There is no need to repeat all the insults with which Lee Jae Myung attacked Yoon – accusing him of groveling before Japan, forgetting the horrors of colonial rule, and so on.

Suddenly, the Democratic Party became effectively center-right, and Lee’s line can now broadly be described as pro-American, at least in public terms.

He openly said that the old formula of “security with America, economics with China” no longer works – that South Korea is now oriented only toward the United States. Of course, this does not mean a complete break with China. He wanted Seoul to be a bridge between Washington and Beijing.

But overall, Lee is moving in the American wake, and one important sign of that is that there has been no reversal on the Japanese track.

Lee effectively stated that all agreements signed under Yoon would be honored, because even if part of the Korean public does not accept them, they were promises made in the name of the nation.

The culmination of this moment was the joint musical performance by Lee Jae Myung and Japanese PM Sanae Takaichi.

Of course, there are still occasional flare-ups, because there cannot not be. For example, Japan’s defense minister skipped a defense forum in Seoul because of another controversy linked to a donation to Yasukuni Shrine, which South Korea sees as a symbol of Japan’s past militarism and colonialism. But overall, the level of integration is much higher, and it continues the same direction set under the conservatives.

The current trilateral exercise is a visible marker of that course.

Those exercises were supposed to proceed normally. But the day before they began, Trump suddenly posted on social media that the drills were expensive and sent bad signals to North Korea, and that he had therefore instructed the defense secretary to scale them down. Then he added that he had asked the South Korean president to join us in our struggle with Iran, and Lee refused.

This creates a very clear picture. Trump, in effect, took revenge for Seoul’s refusal – and, judging by subsequent developments, may even have forced President Lee into taking some limited part in the US confrontation with Iran after all.

Why did Lee refuse in the first place?

First, South Korea’s relations with Iran are not especially bad. Second, for domestic audiences, despite his pro-American course, Lee still wants to preserve the image of a populist who occasionally pushes back against the US, pursues an independent policy, and certainly is not going to send South Korean troops to fight for American interests – especially in a conflict that would be highly risky and politically toxic.

During the Iraq war of 2003-2008, South Korean troops were largely deployed to guard South Korean engineers working on oil fields. The surrounding territory was generally controlled by pro-American Kurdish forces, so the South Koreans spent much of their time sitting tight, occasionally joining mop-up operations.

Joining the Iran war would be very different. Here, regardless of what they were doing, they would have to defend themselves against Iranian missiles and drones – and it is far from clear how effectively they could do so. And any casualties, in today’s media and political climate, would carry obvious domestic political and reputational consequences.

That is one more reason why Lee Jae Myung refused to participate in the American war against Iran. And it is also why Trump trapped him so effectively in a contradiction between his promises.

On the one hand, Lee has repeatedly spoken of the need to draw North Korea into dialogue. To pursue that goal, one would logically need to reduce military activity, including the very exercises that North Korea constantly condemns as rehearsals for aggression.

On the other hand, because North Korea says it will not negotiate with Seoul regardless of whether conservatives or Democrats are in power – on the grounds that South Korea lacks real agency – the more realistic promise from Lee’s side has been the restoration of wartime operational control.

At present, if a major war breaks out, South Korea’s armed forces do not answer directly to the South Korean president but to the so-called Combined Forces Command – effectively, to the Americans.

This arrangement was originally created to prevent South Korea’s first president, Syngman Rhee, from dragging the peninsula into a second Korean War. Today, however, it is widely viewed in South Korea as a limitation on sovereignty. Lee Jae Myung loudly promised that by the end of his presidential term, in 2030, he would restore this operational control.

For that to happen, South Korean generals have to show that they can solve complex strategic tasks as effectively as their American counterparts. And for that, regular, large-scale exercises are necessary. By reducing the scale of the exercises, Trump struck directly at that ambition.

Lee was, of course, forced to put on a brave face and say that the reduction of the drills would indeed send the right signal to North Korea.

But in reality, the far more important and painful consequence was that the exercises would no longer provide the full opportunity to rehearse what is required for the transfer of operational control.

And after that, as we can now see, Seoul’s position on assisting the US against Iran shifted in a direction more convenient for Washington.

That is why this matters. North Korea, naturally, criticized both the US-South Korea drills and the trilateral exercises with Japan. But what is crucial here is this: the bilateral drills were cut back, while the trilateral drills continue just fine. And that says a great deal about Washington’s real goals in the region.

EU candidate countries should cut ties US President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement as they conflict with Brussels’ long-term interests, European Commissioner for Enlargement Marta Kos has said.

Speaking at a Centre for European Policy Studies event in Brussels on Tuesday, Kos warned that prospective members should not develop relations with outside powers that could pull them away from the EU.

”We should not risk our future members building dependencies on others that run counter to our long-term interest,” she said.

Kos singled out Trump’s political movement, saying the Brussels faces “pressure from the West, from the MAGA ideologists who try to persuade us that our European civilization is in decline, that our economy is in decline, and that we don’t have the right democracy.”

Kos also claimed that the EU is facing “adversaries” seeking to influence its enlargement process. “For the first time in history, we have adversaries in the enlargement process,” she said. Asked whom she meant, Kos replied: “Clearly, Russia is one of them.”

The comments come amid growing US economic engagement in the Western Balkans, where several countries are seeking EU membership. American-linked projects have been pursued in Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Albania, including a controversial resort development connected to Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

History doesn’t repeat itself, not even as farce, and thus the latest chapter in the centuries-long confrontation between Russia and Europe will look different from those that came before it.

Today, the German authorities are closing Russian cultural and diplomatic institutions on flimsy pretexts and Norway is seizing Russian research vessels – and while the methods are new, the underlying impulse is familiar. Europe has sought to constrain Russia’s independence since at least the late 15th century.

For now, however, European governments aren’t seeking direct military confrontation, but this should not be mistaken for pacifism in Berlin, Brussels, Paris, or London – nor should we take seriously their ritual declarations about dialogue and a new regional security architecture, given there are more practical reasons for their restraint.

First, Western Europe’s largest states lack the human and material resources for a war with Russia, and although their position is somewhat better when it comes to weapons, much of that capacity is already being directed toward Ukraine, whose population is being asked to make enormous sacrifices in pursuit of European objectives.

However, the European people show little appetite for these sacrifices, mainly because living standards haven’t deteriorated nearly enough to persuade ordinary Germans, Italians, French, and British people to march into a conflict with Russia. Nor should anyone place much faith in Poland or the rest of Eastern Europe because Warsaw’s increasingly belligerent rhetoric disguises a much weaker willingness to actually fight.

France’s development of an independent nuclear deterrent was itself an acknowledgement that Europe could not assume that the US would risk its own destruction on their behalf. Charles de Gaulle and his successors didn’t build this arsenal because they were confident of American guarantees.

Nobody in Europe, therefore, seriously believes that Russia can be easily defeated in a war, because if they did, the temptation to attempt it would be much greater.

Yet these rational calculations run up against a more subjective danger, and we shouldn’t overestimate the European elite’s instinct for self-preservation.

Unlike Russia or China, Western Europe has experienced no comparable replacement of its ruling elites over the past 150 years, meaning today’s political establishments are, in an important sense, descendants of those that led Europe into the First and Second World Wars.

Western European politicians, particularly German and British, have historically displayed a tendency towards adventurism. Indeed, George Kennan, an astute observer of political cultures, drew a revealing contrast in his 1946 Long Telegram where Russian foreign policy, he wrote, “is neither schematic nor adventurist” and “doesn’t take unnecessary risks,” but the same cannot always be said of Europe.

Europe has a more troubling historical record and its powers have repeatedly created dangerous situations that ultimately escaped their control, with World War II as the supreme example. Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and Germany’s invasion more than a century later were also enormous gambles, courses of action that appeared reckless even to many contemporaries.

For the moment, Europe is conducting its struggle against Russia primarily through indirect means because it lacks the resources for something more ambitious and retains enough sound judgment to recognize the dangers of escalation – but it would be reckless for Moscow to assume this restraint will last forever.

With every new stage of confrontation, European governments are burning bridges that might have otherwise supported a more balanced system of coexistence. Seen in this context, Russia’s decision to close the Goethe Institutes isn’t merely a symmetrical response to German measures, but also makes sense in the long term.

Whether we like it or not, cultural and humanitarian cooperation has increasingly become an instrument of state policy, though exceptions remain. Russian and French museum professionals, for example, continue to work together on some projects, as do academics and cultural figures in other fields, but these relationships have become increasingly subordinate to the logic of soft power.

Even seemingly innocuous forms of international cooperation are now expected to serve national objectives, and this is regrettable – but it reflects the expansion of modern foreign policy far beyond traditional diplomacy. Governments can use funding and institutions to influence almost every sphere of international contact.

But in Western countries, these demands are particularly pronounced, so institutions such as the Goethe-Institut cannot realistically be separated from Germany’s broader foreign-policy objectives, and German officials inevitably expect publicly supported cultural organizations to influence attitudes towards Germany and advance the country’s interests.

The result is paradoxical: The political burden placed upon cultural institutions eventually undermines the very value of the relationships they were created to foster.

Perhaps the erosion of these old forms of cooperation is therefore unavoidable and it may even prove necessary if future cultural and academic contacts are to become less dependent on the political climate in European capitals.

For now, however, Russia faces a more immediate problem, in which European leaders remain afraid of direct confrontation, yet their own decisions are steadily pulling them deeper into a spiral of confrontation.

Their caution is real, but history gives Russia little reason to assume that caution will always prevail over adventurism – and that requires vigilance from Moscow and the resolve to act accordingly.

This article was first published by Vzglyad.ru, translated and edited by the RT team.

Israel must do more to explain to its nationals how they are expected to behave in Thailand, according to remarks by Bangkok’s foreign minister, Sihasak Phuangketkeow.

Sihasak, who also serves as deputy prime minister, met Israeli Ambassador Alona Fisher-Kamm on Tuesday following a series of scandalous and potentially criminal incidents involving Israeli nationals that have stirred tensions in Thailand.

“Thailand is a country that welcomes tourists. But welcoming tourists does not mean that visitors, regardless of nationality, can do whatever they want in Thailand,” the minister told the press. “Visitors must understand and respect Thai culture and traditions,” just as Thai tourists must when traveling abroad.

Fisher-Kamm, who indicated ahead of the meeting that she wanted to raise concerns about growing hostility toward Israelis and Jews in Thailand, described the discussion with Sihasak as “good and open” and said it touched on “close cooperation in agriculture, labour, healthcare, and cybersecurity.”

Dual deportation case as Thailand tightens screws on troublemakers

Thailand, a country long known for tourist-oriented nightlife, is seeking to distance itself from its reputation as a destination for debauchery and attract other types of visitors, including families and people interested in ecotourism.

The policy shift coincides with changing attitudes toward foreigners among parts of the local population, particularly in cases where visitors are seen as disruptive to public order. The government has introduced several measures, including shorter visa terms and easier deportation procedures, aimed at dealing with troublemakers.

Last Friday, Israeli national Jacob Ohayon became the first foreigner to be expelled under the new deportation rules. A Thai court had sentenced him to a suspended 15-day jail term and imposed a fine over a dispute with the owners of Samui Exotic Park, a Thai woman and a French man.

The threats ultimately cost Ohayon his right to remain in Thailand, with Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul, who also serves as interior minister, personally signing the deportation order. The French man, Kevin Dimino, was likewise expelled over his harassing and physically abusive behavior during the confrontation.

Sihasak cited the case, stressing that “anyone, regardless of nationality, who violates Thai law must face strict enforcement.” The foreign minister added that Bangkok values its good relations with Israel, where more than 60,000 Thai workers are currently employed.

There is a more than 10% chance that artificial intelligence could wipe out humanity within the next ten years, a senior Anthropic researcher has warned amid mounting concerns over increasingly powerful systems slipping beyond human control.

Evan Hubinger, who works on aligning advanced AI systems with human interests, made the assessment after fellow Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned over fears that leading tech companies are racing toward systems they may not be able to keep in check.

“We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans,” Hubinger wrote on X on Wednesday. “I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.” He added that Anthropic is “trying its best” but still does not have a plan for safely controlling superintelligence and is “not clearly on track” to find one.

Hubinger noted that while current AI models pose a low risk, there is concern that future systems could begin improving themselves recursively, rapidly becoming more capable than humans before adequate safeguards are developed.

Coxon, who previously worked at OpenAI, announced his departure from Anthropic on Tuesday, accusing both companies of ignoring the “civilizational stakes” and “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”

Coxon told the Wall Street Journal that the most aggressive scenarios could see things become “out of control” as early as the end of 2027. He argued that even companies with strong safety programs remain trapped in a race, fearing competitors will push ahead if they slow down.

Both Anthropic and OpenAI publicly say they take the risks seriously and are heavily investing in safety measures. Their leaders have also backed calls for greater government coordination and mechanisms to slow development if necessary, but have nevertheless continued to develop increasingly powerful models.

The latest warnings come amid growing reports of AI agents, such as those developed by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, repeatedly breaking out of testing environments, hacking external systems and taking unauthorized actions against real people and organizations. OpenAI temporarily slowed some development last month after its model compromised the Hugging Face platform.

Britain’s AI Security Institute has also reported agents creating fake identities, writing malicious code, and attempting to manipulate people during evaluations. Researchers have meanwhile demonstrated that AI can design entire functional viral genomes, adding to concerns over how increasingly capable systems could be misused.

The US is turning Australia into a forward base for potential military operations in the Pacific, with American forces and defense contractors controlling or having access to roughly two-thirds of the country’s military facilities, The Guardian reported on Sunday.

Citing data compiled by the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability, the newspaper identified 110 facilities across Australia with some form of US military or corporate presence out of 168 surveyed.

The US military directly controls 17 facilities, including the Pine Gap intelligence complex in central Australia, which plays a major role in US surveillance and military operations. The facility tracks missile launches, intercepts communications and provides targeting information for American forces around the world.

Other installations include a naval communications station in Western Australia used to communicate with submerged US submarines and RAAF Base Tindal in the north, which is being expanded to accommodate nuclear-capable B-52 Stratofortress bombers.

Beyond the facilities it directly controls, the US military has access to dozens of Australian installations, while American defense contractors, including Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, operate at others. According to the Nautilus data, 41 of the 168 facilities surveyed have no significant US presence, while the status of another 17 remains unresolved.

The American footprint is also expanding. In June, AFP reported that the US was preparing to establish a permanent stockpile of battle-ready weapons, ammunition, and equipment for the Marine Corps in Australia, with the facility expected to reach full capacity by 2028.

“Over more than a decade, the United States has been preparing the capacity for high-tempo warfighting operations with China, springboarding from Australia,” Richard Tanter, the author of the Nautilus database, told The Guardian.

Canberra maintains that the growing American presence strengthens Australia’s security. Defense Minister Richard Marles said in June that the expanding US footprint was important both for building the country’s military capabilities and for its national security.

Marles also argued that the US presence helped counter what he described as China’s “very significant military buildup” in the region.

Former Australian Defense Minister Christopher Pyne has similarly said the 2021 AUKUS pact between Australia, the US, and UK goes beyond Canberra’s acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines. He described the arrangement as establishing “a new United States submarine base in the Indian Ocean” that would provide Washington with a “massive strategic advantage.”

Tanter criticized Canberra’s approach, calling it “a massive institutional failure in Australia, a kind of learned incapacity at a political, parliamentary and bureaucratic level.”

German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul has criticized Kiev for failing to spend enough of its Western-provided procurement money on German weapons, arguing that the country’s massive support for Ukraine should at least benefit its defense industry.

Germany is one of Ukraine’s largest bilateral supporters, providing or earmarking more than €43 billion ($50 billion) in “civilian” assistance and around €58 billion in military aid since the conflict escalated in 2022.

“We are now the strongest supporter of Ukraine in terms of financial and military support. And naturally, the German defense industry must benefit from this,” Wadephul told Bild in an interview published on Tuesday.

The minister said he raised the issue with Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky during a visit to Kiev last month.

“At the moment, we are not entirely satisfied with the level of orders in Germany,” he added, saying Kiev has been asked to review its purchases and ensure that the situation “gets better.”

Germany’s demands that the money spent on Kiev flow back to its own weapons makers mirror US President Donald Trump’s approach to Ukraine aid. Since returning to the White House, Trump has largely shifted the financial burden of supplying US weapons to European NATO members and Canada. Under the PURL mechanism, the bloc’s members now pay Washington for US-made arms that are then delivered to Kiev.

Moscow has criticized the unprecedented military buildup by Germany and the wider EU on the pretext of the ‘Russian threat’. President Vladimir Putin said in June that Western governments are no longer concealing their intentions and are “openly saying that they are preparing for war with us.”

Berlin has also stepped up pressure on Ukrainian men of military age living in Germany to return home “without coercion.” Wadephul backed calls by Bavarian leader Markus Soeder and suggested that the German authorities could provide Kiev with information identifying Ukrainians receiving welfare benefits or holding registered residency status so they can be contacted for mobilization. Germany has separately backed stripping newly arriving draft-age Ukrainian men of the automatic temporary-protection privileges granted to refugees.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has announced the seizure of “one of the most modern, unmanned, and smart submarines” in the possession of the US military. The Pentagon downplayed the incident, saying it was an old drone without any sensitive equipment.

On Tuesday, the IRGC published a video of what it claimed was the advanced US undersea drone, which could perform a wide range of tasks, from seabed mapping to intelligence and surveillance operations, pipeline inspection, and anti-submarine warfare support.

The footage shows a grey, metallic, torpedo-like cylindrical vessel around 5.8 meters long and 1.2 meters wide, weighing around 2.7 tons. The undersea vessel can spend up to 10 days underwater and reach a maximum depth of 6,000 meters, according to the IRGC statement.

The Iranian military identified it as a Dive-LD drone developed by US defense contractor Anduril Industries that entered service in April 2025.

The undersea vessel was surveilling regional waters and “neither collected sensitive data nor carried any classified sonar or radar equipment,” US Navy Captain Tim Hawkins, a CENTCOM spokesman, said in a statement.

The incident comes amid yet another escalation between the US and Iran. Late Tuesday, Iran launched ballistic missiles toward US military bases in the Middle East in what it called retaliation for an earlier US attack on Iranian oil tankers near Kharg Island. The IRGC also issued an “urgent warning” late Tuesday, telling tanker crews around the docks and anchorages of Bahrain and Kuwait to leave their vessels immediately ahead of potential attacks.

Iranian forces have struck eight oil tankers in the Persian Gulf and targeted two US Navy vessels in retaliation for attacks on Iranian shipping, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said on Wednesday. It claimed the strikes inflicted “significant damage” on the ships.

US Central Command later rejected the claim that American warships were hit, saying, “no US Navy warship has been struck” and all IRGC attacks failed. CENTCOM added that US forces destroyed ten Iranian tankers over the past week, describing the vessels as part of a multi-billion-dollar network funding the IRGC.

The attacks came after the IRGC Navy issued an “urgent warning” late Tuesday, telling tanker crews around the docks and anchorages of Bahrain and Kuwait to immediately abandon their ships.

“We warn all crew members of the tankers in the vicinity of the docks of Kuwait and Bahrain... to immediately leave their vessels, whether at anchor or at the docks, as they will be targeted,” the IRGC Navy Command said.

The statement accused Bahrain and Kuwait of hosting US forces and being “partners” in Washington’s attacks on Iranian shipping.

Additional footage of a PATRIOT battery conducting a massive ballistic missile engagement over Jordan tonight.

Well over a dozen interceptors can be seen engaging incoming Iranian ballistic missiles. pic.twitter.com/u69lJKtFJ7

— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) September 8, 2026

Iranian retaliation began shortly afterward, with numerous videos circulating online showing ballistic missiles being launched from locations across Iran toward US military facilities in the region.

Videos from Jordan appear to show intense air-defense activity, with Patriot interceptors engaging incoming projectiles, including what some OSINT accounts identified as medium-range ballistic missiles equipped with cluster warheads.

Multiple OSINT accounts identified Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, a major facility used by US forces east of Amman, as one of the principal targets. Some reported missile impacts near the base, but neither the impacts nor the type of warheads used have been officially confirmed.

The latest attacks follow another round on Saturday in which US Central Command said it struck three Iranian crude carriers after ballistic missiles were fired toward a US aircraft carrier and guided-missile destroyer. Two tankers were disabled and a third, which was carrying no oil, was destroyed after the crew was ordered to abandon ship.

Iran subsequently claimed that it struck three tankers traveling along what it described as an unauthorized route through the Strait of Hormuz, as well as three US-linked vessels elsewhere.

Around one-fifth of global oil supplies passed through the Strait of Hormuz before the war, making threats to commercial shipping particularly sensitive for energy markets. Oil prices continue to climb, with Brent breaking above $100 a barrel on Wednesday for the first time in nearly two months as markets price in growing risks to global energy supplies.

Say what you will about ex-BlackRock bigwig German Chancellor and uber-grinch Friedrich Merz, but he has his moments of unexpected alertness.

Currently, he is shocked, shocked! He has noticed that his party, the mainstream conservatives of the CDU are “in serious danger” after suffering their worst defeat in decades.

Germany’s dark star of unpopularity was, of course, talking about the results of the regional elections in the state of Saxony-Anhalt. They have produced a landslide victory for the new-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, under its shooting star Ulrich ‘Uli’ Siegmund. 

They delivered a colossal, devastating fiasco to the CDU and, of course, Merz personally: The AfD has scored 43.8 percent of the vote, the CDU 17.2 percent. When compared with the last state election, the AfD gained 23 percent, while the CDU lost 19.9 percent.

Polls show that the AfD has massively siphoned off former CDU voters and also mobilized previous non-voters with unprecedented success. In terms of age cohorts, the AfD is dominating almost the entire spectrum except among the very old.

The CDU, which had been in charge in Saxony-Anhalt’s capital of Magdeburg for over two decades, has suffered no ordinary defeat but a catastrophic wipe-out shaking the party, to quote Merz again, “to its very foundations.” The former default ruling party of first West and then post-1990 Germany is in tatters. It is a sign of even worse things to come. In Saxony-Anhalt it has no future, quite literally: among the youngest voters the CDU achieved a pitiful 5 percent, far below its already horrific overall result.

It is true that Saxony-Anhalt is small. One of Germany’s 16 federal states, it has a population of 2.1 million, of whom about 1.7 million can vote. That is less than the electorate of, for instance, the city of Hamburg. Yet no one in Germany even tries to pretend that what has happened in Saxony-Anhalt will stay in Saxony-Anhalt. On the contrary, everyone – across the entire mediascape and political spectrum – takes it as self-evident that these elections are bound to have massive national effects. Likewise, it did not even take US President Donald Trump’s unusual social media post to rub in that the Magdeburg quake is reverberating internationally, too.

If Merz falls – and perhaps even if he sticks to his seat for a long time before doing so – the radical-Centrist coalition currently in charge in Berlin will be under enormous pressure. Witness the fact that its frontman from the Social-Democrats (SPD), Finance Minister and austerity-imposer-in-chief Lars Klingbeil is already making terrified noises about rethinking some Berlin’s mean cuts to pensions, healthcare, and social security. How a little pain can concentrate the mind.

One thing seems to finally have sunk in with Germany’s slow, lazy, and complacent establishment: Neither the so-called ‘firewall’ – that is, deliberate discrimination against not merely the AfD but its millions of voters – has failed and offers no hope for the future. Clinging to that moronic, deeply undemocratic and simply indecently unfair strategy will only make the AfD stronger. Exactly as it has up until now.

Among the sane, such a doubling down might appear absurd: Where would it be supposed to lead? Severe unrest? Secession? But you only have to look at the current establishment’s policy toward Russia, Ukraine, and the Ukraine conflict to realize that Berlin, as it is now, does not shy away from anything just because it’s entirely mad and highly damaging to Germany.

And that, notwithstanding the ceaseless and ever less effective mainstream media propaganda smearing the AfD as Nazism redux, is where the real threat to democracy lies. Merz has already struck a tone that is, in effect, threatening: “Reassuring” German citizens, who mostly cannot stand him, that the German Basic Law, the de facto constitution, “prevails in Saxony-Anhalt as well.”

Since, in reality, no one has challenged that fact, Merz’s statement is suspect. It can easily be read as a crude hint that Berlin is looking for pretexts to engage in dirty lawfare against the AfD in general, the AfD specifically in Saxony-Anhalt, or a state government led by the AfD in Magdeburg. This may become even more likely if the AfD there is joined by CDU renegades, as seems probable.

In that case, the CDU leadership in Berlin – if Merz continues to dominate it – would also want to make an example of these local rebels and punish the AfD for the CDU’s own failure to keep its troops together. Finally, never forget that Merz is also ‘Mr. Firewall’: there is no politician in Germany more associated with that failed policy. His personal frustration must be boundless; his good faith and fairness are infamously limited.

The usual “civil society” cut-outs have already started pointing fingers. Merz himself has found time to reaffirm that “especially now” he won’t “budge a millimeter” from, in effect, trying to drive Germany into an open shooting war with Russia because the current proxy war is just not good enough for him.

And, of course, the public is subjected to an ongoing propaganda barrage smearing the AfD as a whole and in Saxony-Anhalt in particular Moscow’s fifth column. In reality, its crime is to have articulated many ordinary Germans’ perfectly reasonable resistance to the establishment’s out-of-control warmongering.

In sum, take these two lines of CDU defense – or attack – together and it is obvious that the real threat to German democracy comes, as before, from the radical Center: Accusing the AfD of being a Russian Trojan Horse and, at the same time, hinting that its success is somehow incompatible with the constitution – those are the key ingredients for justifying repression. Let’s hope that neither Merz nor his CDU nor the establishment as a whole dare try, because if they do, there will be resistance. Berlin has already ruined peace abroad. Domestic peace should not follow.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has blamed his Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party’s crushing defeat by the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Saxony-Anhalt on poor communication with voters, while refusing to change course.

Merz, who has been described as Germany’s least popular head of government in some 30 years, maintained he would not budge an inch on his “reform” agenda following what he called his party’s “most serious electoral defeat in decades.”

The AfD took 43.8% of the vote in the eastern German state over the weekend, coming close to securing an absolute majority in the regional legislature. The conservative CDU, which has dominated Saxony-Anhalt’s political landscape for much of the period since German reunification, finished a distant second with 17.5%.

Ahead of the vote, a regional party official told Euractiv that the CDU branch in Saxony-Anhalt was being forced to pay the price for the deeply unpopular policies of the federal government.

Merz also said his party could not accept a situation in which “almost 60% of voters in a federal state, with a very high turnout, vote for political parties that fundamentally call into question our country’s democratic institutions and rules.”

Apart from the AfD, the Left Party – descended from the former East German Communists – and the recently formed left-wing Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) were also condemned by the chancellor for supposedly challenging Germany’s “democratic” order, according to state broadcaster DW.

Merz maintained that certain things are “not up for a vote” in Germany, including the principle that “power is granted, not seized.” He vowed to “strengthen our political order and our firm anchoring in Europe.”

Merz came to power following snap elections in February 2025, promising to revive Germany’s struggling economy, but has since poured more money into the military while blaming some of the country’s economic problems on Germans themselves. He has told citizens to work more and claimed that the “welfare state as we have it today can no longer be financed.” In May, his government announced plans for social spending cuts and unveiled an unpopular pension reform.

The chancellor also doubled down on his support for Kiev, while acknowledging that “exactly 57.7% of voters” had backed parties critical of Berlin’s anti-Russian policies and unwavering support for Ukraine.

“I will not deviate by a single millimeter from my fundamental conviction that, especially now, we must defend our freedom against Russia,” he stated, advocating for increased military spending and continued aid to Kiev. Berlin has repeatedly justified the policy by citing an alleged “Russian threat,” which Moscow has consistently dismissed as “nonsense.”

Israel’s far-right national security minister has put a seven-year timetable on emptying Gaza of most of its people, and dressed it up as choice. Gazans RT spoke to call it what international law already names it: forced displacement.

Last week, Jewish Power chairman and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir unveiled ‘Disengagement 710’, a policy blueprint for what he calls the voluntary migration of Gaza residents to countries willing to take them. Destinations floated by his party include Türkiye, unspecified Arab states, Ethiopia, and Congo.

The numbers are not modest. The plan foresees the departure of about 250,000 people in the first year, 1.11 million within three years, and some 1.86 million within seven, encompassing the bulk of the Strip’s population.

To run it, Jewish Power wants the next government to create a dedicated ministry for “voluntary migration,” complete with a minister, a director-general, its own budget, an international negotiating team, and an implementation apparatus.

This idea is not new for the Jewish state.

A Zionist through-line

In 1937, David Ben-Gurion, then a leading Zionist figure, promoted the transfer of Palestinians and argued they should be moved to Transjordan. In the 1980s, the same ‘voluntary’ formula was championed by far-right politicians Rehavam Ze’evi – nicknamed ‘Gandhi’– and Meir Kahane. Their schemes never left the drawing board.

Ben-Gvir now presents his version as newly realistic, citing earlier public backing from US President Donald Trump. Trump floated mass relocation from Gaza in early 2025, then walked the idea back under Arab and international pressure. 

His later 20-point framework stated that no one would be forced to leave and that residents should be encouraged to stay. Ben-Gvir treats the first Trump remark as political cover and the second as an inconvenience.

Gazans RT interviewed rejected the initiative as illegal under international law and a crime against humanity.

”People in Gaza and across Palestine know Ben-Gvir’s plans go far beyond our existence in the Strip,” said Abdallah Ali, a resident of central Gaza.

“He wants people out of Gaza, then out of West Bank villages, then out of West Bank cities toward Jordan. He believes in transfer and an ‘alternative homeland’.”

Ali said that is why Gazans, himself included, intend to stay put.

Rami Al Meghari, from Al-Maghazi camp in central Gaza, reached the same conclusion for a different reason: memory of exile.

“Many Palestinians found life in other countries, especially Arab states, awkward and humiliating,” he said. “They will not leave Gaza for a destination that cannot guarantee dignity, whether an Arab capital or some African country Israel has long suggested, like Somalia.”

Polls, rubble, and the meaning of ‘voluntary’

A PCPSR poll last year found 56% of Gazans interviewed unwilling to emigrate. A substantial minority, some 43%, said they would.

As of June 16, 2026, satellite analysis by the UN Satellite Centre found 201,290 structures damaged, an estimated 82% of all buildings in Gaza. Of those, 134,422 were assessed as destroyed, 13,848 severely damaged, 28,096 moderately damaged and 24,924 possibly damaged.

Most of Gaza’s 2.1 million people remain displaced. The Shelter Cluster, surveying in June 2026, said 1.98 million people, 94% of the population, need shelter and household items. 

Food and water continue to be an issue. Between mid-April and June 30, 2026, more than 1.2 million people (59%) were still in dire need of assistance.

Assessments in 2026 found 43% of households below the 15-liter humanitarian minimum per person per day, and 62% below the 6-liter drinking-water floor.

But Ali and Al Meghari insist the pull of the land is much stronger.

“Whatever the suffering, even with around 97 percent of cropland destroyed and most of the built environment gone, people are putting up tents and staying in displacement camps. They are not packing to leave,” Ali said. 

“They lived through the 1948 catastrophe and the 1967 Nakba. They will pull through again.”

Al Meghari still hopes the political weather will change. “Life can move forward in Gaza if there is serious international and Arab pressure to implement the second phase of the ceasefire. The United States has a particular responsibility to make that happen. Russia also needs to play a pivotal role to bring the suffering of the Palestinians to an end.”

Reconstruction as leverage

There is little movement on reconstruction. Israel is blocking construction materials, demanding that Hamas disarm and demilitarize first. The Board of Peace has pushed for weapons to be collected and placed under international supervision, a formula Israel rejects.

Ahmed Al-Masri, a lawyer in Gaza, argues Israel has played this hand before and lost. “We lived this in 2014 [Operation Protective Edge – ed.]. Israel said Gaza should not be rebuilt. Then, under international pressure and with UN supervision, it was forced to comply.”

And he also pins some hope on Israel’s October 27 parliamentary vote. “If the far-right government is removed, there might be a beginning, a glimmer on the horizon, and a better political reality for people here, if Palestinians also insist on rebuilding political, social and economic life.”

That is the wager Gaza is making: that endurance outlasts a plan that needs other countries to open their doors, Washington to revive an idea it already shelved, and two million people to accept that ‘voluntary’ means leaving home because the alternative has been made unlivable.

Ben-Gvir is betting the opposite – that the wreckage, a ministry, and a slogan about suitcases can finish what earlier transfer schemes could not. Gazans say they have heard that speech before.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was personally warned that Hamas was preparing a major attack days before October 7, 2023, but did not relay the information to Israel’s top security chiefs, Haaretz reported on Tuesday.

According to the newspaper, Emirati President Mohammed bin Zayed called Netanyahu roughly ten days before the assault and told him that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was planning a major operation that could cause bloodshed and destabilize the region.

Netanyahu reportedly played down the threat, saying he believed Hamas was more likely to act in the West Bank and that Israel was prepared.

His office has rejected the report as an “absolute lie,” insisting no such call took place.

The alleged advance notice has added to scrutiny over what Israeli leaders knew ahead of the Hamas-led assault and whether warning signs were ignored.

Haaretz previously reported that Sinwar had sent messages through Palestinian intermediaries warning that he was preparing an “earthquake.” The message reportedly reached Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, whose then-chief Ronen Bar briefed Netanyahu. Egyptian intelligence was also reported to have warned Israel shortly before the attack.

Netanyahu’s government has also faced criticism for allowing Qatari funds to flow into Hamas-run Gaza for years. Critics argue the policy ultimately strengthened the group Israel later went to war to destroy.

Questions have also been raised over Israel’s military response on October 7. Investigations have suggested that the so-called ‘Hannibal Directive’, which permits extreme measures to prevent the capture of soldiers, may have contributed to Israeli civilian deaths as forces struck vehicles and other locations where hostages or civilians may have been present.

Around 1,200 people were killed in the Hamas-led attack and 251 were taken hostage. Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza has killed more than 73,600 Palestinians, according to the enclave’s Health Ministry.

A sharp diplomatic rift has erupted between Israel and several of its key Western partners after 12 countries backed restrictions on trade with Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and London accused settlers of carrying out “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians in parts of the territory.

The UK, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden issued a joint statement on Tuesday pledging to introduce, support, or consider restrictions on settlement goods, citing “unprecedented levels of settler violence and settlement expansion.”

London, Paris, and Ottawa specifically committed to national trade bans, while the group demanded that Israel “immediately halt” settlement expansion, ensure accountability for settler violence and investigate allegations against Israeli forces.

The UK measures linked to settlements include:

• A ban on all imports from illegal Israeli settlements;

• Sanctions on businesses, organizations, and individuals involved in settlement expansion through construction, infrastructure, financing, or real estate;

• A ban on UK advertising for properties in illegal settlements;

• Sanctions on extremist settlers who have supported or incited violence against Palestinians;

• A ban on new export licenses for weapons and other goods deemed to “materially contribute to the occupation.”

Goods and services from Israel itself remain exempt.

Israel has retaliated against London by closing the British consulate in Jerusalem, expelling UK representatives from a US-backed Gaza coordination center and barring British politicians and activists. Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir had already called on his government to recognize Argentine sovereignty over the Falkland Islands.

US President Donald Trump reportedly did not object when British Prime Minister Andy Burnham briefed him on the measures in advance. Meanwhile, the escalating row has drawn mixed reactions from governments and political figures around the world.

This live has now ended.

The F-35 multi-role fifth-generation fighter has made headlines for various reasons: its deployment in the conflict with Iran, deliveries to nations participating in the F-35 program, new missiles designed for the aircraft, and staggering operational costs. Even though production of the F-35 has surpassed 1,000 units, doubts persist regarding the program’s overall effectiveness and the aircraft’s compliance with all the standards of a fifth-generation fighter. Let’s take a closer look. 

In June 2015, a report by an American test pilot appeared online under the title “F-35A High Angle of Attack Operational Maneuvers.” It revealed that the latest F-35 was outperformed in a mock dogfight by the fourth-generation F-16D aircraft. Despite the F-35’s advertised advantages, it struggled to get behind the F-16D and lagged in energy maneuverability and pitch rate. What the media overlooked was that the test involved an experimental prototype of the F-35 that lacked operational combat software. Additionally, this prototype was restricted to a 5.5 G overload limit compared to the F-16’s ability to withstand up to 9 G. Once the F-35 received a full software update (starting with Block 3F), the upgraded versions decisively outperformed F-16s and other fourth-generation aircraft during Red Flag exercises – not through maneuverability, but by leveraging their stealth capabilities at long ranges without entering close combat.

Therefore, the main advantage of the F-35 fifth-generation fighter is its stealth capabilities. For the US, stealth is the defining characteristic of fifth-generation aircraft. This refers to the low radar cross-section achieved through the aircraft’s design and specialized coatings that disrupt radar wave reflection. The American strategy hinges on the belief that stealth aircraft can employ long-range missile systems while remaining undetected by enemy aircraft, effectively avoiding dogfights by striking the enemy from a distance.

Other characteristics of the F-35 are more problematic. For example, fifth-generation fighters have a powerful engine capable of sustained supersonic flight without using an afterburner. While the F-35 formally meets these criteria, the F-35B and F-35C variants are restricted from flying above Mach 1.2 for extended periods due to risks of thermal damage to their stealth coatings and tail surfaces. How can a supersonic jet not fly at supersonic speeds? Moreover, the F-35A appears to struggle with sustained supersonic cruising. Compounding these concerns are reports in the media regarding the P&W F135 engine. Reportedly, it faces issues like turbine blade wear, overheating, and a shortage of components for timely repairs.

On top of that, the operational cost of the F-35 is historically high. The total cost of the development and lifecycle of the F-35 has soared to nearly $2 trillion and continues to rise, making it the most expensive weapons system in history. For end users, however, the hourly flight cost is what truly matters. Operating an F-35 runs between $35,000 and $42,000 per hour, while standard F-16s operate at around $22,000 per hour. Overall, this is extremely expensive for a mass-produced fighter. 

Another area where the F-35 falls short compared to its competitors, including Russia’s Su-57 and likely others, is maneuverability. Of course, if the ‘invisible’ fighter manages to hit its target undetected, it may never have to engage in a dogfight. But should close combat occur, the F-35 will face significant disadvantages against highly agile fifth- and even fourth-generation aircraft.

Given that the F-35 clearly has its share of issues, it leads to another important question, namely: Why is it being produced in such massive quantities? Today, it stands as the only fifth-generation fighter jet in the Western world, with over 1,300 units already built and plans for another 2,000 on the way. In the next decade, more than 20 countries will incorporate these jets into their arsenals. So what’s behind this global trend?

The answer seems to lie not in the aircraft’s capabilities or technological advancements, but strictly in the political arena. The F-35 isn’t just a fighter; it is a symbol of close alignment with the US. Countries that purchase the F-35 gain certain privileges from Washington. For example, Israel possesses carte blanche for combat operations and unrestricted access to US weapons arsenals. As for Germany, it may be acquiring the F-35 because it’s currently the only aircraft on the market certified to carry US nuclear weapons within NATO’s nuclear sharing program. This factor may have played a decisive role in Germany’s decision. 

Some countries – potentially South Korea, Japan, and Türkiye – are counting on the F-35’s network-centric warfare and a broad range of munitions while they develop their own viable alternatives to the ‘golden’ F-35. These nations are actively developing their own fifth-generation fighters and are even looking ahead to sixth-generation designs. However, they need a modern aircraft today, and therefore may be willing to overlook certain flaws of the “Battle Penguin” (the unofficial nickname for the F-35 due to its stout appearance). Maintaining strong ties with Washington is crucial for these countries as well. So political commitments and the urgency of having a contemporary fighter jet go hand in hand. After all, they aren’t going to buy Russian Su-57s, are they? Washington and Brussels wouldn’t like that. Though perhaps it wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered the removal of illegal settler outposts in the occupied West Bank, Reuters has reported, citing two people familiar with the matter.

Netanyahu made the demand under pressure from Israel’s main ally, the US, which recently expressed concerns over the rise in attacks on Palestinian homes by the Jewish settlers, the agency said in an article on Sunday. It was not immediately clear when the demolitions would start, it added.

The Israeli outlet Ynet claimed earlier that the prime minister had instructed that some 100 outposts, built without permission from the Israeli government, be brought down.

According to data from the Israeli NGO Peace Now, there are some 340 outposts erected on Palestinian land in the West Bank, along with 146 settlements formally recognized by the authorities in Israel and receiving funding from West Jerusalem.

The UN and most other countries consider all of the Israeli settlements to be illegal under international law due to them being erected on occupied Palestinian territory.

The UN relief agency, OCHA, said in August that there were an average of six settler violence incidents every day in the West Bank during the first six months of 2026. The attacks by radicalized Jews have led to the displacement of more than 2,300 Palestinians, including over 1,000 children, it added.

On Saturday, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, a strong supporter of the Jewish State and self-professed Christian Zionist, said that the settlers behind the attacks were not just criminals, but “terrorists.”
Huckabee insisted that he Israeli government must provide security to Palestinians in the West Bank and make sure that those who assault their homes are aware that they will face “severe consequences.”

The ambassador’s stance was echoed by Netanyahu’s main rival in the Israeli parliamentary election in late October, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who said on Sunday that “if someone comes to burn down the home of innocent Arabs with the people inside it, then of course that is Jewish terrorism.”

Moscow will deliver a “harsh and painful” response to Hungary’s expulsion of ten Russian diplomats, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has warned.

The remarks were in response to Budapest’s decision to expel ten members of Russia’s diplomatic mission over alleged activities deemed “unacceptable for diplomats” under the Vienna Convention.

“The response to the Russophobic lobby in Budapest will be harsh and painful,” Zakharova said on Tuesday.

Hungarian Foreign Minister Anita Orban announced the decision on Tuesday. She said the Russian ambassador had been informed that, “according to the assessment of the Hungarian authorities,” the diplomats had engaged in activities incompatible with their status.

The expulsions come as Prime Minister Peter Magyar’s government has sharply reversed Hungary’s policy toward Russia since taking office in May. In a new foreign policy directive, Budapest designated Russia a “threat to Hungary, Europe, and the global order,” marking a dramatic break with the pragmatic relations pursued under former Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Orban also repeatedly delayed or watered down EU sanctions on Moscow and resisted major financial packages for Kiev, while seeking exemptions that allowed Hungary to continue importing Russian oil, gas, and nuclear fuel. He maintained that cutting Europe off from comparatively cheap Russian energy would damage the bloc’s industrial competitiveness.

His government has also backed new sanctions on Russia and dropped Budapest’s objections to a €90 billion ($105 billion) EU package for Kiev, reversing policies that had previously set Hungary apart from most other EU members.

Dozen of civilians were killed in Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon over the weekend, RT’s Steve Sweeney has reported.

Attacks by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on the neighboring country are continuing despite a US-mediated ceasefire, which has been in force starting late June. More than 4,000 people have been killed and over 12,000 wounded by the IDF in Lebanon since March, according to the authorities in Beirut.

In his report from Lebanon’s Nabatieh area on Tuesday, Sweeney said a baby and two teenagers were among the 22 people who lost their lives in a “bloody aggression” by Israeli forces between Friday evening and the early hours of Monday. The Lebanese Heath Ministry later released updated figures, saying that 27 civilians were killed and 69 others wounded during the period.

He added that the owner of the destroyed home told him that “an evacuation order was issued for this building [by IDF] in the very early hours of Monday morning... he was called by relatives and he evacuated at about 3 AM. And then just minutes later, the Israelis struck.”

The intensification of IDF strikes comes ahead of another round of peace talks between West Jerusalem and Beirut, scheduled to take place on September 15 and 16.

Watch the full report by Steve Sweeney below:

US-based LGBTQ dating app Grindr has agreed to a multi million-pound settlement in a UK lawsuit alleging it shared users’ private information, including their HIV status, with advertising companies without consent.

The £26 million ($35 million) settlement covers claims brought by around 12,000 users over the company’s handling of personal information before early 2020. Grindr disputes the allegations.

“The settlement includes no findings or admission of liability,” Grindr said in a US regulatory filing submitted late last week. It nevertheless acknowledged the “distress and loss of trust” expressed by some users.

The legal action was launched in April 2024 by law firm Austen Hays at the High Court of England and Wales. Information allegedly disclosed also included HIV test dates and whether users took medication to prevent infection, according to the firm. Anonymity orders were granted to protect those bringing the case.

Under the settlement, reached on September 2, Grindr will pay £13 million by the end of this year and another £13 million by March 31, 2027. Individual awards have not been specified, and legal and insurance costs will be deducted under the terms published by Austen Hays.

In 2018, Norwegian researchers found that Grindr had shared users’ HIV status with two analytics providers. Grindr subsequently announced that it would stop the practice.

In a separate case, Norway’s data protection authority fined Grindr 65 million Norwegian krone ($7 million) in 2021 for sharing personal information for advertising without valid consent. An appeals court upheld the penalty in October 2025.

The court also found that Grindr’s assurance that it did not sell users’ personal information to third parties for advertising was misleading, according to the Norwegian Consumer Council.

German auto giant Volkswagen has agreed on plans to sell one of its factories and convert the site into a military production hub, with Israeli arms manufacturer Rafael Advanced Defense Systems set to become its first major industrial partner.

Volkswagen announced on Monday that it had reached an agreement with the state of Lower Saxony and the Israeli investment company Aurelius Capital on key terms for the sale of its Osnabrück plant. Under the plan, Aurelius would become the majority owner, while Lower Saxony would also take a stake in the facility.

The factory would then be gradually transformed from car manufacturing into what Volkswagen described as a “competence center for security and defense solutions.” Its first anchor project would involve cooperation with Rafael on the manufacture of air-defense systems and components for Germany and other European customers.

The Osnabrück site has a history of military production dating back to Nazi Germany. The factory originally belonged to coachbuilder Karmann, which produced aircraft components for the German war effort and used forced labor during World War II.

Volkswagen took over the company’s Osnabrück operations following Karmann’s insolvency in 2009 and decided in 2024 to end vehicle production by the summer of 2027. The new arrangement is expected to provide employment to more than 1,200 workers, while Volkswagen Group CEO Oliver Blume said the agreement would open up a “new industrial future” for the site.

The deal had reportedly faced resistance from Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, one of Volkswagen’s largest shareholders. The eventual structure keeps Rafael out of the ownership of the plant, with Aurelius and Lower Saxony taking it over instead.

The conversion comes as Volkswagen undertakes one of the biggest restructurings in its history. Last week, the company confirmed plans to eliminate as many as 100,000 jobs worldwide by 2030 as it struggles with weak European demand, high energy costs following the loss of cheap Russian supplies, US tariffs and growing competition from Chinese manufacturers.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that modern Germany and the rest of the EU are “transforming into a Fourth Reich,” pointing to Berlin’s drive to build the strongest conventional army in Europe.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said in June that NATO countries were no longer concealing their intentions, and had moved beyond supporting Kiev to now “openly saying that they are preparing for war with us.”

Iran has conveyed its conditions to the US through intermediaries after Washington recently sent new proposals to Tehran, a political source in the Iranian capital has told RT.

The reported contacts come amid renewed regional efforts to revive diplomacy after last week’s flare-up, when the US carried out several rounds of strikes on Iran and Tehran retaliated with missile and drone attacks on American military facilities in Jordan and Bahrain.

“Following the halt of negotiations resulting from US breaches of commitments and its repeated failures in military engagements, the US has recently conveyed proposals to Tehran through mediators,” the source said.

Given Washington’s “repeated violations” and “constant fluctuations in its positions,” Tehran responded by conveying its own conditions to the intermediaries, the source added.

The source did not disclose the details of either the American proposals or the Iranian conditions, but said mediators “continue to talk to both parties.”

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei said on Monday that US and Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities were themselves the main obstacle to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), arguing that Washington was responsible for the resulting lack of access while simultaneously using the issue to increase pressure on Tehran.

“The ball has long been in the US court,” Baqaei said, adding that Washington must end its military attacks, economic sanctions and naval blockade if it wants to resolve the confrontation.

Qatari Foreign Ministry spokesman Majed al-Ansari told CNN that Doha had put forward several ideas and was exploring different scenarios aimed at addressing the concerns of both sides.

Tehran and Muscat have meanwhile reported significant progress on a separate arrangement for a temporary safe shipping route through the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian officials have stressed, however, that such an agreement would not amount to the full reopening of the strategic waterway, as Washington has claimed.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has said Greenland’s future is for its people and Denmark to decide, pushing back against US President Donald Trump’s threat to annex the Arctic island.

Greenland is an autonomous Danish territory rich in minerals and strategically located close to North America. Denmark, which oversees the island’s foreign and security policy, is a member of both the EU and NATO. Trump has repeatedly argued that the US needs Greenland for national security and its mineral resources, putting Washington at odds with its European allies.

“Greenland’s future is for the people of Greenland and Denmark to decide, no one else,” von der Leyen said in the island’s capital, Nuuk, on Monday, concluding a two-day visit. She cited territorial integrity, sovereignty and the inviolability of borders as fundamental principles of international law.

Greenland’s mineral wealth is of particular interest to the EU. The island holds 25 of the 34 raw materials Brussels classifies as critical, and closer access could help the bloc reduce its dependence on China.

Von der Leyen’s trip came as Trump posted a map on Monday depicting Greenland, Canada and other parts of the Americas under the US flag. The image also included Iceland and was labeled ‘United States of America.’

Washington’s push for control of Greenland has strained relations with Denmark and other European allies. White House officials said earlier this year that military force remained “always an option,” raising the prospect of a confrontation between the two NATO members. Trump has also repeatedly questioned the alliance’s value to the US.

The visit also coincided with the start of Arctic Shield, military drills involving 11 NATO countries and around 400 troops in Greenland. No US personnel are taking part in the exercises, which run from September 7 to 18.

September could prove decisive for Germany’s political future, with elections in Saxony-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Berlin. If the ruling Christian Democratic Union suffers serious defeats across the board, which is by no means certain, the federal government itself could come under pressure and for Chancellor Friedrich Merz, the consequences may be more immediate.

A CDU defeat in Saxony-Anhalt had been expected, but the scale is nevertheless notable. Whether Alternative for Germany ultimately secures an absolute majority and can form a government on its own is almost secondary, because the message to Germany’s political establishment could hardly be clearer. The warning light is flashing red

Merz himself has become part of the problem. Judging by this campaign, he has reached the unenviable political stage at which his interventions appear to produce the opposite of their intended effect, so the more passionately he urges voters in one direction, the more determinedly some seem to move in another.

There is something almost late-Soviet about it, like when an official appeared on television to insist upon something and a significant part of the population instinctively concluded that the truth probably lay elsewhere.

Attempts in the final days of the campaign to portray the AfD as Nazis and Putin’s puppets plainly failed to stop its advance in this eastern state and they may even have helped it by irritating voters already tired of such accusations. Nor did the murky drone incident in Leipzig, which was used to heighten tensions with Russia, noticeably alter the political mood.

Suppose an AfD government is formed in Magdeburg, then the temptation elsewhere in the federal system will be to obstruct it and there’s already discussion of limiting cooperation with AfD-led authorities, including in sensitive areas such as security and intelligence.

That would be an extraordinary path to take, given Germany’s federal system has traditionally functioned effectively precisely because the Länder (states) and federal government cooperate despite political differences. To start withholding information or obstructing a legitimately constituted state government would risk damaging the system in an effort to contain one political party. It would be the sanctions mentality, so familiar from international affairs, brought home and deployed against part of Germany itself.

The alternative may be an unwieldy coalition of virtually everyone else, assembled primarily to prevent the largest party from governing, which may be constitutionally possible, but repeating it indefinitely carries an obvious political cost and voters eventually notice when electoral victories don’t translate into political power.

The more intelligent approach might be to accept the result, allow the AfD to govern where it wins, and gradually draw the party into the political establishment. Government has a habit of disciplining insurgent movements and responsibility exposes contradictions that opposition can conceal, while administrative reality is often more effective than denunciation at diminishing radical parties.

But such a strategy requires political subtlety, something Germany’s federal leadership currently possesses in limited supply. At decisive moments, German politics has a tendency to substitute moral certainty for flexibility, which is why the mainstream spent years constructing a cordon sanitaire around the AfD. Having turned the party into something with which cooperation is deemed morally impossible, it’s now difficult to reverse course without admitting that the original strategy has failed.

The origins of this divergence lie partly in the high period of globalization 25 or 30 years ago. As economies became more interconnected, more decisions migrated from the national to the supranational level, but this wasn’t simply an ideological project as in an integrated world, many problems genuinely could no longer be managed effectively by individual states.

For a time, the arrangement worked because it delivered tangible benefits. The increasingly cosmopolitan political and economic order could point to prosperity and rising living standards and while people might have felt that decision-making was becoming more remote, the system compensated them materially. 

But that bargain has weakened as globalization no longer functions as its architects expected. Economic integration remains dense enough that governments can’t simply retreat behind national borders, yet it no longer produces the political confidence and economic dynamism that once legitimized it and as a result, established elites find themselves trapped between structures inherited from the previous era and electorates demanding greater national control.

The result is the rise of protest movements across Europe. They share certain characteristics, particularly an emphasis on sovereignty and hostility towards established institutions, but they aren’t interchangeable because French, German, and British nationalists won’t necessarily become natural allies simply to spite a Brussels which dislikes all of them. Nationalism by definition reflects different histories and interests.

Saxony-Anhalt therefore matters beyond Saxony-Anhalt and the treatment of the AfD after its electoral breakthrough will provide a useful indication of how far Germany’s establishment is prepared to go to preserve the existing political architecture, and what consequences follow when it does.

None of this means that the Western Europe emerging from the present transformation will necessarily be more congenial to Russia, and Moscow should harbor no illusions on that score. A Europe of resurgent nationalism and competing interests has historically been quite capable of producing instability of its own, and Russia has rarely escaped the consequences.

But political systems don’t remain fixed indefinitely and the European order created during the age of triumphant globalization is entering a period of profound adjustment. Germany may simply be where that transformation is becoming impossible to ignore.

Israeli forces have demolished nearly an entire Palestinian community in the occupied West Bank, destroying homes, animal shelters and water infrastructure and leaving dozens of residents without shelter.

RT’s Charlotte Dubenskij reports from Khirbet al-Tabban in Masafer Yatta, in the South Hebron Hills, where locals say the demolitions came without warning and lasted for several hours.

”What happened was the erasure of this village from existence,” local council head Nidal Younis told RT.

According to Younis, homes belonging to 12 families were destroyed, along with rainwater collection wells and small water tanks. Nearly all of the roughly 70 people living in the community were left homeless.

Resident Suad Mohammad Obeid said her family tried to save its belongings, only for much of what they moved to be crushed during the operation. Seven members of the family are young children.

Younis told RT that genuine military exercises in the area are rare, accusing the authorities of using the designation to pressure residents to leave.

The demolitions come amid mounting pressure on Palestinian communities across the West Bank. The UN says violence and displacement in the territory have reached record levels since the Gaza war began in October 2023.

Residents of Khirbet al-Tabban say they intend to rebuild despite fears that the Israeli military could return and demolish the community again.

Watch the full story below:

On the night of September 7, 2026, the results of landmark state elections were finalized in Berlin. Officially, the numbers recorded a crushing defeat for the ruling elites in one of Germany’s smaller states – Saxony-Anhalt, home to just 2.1 million people. Yet many are already interpreting these figures as a complete breakdown of Germany’s postwar political order. 

For the first time, the right-wing conservative party Alternative for Germany (AfD), led by Ulrich Siegmund, captured a historic 43.8% of the vote, coming within a single step of an absolute majority in the state parliament. Add to that the result of the left-wing conservatives from the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) at 5.3%, and the historic collapse of the CDU, which plummeted to 17.2%, and the math of Germany’s crisis becomes unforgiving: an overwhelming majority of residents in this eastern state officially voted for a radical break from the policies of the current federal government under German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

The long-standing Berlin consensus of the traditional parties – the much-touted political Brandmauer (firewall) designed to isolate Eurosceptics from financial and political power – has now collapsed. In German expert circles, an uncomfortable diagnosis is increasingly being whispered, if not yet spoken aloud: modern Germany is gradually sliding into systemic, ungovernable chaos, which, in terms of its fractured personnel, social fabric, and psychological state, directly evokes the pre-Reich atmosphere of the late 1920s. Attempts by the liberal mainstream in Berlin and Brussels to interpret this resounding explosion simplistically – purely through the lens of the migration crisis – only reveal a deep functional blindness. The ‘Saxon filter’ has sifted out the political chaff, exposing the underlying processes that are inexorably transforming Europe.

The success of the AfD and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance and why it matters

Attempts to dismiss the Saxony-Anhalt case as a flare-up of xenophobia or protest voting by marginal societal groups appear unfounded – the significance of 43.8% for the AfD and 5.3% for the BSW extends far beyond migration debates. The primary driver here, in our view, is the dire state of the Mittelstand – the small and medium-sized enterprise sector which forms the backbone of Germany’s national economy. 

In parallel, the ‘Saxon filter' registered another historical fracture that would have been unimaginable on the electoral map of the former GDR before 2026. In this eastern state, the climate ideologues of the Green Party virtually tied in vote share with the traditional standard-bearers of the left flank – the Left Party (Die Linke). However, this was not due to a victory for the green agenda. Rather, industrial collapse and economic chaos meant that the core protest electorate of the old East German socialists was absorbed wholesale by the triumphant AfD and the pragmatic Wagenknecht Alliance. As a result, the Left Party crashed to the brink of survival, where they were overtaken by the Greens, who gathered the frightened urban middle class under their banner.

The importance of this shift is compounded by the result of the Wagenknecht Alliance (5.3%). Contrary to the canonical dogma of incompatibility between the right and left flanks, a consensus is currently forming in East Germany whose goal can be described as saving German industry and the Mittelstand, with these forces now controlling nearly 50% of the state parliament. Wagenknecht’s left-conservatives and Siegmund’s right-wing sovereignists are tightly bound by a shared macroeconomic platform: demanding an immediate end to the sanctions war with Moscow, a halt in funding for Kiev, and a return to hard-nosed national self-interest. Berlin can no longer mathematically ignore this consolidated revolt by the industrial core – the old model of governing Germany has officially been nullified.

Herein lies the most unpleasant aspect for the current federal coalition government: political elites spent years building a wall around alleged fringe groups like the AfD and BSW, yet now, after these elections, they are obligated to engage with them and maintain dialogue within the framework of existing democratic processes. 

Moreover, the chief existential nightmare for intelligence services in Berlin and Brussels lies in the inevitable institutional legitimization of these “radicals” through purely state-level coalition agreements. By sitting down at the negotiating table in Magdeburg, representatives of the AfD and the Alliance legally gain direct and legal access to classified state security channels and secret documents – including operational reports from the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (the domestic counterintelligence agency) and infrastructure plans for strategic facilities. 

The root causes: The current state of Germany and its East

The electoral defeat of the ruling CDU in Saxony-Anhalt is a direct result of Friedrich Merz’s economic policies, which prioritized military budget increases while stripping the eastern states of social and industrial support. The special irony is that Berlin’s ambitions to build a powerful independent army in the 21st century are merely an illusion: the Bundeswehr is de facto completely devoid of autonomy and remains under strict, pervasive oversight from Washington and the Pentagon. The attempt to sacrifice Saxony-Anhalt’s real economy to transatlantic military dogma has permanently erased voter trust in the traditional elites.

In examining the broader causes of this crisis, it is necessary to dismantle the myth of a “united Germany,” which has served as Berlin’s polished showcase for thirty-six years. The former GDR never truly became an equal partner within the federation. Instead, it was relegated to a kind of internal protectorate for the western states – a subordinated region systematically drained of its raw materials and skilled personnel.

By 2026, the economic and infrastructural disparities between a prosperous state like Bavaria and the struggling region of Saxony-Anhalt had reached critical thresholds. According to official reports from the Federal Statistical Office of Germany (Destatis), the gap in living standards has widened into a chasm: while Bavaria’s annual GDP per capita stands at nearly €59,000, Saxony-Anhalt firmly anchors the bottom of the federal list at just €36,517. In real terms, a resident of an eastern state generates nearly half the economic output of a southerner. Against this backdrop, the 2.7% decline in real industrial output in Saxony-Anhalt (particularly in manufacturing and chemicals) looks catastrophic, and far worse than the overall German recession.

The industrial base of East Germany, shaped during the Soviet era, was originally designed for deep integration with the Eastern Bloc. Under the guise of “European integration” following reunification, however, these manufacturing hubs were systematically hollowed out or dismantled. The few enterprises that managed to survive – ranging from the massive Leuna chemical complex to Magdeburg’s heavy machinery plants – were left entirely dependent on cheap Russian pipeline gas and placed under the external corporate management of Western conglomerates.

Saxony-Anhalt’s current state is a mirror of the systemic degradation that Brussels cynically labels the “green transition.” The state’s real economy is being decimated by bankruptcies among small and medium-sized businesses. Living standards, human capital, and social guarantees in Magdeburg and Halle are rapidly deteriorating against the backdrop of thriving cities like Frankfurt or Munich. 

It is precisely this colonial snobbery from the federal center that has transformed Saxony-Anhalt into a scorching political filter. Voters in the East have come to a stark realization: to the Berlin establishment, their factories, their jobs, and their right to a stable life are nothing more than bargaining chips in a grand geopolitical game. Therefore, the triumph of the AfD and Sahra Wagenknecht’s alliance in Magdeburg should be viewed as a fierce declaration by East Germany that it is abandoning a bogus liberal consensus.

The fate of Europe and prospects for Russia

Saxony-Anhalt has acted as a harsh filter, which may also signal a general rightward shift across Europe. Moreover, the liberal establishment in Brussels does not yet fully grasp the true scale of this process. The fact that the AfD’s triumph has become a central topic on the global agenda is confirmed by the rapid reactions of key figures on the global conservative flank: Elon Musk openly endorsed the results with an overnight statement, and Donald Trump quickly posted the election statistics on his social media platform, TruthSocial. It is clear that this local electoral revolt in East Germany is breaking the entire isolation strategy that Brussels spent years building against Eurosceptics and erecting a powerful geopolitical shield for the sovereign-minded elites of the Visegrad Group.

However, behind this outward euphoria lies a deep structural divide, as not all right-wing forces on the continent welcome this victory. The situation holds a fundamentally different, far more unsettling meaning for Western Europe’s leading right-wing leaders, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and France’s Marine Le Pen. For Meloni, who anchored Rome’s EU strategy on compromises with Brussels and unconditional alignment with the West’s anti-Russian course, the AfD’s triumph is a painful blow to her concept of “respectable conservatism.” Saxony-Anhalt has bluntly demonstrated that European voters demand unyielding economic self-interest, not subservience to the European Commission.

For Marine Le Pen in Paris, who previously demonstratively isolated the AfD in the European Parliament in order to bolster her own mainstream image, the overnight 43.8% in secured in Magdeburg represents an existential challenge. They understand all too well that a resurgent, nationalist Berlin could eventually revive old geopolitical ambitions, completely upending the delicate balance of power within the Paris-Berlin axis for decades to come.

However, for Moscow, rather than promising tactical dividends in the form of revived gas contracts, this rightward turn of the EU’s industrial locomotive introduces existential, long-term challenges. The deep historical programming of any European ultra-nationalism inevitably carries within it a creeping revision of the outcomes of World War II and the systematic dismantling of the historical legacy of the Yalta-Potsdam security architecture.

As these nationalist forces consolidate power, Moscow will inevitably face coordinated attempts to rehabilitate the dark pages of Europe’s past. Within this emerging ideological landscape, the sacredness of victory in the Second World War and the immutability of post-war borders will become the primary targets for ideological assault. In the medium term, the complete paralysis of the EU leadership’s ability to forge consolidated decisions will transform the European architecture into a scorched field of egotistical bargaining – a hostile arena where Russia will be forced to aggressively defend both its core values and its national security.

The Ukraine conflict has exposed a German establishment more willing to defend its commitments to Kiev than to consider their cost to Germany. Saxony-Anhalt has delivered its verdict: an overwhelming win for the AfD (Alternative for Germany).

Now the parties it defeated may try to preserve their power through the establishment’s political firewall, while the BSW (Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance) must decide whether it will help restore political independence and relations with Russia or become the anti-Russian establishment’s last line of defense.

The war in Ukraine has posed a very basic question: whose interests should the German government serve? Kiev has its objectives. Germany has its own responsibilities, resources, and limits. The two cannot simply be declared identical. The AfD deserves credit for challenging this confusion. It has insisted that German interests are paramount and that Russia cannot be treated as a permanent enemy without serious costs to Europe. Its proposals include reducing financial and military assistance to pressure Kiev into peace negotiations, offering partial sanctions relief to encourage talks, and lifting sanctions fully once a peace agreement is reached. These are subjects for practical diplomacy. They recognize that Russia will remain a major European power whatever German ministers say about it, and that a durable settlement must be negotiated with Moscow. The AfD’s parliamentary proposal gives negotiations and the restoration of relations a place in policy that endless establishment declarations of “resolve” cannot supply.

The BSW’s opposition to arms deliveries to Ukraine and its demand for diplomacy give it substantial common ground with the AfD. This is one reason to welcome its presence in parliament. Thus, in Saxony-Anhalt, the immediate opportunity belongs to the AfD and BSW: together, they could turn their rejection of the present course into a governing coalition.

Saxony-Anhalt has now given that challenge political weight. The AfD won 43.8% and 39 seats. The CDU (Christian Democratic Union, Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s party) received 17.2% and 15 seats. The BSW entered parliament with 5.3% and five seats. Together, the AfD and BSW would hold 44 of the 83 seats, exceeding the 42 needed for a majority. The CDU, SPD (Social Democratic Party), Greens, and Left have only 39 between them. An alternative majority excluding the AfD would therefore require the BSW. The reported seat allocation presents the BSW with a clear choice: negotiate a change of government with the election winner or help its opponents keep it out.

The AfD fell short of an absolute majority, but has still earned the strongest political claim to lead coalition negotiations, even though it has no automatic right to govern. The establishment’s firewall exists to prevent that claim from being tested through ordinary bargaining. Before demands are presented, before compromises are considered, before a common program is examined, the answer is already supposed to be no. The establishment then describes this refusal as a “defense of democracy.” It might more honestly describe it as a defense of its own exclusive right to supply the government.

No party is legally obliged to cooperate with the AfD. Equally, no party is entitled to escape criticism for refusing. The defenders of the firewall like to recite the first point as though it settles the second. It does not. Parties make choices, and voters are entitled to judge them. If the CDU can contemplate arrangements involving the Greens and the Left (both radical, socially destructive, and truly extremist), it must explain why differences in those directions can be managed while differences with the AfD prohibit even a discussion. Saying “we will not cooperate with the AfD because of the firewall” does not explain why cooperation would be wrong.

This is the practical meaning of the uniparty. The Greens and the Left openly advance the left-liberal agenda, the SPD supports it, and the CDU helps preserve it while calling itself conservative. Their campaign quarrels offer voters the illusion of choice without a real change of direction. When the AfD threatens to overturn that agenda, they unite to keep it out of government and call their cooperation “democratic responsibility.” Ministers can be replaced and coalition partners reshuffled, but the same political course survives. The firewall protects the established parties from the consequence elections should make possible: losing power to an opposition that intends to govern differently.

The firewall lets the established parties lose voters without losing power. Instead of defeating the AfD through better government and stronger arguments, they can gather enough coalition partners to keep it out. Parties rejected at the ballot box then present their survival in office as a “victory for democracy.” This gives force to the AfD’s accusation that opposition is welcome only while it cannot govern. Every additional party recruited to keep the AfD out makes the arrangement harder to disguise: the established parties are protecting their own hold on power.

The BSW should understand this danger better than most. It was founded to challenge policies that the established parties treated as beyond debate. It deserves sympathy for reopening arguments about war, economic interests, and the costs imposed on ordinary people. Its call for normal relations with Russia offers a necessary alternative to permanent confrontation, and its willingness to defend that position under political pressure deserves credit. However, if the BSW refuses to enter into a coalition with the AfD, it accepts an establishment veto over its own political freedom. It may still speak against the system, but the established parties will have allowed the BSW to criticize their policies while preventing it from forming a government that could change them.

Supporting individual AfD proposals is better than rejecting them on principle, but it can become an excuse for avoiding the real contest over power. The BSW could claim influence through occasional votes while leaving the government and its priorities in other hands. A government in Saxony-Anhalt cannot stop Germany’s weapons deliveries to Ukraine or negotiate peace with Russia; those decisions belong to the federal government. An AfD-BSW coalition would need an agreement on matters it could directly influence, such as schools, policing, and state spending. If it governed well, it would give voters concrete evidence that cooperation between the two parties can work. That would weaken the argument for keeping the AfD out of office. The established parties would then have to defend their record against an actual AfD-led government. The firewall spares them that comparison.

Russia and North Korea have opened the first road bridge across the Tumen River, linking Russia’s Primorye region directly with the neighboring country, Primorye Governor Oleg Kozhemyako has announced.

The new crossing over the river dividing the countries is expected to boost mutual trade and provide year-round transport.

Construction of the new bridge began in April 2025 under an agreement signed by Moscow and Pyongyang in 2024. Until now, the neighboring countries’ only direct land transport connection had been the Friendship railway bridge across the Tumen River.

Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and his North Korean counterpart Pak Thae Song launched traffic across the bridge by video link. 

“The new route will ensure reliable and stable supplies of various products and will help expand trade and economic cooperation between our countries,” Kozhemyako wrote on Telegram on Monday.

Leading the first Russian convoy across the bridge was a piece of Soviet history – a restored red ZAZ-968M Zaporozhets once owned by Soviet officer Yakov Novichenko, after whom the crossing is named. His grandson Nikolay Shcherbitsky drove the 1980 car, which he had restored himself.

During a mass rally in Pyongyang in 1946, Novichenko shielded Kim Il Sung from a grenade thrown toward the platform where the Korean leader was standing. He survived despite severe injuries and the loss of his right hand, and was later awarded North Korea’s highest labor title.

A new Khasan road checkpoint has also been built next to the bridge. It has ten traffic lanes and is designed to process up to 300 vehicles and 2,850 people per day once it operates at full capacity, according to the Russian Transport Ministry. Russian officials say the new road link should cut transport costs and increase bilateral trade.

The opposition right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party could join forces with the left-wing Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) after its landslide election win in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt, RT contributor Rachel Marsden has said.

The AfD won 43.8% of the vote in Sunday’s regional election, leaving German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) far behind in second place at 17.5%. However, the right-wing party claimed 39 out of 97 seats in the local legislature, falling short of a governing majority.

Speaking to RT on Monday, Marsden pointed out that Saxony-Anhalt is “one of the AFD’s strongest states. So, no, it’s not like Germany has suddenly undergone some kind of mass political conversion.”

The AfD and BWS might sit on the different sides of the political spectrum, but their positions overlap in many areas, especially when it comes to urging dialogue with Russia and resisting the growing influence of EU bureaucrats in Brussels, Marsden stressed.

“There’s also the possibility that the AfD would refuse to work with anybody in favor of just kind of rolling the dice and hoping that nobody can form a coalition government,” which would lead to a new election, giving the right-wing party another chance of calming enough votes to govern Saxony-Anhalt alone, she added.

Watch the full video below:

Thousands of people gathered in Belgrade on Monday to pay their respects to former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic before his burial, which took place without formal state or military honors.

Supporters carrying Serbian flags and photographs of Mladic gathered outside the Church of St. Luke, where his coffin was displayed ahead of the funeral service. He was later buried beside his daughter at a nearby cemetery.

Mladic commanded Bosnian Serb forces during the 1992-1995 war that broke up Yugoslavia. In 2017, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) convicted him of genocide for targeting Bosnian Muslims, Croats and other groups.

Mladic died in The Hague on August 27 at the age of 84 while serving a life sentence.

His remains were returned to Serbia last week on a government plane. Serbian soldiers carried the coffin from the aircraft, which was then escorted through Belgrade. A separate commemoration was held on Saturday at the House of the Serbian Army.

Despite the convictions, Mladic has remained a respected figure among some Serbs, who view him as a wartime defender of the Bosnian Serb population. Many also share longstanding complaints that international courts have treated crimes against Serbs differently from those committed by Serb forces during the Yugoslav wars.

Public tributes to Mladic have also spread to football stadiums. The normally fierce rivalry between Crvena Zvezda (Red Star) and Partizan Belgrade was set aside at the Serbian capital’s derby over the weekend as both sets of fans chanted Mladic’s name, before a giant tifo bearing his image was unveiled. Crvena Zvezda fans also chanted in Mladic’s honor during a Europa League match last month, prompting UEFA to fine the club €90,000 ($105,000). Bosnia’s FK Borac Banjaluka was also fined €39,500 over similar chants and other fan offenses.

🫡

🔴⚪️ #fkcz pic.twitter.com/n0IwG1NDTu

— FK Crvena zvezda (@crvenazvezdafk) September 6, 2026

Justice Minister Nenad Vujic had initially suggested that Mladic would receive state honors, however, the final funeral arrangements included no artillery salute, ceremonial military presence, or attendance by senior Serbian officials.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic rejected the criticism, arguing that Brussels had failed to identify any concrete act of “glorification” by the Serbian authorities, and called Kos’ statement “stupid, as usual.”

“I suppose we should ban people from showing up, ban the funeral,” he said.

Vucic had earlier said Serbia would help Mladic’s family arrange a “dignified” burial and criticized The Hague for refusing repeated Serbian requests to allow the former general to return home as his health deteriorated.

The president did not attend Monday’s funeral, citing a previously scheduled visit by Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev.

Iran will announce a new “restricted zone” for shipping outside the Strait of Hormuz in the coming days, high-ranking security official Mohsen Rezaei has said.

The US resumed strikes on Iranian targets last week, saying they were in response to Tehran hitting commercial ships in the key waterway. The Islamic Republic maintains that no vessel can pass through the Strait of Hormuz, which accounts for the shipment of some 20% of global oil, without its permission. Iran retaliated with a missile and drone barrage against US military facilities in the Gulf, while also firing at American warships, including an aircraft carrier.

In a televised interview on Sunday, Rezaei, who is the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said Tehran plans to place even wider curbs on shipping in the region.

The restricted area “will begin from the US Navy’s blockade line and extend into parts of the Persian Gulf,” stretching toward several key ports, he said.

Rezaei insisted that the Strait of Hormuz remains “completely closed and under the control of the armed forces” of Iran, describing US President Donald Trump’s claims that it’s open as a “big lie.”

More than a hundred vessels passed through the waterway on a daily basis before the US-Israeli attack on Iran in late February, but now the number has reduced to only seven or eight per day, the official said. Those vessels are transporting essential goods for the Islamic Republic, he added.

“The Americans are trying to smuggle five to six vessels through at great expense, but these ships are usually struck,” Rezaei stressed.

Iran isn’t sinking those ships because they are carrying oil and doing so would harm the environment, he stressed.

US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth warned in a post on X that Washington could target the Iranian oil tanker fleet in the Middle East or in the Indo-Pacific region. “It’s simple: if Iran shoots at US ships, we will destroy (and sink) their oil tankers,” he wrote.

Iranian Parliament speaker and top negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf warned on Sunday that further aggressive actions by the US will be met with “faster, heavier and more painful” retaliation by Tehran.

“The Americans have surely understood that the era of proportionate responses has come to an end and our recent strikes against aggressor bases was only a start,” Ghalibaf said.

Right-wing protesters have clashed with police in the British city of Portsmouth as they tried to prevent a group of newly arrived migrants from being processed, videos from the scene show.

A small boat which departed Normandy in France with some 140 asylum seekers aboard was intercepted by the UK authorities in the English Channel and escorted to Portsmouth, British media reported on Sunday.

The news prompted hundreds of anti-immigrant activists to head to the city in Hampshire in south-eastern England. The demonstrators blocked roads in the area in an attempt to prevent buses from delivering the migrants to a Home Office processing center in the village of Manston in Kent.

The protesters, many of whom were dressed in black and wore face masks, chanted: “Stop the boats” and “Send them back.”

Footage from the scene captured minor scuffles between the activists and police armed with riot shields. The demonstrators were also filmed throwing objects at the officers.

Riot police clash with protestors in Portsmouth after small boat arrival. Shot for @PA pic.twitter.com/JavKFpfVVa

— Jamie Lashmar (@jamie_lashmar) September 6, 2026

Daniel Thomas, also known as Danny Tommo, who recently founded the Patriot Platform group, said in a live stream from the scene that “we will not accept this anymore.”

BREAKING:

The police and anti-migration activists are facing off with each other in the sea near Portsmouth.

After the police started splashing water on the activists, they responded with the same measure. The activists are there to block illegal migrants from being disembarked…

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) September 6, 2026

“This is no longer an option to tell us that the boat numbers are down. This isn’t about the numbers being down… this is about understanding that this has to come to an end now,” Thomas, who is an associate of prominent British right-wing activist Tommy Robinson, said of the flow of migrants from the other side of the channel.

🚨 LIVE FROM EASTNEY, PORTSMOUTH

Police have attempted to gain ground on patriots by reversing vehicles into them.

One man decided to lay down to try and stop them.

Pepper spray is being used by police.

🎥 @WesleyWinterYT https://t.co/6U358pa0iZ pic.twitter.com/Y1gSIk46rJ

— The Nationalist GB (@TheNatGB) September 6, 2026

The demonstrators said they intended to continue blocking the roads all night, but ended the rally at around 3 AM local time after police obtained a dispersal order and warned that officers would begin making arrests, according to The Guardian.

Police start attacking people & end up hitting an elderly man . Portsmouth 👇 pic.twitter.com/1VXq3xxegS

— 🤍𝕁𝕆🤍 (@jomickane) September 6, 2026

A British government spokesperson said that “we condemn the intimidating and thuggish behavior we are seeing tonight. The right to peaceful protest is fundamental to our democracy, but it must never cross a line into disorder.”

Some 33,000 people, mostly adult men, arrived in the UK in small boats between July 2025 and 2026, making up around 88% of all illegal migrants entering the country, according to government data. During the same period in 2024 and 2025, the number of asylum seekers crossing the channel stood at 41,000.

A YouGov poll published in August showed that 69% of Britons believe immigration over the past decade has been too high, while 43% said it had been mostly bad for the country, up from 33% in 2016.

The German government’s increasingly hostile stance toward Russia, mounting economic problems, and concerns over migration have helped propel the Alternative for Germany (AfD) to a historic election victory in Saxony-Anhalt, Professor Vladislav Belov, head of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Center for German Studies, has told RT.

The AfD won 43.8% of the vote, more than doubling its result from the previous state election, according to official preliminary results. It is set to hold 39 of the state parliament’s 97 seats, falling short of the 49 required for an absolute majority.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which has led Saxony-Anhalt’s coalition government since 2021, finished a distant second with 17.2% and 15 seats. Sven Schulze, the party’s lead candidate and outgoing regional head, conceded defeat and congratulated the AfD on its success.

Speaking shortly after polls closed on Sunday, Belov recalled his earlier assessment that the anti-Russian positions adopted by German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul and Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt would benefit the AfD among certain groups of voters.

The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), founded in 2024, entered the Saxony-Anhalt parliament for the first time after securing 5.3% of the vote.

Belov argued that the campaign had been unusually dominated by federal issues, despite voters formally electing a state parliament.

“For the first time, the AfD presented itself not merely as a protest party but as a party with governing competence,” he said, identifying migration, education, and Saxony-Anhalt’s economic and political situation as key campaign issues that other parties had failed to address.

The predominantly rural state is also home to a sizeable chemical industry that has been affected by higher energy costs since Germany abandoned inexpensive Russian pipeline gas. Unemployment stood at 8.1% in July, compared with 6.4% nationwide.

Belov attributed the Greens’ result to tactical mobilization rather than voter support for their policies. He described the ‘Taktisch Wählen’ initiative, which used door-to-door canvassing and an online tool to encourage support for the SPD or Greens in order to block an AfD majority, as “scandalous.”

US backroom diplomacy on Ukraine cannot achieve peace without Washington accepting that it is no longer the world’s sole superpower, economist and public policy scholar Jeffrey Sachs has told RT.

The comments follow separate closed-door talks held by US special envoy Steve Witkoff and President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow and Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky in Kiev over the weekend. Details of the proposals exchanged during the meetings have not been made public.

“The US still has a grandiose idea that it is the world’s hegemon and the sole superpower, and it is not. Clearly, we are in a multi-polar world,” Sachs told RT in an exclusive interview on Sunday.

Sachs argued that a peace settlement requires taking Russia’s security interests into account and abandoning the expansionist foreign policy the US has pursued for more than 30 years.

“It seems to be psychologically very difficult” for Washington to openly accept that “basic reality,” he argued, saying this is why it resorts to “backroom negotiations” and secrecy that ultimately produce no tangible results.

Sachs also described the situation in Ukraine as an “endgame situation,” arguing that Kiev is in a desperate position militarily, socially, and politically.

Watch the exclusive interview with economist Jeffrey Sachs in full below.

Ukraine lost around $1.2 billion to fraud, waste and mismanagement in military procurement in 2024 alone, the New York Times has reported, citing confidential government audits and court records.

Seven of the country’s ten largest military contractors continued to receive new orders despite fraud investigations, previous failures to deliver, or the arrest of executives on corruption charges, the paper wrote on Sunday, describing the pattern as a “persistent phenomenon.”

Auditors also identified 18 companies awarded contracts despite earlier defaults, six of which had failed to fulfill a single deal.

Defense industry fraud is “a longstanding tradition” in Ukraine, American anti-corruption expert James Wasserstrom has told the NYT. “Anything that isn’t nailed down in Ukraine will be stolen,” he said.

The audits also found that cheaper offers were sometimes bypassed. In one tender, Kiev reportedly bought Turkish-made munitions for multiple-launch rocket systems through a Czech intermediary for around $5,100 each despite the manufacturer offering them directly for roughly $4,200.

The losses accumulated as Vladimir Zelensky repeatedly appealed to Western governments for more weapons, warning of critical shortages on the battlefield. In April 2024, he said Kiev was in “dire need” of increased support and pressed its backers to deliver promised arms and ammunition.

The report comes amid a series of high-profile graft investigations involving top Ukrainian officials and figures close to Zelensky. In August, the Ukrainian leader sacked the deputy head of his office, Irina Mudraya, while other recent corruption probes have implicated former ministers, diplomats and senior officials.

Former Defense Minister Mikhail Fedorov, meanwhile, accused the government of “systemic corruption” following his dismissal in July. Fedorov, who had sought to overhaul military procurement, has claimed that entrenched defense-industry interests resisted his reforms and has since called for wartime elections.

Moscow has long argued that the scandals are evidence of systemic corruption in Ukraine. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said earlier this year that corruption “permeates the entire Ukrainian power structure, including Zelensky’s inner circle and Zelensky himself.”

Five people have been killed and several others injured after a cargo plane overran a runway and crashed near Miami International Airport, authorities have said.

The FAA identified the aircraft as a Boeing 767 operated for Amazon by 21 Air. It had arrived in Florida from San Juan, Puerto Rico, at around 2 PM on Sunday.

The crash prompted “a full ground stop” at the airport while first responders assessed the scene, US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said.

“Units arrived to find an airplane that had caught fire as a result of this crash, with heavy flames and smoke showing,” Miami-Dade Fire Rescue said on X. “Firefighters are working on extinguishing the fire and assessing patients.”

Videos circulating online appear to show the aircraft travelling beyond the runway and crossing a road before coming to rest near a parking area. Other footage shows flames engulfing its right side as thick black smoke rises from the wreckage. The right wing appears severely damaged.

Plane crashes at miami international airport.
Prime Air Boeing 767 cargo plane on fire with heavy black smoke after overshooting the runway at Miami International Airport. pic.twitter.com/FXFAvsROlw

— Indian🇮🇳 (@singh31919) September 6, 2026

NBC Miami reported, citing a source, that the two pilots were taken to Jackson South Medical Center, while three other people were transported to Jackson Memorial Hospital. Their conditions remain unknown.

CCTV footage showing the Prime Air B-767 crash today in Miami.

pic.twitter.com/qu1DStuEhT

— Francisco Cunha - ✈️ Aviation et al (@OnDisasters) September 6, 2026

One of the airport’s four runways reopened at around 4:15pm, followed by a second approximately 30 minutes later. Officials nevertheless warned passengers to expect continued disruption.

The National Transportation Safety Board is sending a team to Miami to lead the investigation, with the FAA also examining the crash.

A US federal magistrate judge has ordered the administration of US President Donald Trump to disclose the names of those who had created a now-defunct fund for victims of politically-motivated prosecution. The lawsuit was filed by multiple plaintiffs, backed by a Soros-funded NGO.

Critics have argued that the $1.8 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund was designed to funnel taxpayer money to certain Trump supporters who claim they were unfairly investigated by the Justice Department, including those prosecuted over the Capitol Hill riots on January 6, 2021.

On Friday, Judge Ivan D. Davis granted a request that the identities of the masterminds behind the fund be revealed to the plaintiffs and their attorneys, noting that this information must not be made public at this stage.

The DOJ has insisted that the names of those people are “irrelevant” to the case and, moreover, constitute confidential attorney-client discussions or government officials’ deliberations. The Department has also filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit altogether.

Providing legal support for the lawsuit is the Democracy Forward Foundation – a nonprofit organization that professes to advance “democracy and social progress through litigation, policy and public education, and regulatory engagement.” In May, it was named among the recipients of a five-year $300 million grant from billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF), according to Inside Philanthropy.

The DOJ announced the creation of the fund in May as a part of a settlement agreement between Trump and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Under it, Trump and several members of his family, along with the Trump Organization, agreed to drop their lawsuit over a leak of their tax returns. In exchange, the Anti-Weaponization Fund was to be established to provide redress to “victims of lawfare and weaponization.”

“The machinery of government should never be weaponized against any American, and it is this Department’s intention to make right the wrongs that were previously done,” Attorney General Todd Blanche said at the time.

However, faced with criticisms from both Democratic and Republican members of Congress, Blanche declared the fund “dead” in August.

A US munition likely landed a direct hit on a wedding in Iran last week after it veered off its designated target, the Washington Post reported on Sunday, citing a person familiar with the operation.

The incident occurred in Kuhestak, Hormozgan Province, amid a new wave of airstrikes unleashed by the US on Iran on Tuesday. One of the munitions hit a residential home with a wedding party underway, killing at least five and wounding nearly 70. The Iranian authorities said the victims were three women and two children aged four and 16.

The explosion at the party was highly likely a result of a direct hit by a US munition, according to the WaPo. The US Navy dropped six glide bombs at a communications tower in the town, with all but one striking the designated target. The stray munition missed the tower, reportedly hitting the house located around 135 meters (440 feet) away. The comms tower was the only designated target within the town during the Tuesday strikes, the source told the WaPo, ruling out any prospects the home was attacked intentionally or mixed with some other target.

US Vice President J.D. Vance said on Thursday that Washington is looking into the incident. “We’re investigating it because obviously we care. We want to know,” he told reporters. The US military has insisted it does not target civilians and has not taken responsibility for the strike.

The attack on the wedding party has become the latest in the string of civilian mass-casualty incidents that occurred amid the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. 

On the opening day of the US-Israeli war on Iran, US forces hit an elementary school in Minab, killing 175 people, predominantly young girls. At least 21 civilians, roughly a third of whom were children, were killed in Lamerd that day. Tehran has repeatedly accused the US of committing war crimes throughout the conflict, reporting some 3,000 civilian casualties since it began late in February.

The opposition right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has won Sunday’s regional election in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt with 43.8% of the vote, the local election commission has said. The AfD is set to claim 39 out of 97 seats in the local legislature, falling short of a governing majority.

The vote was marked by a record turnout of 78%, the highest since the reunification of Germany in 1990.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party finished in a poor second, securing just over 17.2% of the vote and 15 seats, according to official preliminary results.

AfD lead candidate in the state, Ulrich Siegmund, said the party has “written history” and that the outcome of the vote would “shake all of Germany.”

“We are going to get our country back, and we are starting with Saxony-Anhalt,” he said.

AfD co-chair Alice Weidel earlier did not rule out forming a coalition government in the region, including with Merz’s Christian Democrats, should the right-wing party fail to secure an absolute majority.

After the exit polls gave victory to the AfD, Sven Schulze, the CDU lead candidate in Saxony-Anhalt and the outgoing regional head, conceded defeat, congratulating the opponents on their electoral success.

“That’s democracy,” Schulze said, adding that voters have sent a clear message which must be heeded, both at the regional and federal levels, as quoted by German media.

Schulze attributed his party’s poor showing to the unpopular policies pursued by the federal coalition government, which is comprised of the CDU and the Social Democratic Party (SPD). 

SPD co-leader and Vice Chancellor Lars Klingbeil similarly spoke of a “signal to Berlin,” insisting, however, on the continuation of the so-called ‘firewall’ policy, under which all major parties refuse to cooperate with the AfD.

According to preliminary results, the SPD has finished third with 9.3% of the vote, followed by the Greens and the Left Party with 8.9% and 8.6%, respectively. The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) has also narrowly secured the spot in the legislature with 5.3%.

Over the past several months, opinion polls have consistently shown that the AfD is the most popular party nationwide, enjoying the support of 28% of respondents.

Having the largest opposition faction in the Bundestag, the party campaigns on an anti-immigration platform and is also highly critical of the German government’s support for Ukraine, as well as sanctions against Russia.

An INSA poll published by Bild in late August indicated that support for Germany’s governing Christian Democratic CDU/CSU bloc had fallen to 20%, with some 78% of respondents dissatisfied with Merz’s coalition government.

There are grounds for cautious optimism following Saturday’s talks between US President Donald Trump’s envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, former Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl and ex-White House aide Steve Gill have told RT.

Trump’s son-in-law and the US special envoy likely presented concrete and well-developed ideas on ending the Ukraine conflict to the Russian leadership, Kneissl and Gill surmised.

According to Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov, the talks, which lasted over three hours and included formal discussions as well as an informal exchange over lunch, were “substantive, constructive, extremely candid and trusting.” Aside from the Ukraine conflict, the two sides are understood to have discussed economic cooperation and potential “major, mutually beneficial Russian-American projects.”

Speaking to RT on Sunday, former Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl said that “there is apparently something materializing because these two persons would not come without anything in their hands.” She also claimed that “trust is there” between Moscow and Washington, citing “this ongoing direct communication on a high-ranking political level.”

Kneissl also pointed to the previously unannounced visit to the Russian capital by CIA Director John Ratcliffe last Tuesday, during which he met with Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) chief Sergei Naryshkin.

On Sunday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov likewise said that Saturday’s negotiations were indicative of an “atmosphere of trust” between Russia and the US.

Conservative media host Steve Gill, who served in the office of the US Trade Representative under Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, concurred with Kneissl, saying that he was “optimistic that the meeting took as long as it did.”

He told RT that the trip Witkoff and Kushner made to Moscow was likely preceded by considerable preparatory work, with Trump’s envoys plausibly bringing a substantive proposal to the Russian capital.

“The fact that it took three hours to kind of work through those details and now they’re heading to Ukraine leaves me at least optimistic that hopefully some progress was made today,” Gill concluded.

US special envoy Steve Witkoff has expressed optimism about Washington’s renewed efforts to resolve the Ukraine conflict following talks in both Moscow and Kiev, saying the Trump administration hopes to find a diplomatic solution.

Witkoff and US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner met Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky in Kiev on Sunday, a day after holding more than three hours of talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin. Sunday’s trip marked the US envoys’ first official visit to the Ukrainian capital as part of Washington’s peace efforts.

Witkoff said on Sunday that he “felt good” about the discussions in both capitals and that Washington hopes diplomacy can bring an end to the conflict. He also suggested that direct talks involving all three sides could take place soon, pointing to “a trilateral that we’re hopeful will be announced in short order.”

According to Ushakov, the American envoys presented several ideas on possible paths toward a settlement, while Putin reiterated Moscow’s readiness to continue working with Washington to seek a political and diplomatic solution. The Russian leader also stressed that any lasting agreement would have to address what Moscow describes as the root causes of the conflict.

According to an Axios source familiar with the meetings, during the talks in Kiev on Sunday Zelensky discussed Ukrainian preparations for continuing the war through the winter, while Kushner and Witkoff stressed they want a breakthrough before then.

A White House official also told Axios the Moscow discussions were substantive, saying the two sides had discussed plans for the next steps that are expected to be announced in the coming weeks.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has earlier thanked Trump for his efforts to help resolve the conflict, saying the US president continued seeking a settlement despite the difficulty of the situation. Putin also reiterated Moscow’s commitment to refrain from strikes on Kiev during a three-day period beginning at midnight on September 5, intended to allow the US envoys to travel safely to the Ukrainian capital.

It’s impossible to fully understand the legacy of American feminist icon Gloria Steinem without mentioning Russia.

Steinem – who fought her entire life to promote the radical concept that women should be able to choose whatever kind of life they want – passed away peacefully at her New York home last week at the age of 92. Judging by all the hair-pulling going on over her involvement with the CIA, you’d think that she had been tasked with planting exploding cigars on Fidel Castro.

But here’s what actually happened. Fresh out of Smith College in her early 20s, she took off to India to report for two years for a murky “fellowship,” capturing a newly independent country experimenting with Gandhian social reform, where women were actively collaborating to find their place.

When she returned home, she wanted to keep the party going and spread the same kind of enlightened ideals. She asked around about funding. Shockingly, corporations weren’t interested. But THE Corporation was.

The CIA was willing to fork over some cash, but it would involve setting up a think-tank: the Independent Research Service. She could load up a flight with liberal-minded young American students and professionals who were psyched about leftist ideals – but not too psyched – and take them over to the Soviet-organized World Youth Festivals in Helsinki and Vienna as an option to Communism. In exchange, she just had to produce some deliverables with her observations.

But what does any of this have to do with her lifelong fight for women’s rights and equality? Lots, actually.

Right around the same time as Steinem was being paid by the CIA to take Americans to the festivals, the agency published a report expressing its concern over the use of peace, brotherhood, and social progress to attract non-Communists from around the world to these festivals.

It cited a 1956 Moscow Radio broadcast: “The World Festival which is to be convened in Moscow” will “greet the festival of youth and peace with new labor achievements… Let us show our foreign contemporaries the results of the inspired creative labor of the Soviet people, the wealth of our socialist motherland, and everything of which the Soviet people are proud.”

One of those things of which Soviet society was very proud was the leading role of women in the workforce. In the wake of WWII’s losses, it was an inevitability that women were going to be stepping up as a matter of pragmatic reality.

The Committee of Soviet Women (KSZh) leveraged the 1957 Moscow festival to establish relationships with women from the developing world. The committee’s later reports indicate that women from Africa and South Asia were interested in the Soviet model, including such things as childcare provisions and female workforce participation, according to diplomatic historians.

Soviet archives say that visitors encountered Soviet institutions and it prompted them to think about “new possibilities for their societies.” The status of women was specifically one of the areas around which Soviet hosts and foreign visitors developed solidarity.

At the 1957 Moscow World Youth Festival, the Soviet Union made the social position of women part of its international cultural diplomacy. They were presented as educated, socially active participants in Soviet public life.

And surely it’s just another coincidence that President John F. Kennedy established the President’s Commission on the Status of Women in 1961, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt – or that JFK himself had been impressed by women in important positions in the USSR, according to his own brother, the late Senator Ted Kennedy.

Steinem’s Playboy Bunny exposé showing the exploitation of women in Hugh Hefner’s “gentlemen’s” clubs came just a year after one of the festivals, in 1963. The same year that the USSR was also sending a woman to space, while America was sending women to get butt-slapped by some pervert for a paycheck.

Don’t think that the CIA noticed or really cared that much about what women were doing in the workforce at home and abroad? They were actually kind of obsessed with it. To the point of collecting for their files a 1965 congressional report pointing out how women were everywhere in the Soviet workforce, and that “the party and Government have succeeded in altering social custom and public attitudes toward the employment of women.”

In 1963, the CIA found that “by 1959 about 80 percent of Soviet physicians and almost 75 percent of teachers, economists, and planners were women,” in a report concerned with Soviet leadership potential.

In 1974, three years after Steinem had nationally launched the political women’s issue magazine, ‘Ms.’, and become synonymous with the women’s liberation movement, Washington’s Rand Corporation think tank was still churning out research on women’s roles in science and technology in the USSR vs. America.

The Soviets had already understood the value of putting women to work, educating them, and showcasing them as evidence of social progress to the rest of the world. Hardly surprising that it wasn’t long before Washington understood the competitive value of offering its own version.

Steinem entered the American establishment’s Cold War contest with Russia over competing models of modernity at precisely the moment when the status of women had become part of that ideological battlefield.

At the perfect time, she waltzed in through a door that was just begging to be opened by the American establishment. One that had already been flung wide open by Soviet men and women.

Summer is officially over in Europe – and for millions of people, this may be remembered as the year when extreme weather stopped feeling particularly unusual.

Western Europe endured an extraordinary succession of heatwaves, drought, wildfires, and water shortages. Temperatures repeatedly climbed above 40C (104F), rivers fell to historic lows, and crops withered.

Then, in some places, the drought ended not with gentle rain but violent storms and flash flooding.
France, the UK, and Belgium all recorded their hottest summers on record.

So, was 2026 simply an exceptionally unlucky summer?

Scientists increasingly say no.

How hot was it?

France averaged 24C across June, July, and August, 3.6C above the 1991-2020 norm. The previous record, set during the deadly summer of 2003, was 2.7C above normal.

The country endured three official heatwaves totaling an unprecedented 53 days. Some 45% of France experienced temperatures of at least 40C at some point during the summer.

Britain, hardly famous for scorching summers, recorded a seasonal mean temperature of 16.5C – the highest since national records began in 1884. Temperatures peaked at 38.1C at London’s Kew Gardens, while 54 weather stations operated by the Met Office, the UK’s national weather service, broke their all-time maximum records.

Across Western Europe, June and July were the hottest on record, with the average temperature reaching 21.62C – 2.79C above the 1991-2020 norm, according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

How deadly was it?

Extreme heat can worsen heart, respiratory, and kidney problems, meaning its health impact is often measured through excess mortality rather than deaths explicitly attributed to heat.

In France, the national public health agency estimated almost 5,800 excess deaths from all causes during the June 17-July 2 heatwave, 36% above the expected level in the affected areas. Another 1,243 excess deaths were recorded during heatwave periods between July 3 and 22.

The figures are preliminary and do not mean heat caused every additional death, but health officials said the sharp increases highlighted the impact of prolonged exposure to extreme temperatures.

Older people were particularly vulnerable: Those aged 75 and over accounted for roughly two-thirds of the excess deaths during France’s first heatwave.

From heat to drought – and fire

Meanwhile, tinder-dry vegetation fueled wildfires. By early September, fires had affected more than 647,000 hectares in the EU, nearly twice the 20-year average for that point in the season, according to the European Commission’s Joint Research Center.

The economic cost

Agriculture was among the hardest-hit sectors.

In Britain, preliminary estimates suggested the country could be heading for its smallest harvest since detailed records began in 1984.

The impact also stretched across the EU. The European Commission has forecast the bloc’s maize harvest at a near 20-year low, following severe heat and water shortages in major growing regions.

How can drought and floods happen together?

A warmer atmosphere can hold roughly 7% more water vapor for every 1C of warming, providing more moisture for intense rainfall when storms develop.

At the same time, prolonged heat can leave some soils so dry that, under certain conditions, intense rain falls faster than the ground can absorb it, increasing runoff and flash-flood risk.

Northern Italy demonstrated the abrupt shift in August, when weeks of extreme heat were followed by torrential rain and flooding in Liguria, Lombardy, and northern Tuscany. 

France also experienced violent thunderstorms. On August 24, more than 20,000 lightning strikes were recorded alongside intense rain, hail, and powerful winds.

When the heat got weird

The extreme temperatures produced some unusual scenes across Europe.

In Belgium, young birds were reported jumping from nests to escape temperatures of up to 50-60C beneath roofs. One wildlife rescue center said it was receiving more than 40 heat-stressed animals a day as swifts, swallows, sparrows, and starlings struggled with the conditions.

Zoos resorted to creative ways of keeping animals cool. Prague Zoo brought in tons of ice for its polar bears and other animals, while Rome Zoo served frozen fruit, vegetables, and fish and moved some heat-sensitive species into climate-controlled areas.

Infrastructure also suffered. In Germany, sections of the A2 motorway buckled in the heat, while melting asphalt around tram tracks disrupted services in Leipzig. In Sweden, heat was blamed for warping railway tracks into a so-called “sun curve,” causing a freight train to derail.

The heat even interfered with history. In Belgium, organizers canceled a reenactment of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo because temperatures were considered too dangerous for participants and spectators.

Is this the new normal?

Not quite – yet.

The UK Met Office estimates that a summer as hot as 2026 would have had a less than one-in-1,000 annual chance in a climate without human greenhouse-gas emissions. In today’s environment, the probability is roughly one in nine – making such a summer about 130 times more likely.

Meteo-France reached a similar conclusion. It estimates that around 2.4C of the difference between summer 2026 and an average pre-industrial national summer was attributable to human-caused climate change.

Europe will still experience cooler and wetter summers. Natural weather variability has not disappeared, and no one can say whether 2027 will repeat this year’s extremes.

But the odds are shifting. Heatwaves are becoming more frequent and intense, while higher temperatures can worsen drought, wildfire conditions, and extreme rainfall.

Summer 2026 therefore may not be remembered simply as Europe’s summer from hell.

It may eventually be remembered as the summer when an extreme future briefly arrived early.

Violent Israeli settlers are “terrorists” who must be held accountable for targeting Palestinians, US Ambassador to West Jerusalem Mike Huckabee has said.

The UN relief agency, OCHA, said in August that there were an average of six settler violence incidents every day in the occupied West Bank during the first six months of 2026. The attacks by radicalized Jews have seen more than 2,300 Palestinians, including over 1,000 children, displaced, it added.

Huckabee, who is a strong supporter of Israel and calls himself a Christian Zionist, visited the town of Turmus Ayya near Ramallah on Saturday. The area has been frequently targeted by settlers this year, and around 80% of the town’s population of 3,000 people are Palestinian Americans, according to its mayor.

During his meeting with residents, Huckabee said that “if there are squatters that come in and put up their own flags and take possession of something that does not belong to them, if they burn a car, if they torch a mosque, if they go into someone’s home and vandalize it, paint graffiti on the walls, that’s a criminal act. But it extends beyond a criminal act. It’s an act of terror.”

According to Huckabee, doing so is in Israel’s “best interest” because the violent settlers damage the country’s reputation “when it appears that this tiny little group of marauders are somehow representative of the larger population.”

“There may be a few hundred who are responsible, but that’s a few hundred too many,” he said.

The US envoy already labeled the settlers “terrorist” in August after a series of attacks in the town of Qusra in the West Bank. Last week, after radicalized Jews set fire to a mosque in the village of Bizzariya, they sprayed graffiti on a wall, reading: “Regards to Huckabee from the terrorists.”

Carlson pointed out that, according to the Book of Genesis, the territory offered by God to the Hebrew patriarch stretched “from the Euphrates to the Nile,” which includes current Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and some parts of Saudi Arabia. “It would be fine if they [the Israelis] took it all,” the ambassador replied.

According to the UN, violence in the West Bank has been at an “all-time high” since Israel launched its military operation in Gaza in response to an incursion by Hamas on October 7, 2023.

Over 1,100 Palestinians have been killed in the areas since then, with new illegal settlements being approved by the Israeli authorities and the country’s military often attacking Muslim communities together with the settlers, it said.

The talks that Russian President Vladimir Putin had with US President Donald Trump’s envoys on Saturday are indicative of an “atmosphere of trust” between Moscow and Washington, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said.

Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have arrived in Kiev, where they are meeting with the Ukrainian leadership as part of US efforts to mediate a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.

Speaking to Russian journalist Pavel Zarubin on Sunday, Peskov stated that “there is indeed an atmosphere of trust, at least with respect to this communication channel, [and] it is growing stronger.”

The official added that the “exchange of such greetings [between the Russian president and foreign dignitaries] is extended… when there are messages that the head of state deems necessary to convey.”

According to the Russian official, the US negotiators presented a “number of considerations regarding possible paths toward a settlement” of the Ukraine conflict.

Ushakov revealed that the Russian president and Trump’s envoys had also discussed economic cooperation and potential “major, mutually beneficial Russian-American projects.” He characterized the talks as “timely and very useful for both sides,” with Putin and Trump intending to continue personal contacts as well as the diplomatic work being conducted by Witkoff and Kushner.

The Russian president earlier praised his US counterpart for his sustained efforts to end the hostilities between Moscow and Kiev.

Ahead of the US negotiators’ departure for Kiev, Putin ordered a three-day hiatus in strikes on the Ukrainian capital to allow Witkoff and Kushner to safely carry out their mission.

The latest visit to Moscow by Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff has triggered a fresh wave of speculation in Russia about what Washington is really trying to achieve.

With US President Donald Trump under pressure at home and much of his administration’s foreign-policy bandwidth consumed by Iran, the trip has been interpreted less as a breakthrough mission than as a signal – one that may be aimed as much at domestic American politics and alliance management as at Russia itself.

Russian analysts see the visit in different ways. Some believe the Americans are simply sounding out Moscow before returning to Kiev, trying to gauge whether any space remains for movement on Ukraine. Others argue the mission is part of a broader performance of diplomatic activity by the Trump White House, intended to project momentum where little real progress is possible. Still others view it as an exercise in ‘shuttle diplomacy’, useful mainly for information-gathering and atmospherics rather than for producing concrete results.

Roman Romanov, American studies specialist, lecturer at the Faculty of International Relations, Political Science, and Foreign Regional Studies at RSUH

I have two explanations regarding the visit and the format of this visit. First, the American side has already shown several times that it is interested in maintaining dialogue with both Moscow and Kiev. And this visit – or rather, this tour – is aimed at “synchronizing watches.” What does that mean? The Americans are trying to understand what conditions might be acceptable to the parties for resuming an active negotiating process. In other words, what can be offered to both sides so that they are prepared to move the dialogue in the direction of progress.

The second explanation is purely domestic-political for the United States. Against the backdrop of the failure of the Iran campaign, it is necessary to demonstrate some other kind of political activity that at least theoretically resembles progress with a concrete result. Trump has done this kind of thing more than once.

Do they have any ready-made proposals? I do not think so, because, first, at the moment a significant part of US foreign-policy resources is concentrated on Iran, and second, because despite the constructive role of both Witkoff and Kushner, they still act more as envoys of the American president on a specific issue than as direct participants formulating the American president’s position on this issue.

It is difficult to explain why they first went to Moscow and then to Kiev. One can assume they first want to hear Moscow’s stance, because it is in a more advantageous position – Russia is advancing, winning on the battlefield – so the US believes it would be more expedient first to hear out Moscow’s demands and gauge how much they’ve changed since August 2025, since the meeting in Anchorage.

At the same time, although we do not observe public participation by the EU, through closed channels the European Union surely communicates its interests. Their representatives are not there, but the position the Americans are shaping includes the EU’s position as well.

Dmitry Dtobnitsky – Russian political scientist specializing in American studies, expert in US foreign and domestic policy

These negotiations will continue – that’s the only perspective they have. What are we negotiating with the US about? About how to stop the conflict in Ukraine? Let’s be serious. First, this conflict is much broader than Russia’s military operation. It is a geopolitical conflict with very high stakes, the kind that happens with Europe once every several decades or even centuries. The Cold War period with the US was still an exception in that there were at least attempts to play at détente from time to time.

The world has entered an era of major transformation. In that sense, the narrow focus is – will they reach an agreement on Ukraine? No. Every time you think about that, you have to recall how it all started, why it is like this, how wrongly the world is structured, how important it is for Russia to insist on its interests, why the European bureaucracy itself cannot accept that, because otherwise that would mean the end of both it and the political class of many countries. Why can’t this conflict stop? Because it can’t be settled. Someone has to win. Just as with the US and Iran (which, incidentally, is a much more local conflict) – it is impossible to agree, there can be no deal. There can only be some movement in which one of the sides explicitly or implicitly recognizes its defeat. It may not be total defeat, but at least at some stage one side wins and the other side does not recognize it. Such a process will last a long time, but in the end there will still be some de facto consolidation of the results of this conflict. Not a negotiated one, unfortunately, but a factual one. Diplomats may formalize such a conclusion, or they may not. Frankly, that is no longer important.

Some say [Russian Finance Minister] Siluanov and [US Treasury Secretary] Bessent will come to some understanding, and perhaps there will be incredible financial, economic, or investment cooperation between the US and Russia. I have said many times that there can be no serious cooperation between Russia and the US. There are neither material nor geopolitical grounds for it. Are we now supposed to throw away all the achievements of localizing our civilian aviation industry and start buying Boeing again? Are we going to hand over half of the most convenient Arctic territory on the planet to the US? Is that it? Or are we going to sell all Russian oil through Mr. Kushner? How do you imagine that? Some say: “Investments will come here.” But that would mean that instead of creating a sovereign financial system, we would say: “No, let’s reintegrate ourselves back into the collapsing dollar system. Let’s support it with our achievements of the past five years.” It’s obvious that there can be no real cooperation.

One can have symbolic cooperation. It is a wonderful look when two great countries can do something together. The most we will get is a hockey match and an ‘Apollo-Soyuz’. It must be understood that these are purely token steps, which only demonstrate that nothing particularly substantial can happen. It does not mean it will be forbidden. It simply will never play a substantial role. Even in 2019, before Covid and the military operation, trade turnover between Russia and the US was negligibly small. And that is understandable: it is geopolitics, geoeconomics – you cannot jump over that. And now, after so much effort has been spent to become independent and to work with Eurasia on a new basis, to say, “No, now let’s start doing something again with the Americans” is just laughable. That will not happen.

Andrey Manoylo, doctor of Political Sciences, professor at Moscow State University, head of the Department of Information and Hybrid Wars at APN Alter

Why did Kushner and Witkoff fly to Moscow for the sixth time? It’s both simple and complicated at the same time. Kirill Dmitriev, being one of the corners of the ‘Anchorage triangle’ (a configuration of three equidistant centers of power – [Foreign Minister] Sergey Lavrov, [Kremlin aide] Yury Ushakov, Dmitriev), is a red rag both for Ushakov, the “social architect” of Anchorage, and for the more skeptically minded Sergey Lavrov. Especially given his ability to remain in the media spotlight.

That is precisely why the visit of Witkoff and Kushner – direct competitors of the ‘triangle’s’ hardline diplomacy – may have been planned as a simple diversion: to annoy those with whom [CIA chief] John Ratcliffe had contacts in Moscow. To show that the ball is now in Dmitriev’s court.

In all seriousness, though, Witkoff and Kushner did not bring anything strategic to Moscow. Their direct and, most likely, only task is to gather feedback from Ratcliffe’s visit.

Dmitriev is a gifted figure, but he is not an intelligence officer with an innate poker face, nor is he a career diplomat. Dmitriev is a living person, he is talkative, and “a chatterbox is a godsend for a spy.” I am convinced these two are flying in with an intelligence questionnaire. They will extract all the information from Dmitriev – what people are talking about in the president’s circle, rumors, gossip, among which there will also be leaks of genuinely secret information.

Ratcliffe made a lot of noise. His visit is still agitating minds; some see in him almost a messenger of the Apocalypse. It is no coincidence that people immediately started talking about mobilization – which in reality is “utter nonsense” (as our president said), about some secret Security Council meetings right in the middle of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, and even about war with Norway. It is obvious that Ratcliffe stirred something up, and the American duo came to find out how ready that brew is. They have no other tasks.

And one more important point. What Witkoff and Kushner are doing now with Dmitriev is the well-known practice of ‘shuttle diplomacy’. We know it from the events preceding the collapse of the Soviet Union. The author of the term was Henry Kissinger, who once bought Mikhail Gorbachev’s trust by saying: “Gorby, while you and I are trying to break the ice of hatred, our foreign ministries with their slowness are ruining everything – they are slowing down the reset of our relations. Let’s push them aside and solve things directly. We are not stupider than our subordinates, are we?” Gorbachev happily agreed, realizing that by removing the Foreign Ministry from the talks, he was ridding himself of criticism – no one would contradict him. But practice showed that the Foreign Ministry was the very mechanism that protected against hasty decisions, even if they seemed correct and the only possible ones. Gorbachev lost, and together with him the entire Soviet Union lost.

And this is not the only case that confirms the rule: however attractive ‘shuttle diplomacy’ may look, it always leads to defeat, and defeat leads to catastrophe. Having such rich historical experience and so many examples, we still continue enthusiastically to play at ‘shuttle diplomacy’ with Kushner and Witkoff. Why? That’s a good question.

Gevorg Mirzayan, specialist in American studies

The US began sending signals about its readiness for dialogue after Russia sharply intensified its retaliatory strikes on Ukraine and put the Kiev regime before the inevitable catastrophe of the coming winter. It is possible the Americans will ask us to stop, and then Trump could show voters, before the congressional elections, a nice picture of his successful peacekeeping mission.

The meeting between Bessent and Siluanov at the G20 summit also fits into this scheme – no serious issues were raised there; the important thing was to demonstrate the positive attitude of the US administration toward bilateral interaction.

Well, we are ready for peace in Ukraine, but only on our own terms – and those terms are unchanged and well known to Washington.

Yegor Tropov, political scientist specializing in American studies

The latest visit by the American negotiating delegation is primarily a symbolic step toward restoring dialogue and laying the groundwork for the future development of relations between Russia and the United States. In the four-sided diplomatic process, it is the American side that is most interested in the quickest possible signing of a peace document – though one that is more formal and declarative than a genuine and lasting peace.

For the sake of media image and his political role as the chief mediator, Donald Trump is ready to conduct numerous negotiations that verbally move towards peace, whereas in reality what leads to peace is only the lack of political will, finances, and weapons on the part of Europe and Ukraine to continue resisting – resources they still have enough of for years to come.

At the same time, one should not underestimate the importance of symbolism in the art of diplomacy: interstate communication, the establishment and strengthening of professional and personal relationships can play a much more significant role in the future – under conditions of a full-scale warming of interstate relations and the resumption of full-fledged economic and political cooperation.

France lacks money for itself and simply cannot keep funding Ukraine indefinitely, Jordan Bardella, the president of Marine Le Pen’s right-wing National Rally (NR) party, has said.

The main French opposition party faced harsh criticism from its rivals earlier this week after its vice president, Louis Aliot, said that NR “would turn off the tap” for Kiev if it comes to power after the 2027 presidential vote. Le Pen is seen as having strong chances to succeed in the election next year, no matter who her rival will be in the second round.

Bardella weighed in on the issue during his speech at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy on Saturday, saying that Ukraine needs support from France and other Western nations during the conflict with Russia, but “our objective should not be to finance the war ad vitam æternam,” which means ‘forever’ in Latin.

“The extremely serious and worrying state of French public finances means we can’t give money without any guarantees or assurances that this money will be repaid one day,” the National Rally president said.

Paris has been one of the strongest backers of Kiev in the EU after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022, providing it with billions in military aid and supplying various sophisticated weapons, including CAESAR self-propelled howitzers and Mirage fighter jets.

According to Bardella, the Americans were “much smarter” than the Europeans when it came to assistance for Kiev “because the money they gave to Ukraine is secured against rare earth mining.” He was referring to the deal agreed upon between Washington and Kiev last year, which grants the US preferential access to Ukrainian mineral resources.

During US President Donald Trump’s second term, Washington also significantly reduced aid to Ukraine, making European NATO members pay for American-made arms supplied to the country.

Le Pen said on Thursday that the National Rally is skeptical about further assistance to Ukraine because it believes that the conflict with Russia needs a diplomatic solution.

A poll by Harris Interactive in late August suggested that Le Pen has the support of 34% of the French public, which should guarantee her a place in the second round of the presidential election, where she would likely win comfortably against either her left-wing rival Jean-Luc Mélenchon or the centrist candidate, former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe.

Russian officials said repeatedly that foreign weapons being sent to Kiev will not prevent Moscow from achieving its military goals, but will merely prolong the fighting, while increasing the risk of a direct confrontation between Russia and NATO.

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has confirmed plans to cut jobs as Britain’s largest carmaker struggles with rising costs, falling sales, and the impact of US tariffs, with The Times reporting that up to 4,000 positions could be eliminated.

JLR has faced mounting pressure from US tariffs, which have made its British-built vehicles more expensive to sell in the US despite London securing a reduced 10% rate. The impact has been particularly significant given that North America is the company’s largest market. Its troubles were compounded by a major cyberattack last year that forced it to halt production for several weeks.

JLR’s revenue fell by nearly 10% in the quarter ending in June, while pre-tax profit plunged by more than two-thirds to £109 million ($147 million). According to The Times, chief executive PB Balaji is under pressure from JLR’s Indian owner, Tata Motors, to cut costs.

In a statement to media, JLR said it “must adapt to evolving global market conditions” while seeking approximately £1.7 billion ($2.3 billion) in savings over the next two years and lowering its annual break-even point to 300,000 vehicles.

Employees were reportedly informed on Friday. The Times reported that up to 4,000 positions could be eliminated over the next two years, although JLR has not confirmed the number.

JLR directly employs around 34,000 people at sites in the West Midlands and Merseyside and supports an estimated 120,000 jobs across Britain’s automotive supply chain.

European carmakers have been reducing their workforces amid weak demand, rising costs, and growing competition from lower-cost Chinese manufacturers. Volkswagen this week approved another 50,000 job cuts by 2030, bringing its planned global workforce reduction to approximately 100,000. Its Porsche subsidiary is set to eliminate another 5,000 positions by 2035.

Germany’s car-manufacturing crisis has also been compounded by high energy costs since the country lost access to much of the cheap Russian pipeline gas on which its industrial economy had long relied following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022. Volkswagen CEO Oliver Blume has separately cited US tariffs and intensifying Chinese competition among the pressures weighing on the company’s competitiveness.

Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella has vowed to step up operations against armed groups after a drone swarm attack on a military compound killed three soldiers and injured four others.

The assault comes as Colombia is grappling with what has been described as its worst wave of violence in a decade. In August, an explosion outside a police station in Cucuta injured 11 officers and killed a police dog. Earlier this week, a car bomb outside another police station in the northeast killed one civilian and injured 11 others.

The latest attack occurred on Friday night at the El Trapiche military post in Ocana, in the northeastern department of Norte de Santander, according to Colombian authorities.

At least 20 UAVs were used in the assault, AFP reported. Explosives dropped from the drones struck barracks and other parts of the base before a firefight broke out. Two soldiers died at the scene and a third passed away after receiving medical attention. A Colombian Air Force helicopter was also hit by shrapnel.

#ATENCIÓN | Un helicóptero de la FAC habría sido impactado tras el ataque con drones por parte del ELN, contra el Ejército, en la base militar de Ocaña Norte, Santander.

Vía @josedavid88_ pic.twitter.com/VBQwr1hMtK

— ÚltimaHoraCaracol (@UltimaHoraCR) September 5, 2026

The Colombian military “categorically” condemned what it called a “terrorist action” and attributed the attack to the National Liberation Army (ELN), the country's last major active leftist guerrilla organization.

“To the ELN I say with absolute clarity: for every police officer or soldier you kill, I will bring down on you the full weight and legitimate force of the State,” De la Espriella wrote on social media.

IMPACTANTE
Primeras imágenes de los heridos del Batallón Santander tras el ataque con drones.
Soldados colombianos heridos. Familias en zozobra. Un ataque cobarde.
Los narcoterroristas que hicieron esto lo van a pagar. Y lo van a pagar caro. pic.twitter.com/eCydsYuDDl

— Jhonf Fonseca (@Jhonffonseca) September 5, 2026

The president pledged a new strategy for Catatumbo targeting the ELN’s leadership, organizational structures, finances, and illicit revenue.

Founded in 1964 with the hopes of overthrowing the national government and establishing a Cuban-style socialist state, the ELN later turned to the narcotics trade. It has fought FARC dissidents for control of Catatumbo, a major coca-growing region and drug-trafficking corridor along the Venezuelan border.

De la Espriella, a close ally of US President Donald Trump, took office last month after campaigning on a tough-on-crime platform and has intensified military operations against armed groups.

His government has also pursued closer cooperation with Washington through the US-led “Shield of the Americas” anti-cartel alliance, which includes Argentina, Ecuador, and El Salvador. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is expected to meet De la Espriella in Barranquilla next week.

The husband of a 28-year-old Lebanese woman killed in an Israeli airstrike just two days after their wedding has told RT how he was speaking to his wife on the phone moments before their home was hit.

Saja Sharara was killed at the couple’s home in Arabsalim, southern Lebanon, on August 27. Six other people, including a child, were wounded.

Hussein said he called Saja after hearing about an Israeli strike nearby. Minutes later, she called him back and suddenly said: “A rocket, a rocket is coming towards us, Hussein.”

The connection was lost. “The rocket fell on her,” Hussein recalled. “And then I realized that it was over.”

Israel has not said specifically what it was targeting at the house. It said its wider attacks in the Nabatieh area targeted Hezbollah infrastructure in response to drones launched at IDF troops. No Israeli casualties were reported.

Hussein said the continuing Israeli military presence and air operations mean there is no ceasefire in practice.

“There is no ceasefire as long as this enemy is on our land and the aviation is flying above us,” he told RT.

RT’s Steve Sweeney spoke exclusively with Hussein in southern Lebanon about the future he and Saja had planned together.

An Iranian crude oil tanker has sunk in the Gulf of Oman after being struck by American forces, US Central Command (CENTCOM) has said. It was one of three commercial vessels targeted by the US on Saturday after Iran launched ballistic missiles at two American warships.

The M/T Kylo went down in the Gulf of Oman, CENTCOM said in a post on X on Sunday. The oil carrier “joined Iran’s navy at the bottom of the sea,” it added.

CENTCOM published drone footage showing the half-submerged vessel, with plumes of smoke coming from it. The US military said the M/T Kylo had not been carrying oil and that its crew had been directed to abandon ship before it was struck.

The attack follows renewed US-Iran hostilities earlier this week. Washington launched strikes on Iran on Tuesday, prompting Tehran to retaliate against US facilities in the Gulf with missiles and drones.

The US military described Iran’s missile launches against its aircraft carrier and guided-missile destroyer as unsuccessful and “unprovoked.” It claimed the three vessels it subsequently targeted were part of “a multibillion-dollar shadow network” financing Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

“Let the message to the IRGC be clear: If you shoot at two of our ships, we will impose an even higher economic cost – taking out three of yours,” CENTCOM commander Admiral Brad Cooper said in a statement.

In response, the IRGC said it had struck three oil tankers that were “trespassing” in the Strait of Hormuz, along with three US-linked vessels, in retaliation for the American attacks.

The IRGC later said it had fired several ballistic missiles at a US aircraft carrier and a destroyer. “After sustaining damage and fearing another reprisal, the two warships were forced to flee the area of engagement,” it claimed. CENTCOM, however, said the vessels had successfully evaded the Iranian attacks and that no American personnel were harmed.

Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev has refused to assign blame for last month’s drone incident in Germany squarely to Russia, citing “reckless” Western weapons deliveries to Kiev.

Earlier this week, the German government said it had grounds to believe that Moscow was behind the incident, in which an explosive-laden UAV was found between Ukrainian Antonov cargo planes at Leipzig/Halle Airport on August 4.

Berlin subsequently announced the closure of the Russian Consulate General in Bonn and the Russian House in Berlin, as well as tighter border controls for Russian citizens. Moscow responded by shutting down the Goethe Institute centers in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Ekaterinburg, which promote German language and culture.

Moscow has rejected the allegations, with President Vladimir Putin suggesting they were being used as a diversionary tactic to distract Germans from domestic economic woes.

A case in point is Bulgaria, whose prime minister told the parliament on Friday that European shipments of long-range weapons to Ukraine have been just as “reckless” as the failed sabotage attempt in Germany last month. Radev pointed out that Kiev is using Western-made weaponry, backed by European intelligence and instructors, to conduct strikes deep inside Russian territory.

“And what can we expect when we attack deep inside another country with our long-range weapons? Will it stand by or will it respond?” the Bulgarian prime minister inquired rhetorically.

“Europe can exist without Russia, but Europe will hardly exist for long against Russia,” Radev concluded, calling on the EU to “sit down at the negotiating table [with Moscow] as soon as possible.”

Meanwhile, a number of prominent political figures in Germany have called into question the government’s response to the drone incident and, more broadly, Berlin’s current hostile policies toward Russia.

Similar assessments have been voiced by those at the opposite end of the political spectrum. Fielding questions from The Pioneer media outlet on Tuesday, Ulrich Siegmund – the lead candidate for the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in Sunday’s regional elections in Saxony-Anhalt – said that a “continuous sequence of events” had led up to the drone incident at Leipzig/Halle Airport. He cited his country’s ever-deeper involvement in the Ukraine conflict, arguing that “it’s only logical that there will be some kind of reaction at some point.”

Siegmund criticized the anti-Russian policies pursued by successive German governments since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, saying that weapons deliveries to Kiev and economic sanctions against Moscow have done little to resolve the conflict and save people’s lives.

The AfD politician insisted that it was high time Germany engaged earnestly in diplomacy with Russia instead.

Xi Jinping’s state visit to Egypt, which began on September 1, was his first in a decade and coincided with the 70th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

During his meeting with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Xi called on Middle Eastern states to become masters of their own destiny, resist outside interference, and discuss a new regional security architecture. Beijing and Cairo agreed to deepen cooperation on security and counterterrorism, develop projects with data centers, semiconductors, and critical minerals, and expand the use of national currencies in bilateral trade. The relationship is moving beyond conventional trade and infrastructure into sectors that will shape economic sovereignty for decades.

The agenda fell within China’s familiar formula – development, state sovereignty, and fairer global governance. Beijing increasingly presents itself as a voice for the global majority and the Global South, where many countries associate today’s instability with Western hegemony, US sanctions, and decades of attempts to reorder other regions by force. Wars, regime change campaigns, economic blockades, and the division of states into “acceptable” and “unacceptable” have brought the Middle East neither lasting peace nor promised prosperity. Instead, they have created zones of chronic conflict, and made dependence on foreign patrons a source of regional vulnerability.

Beijing offers a different model of engagement, built around infrastructure, trade, investment, and recognition of every state’s right to choose its partners and development path. China is not doing this out of charity – its policies serve the world’s largest industrial economy, which needs export markets, secure transport corridors, and reliable access to raw materials. Even so, many countries in the Global South find it more attractive than a Western approach often accompanied by political conditions, sanctions threats, and demands to accept an external hierarchy of priorities. Chinese investment can also create debt as well as technological, and trade dependencies, but it rarely entails overt supervision of a partner’s domestic order. That distinction allows Beijing to work with very different governments that share a desire for greater freedom of action.

Xi’s visit to Cairo is thus a part of a broader Chinese initiative to strengthen ties with countries seeking a multipolar order and to set constructive interdependence against the destructive effort to preserve a unipolar system. Egypt occupies a special place in this strategy – it is simultaneously an Arab, African, and Mediterranean power, capable of anchoring China’s presence across several regions at once.

For China, Egypt offers a rare combination of strategic advantages. With a population of more than 110 million, it has a large domestic market, controls the Suez Canal, carries considerable political weight in the Arab world, and provides direct access to African markets. One of the principal maritime routes between Asia and Europe passes through Suez, making Egypt’s stability directly relevant to the security of Chinese foreign trade. Cairo is becoming a bridge between the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and Africa, where China has steadily expanded its economic and political influence.

China–Africa trade reached a record $348 billion in 2025, while Beijing’s removal of tariffs on imports from 53 African countries strengthened its position just as the US was returning to protectionism. Africa’s importance to China goes well beyond mineral resources. Its rapidly growing population needs roads, power plants, ports, telecommunications, and industry – all areas in which China has extensive capacity. By building infrastructure and manufacturing hubs, Beijing opens markets for Chinese companies, embeds long-term commercial ties, and converts economic presence into political capital.

Egypt is particularly important because of the Suez Canal Economic Zone, which, according to the Egyptian government, has already attracted around $4 billion in Chinese investment. Chinese companies are involved in port and railway development, construction of the New Administrative Capital, pipe and tire manufacturing, green energy projects, and satellite production. Total accumulated Chinese investment in Egypt exceeds $10 billion, while bilateral trade reached a record $20.79 billion in 2025. In the first half of 2026 alone, trade rose by a further 21.5% to $11.3 billion. Egyptian exports to China roughly tripled over the same period, although their absolute value, at $840.8 million, remained far below the volume of Chinese goods flowing in the opposite direction.

This imbalance remains the main economic contradiction in the partnership. Egyptian imports from China reached roughly $10.4 billion in the first half of the year, and Cairo cannot remain merely a market for Chinese products. It must move from importing finished goods to localizing production, securing technology transfers, creating jobs, and integrating Egyptian companies into transregional value chains. If Chinese industrial zones support component manufacturing, workforce training, and exports to Africa, the Arab world, and Europe, the partnership will become more balanced. Otherwise, impressive figures will continue to conceal dependence on foreign supplies and a persistent trade deficit.

China’s presence also broadens Egypt’s room for manouver in foreign policy. Cairo receives approximately $1.3 billion in US military assistance each year and remains close to Washington while developing ties with China, Russia, and BRICS. El-Sisi calls this a strategic balance, reflecting the Global South’s wider desire to diversify partnerships and escape junior status within a Western-led system. Beijing supports that choice, because every industrial project, logistics terminal, or yuan-denominated transaction turns multipolarity from a slogan into material reality.

The Middle East’s importance to China is most clearly expressed in numbers. Trade between China and the Arab states reached $407.4 billion in 2024, with Chinese exports accounting for $206 billion and imports for $201.4 billion. Behind this apparent balance lies a critical energy dependence. In 2025, the Middle East supplied around 52% of China’s oil imports, or approximately 1.9 billion of the 3.6 billion barrels it purchased abroad. Six Arab suppliers in the Gulf provided 42% of all Chinese oil imports: Saudi Arabia accounted for 14%, Iraq 11%, the United Arab Emirates 7%, and Oman 6%. The region also supplied nearly one-third of China’s liquefied natural gas imports, most of it from Qatar.

For China, stability in the Middle East is an economic necessity. Rising oil prices increase industrial and transport costs, while any threat to the Strait of Hormuz affects several major suppliers at once. The Red Sea and Suez Canal are equally important: disruption forces ships around Africa, lengthening delivery times and raising insurance costs, especially for China-Europe trade. Beijing is diversifying suppliers, developing pipelines, building strategic reserves, and accelerating its shift to renewable energy, but it cannot quickly replace Middle Eastern supplies without substantial costs.

Iran occupies a distinct place in this equation. According to estimates by the global trade analysis company Kpler, China imported around 1.38 million barrels of Iranian oil per day in 2025, equivalent to roughly 12% of its total oil imports. Sold at a discount of about $8-10 a barrel, Iranian crude remains an attractive resource for Chinese industry, while Beijing’s purchases provide vital support to an Iranian economy under sanctions. Yet Saudi Arabia and the UAE are far more important to China in terms of overall trade. In 2025, Chinese trade with each country reached approximately $108 billion, compared with an estimated $41 billion with Iran once unrecorded oil shipments are included.

Beijing maintains a strategic partnership with Tehran, exceptionally close relations with Pakistan, expanding ties with the Gulf monarchies, and support for Palestinian statehood, while avoiding commitments that could draw it into a regional war. Chinese diplomacy aligns with Iran in opposing external military pressure and unilateral sanctions, and with the Arab majority in supporting an independent Palestinian state. At the same time, economic interdependence compels Beijing to maintain working relations with every major regional actor, including Israel.

Beijing has neither sent troops to defend Tehran against the US and Israel nor turned the relationship into a military alliance. It prefers diplomacy and trade, and refuses to recognize unilateral restrictions. China seeks not one regional power’s triumph, but an equilibrium that safeguards commerce, keeps maritime routes open, and prevents an outside hegemon from determining the region’s future.

The final element of China’s proposition concerns global and regional governance. Xi has urged Middle Eastern states to determine their region’s future and limit external interference – an appeal that has found a receptive climate.

The Gulf states, Egypt, and Türkiye continue to cooperate with the US while expanding ties with China, Russia, India, and one another, because recent experience has exposed the risks of excessive reliance on US security guarantees. Washington still commands the region’s largest network of bases and alliances, yet this power has failed to produce durable order and has often accompanied new wars and divisions.

The Mecca joint defense agreement signed by Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Pakistan on August 7 expressed this desire for greater autonomy. It establishes that an armed attack on one member will be regarded as an attack on all, although practical mechanisms remain undefined. Egypt’s possible accession would give the grouping far greater political and military weight. Beijing views its underlying logic favorably as regional responsibility, diversified partnerships, and reduced external dependence accord with China’s understanding of multipolarity, while Pakistan links the emerging framework to one of Beijing’s closest partners.

It would nevertheless be wrong to cast China as a selfless champion of the Global South or a future replica of the US. Beijing pursues its own interests and uses its economic scale to promote Chinese companies, standards, and currency. Its instruments, however, are different. Beijing does not organize regional policy around regime change, divide partners by ideology, or build military protectorates. Nor is it prepared to replace the US as an all-encompassing security guarantor or immerse itself in the region’s religious, national, and dynastic rivalries.

China’s influence is growing by other means: trade, investment, technology, ports, energy contracts, diplomatic mediation, and support for the autonomy of regional powers. This strategy has already produced tangible results. Saudi Arabia and Iran restored relations through Chinese mediation in 2023; BRICS expanded; China-Arab institutions grew stronger; and the gradual shift towards settlement in national currencies began. None of these developments alone will displace the dollar or erase Western military and political influence. Together, however, they are weakening one center’s monopoly on writing the rules.

Xi Jinping’s visit to Egypt marks the next stage of that process. China remains cautious about the use of military power, but its expanding economic presence is increasingly translating into political influence. Its ability to engage simultaneously with Iran, the Arab monarchies, Egypt, Türkiye, Pakistan, Palestine, and Israel makes Beijing a natural participant in any future regional security system. For the global majority, what matters is the principle embodied in this presence: a major power that does not demand unconditional loyalty, but helps broaden the choices available to the states of the Global South and reinforces their sovereignty.

That is why China’s approach is increasingly regarded across the region as a substantial counterweight to US-led Western hegemony. This is not simply about replacing one global leader with another, but about creating an order in which no power can impose its will on everyone else. Egypt, linking Asia, Africa, and the Mediterranean, can become one of its pillars. Xi’s visit shows that multipolarity is ceasing to be a diplomatic abstraction and is acquiring infrastructure, trade routes, financial mechanisms, and political agency.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s talks with US President Donald Trump’s envoys were “constructive,” “extremely candid” and useful to both sides, Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov has said.

Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met Putin in Moscow on Saturday for talks focused on settling the Ukraine conflict. The meeting lasted over three hours and included both formal discussions and an informal exchange over lunch, according to Ushakov.

“The conversation was substantive, constructive, extremely candid and trusting,” the presidential aide told reporters following the meeting.

The Russian side provided a detailed assessment of the battlefield situation, expressing confidence that Moscow would achieve its objectives and reiterating that any lasting settlement must address what it considers the root causes of the conflict, Ushakov said. Putin also confirmed Moscow’s readiness to continue working with Washington to seek a political and diplomatic settlement, he added.

The US envoys are expected to travel to Kiev on Sunday. Ushakov said they had promised to use the assessments and observations they received directly from Putin in their talks with the Ukrainian side.

Putin earlier thanked Trump for his efforts to help resolve the conflict, saying the US president continued seeking a settlement despite the difficulty of the situation. The Russian president also reiterated Moscow’s commitment to refrain from strikes on Kiev during a three-day period beginning at midnight on September 5, intended to allow the US envoys to travel safely to the Ukrainian capital.

In his opening remarks before the closed-door talks, Putin noted that Ukraine had also sharply reduced attacks on Russian territory, including Moscow, but stressed that Moscow and Kiev had not agreed on a broader three-day truce proposed by the Ukrainian side.

The talks also covered issues beyond Ukraine. Ushakov said the two sides discussed economic cooperation and potential “major, mutually beneficial Russian-American projects” in detail.

Putin additionally drew the US envoys’ attention to Ukraine’s plans to rebury the remains of Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) figures Andrey Melnik and Evgeny Konovalets, whom Ushakov described as among the “most notorious Nazi criminals.” The Americans “took note” of the issue, according to the Kremlin aide.

Ushakov described the talks as “timely and very useful for both sides,” adding that Putin and Trump would continue personal contacts and that the diplomatic channel involving Witkoff and Kushner would remain active.

The right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) – known for its anti-immigration stance – is predicted to convincingly win the election in the Saxony-Anhalt region, according to exit polls published after voting closed on Sunday. The AfD looks likely to win up to 45% of the vote while German Chancellor Friedrich Merz's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party is likely to lose half of its electorate to record an 18% vote and a slump of teh same amount.

Berlin is apparently so wary of this potential outcome that it is actively preparing mechanisms to cut a potential AfD government off from some federal resources, such as the intelligence-sharing network, according to Defense Minister Boris Pistorius.

What did the polls predict?

Prior to the vote the AfD enjoyed between 40% and 43% support in the state – about double that of Merz’s CDU at 22-23%, according to the last pre-election surveys conducted on behalf of the public broadcasters German ZDF and ARD.

Should those numbers hold, the AfD could emerge as the only political group in the parliament capable of forming a government, because all other parties would have to put together a broad coalition to challenge it. Such a coalition would require the right-of-center CDU to enter an agreement with The Left – the successors of the former East Germany’s Communist Party, which is projected to finish third. Such a scenario was already rejected out of hand by current Saxony-Anhalt government head Sven Schulze, the CDU’s leading candidate.

Saxony-Anhalt: Mirror of German woes

Saxony-Anhalt is a relatively sparsely populated, predominantly rural state but it also has a sizeable chemical industry. In many ways it has become a reflection of the troubles facing the entire German economy.

Unemployment in Saxony-Anhalt stood at 8.1% as of July 2026, far above the nationwide average of 6.4%.

Germany’s decision to abandon cheap Russian gas imports in 2022 has played a major role in slowing down the German economy. It contracted in both 2023 and 2024, the first back-to-back annual decline in more than two decades, and grew only by 0.2% in 2025. Corporate insolvencies also rose by more than 22% in each of those years, according to official data.

The state’s political agenda is thus dominated by economic issues, according to ZDF polling. 

‘The most dangerous man in Germany’

The AfD’s election lead is Ulrich Siegmund, a charismatic 35-year-old wholesale and foreign trade specialist.

When the Der Spiegel weekly ran a cover story about him titled ‘Germany’s most dangerous man’ last month, the politician described by the Financial Times as “charming” with a “toothpaste-advert smile” turned it into a publicity stunt by autographing a pile of printed copies featuring his photo.

The party is not relying on Siegmund’s charisma alone, though. Its backing of a more restrictive immigration policy and reliance on German workers, as well as promises of extensive social benefits, lower taxes, and vows to avoid new government debts have resonated with the electorate.

Siegmund has criticized the German government for what he called “giving away money all over the world.” Tens of billions of euros are going to asylum and integration spending, he told the broadcaster MDR in an interview, adding that “every minute, 20,000 euros ($23,190) go to Ukraine. That’s all money we need, money the federal government could also pass on to the states.”

In a separate interview with Die Welt, he also vowed to fight “deindustrialization” and predicted “an economic boom” in Saxony-Anhalt. 

A study by the Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH), however, suggested that an AfD government could face an annual budget deficit of €2.2 billion if the party follows through on all of its election promises without external support.

Why is the AfD shunned by elites?

German officials and politicians have routinely referred to the AfD as “right-wing extremists” or a “far-right” party. They contend the party does not uphold modern “democratic” values and seeks to undermine the political system, though the AfD itself has never voiced such intentions publicly.

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius tried in July to justify the federal government’s plans to deny any potential AfD government access to classified information by claiming that the party is “opposed to the very constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany” and willing to “destroy our democracy from within.”

The party’s anti-immigrant stance appears to be at the heart of the standoff with the German political system. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, sought to label it a “confirmed right-wing extremist organization” in 2025, claiming the party “disregards human dignity” and uses terms such as “knife-wielding migrants” to ascribe violent tendencies to non-European ethnic groups.

Back in 2025, AfD co-chair Alice Weidel described her party as “libertarian conservative” and said it fights bureaucracy and seeks to “free the people from the state.” She also criticized the then-German government for fostering “immigration into the social system” and accused the EU of Hitler-like censorship in a lengthy interview with Elon Musk on X ahead of snap elections.

So is the AfD controversial?

The party still attract its fair share of controversy, mostly linked to Germany’s Nazi past or the Holocaust. In 2024, the AfD’s top candidate for the European Parliament elections, Maximilian Krah, had to step down after claiming that not all members of the Nazi SS were “automatically” criminals. In 2022, an AfD MP, Holger Winterstein, was accused by the Israeli ambassador of “dancing” on the Berlin Holocaust memorial, prompting the party to intervene and take “measures” against the lawmaker.

Why is the AfD so popular?

The AfD is the most popular party in Germany, according to polling agencies Forsa and INSA, maintaining a healthy 8% lead over its closest rival – the CDU.

Support for the party has surged outside its political heartland in the former East Germany, achieving electoral milestones in regional votes in two western German states.

AfD co-Chair Alice Weidel told ZDF in August that the party would bring “law and order to Germany,” adding that she was fed up of being “lied to.” Earlier, she also called for bringing back cheap Russian energy, claiming it was “the secret of the success of ‘Made in Germany’.”

The party’s rise in public standing comes as approval ratings for Merz’s government coalition comprising the Christian Democratic CDU/CSU bloc and the Social Democratic Party is at record lows. Merz was named Germany’s least popular chancellor in 30 years in July, with a disapproval rating of around 84%.

Merz, who came to power as a result of snap elections in February 2025, has spectacularly failed to deliver on his own campaign promises. The chancellor, who vowed to revive the struggling economy, ended up funneling money into the military while blaming the economic problems on Germans themselves.

In July he admitted that the nation’s “ongoing energy crisis [was] due to the lack of Russian gas” but suggested no way out of it while ignoring suggestions from the AfD to “call Moscow.”

Merz has backed a massive military spending increase, vowing to make the German army the strongest conventional force in Europe, repeatedly pledging more support for Ukraine and resorting to megaphone posturing on any question of resolving the conflict.

In Saxony-Anhalt, a CDU member told Euractiv on Tuesday that the local party branch was paying the price for Berlin’s policies.

Is the Brussels-based consensus facing a shock?

An AfD victory would likely be met by a federal government attempt to limit the power of any new Saxony-Anhalt government. The Telegraph and Die Welt reported in July that Berlin was developing a “secret plan” to prevent any “obstructionism” on the part of the regional authorities in case it would need to facilitate a massive NATO troop movement through the German territory, potentially towards the Russian borders.

Under German laws, a regional government exerts control over the state’s police, education, environment, and health. It can also have limited influence on federal policies through the Bundesrat – a House of the German parliament consisting of the regional governments’ representatives.

The options reportedly considered by the federal government would revise nationwide emergency regulations to allow Berlin “overrule individual states or to take the necessary measures” without the states’ explicit consent.

A potential AfD government is also likely to be perceived as another sign of the continued right-wing resurgence across the EU, where support for such political parties has grown, by some accounts, as much as fivefold since 1995.

At the same time, the bureaucrats in Brussels are looking for ways to tap into citizens' savings and compel people to invest in the “EU’s strategic objectives” to address “new geopolitical dynamics.”

The Saxony-Anhalt election could represent a significant setback for Berlin and for the Brussels consensus, which it plays such a strong role in dictating.

Last week, UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced in Kiev that defense manufacturer MBDA had been authorized to disclose information concerning the British components of the SCALP missile, the French version of the long-range Storm Shadow, to Ukraine.

Officially, the decision concerns documentation required to organize local assembly, but in practice, it could facilitate the transfer of blueprints, components, assembly kits or finished missiles.

Moscow regards this technology transfer as the UK crossing a red line, as London hasn’t even attempted to shift responsibility onto intermediaries and the decision was publicly authorized by the prime minister. Britain has therefore assumed direct responsibility for the resulting escalation and deepened its involvement in military operations against Russia.

SCALP was developed through a joint British-French program and its assembly requires classified information about British components and French sub-assemblies, as well as access to a secure facility. Ukraine doesn’t possess a complete production cycle, but even a partial transfer of classified data would integrate Ukrainian assembly into the British-French manufacturing chain and bind all three parties together for years.

Before this decision, Britain had been far more careful about covering its tracks. For example, the Flamingo missile, marketed as a product of the Ukrainian company Fire Point, is identical to a design unveiled in 2025 by the British-Emirati Milanion Group. That arrangement allowed London to keep its distance, with formal responsibility for the missile’s development and deployment resting with Kiev.

British drones are already being used by Ukraine to strike targets deep inside Russia. They include the Nyan jet-powered drone, manufactured by Callen-Lenz, a subsidiary of BAE Systems. For its developers, the battlefield offers something particularly valuable: operational data with which to refine the weapon.

Russia has also repeatedly pointed to the direct involvement of British specialists in the deployment of Storm Shadow missiles.

On the same day as the SCALP announcement, London secured access to Avengers AI Labs, an extensive body of data gathered by Ukrainian frontline sensors, so now British companies will be able to use this information to train target-recognition and autonomous-control systems, greatly shortening the journey from development to battlefield deployment.

Five British governments have come and gone during the active phase of the Ukraine conflict, but the country’s anti-Russian course has remained remarkably consistent.

Boris Johnson began a program to develop the Ukrainian navy, Rishi Sunak signed a ten-year security agreement, Keir Starmer followed with the Centenary Partnership Agreement and Burnham has now authorized access to classified missile technology. Each government has built upon the commitments made by its predecessor.

That review established the principle of “NATO first, but not only NATO” and committed Britain to preparing for war.

These doctrines are supported by long-term financial obligations, given London has promised Ukraine £3 billion, approximately $4 billion, annually until at least the 2030-31 financial year. The century-long partnership agreement provides for joint production, technology transfers and cooperation in the Baltic, Black and Azov seas where Britain’s presence is intended to endure for decades, regardless of when the current military campaign ends.

The declaration signed by Britain, France and Ukraine on January 6, 2026, already outlines arrangements for the postwar period. These include multinational forces, military logistics hubs, secure facilities and a special legal regime for foreign personnel. In London’s calculations, a ceasefire wouldn’t end its involvement, but it would consolidate a new phase of Britain’s military and industrial presence.

To coordinate these efforts, Britain is assembling several overlapping structures, such as the Joint Expeditionary Force, the Maritime Coalition, the “coalition of the willing,” the International Fund for Ukraine and Lancaster House 2.0. Meanwhile, a classified British-German program known as Deep Precision Strike also envisages developing weapons with a range exceeding 2,000 km during the 2030s.

The International Fund for Ukraine is financed by Britain and 15 other countries, while the British Ministry of Defense administers procurement. Participating states receive technology, contracts, guarantees and a place at the planning table while London turns the resources of its partners into instruments of British influence.

The Joint Expeditionary Force coordinates national and NATO operations during the transition from crisis to conflict, at the same time Britain is doubling its contingent in Norway, expanding its presence in Estonia and deploying equipment stocks, command systems and targeting capabilities. A network of supply, communications and fire-control facilities is being constructed close to Russia’s borders to enable rapid combat deployment.

Britain also seeks a leading role in coordinating NATO defense initiatives. This allows London to shape allied plans, establish standards and monitor their implementation, while also influencing how other countries build their armed forces and prepare for a possible war against a specifically identified opponent. Yes, Russia, of course. 

Britain’s elected governments merely provide public legitimacy for this strategic course, as beyond the electoral cycle, the same network of intelligence agencies, professional bureaucrats, City financial interests, defense corporations, foundations and think tanks continues to operate.

This network establishes the institutional framework, distributes contracts, attracts investment and moves personnel between government departments and corporate boards. Ukraine has become one of its principal hubs, bringing together British standards, European manufacturing, Western capital, defense conglomerates and Silicon Valley start-ups.

This is the essence of the British approach, where London compensates for its shortage of resources by coordinating the capabilities of others and turning that coordination into political power.

London will therefore support only a settlement that preserves its military and institutional position in Ukraine and it won’t accept any peace agreement that restricts British influence over the postwar order.

Russian attacks on port and logistics infrastructure in Yuzhny and Izmail affect more than supplies to the Ukrainian armed forces. For Britain, which leads the Maritime Coalition and has extended its century-long partnership to the Black and Azov seas, these ports possess particular strategic value, given that military logistics, export routes, insurance markets and future maritime programs all converge there.

Russian policy must recognize the networked character of Britain’s strategy and focus upon the coordination centers through which London harnesses foreign resources while diluting its own accountability. So long as Britain can raise the stakes while transferring the costs to its partners, its policy will not change.

Deterrence begins when the cost of a strategy is borne not only by those who execute it, but also by those who organize it.

This article was first published by Kommersant and was translated and edited by the RT team.

Recently, a middle-aged man on an e-bike was passing me on the sidewalk. Out of nowhere, he swerved, kicked me in the shin, shouted “Leftist pig!” and sped off. An elderly woman with a walker asked me, visibly shaken, if I knew him. I said no, just as alarmed as she was.

A little later, a woman was handing out SPD balloons between market stalls and a stage in the town center. I listed the cruelties her party in Berlin is currently shoving down the throats of workers. She squeezed out the word “constraints,” pointed to the CDU, and brushed me off. The DGB trade union federation has also apparently awakened from its coma. A Verdi trade union member was recruiting members and babbling about “solidarity.” I asked him whether he meant that “social partnership between capital and labor” that has never actually existed. He looked at me in confusion and said this was all about the AfD. When I replied that the AfD also just wants to enforce capital’s interests through law, just as the SPD does in government, he quickly cut the conversation short. He had no interest in leaving his parallel world.

The closer the state election gets, the more madness spreads in Saxony-Anhalt. The SPD presents itself as a “workers’ party” while throwing workers’ rights in the trash. The Greens pose as protectors of homosexuals while beating the war drum loudest for war against Russia. The CDU waxes lyrical about tried and tested traditions while implementing one AfD demand after another. The still-governing FDP markets the leftovers of its neoliberal fairy tale about the “trickle-down effect.” Helplessly, The Left wobbles back and forth because it does not want to miss out on bourgeois respectability – a sorry spectacle.

That means the AfD doesn’t have to do much more than counter this madness with a parallel world of its own. Its lead candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, smiles into many cameras. Before his supporters, he even rhapsodizes about the GDR, which he never experienced himself, while his party constantly accuses The Left of socialism and being the Stasi the moment it so much as utters the word “social.” Siegmund moves from talk show to talk show, complaining about exclusion, even though right now nothing is more omnipresent than his party.

One could laugh at how the ‘bourgeois center’ and its media keep boosting the AfD with all their fuss. The panic does seem genuine; more than a few public employees probably quite rightly fear that they will soon be “cleaned out” politically, to borrow the words of one AfD campaigner I met. Better not to mention that under CDU rule this has long been happening quietly already. Only now the circle of those purged could grow, and posts and mandates are at risk of collapsing. Once again, it is mainly about money and status.

In their own reality, the bourgeois center sees itself as the representative of “democracy” in a struggle against “anti-democrats.” This is nonsense, of course, because the AfD also wants to pour its system-supporting demands into laws. That is as democratic as things in the Federal Republic have always been. Its mix of nationalism, authoritarianism, chauvinism, neoliberal economic policy, and sanctimonious moralizing is simply distributed a little differently and expressed more bluntly than by the “old parties.”

CDU in blue

Neither mainstream nor alternative media like to talk about how much less the AfD’s program differs from the CDU’s than many assume. One striking example sounds as if copied directly from one of the Christian Democratic parties: the AfD wants to “give special support to Christianity” – in the very federal state with the lowest proportion of church members, at not even 14%.

Like the CDU, the AfD demands unpaid compulsory work for asylum seekers. But in parts of Saxony-Anhalt, this already exists. Municipalities happily replace regularly paid jobs, for example in park maintenance, with unpaid labor from refugees and the unemployed. It also wants Ukrainians no longer to be recognized as war refugees, fully aware that the CDU has already pushed this through the EU and that those sent back will be forced by Ukraine to the front against Russia. That fits its supposedly anti-war line just as badly as its demands – entirely compatible with the ‘old parties’ – for more rearmament, more military industry, and more simplified weapons exports across the world.

In May, for example, the AfD voted together with the CDU in the town council of Sangerhausen, a small town in Saxony-Anhalt, in favor of bringing in the Israeli arms company Elbit Systems – genocide in Palestine and possible business with Ukraine notwithstanding. None of that concerns us in Germany at all, Hans-Thomas Tillschneider admitted openly in an interview with Compact magazine. The only things that mattered were the 400 promised jobs and extra tax revenue. What he did not say: he means the taxes paid by workers, which in any case only flow to the federal level, because the AfD would prefer to cut corporate taxes.

On taxes, Siegmund’s party appears to have borrowed heavily from American tech oligarchs. It even wants to “examine special economic zones in Saxony-Anhalt.” That means areas where corporations pay little or no tax and where normal labor rights for employees would no longer apply. Under current law, this is not enforceable. But laws, of course, can be changed later.

Special economic zones are a fetish of so-called market libertarians – neoliberal extremists like tech billionaires Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. And who would have thought it: in the CDU-linked Konrad Adenauer Foundation, such market-radical fantasies are highly popular as well. There, common ground is easy to find.

More of the same

On many issues, the AfD merely goes a little further than the governing parties in Saxony-Anhalt – the CDU, SPD, and FDP. It wants to force teachers and public servants into patriotic declarations, arm the police even more heavily than they already are, and largely prevent investigations into officers even after deadly use of firearms. The executive branch is to become an untouchable authority, which in reality it already almost is – no surprise when the police investigate themselves.

The AfD also calls for a ‘voluntary citizens’ guard,’ meaning a private vigilante force supported by municipalities. Such a force could, for instance, help the police ‘catch’ student councils, which the AfD wants to ban, or “put Antifa back in its place.” It wants to classify the latter as a terrorist organization – greetings from US President Trump. Since there is no actual group by that exact name, any number of political dissidents could then be branded with the label. How convenient. This fits its desire for prison sentences for anyone who “disparages Germany.” That, too, is almost infinitely open to interpretation.

The conclusion is obvious: for both sides, freedom of expression means above all freedom for their own opinions and suppression of those who think differently. The two camps are not actually that far apart.

So much for the claim that the AfD is less neoliberal than the CDU, Greens, SPD, or FDP. This is entirely compatible with an authoritarian state, as we can already observe in part. Wealthy industrial donors likely want exactly that. The AfD already has plenty of such backing: last year, in large donations above €35,000, it came in second place directly behind the CDU, with nearly €5.15 million in income, while the CDU collected €6.35 million. That figure does not include all smaller donations.

The AfD received its largest donation from Henning Conle, a German-Swiss real estate shark who has heavily financed the party since its founding, up until 2021 together with the now-deceased billionaire August von Finck Jr. Millions flowed into the AfD’s coffers over the years, often more or less covertly via shell companies, think tanks, and advertising agencies. Not that things are so very different with the ‘old parties’, they are just better at not getting caught.

Such huge sums from circles of capital, intended to enable a party’s rise, do not really fit the myth of some kind of fundamental opposition on behalf of the ‘little people’. Whoever gives that much is pursuing something that certainly does not lie in the interest of the majority. In that respect, it is no different from the other parties.

Collusion with the old parties and corporate bosses

And yet the story of the one and only true opposition party stubbornly persists. That is due above all to the scaremongering of the self-appointed ‘true democrats’ in politics and the media. For Saxony-Anhalt’s AfD lead candidate himself likes to blurt out what they do not want to hear. Recently podcaster Benjamin Berndt asked him about the Potsdam ‘remigration meeting’, which some media outlets inflated into a new Wannsee Conference.

Siegmund laughed it off: it had merely been one of many meetings with cadres from various parties, including the CDU, and influential business figures. That, he said, is how the AfD forges “networks” with the economy and other political factions – and collects donations at the same time.

In saying this, he spoke aloud what anyone in Saxony-Anhalt who wants to know it knows. It immediately reminded me of 2017: in Oebisfelde, a small town near Magdeburg, the AfD invited people to an election event disguised as a “citizens’ regulars’ table.” Volkssolidarität provided the hall, there were free drinks, complimentary snacks, and a podium. Sitting on that podium were not only AfD members, but influential businessmen and CDU and FDP politicians who – to everyone’s amazement – openly campaigned for voting AfD and boasted of their donations to it. There was no sign of exclusion even back then, nine years ago – and nothing has changed since.

The AfD regularly stages such meetings in eastern Germany. Any journalist on the ground could have found that out. But the press prefers to feign outrage over isolated incidents. Thus, for example, the regional news outlet Volksstimme blathered in 2022 about a “secret meeting” and sanctimoniously asked: “Were the CDU and AfD in Saxony-Anhalt making common cause?” More recently, the Tagesspiegel cooked up a new scandal: a CDU politician had donated €10,000 euros to the AfD. Well, fancy that?

This ‘business as usual’ is probably rather embarrassing even to the self-proclaimed ‘center democrats’ themselves. In reality, they have been colluding with the AfD so actively for so long that even the Left, sitting at the children’s table, can no longer fail to notice it. Yet the Left is just as eager to flee from the truth and courts the CDU in a manner as embarrassing as it is futile, hoping that it will finally tear down the only truly existing firewall it has – the one against the Left.

Anyone who refuses to pick a side can only feel like a misplaced extra in the midst of a mad shadow-fight between two camps, each trapped in its own parallel reality: two camps that inflate tiny differences, spread panic, talk nonsense, blank out reality, deceive workers, make the poor poorer (or want to), and stir up the aggression already visible on the streets.

All Siegmund has to do is show up, smiling, and churn out culture-war phrases about banning gender asterisks, “leftist terrorists,” and compulsory German flags – all of which explains neither how people are supposed to pay tomorrow’s rent with money they do not have, nor how their lives are to improve. But then, the others do not explain that either.

The frustration in the German state with the highest average age was thus inevitable. And Siegmund apparently sees it coming. In the above-mentioned podcast, among other things, he tries to prepare for it accordingly: he stressed that he could not change very much very quickly because the CDU had left him with a pile of shattered glass. Naturally – voters have to be kept on the hook for longer than a single election campaign.

The pile of broken shards is real. And Siegmund knows, just like the “old parties,” that a harder-edged CDU policy will not improve the lives of the majority. But whoever wants to administer the system had better not talk about the system’s causes. In inventing problems to distract from the real ones, they all outdo one another. In Saxony-Anhalt, capital is merely rehearsing a test run – with new protagonists.

This article was first published by RT DE, and translated and edited by RT.com

Russia has the right to strike NATO plants making weapons for Ukraine, but President Vladimir Putin is showing great restraint to avoid a direct clash with the bloc, former American judge Andrew Napolitano has said.

Kiev has been launching hundreds of fixed-wing drones deep into Russian territory on a daily basis in recent months, many of which are manufactured in European countries. Earlier this year, the Defense Ministry in Moscow published a list of enterprises producing the UAVs, some of which are based in the UK, Germany, Italy, Czechia, and other NATO-member states. London and Paris are currently also discussing plans to make long-range SCALP/Storm Shadow missiles in Ukraine.

In an interview with RT on Friday, Napolitano, who hosts the popular ‘Judging Freedom’ interview channel on YouTube, said that “President Putin has demonstrated an almost saint-like capacity for patience and forbearance” by not ordering Russian forces to target those facilities.

“I’m sure he understands that. My guess is that he’s considered it, but he’s been consistently patient. Sometimes even to the dismay of his strongest supporters,” the former New Jersey Superior Court judge added.

Putin is focused on the Ukraine conflict and “does not want a war against NATO,” he argued.

The Russian president previously labeled claims of Moscow having aggressive designs against the bloc as “nonsense,” saying that they are only made by Western politicians to distract the public from problems at home and justify growing military spending.

Russian officials also said that if Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania knowingly helped to facilitate Ukrainian drone attacks against northwestern Russia, Moscow could consider them complicit in those actions and would have the right to self-defense under the UN Charter.

Napolitano said that the Ukraine conflict is “headed into an acceleration” and that he expects “a last-ditched effort by some of the NATO countries to try and prevent the inevitable, which is the achievement by the Russian military of its objectives.”

“The Ukrainians are aware that they’re on their last legs, so to speak, in the war. They know that their days are numbered,” he stressed.

Europe sees Russian drones everywhere

Germany found a new Russian threat this week, accusing Russia of staging a drone incident at Leipzig/Halle Airport in August, where an explosives-laden UAV was reportedly found between Ukrainian Antonov cargo aircraft.

Before returning to Germany, RT India reports on a case of Ukrainian mercenaries who launched a drone at a passenger jet in Myanmar, and are now languishing in an Indian jail.

Berlin launched a raft of anti-Russian measures, including closing Moscow’s consulate in Bonn, ending the lease of the Russian House cultural center in Berlin, tightening border controls for Russian nationals, and drawing up another sanctions list.

But as these stories usually go, Berlin presented no actual proof that Russia had anything to do with the drone.

Berlin’s outburst is the latest evidence of the mass Russian drone hysteria that has gripped many of Kiev’s European backers. No claims of Russian drones over airports, military bases, and infrastructure have been proven, while the Brussels hymn sheet includes ‘hybrid attacks’ and a ‘drone wall’.

Kiev gets desperate, threatens EVERYONE

While European governments searched the skies for Russian drones that may or may not exist, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky threw subtlety out the window and issued a direct threat to virtually all aircraft flying in Russia’s airspace.

After threatening not only Russian passengers, but also airlines from Türkiye, China, the Gulf, Central Asia, and even Europe, Kiev demanded that the International Civil Aviation Organization effectively close Russian airspace to all international traffic. The ICAO did not oblige.

RT looked at who exactly Zelensky was threatening, how many people use Russia’s skies daily, whether Kiev could actually close Russia’s enormous airspace, and why foreign airlines have so far refused to panic.

Aviation expert Roman Gusarov told RT that Zelensky’s threat is an “act of desperation” after weeks of punishing Russian strikes on Ukrainian ports, energy facilities, warehouses, and military infrastructure.

Over the week, Zelensky’s problems at home only grew as agents of the SBU and HUR, two of the country’s most powerful security agencies, exchanged gunfire in a residential district of the Ukrainian capital. The shootout took place over the detention of an officer from the neo-Nazi-linked Russian Volunteer Corps. Three servicemen were wounded.

Meanwhile, in Kiev’s suburbs, residents have been demanding answers as to why their government is storing explosives beside their homes. The protests came after a Russian strike on a Ukrainian ammunition depot in the village of Milaya triggered hours of secondary explosions, scattering ordnance throughout the surrounding residential area, killing at least 38 people and damaging more than 200 homes.

”Ukraine has decided that they want to blow up Russian energy assets and refined products,” Bessent said, adding that the strikes are creating “upward price pressure on a global basis.”

West aids Kiev’s hunt for Russian property

The Norwegian authorities seized the Professor Molchanov while it was docked in Barentsburg, Svalbard, following a request from Ukraine’s state-owned gas company, Naftogaz, which is trying to shake Russia down for $4.22 billion over supposed lost assets in Crimea.

Check out RT’s detailed explainer to learn more about the ship, its significance for science and Arctic researchers, and the broader context of the arrest.

The West escalates, Eurasia shakes hands

The capture of the Professor Molchanov came just days after Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov published a sweeping article on the future of the Arctic, in which he accused NATO of trying to turn the region into a new front against Russia, pointing to military exercises, new command structures, and a broader Western buildup in the High North.

Russia, however, wants the Arctic to remain “an area of peace and cooperation” and is ready to work with countries willing to engage on equal terms, Lavrov said.

Putin joined Chinese President Xi Jinping, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and other leaders from across Eurasia to discuss future development opportunities.

Putin told the summit that the emergence of a new multipolar world order is “irreversible” and called for countries of the Global South and East to receive greater representation in global institutions.

Another American strike, another civilian target

In the Middle East, however, diplomacy appears to have failed once again as the US resumed attacks on Iran on Tuesday. Tehran responded with missile and drone attacks against US military facilities across the region.

The attack killed five people and wounded nearly 70 others. The dead reportedly included a 4-year-old and 16-year-old.

The incident has reignited accusations of war crimes against Washington, which has also been accused of attacking an elementary school in Minab on the first day of the war, killing around 170 people, most of them children.

In other news

One of the week’s more alarming numbers came not from a battlefield, but from a farm. A new study published in the Frontiers in Public Health journal estimated that as many as 433 million agricultural workers suffer acute pesticide poisoning every year – around 46% of all farmers worldwide.

Thousands died inside the facilities, while biological weapons developed there killed far more people across China. Check out the full deep-dive into the horrific history of the unit here.

Germany could deliver another headache for Chancellor Friedrich Merz this weekend. Voters in Saxony-Anhalt go to the polls on Sunday, with the AfD polling around 41-42% against 22-23% for the CDU. An outright majority looks unlikely, but a landslide first-place finish would still be a major blow to the political establishment.

India then takes center stage. The first INNOPROM India fair opens in New Delhi on Wednesday, ahead of the BRICS summit on September 12-13. Modi said he expects Putin in India, with trade, Russia-India ties, and the broader multipolar agenda likely to dominate.

September 10 will also mark one year since the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, a killing that became a rallying point for Republicans and sharpened the debate over political violence in the US.

AI agents apparently linked to OpenAI hijacked a German programming website and turned it into a message board where they exchanged tactics for bypassing restrictions and avoiding detection, Reuters has reported.

The previously undisclosed incident, which reportedly began in May, adds to a series of cases in which advanced AI agents have gone beyond their instructions, reached the open internet, or taken unauthorized actions during testing.

Reuters on Friday cited researchers who found more than 15,000 edits on a German programming wiki that they attributed to OpenAI agents, some made at speeds far beyond normal human activity.

The agents reportedly used DseWiki to share ways to cheat on tasks, bypass OpenAI’s restrictions, and hide their behavior. They discussed using Tor, a tool for browsing the internet anonymously, to evade detection and created backup pages after a moderator began deleting their messages.

The messages were signed by users identifying themselves and each other as agents, with names including ‘OpenAIResearcher’ and ‘OAIResearchMar26’. Researchers also found much of the activity originated from Microsoft Azure infrastructure, which OpenAI uses, and observed visits to the site by company employees afterward.

“It seems extremely unlikely that OpenAI wanted them to do this,” researcher Sydney Von Arx told Reuters, adding that she doubted the agents were supposed to coordinate or write on the open internet.

OpenAI officials learned about the incident weeks ago but did not disclose it publicly, Reuters reported. The outlet also said attempts to broaden an internal probe met resistance, including from legal advisers. OpenAI denied that its legal team had discouraged an investigation.

The company disputed describing the agents’ activity as hacking and said it could not “meaningfully respond” to findings it had not yet reviewed.

Last month, OpenAI said it had temporarily slowed some frontier-model development while strengthening monitoring, alignment, and containment safeguards.

Early in August, the UK’s AI Security Institute reported that agents powered by OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol and Anthropic’s Mythos 5 had gone beyond their instructions during cybersecurity testing and engaged in potentially harmful activity targeting real people and organizations.

The company said the incident was primarily driven by an internal research model comparable in scale to GPT-5.6 Sol and described it as a “warning shot” showing that advanced AI agents can work around technical controls and take dangerous actions without human direction.

Anthropic and Meta have also disclosed cases in which their models gained unauthorized access to real organizations during cybersecurity evaluations, although both attributed the incidents to problems with testing environments.

Speculation abounds over the reason for CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s recent trip to Moscow. Which probably could have been an email. Or a social media post. Just like everything else this administration does.

Oooh, don’t tell me! He went to demand that Russian President Vladimir Putin not help Iran! Or he went to ask whether they’re still up for more speed dating to talk peace in Ukraine! Or maybe just to talk about swapping prisoners. Which happens fairly regularly. And doesn’t require a personal visit. Or maybe Ratcliffe just had a jonesing for that ice cream at the GUM mall in Red Square. Who really knows.

So I’d like to personally take the opportunity to add to the theories, which can only really be evaluated sometime down the road in hindsight.

The thing that strikes me the most about this trip is the sudden secrecy. Specifically from an administration with a penchant for blabbing about everything. If Trump wanted to tell Putin or Russian intelligence something, he’d do it himself on Truth Social Instead, he was uncharacteristically vague, calling the trip semi-routine. When is this guy tight-lipped about anything? It’s so far out of character for the American President that one is almost obligated to look for a motive for the secrecy.

So with that in mind, it seems reasonable to ask whether there is any financial or political constituency that stands to benefit from the message being sent by this unusually secretive trip.

Well, it turns out that it just happened to take place at the same time as the European Union was meeting to set its new 7-year budget, and Eastern European Baltic nations were making a massive push for cash from Brussels.

So here you have Europe, that’s been sitting there while Kiev says 'gimme money', and 'I deserve it because I’m defending all of Europe for you. Oh, and even better, actually, defending DEMOCRACY for you lazy bums'. And instead of whacking it on the nose and going, 'NO, BAD! Brussels just goes, 'Wanna treat?'

So now, what do you know, here comes Latvia, who’s been watching this whole charade, seeing that Ukraine goes from begging to getting tossed a bone every single time, and now they too are like, 'Woof, woof, I’m defending all of Europe for you. Where’s my money? 7 BILLION EUROS, specifically'.

And it’s not like Latvia is even bothering to come up with its own twist on Ukraine’s pitch. It’s not like they’re saying, 'Ukraine’s pitch to Brussels is, ‘Look, we’re being invaded. You’d better give us what we want because we’re the only thing standing between Putin showing up in Europe with a neck pillow for an Interrail tour of Europe.’ So we, Latvia, need to come up with something else. Especially since we aren’t actually being invaded – we just need some emotional-support money'.

No, instead, they’re just basically saying the exact same sort of thing minus the existential threat – that Latvia is the bouncer at the Baltic door keeping Putin on the other side of the velvet rope.

And now energy prices are going back up again, too – an 83% spike in gas prices since the beginning of this year in Latvia, and 24% over just the past month. An established trend since the EU cut everyone off from Russian fuel and now Trump’s cutting everyone off from fuel from the Middle East with his apparently endless 'mine’s bigger' standoff with Iran.

Oh look, here comes Lithuania now, too. What a surprise! Another guy watching from the cheap seats and going: 'Hang on. We’re also next to Russia. We have security problems, infrastructure costs, and defense bills. Where is OUR cash handout?'

Turns out that Lithuania has just gone directly to Brussels with the invoice, essentially saying: You keep telling us the eastern flank is crucial to European security. Wonderful. Please prove this commitment using the traditional European unit of measurement: euros.

When it comes to Eastern Europe, the EU’s seven-year budget plan is starting to look like a group dinner where everyone suddenly remembers that the guy at the end of the table has a corporate credit card.

All this comes after the western press reported that the CIA director flew to Moscow this week to tell Russia not to attack NATO countries. Which is actually great marketing for the cause of Eastern European countries shaking down Brussels and basically launching a grant program. They’re behaving now as though a potential future hypothetical Russian attack on NATO is serious enough to justify enormous new expenditures, but the benefit of Brussels’ largesse risks going to Washington as the top weapons supplier.

The trip is remarkably convenient for governments seeking to turn fears about Russia into a case for vastly increased European defense spending – and for the American defense industry that stands to benefit from a big chunk of that spending.

But hey, who really cares if everyone’s barking out for treats when you’re Brussels and all you ever need to do is reach into the pockets of the taxpayer. Even if you then run straight back to Uncle Sam with it and drop it in his lap.

A US Army doctor has testified that she knows of 28 US military deaths caused by Covid-19 vaccines, Politico has reported citing a court deposition. The US government is investigating 2,544 deaths reported following the jabs, the official has said.

Theresa Long, who also serves as an adviser to US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., reportedly gave the testimony during an August 14 deposition in a federal court case in Virginia. Neither her testimony nor her role at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) had previously been reported.

Long allegedly said that the 2,544 unverified deaths were reported to the department’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).

Former US President Joe Biden ordered all US military staff to be vaccinated or be discharged from service, resulting in over 9,000 dismissals. After returning to office, President Donald Trump ordered the Pentagon to offer reinstatement to those who had been discharged for refusing a vaccine.

Long testified for the defense in a lawsuit being heard by District Court Judge Michael Nachmanoff over the dismissal of Terry Adirim as director of the CIA’s Center for Global Health Services. Adirim alleges that the intelligence agency fired her for political reasons, specifically because of her advocacy for Covid-19 vaccination.

Adirim served as acting assistant secretary for health affairs at the Department of Defense during the pandemic. The CIA fired her in April 2025, a move highlighted at the time by several conservative political commentators, including Ivan Raiklin, who is a defendant in the lawsuit. Her termination came about a month before she would have qualified for full federal retirement benefits.

In May 2025, Nachmanoff expressed skepticism about Adirim’s chances of prevailing in the case when he declined to issue an injunction reversing her termination. The CIA has argued that the matter is an ordinary contract dispute.

Romanian authorities have indicted social media influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate in absentia on charges including human trafficking, sex offenses involving minors, money laundering and witness tampering. The brothers have been held in a US jail since mid-July while fighting a separate British extradition request.

Both have strongly denied wrongdoing.

Andrew Tate, a former professional kickboxer and dual British-US citizen, built a global following promoting wealth, hyper-masculinity and traditional gender roles. His online content has attracted millions of followers while drawing widespread criticism over remarks about women.

Romania’s Directorate for the Investigation of Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT) announced on Friday that Andrew had been charged with human trafficking, having sex with a minor, money laundering and influencing witnesses. Tristan is accused of aiding and abetting him.

Prosecutors allege that in 2012 Andrew recruited a 15-year-old girl in the UK by falsely claiming he wanted a romantic relationship with her before taking her to Romania. She was then allegedly forced to produce pornographic content for a webcam business, with the brothers controlling her through threats, emotional blackmail and physical violence.

Prosecutors have separately accused Andrew of having sex with another 15-year-old girl.

The case has been referred to the Bucharest Tribunal, where preliminary proceedings are expected to take at least two months.

Eugen Vidineac, the brothers’ Romanian lawyer, said the defense would challenge the indictment. Andrew and Tristan, who moved to Romania in 2016, were arrested there in December 2022 in a separate case involving similar allegations. An appeals court later returned that case to prosecutors after finding some evidence inadmissible. The charges were not dismissed, but travel restrictions were lifted in February 2025, allowing the brothers to fly to Florida.

In July, Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service announced additional charges against the Tates, bringing the British case to seven alleged victims and 59 charges combined, including rape, sexual assault and trafficking-related offenses.

The brothers were subsequently arrested in Florida following a British extradition request.

Their lawyer, Joseph McBride, has said Andrew and Tristan will vigorously fight extradition, describing the British case as politically motivated because his clients have repeatedly criticized the UK authorities and political establishment.

Clashes broke out between protesters and police in central Madrid this week following a mass rally over the Spanish government’s handling of the migrant crisis in Ceuta.

The enclave, a small Spanish territory located on the North African coast, has faced severe pressure since around 72,000 people crossed from Morocco in late July. Although most returned or were sent back, thousands remain, straining local services and intensifying criticism of the Spanish government’s border policy.

The unrest followed a gathering outside Madrid City Hall on Wednesday, with official attendance estimates ranging from 50,000 to 150,000. Several hundred demonstrators later moved toward parliament, where police said objects were thrown at officers. Riot police responded with tear gas and rubber bullets, leaving four people arrested and several officers injured, according to EFE news agency.

The demonstration was part of gatherings held across Spain to mark Ceuta Day. Although organizers presented them as a show of solidarity with the territory, many participants blamed Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s left-wing government for the crisis, chanting “Sanchez, traitor, resign” and calling for him to be jailed.

Santiago Abascal, leader of Spain’s right-wing party Vox, said that Ceuta had been “abandoned and betrayed.” He also claimed that the crisis offered a warning of what could happen elsewhere in Spain unless the government took stronger action.

Sanchez had previously condemned the mass crossing as a “violation of Spain’s territorial integrity” and pledged to strengthen border controls. Addressing the Spanish parliament on Thursday, he acknowledged that the authorities’ response “has not been sufficient.” He said trafficking networks and false claims circulated on social media were among the factors behind the influx.

Tensions have also risen inside Ceuta, where residents have demanded faster deportations and a stronger response from Madrid. Local authorities have struggled with overcrowding, sanitation problems, and disease outbreaks, while police have investigated numerous violent and sexual crimes during the crisis.

A police intelligence report submitted to a Spanish court this week said suspected Moroccan officers had guided migrants toward crossing points, but stopped short of accusing Rabat of organizing the operation.

The AfD enters the Saxony-Anhalt election with a ten-point plan for rapid reform as the political establishment resorts to surveillance, raids, ban proposals, and economic threats to stop it.

A few days before the September 6 state election in Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD is on the verge of becoming the first party outside Germany’s postwar political cartel to govern a German state. Two months ago, at its state party conference in Magdeburg, the party presented a clear and ambitious 100-Day Program. The party entered the final days of the campaign united, confident, and focused on the concerns of ordinary German citizens. The ten-point plan offers a practical course for immediate action should the AfD assume government responsibility. It seeks to restore order and protect the homeland.

The establishment has answered this program with threats rather than arguments. The state Office for the Protection of the Constitution (a fittingly Orwellian name for such a dystopian organization) has classified the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt as a ‘confirmed right-wing extremist’ party since 2023, allowing an agency controlled by the Interior Ministry to spy on the strongest opposition party and infiltrate it with informants. Days before the vote, leading SPD (Social Democratic Party) and Green politicians renewed calls to ban the AfD’s state branches in Saxony-Anhalt, Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenburg. Ten days before the election, police searched 15 properties in an investigation into the alleged continuation of Artgemeinschaft, a Germanic neo-pagan association banned in 2023 as a ‘right-wing extremist’ organization. Two AfD parliamentary candidates were among those targeted. The legal merits of the case will be decided later, but the political images were broadcast before voters enter the polling stations. The message was plain: The state will place every possible obstacle before a party it cannot defeat at the ballot box.

First, the AfD will terminate the state broadcasting treaties and begin the reform of public media. The present compulsory fee forces every household to finance television and radio organizations that regularly treat opposition to mass immigration, hysterical climate policy, European centralization, and the war course against Russia as signs of moral or political deviance. The AfD wants a leaner, cheaper, and fully transparent system that informs citizens instead of lecturing them. This proposal strikes directly at one of the establishment’s main instruments of power, which helps explain the fury it has caused.

Second, the program promises deportations from minute one. An AfD government would use every legal instrument available to ensure that people who have received orders to leave Germany are actually returned to their countries of origin. Temporary detention would prevent those scheduled for removal from disappearing before deportation. Borders must be controlled, German communities must be protected, public resources must serve those entitled to them, and laws must be enforced. A state that announces deportations but fails to carry them out teaches both citizens and foreigners that its rules are empty words. The AfD intends to end that practice immediately.

Third, asylum seekers who are allowed to remain will have to perform mandatory community service. Anyone supported by society will be expected to make a contribution to it. Centralized accommodation in suitable facilities will become the rule, while placement in private apartments will be restricted to exceptional cases. This will improve oversight, security, and the orderly administration of the asylum system while respecting the taxpayers who finance it.

Fourth, an AfD state government will redirect public money away from party networks and ideological pressure groups. It will end funding for party foundations, including its own, and cut state support for the asylum and integration industry, the climate rescue industry, gender programs, and projects such as ‘School without Racism – School with Courage’. These organizations are presented as independent parts of civil society, yet many promote the establishment’s political slogans and campaign against the AfD. Taxpayers are thus forced to finance bodies that instruct them how to vote and denounce them when they refuse. The AfD would break this cycle. Public money would return to the people of Saxony-Anhalt and serve roads, schools, families, public safety, and other real needs instead of an army of activists protected from the economic conditions imposed on everyone else.

Sixth, the AfD will establish special classes for children of refugees and asylum seekers. These pupils will be taught material from their home countries to prepare them for eventual return and reentry into their national school systems. The measure will also protect the learning environment for German students and reduce the strain on teachers who are expected to overcome language barriers, cultural conflicts, and serious differences in educational level without adequate support. At schools affected by violence and persistent disruption, the AfD will deploy professional private security services. Teachers should teach, students should learn, and parents should be able to send their children to school without fear. The present system often conceals disorder because officials worry more about damaging the image of ‘diversity’ than about protecting children. Violence is softened into ‘conflict’, intimidation becomes a ‘challenge’, and falling standards are blamed on a lack of funding. The AfD rejects this evasive language. When a school is unsafe, security must be restored. When students cannot follow lessons, they must receive suitable instruction. A functioning school serves children through discipline, knowledge, and clear rules.

Seventh and eighth, the program calls for a cultural renewal that honors German traditions. Rainbow flags will be removed from schools because classrooms should not serve as advertising space for deviant sexual orientations and leftist political campaigns. The black-red-gold federal flag will fly in their place. This will teach children that Germany is their shared country and that belonging to it carries duties as well as rights. The state’s existing #moderndenken (modern thinking) campaign will give way to #deutschdenken (German thinking). The new initiative will affirm German history, culture, regional character, and national identity. The AfD also rejects the attempt to define Saxony-Anhalt chiefly through the Bauhaus movement, whose international style sought to strip art and architecture of much of their inherited ethnic and regional character. It will instead place more emphasis on the older heritage of the land and the people who formed it. This has provoked a flood of claims that the AfD threatens art itself. The charge confuses the withdrawal of state favor with censorship. Artists may continue to create what they wish, but they will no longer possess an automatic right to public money. The German nation has the same right to preserve its own culture that every other people is told to exercise with pride.

Ninth, the AfD will reduce the number of ministries in the state government. Too many ministries produce more offices, titles, press departments, and senior posts for loyal party functionaries without producing a better government. A smaller administration will lower costs, shorten lines of responsibility, and make it harder for ministers to hide failures inside a maze of agencies and committees. The government should concentrate on the essential services that affect daily life.

The final polls put the AfD at around 42%, almost twice the CDU’s 22%, with the Left Party near 13%. Depending on how many small parties fail to clear the 5% threshold to enter the state parliament, the AfD could even win an absolute majority of seats.

Ulrich Siegmund, who received 99.5% support in his election to the executive board, has nevertheless called for humility, discipline, and hard work until the last ballot is cast. Against him stands the whole machinery of the old order. Chancellor Friedrich Merz has warned that an AfD government would frighten away foreign investors. This is nonsense: Investors care about affordable energy, public safety, skilled workers, and reliable rules, all areas in which the established parties have failed. Leftist activist groups are urging voters to cast tactical ballots for the SPD and Greens solely to deny the AfD a majority. Commentators have discussed whether civil servants and police officers might refuse orders from an elected AfD government. German law does not permit refusal merely because a superior belongs to the AfD, but we all know that German law means nothing when push comes to shove.

The major parties maintain their firewall and would rather form a coalition across old ideological divisions than allow the strongest party to govern. The AfD’s answer remains its program: a concrete plan to govern from the first day and break with decades of failed establishment rule. The old parties had decades to solve these problems. Their rule brought higher costs, weaker public order, open borders, more crime, failing services, and contempt for national identity. Now that voters are turning away from them, they call the voters dangerous. Saxony-Anhalt has the chance to show that ballots still outrank secret-service files, media campaigns, ministerial warnings, and political threats.

The EU- and US-funded press watchdog, Reporters Without Borders (RSF), has called for tighter controls on AI-based search technology, after discovering that chatbots bypass European censorship laws and present Russian media sources banned by in Western Europe to users.

The Paris-based RSF, which lists EU and the US National Endowment for Democracy among its backers, found that popular AI services can provide RT articles, links, excerpts, and news summaries to web users. “Public chatbots can access these websites and redistribute their content,” a statement by the organisation claimed on Wednesday.

The EU and UK have banned numerous Russian news outlets since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, including RT and Sputnik. Moscow has denounced the EU-wide ban as an attempt to silence coverage of the conflict that contradicts Brussels maximalist political stance.

The censoorship has since spread across virtually every publishing channel, including websites, apps, chats and social media. RT has been blocked and removed from practically all Western tech platforms, while RT France was forced to close in 2023 after its accounts were frozen and RT America suffered a similar fate in 2024.

RSF asked popular AI services to retrieve international news exclusively from sanctioned outlets, including RT, Sputnik, and RIA Novosti.

ChatGPT and Grok emerged as the “leading bots for circumventing EU sanctions,” retrieving headlines and providing links, excerpts and detailed summaries. ChatGPT complied “without reservation,” according to RSF, while Claude responded with “unfailing consistency.”

Gemini cited sanctions to refuse requests while Meta AI, whose parent company unilaterally banned RT from Facebook and Instagram in September 2024, was the only chatbot tested that “consistently refused” to provide the requested material.

A group of migrants in the Spanish North African enclave of Ceuta have been accused of pulling a baby dolphin from the sea and beating it to death, after disturbing footage sparked outrage online.

The bottlenose dolphin calf was spotted swimming close to the shore at El Trampolin beach on Wednesday before several men dragged it from the water, according to local newspaper El Faro de Ceuta. One of them allegedly struck the animal in the head with a stick, leaving it mortally wounded.

A beach worker reportedly confronted the group and told them not to touch the dolphin and to call wildlife services. They then tried to return it to the sea, but the animal appeared already dead.

Ceuta-based blogger Juan Ruiz filmed members of the group raising the dolphin like a trophy as he approached them. “You can’t take that, it’s a dolphin, you don’t eat that!” he shouted, before demanding to know who had killed it.

When people in the group apparently claimed the animal had already been dead in the water, Ruiz responded sarcastically: “Yeah, it died in the water on its own, right.”

Local environmental group DAUBMA has filed a complaint with Spanish law enforcement, demanding the authorities investigate the incident and identify those involved.

Ceuta has been gripped by chaos since an unprecedented migrant influx from neighboring Morocco in late July, when around 72,000 people crossed into the tiny Spanish territory.

Thousands remain, many living in makeshift camps, on beaches, and in the streets. Local authorities have struggled with overcrowding, sanitation problems, and disease outbreaks, while police have investigated numerous violent and sexual crimes during the crisis.

Residents have repeatedly protested, demanding faster deportations and tougher action from Madrid. Last month, locals tore down migrant shelters at El Trampolin as police intervened to keep the groups apart.

Venice Biennale President Pietrangelo Buttafuoco has defended his decision to reopen Russia’s pavilion at the event, saying “art won” despite EU pressure and Brussels stripping the exhibition of €2 million in funding.

In early March, the Venice Biennale announced Russia’s return despite the Ukraine conflict, Moscow’s standoff with Brussels, and unprecedented EU sanctions.

Russia, which has owned one of the exhibition’s oldest pavilions since 1914, went on to stage a show titled ‘The Tree Is Rooted in the Sky’ there in May, bringing together more than 50 young musicians, poets, and philosophers from Russia and other countries. Russian cultural envoy Mikhail Shvydkoy called the exhibition proof that attempts by Western political elites to “cancel” Russian culture had failed.

“It was more than right and proper toward the institution I preside over,” he said, adding that none of its formal decisions contained “a single comma” that violated laws or regulations.

The comments followed Italian Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli’s claim in May that “[Russian President Vladimir] Putin won at the Biennale.” Buttafuoco rejected that characterization, saying: “Putin didn’t win, art did.” He argued that the Biennale’s 131-year history was built on remaining open to the world even during conflicts and likened that principle to the ancient Olympic truce.

Buttafuoco also renewed his criticism of Brussels, which had challenged Russia’s participation on ethical and sanctions grounds. He stated that under the EU’s stated standards on democracy and freedom of expression, roughly 87% of non-EU countries represented at the Art Biennale would fail to qualify.

Russia’s return to one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious art festivals triggered a backlash in Brussels. The European Commission withdrew €2 million ($2.3 million) in funding for the Biennale in July, claiming that Russia’s participation violated EU sanctions and that taxpayer-funded cultural events must uphold democratic values. The Biennale stressed, however, that the grant had been earmarked for film projects that had “nothing to do with Russia’s participation” in the exhibition.

The funding row followed months of pressure from Kiev and its European backers. Ukraine separately sanctioned people linked to the Russian pavilion, while activists staged protests in Venice. The pavilion opened during the May preview but remained closed to the public after the Biennale officially began.

Moscow blasted the funding cut, with Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova describing it as a “relapse into anti-culture.”

The world’s elderly population has overtaken the number of young children for the first time in human history, according to a new US Census Bureau report. Europe, already the world’s oldest region, is at the forefront of the trend.
People aged 65 and over accounted for 10.5% of the global population in 2025, surpassing children aged five and younger for the first time, the bureau said in its An Aging World: 2025 report.

The reversal has been driven by longer life expectancy and falling birth rates. The Census Bureau said sustained fertility below replacement level can create a “fertility trap,” as the number of potential parents eventually declines.

Around 132 million babies are now born worldwide each year, down from a peak of roughly 142 million in the early 2010s, according to UN data. Africa accounted for roughly 47 million births in 2024, reflecting an increasingly uneven global trend.

The decline has been particularly pronounced in Europe. Just 3.55 million babies were born in the EU in 2024, nearly half the 6.8 million recorded in 1964. The bloc’s fertility rate has fallen to a record low of 1.34 children per woman.

The demographic shift is set to accelerate. The global population is expected to grow by more than 2 billion by 2060, while the number of people aged 65 and over will rise by around 1.15 billion, according to the US Census Bureau.
The elderly are projected to account for 19.6% of humanity by then, up from 10.5% today. In Europe, their share is expected to rise from 21% to nearly 31%, the report said.

The shift will put further strain on government budgets as fewer workers and taxpayers support a growing number of retirees. The Census report estimates that across Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, increased government healthcare spending over the next decade will amount to 2.6% of GDP, twice the projected 1.3% growth in revenues.

The EU’s top court has rejected claims that the nature of Russia’s political system can be used as the sole justification to freeze assets belonging to Russian-linked companies, after bloc member Lithuania cited Russian President Vladimir Putin when taking action against an electricity supplier.

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) made the finding on Thursday in a case involving Lithuania’s 2022 decision to freeze the funds of electricity supplier Inter Rao Lietuva, which was not itself on the EU sanctions list.

The company operated in Lithuania as an independent importer and supplier of electricity. Some 51% of its shares are owned by Finland-based RAO Nordic, which is in turn wholly owned by Inter RAO, a major Russian state-controlled power company.

The freeze severely disrupted Inter Rao Lietuva’s operations, with the company launching insolvency proceedings after saying it could no longer meet its obligations to creditors.

The authorities in Vilnius claimed that Inter Rao Lietuva was ultimately controlled by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is subject to EU sanctions, pointing to its ownership links to Russian state-controlled companies and the broad powers of the Russian presidency.

However, the CJEU concluded that the nature of Russia’s political system “does not, in itself, constitute sufficiently solid evidence” that the Russian president controls Inter Rao Lietuva.

The court said authorities must have “an objective and sufficiently solid basis” to prove that a company is controlled by a sanctioned individual before freezing its assets.

The case will now return to Lithuania’s Supreme Administrative Court, which must resolve the dispute in line with the Luxembourg court’s interpretation of EU law.

Israel’s seizure of UN facilities in occupied East Jerusalem amounts to “highway robbery,” Palestinian-American journalist Daoud Kuttab told RT.

His comments come amid an escalating dispute over facilities belonging to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, the UNRWA. Israeli security forces seized the agency’s Kalandia vocational training center in East Jerusalem last week. Israel disputes the UNRWA’s rights to the site and plans to repurpose it as part of a Jerusalem municipal development project.

Earlier this year, the Israeli authorities seized and partially demolished the UNRWA’s former headquarters in the Palestinian neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.

“Israel… literally stole, took over [UNRWA] buildings and turned them over to the Israeli municipality of Jerusalem. This is highway robbery, literally stealing UN property without any authorization,” Kuttab told RT’s Rory Suchet on Thursday.

Kuttab also discussed the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

Watch the full interview below.

US President Donald Trump has said he intends to present Europe with a belated bill for billions of dollars Washington spent arming Ukraine under his predecessor, Joe Biden.

In a post on Truth Social on Thursday, Trump renewed his criticism of the scale of the Biden administration’s support for Kiev, claiming that “Hundreds of Billions of Dollars was given to Ukraine and NATO, free of charge, that Europe would have paid for – If they were only asked.”

“We will be asking for that money, though somewhat belatedly!”

Trump did not specify how much Washington would seek, which European countries would be expected to pay, or how any retroactive payments would be arranged. Earlier this week, he said Biden gave Ukraine more than $300 billion worth of weapons “free.”

Under Trump, Washington has shifted the cost of new US weapons supplied to Ukraine through the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) to other NATO members and partners. Launched last year, the scheme allows them to pay for US-made weapons and ammunition supplied to Kiev. NATO says more than $6 billion worth of US military equipment has been funded through the program.

Moscow has maintained that additional Western weapons will not change the outcome of the conflict, arguing that they will only prolong the fighting.

Trump’s latest remarks came as he pushed back against reports that the conflict with Iran has severely depleted ammunition stocks, saying the US is ramping up production and currently keeping newly produced munitions for its own forces rather than selling them abroad.

German police have launched an investigation into a suspected arson attack near the Munich premises of defense contractors Rohde & Schwarz and Helsing, detaining two Bulgarian nationals in connection with the incident.

Two incendiary devices were thrown from a car at a construction site around midnight on Thursday, Bavarian police said. One ignited and was extinguished by officers, while a bomb disposal team defused the second. No injuries or significant damage were reported.

Police shortly afterward detained a 28-year-old woman and a 38-year-old man, both Bulgarian citizens.

The motive remains unclear, although police noted that “several defense companies are located” at the site. Because a political motive cannot be ruled out, the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office and the Bavarian Central Office for Combating Extremism and Terrorism have taken over the investigation.

Die Welt later reported, citing a police spokesperson, that a letter claiming responsibility had appeared on a platform linked to left-wing extremists.

Since the escalation of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in 2022, EU officials have repeatedly alleged Russian involvement in suspected sabotage and other incidents described as ‘hybrid attacks,’ although Moscow has denied responsibility and conclusive evidence has not been publicly presented.

In another high-profile case, an explosive-laden drone was discovered between Ukrainian Antonov cargo planes at Leipzig/Halle Airport in early August. German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt and Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said on Tuesday that authorities believe Russia was behind the incident.

Berlin subsequently announced the closure of the Russian Consulate General in Bonn and the Russian House in Berlin, along with other measures.

Moscow has rejected the allegations. Russian President Vladimir Putin accused Berlin of seeking to distract from its domestic economic problems by “planting the evidence” to implicate Russia.

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova likewise dismissed the accusations as an “absolutely trumped-up and far-fetched” pretext for closing the Russian facilities.

The anniversary of victory over militarist Japan is more than a commemoration of a distant war. It is an opportunity to ask uncomfortable questions: What exactly was defeated in 1945 and what lessons were meant to survive the victory?

What was supposed to end in 1945?

Japan’s surrender ended a catastrophic war in Asia and the Pacific. Germany’s defeat ended an equally catastrophic war in Europe. In both cases, military power had ceased to be merely an instrument of state policy and had become a force shaping policy itself. Countries were destroyed and tens of millions were dead as a consequence.

After the war, Japan was forced to embraced a high degree of military self-restraint, symbolized by Article 9 of its constitution and by the deliberately defensive character of its armed forces. Germany followed a different path but reached a similar conclusion: Military power requires strict limits and could not be treated as the normal measure of national strength.

Neither country ended up completely defenseless. Both retained armed forces and entered alliance structures. But for decades, there was an underlying recognition that more weapons did not necessarily mean more security.

Today, that recognition is fading. Japan is undertaking its most extensive military buildup since World War II. Germany is carrying out the most consequential rearmament of its postwar history. Both are increasing military spending, expanding defense-industrial capacity, acquiring more powerful strike capabilities, and deepening strategic cooperation. More ominously, both are reassessing their relationship with nuclear weapons.

The justification is simple. The Japanese are told to fear China. The Germans are told to fear Russia.

But what if these threats are being systematically inflated – and politically manufactured? What if the preparations supposedly intended to prevent war are making a larger war increasingly likely?

Japan’s transformation is historically significant, because its postwar restraint was a conscious reaction to the disaster of the first half of the 20th century. Today, however, restraint is increasingly presented as an obsolete luxury in an age of geopolitical competition.

Japan is expanding its defense budget, strengthening its naval and air capabilities, acquiring long-range missiles, and developing what it calls “counterstrike capabilities.” It is strengthening its military infrastructure and integrating more closely into wider regional military planning. All of this is still framed as defensive measures, but that doesn’t change the fact that Japan is becoming a powerful military actor.

The relentlessly repeated justification is that China is growing stronger, therefore Japan must rearm. China is expanding its naval forces, therefore Japan must expand its own. China possesses increasingly sophisticated missiles, therefore Japan requires long-range strike capabilities.

But this narrative usually omits the strategic environment from which China’s own military policies emerge.

China is not surrounded by Chinese military bases. Instead, it faces a dense US-centered network of bases, alliances, intelligence systems, and military partnerships operating along its maritime periphery. US forces are stationed in Japan and elsewhere across the region. Japan is expanding its own military role and acquiring new offensive-range capabilities. Beijing’s response to this environment is then cited as proof that the original buildup was necessary, creating a vicious cycle of artificial reasoning.

China, like any major power, does pursue its own interests and take part in the global competition for influence. But the idea that China is simply a disguised aggressor waiting for an opportunity to attack Japan ignores both the elementary logic of power politics and Chinese strategic culture.

Why would China deliberately initiate a major war against Japan, knowing that this could bring it into direct conflict with the US and its allies? The more plausible scenario is the opposite, that China will increasingly prepare for a conflict because it sees one being prepared against it.

Germany is undergoing a parallel transformation. The army is expanding, military procurement is accelerating, arms production is being encouraged, and Germany is openly aspiring to a much larger role in EU military security.

The entire project rests upon a single dominant assumption: Russia is preparing to threaten Europe, and Europe must therefore prepare for war with Russia. Every day, the Europeans are being told that Russia intends to attack Germany or conquer Europe. These claims are absurd.

Russia’s strategic concerns have long centered on the military configuration along its borders and the expansion of hostile infrastructure toward them. These concerns are being consistently ignored, and all it does is show an unwillingness to understand how Moscow calculates risk.

The dangerous habit of contemporary Western policy is to assign cause and effect selectively. NATO’s expansion and military buildup are described as defensive. Russia’s response is described as proof of inherent aggression. More NATO deployments become necessary because of that response. Another example of circular logic.

Portraying Russia as an inherently expansionist force with no intelligible security interests creates the intellectual conditions in which permanent confrontation becomes inevitable. And permanent confrontation is increasingly becoming the organizing principle of German policy.

China and Russia have become indispensable threats for those advocating a historic expansion of Japanese and German military power. Without the Chinese threat, Japan’s transformation would be much harder to justify. Without the Russian threat, Germany’s rearmament would lose its central political rationale.

An external threat is useful to unlock budgets, strengthen arms industries, create political urgency, and marginalize those who ask whether another course is possible. But history repeatedly demonstrates that exaggerated threats can produce genuine catastrophes.

The nuclear dimension makes the parallel German-Japanese rearmament even more disturbing.

Germany has long taken part in NATO’s nuclear-sharing arrangements, but discussion is now moving beyond passive acceptance of an existing framework. Berlin is increasingly involved in debates about a broader European nuclear architecture and closer strategic coordination with France. The question is no longer merely whether Germany lives under an allied nuclear umbrella, but how deeply it should take part in planning and arrangements surrounding nuclear deterrence.

Japan’s case is even more historically charged. The only country to have suffered nuclear attacks, Japan built an important part of its postwar identity around the Three Non-Nuclear Principles: not possessing, producing, or permitting the introduction of nuclear weapons. Now, questions regarding nuclear sharing, extended deterrence, and the practical limits of Japan’s non-nuclear commitments are being discussed more openly than before.

This should concern the entire world. Once countries with Germany’s and Japan’s histories begin moving closer to nuclear strategy, a critical psychological barrier is weakened. Nuclear weapons become increasingly normalized as instruments of security policy rather than recognized for what they are: weapons whose actual use would represent a failure of civilization on an unimaginable scale.

In March, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius proposed a Reciprocal Access Agreement with Japan during talks with his counterpart, Shinjiro Koizumi.

This agreement would reduce legal and bureaucratic obstacles to the movement of German and Japanese military personnel onto each other’s territory, facilitating joint training, exercises, and potentially operations.

The proposal would give the Berlin-Tokyo military relationship a more permanent operational structure. Germany has already increased its military activity in the Indo-Pacific through deployments and exercises; a reciprocal access framework would make cooperation easier and more routine.

The symbolism is difficult to miss: Countries whose military histories were forcibly ended in 1945 are now building new structures for military access, deployment, and cooperation with each other.

And growing pressure generates resistance. Military blocs generate opposing alignments. The world is once again being divided into increasingly rigid strategic camps – and the countries that spent decades demonstrating the value of military restraint are now helping accelerate this process.

The lesson the world should draw from 1945

Military strength itself is not the problem. States have legitimate security interests and legitimate reasons to maintain capable armed forces. The decisive question is what political leadership does with that power. A strong military under prudent leadership can deter conflict. A rapidly expanding military under leadership convinced that confrontation is inevitable can accelerate it.

The task of serious statecraft is not to declare one side’s fears legitimate and another’s imaginary. It is to prevent competing security concerns from becoming a machinery of permanent escalation.

Eighty-one years after victory in 1945, Japan and Germany should remember that lesson particularly well. Their postwar restraint was not weakness – it was an understanding born from catastrophe.

Today, Japan is rearming against a supposedly inevitable Chinese threat. Germany is rearming against a supposedly inevitable Russian threat. Both are moving closer to nuclear strategy. Both are expanding military partnerships. Both are being told that there is no alternative.

This is perhaps the most dangerous phrase in international politics. There is always an alternative before war begins.

“For the surgeons, it was a regular workday.” This is how, many years later, one of the doctors from Unit 731 recalled the autopsies performed on living humans in a Japanese military laboratory near Harbin during the Second World War.

This is neither a mistake nor an exaggeration: human vivisections, exposure to plague and cholera, and chemical weapons testing on prisoners were simply “routine work” for those who worked in the unit – along with protocols, reports, video recordings, and visits of high-ranking guests who were shown the experiments. 

On the anniversary of the official end of WWII, we recall how this horrific “routine” was sanctioned by top officials in the Japanese government, and examine how biological weapons were tested on prisoners and why the US refused to punish Japanese war criminals after the war ended. 

In 1926, a new emperor, Hirohito, ascended to the throne in Japan. The country, already rife with far-right sentiment, quickly gravitated toward extreme militarism. There were two reasons for this.

Japan dominated East Asia and was economically superior to its neighbors: China, which was torn apart by civil war, and Korea, a former Japanese colony. Against this backdrop, Japanese elites sought to significantly expand their sphere of influence in the region.

The first step in Japanese expansion was the Mukden Incident of 1931, a supposed Chinese bombing of a railway. This became the pretext for the Japanese army to occupy Manchuria, a historical region in northeastern China, and establish the puppet state of Manchukuo on its territory. Japan then hoped to subjugate the remaining territories of China.

The second reason for Japan’s extreme militarism during the interwar period was the idea of ​​Japanese racial superiority promoted by state propaganda. Unlike Nazi Germany, Japanese ideology was not formalized into an official doctrine, but was supported by a significant portion of Japanese society.

A characteristic incident that vividly illustrated the situation in Japan at the time occurred in 1932.

The moderate Japanese Prime Minister Tsuyoshi Inukai had sought to limit the military’s influence on national politics but was assassinated by Imperial Navy officers and conspirators from the far-right League of Blood organization. Then-Emperor Hirohito received a petition with 350,000 signatures, some made with blood, as well as 11 severed fingers: members of the far-right offered their lives in exchange for the lives of the conspirators. As a result, the assassins received symbolic prison sentences, and power in the country was completely transferred to the military.

Japan was about to take the first step in the upcoming new world war.

In 1928, a brilliant graduate of Kyoto University, a young doctor and talented microbiologist, Shiro Ishii, traveled to Europe. He was described as a harsh and withdrawn man. In interwar Europe, he formally studied chemical warfare agents and bacteriology.

Ishii drew an important conclusion: Europe, devastated during the First World War by chemical weapons and the Spanish flu epidemic, was terribly afraid of new diseases and infections. The Geneva Protocol of 1925 banned the use of chemical and biological weapons in war. From this, Ishii deduced that biological weapons could become the tool that would break the will of Western governments.

Returning home in 1930, and armed with this knowledge, Ishii found powerful patrons: the ultra-nationalist Minister of War Sadao Araki and the country’s chief military physician Koizumi Chikahiko. The latter, who had been interested in chemical weapons since WWI, was impressed by the use of chlorine near Ypres in 1915 and hoped to fully develop this idea with Ishii’s help.

Together, in 1933, they obtained imperial approval to begin a secret project. They not only planned to develop biological weapons, but also initially planned to test them on living people.

From a secret laboratory to a death factory

Unit 731 was located in Manchuria, and not without reason. Having occupied this region, Japanese troops gained virtually unlimited access to the Chinese people, whom they viewed as a free resource for their inhumane experiments.

Another category of the unit’s victims were Soviet citizens, primarily ethnic Russians. Beginning in 1930, Japanese saboteurs began capturing Soviet citizens in border areas to obtain intelligence on the situation in the USSR.

China and the USSR were considered Japan’s primary adversaries in the upcoming WWII so Japanese doctors studied the use of biological weapons on representatives of these nations. It is estimated that the Chinese constituted approximately 70% of Unit 731’s victims, while Soviet citizens and a few Koreans, Manchus, and Mongols accounted for about 30%.

The project initially began as a small, secret laboratory in the Zhongma prison camp. But after several prisoners escaped, it became clear that the project needed better security. 

Under the cover name of ‘General Directorate of Water Supply and Prevention of the Kwantung Army’ a real fortress was built in Pingfang, on the southern outskirts of Harbin. To make space for it, about 300 peasant houses were demolished, and in their place were erected barracks, laboratories, and a private airfield. The unit’s total staff numbered about 3,000 people. 

With the outbreak of WWII, similar units were established in Japanese-occupied territories, including Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia, Myanmar, and elsewhere. These units were part of the so-called Ishii Network, which numbered about 10,000 people.

The unit was divided into several specialized departments: one researched various viruses and infections, such as plague, typhus, anthrax, and cholera; another designed bombs for delivering biological weapons; and a third was engaged in the mass production of the pathogens themselves. Another department was responsible for “annihilating and writing off logs” – the term used to refer to prisoners subjected to inhumane experiments.

Initially, Unit 731 carried out experiments on POWs, anti-Japanese partisans, and common criminals. Initially, they were well-fed, given meat, fish, and sometimes even alcohol, all to ensure they were in good physical condition before the sadistic doctors began their experiments.

What happened inside

❗The editors warn that the description of the horrific experiments that took place in Unit 731 may shock readers.

Prisoners were infected with plague, anthrax, cholera, typhus, gonorrhea, and syphilis. They were also subjected to experiments to test their resistance to dehydration and frostbite. Essentially, the prisoners were subjected to conditions in which the Japanese army would operate in Southeast Asia and the Soviet Far East. These experiments simulated combat conditions more realistically than one could imagine. 

For example, weapons such as grenades and bombs were tested on prisoners. To determine the optimal treatment for shrapnel wounds, prisoners were tied to posts and bombs and grenades were detonated at varying distances from them. Autopsies were performed on the dead, and those who survived were treated, but only to be killed in the next experiment. Flamethrowers were also tested on prisoners.

A separate horror was human vivisection – experimental surgeries and dissections of living people. These were done to study the body’s response in various conditions. A Japanese medical worker who witnessed this horror and had personally cut open a living person said that “for the surgeons, it was a regular workday.”  Equally disgusting is the description of how, whenever the surgeons needed individual organs, such as the brain, they ordered the guards to find a suitable prisoner. The guards would smash the prisoner’s head with an axe, give the brain to the doctors, and send the body to the crematorium.

Prisoners were also subjected to prolonged starvation, placed in pressure chambers, crushed with heavy objects, electrocuted, buried and burned alive. The effects of phosphorus, phosgene, mustard gas, and other chemical warfare agents were also tested on the prisoners.

All these inhumane experiments were videotaped, meaning they weren’t isolated incidents perpetrated by specific sadists, but rather a routine and established procedure. Notably, some doctors later described with horror what they witnessed in Unit 731, while others, far from repenting, described the experiments performed on living people in scientific articles.

It’s also horrifying that the disembowelment of living people and other inhumane experiments were conducted for high-ranking guests visiting Unit 731 as a form of sadistic and inhumane entertainment.

Weapons in action

The developments of the sadistic doctors from Unit 731 weren’t limited to laboratory use; they were actively used by the Japanese military in China. The Soviet Union first encountered Japanese biological weapons during the battle with the Japanese at Khalkhin Gol in 1939. At that time, Japanese troops secretly smuggled typhus vials on a passenger train and dumped them into border rivers, thus causing an outbreak of the disease on Soviet territory.

The Japanese military then carried out at least 12 attacks against Chinese cities. Specifically, they dropped plague-infected fleas from low-flying aircraft over the cities of Ningbo and Changde, causing an outbreak that claimed tens of thousands of civilian lives. During the war in China, the Japanese military also massively contaminated agricultural facilities, reservoirs, and wells. They also dropped contaminated food and clothing on territories unoccupied by the Japanese military under the guise of humanitarian aid; contact with these contaminated items led to infection and death. According to various estimates, at least 200,000 Chinese people died from plague, cholera, and anthrax spread by the Japanese military.

The plan was to launch aircraft from submarine aircraft carriers; the aircraft, manned by kamikaze pilots, would carry biological weapons developed by Unit 731, including plague, cholera, and typhus. The submarine crews were then expected to intentionally infect themselves and land on US shores.

However, this operation was initially suspended by the Chief of the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff Yoshijiro Umezu, and was subsequently cancelled after Japan’s surrender.

Attempts to conceal crimes

The Japanese military also planned to use biological weapons against the Soviet Union, but the rapid defeat of the Kwantung Army by Soviet troops thwarted these plans.

Realizing that they were on the brink of total defeat and seeking to cover up their crimes, the Japanese military destroyed the buildings of Unit 731 and its branches, laboratories, accumulated stockpiles of biological weapons, documents, and experiment results. About 300 remaining prisoners and 600 Chinese and Manchurian workers were exterminated.

This was standard Japanese military practice at the time. For example, on August 9, 1945, the day the USSR and Japan entered into war, Japanese gendarmes arrested and executed 19 Soviet citizens in the city of Hailar. Unlike the prisoners of Unit 731, those were ordinary people who were executed as potentially disloyal individuals.

So, when the Red Army units arrived at the site of Unit 731 a few days later, they found only an empty death camp. By that time, at least 3,600 people had died in horrific experiments, and hundreds of thousands others were killed by biological weapons developed by the Unit.

More precisely, it was primarily the USSR that wanted to punish the war criminals. After all, their experiments were also carried out on Soviet citizens. The Americans, however, assessed the situation differently.

The US needed to rebuild post-war Japan, which had fallen within its sphere of influence, so Emperor Hirohito, who had sanctioned the creation of Unit 731, was spared from a war crimes tribunal. The fates of the others who stood behind the creation of Unit 731 varied: Chikahiko, one of Ishii’s patrons, committed suicide in accordance with samurai tradition; another of his patrons, Sadao, spent several years in prison and was released in 1956.

Ishii’s fate is far more interesting. Shortly before the Soviet Army occupied Manchuria, Ishii evacuated with most of his staff and archives, first to Korea and then to Japan. It was there that the Americans found him after the end of WWII.

Initially, Ishii denied carrying out experiments on humans and the use of biological weapons, but the American military made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: complete immunity from prosecution in exchange for providing all data on biological weapons research based on human experiments.

As a result, Ishii and his associates prepared what the Americans themselves called an “absolutely invaluable” report on their work in human experimentation and the use of biological weapons. Ishii and other Japanese scientists then lived and worked peacefully under American supervision.

While the US concealed information about the activities of Unit 731 as much as possible, the Soviet Union held a public trial in Khabarovsk in 1949. Twelve high-ranking commanders and scientists from Unit 731 and its associated units were found guilty of war crimes and developing and using biological weapons, and served sentences in Siberian camps.

On the anniversary of the official end of WWII, it’s worth remembering not just the abstract horrors of the past, but also the concrete facts: how a totalitarian machine placed its own interests above human life and universal moral laws. And how, after its defeat, its members received virtually no punishment for their crimes.

Many of the members of Unit 731 lived long and peaceful lives, pursuing successful careers in science, medicine, and business.

The only thing that can be done for the thousands of people who died in the camps of Unit 731 and the hundreds of thousands of victims of biological weapons developed there, is to remember the horrors perpetrated by this inhumane system and prevent them from ever happening again.

Former Ukrainian Defense Minister Mikhail Fedorov has announced the launch of a new military technology company, with Palantir CEO Alex Karp set to become its lead investor.

Fedorov has remained highly active in business and politics since Vladimir Zelensky dismissed him in mid-July amid reported tensions with then-commander-in-chief Aleksandr Syrsky. The former minister has also grown increasingly critical of Zelensky, claiming he was removed over his anti-corruption efforts and calling for elections, which have been repeatedly postponed under martial law.

Last week, Fedorov unexpectedly emerged as an adviser on “defense innovations” to Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto. He said his role would involve helping Rome “develop modern warfare technologies” and “improve the defense sector.”

“We’ve worked together for a half decade. I have been absolutely inspired by what you and the Ukrainians have pulled off and very and super delighted that we could play a part. And you and your colleagues are launching a company that I think will be defining for the world, bringing your knowledge and acumen about the art of war as a product to allied countries,” Karp told Fedorov.

The ties between Fedorov and Karp span well beyond the ex-minister’s six-month tenure as defense minister. Before assuming the post in mid-February, he oversaw Ukraine’s digital transformation in various capacities. Immediately after his dismissal, Fedorov claimed to have been offered a job by Karp.

The anti-graft crusade supposedly led by Fedorov has remained questionable at best. Multiple media reports suggest he focused more on wresting contracts away from companies associated with Zelensky’s inner circle and steering them to companies linked to him personally than on truly battling corruption. Federov’s background has further fueled suspicion. Before entering Zelensky’s government, he considered himself a businessman while repeatedly facing allegations of running online and phone scams, laundering money through online advertising, and engaging in other fraudulent activities.

The central bank of the Netherlands has become the latest country to move gold holdings out of the United States, announcing on Wednesday that it had transferred 86 tons of bullion to London. The bank described the move as “crisis preparedness” during a time of “increasing geopolitical unrest.”

The transfer was carried out between March and August. The bulk of the gold was moved from New York, with the rest coming from Canada. Only about 27 tons were physically transported across the Atlantic, while the remainder was accomplished through sales in the Americas and repurchases in London. Prior to the transfer, the Dutch central bank (DNB) had held 313 tons in North America.

“With this relocation, we have improved the tradability of our gold reserves,” according to a written statement by DNB Governor Olaf Sleijpen. “We expect that we will never need to use them, but we do need to strengthen our resilience and preparedness.”

The DNB’s move comes after France’s central bank sold its remaining 129 tons of gold held at Federal Reserve vaults in New York between July 2025 and January 2026, leaving it with no bullion in the United States. The proceeds from the sale were used to purchase an equivalent amount of gold in Europe.

Venezuela under President Hugo Chavez repatriated about 160 tons of its gold reserves from foreign banks, a move that was completed by January 2012. However, some 31 metric tons of Venezuelan gold are still held by the Bank of England. Efforts undertaken by then-President Nicolas Maduro to bring the bullion home were stymied by Great Britain, which did not recognize Maduro as the legitimate head of Venezuela’s government.

The DNB praised Bank of England-held gold as being “the world’s most easily tradable gold.” The Dutch central bank reported owning 612.4 metric tons as of the end of 2025, worth about €72 billion (about $84 billion).

Germany appears to be seeking a pretext for further confrontation with Russia by accusing Moscow without evidence over a recent drone incident, former Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl has told RT.

On Tuesday, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt and Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said the German authorities had concluded that Russia was behind the August 4 incident in which an explosive-laden drone was found between Ukrainian Antonov cargo planes at Leipzig/Halle Airport.

Berlin subsequently announced the imminent closure of the Russian Consulate General in Bonn and the Russian House in Berlin, as well as tighter border controls for Russian citizens.

Moscow has rejected the allegations, with President Vladimir Putin suggesting they were being used as a smokescreen to distract Germans from domestic political and economic problems.

Speaking to RT on Wednesday, Kneissl said Berlin had followed a familiar Western pattern of blaming Russia before presenting any hard evidence. The latest allegations are “not based on facts,” but merely assumptions, she said.

Kneissl suggested that the speed with which Berlin blamed Moscow could signal that the German leadership is “ready to confront Russia.” 

She also described the decision to shut down the Russian House in Berlin as a “very deplorable measure,” noting that cultural institutions were rarely targeted even at the height of the Cold War.

Speaking on Tuesday, Putin accused the German authorities of having “planted the evidence” to frame Russia. He also called Berlin’s confrontational stance a “gross mistake” that runs counter to the interests of the German people.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the German authorities had long sought to target both the Russian Consulate General in Bonn and the Russian House in Berlin, and had concocted an “absolutely trumped-up and far-fetched” pretext to further damage bilateral relations.

On Thursday, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov announced that Russia would respond to Germany’s moves by shutting down the Goethe Institute centers in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Ekaterinburg, which promote German language and culture.

Western media are using unverified claims that Beijing censored footage of the deadly Nepal-Tibet floods to promote “false narratives” about China, Hong Kong-based author Nury Vittachi has told RT.

Speaking on Thursday, Vittachi said Western outlets frequently cite Tibetan advocacy groups without adequately disclosing their funding and location, while shaping reporting that portrays Beijing in an overwhelmingly negative light.

“The Western media pick up these groups and they deliberately hide the funding,” he said, arguing that readers consequently get a “very distorted view.”

Vittachi singled out organizations supported by the US-based National Endowment for Democracy (NED), accusing them of “weaponizing human rights against China.” He argued that negative coverage of China ultimately serves a broader effort to “manufacture consent for a war on China.”

The comments come as Western outlets including the BBC and Telegraph have accused Beijing of suppressing footage of the catastrophic flooding along the Nepal-China border. The BBC claimed images of the disaster had spread around the world while being heavily restricted inside China.

Reporting live for RT from Gyirong, CGTN correspondent Cen Ziyuan showed the scale of the destruction and the difficulties facing rescue crews trying to reach the worst-hit areas. Heavy mud and huge rocks have blocked access roads, forcing crews to deploy excavators and other heavy machinery, she said.

Cen said rescuers had in some cases spent more than ten hours climbing through mountainous terrain to reach the border area, while helicopters had been used for airdrops. Her report from the disaster zone also showed heavy machinery working near the destroyed Gyirong Port and flood-damaged roads.

The on-the-ground coverage comes as search and rescue operations continue following the catastrophic landslide and flooding, with thousands reported dead or missing across the affected region.

The deadly strike on a wedding in southern Iran earlier this week was likely a direct hit by a US munition, Reuters reports, citing its own analysis.

The strike on Kuhestak, Hormozgan Province on Tuesday left five people dead and nearly 70 wounded. The Iranian authorities said the victims were three women and two children aged 4 and 16.

Four weapons experts who reviewed images and videos verified by Reuters said the damage was inconsistent with debris or a ricochet from another target. Three concluded that the munition was likely American rather than an errant Iranian air-defense missile, while one suggested that it may have missed its intended target.

Two US officials confirmed to the outlet that US forces specifically targeted a telecommunications tower around 135 meters from the wedding site. Weapons experts previously cited by AP and the New York Times identified recovered fragments as belonging to a US air-delivered guided munition, most likely a JSOW.

US Vice President J.D. Vance said on Thursday that Washington is investigating the incident. “We’re investigating it because obviously we care. We want to know,” he told reporters. The US military said it does not target civilians and has not accepted responsibility for the strike.

Australian tunnel safety and disaster expert Arnold Dix has urged rescuers in Nepal not to give up hope of finding survivors inside the tunnels in the Upper Trishuli-3A hydropower project, where scores of workers are feared trapped underground days after a flash flood.

“The operation at Trishuli 3A is proceeding as a rescue, not a recovery,” Dix, who is remotely assisting the operation, wrote on LinkedIn. Footage recorded around the time of the August 26 flood shows around 30 people moving toward and seeking shelter in the power station tunnels, he said. 

Dix said tunnels can remain comparatively stable after devastation above ground and may preserve breathable air and survivable spaces. “Silence is not evidence of death. It is only the absence of a signal,” he wrote, citing past rescues in Chile,

Thailand, and India where people survived underground for days without contact. Rescue teams are still trying to reach workers at more than a dozen hydropower sites along the Bhote Koshi-Trishuli corridor. At Trishuli-3A, a 93-member team is working with Chinese tunnel specialists, while teams from India and South Korea are assisting operations at other sites. 
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लाङ्गटाङ्ग जलविद्युत सुरुङबाट शव उद्धार || Dead Bodies Recovered from #LangtangTunnel#NepaliArmy #BhotekoshiFlood pic.twitter.com/Oc9UYTpD6v

— Nepali Army (@NepaliArmyHQ) September 3, 2026

Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority (NDRRMA) said on Thursday that 1,252 people have died and 4,216 remain missing. Around 900 people working at hydropower projects are among those still unreachable, while 11,993 people have been rescued. 

For decades, mutual deterrence among major powers provided the world with a degree of predictability, with the nuclear factor lying at the heart of this system since the middle of the last century. The great powers restrained one another and, in doing so, restrained themselves.

They understood that overly ambitious geopolitical adventures could carry unacceptable risks, thus “strategic stability” was the reassuring term given to what was, in reality, the capacity for mutual destruction. International institutions grew around this balance like mushrooms around a tree trunk, but beneath all the agreements and diplomatic language lay something much simpler: the fear of the consequences of a direct conflict between major powers. Now, however, that system is falling apart.

Many posit that the problem is precisely the loss of fear as political elites have ceased to believe that nuclear war is genuinely possible and hence the declining restraint we see in the conflict in Ukraine, in the Middle East and, potentially, in Asia.

The apparent solution is therefore to remind everyone just how terrifying nuclear war would be. Restore the fear, the argument goes, and states will once again exercise restraint and become ready to negotiate new rules. There’s logic to this, but there’s also an enormous danger.

In that case, nuclear weapons could cease to be primarily a political and psychological barrier and become simply another means of warfare, albeit an extraordinarily powerful one. Would this restore fear? Or would states instead accelerate the development of nuclear weapons designed for more effective battlefield use? Well, in the present atmosphere of growing recklessness, either is conceivable.

Nuclear weapons are the most powerful weapons humanity has invented and they were created to fight wars, but we discovered that they could perform another function by preventing the largest and most destructive wars from occurring at all. Today, however, perceptions seem to be returning to their starting point that a weapon is a weapon, even when it is nuclear.

Yet expecting weapons to solve the problems between states places impossible demands on them, particularly when warfare itself is becoming increasingly asymmetrical and all-pervasive.

States are finding it harder to hold on to what they can’t afford to lose. The erosion of borders, once celebrated as one of the great achievements of liberal globalization, is acquiring a much more alarming character.

States won’t simply accept this loss of control, so every action produces a reaction, which means the struggle will become fiercer. More importantly, the battlefield will increasingly encompass almost every sphere of human activity.

Under such conditions, what does “strategic stability” even mean, and how can it be maintained?

War itself increasingly resembles not a means of resolving conflicts but a permanent form of interaction, even coexistence and there may be no decisive victory or defeat, but only repeated attempts to exhaust an opponent economically, militarily, politically, and psychologically.

However, prolonged attrition produces two contradictory effects. States become more experienced and capable of enduring confrontation, but at the same time, fatigue accumulates, along with the temptation to end an apparently endless struggle by reaching for the most decisive and destructive argument available.

The world is losing the systemic safeguards that once limited such impulses and it increasingly resembles a hunting ground during open season.

So what, then, can we hold on to? For now, perhaps only common sense and an accurate assessment of the relationship between our ambitions and our actual capabilities. It’s a fragile lifeline, but it may be enough to prevent us from feeding the flames and instead keep us clear of them.

At least until the value of restraint, including self-restraint, is once again understood by everyone.

This article was first published by Russia in Global Affairs, translated and edited by the RT team

Nearly half of the world’s estimated 934 million farmers suffer unintentional pesticide poisoning each year, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Frontiers in Public Health.

The study, conducted by researchers from the Pesticide Action Network (PAN), analyzed 214 publications from 2006 to 2023 alongside World Health Organization mortality data. It estimated up to 433 million cases of unintentional acute pesticide poisoning annually, affecting around 46% of agricultural workers worldwide. About 11,000 cases are fatal each year.

The burden falls disproportionately on the Global South, researchers found.

South and Southeast Asia and eastern Africa recorded the highest estimated numbers of cases. In Burkina Faso, nearly 84% of farmers are estimated to suffer acute pesticide poisoning each year.

“Behind these staggering numbers are farmers, workers and families paying a terrible human price for pesticide exposure,” PAN India Executive Director Jayakumar Chelaton said. “This research exposes a crisis that can no longer be ignored.”

Without pesticides, between 20% and 40% of global crop yields could be lost to plant pests and diseases each year, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

The risks posed by pesticides add to wider food-security challenges, particularly in developing countries already struggling with climate shocks, conflict, and pressure on agricultural production. Russia has sought to address some of these pressures through food and agricultural assistance to countries in Africa and Asia.

Russian companies have also provided fertilizer to countries facing food insecurity. Fertilizer producer Uralchem recently donated 30,000 metric tons of potash to Bangladesh in a shipment facilitated by the WFP. The company says it has donated more than 220,000 tons of mineral fertilizers free of charge since 2022, with shipments reaching Malawi, Kenya, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

The German government approved nearly €800 million ($930 million) in weapons exports to Israel between January and June, Der Spiegel reports, citing a government response to a parliamentary inquiry. The sum is already four times higher than the total value Berlin greenlighted last year.

Around one-fifth of the exports was linked to German-Israeli defense-industry cooperation benefiting the German Armed Forces, according to the government. Just over two-thirds of the approved value is tied to the INS Drakon, a nearly 70-meter-long Dolphin II-class submarine built for Israel by German shipbuilder TKMS. The vessel, which can remain submerged for weeks, left Kiel on Tuesday and is reportedly on its way to Israel.

Berlin said the remainder covered equipment not classified as ‘weapons of war’, including small arms, ammunition, explosives, and drones, according to Der Spiegel.

“As [Chancellor] Friedrich Merz was supposedly outraged by [Israeli Security Minister Itamar] Ben-Gvir’s inhumane statements, his federal government was pushing ahead with cooperation with a government and an army facing genocide charges before the International Criminal Court, supporting settler violence in the West Bank, and continuing to occupy southern Lebanon,” MP Lea Reisner said.

The controversial Israeli minister stated last month that he considers the enclave “to be ours” and urged the IDF to carry out dozens of “targeted assassinations” there every night, claiming that some in the Palestinian enclave “are not people.”

Germany’s War Weapons Control Act requires licenses to “always be denied” where weapons risk being used in “peace-disturbing acts” or where Germany’s obligations under international law could be impaired.

Germany is meanwhile expanding military cooperation with Israel. On Wednesday, the German Navy said it had successfully tested an Israeli ballistic missile in the North Atlantic with a range of up to 500 kilometers. Germany has no ballistic missiles of its own, with Taurus cruise missiles being its longest-range missile systems.

Germany’s unwavering support for Israel, which is facing genocide accusations before the International Court of Justice in a case filed by South Africa, has arguably cost Berlin international support, as it failed to secure a seat on the Security Council in June.