Uday As Big Game Hunter / Stewart Does Trump / Trump’s Cuts to NOAA make El Niño Invisible / Billions In Fines Won’t Change META’s Ways / The Troika Behind the Violence in France

Uday’s Great Mongolian Adventure with Sherpa Furnished by Vladimir Putin

Financial Times

Scott: Umar Lutfulloyev spent his youth as a minor player for Russian organized crime, run…

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Bibi’s Closest Confidant Denounces Him / Trump Accused of Yet Another Rape / Putin sent AfD Leaders to Syria / Trump Celebrates Billions for Big Oil / Student Power Prevails in Serbia

Ron Lauder, President of the World Jewish Council, Denounces Netanyahu

Charles: Today Israelis go to the polls to make their most important decision since their country was founded: will they finally rid themselves of the most catastrophic prime minister they have ever had?

Ron Lauder is perhaps the single most important pillar of the international Jewish establishment: President of the World Jewish Congress. He has devoted his whole life to the Zionist project. He financed a network of Jewish schools in Eastern Europe and contributed millions to Israeli institutions.

For decades he was also Benjamin Netanyahu’s closest confidant.

But now he has sold all of his homes in Israel and vowed that he will never visit the country again.

Ron Lauder in his mansion in Manhattan

Last week, on the eve of the Israeli election, he gave an explosive interview to Haaretz, denouncing his old friend and begging Israel to throw him out of office.

Lauder says the house of Israel is burning and that his life’s work is in real danger.

“I’ve been silent for 20 years, 30 years,” Lauder says. “One of the things that made Israel so special compared to other countries is that they had a real democracy. What we’re seeing now feels more like a banana republic.”

More than anything, just before next week’s elections, Lauder is determined to explain why he is so concerned about the future of the State of Israel. To try and wake Israelis up, before it is too late. “I want you to hear me. I’m 82 years old, I may not have that much longer to live... I want this thing to be written in Haaretz.”

He contends that the government has put its own interests ahead of the people’s, and that extremists like National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich are destroying the country with Netanyahu’s knowledge and consent.

“What you have is a dictator, a one-person show. Israel is a democracy, but Netanyahu is not playing by the rules of democracy.”

The only thing that you can never have again is extremists in the government. They have done so much harm. Smotrich, with his statement saying that the Palestinians have no right to be in the Israeli area – it was very much looked on as a declaration [of intent] by Israel to get rid of the Palestinians. And Ben-Gvir’s hatred of Palestinians, being able to kill them, destroying their villages, with the complete consent of the prime minister... If Ben-Gvir and Smotrich’s parties play any role in government in the future, Israel is doomed. The fact is that Bibi could have been one of the great leaders of all times, and is going to go down in history as a failure.”

Meanwhile, in another blockbuster development, yesterday a commission of United Nations human rights experts flatly declared that Israel was continuing to commit genocidal acts against Palestinians in Gaza despite the ceasefire there, and is also carrying out crimes against humanity in the West Bank.

The report by the U.N. Independent Commission of Inquiry, which comes on the eve of Israel’s first general election since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack, is meant to look at the drivers of violence by Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the panel said. It said that Israel was deliberately targeting Palestinian children and was using torture, rape and sexual violence as part of a broader attack aimed at displacing and subjugating the Palestinian population.

Israel immediately rejected the claims.

The report, delivered to the U.N. General Assembly, noted that between the cease-fire announced on Oct. 10, 2025, and the end of September 2026, Israeli airstrikes, artillery and gunfire had killed 1,431 Palestinians in Gaza, including 300 children. The report rejected a claim in May by the Board of Peace set up by President Trump that the cease-fire had “largely held.”

An Israeli strike on a Gaza City mosque in July.Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times

Dramatic New Rape Allegations Detailed Against Trump

Huffington Post

Trump with the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Photo: Estate of Jeffrey Epstein

Scott: It’s commonplace for anchors on corporate US broadcast media to observe that there are “no credible allegations of rape or sexual assault involving President Trump.” Heaven knows why they make such statements, because they’re obviously false. Not only is there is an abundance of detailed, credible evidence of sexual assaults committed by Trump, he is in fact an adjudicated rapist based on the federal court case of E Jean Carroll in Manhattan, with respect to which Trump has now exhausted his appeals and been forced to pay a first installment of damages. Now the House Judiciary Committee Democrats have issued a 50-page report which details more than two dozen sexual assaults committed by Trump, including a never-before-reported rape that occurred in the Plaza Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey immediately following a meeting between Trump, his best friend, Jeffrey Epstein, and the victim. The import of this document? Rep Jamie Raskin (D-MD) who oversaw it will, after the new Congress is installed in December, be the Judiciary Committee chairman and will have responsibility for the committee’s inquiries and possible impeachment proceedings. Do the rapes and sexual assaults constitute a basis for impeachment? The law on that, based on seventeenth century English precedent, is clear: yes, they do. Moreover, the report also contains a searing indictment of the DOJ under Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche as it covered up all this evidence and lied under oath about it.

A former beauty pageant contestant who has said she rebuffed a sexual advance from President Donald Trump in 1993 now says Trump raped her during the encounter, according to a report from the House Democrats who will take the lead on any potential impeachment of Trump next year.

In a series of interviews with Democratic staff on the House Judiciary Committee, Beatrice Keul said Trump raped her that year in “brutal” fashion in a hotel room at Trump’s Plaza Hotel in Atlantic City after the pair spent time with Jeffrey Epstein, the now-deceased child sex trafficker who was among Trump’s closest friends at the time.

Democrats detailed Keul’s account in a lengthy report on Monday, saying it’s consistent with several of the other already-public accusations of sexual assault against Trump and describing it as a pattern of behavior the president pursued during his friendship with America’s most notorious sexual predator.

“A growing body of evidence demonstrates that Donald Trump was an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of young women during the mid-to-late 1990s,” the report says.

The document says the Trump administration has illegally prevented the full release of the Justice Department’s files on Epstein in order to protect Trump and other former associates of Epstein, who killed himself while awaiting federal charges in 2020. Congress ordered the documents to be made public last fall.

“Government complicity in a cover-up to protect traffickers and rapists is criminal obstruction of justice and an intolerable offense against a free society,” the report says. “The full extent of the President of the United States’ involvement with a criminal sex trafficking ring is, inescapably, of the utmost concern to Congress and the American people.”...

Keul, who is Swiss, first described unwanted advances from Trump in an October 2024 interview with the Daily Mail. She said Trump “jumped” on her and groped her but that she ultimately convinced him to stop. She was 24 at the time.

“I tried everything I could. Finally, I said, ‘Let’s talk first’ or something like that, then he slowed down,” Keul told the Daily Mail.

How Putin’s Training Bureau Sent AfD Leaders to Syria for Training with Hezbollah

Handelsblatt

Scott: A massive leak of internal communications and documents from Germany’s Neo Nazi AfD is creating quite a stir in Germany, but has thus far gone essentially unreported in US corporate media. None of the disclosures is more indicative of what this party is and how it came to power than the materials assembled here by Germany’s leading business journal, Handelsblatt. We learn of a field trip organized for senior AfD figures by the Kremlin to travel to Syria and meet there with Assad and leaders of Hezbollah, ostensibly for an introduction to Middle East politics. We still have little detail over what the AfD leaders did and who they met on their furtive trip to Syria.

But the whole junket is particularly interesting in a historical context. Figures from Germany’s Baader-Meinhoff gang and its Rote-Armee-Faktion, notorious terrorist groups active in the seventies and eighties, report that they were supervised by a young KGB major in Dresden whom they knew as “Vova” and whom they subsequently identified as Vladimir Putin. Vova was responsible for arranging their mission training, dispatching them to Greece, Libya and, notably, Syria for meetings with Palestinian and other terrorist groups.

Today of course Vova is the president of Russia, and he is known to take a strong personal interest in the whole AfD project of the Russian intelligence services. Which may well explain this particular Syria junket.

Keep in mind as you read this that it is now official US government policy to support—and fund through a diversion of DOS democracy support funds—the AfD. Donald Trump, JD Vance, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk all praise the party, and both Musk and Thiel have steered considerable money to them. And yet this party is not much more than a Russian intelligence operation designed to subvert the government of Germany, a longstanding US ally.

“The last Beck’s is in Reyhanli, just before the Syrian border,” wrote AfD security officer Peter M. in an email to a party politician. After that it will be dry – until Latakia or Damascus.

It is Wednesday, March 7, 2018, 2:35 p.m.: Seven AfD members are in Syria at this time. It is a trip that M. describes from afar as irresponsible and careless.

As a German, the best way to enter Syria is to take the route via Reyhanli to the rebels: “Shortest route to Aleppo and the best arms market in the area,” writes M. Or via the northeast to the Kurds, “who wants to join IS.”

Peter M.’s emails are part of a data leak that became public in mid-October. Hackers attacked an AfD service provider and published more than 420,000 emails. According to the hackers, the data comes from the AfD.

There is a lot to be said for the authenticity of the emails. Press inquiries from the Handelsblatt could be compared. The party admitted that there had been a data leak. When asked by the Handelsblatt, the former federal spokesman for the AfD, Jörg Meuthen, also assessed an email he had sent as authentic. He could not confirm the exact time of the email…

M. quickly gets to his own people in his email. He calls them “our little excursion company”. You fly “comfortably” to Beirut and then let Hezbollah take you “the shortest route to the border, where the Russians then take you over and take care of the rest of your travel.”

He writes that you don’t have to get the visa at the Syrian embassy in Berlin - the guys from Hezbollah or the GRU, the Russian military intelligence service, do it on site “without any bureaucracy.”

On the Campaign Trail, Trump Brags about the Profitability of the Fossil Fuels Industry, Meanwhile a Study Shows He is Profiting From the Iran War by Investing Heavily in Oil & Gas Stocks

CBS News

Scott: In campaign appearances this weekend in Ohio and Michigan, Trump belittled concerns about the price of gasoline and diesel fuel, saying that Americans instead should be happy about the record profits that the fossil fuels industry is achieving in the wake of his decision to go to war against Iran. He is happy about it, he added. And indeed, he is. An examination of his own stock portfolio shows that just before he decided to go to war in the Gulf, Trump diverted huge sums in his investment portfolio into oil and gas industry stocks, from which he is now reaping huge profits. CBS News has the story.

As President Trump boasts about how much money the U.S. oil and gas industry is making from the war with Iran, the president’s personal holdings in oil and gas are now worth between $22.5 million and $81.6 million, compared with $12.6 million to $46 million at the end of 2025, according to a new report by Democrats on the Congressional Joint Economic Committee.

The stocks the president holds have increased in value by an average of 43% since the end of 2025, the Democratic minority said, based on data from LSEG Data Analytics. The report also found the president purchased between $4.7 million and $17.5 million in oil and gas stocks between March, after the war began, and the end of August, which is the most recently available data. He also sold between $2 million and $5.4 million in oil and gas stocks in the same timeframe, the minority found.

The report was obtained exclusively by CBS News and is based on the president’s financial filings with the Office of Government Ethics. Filers are only required to report transaction ranges, not specific amounts.

But as Americans are paying significantly higher gas prices due to downstream effects from the war, Mr. Trump on Saturday night in Georgia bragged that U.S. oil and gas companies are “making hundreds of billions of dollars.”

“And while oil prices are temporarily high and will be falling dramatically in a short period of time, as soon as that war’s over, because there’s so much oil,” he told the crowd. “All in the Hormuz Strait, there are ships waiting to come, we’re getting them out so fast. The United States oil and gas business is making hundreds of billions of dollars. … Our country is making hundreds of billions of dollars because of what’s happened in the Middle East.”

In Serbia, Vučiċ Falls and the Student Movement Comes to Power: But Who Are They?

Financial Times

Scott: In my career as a legal consultant I had several meetings with Aleksandar Vučiċ and always thought of him as a clever and rather complex figure, constantly trying to straddle several lines—between the Kremlin and the EU, between Serbia’s militaristic nationalists and something more peaceful and rational. He was for the most part closer to Viktor Orbán and Slovakia’s Robert Fico than other European leaders. But fidelity to the Kremlin and maintenance of its populist themes was his prime directive.

Yesterday he fell in Serbian elections that produced a remarkably clear result in favor of a spontaneous students’ movement that has produced no real high profile leadership figures and an agenda that defies conventional left-right categorization. The essence of the opposition to Vučiċ is an anti-corruption drive and demand for good government that focuses less on the global stage and more on villages and neighborhoods, rotting infrastructure and a feel that political hacks are taking the country down. Vučiċ’s dealings with Jared Kushner and his efforts to give the president’s son-in-law valued state property for development projects figured as the prime example of corruption in the country. And indeed, that’s exactly what it was. Significantly, the vote on Sunday saw a dramatic increase in voter turnout, led by young voters—who were markedly hostile to the party in power, and political parties, generally.

Financial Times gives us a look at the newly empowered student movement. Who are they and what are they up to? They turn out to be the best educated part of the electorate, and not committed to any ideology.

Serbia’s Student List swept to power without a clear leader, party structure or fully formed programme. Now the protest movement that ousted Russia-friendly, Maga-linked strongman Aleksandar Vučić must work out how to govern.

Based on collective decision-making and comprising people with no political experience, including university professors, opera singers and former sportspeople, the movement formed two years ago must now quickly form a government and prove it can rid the Balkan nation of entrenched corruption and mismanagement.

“The institutional heart will be the list of 250 candidates, most of whom will be MPs, plus the movement itself, which will guide them. They won this way. Now they need to figure out how to govern,” said Aleksandar Rankovic, a Paris-based teacher and activist who helped the movement during the election campaign.

“They have really taken the collective approach seriously,” he said, adding that the movement “will have to invent a mechanism for how to do that”.

The challenges ahead were apparent on election night, when Student List struggled to decide who should deliver its victory speech. Radomir Saičić, a chemistry professor and one of its leading figures, eventually declared: “This is the victory of the conviction that Serbia can and will do better.”

According to a projection by independent polling groups CeSID and Ipsos, 140 people on the list have won seats, including ex-basketball star Dejan Bodiroga, actor Tihomir Stanić, opera singer Nikola Mikić and former National Bank of Serbia governor Dejan Šoškić.

Topping the list is a cardiologist from Novi Sad, Ilija Srdanović, who joined the protest movement in 2024 after the collapse of a renovated railway station canopy killed 16 people. Allegations of corruption and lax oversight in the awarding of public contracts turned the disaster into a symbol of Vučić’s 14-year rule.

“As parents of four . . . when we first heard what had happened, we desperately tried to account for our family members,” Srdanović told the FT before the vote. “The sense of horror turned into anger, then demands for consequences.” The movement must also decide whether to evolve into a conventional party or retain the democratic assemblies known as plenums that have guided its decisions so far.

M42: The Great Nebula in Orion

Explanation: The Great Nebula in Orion, an immense, nearby starbirth region, is one of the most famous of all astronomical nebulas. Here, glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud only 1500 light-years away. In the featured deep image in assigned colors highlighted by emission in hydrogen, wisps and sheets of dust and gas are particularly evident. The Great Nebula in Orion can be found with the unaided eye near the easily identifiable belt of three stars in the popular constellation Orion. In addition to housing a bright open cluster of stars known as the Trapezium, the Orion Nebula contains many stellar nurseries. These nurseries contain much hydrogen gas, hot young stars, proplyds, and stellar jets spewing material at high speeds. Also known as M42, the Orion Nebula spans about 40 light years and is located in the same spiral arm of our Galaxy as the Sun.

Photo: Roberto Palaia

Your Online Moment of Zen

Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 8 (Pathétique)

Second Movement

Performed by Lang Lang

When I was seven years old I stayed home sick one winter day. The newest addition to my parents’ record collection was RCA’s boxed set of Beethoven’s 9 symphonies, performed by the NBC Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Arturo Toscanini. I played every one of them that day.

I have been addicted to the Maestro ever since.

Though I always refer to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony as Western culture’s greatest achievement (Don’t I Mr. Lowder?) the melodies that reach the very bottom of my soul are from the second movement of the Pathétique,

Re Wiki: Sonata Pathétique, was written in 1798 when the composer was 27 years old and was published in 1799. It has remained one of his most celebrated compositions. Beethoven dedicated the work to his friend Prince Karl von Lichnowsky. Although commonly thought to be one of the few works to be named by the composer himself, it was actually named Grande sonate pathétique (to Beethoven's liking) by the publisher, who was impressed by the sonata's tragic sonorities.

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BULLETIN! A Brazilian Miracle!

New York Times

Charles: President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil surged to a remarkable re-election on Sunday, according to official preliminary results.

Bolsonaro pulls a Trump, refusing to concede.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil celebrating with his running mate Geraldo Alckmin on Sunday.

Andre Penner/Associated Press

How The EPA Became the Chief Warrior for Air Pollution

New York Times

Charles: In a superb piece of investigative journalism, Eric Lipton and Maxine Joselow describe in granular detail how Donald Trump allowed the chemical industry to take over the Environmental Protection Agency and eliminate almost every new Biden-era regulation aimed at removing carcinogens in the air.

A total of 71 coal plants, 71 chemical plants, 40 sterilizers, 19 steel-related facilities and 1 copper smelter have been exempted from clean-air regulations for nonexistent “national security” reasons.

The Times spent six months pouring through 10,000 documents and interviewing more than 70 people to piece together what could be the largest and single most destructive pay for play scheme the Trump administration has carried out.

The 4,700 word piece ran exactly where it should have–as the lead story of the Sunday paper.

A complete integration of big business and the national government has always been a signature feature of fascism. This piece spells out its horrific real world consequences.

Within sight of a southeast Texas middle school stands a chemical plant that President Trump excused from new federal rules intended to curb its cancer-causing pollution.

First the President issued scores of temporary two-year waivers to allow the chemical business to spew limitless carcinogens. Then he stocked the EPA with former lobbyists and industry officials to gut the regulations altogether.

In granting the waivers to those rules, Mr. Trump cited an obscure clause in the clean air act that allows exemptions if complying with new rules would threaten national security and if the necessary technology is not widely available.

Yet the president approved the waivers even though the equipment was readily accessible and the industry’s national security claims had little detail to substantiate them, documents show.

The Biden administration pushed through the new pollution requirements after evidence emerged about the health threats posed by ethylene oxide, a colorless gas used to make products like plastic soda bottles and to sterilize medical devices like pacemakers.

E.P.A. researchers had concluded that ethylene oxide was 30 to 60 times as carcinogenic as previously thought, particularly for people who live near plants where the gas is made or used. The agency held meetings to warn community members about the elevated risks.

The Trump administration did not ask companies to present an exhaustive case for why they deserved a waiver from these new requirements. It was as easy as sending an email to the E.P.A. and invoking the obscure exemption language in the act, a provision that no president had ever used.

Mr. Trump’s decisions rewarded industries that backed his re-election campaign and continued to donate to his pet causes once he won.

AdvaMed boasted earlier this year in a letter to members that its lobbying efforts, which included political contributions to Mr. Trump’s causes, had paid off, saving the industry millions of dollars in upgrades.

“Membership has its privileges,” the group wrote.

Trump Gives Kremlin Proxy Control Over Huge Alaskan LNG Deal, US Executives Quit

Financial Times / New York Times

The Arctic LNG 2, a Russian gas export terminal developed by Novatek, was blacklisted by the US in 2023. Now US executives working on a massive new LNG terminal in Alaska learned to their shock that Trump was turning control of the project over to the Russians. Photo: AFP/Getty Images

Scott: In the week before the Trump-Putin Anchorage summit, Trump stated that he was traveling to “Russia” to meet Putin, spawning jokes in the Russian media that he intended to return control of Alaska—a Russian province before it was purchased for the US in 1867 by Secretary of State William H Seward—to Russia. But perhaps this isn’t a joke. On Friday, both the FT and NYT reported that a much-touted LNG terminal project in Alaska, built with US Government support and apparently controlled by investors close to Trump and his son, Don Jr, was being turned over to a sanctioned Russian firm, Novatek, close to the Kremlin. The news was so unsettling to US executives working on the project, all of them Exxon veterans, that they decided to resign en masse.

The news refocuses attention on the highly secretive dealings between Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s personal representatives, and the Kremlin. These dealings are ostensibly about ending the war between Russia and Ukraine. But intercepts of conversations between Kushner and Witkoff on one hand, and their Russian interlocutors (particularly Kirill Dmitriev) on the other, show that Ukraine rarely ever featured in the conversation. Instead the focus has consistently been on a series of lucrative investment deals the Russians have dangled in front of Kushner and Witkoff, with a promise that the deals will make them massively wealthy.

Prior reporting has focused on a massive sale of LUKoil foreign assets to a consortium close to Trump and his entourage, worth tens of billions of dollars. But this is only one of dozens of deals.

What marks all the proffered transactions is an effort to entangle Trump, his family, and individual investors close to him to the now heavily sanctioned Russian oil and gas industry. This obviously serves the strategic interests of Russia by helping it to overcome crippling sanctions. And it would make private US investors, all connected to Trump (and largely presumably merely proxies for Trump) very wealthy indeed. On the other hand, there is no plausible benefit for the US in such a deal. To the contrary, it works aggressively against clearly defined US national security interests.

As NYT reports, Trump’s accounts of the Alaska deal in the past claimed that he had brought in Emirati investors to support it. However, the latest dealings expose the UAE investor as a chimera. The interests behind it are Russian. And Trump clearly knew this all along.

The former chief executive of a $25bn US gas export venture has accused Russian energy giant Novatek of secretly controlling the project, triggering the mass resignation of the company’s leadership over fears it is violating US sanctions.

The company, Polar Train LNG, is developing a gas export terminal on Alaska’s North Slope, part of a Trump administration initiative to expand US energy exports to Asia and strengthen its position in global energy markets.

The venture was launched with the involvement of Gentry Beach, an investor with ties to Donald Trump’s family. It has also featured in high-level negotiations between Washington and Moscow over potential business deals that could help secure an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Polar LNG was launched in March with plans to repurpose a partially constructed Novatek gas terminal for installation in Alaska. The company sought permission from US sanctions authorities at the Treasury department to negotiate with the Russian group but had not yet received approval.

Joel Riddle, Polar LNG’s American chief executive, told the FT that he discovered Novatek was already financing the venture and directing its operations before the necessary approvals were obtained. He resigned in September, followed by almost the entire executive leadership team, including chief financial officer Dan Chandra, executive vice-president Jim Smith and executions manager Jody Trantham.

The allegations raise questions about the extent to which Russian commercial interests are already seeking a foothold in the US energy industry before any agreement has been reached. They threaten to embroil a strategically important US energy project in the fraught relationship between Washington and Moscow, despite the Trump administration’s abrupt favourable shift towards Russia.

Anderson Cooper With The Very Last Word on America's #1 Assman

Charles: Some doctors see special meaning in Donald Trump’s most recent ramblings:

Disinhibition is a trait frequently connected with severe senile dementia. Sometimes a person with dementia can lose their inhibitions and may behave in ways that others find embarrassing. . .The exclamations may reveal that a person has a long suppressed sexual orientation different from the one he manifests in public.

Judge for yourself! Go Here

Anna Paulina Luna’s Husband Owns 10% of Drone Startup That Got $37mn in Pentagon Deals

Mother Jones

Scott: Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) was the Kremlin’s longtime favorite member of Congress—so favored in fact that the Kremlin is said to have funnelled a nearly $1mn payment to him in crypto. Rohrabacher was then forced to give up his seat in Congress.

But now the Kremlin has a new favorite, Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL). Her press conferences, and particularly her statements about Ukraine, read like a Radio Moscow retransmission station. And she seems available for just about anything the Kremlin wants… like hosting a visiting delegation of State Duma members from Putin’s United Russia party.

None of this seems to pose any problem to Luna’s ability to secure (through her husband) highly lucrative contracts with sensitive defense technology. Mother Jones has the scoop.

According to Luna’s 2025 financial disclosure report, her husband, Andrew Gamberzky, works for OKSI, a defense technology and artificial intelligence company. Her financial disclosure form also indicates Gamberzky has a 10 percent ownership stake in Nokturnal AI, which Luna has described as a subsidiary of OKSI. At the end of 2025, Luna reported that Gamberzky’s 10 percent interest was valued at no more than $1,000.

But just a few weeks later, Nokturnal AI got its first government contract: a $46,222 purchase order from the Air Force for a small unmanned aircraft system. (The company was, at that point, operating under the legal name of OKSI Ventures. OKSI Ventures changed its name to Nokturnal AI in June 2026.)

Her comments about opposing the personal enrichment of lawmakers seem to conflict with her family’s stake in a private drone company that has received more than $30 million in government contracts over the past year.

That January 23, 2026, award was minuscule compared to the contracts that followed. Government acquisition documents show that between February 2 and March 20, a consortium that links tech companies to the Department of Defense received more than $9.2 million for a two-phase contract. The consortium listed OKSI Ventures as the “primary” vendor. The contract did not list any other vendors. The government’s description for the first phase of this contract was “gauntlet award.”

Meanwhile, in early 2026, Nokturnal AI was participating in a competition called “the Gauntlet.” It was part of the Defense Department’s new effort to unleash “US Military Drone Dominance,” which stemmed from an executive order President Donald Trump signed in June 2025. Upon announcing plans for the program, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said “drone dominance is a billion-dollar program funded by President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill.”

Luna is among the 218 House Republicans who voted for the bill in July 2025. That month, she also voted for the House version of the 2026 Department of Defense Appropriations Act, which included $400 million for the Pentagon’s Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies program (APFIT). According to the Pentagon, APFIT is an initiative to encourage “small business[es] or non-traditional performer[s]” to compete in the defense acquisition space. The goal is that increased competition will help bridge the “valley of death” between initial development and the implementation of new autonomous technologies.

APFIT is the same program under which Nokturnal AI received its third government contract on July 9, 2026. The contract, which stated Nokturnal AI’s former name of OKSI Ventures, shows an award of $28 million in exchange for “Unruly follow on production OT.”

According to Nokturnal AI, “Unruly” is a long-range drone missile featuring an “11 ft carbon fiber wingspan and state-of-the-art autonomy.” It’s a “completely self-reliant” system that “combines far-reaching endurance with computer-vision-aided precision.” (One can learn more about the drone by visiting Nokturnal AI’s website, which replaces the standard mouse cursor with a crosshair.)

Five days after the $28 million contract was finalized, the Department of Defense publicly announced that US Special Operations Command was spending $31 million on Unruly one-way aerial systems.

The press release did not identify Nokturnal AI as the drone vendor, nor did it specify where the remaining $3 million went.

Read more

Trump Corruption Watch

How Jared Kushner Scored Billions from Saudi and Emirati Princes To Do Their Bidding

Vanity Fair

Scott: Only a few weeks ago, Dexter Filkins used phone intercepts of Kushner’s WhatsApp calls to Russians to present us with a detailed introduction to what Kushner’s supposed negotiations with Russia about Ukraine were all about. The intercepts were furnished by Polish intelligence, but it appears that at least four other European intelligence services had the same materials. What we learned was that peacemaking was almost entirely absent from their dealings, which instead focused on the Russians dangling a long string of very lucrative private deals before the extremely naïve and very greedy personal envoys of Trump. Today, the first excerpt of Matthew Cole’s blockbuster new book, Princes and Thieves, has been published in Vanity Fair. And what we learn—this time courtesy of intercepts by Dutch intelligence—focuses much more on Kushner’s dealings with his Saudi and Emirati patrons and is still more hair-raising. Billions of dollars are dangled in front of Kushner, and he is given control of accounts holding these funds. The princes want a long slew of policy adjustments (including making war on Iran) from Washington to meet their needs, and they appear to have gotten everything they wanted. It’s pretty clear none of these things were in the national interest of the United States as historically interpreted. The brazenness and audacity of this corruption are breath-taking and far exceed anything Americans have seen in their history to date. And the facts present straightforward crimes of corruption by Kushner and others around him. The piece is an essential read, a primer on what the words “foreign policy” really mean under Trump.

In The Hague, the MIVD hacking team tried to reverse engineer the Russian penetration of Kushner’s iPhone. Kushner owned what was then the latest model, the iPhone X. Released in November 2017, it featured Face ID, a state-of-the-art security feature that Apple had promoted at its launch. The Dutch team had been trying to pick the phone’s door lock, so to speak, when it occurred to them that the Russians may have found an unlocked window to gain entry instead. Their hypothesis was correct. By early 2018, the MIVD had found a vulnerability in the iPhone that gave them access. The security exploit wasn’t perfect, however. Some malware allows a hacker to turn a victim’s phone into a microphone and video camera, turn the phone on or off, and pull and add files. The Dutch solution did not provide that level of access. Instead, when Kushner used the phone, they could see his screen. Almost as soon as they got inside, the intelligence service began capturing every image of Kushner’s screen as he used it, filing their own cache of surveillance on their internal computer servers.

As they monitored Kushner’s phone, they discovered he used it to log in to a UAE bank account. By the time the Dutch spies had visibility into the phone, the account had received hundreds of millions of dollars from a bank in Azerbaijan. Their initial assessment was that the bank account was affiliated with the government there.

“Jared was looking for shortcuts in his diplomacy,” a source who knew of the UAE’s deal with Kushner said.

For the MIVD hackers, the bank account became an intelligence mystery to unravel. Nearly everything they worked on had a tinge of Russian conspiracy. A little over a year into Trump’s first presidency, the MIVD, like FBI agents and federal prosecutors in Washington working on the Robert Mueller investigation, had only part of the story.

Kushner, UAE ruler Mohamed bin Zayed (MBZ) and Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) of Saudi Arabia, converged at an auspicious moment. MBS wanted to be crown prince. MBZ wanted to blow up Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, and Kushner wanted both to help him force the Palestinians into a deal that Israel would accept. Despite the perception of his wealth, Kushner was not entirely financially independent of his parents, and the family business, Kushner Companies, faced a billion-dollar loan coming due on their trophy property, the Manhattan office building at 666 Fifth Avenue.

Early in the first Trump administration, MBZ and MBS offered to pay for a slush fund dedicated to helping the new administration with foreign policy goals. The idea was to help pay for Trump’s promised wall between Mexico and the US, for example, in an effort to secure a second term in the White House. The two Arab royals initially discussed with Kushner putting more than $10 billion into the effort. Within months, though, as MBZ pushed the Trump administration to help back MBS’s effort to become his country’s crown prince—and future king—the broader foreign policy slush fund idea fizzled. Instead, MBZ and MBS initially, and then MBZ alone, put at least $2 billion into at least two bank accounts for Kushner. It is unclear how the royals organized their $2 billion in combined payments, but they effectively split the cost. For the purposes of explanation, it is best to understand where and how each bank account was controlled.

Bank account Alpha was held at First Abu Dhabi Bank, the largest in the UAE, and was overseen by MBZ’s brother, Tahnoon bin Zayed, who served as the bank’s chairman. Beginning in 2017, the Saudis and Emiratis transferred roughly $750 million into the Alpha account. Alpha would be used as a foreign policy fund. This money would be overseen and partially managed by Kushner and MBZ, who, in their effort to strike a grand bargain to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, believed the region’s map needed to be redrawn.

“Jared was looking for shortcuts in his diplomacy,” a source who knew of the UAE’s deal with Kushner said. This person held discussions with both senior UAE and Israeli officials about the secret financial arrangement between Kushner, the UAE, and, at least initially, Saudi Arabia. “Jared promised MBZ that he’d push their agenda with Trump if they participated in a fund. He wanted normalization with Israel so that business could take off.” A slush fund—a shared pool of money for off-the-books diplomatic objectives—was a common form of Gulf Arab government corruption, this person explained. “The Emiratis and the Saudis do this once a year. A billion or two is nothing for them, and if it gets them what they want, it’s money well spent.”

The Alpha account looked like the funding source of a UAE government program, by which MBZ paid his bureaucrats their salaries or funded government-run schools. But how and through whom the money flowed into the Alpha account revealed that it was intended to remain secret, more akin to a covert and illicit scheme, given that it was managed in part by a senior advisor to the president of the United States…

Regardless of whether he was a signatory or the owner, Jared was required by federal government regulations and the Internal Revenue Service to disclose his access to the account. Unless disclosed to and approved by the US government and reported on his tax returns, Kushner’s access to the Alpha account may have violated US law… In addition to the Alpha bank account, MBZ put money into at least one other account intended for Kushner. By the spring of 2018, the crown prince had moved roughly $1 billion to Israel via Azerbaijan for Kushner. We will refer to this account as the Beta bank account. It is unclear how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu first learned of MBZ’s money for Kushner, but a person briefed on the Beta account told me that the prime minister encouraged Kushner to have the money deposited in the Israeli Central Bank, in what would appear to be a government account. It is also unclear how Kushner used the money the UAE deposited into the Beta account for him, but according to the person with knowledge of the money, its allocation was for Kushner’s personal benefit. But as with the Alpha account, there were clues in the way the Beta account was managed.

Israel’s Central Bank does not operate personal accounts. The bank holds and transfers only government funds. The government accounts use a dual-key system, which requires two authorized individuals to make any transfers from the account as an oversight mechanism. Netanyahu required Kushner to inform him before making any transactions from the Beta account.

To do so, Kushner passed his messages through Ambassador David M. Friedman, who frequently met with Netanyahu. With the money in the Central Bank, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to connect MBZ’s payment to Jared. It is unclear if spies in the Netherlands had any indication of the Beta account…

Apparently, Kushner faced the challenge of moving money from the Beta account in Israel to other accounts where he could have untraceable access to the funds. One person who worked with Kushner to move the money out of Israel said that much of it went to bank accounts in Cyprus before being moved elsewhere…

Although Kushner’s position as senior advisor to the president was unpaid, he was an official government employee. Not only did his position require financial disclosures for ethics regulations, but each year he worked in the White House, he had to file both a public and confidential financial form, known as the Executive Branch Personnel Public Financial Disclosure Report, also known as a 278e disclosure. Because he had access to classified government secrets, Kushner was required to disclose any bank account to which he had signatory—or beneficiary—access.

Kushner’s apparent betrayal of the public trust, however, went further than his failure to disclose the secret Alpha account in the UAE or the Beta account in Israel. By giving him access to roughly $2 billion, regardless of how the money was used, MBZ and MBS were paying for his influence within the US government. Any efforts he made to shape US policy that came from a foreign government that had provided him with money would make him an agent of a foreign power. US law requires citizens who lobby on behalf of a foreign power to declare themselves and the country they are working on behalf of to the Justice Department.

One former prosecutor who worked on the Mueller investigation said that if Kushner promised anything to MBZ and MBS in return for the money they offered him—even if it was just speaking to his father-in-law—he may have violated federal bribery laws, as well as the foreign agent statute.

Kushner’s response to the Vanity Fair excerpt can be read here:

France Under Siege

A helicopter hovering over Les Halles in Paris Thursday night to enforce a curfew

Photo by Michael Finnegan

Putin’s War On Ukraine Puts Oil Giant Rosneft Under Mounting Pressure

Bloomberg

Smoke rises from a fire at Rosneft’s Tuapse Oil Terminal, in a photo distributed by Russian state media. According to Russian officials, a massive drone attack on the night of April 20 targeted the city of Tuapse.Photo: Boris Morozov/Sputnik/AP Photo

Scott: The suggestion that Ukraine’s strategic attack on Russia’s oil refining and transportation system was driving up the price of gasoline at the pump in the US is, as every industry analyst knows, utterly risible. Nevertheless, this campaign has been devastating to the Russian oil industry and was on the cusp of presenting an existential threat to Vladimir Putin and his on-going rule. Hence, he pushed the panic button and summoned Trump to reveal his true relationship by taking extreme measures to protect Putin and enable Russian ballistic missile attacks on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities. While European commentators largely understand exactly what is going on, very few commentators in the US understand it or are willing or able to describe it. Bloomberg’s deep dive into how the Ukrainian strategy has been devastatingly effective and how it was putting Putin in a desperate position is thus invaluable.

• Officials at Russia’s largest oil producer are concerned that even a few more months of the war with Ukraine could leave lasting damage across the business.

• One of Rosneft’s biggest refineries, Ryazan, has been shut for more than half the time since it was first hit by Ukraine in May and has run well below full capacity when operating, according to damage assessments seen by Bloomberg.

• Another, Syzran, has spent much of the past six months either completely shut or operating at less than a third of capacity, according to data reviewed by Bloomberg. The Tuapse refinery has been offline since April.

• Ukraine is conducting repeat strikes on the refineries as soon as repairs are completed or nearing completion. The need to repeatedly repair damaged equipment is straining operations and causing costs to pile up to levels that Rosneft officials have privately warned cannot be sustained long-term.

• Some plants have deliberately slowed repairs as a result, stretching work that should take days into weeks, according to people familiar with the matter.

• Efforts to protect the facilities with shipping containers, nets and steel cables have proved ineffective against swarms of drones, company plans show.

• The damage is particularly difficult to repair when strikes hit complex secondary units, whose parts would previously have been sourced from the West. It means relying on Russian-made copies and Chinese imports that can take months to obtain and are not always compatible with existing machinery.

• It’s put Rosneft into financial trouble. Even before the ramping up of Ukraine’s drone campaign, the company saw a “perfect storm” for its finances. Since then, its profits are down and debt is rising despite what should have been a big windfall from the Iran war.

• Moscow Credit Bank, which is linked to Rosneft, is showing signs of distress with $8 billion of problem loans. It highlights how both Russia’s energy and banking sectors are coming under strain at the same time, a dynamic causing concern to Russian finance officials.

This also helps us understand the strategy pursued by the Kremlin in dealing with Trump and his private envoys: it is to entangle them as deeply as possible in the Russian oil and gas industry and thus furnish every incentive for them to support Russian efforts to seize and incorporate Ukraine. Thus the process starts with a massive deal worth tens of billions to sell LUKoil foreign assets to cronies tied to the Trumps, who would likely hold the assets under a US Treasury license as proxies for Trump and his entourage.

What Russia is doing was all described in Putin’s remarkable dissertation as a kandidat nauk at the St Petersburg School of Mines, in which he argued that Russia’s oil and gas resources could and should be manipulated to accomplish the country’s national security objectives—by enticing and corrupting foreign interests, among other things.

It’s truly remarkable that no major US corporate media appear to be capable of stringing simple facts together into a credible analysis of what’s going on right under their noses. But then, it seems they don’t want to do this.

Trump Corruption Watch (2)

Venezuela After the Apocalypse

The Atlantic

The remnants of a public-housing complex in La Guaira, Venezuela, in September, more than two months after two earthquakes devastated the city and neighboring Caracas. Photos: Lynsey Addario

Scott: What is happening in Venezuela today furnishes an excellent demonstration of what Trump “foreign policy” is all about. It is not a foreign policy in a conventional sense, in which the national interests of a country are elaborated and pursued through diplomatic, political, economic and military means. Rather for Trump, foreign policy means using the power, prestige and influence of the United States to accumulate private resources and influence for the Trump family and its entourage. The means used are not so much like the imperialism pursued by the European great powers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rather they are more akin to the conduct of an organized crime family moving in on a neighboring territory. The capo of the neighboring family may be executed, but the rest of the family may be left in place as long as it supplies a suitable cut to the capo de tutti capi. Anne Applebaum reports:

After the boom came the bust, at first slowly and then very fast. Hugo Chávez, who ruled the country as a leftist authoritarian from 1999 to 2013, and then Nicolás Maduro, the autocrat who succeeded Chávez and ran the country until he was removed by an American military operation early this year, undermined the industry, chasing away engineers and impoverishing workers. Even as they said they were building “Bolivarian socialism,” they removed benefits, lowered salaries, and created a capricious, repressive regime. Millions of people left the country.

Most American and European companies left too. The Russian and Chinese companies that arrived to replace them invested very little. Lake Maracaibo, the largest body of water in South America, also became one of the largest environmental disasters in South America. Two decades of neglect produced leaks, spills, poisoned water, and the ghostly drilling platforms I saw from the fishing boat. Fishermen sometimes rinse their crabs and shrimp with gasoline to remove the crude oil. All of their nets turn brown.

Billions of dollars of investment will be needed to remediate the site and recover more oil. In the meantime, people who live around the lake, like millions of other Venezuelans, work hard and earn very little. Their fish have to be sold immediately, because electricity is unpredictable and freezers are thus unreliable. Rapid inflation—20 percent in July, an annualized rate of 783 percent—has made everything unaffordable. In a Caracas market, I found prices and exchange rates written on whiteboards, because they change every day.

Fishermen and their families live along the polluted shores of the lake, the largest body of water in South America—and one of the continent’s largest environmental disasters.

The state is absent, or indifferent. Carlos pointed to a scar on his leg that he said was an old gunshot wound, the souvenir of an assault by one of the pirates who control the lake: “If you don’t pay them, they kill you and take your boat.” The coast guard is supposed to patrol the lake, he said, but it is rarely there.

The oil industry offers few well-paying jobs. At a lakeside town, its beaches blackened by oil, Francisco, a former boat mechanic at the state oil company⁠—Petróleos de Venezuela, or PDVSA—told me he had quit because he got tired of not having the right tools and spare parts. One of Francisco’s neighbors, Iliana, told me her husband had quit PDVSA too, after his salary plummeted from $50 a day to just a few cents a day. He now works for a Russian company that pays about $35 a day, but he has to spend most nights sleeping on the drilling platform.

From a great distance—Washington, say, or Mar-a-Lago⁠ —Venezuela is sometimes described as a bonanza for America, a trove of riches. On January 3, the day that the U.S. military captured Maduro, Donald Trump promised that it would be. “We’ll run it properly; we’ll run it professionally,” he said at a press conference that day. “We’ll have the greatest oil companies in the world going and invest billions and billions of dollars, and take out money, use that money in Venezuela, and the biggest beneficiary are gonna be the people of Venezuela.” But at that same press conference, he also announced that he would be working with a new president: Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s deputy and a leading member of the regime that had caused the destruction in the first place. He dismissed the country’s opposition leader, María Corina Machado—who was the true winner of Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election—as a “nice woman” who “doesn’t have the respect within the country.”

In Venezuela, this language sounded jarring. Since then, it has become even more confusing, because it is so at odds with reality. When I asked people living right next to some of Venezuela’s largest oil fields whether Rodríguez had made any difference to the industry or the country, they laughed or sneered. Iliana told me, “People thought that things would change, but in reality nothing changed.” José, another fisherman who used to work for PDVSA, had a darker view: “The gringos came to rob everything—the oil, the minerals. We are rich in everything, but here, we don’t have anything.” Later, a local oil engineer told me that none of the American agreements matters anyway, because the Venezuelan government is illegitimate and so “nothing is legal.”

Cops left the force. They kept tracking people with a powerful camera network.

Washington Post

Scott: Surveillance cameras are the centerpiece of any surveillance state worth its salt. Which is why Flock and its project of spreading surveillance across the US is so important. And it seems however low the assumptions surrounding this system, the reality always turns out to be still worse.

Though Flock has pitched itself as a security-first business that closely controls access to its trove of license-plate data, company leaders have resisted calls from their own staff to implement stricter guardrails, according to three former employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid professional repercussions.

Flock managers told staff repeatedly that they didn’t want to create barriers to securing camera contracts with law enforcement agencies that were resistant to more restrictive security controls, two of the employees said.

To provide the most detailed accounting to date of unauthorized access, including two incidents that have not been previously reported, The Post interviewed police or city officials in eight states and three former Flock employees who worked on technical issues. The Post also analyzed Flock software logs released in response to public records requests, court documents, police records and officials’ statements.

The 11 incidents of unauthorized access tallied by The Post reveal how easily users could gain or retain access to Flock’s data. In four of the cases, officers were able to keep using their log-ins to Flock after leaving the force or while serving a suspension, because their accounts were not shut off. In six of the cases, police shared log-ins or passwords with active law enforcement officers from other agencies, in what officials later deemed violations of state laws, department policies or Flock contracts.

In Indianapolis, a police recruit who was not authorized to access Flock was able to use the tool for more than two years after a more senior officer opened it on the more junior officer’s laptop and didn’t log out. The junior officer, Matthew Binford, used his colleague’s credentials to search his estranged wife’s license plate more than 1,000 times over a 12-month period, according to a court affidavit. Prosecutors criminally charged Binford and four other Indianapolis officers last month, after an August inquiry from The Post prompted an agencywide audit by the city’s police department.

Binford declined to comment when reached by phone.

Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based company valued by investors at $7.5 billion last year, has rapidly built a nationwide surveillance network, blanketing roadsides with at least 120,000 cameras that photograph passing cars and enable police to track suspects’ vehicles over time. The network’s growth has also expanded the potential for abuse: The Post has reported that at least 100 employees of law enforcement agencies have been charged with or accused of misusing license-plate readers for unauthorized purposes.

Flock has been slow to adopt basic safeguards that are standard practice among commercial and government software vendors — measures that could have prevented many of the intrusions, according to security experts interviewed by The Post.

Many police departments don’t require employees to register Flock accounts to a government-issued email address, which could be deactivated at the end of their employment, interviews and officials’ statements show. Though Flock contractually requires the use of official emails, the company acknowledges it hasn’t widely enforced that policy until recently.

While movie-streaming companies like Netflix have built tools to crack down on password sharing, Flock does not appear to closely monitor for log-ins occurring from unusual locations and devices, said Jon Gaines, an independent security researcher.

Marina mania: super-rich compete for superyacht slots

Financial Times

Port Hercule, venue for the annual Monaco Yacht Show

Scott: In the world that Trump, Putin and their tech bro fellow travelers are building, there won’t be money for hospitals and healthcare, but there will be plenty of money for data centers, the development of new AI-guided weapons systems, and for various military entertainments for the empire-builders. On the other hand, the plutocrat class will have a whole new category of trials and tribulations, like finding suitable berths for their superyachts—an obsession shared by the tech bros and the Russian oligarchs.

A group of white yachts — sails down, masts tall — float off the Greek island of Corfu, waiting to dock at the Gouvia marina in the late afternoon sun. It is the first Friday in September and the weather is perfect for sailing — hot, with an occasional breeze.

The Gouvia marina occupies the site of a former Venetian shipyard, built during an Ottoman invasion in 1716. It now encompasses circa 200,000 sq m of green-blue waters, protected from the choppier Mediterranean Sea. Across its pontoons, it can dock 1,300 craft, from small motorboats to multistorey yachts, and today there seem to be almost that number in residence, hardly a spare berth in sight.

“You see each year more and more boats in the Mediterranean Sea, and it is super-tough to build new marinas,” says Oliver Dörschuck, chief executive of D-Marin, which owns the port at Gouvia and more than 20 others in the region. “We normally have three to four boats inquiring for one berth.”

The marina at Gouvia is one of about 400 premium marinas located in the Mediterranean, the global capital of the yachting industry, with around a thousand in total in the region. It is in the same league as the likes of Port Hercule, host of September’s Monaco Yacht Show, and Porto Montenegro.

Yet while the number of yachts is flourishing, the number of marinas is not. Thanks to regulatory barriers, environmental restrictions and a limited supply of suitable locations, it remains difficult to build a port.

This mismatch is turning an overlooked sector into big business. Earlier this year D-Marin was sold by its private equity owners, CVC, to the French investment group InfraVia for more than €1bn. The sale auction drew interest from numerous companies, the latest deal to underscore the attraction of the business model. Industry executives expect further acquisitions.

Marina mania is more than a business play, although it is certainly that. The market is fragmented, with few large-scale players, and demand has grown from clients around the world. But what gives the phenomenon its real spice is that it forces the super-wealthy into competition with each other for a defiantly limited, slowly expanding stock of berths. They may have all the money in the world, but that does not mean they can dock where they please.

Josephine De Luca, who runs an independent consultancy representing boat owners, says that she never had trouble finding a berth at Port Vauban in Antibes for her clients before the pandemic ignited the yacht boom.

“It’s actually about scarcity now, for me that’s really key,” De Luca says. “Berthing — it’s not just more expensive but because the yachts are bigger and there’s a finite amount of berths, the bigger change is being able to get the berth you want.”

The First Green Star, WD J1330+6435

Explanation: Star light, star bright: is there a green star out tonight? Other than the Sun, all stars are so far from Earth that they appear as points in the sky. They are mostly white, but sometimes noticeably red or blue. This color typically relates to the temperature: blue stars are hotter than red stars. What about other colors? The featured image is an illustration showing WD J1330+6435, a white dwarf star, surrounded by an accretion disk with gas and rocks orbiting the star. White dwarfs are small, faint stars that are left over when a star like the Sun exhausts its nuclear fuel. Astronomers recently found that some white dwarf stars, despite their name, would appear yellow, green, cyan, pink, or purple. In these cases, trace elements that were accreted to these stars interact with the stellar atmosphere and shift its normally white color. But, alas! I wish I may, I wish I might, but they are too faint to see tonight…

Illustration: Mark A. Garlick/University of Warwick

Your Online Moment of Zen

City Blocks

Joe Stouter

Oil on canvas

2022

This Bribe Was Worth $50 million for Alina Habba / Gopnik On France / A SCOTUS Miracle / Another Bribery Investigation Shut Down by Trump / Musk Lets Missiles Rain Down on Ukraine / Brad Lander Seized In Israel For Picking Olives / Donnie and Vlad In Lockstep Again

Alina Habba Nets a Cool $50mn on the Latest Pay-to-Play Pardons Grift

New York Times

Julio H…

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Lesley Stahl Strikes Back

Charles: Last week I slammed Lesley Stahl for a feeble piece that let Israeli settlers pretend that their horrific attacks against Palestinian residents of the West Bank were l…

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A Threesome Right Out of 1984 / Haunted Holocaust Memorials Wherever AfD Is / The New Trans-Atlantic Alliance / Looting And Despair in France MAGA and the Kremlin Goosestepping Together

Putin Proposes Yalta II So that He Can Divide Up the World With Trump and Xi

Wall Street Journal

Russian President Vladimir Putin. Photo: Igor Ivanko/…

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Violence Tears At The Fabric of France / Judge Targets DOJ Lawyers for Discipline / US Threatens Europe for the Tech Bros / Tik Tok Blacks Out Musk for Musk / The French Economists Behind California’s Wealth Tax

France: “A Level Of Violence We Have Never Seen Before”

The Guardian

The Mairie of Limoges…

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Zelenskyy defies Trump as Ukraine resumes strikes on Russian refineries

Financial Times

Volodymyr Zelenskyy: ‘The block [on attacking refineries] is out. We’re done’ © Charlie Bibby/FT

Scott: Over the last forty-eight hours, Elon Musk and Donald Trump have been competing for honors as to who can do more to betray Ukraine. By rights, Zelenskyy should be in a state of furor and striking back. But unlike both Musk and Trump, Zelenskyy is a serious and important person in world historical terms. And in an interview with the FT, he offers up a remarkably sober and astute take on who Trump is and what he’s doing. It’s something to which the US corporate media should pay attention, but won’t.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said Ukraine will restart strikes on Russia’s oil refineries as he expressed anger over a “dangerous” withdrawal of US intelligence and simultaneous weakening of Starlink satellite internet service at a time of intense Russian attacks.

“The block [on attacking refineries] is out. We’re done,” Zelenskyy said in a defiant interview with the FT in London. He also lambasted Washington’s eagerness to strike business deals with Moscow and President Donald Trump’s apparent admiration for Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Asked to explain the two leaders’ relationship, Zelenskyy said Trump had an instinctive affinity for autocrats and the super wealthy. “He [Trump] speaks about it openly and loudly that he loves such people and he respects such people. Because for him people who can be leaders 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, it means they can be very strong.”

Washington has piled pressure on Kyiv to stop hitting Russia’s refineries, claiming that a moratorium, alongside a US deal with Moscow to buy hundreds of thousands of tonnes of Russian diesel, is essential to bring down American fuel prices.

Zelenskyy said he had paused energy strikes for three days to comply with US wishes, while Moscow continued to pound Ukrainian energy infrastructure and kill civilians — more than 100 in the past week.

But Zelenskyy suggested Trump could face a public backlash. “This politically is not simple [in America], because everybody will want to ask how it can be when some people are surviving, fighting, dying — and you make . . . business with the guys with such aggression.”

The Ukrainian president was speaking in central London after a day of meetings with King Charles, UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham and defence officials. On Friday he will address EU leaders in Brussels to plead for more robust sanctions against Russia and a faster release of EU funds to assist Ukraine’s war effort.

Zelenskyy said fighting without the US would be “very difficult” and conceded Europe would be stronger if truly united.

But a spate of elections in Europe over the next 12 months, with possible gains for pro-Russian parties, could bring “a lot of challenges” for Ukraine, he added. Asked about French far-right leader Marine Le Pen’s vow to stop financing Ukraine, he said France had a lot to lose because experience of the Ukrainian battlefield was essential for its defence companies. “It’s a win-win.”

Following Zelenskyy’s comments, Pavel Malkov, the governor of Russia’s Ryazan province, on Thursday said Ukrainian drone strikes had caused a fire at a refinery owned by state oil company Rosneft, adding that the damage was being assessed.

A Ukrainian official told the FT on Thursday that Kyiv hit a refinery in Russia’s Ryazan province overnight in retaliation for Moscow’s energy strikes. Rosneft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Ukrainian state energy company Naftogaz said Russia had struck one of its gas production facilities east of Kyiv overnight, halting operations.

Despite Ukraine’s pause, Zelenskyy said his forces had been left without US early-warning alerts for incoming ballistic missiles, while Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite communications service had been slowed down across the country, hampering frontline operations and medium-range strikes against Russian military sites.

Zelenskyy said Ukrainian military officials were told by their US counterparts that “if you will not stop [the energy strikes], we will block intelligence”, although it was subsequently presented to Kyiv as a technical glitch. He also dismissed the idea that failures of the Starlink system might have been caused by a fault. “It was not a technical problem, it was the will.”

Trump Corruption Watch

Trump’s Ballroom is Another Gigantic Pay For Play (Surprise!)

Washington Post

Charles: In another blockbuster exclusive, Washington Post reporters Jonathan O’Connell, Sarah Blaskey and Aaron Schaffer obtained the list of all the major contributors to Trump’s ballroom “including previously undisclosed contributors who have benefited from regulatory decisions, government contracts and, in one case, a pardon for a family member.”

The vast majority of funds came from companies and wealthy citizens doing business with the Federal government.

Nvidia and Apple, the Adelson family, and Charles Ergen, co-founder and chairman of Dish Network, each committed $25 million to the project.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told reporters that the company was contributing to Trump’s ballroom “in a small way” but did not provide a dollar amount. Documents show Nvidia requested that its $25 million donation be kept anonymous.

The White House publicly identified 37 people, companies and foundations as donors last October, without revealing the amount of their individual gifts.

The list obtained by The Post, an internal spreadsheet used to track contributions for the fundraising effort, contains the source, date and amount of all 67 donations above $10,000 recorded as of late last month. It shows a total of $333 million from private donors, aligning with the administration’s public statements. Additional records, also internal to the fundraising effort, provide more detail about the donations and indicate that at least $77 million came from donors who requested anonymity.

Cryptocurrency companies, now under loosened regulations from the Trump administration, and their investors promised more than $18 million. The largest portion came from Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, co-founders of the Gemini crypto exchange, who together donated bitcoin valued at $5,050,018, the records show.

One of the earliest commitments to donate to the ballroom, from Sept. 23, 2025, came from the daughter of Julio Herrera Velutini, an international banker and dual Venezuelan-Italian citizen.

In 2022, the Justice Department indicted Herrera Velutini, then 50, on bribery charges, accusing him of helping finance the campaign of Puerto Rico’s then-governor in exchange for the removal of a regulator investigating his bank. The former governor and a political consultant were also charged.

Herrera Velutini and his attorney unsuccessfully tried to get the case dismissed, claiming prosecutors were criminalizing lawful political activity.

After Trump’s victory, Herrera’s daughter, Isabela Herrera, made two donations to Trump’s MAGA Inc., a political action committee, totaling $3.5 million, campaign finance records show.

The donations prompted the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center to file a complaint with the Federal Election Commission alleging that Isabela Herrera was serving as a “straw donor” for her father. The organization described her as a self-employed financial consultant in her mid-20s whose only prior political donation was $20 to Pete Buttigieg, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate.

The organization said it got no response from the FEC, which declined to comment for this story.

In August 2025, Herrera Velutini’s charges were reduced to a misdemeanor as part of a plea agreement.

The following month, Isabela Herrera committed to donating $2.5 million for the ballroom, which has not been previously reported. Records show she paid a first installment of $835,000 on Oct. 14, 2025. Trump pardoned Herrera Velutini in January. Herrera’s second payment was due this month, the records show.

Last year, Charles Ergen, the telecommunications executive, found his company EchoStar in the Trump administration’s crosshairs.

Brendan Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, wrote Ergen in May to inform him that the agency had begun investigating EchoStar. Carr threatened to yank government licenses that were critical to the survival of the business, accusing EchoStar, owner of Dish Network, of not following through on promises it had made to upgrade its cellphone network.

The following month, Ergen met with Trump and Carr behind closed doors to discuss the investigation, according to Bloomberg. The outlet, citing unnamed sources, said the June 11 discussion included a brief exchange about Ergen’s political donations and whether he gave to candidates in both political parties.

The company referenced a June 11 meeting between Ergen and Carr in a regulatory filing and wrote that Trump “subsequently encouraged the parties involved to reach an amicable resolution.”

Ergen negotiated a deal to sell some of the company’s licenses to AT&T in August, subject to approval of the FCC and Justice Department.

Carr dropped the investigation the following month, thanking Ergen for his responses and for information he had provided.

In December, with the sale still pending, Ergen committed $12.5 million to Trump’s ballroom, according to the donation list. Records indicate Ergen requested that the source of the donation remain anonymous. The donation has not been previously reported.

U.S. lifts sanctions on Delcy Rodríguez’s brother amid Venezuela controversy

Miami Herald

Venezuela’s National Assembly President Jorge Rodriguez arrives to address the media and sign agreements during the closing day of the first cycle of national dialogue talks, in Caracas on Aug. 12, 2026. Leonardo Fernandez Viloria REUTERS

Scott: How do we distinguish the empire building practices of George W Bush and his Neocons with Donald Trump and MAGA world? Venezuela is furnishing an excellent demonstration of how Trump builds an empire. In essence, it’s exactly the way the kingpin of an organized crime family would. The Neocons spoke of spreading democracy and market economics and addressing human rights abuses. Trump however is perfectly happy to keep the previous crime kingpin in power provided that he makes the necessary payments to the capo di tutti capi and creates opportunities for his lieutenants. And nothing demonstrates this better than the unexplained decision taken today to eliminate sanctions against a Maduro deputy who the US previously described as a corrupt drug trafficker. It turns out that Jorge Rodríguez may very well be just that, but as long as Trump gets his take, it’s perfectly okay.

The Trump administration has removed Jorge Rodríguez, the brother of Venezuela’s acting President Delcy Rodríguez and one of the country’s most powerful political figures, from a U.S. Treasury Department sanctions list, further intensifying an already controversial relationship between Washington and the Venezuelan government that succeeded ousted President Nicolás Maduro. The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control announced the removal of Jorge Jesús Rodríguez Gómez from its Specially Designated Nationals List, reversing sanctions imposed in September 2018 when the United States accused him and other members of Maduro’s inner circle of helping the Venezuelan leader consolidate his grip on power. The action comes amid growing cooperation between Washington and the government headed by Rodríguez’s sister, which has reportedly facilitated the transfer of prominent businessmen wanted by U.S. prosecutors, including Alex Saab in May and his longtime business partner Álvaro Pulido earlier this week. The Treasury notice does not explain why Rodríguez was removed from the sanctions list or indicate whether the decision was connected to Venezuela’s recent cooperation with U.S. authorities. The decision marks another significant development in the Trump administration’s increasingly controversial relationship with the Venezuelan government that emerged after Maduro was removed from power in January. Many Venezuelans, particularly opponents of the former president, view Rodríguez not as a departure from the authoritarian system they have long opposed, but as its continuation under new leadership. As one of Maduro’s closest and most powerful allies, she remains closely associated with a regime widely blamed for political repression, economic devastation and the exodus of millions of Venezuelans. For those critics, Washington’s growing embrace of her administration raises concerns that the United States may be helping preserve the very political system it once sought to dismantle. Jorge Rodríguez, a longtime Maduro ally who has held several senior government positions, has remained an influential figure in Venezuelan politics and a central member of the leadership surrounding his sister.

Paying The Price For Trusting The USA

Phillips R O’Brien

As America’s space budget is largely simply signed over to Elon Musk, Trump and Musk view a US taxpayer funded SpaceX Starship rocket launch in Brownsville, Texas, on Nov. 19, 2025.

Scott: This week America’s long-time allies have learned the hard way that relying on a Trump-led United States to behave as it promised is a very dangerous thing. The US has no alliance or partnership with the Russian Federation. But now we can see that in Trump’s mind, Russia is the paramount partner, and America’s role is a subservient one. This week that fact translated into hundreds of dead civilians in Ukraine as Trump pulled the plug on Ukraine’s missile system so that a ballistic missile attack from Russia—that clearly seems to have been coordinated with the White House—could rain down on apartment buildings in Kyiv.

Two states in particular are paying a great price this week for trusting in the USA—those are Saudi Arabia and Ukraine (and through all of Ukraine, Europe as well). Both states are getting bombarded by their enemies and are either being abandoned by the USA or, in the case of Ukraine, are seeing these attacks being supported by the USA. It is a lesson that needed to be learned long before this, but sadly was not. The depressing thing is that things will only get worse and that will be the first story in this update.

The second part of this midweek update will cover the fast-developing story of how the US government is now dealing a major blow to the Ukrainian war effort through limiting Ukraine’s access to Starlink/Spaceshield, over the territory of Ukraine. This started being reported on yesterday morning and represents the greatest overt act of the United States as it attempts to crush Ukrainian democracy on behalf of Russia’s Putinist dictatorship. The primer will go through what has happened, why it matters so much and how it came about (probably). It will also mention some important early signs of blowback. This really is one of those decisions that will live in infamy.

At the end of that will be a short word of warning for what this all means for Europe and the rest of the world. The USA is showing everyone what vulnerability truly means. I do hope you are paying attention.

Paying The Price For Trusting The USA

In some ways the geopolitical positions of Saudi Arabia and Ukraine are eerily similar. Both had based almost all (in the case of Saudi Arabia) or at least some of its most important (in the case of Ukraine) defense capabilities on the fact that the USA was a trustworthy partner.

The Saudis in some ways had the most obvious investment. For decades they had invested hundreds of billions of US dollars in buying US military equipment. They had also hosted US bases. It was all part of a plan to “purchase security” as I like to call it—and not actually prepare to defend yourself based on your own resources. It was an almost total strategic outsourcing that seemed to work for decades, but which actually has left the Saudis extraordinarily vulnerable.

The Ukrainians, it could be said, had little choice. They had certain defensive needs, and had been put in a position where they had no ready replacements for US assistance. That of course made them arguably even more vulnerable.

Let’s discuss the Saudis first. In the last seven days (since last midweek update) the Houthis have been able to launch a wide range of strategic attacks on Saudi Arabia. Here are the main ones that I could find.

Thu 8 Oct – King Khalid International Airport (KKIA)

Saudi-confirmed: There seem to have been two attacks: the first hit airport facilities and the second a Saudia aircraft. (Gulf News; AeroTime)

Debris damage: Ballistic missiles were intercepted over Riyadh, and falling debris reportedly damaged several buildings. (CFR tracker)

Sat 10 Oct – KKIA Again

Casualties: Bloomberg reports 12 killed and 309 wounded (Bloomberg). Reuters reports 13 killed and more than 300 wounded (Reuters via Hawaii Tribune-Herald).

Saudi authorities said four of the dead were Saudis and the rest foreign nationals.

Sun 11 Oct – KKIA Again, also King Fahd Airport (Dammam), and claimed Aramco strikes

KKIA: A further attack killed one person and injured 11.

Dammam, Saudi-confirmed: King Fahd International Airport was targeted. (QNA)

Houthi claim (unconfirmed): Four operations, including strikes on Aramco’s Shedgum gas plant and the Tanajib oil facility, and said both sites caught fire

Other activity: A ballistic missile aimed at Khamis Mushait was intercepted. (CFR)

Mon 12 Oct – Riyadh

The coalition said it downed a ballistic missile fired at Riyadh, while the Houthis said they had targeted KKIA. (Al Jazeera)

Tue 13 Oct – Aramco headquarters, Dhahran

Saudi-confirmed: The energy ministry said Aramco’s executive headquarters in Dhahran was hit and part of the complex caught fire. (Bloomberg, Al Jazeera)

Context: Earlier that day the Houthis had told people near Saudi oil facilities to evacuate, calling the sites legitimate targets. The strike came hours after Saudi strikes on a Sanaa oil facility. Al Jazeera

A Word Of Warning for Europe and the World

I am not sure that there could be a better example for the rest of the world about the great peril they are in if they rely too much on the USA (or any other country) to provide for their security. There were supposedly safeguards put in place so Ukraine would not be exposed like this. Europeans are paying for this service, under contract, and the US has created an obligation through that to make sure that Ukraine has such linkage at least over the territory of Ukraine (and that is unoccupied and occupied territory).

Because of such assurances, the Ukrainians have built up much of their campaign based on the assumption that they would have such a service when needed. Moreover, as this service had nothing to do with the Ukrainian strike campaign against Russian refineries, they did not believe that it was under peril.

They were foolish, of course. The USA cannot be trusted these days to fulfil any contract or obligation and the US government is now determined to get the best deal possible for Vladimir Putin. However, it seems, having built this Starlink/Starshield dependency into their plans, the Ukrainians felt they had no alternative but to proceed as is.

They are now left exposed.

What they, and the Europeans, must do now is build their own such system, access to which can never be controlled by another power. It is simply too vital to have such communications. I hear people saying that it will take too long and will be too expensive. This argument is so ass-backwards it is hard to engage with. First off, a primitive system can be developed relatively quickly if Europeans were determined. The Russians have put their own primitive system, called Rassvet, into operation in relatively short order, and supposedly it is getting better and better. It should soon be a major aid for them.

Usually what people are saying when they claim that there is no alternative, is that they do not want to invest enough to build an alternative.

Europeans have actually been doing some preplanning on this for a while. There are a number of possible European-secured starlink competitors (six I believe). So far the problem has not been technology as much as it is money.

Chandra Finds Possible Origin of ‘Treble Clef’ Waves

A formation of radio waves looks remarkably like a treble clef in this Oct. 14, 2026, image from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory. Researchers used Chandra to find that the Treble Clef is likely caused by an outburst from a supermassive black hole, followed by a collision of two galaxy clusters.

Read more about this discovery.

Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/INAF-IRA/A. Botteon et al.; Infrared: UKIDSS-GPS ; Radio: ASTRON/LOFAR; Image processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk

Your Online Moment of Zen

Baby, Stop Crying

Performed and written by Bob Dylan

Released as the 4th song on the first side of the album Street Legal, June 15, 1978

A shorter version was released as a single in the USA, July 31, 1978

Most critics were baffled and appalled when Street Legal was first released–just because Bob had once again completely reinvented himself. The single of Baby, Stop Crying failed to chart in America but it reached #13 in the UK and was a top-ten song in much of Europe.

Over the next four decades the album was gradually accepted as a vital part of the Dylan canon.

When I interviewed Bob I asked him, “What's sixteen years mean at the beginning of Street Legal?”

”That's one thing I can't really say,” he replied. “That was the first line to the song, and sometimes you don't know what it means yourself.”

But now it seems quite obvious—Street Legal was released sixteen years (and three months) after his first album, Bob Dylan.

I loved Street Legal right from the start.

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Elon Musk Again Supports Moscow, Shutting Down Starlink Support Needed for Ukrainian Defense Against Russian Missiles

The Guardian

Russian ballistic missiles raining down on Kyiv as Elon Musk pulls the plug on Starlink resources used to defend against the missiles. Reuters

Scott: Studies have consistently shown that Elon Musk’s climb to trillionaire status was achieved on the back of US taxpayers, who funded the research and development of his various ventures with little return on their investment. His is quite simply the most dramatic example of state investment converted to private wealth in human history. Now add to this the fact that Elon Musk, also the most powerful holder of government contracts in US history—many of them involving highly classified projects—has decided to pursue his own foreign policy. And that policy is unmistakably aligned at critical points with Vladimir Putin… a man with whom, as the WSJ and ZDF have reported, he has maintained a covert and illicit dialogue for many years. Putin’s obsession right now is simple: to secure as much advantage in his war against Ukraine as possible before America’s midterm elections produce likely constraints against his various US sock puppets, particularly Trump, Musk and Thiel. And Musk is chiming in right on time to allow Russian ballistic missiles meet their targets in Ukrainian cities with no defense from the Ukrainians defenders, who rely, to their detriment, on Musk’s StarLink.

Launch of Russian ballistic missiles on Ukraine, with no US warning, coincides with outage of Starlink managed by Musk’s SpaceX

Ukraine’s military has suddenly had its access to Starlink satellite internet terminals restricted as the Trump administration has increased pressure on Ukraine to halt long-range strikes on Russia’s oil industry immediately.

The terminals, which are produced by Elon Musk’s SpaceX but managed by the US government, are a key component of Ukraine’s military operations and the sudden restrictions on the terminals travelling at high speeds on Tuesday evening led to the failure of several combat missions, said an adviser on military technology to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

The sudden outage came as Russia launched ballistic missiles at Ukraine without any advance warning from the US for a second night. For years, the US has provided Ukraine with intelligence when strikes were about to take place.

Donald Trump has denied that his administration has cut intelligence sharing with Ukraine. Zelenskyy also indicated that the US was continuing to share intelligence with Ukraine in an interview with NPR aired on Wednesday, but confirmed that military advisers had received threats from the US that intelligence sharing could be limited.

Ukraine did not receive any warning before Russia launched its first barrage of ballistic missiles on Tuesday evening, according to Col Yurii Ihnat, a spokesperson for the air force. But it did receive warnings from “foreign partners” about three subsequent barrages, leaving further confusion about whether or not the US is intentionally withholding intelligence from Ukraine.

Musk said that Starlink is not licensed to clients who are using weapons, and that the Ukrainian military was linked to a separate network called Starshield, which is operated by the US government. “This is not under SpaceX control,” Musk wrote.

Terminals travelling at more than 100mph and using a version of Starlink for the military and other national security agencies suddenly lost connectivity, said Serhiy Beskrestnov, in what appeared to be a targeted outage meant to disrupt military operations.

“Our armed forces did not receive a warning about these restrictions and this led to the failure of a number of missions,” said Beskrestnov, who is also a popular military blogger. “It’s clear that this action cannot be a coincidence and is connected to the current political situation.”

Limiting Starlink’s access speeds would have a significant effect on Ukraine’s air defences because it is being used, according to Beskrestnov, in “the most current effective solution”: interceptors that target the jet-powered Shahed drones now deployed in large numbers to bomb Ukraine.

“With their actions our partners are depriving us of one of the few chances we have to defend ourselves,” he added in a follow-up post. Shahed interception rates had already dropped from more than 90% to about 60% when Russia upgraded its engines to jet power in the early summer.

Musk has supported Trump’s calls for Zelenskyy to be replaced as Ukraine’s leader – an extraordinary act of political interference against a wartime ally – as a personal feud between the two presidents has burst into the open.

The reports that Starlink was being throttled on the frontlines were interpreted by some as further pressure on Ukraine to end the fighting and make a deal with Russia at any cost.

US Department of Revenge Targets California With New Election Disruption Scheme

Los Angeles Times

Charles: With early voting already under way, the Department of Revenge (formerly, Justice) launched a new scheme to disrupt voting in California, demanding state officials prove the citizenship of any voter flagged by the Feds as a possible noncitizen, or set aside their ballots.

In letters to the California Secretary of State and the Los Angeles County Clerk’s office, the acting deputy U.S. Attorney General demanded that state officials check their rolls against a list provided by the Feds of possible noncitizens. “We request that you review the list within 48 hours to determine whether any citizens are listed. For individuals whom you cannot independently confirm citizenship status, we request that you immediately instruct the appropriate elections officials to segregate — not cancel — those individuals’ vote-by-mail ballots until their citizenship status can be determined,” R. Trent McCotter wrote. “Voters on the federal list who haven’t already been sent a ballot should not be sent one until their citizenship is verified, while ballots already returned by voters on the list should not be counted until their citizenship is verified,”

Todd Blanche, head of the Department of Revenge

Similar Federal lists provided to other states have been wildly unreliable:

“One must question why the DOJ would violate its own rules about investigating elections close to election day, and over a week after they knew the state had already mailed ballots out, particularly when their past claims have been full of errors,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research.

Becker noted the Trump administration alleged that there were nearly 16,000 noncitizens registered in Nevada, later reduced that number to 185 after additional scrutiny, and then determined all of them were in fact citizens.

Obviously, the only reason for the Feds to make these demands nineteen days before election day is to sow as much chaos and confusion as possible–because they know they are facing one of biggest blue waves of all time.

FBI Crime Enforcement Plummets; Kash Patel Starts Fudging with the Numbers

MS-Now

Kash Patel, director of the FBI, during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Sept. 15, 2026, in Washington, D.C.Graeme Sloan / Bloomberg via Getty Images

Scott: As he heads off to Moscow and St Petersburg for curiously extended meetings hosted by his handlers or counterparts at the Russian FSB (successor to the KGB), Kash Patel faces embarrassing disclosures concerning the performance of the FBI as America’s leading police force. Overall criminal case filings by the FBI have dropped precipitously. This stems directly from two major events during Patel’s tenure at the Bureau: first, firing or forcing the resignation of some 1,500 special agents on various pretexts; and second, reassigning thousands of agents to politically-motivated wild goose chases targeting political adversaries as well as a preposterous effort involving hundreds of agents to prove that Trump won the 2020 election. Additionally, the data suggests that a major shift under Patel’s leadership includes assigning FBI agents to support immigration enforcement, with immigration cases comprising a massive 59.3% of all federal criminal cases filed from February 2025 through July 2026: hardly any of these cases are actually criminal in the strict sense of that term. To cover this up, Patel has grotesquely adulterated FBI crime statistics by including arrests made by state, local and foreign police forces and claiming they involved the FBI, when the FBI’s involvement usually consisted of nothing more than having a special agent present when the charges were announced.

With fewer agents and a strained budget, the FBI under its director, Kash Patel, has brought thousands fewer criminal cases than previous administrations, an MS NOW review of Justice Department data shows. The findings rebut Patel’s repeated claims that he has led a crackdown on violent crime.

Patel has boasted that the FBI has arrested 54,000 violent criminals, which he describes as a 90% increase in arrests from the same period in the Biden administration. What he doesn’t mention is that his count is inflated by including arrests that state and local police forces and other federal agencies have made when an FBI employee is present.

Many of those arrests are not FBI cases, the FBI acknowledges.

In reality, the FBI has referred 15% fewer criminal cases for federal prosecution during the second Trump administration than during the same period in the Biden administration. And, while the FBI does not break down its criminal referrals into types of cases, the data also shows that the DOJ prosecuted 15% fewer cases of violent crimes during the first 16 months of the Trump administration than during the same period of the Biden administration.

There were nearly 3,800 fewer people charged federally with violent crimes during the first part of the second Trump administration than during the comparable Biden period — the opposite of what Patel says. That figure includes cases referred from all federal agencies, not just the FBI.

MS NOW analyzed public DOJ data obtained and shared by Justice Connection, a group of former DOJ and FBI employees who have accused the Trump administration of weaponizing the department and breaking long-revered norms to pursue President Donald Trump’s political ends. The data covers all criminal cases with a filing date recorded for a U.S. district court.

The biggest priorities shift in the second Trump administration has been a huge increase in arrests and charges related to immigration crimes. Patel has required FBI agents to support immigration enforcement, which has traditionally not been part of their mission.

According to the public DOJ data, immigration cases comprised a whopping 59.3% of all federal criminal cases filed by the DOJ from February 2025 through July 2026 — compared to 41.1% over a similar period in the first Trump administration and 35.5% over a similar period in the Biden administration.

In public appearances, Patel has consistently made false or seriously misleading claims about the Bureau’s crime enforcement activities:

• “1.1 million fewer violent” crimes: on Oct. 2, Patel told Fox News that there were “1.1 million fewer” violent assaults, rapes, robberies and homicides. In fact, 1,119,768 was the entire estimated 2025 violent crime total, and the FBI says the year-over-year decline was 9.3%. He appears to have confused the total with the decline.

• “197% increase” from 34,000 to 67,000 arrests: In February, Patel made a basic math error in an op-ed under his own byline. The increase is 97.1%; 67,000 is 197% of 34,000.

• “Rape, robbery, assault, all down double-digits”: Patel said this in August, but two of the three named categories were not down double digits. The FBI’s own release — which contained Patel’s quote in a video — put robbery down 18.5%, but rape down 7.6% and aggravated assault down 7.2%; overall violent crime was down 9.3%.

• The Massachusetts Immigration and Customs Enforcement sweep: Patel said in May 2025 the FBI had joined ICE to round up “370 violent and dangerous fugitives.” ICE’s own description was 370 alien offenders; it said 205 had “significant criminal convictions or charges.”

• “Operation Restore Justice”: On May 7, 2025, Patel said the operation lasted a month, involved 450 warrants, and rounded up nearly 400 child predators. DOJ’s same-day release says the named operation lasted five days and produced 205 arrests.

Trump Corruption Watch

Four Alarms Sound in CFTC Over White House Oil Trades

Bloomberg

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) headquarters in Washington, DC. Photo: Daniel Heuer/Bloomberg

Scott: Since the start of the Iran War, market observers have noted a consistent phenomenon—the White House would issue a statement from Trump and sometimes other senior Trump players which would report either a sudden unanticipated peace breakthrough, which rarely bore out as truthful over the coming days. Usually a matter of minutes before this statement, commodities brokers would report the sudden booking of hundreds of millions in futures trades, the value of which would spike suddenly on the release of the statement. It appeared to be insider trading and market manipulation by people in the immediate proximity to Trump based on their knowledge of his soon to be released statement. In his piece studying Jared Kushner for the New Yorker, Dexter Filkins reported that Kushner’s own senior staffers strongly suspected that he and other members of Trump’s family were behind these trades, but lacked direct evidence of this.

CFTC is the regulatory agency with oversight responsibility for this area and the duty to enforce the law in the event of insider trading or market manipulation. Now we learn that career staffers at CFTC in fact flagged these highly suspicious trades, did a preliminary investigation and concluded that circumstances warranted a referral to the enforcement department for civil or criminal enforcement action. Then political appointees at CFTC demanded that they retract their referral.

This furnishes more reason to believe that senior figures in the White House were involved with insider trading and have gleaned massive profits from it… and they are using raw political muscle to stop the machinery of law enforcement.

When President Donald Trump backed away from threats to strike Iranian power plants on March 23, it sparked a frenzy of buying and selling across oil, equities and other markets.

Traders had grown accustomed to prices lurching wildly on developments in the Middle East. But this time, some bettors had timed it perfectly. Billions of dollars’ worth of contracts predicting oil would fall and the S&P 500 would rise were placed about 15 minutes before the president announced his U-turn in a post on Truth Social, fueling widespread speculation about whether someone had an unfair advantage.

Responsibility for looking into the incident fell to the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal derivatives regulator whose remit — and profile — has soared with the advent of cryptocurrencies and prediction markets. There, a team of career forensic analysts embarked on their usual task of pulling together data on the day’s winners and losers.

Based on the timing of the trading they observed and who was behind it, the analysts, from the agency’s Division of Market Oversight, filed a referral to the Division of Enforcement, which would decide whether to launch a full-scale investigation into potential insider trading, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified discussing government deliberations. Representatives from the two divisions also met and talked through how best to collaborate, people familiar with the matter said.

What happened next, they said, was highly unusual: Mel Gunewardena, a senior adviser to the agency’s Trump-appointed chairman, Michael Selig, told a supervisor within the market oversight team to retract the referral.

The team didn’t know how to proceed, the people said. As a practical matter, it was unclear how they might even carry out such an action since it had rarely, if ever, been done before. It marked a break with precedent in another way as well. Career experts had always been entrusted with the specialized but prosaic task of gathering reams of data and writing preliminary reports that the attorneys in enforcement would then decide whether to pursue.

Now, according to the people, an adviser to political appointee Selig was intervening to scuttle the referral and oversee the gathering of data himself. Gunewardena, a Wall Street veteran who spent time at the CFTC during the first Trump administration, had rejoined the agency a few weeks before as head of the Office of International Affairs and Senior Markets Advisor to the chairman, and it wasn’t clear what role he had in the evidence-gathering process.

“In every previous administration I’m familiar with, that would not just have been unusual — but never done,” Aitan Goelman, who served as the agency’s Director of Enforcement from 2014 to February 2017, said when asked generally about such an intervention. “It makes it harder for the staff, if they know that any moment the rug can get pulled out from under them.” (Goelman has represented CME Group Inc. in a lawsuit against the CFTC.)...

The trading in question was eye-popping. In a two-minute window starting at 6:49 a.m. in New York on March 23, traders sold contracts equivalent to at least 6 million barrels of Brent and West Texas Intermediate, more than 8.5 times the volume that had changed hands that time in the morning over the prior week. A similar increase in activity was observed in futures tied to the S&P 500, with contracts worth more than $2 billion in notional value traded — far more than would be expected in an otherwise quiet premarket session. Unusual volumes were also visible in natural gas and other futures markets.

Those trades paid off 15 minutes or so later, when Trump wrote on Truth Social that he was reversing his threat to attack Iranian infrastructure unless the country re-opened the Strait of Hormuz. Brent oil prices plunged as much as 14% after the post. US crude plummeted in the double digits as well, while stock markets in the US and Europe jumped about 4% from their session lows to intraday highs.

Russia Launches Ballistic Missiles at Ukraine, and Suddenly NATO Stops Getting Warnings. Trump is Behind This.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Russian ballistic missiles devastate Kyiv as suddenly Ukraine receives no warning of the launch and Elon Musk pulls the plug on Ukrainian defense systems. Ukrainians are convinced that Trump and Musk are now backing Moscow. They’re right.

Scott: Ukraine has been devastated by Russian ballistic missile attacks over the last 72 hours that it has been unable to defend. Why? Two things suddenly occurred. First, Ukrainian defenses have been predicated on distant warning at launch time furnished by NATO monitors. Three days ago, they suddenly went silent, giving Ukrainians no inkling that the missiles were coming, with a resultant loss of hundreds of civilian lives. Second, Elon Musk suddenly and without notice pulled the plug on anti-missile defense systems that use StarLink, meaning that the Ukrainian defensive shield disappeared. What’s behind this? As FAZ notes, all signs point very clearly to one explanation: Donald Trump has decided to realign himself with the Kremlin. He talked about an energy ceasefire. Zelenskyy instantly accepted. Putin responded by launching his heaviest attack on energy plants in two years. Trump replied by again blaming Zelenskyy. All of this points clearly to acts of perfidy and deceit… by Donald Trump.

Russian ballistic missiles hit Ukraine’s electricity supply harder than they have in a long time. Zelensky complains about the lack of information. There are also new problems with Starlink. Is Trump behind it?

Ukraine has been exposed to massive Russian attacks on the energy system since US President Donald Trump announced an energy ceasefire. At the same time, the USA is putting increased pressure on Ukraine. According to Ukrainian information, Russia used 39 ballistic missiles and more than 120 combat drones in the attacks on Wednesday night. Loud explosions were heard in Kyiv throughout the night. All three thermal power plants in the capital were hit. The result was power outages, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke of “significant damage to 26 locations on the power grid.” Three civilians were killed.

When repelling the attacks, the Ukrainians had to deal with several problems at the same time. On the one hand, the air defense still lacks interceptor missiles for Patriot anti-aircraft systems. On the other hand, there were once again no warnings about the launch of the ballistic missiles. After a rocket attack on Monday evening, Zelensky had already complained about the “lack of warnings from Western partners”. His complaint caused great concern in Ukraine. Many suspected that Zelensky was referring to the Americans with the phrase “Western partners.”

Western partners usually warn Kyiv when they detect Russian missile launches. Then Ukraine can raise an air alarm so that people can get to safety in time.

Dependent on American intelligence

There are fears in Ukraine that the transmission of American intelligence information will be interrupted. There had already been one in March 2025 for a week after a rift between Trump and Zelensky in the White House. According to media reports, Trump’s negotiators once again threatened the Ukrainian delegation with such a scenario during talks in Miami over the weekend. On Tuesday evening, after the first strikes in Kiev, Zelensky said it was “unfair that Ukraine had not received any warnings about ballistic missile launches.”

It is unclear why the warnings failed to materialize. Technical reasons are also conceivable. Ballistic missile launches cannot always be reliably detected. Trump told reporters on Tuesday that they were continuing to provide information to Kyiv. The spokesman for the Ukrainian Air Force also said on Wednesday morning that after the first wave of attacks (without warnings), partners had, as usual, warned about the launch of ballistic missiles.

No European replacement in sight

Neither with Starlink nor with reconnaissance data can the Europeans step in for the USA and provide Ukraine with replacements. They are themselves dependent on American capabilities – in real-time battlefield surveillance as well as in satellite communications.

NATO does have 14 AWACS surveillance aircraft, which are primarily deployed on the eastern flank. They monitor the airspace over Ukraine and warn states there if missiles or drones come dangerously close to them. Depending on the altitude of the target object, their radar has a range of 400 to 500 kilometers. But it is designed for aircraft and large drones, not ballistic missiles.

It’s different with the Patriot system’s radar. It can detect such targets at a maximum distance of 180 kilometers. What the Europeans are missing, however, is the permanent monitoring from space that allows the entire trajectory of a ballistic missile to be recorded in real time.

NASA’s Space X CRS-35 Launch Jellyfish

Sunlight illuminates the exhaust plumes of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company’s Dragon spacecraft on Oct. 13, 2026. This visual phenomenon is known as a “jellyfish”; it happens near sunrise or sunset when the exhaust plume from the rocket becomes brightly illuminated, creating a glowing shape resembling a jellyfish.

The mission lifted off at 6:33 a.m. EDT from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, carrying scientific investigations, supplies, and equipment to the International Space Station on SpaceX’s 35th commercial resupply services mission for NASA. The rocket’s exhaust plumes were visible across the eastern United States.

Watch the uncrewed Dragon spacecraft rendezvous with and dock to the International Space Station on Oct. 15. Coverage begins at 9:15 a.m. EDT.

Image credit: NASA/John Kraus

THKR Screen Tip

The most important figure in the history of the US in the 21st century thus far isn’t Donald Trump… he isn’t even American by any reasoned measure. He’s a South African businessman named Elon Musk, who shot to power and became the world’s first trillionaire almost entirely on the strength of US government contracts he acquired through dark channels. Now he may well be the most powerful figure in the country. And what most Americans think they “know” about Musk consists of a long train of lies that he has carefully planted and cultivated. Go to a theatre to see the most important documentary of this decade: Musk, by Alex Gibney.

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Your Online Moment of Zen

Most of the Time

By Bob Dylan

Alternate version

Bootleg Series Volume 8

One of the saddest and most beautiful songs Dylan has ever recorded.

Reposting for anyone who missed it the first time.

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Lesley Stahl Enables the Destruction of 60 Minutes

CBS News

Charles: On Sunday night eighty-four year old Lesley Stahl narrated a shockingly incomplete piece about the escalating violence illegal Israeli settlers are committing against Palestinian residents of the West Bank.

The New York Post reported CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss and her deputy Charles Forelle became “very, very hands on” editing Stah’s segment—so much so that Stahl considered quitting, according to the Status newsletter.

Stahl didn’t quit. But she should have.

The actions of the Israeli settlers are so blatantly illegal that–as even Stahl pointed out–US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has described them as “terrorism.” But instead of making that point herself, Stahl included outrageous statements like this one from an Israeli settler named Mordehai Minster:

Whenever you have ethnic religious communities, especially in the Middle East, fighting over land and resources, that conflict sometimes gets ugly. The fact that violence exists doesn’t change the merit of the right that we have to this land.

Lesley Stahl reporting from the West Bank

The Israelis have no right to the houses and the farms of Palestinians on the West Bank. But Stahl repeatedly presented this as a simple disagreement between the Palestinians and their oppressors.

Completely absent from her piece were basic facts like these that have been documented by Human Rights Watch:

• Escalating Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank have fully or partially displaced 107 communities since January 2023 alongside unprecedented settlement expansion.

• Settlers responsible for attacks operate with the financial, material, and legal backing of the Israeli state.

• More Palestinians were forcibly displaced by settler attacks, demolitions, and evictions in the first four months of this year than the whole of 2025. OCHA has documented an average of 6.6 settler attacks per day that resulted in casualties, property damage, or both, higher than any year on its record.

• While the Israeli military remains responsible for the majority of killings in the West Bank, fatalities attributed to settlers have risen sharply. OCHA recorded at least 15 Palestinians, including two children, killed by settlers as of July 24, putting 2026 on track to surpass OCHA’s previous record of 16 such killings set in 2023.

The Weissification of CBS News continues unabated. It’s time for Stahl to acknowledge that this is making it impossible to practice serious journalism there.

AI godfather Geoffrey Hinton: Trump is A Corrupt, Senile Felon Who Understands Nothing About AI

The Guardian

Geoffrey Hinton in his garden in Toronto, Canada. Photo: Cole Burston/The Guardian

Scott: We live in a time of huge controversy surrounding artificial intelligence, driven largely by figures deep inside the industry that is producing it. The assessment of risks to humankind coming from AI are all-but uniform. Yet Donald Trump, at the bidding of the tech bros who put him in office, has asserted the unilateral power to block all regulations and safeguards to protect humanity. It might make sense to view Trump and his presidency as the threat behind the threat of AI, determined to maximize it.

The pioneering computer scientist on why Trump is using ‘superintelligence’ wrong, whether AI could wipe out humanity – and how our biggest challenge will be accepting we’re not the only intelligent beings.

Donald Trump is a “corrupt, senile felon” whose fixation on the term superintelligence proves he knows nothing about AI, said Geoffrey Hinton, “godfather” of the technology, in a wide-ranging interview where he doubled down on recent warnings that AI models pose an existential threat to humanity and scoffed at claims the industry could regulate itself.

The pioneering computer scientist, whose work helped lay the foundations of modern AI, has since become one of the technology’s most vocal critics. His latest remarks come after a tumultuous month during which a growing list of senior AI scientists and researchers have joined Hinton in ringing the alarm about how the technology he helped create could ultimately escape human control, sparking an industry crisis, the hasty assembly of congressional meetings and a rare global consensus that something must be done.

There has also been fierce pushback. Last week the leader of the world’s most valuable company singled out the Toronto-based Hinton for a scathing attack.

“I love [him]. I hate his predictions … All of his predictions have been wrong. Enough predictions,” Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, told the podcaster Ezra Klein. Huang, whose company makes the chips that AI firms require, dismissed Hinton’s vocal concerns that the pace and breadth of AI development at the “frontier” could soon outpace the human ability to control it, and particularly his warning that there is a 10-20% chance of AI causing human extinction in the coming decades.

“That [figure] is not grounded on science, is not grounded on research. Just because it comes from a scientist doesn’t make it scientific. Those predictions are hurtful,” Huang said. “Don’t think for a second just because you’re an alarmist that you’re doing a social good. It is not true. So I think that we ought to just all be wiser, more mature, be evidence-based, be scientific.”

“I’m trying to convey that there is a really serious possibility of something happening. If, for example, you’re told there was a 10% possibility of a bus crashing, you wouldn’t get on the bus,” he said. “The point of giving numbers is to say this is a serious risk. We don’t know how serious, but it’s serious.”

Recent safety breaches have evoked comparisons to a techno-dystopia story. The recent unwanted hack of the tech company Hugging Face by a “swarm” of AI agents that escaped the boundaries put on them by their creator has divided the technology community, with some seeing it as an example of what could come, while others accuse critics of anthropomorphizing systems that are simply following instructions. Hinton thinks dismissing the scenarios is unwise.

AI godfathers warn of runaway ‘intelligence explosion’

Read more“This used to be the domain of science fiction. You’re going to have AI agents and they’re gonna go rogue. Oh, come off it. And they’ll go rogue and they’re going to learn how to communicate with each other, even though we didn’t think there was a way. Oh, come off it!” said Hinton. “And when they figure this out, they’re going to have big emotional expressions like, ‘oh my God!’ Well, of course, they don’t really mean ‘oh my God’. They’re just parroting the words we use. They’re going to learn to sacrifice themselves for the common good!’...

Today, his concerns extend to the powerful figures building some of the AI models, and the political beliefs of those men. Hinton said that the AI venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, and the CEO of the newly rebranded SpaceXSI, Elon Musk, “don’t believe in democracy”. They see themselves as “Übermenschen” who believe they should “control society” and that Trump is a useful instrument in that aim, he said.

The US president, for his part, no doubt noticing how the huge valuations of AI firms have propped up the stock market, has claimed the only thing needed to rein in AI is a “smart president”, rejected any government safeguards in favour of allowing companies to regulate themselves, and wrote on his social media page that anyone who doesn’t use his preferred new term for AI, “super intelligence”, is “THE ENEMY”.

Hinton called Trump “a corrupt, senile felon”.

“I’m sure the oil and asbestos companies would have liked to [regulate themselves] as well,” he said. “Do we think tobacco companies should have been allowed to design the warnings on the packets? So that they could print them in a six-point font, in dark grey on black?”

Trump’s use of “superintelligence” proves he understands “almost nothing” about AI, Hinton added.

“He’s taken a technical term which has a very clear meaning and then reused it,” Hinton said. “Superintelligence means smarter than people, and has been around for at least 20 years. It’s got a very clear meaning. And now he says we’re going to call AI ‘superintelligence’. You can’t make it smarter than people just by calling it smarter than people.”

The speed and scope of developments has promoted a worry of catastrophes and of society’s inability to grapple with the nature of the challenge. But Hinton also sees an additional obstacle: helping people understand the “alien beings” that the companies are creating.

Paxton Plays Outlaw in Dubai

Wall Street Journal

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty

Scott: Ken Paxton is the best traveled candidate in this midterm election, and where he goes and who he travels with is very telling. Take his New Year’s 2024 junket to Dubai. As usual, with a woman not his wife. And his party friends? Felons who fled the US to avoid prosecution. That’s also a not infrequent pairing… What’s truly amazing is that no Texas newspapers, magazines or broadcast media ever seem to be able to tell their readers what their attorney general is up to.

As President Trump weighed endorsing Ken Paxton over incumbent Sen. John Cornyn of Texas this spring, he was told that damaging revelations were likely to surface about Paxton, according to people familiar with the conversations. Trump was dismissive and said there would be more negative material about Democratic nominee James Talarico.

Trump plowed ahead and endorsed the scandal-plagued Texas attorney general, helping him win the Republican-primary runoff in May. Months later, that decision is looking like Trump’s biggest gamble of the midterms.

Despite efforts by Paxton to paint his opponent as a far-left zealot, Talarico consistently holds a narrow lead in polls, raising a once unthinkable possibility: A Democrat could win statewide office in Texas for the first time since 1994.

Meanwhile, damaging revelations about Paxton continue to emerge. A new scene that could join the list: a previously unreported New Year’s Eve 2024 celebration where Paxton partied in Dubai with two fugitives from U.S. justice and a woman who wasn’t his wife.

As fireworks exploded over the Burj Khalifa skyscraper to welcome 2025, Paxton and his girlfriend Tracy Duhon watched from a luxury high-rise balcony full of people, according to a video of the gathering viewed by The Wall Street Journal, details of which were contained in court filings and confirmed by people familiar with the matter.

Among those at the event with Texas’ top law-enforcement official were two Americans who had been indicted months before on federal healthcare-fraud charges but failed to return to the U.S., Anosh Ahmed and Sameer Suhail, according to the court records and people familiar with the matter. Ahmed, a healthcare executive, had donated $190,000 to Paxton, campaign-finance records show, including $25,000 days after he was indicted.

The two fugitives at the Dubai event had been both indicted in federal court in Illinois in 2024 on charges that they embezzled $15 million from a Chicago hospital where Ahmed was chief financial officer. A businessman with interests in Texas, Ahmed was later charged in a much larger scheme involving at least $195 million in alleged payments from the government for fraudulent Covid-19 tests, to which he has pleaded not guilty.

Both men are now back in the U.S. to face the charges. Ahmed is in custody, and his attorneys have said in court filings that he was abroad at the time of the first indictment and his return to the U.S. was delayed by family health issues. Suhail’s attorney, Adam Sheppard, said civil matters in Dubai affected Suhail’s ability to travel after the indictment and he returned voluntarily when they were resolved.

And here’s how Paxton campaign responds to a request for comment:

“Like President Trump, Ken Paxton has been politically persecuted for years, and every time, voters have seen through it and sent him back to office because they know he has always fought for Texas,” Maddux said.

Note: no denial of any element of the reporting.

The Dark Money Prosperity Gospel Comes Through in a Big Way for Speaker Mike Johnson

Washington Post

Kelly Johnson, the wife of Speaker Mike Johnson, greets President Donald Trump at his inauguration in January 2025. (Angelina Katsanis/Politico)

Scott: Mike Johnson is a Southern Baptist deacon, and no tenet of faith is as important to him as the prosperity gospel: the belief that Jesus Christ died on the cross not only to remove sin, but also to lift his faithful followers out of poverty and sickness. And the instruments by which Christ works this miracle, at least in the case of Mike Johnson, seem largely to consist of darkmoney PACs. Today the Washington Post describes how God’s bounty flows through Mike’s wife Kelly, in wondrous ways. Praise be.

After House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) ascended to one of the most powerful offices in Washington three years ago, his wife, a faith-based counselor, turned her focus to the nation’s capital.

Kelly Johnson reoriented a religious nonprofit she was running back home in the Shreveport area into a ministry focused on female congressional staffers. Its new purpose, according to an IRS filing, was to help “the hundreds of unreached young women” working around Capitol Hill “find purpose, belonging, and Christian community.”

Through the organization, a part-time endeavor run solely by Johnson, she provides counseling, delivers speeches and conducts “spiritual heritage tours” of the U.S. Capitol that highlight the nation’s Christian history. In 2024, financial disclosures show Johnson was paid $50,000 for 10 hours of work per week.

The nonprofit, Onward Christian Education Services, has become part of the rising presence in official Washington of evangelical Christianity as its devotees, a key bloc of support for President Donald Trump, seek to inject a biblical worldview into American politics and government.

The centerpiece of Johnson’s organization is the faith-based counseling that she said she provides free to staff and the spouses of House members.

“I’m a missionary here,” Johnson said in an interview.

In Poland, a Parliamentary Inquiry Reports on Pegasus Software: How Netanyahu Spies on Politicians and Journalists Around the World

Gazeta Wyborcza

Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk speaks during the opening session of the Warsaw Security Forum in Warsaw, Poland, on 12 October 2026 (Wojtek Radwanski/AFP)

Scott: Here’s how it works. US taxpayers heavily subsidize and support Israeli Intelligence Unit 8200, training its senior people and sending a large number to US universities to get graduate degrees. They develop surveillance technologies for the IDF, usually sharing what they develop with the US. They then develop “private” businesses (which in fact remain largely but not entirely under the thumb of Israeli intelligence) to commercialize their products. With an okay from Israel, they proceed to sell the software to the most brutal tyrannical governments in the world to help them spy on journalists, students and political adversaries. They also sold it to Poland’s right-wing PiS party, which promptly used the Pegasus software to spy on its domestic opponents, journalists and others. Now a Polish parliamentary commission has reported on this in detail, including the bombshell that whatever secrets Pegasus uncovered were instantly shared with Netanyahu.

The parliamentary inquiry committee on Pegasus has presented its final report. It filed ten formal notifications regarding former ministers and heads of security services, and the prosecutor’s office has just confirmed its findings: surveillance data was being transmitted abroad, and the Polish side had no control over it.

“This is no longer just a scandal. It is a crime—a crime against the state,” Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Monday morning, summarizing the evidence gathered by the committee and revealed by the prosecutor’s office following an investigation into the Pegasus purchase agreement concluded by the PiS government’s security services.

Tusk spoke ahead of the meeting where the committee was scheduled to present its final report. “We paid over 60 million zlotys for this, with 25 million coming from the Justice Fund. That money was meant for crime victims, yet they spent it on this comprehensive cyber-surveillance system. They signed a contract paying an Israeli company over 30 million zlotys for a tool used for surveillance, tracking, wiretapping, and covert monitoring—yet they had no actual control over it, as control remained in the hands of Israel and the Israeli company,” he said in a video posted on X. He also confirmed that the contract with the Israeli firm NSO “clearly stated that Poland could not use this surveillance tool against phone numbers from Russia, Belarus, and North Korea—countries that pose a high terrorist threat.” “They readily used this tool against Polish citizens and Polish opposition members,” the Prime Minister added.

Coinciding with Tusk’s statement, Team No. 3 of the National Prosecutor’s Office—which is investigating the Pegasus case—issued a communiqué. It reveals that fundamental security considerations were overlooked in the agreement regarding the purchase and use of Pegasus. The CBA lacked full control over the system; data transmitted via the system left Polish territory, and the manufacturer of Pegasus (the Israeli company NSO) had the technical capability to access materials obtained through operational surveillance.

“It was a weapon on someone else’s leash,” said KO MP Witold Zembaczyński while presenting the committee’s report.

Sroka: The state treated like a private fiefdom

for the committee, both Tusk’s words and the findings presented by Team No. 3 served as support, although its members—speaking to *Wyborcza*—insist they had not been informed about the communiqué beforehand. “This is one of the most important findings we have reached. For months, we had been pushing for the disclosure of an ABW expert opinion that was previously classified as ‘top secret.’ It is good that the prosecutor’s office made this decision,” Joanna Kluzik-Rostkowska (KO), the committee’s deputy chair, told us. The issue of data insecurity is addressed in the report, but thanks to the prosecutor’s office’s statement, the public can now learn more details.

Establishing the committee was one of the democratic coalition’s priorities following the change of government. Lawmakers investigated the Pegasus affair for nearly three years. Brought to light by independent media, it became a symbol of the political use of special services during the PiS administration. Although the system was designed to combat terrorism, espionage, sabotage, and organized crime, in Poland it was also used to target political opponents of the government of the time. Information obtained via Pegasus was published in pro-government media with the aim of discrediting inconvenient politicians.

Desert Stairway to Heaven

OriginalAnnotated

Explanation: This stairway in Chile brings you only a little bit closer to heaven. But ooh, the sky above it makes you wonder. For example, you may wonder about the dark lane of our own Milky Way galaxy rising behind the expansive Atacama Desert in Chile, the band of zodiacal light on the upper left, the green and red airglow just above the horizon, the star Spica in the zodiacal light stripe, and, at the very top on the right, the Small Magellanic Cloud galaxy. The Desert Staircase sculpture is in the foreground, and this image was timed to catch the picturesque peering perch just in front of the near-vertical Milky Way band. Upon close inspection of the horizon you can find, left to right, some Andes Mountains, the Licancabur volcano, and the town lights of San Pedro de Atacama. The featured wide-angle composite was captured in July 2025.

Photo: Julien Looten

Your Online Moment of Zen

Rhapsody In Blue

Joe Stouter

Oil on Canvas

2021

Israeli Soldiers Describe The Gaza Genocide / US Embassy Aide Suppresses the Truth From Jerusalem / The Houthis Put the Screws on the Saudis / NATO Chief Plans For Russian Invasion but Trump Is On The Opposite Side / Paxton’s Friends Libel Talarico

Gaza Through the Eyes of Israeli Soldiers: “The Rule Was, Shoot Everyone You See”

Der Spiegel

Israeli soldiers Green and Tomer. The one refused to continue serving, the other is still deployed. (Photo: Jonas Opperskalski / DER SPIEGEL (2))

Scott: Benjamin Netanyahu faces charges before the ICC of the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts. With the release of the award-winning documentary NAZA, Netanyahu is freaking out and, inspired on this point by Trump, Orbán, Putin and Erdoğan, is issuing formal orders that the IDF soldiers who spoke out in the documentary, as well as its producers and directors, be prosecuted for whatever criminal charges can be fabricated against them. Now Der Spiegel has also published interviews with ten IDF soldiers who describe their experiences in Israeli operations in Gaza and specifically how they were instructed to deal with the civilian population. This strongly corroborates the NAZA reports. If Netanyahu were turned over to the Hague and forced to stand trial on the charges raised against him, this evidence and other documents already released and published in Israel would certainly be sufficient to sustain the charges against Netanyahu, insuring his conviction and sentencing. At this point, only Donald Trump stands between Netanyahu and accountability.

Der Spiegel spoke to 10 Israelis who served in the Gaza Strip after the Hamas terror attack of October 7, 2023, remotely piloted drones or selected targets for airstrikes. The Israeli organization Breaking the Silence, which collects testimonials from soldiers about misconduct and crimes committed by the military, facilitated contact with some of them. Der Spiegel checked all the statements as thoroughly as possible, cross-referencing them with other accounts and with independently verifiable information, and considers them credible.

All the soldiers except one chose to remain anonymous. Their units and personal details cannot be disclosed either because of the potential negative consequences. Most refuse to serve in Gaza again, though one was recently redeployed there just a few weeks ago. A ceasefire has been in effect in Gaza for a year, but the Israeli military still occupies around two-thirds of the territory and regularly strikes targets in Gaza.

David, infantry reservist: “My unit killed many people”

David served as a reservist in an infantry unit and was deployed in central Gaza and Khan Younis for several months from October 2023 onward.

I knew from the start that this war was going to be bad. But I couldn’t imagine how bad. And I couldn’t imagine how long it would last, either. A month at most, I thought. That this war would go on for years – that seemed impossible. And then there was the scale of the destruction. From the perspective of an individual soldier, it even makes sense. Is one building the tallest in our sector? We destroy it because it could pose a threat. But then the next-tallest building becomes the tallest, and so it goes on until everything is destroyed. At first, we were told to destroy individual buildings. Later, we were assigned an entire area.

When I returned to Gaza in 2025, there was nothing but rubble for miles. Officially, the aim was to create a “buffer zone.” But once I heard senior officers say: The Arabs have to be punished. They have to understand that we are taking more and more of their land and pushing them farther and farther back.

When we used civilian homes as a base, we were often told to set the house on fire as we withdrew. That didn’t destroy the building completely, but it made it uninhabitable. We understood that the point was to prevent the residents from returning. I also saw few soldiers who had nothing to do use bulldozers to destroy an olive grove.

My unit was actually made up of people that are more educated, secular Israelis. But the longer the war went on, the fewer of them wanted to serve in the reserves. Instead, more and more messianic extremists joined. For them, the deployment is a mitzvah [a religious duty]. On my second deployment, there were a lot of them in my unit. They said crazy things like: “We have to eliminate all the Arabs. We have to build settlements. We’re going to wipe out Gaza.” Things you hear from the Israeli ministers Bezalel Smotrich or Itamar Ben-Gvir.

As soon as an area was evacuated, officially there were no civilians there. Anyone still there is considered to be involved in terrorist activity. The most permissive rules of engagement were applied. In some units, the instruction was: “Shoot everyone you see.” Our commander wasn’t like that. He said: “Don’t shoot women and children. But shoot to kill men of fighting age.” Again and again, we were told: “Remember, anyone could be a spotter, anyone could be a messenger, anyone could be involved. That’s Hamas’s tactic.” And that’s true – we often found weapons depots in houses, and of course they don’t fight in uniform. The rules of engagement were really only clear when it came to preventing our own troops from being fired on. Not to protect the people in Gaza.

Once, I went on patrol with some other soldiers. It was dark. Suddenly, we heard noises and took cover. Then we saw two men on bicycles, maybe 25 meters away, and opened fire on them. They weren’t armed. A little farther away, two men were loading a truck. We shot at them too. They drove off; I don’t know if they survived. Then two more men came walking along. We fired at them too…

I estimate that my unit killed many people simply because they were men of fighting age moving around in our sector. We often fired from ambush. You set out early in the morning under cover of darkness, wearing night-vision goggles, march somewhere, take up a position, and then basically shoot at anyone who comes by. We knew nothing about international law. But when you’re there as a soldier, you don’t think about it. You just go along with it.

There was a moment that broke me. When we encountered Hamas fighters in a house and they opened fire on us, we lost people; some were seriously injured. Afterward, our company commander gave a motivational speech. He said something like: “We accomplished our mission. We paid a very high price, but we will continue this most just of wars.” And it was such a fucking joke! My friends’ deaths felt like a sacrifice for this war of annihilation. Then I went to their funerals, and right-wing politicians showed up and said: “We’re going to build settlements in Gaza.” That made me so angry…

Nine more accounts follow, all of the same nature—conscious targeting and shooting of innocent civilians. And in one, we see an order to kill a Reuters journalist, precisely because he was a Reuters journalist and the IDF unit understood that. This is how the IDF operation in Gaza came to kill more journalists than World War I, World War II and the Korean War combined.

Top American Embassy Official Systematically Suppresses the Truth from Jerusalem

New York Times

Charles: In a superb exclusive in the Times, Natan Odenheimer and Adam Rasgon reveal that one aide to Ambassador Mike Huckabee in the US embassy in Jerusalem has systematically prevented his colleagues from reporting accurately about Netanyahu’s government.

The goal of great foreign service officers is to give the State Department better information about the country they are serving in than anyone else can provide. Thirty-six year old David Milstein, a former aide to Senator Ted Cruz, has repeatedly censored the truth since he arrived in Jerusalem–always to make the current Israeli government look better.

• When the government approved the largest increase in settlers in the West Bank ever last March, Milstein killed the cable describing the action

• As settler violence in the West Bank surged in the spring he stymied embassy reporting suggesting that the Israeli government was failing to take action, according to the three officials. Instead the embassy sent a cable to Washington praising Israel for “cracking down” on the attacks.

• When members of Congress pushed for accountability over the killings of Palestinian Americans by Israeli settlers and security forces, he suppressed a detailed report that the embassy staff had written, effectively stonewalling lawmakers’ efforts to gain information, according to multiple officials briefed on the matter.

• Soon after arriving in Jerusalem, Mr. Milstein began insisting on approving communications from the embassy section that handles Palestinian affairs, multiple officials with direct knowledge of the process said. The flow of cables plummeted from several a week to a few a month, as some staffers refrained from writing reports for fear that Mr. Milstein would block or rewrite them, these officials said.

• Mr. Milstein’s efforts have helped insulate Israel’s right-wing government against potential blowback from a Trump Administration that has been its closest ally.

Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, at his residence in Jerusalem last year.

The Times said it has 15 US government sources for its story.

Huckabee said “I personally and categorically refute the elements of your proposed ‘story.’ ”

Iran-Backed Militants Are Tightening the Screws on Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince

Wall Street Journal

The way Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman handles Saudi Arabia’s crisis will have consequences far beyond the kingdom. Photo: Julie Sebadelha/AP

Scott: Has Crown Prince Bone Saw severely underassessed the threat presented to his rule by the Houthis in Yemen? WSJ reports that he is roaming from one heavily fortified palace to the next, hiding out in underground bunkers, fleeing Houthi missiles, and pleading in the most abject fashion with his allies for military support to ward them off. He cuts a truly pathetic figure. And particularly he presents himself as a man betrayed by Donald Trump, who he felt was his creature due to the high price he paid into Trump’s private coffers and those of Jared Kushner.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman started the year on a high note. He had just visited the White House where he was embraced by President Trump. Even after the war with Iran kicked off, Saudi Arabia looked relatively well positioned. It could export oil through a pipeline that bypassed the blocked Strait of Hormuz.

But the Saudis’ escalating fight with Iran-backed Houthi militants in neighboring Yemen now poses new challenges to the kingdom’s security and the crown prince’s ambitious but already struggling plans to transform the country’s oil-dependent economy.

On Saturday, at least one Houthi missile slammed into the Saudi capital’s international airport, killing at least 13 people and injuring hundreds more, many seriously. It was the single deadliest attack on the U.S. or its Gulf allies in the conflicts related to the Iran war. A 28-year-old Egyptian flight attendant bled to death after her arm was blown off, one of several victims to lose limbs, officials briefed on the attack said.

Two terminals were struck and their roofs partially collapsed, people familiar with the damage said. Video verified by Storyful, which like The Wall Street Journal is owned by Dow Jones, showed passengers rolling suitcases past a trail of blood on the floor as the airport was evacuated. Authorities reported more attacks on the closed airport Sunday, saying a projectile caused a fire in Terminal 4 and led to one death as well as injuries.

As recently as this summer, Saudi officials briefed journalists that the Houthi situation was under control. But the militants’ escalating attacks, which they say are retaliation for Saudi actions against them, have hit airports and energy facilities—including the kingdom’s main east-west pipeline and refineries—showing the growing threat along the southern border.

The conflict is jeopardizing Saudi efforts to build travel and tourism into a pillar of the economy, including a marquee international investment conference scheduled for the end of the month that is now increasingly in doubt. The costs of the war have already widened the budget deficit and threaten to push the economy into contraction.

The Supreme Commander of NATO Details a Defense Plan Against Russia, Meanwhile His Boss Contemplates Alliance with Moscow

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Russian tanks in exercises near Chelyabinsk. Photo: TASS

Scott: NATO strategic planners believe they have reasonably reliable intelligence that the Kremlin is planning a military action against the alliance’s eastern flank only months away. They have therefore detailed a plan to engage a Russian offensive with their own countermeasures. But the bigger problem lies elsewhere: Putin’s personal focus has steadily been on fracturing NATO and using its dominance by the United States as a key point of vulnerability. And he is spinning a remarkably effective web to achieve this goal: think for instance of the lavish Caribbean wedding for Trump’s son he funded, the highly lucrative LUKOil deal he is presenting to Kushner and Witkoff, and now the “diesel deal” that was announced this weekend but according to multiple sources was actually struck weeks ago in order to furnish Trump with a pretext for terminating sanctions on Russia and realigning the US with Russia in its struggle against Ukraine. This presents a grave challenge which cannot be tackled through the existing machinery of NATO—in essence, the prospect that the Kremlin has through various ploys captured the White House.

“We will repel and defeat any attack,” says Alexus Grynkewich. Speaking in Warsaw, he outlined the alliance’s secret agreement—a clear warning to Moscow.

On Monday, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), Gen Alexus Grynkewich (USAF), publicly outlined for the first time how the alliance intends to defend itself against a Russian attack. “Should war break out, we will repel and defeat any attack,” Grynkewich said at a security conference in Warsaw. “And should it nevertheless not cease, we will defeat the forces attacking us right where we have practiced doing so.” Grynkewich spoke of a “theory of victory” upon which the 32 allies had internally agreed. “We finalized it about three months ago. And the definitive version exists in classified form,” he said.

SACEUR cited the current threat landscape as the reason for the unusual step of making these strategic considerations public. “Given the numerous acts of sabotage and arson, the populations within our alliance are, in my view, somewhat nervous,” he said. He wanted to reassure citizens “that we have the situation under control.” This message was also directed at anyone “thinking about causing us harm.” They should not dare to attack, he warned, because NATO knows exactly what it would do. At no point during his roughly 15-minute address did Grynkewich mention Russia by name; instead, he consistently referred to “our adversary.”

Central to his strategic thinking was the principle that NATO, as a defensive alliance, focuses all its forces on defending its territory—with the aim of inflicting a “tactical and operational defeat” on the aggressor. “We dismantle the war-fighting system attacking us, rendering it incapable of continuing the attack.” However, the goal is not to inflict a “strategic defeat” on the adversary—that is, to completely bring them to their knees and occupy their territory.

Paxton’s Suicide Bombers Detonate Too Soon

The Daily Beast

Politician James Talarico (C) meets with fans during the 2026 Austin City Limits Music Festival at Zilker Park on October 09, 2026 in Austin, Texas—as the Paxton campaign was insisting he was in a mental health clinic in Ohio.

Scott: Surely the focal congressional contest in this year’s midterms involves a young Texas Democrat (who like a number of Democratic candidates, has a religious background—he’s currently a Presbyterian seminarian) and Texas’ notorious, twice-indicted felon attorney general, Ken Paxton. Texas Democrats have not won a state-wide race since Anne Richards was governor; the state has been under heavy-handed one-party rule by the GOP for 31 years.

Surely Paxton is marked by his ruthlessness as a politician, and his pursuit of power and influence through unabashed corruption. But this weekend also provided evidence of his sheer incompetence and that of his campaign team. Searching for vulnerabilities, Paxton’s team has constantly attempted to make an issue of Talarico’s health, implying he is a closeted gay, suffers from AIDS, or has a personality disorder. In the past week, when Talarico missed a series of campaign events in order to recover from the flu, Paxton turned to a well-known serial fabulist (who is also facing criminal charges and has fled his home state of Kentucky to avoid prosecution) Nick Sortor, to concoct a hoax about Talarico being flown to a clinic in Ohio for treatment for a mental health crisis. Paxton’s campaign, with key help from Elon Musk and a New York Post “reporter” spread these fabulations wildly on the internet. Then the truth caught up with them. The episode would appear to confirm all the worst that Paxton’s critics say about him.

A page from serial fabulist Nick Sortor’s rap sheet. He’s also the former boyfriend of a Sputnik reporter who is connected to Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR

Wild MAGA conspiracy theories about Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico have taken a humiliating hit.

Talarico, 37, had been missing from the campaign trail after contracting the flu. His opponent in Texas, Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, 63, and President Donald Trump, 80, have both repeatedly called out his absence.

The disappearance led to online conspiracy theories that Talarico may have been experiencing a mental health crisis, a theory exploited by Paxton’s team. “Low-T Jimmy appears to be having a full-blown mental Tala-freak-out on the national stage,” Paxton campaign spokesperson Madison Cercy said in a statement Thursday obtained by the Texas Tribune. “If James Talarico is too fragile to face Texans, he has no business asking for their vote.”

On Sunday, MAGA influencer Nick Sortor fueled the flames, claiming on X, “Ohio mental hospital CONFIRMS James Talarico was discharged from the facility earlier this week,” adding that “the ‘flu’ thing was a BIG FAT LIE.”

Actually, at the time Sortor posted this, Talarico had returned to the campaign trail and was making public appearances in Austin. But

the X post, which was labeled “exclusive,” alleged Talarico had “been a patient at the Lindner Center of Hope near Cincinnati, Ohio.” He was referring to a mental health center and psychiatric hospital located in Mason, Ohio..

Sortor added, “While I sympathize with those dealing with mental health crises, this man is CLEARLY not suited to become a US Senator representing over 30 MILLION TEXANS.”

MAGA figures, including billionaire Elon Musk, engaged with the post, while in the comments section Sortor suggested, “Maybe Trump called him Talafreako one too many times.”

However, later on Sunday, the mental health facility set the record straight in a post on X, saying, “Representative James Talarico has never received treatment from Lindner Center of Hope.”

Talarico shared the post, adding, “I’ve never even been to Ohio” with the crying face emoji.

Musk used his control of Twitter to spread the Sortor post far and wide, while blocking the posting of any Community Note that would correct its falsehoods. Saying that a political candidate is hospitalized for a mental health crackup is libel per se if false, as this one was. Thus Talarico is now well positioned to seek damages against all those involved in this caper, certainly including Sortor, Elon Musk and the New York Post staffer who were eagerly spreading the claims.

Jupiter and the Moons

Explanation: How many moons can you see? The best answer is five: four orbiting Jupiter and Luna orbiting Earth. This multi-moon picture was possible because Earth’s Moon moved directly in frontof Jupiter last week. The featured image is a series of exposures near alignment taken from Westchester, New York, USA. The sunlit crescent of Earth’s Moon, on the lower left, is overexposed, while the Moon’s night side, on the upper right, is faintly illuminated by Earthshine. Lined up nearly vertically above our Moon, listed from bottom to top, are Jupiter’s bright Galilean satellites: Ganymede, Io, Callisto, and Europa. Callisto, Ganymede, and Io are larger than Earth’s Moon, while Europa is only slightly smaller. NASA’s robotic spacecraft Juno is currently orbiting Jupiter and has made close passes near three of these moons.

Photo: Chirag Upreti

Your Online Moment of Zen

When That Man Is Dead And Gone

Lizzy & the Triggermen

By Irving Berlin

First performed February 1, 1941, on the radio program ASCAP on Parade.

In 1941, when the Nazis occupied most of Europe, it was almost impossible for anyone to be optimistic about the future. But the optimists like Irving Berlin turned out to be right. I cling to their example to remain optimistic today.

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Happy Columbus Day!

We’re giving you the day off so you can celebrate both properly.

Your Online Moment of Zen

When The Ship Comes In

“Hello! You never thought you’d hear Dylan with an Irish accent, did you?”

The Clancy Brothers

Written by Bob Dylan

Performed October 16, 1992.

Madison Square Garden

The Bob Dylan 30th Anniversary Concert

Faithful readers will already know I was there.

Two of the Clancy brothers arrived in Greenwich Village in 1951.

When Bob Dylan got there ten years later, they acted as his older brothers.

Liam Clancy shared his philosophy with a young Bob:

No fear, No envy, No Meanness.

It’s the one I aspire to.

John Hammond signed the Clancy Brothers to Columbia Records in March, 1961, for the gigantic sum of $100,000.

Dylan was brought on to the label by Hammond seven mothers later.

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Mamdani’s Sane and Sensible Statement on October 7

New York Times

Charles & Scott: On October 7th, the third anniversary of the Hamas attack that killed more than 1100 Israelis and led to the abduction of 251 others, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani issued a compassionate and intelligent statement mourning “the horrific war crimes” of that day. Then he used more words to decry the Israeli government’s “devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza.”

The space he devoted to each event was appropriate and proportionate–because the Israeli response to the original tragedy has lasted three years longer than the attack by Hamas, and killed tens of thousands more than Hamas did.

This is what the Mayor said:

This day is profoundly painful for so many New Yorkers. It marks three years since the horrific war crimes of October 7. On that day, Hamas killed more than 1,100 Israelis and abducted 251 others. We grieve alongside our many friends and neighbors who still carry that unthinkable loss. The suffering did not begin nor end that day. It instead continued through the Israeli government’s devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza, in which it has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians—including more than 21,000 children. Even since the so-called ceasefire, more than 1,400 Palestinians have been killed. That suffering has intensified with every Israeli bomb dropped on ambulances waiting outside hospitals, every drone strike targeting a residential building or journalist, and every shipment of food aid turned away at a border crossing. Many New Yorkers are reckoning with this unbearable grief, and we mourn alongside them - all while knowing that our tax dollars fund these war crimes. Three years later, we must refuse to accept a world in which occupation and apartheid continue, where war crimes are met with impunity, and our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment. To honor the dead, we must fight for a world in which every person can live with freedom, safety, and dignity.

The New York Times, whose coverage of Mamdani has ranged from skeptical to petty to openly hostile, focused on the anger of a handful of Jewish leaders who accused the Mayor of being insensitive to their pain.

Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, the president of the New York Board of Rabbis, said Mr. Mamdani’s statement was “morally perverse” and “like sticking a knife into the pain of the Jewish community in New York and in America.”

The 112th Mayor of the City of New York

The Times story seemed to endorse the criticism of Jewish leaders by noting “the bulk” of the Mayor’s statement “provided a detailed denunciation of Israel’s military actions in Gaza since the attacks, which Mr. Mamdani described as a ‘devastating, ongoing genocide.’ He did not provide a similarly detailed account of the killings of Israelis and abductions of hostages.”

The implicit attitude of The Times story and the Mayor’s critics is that Jewish lives count, while Palestinian lives count for much less.

Scott and I agree that the attacks on the Mayor’s statement were groundless and unhinged. There is nothing offensive about the Mayor’s approach to any ethical citizen of the world.

The war crimes perpetrated by Hamas and the IDF are grave and deserve condemnation; the perpetrators of these crimes ahold be held to account, but neither the Palestinians nor the Israeli people as a whole are culpable for these war crimes. That was the point of the Mayor’s statement.

34 Sailors Survived a US Attack on their Boats; They Were Just Found Innocent of the Charges the US Leveled at Them

Diario Ahora

Scott: We now know that a stream of senior officers, including the former commander in chief of Southcom, resigned rather than execute Pete Hegseth’s military operations targeting ostensible narcotics trafficking exercises—which have now killed 234 people in 78 separate attacks. The opposition to the measure was clear enough: these operations have historically been the responsibility of the US Coast Guard, which has an excellent track record in carrying them out; moreover, the intelligence used for the attacks is highly speculative, and—according to DEA officers—rarely has a more than 50% likelihood of being accurate. To execute people based on such assessments is in fact a crime (it’s called, in technical terms, extrajudicial execution). But Hegseth was emphatic: there would be no arrests, no people taken into custody, and no trials. He simply wanted them dead. He assumed, correctly, that dead men would be less capable of embarrassing him. In other words, he specifically authorized extrajudicial killings—and this is of course a crime as well.

In an effort to save its citizens from this predatory conduct of Hegseth’s Pentagon, Ecuador worked out a deal under which survivors of strikes that occurred in or off Ecuadorean waters would be turned over to Ecuador. Ecuadorean prosecutors would be supplied with whatever evidence the US had (and was willing to share) that supported the strikes, so they could be prosecuted.

More than a hundred sailors were simply set loose after prosecutors, reviewing the US evidence and coupling it with their own, concluded there was no material evidence that would support a prosecution. More than eighty were charged, with their trials to occur in three separate groups. This week the first of these trials concluded with a verdict of acquittal for 32 sailors.

All of this is of course highly embarrassing for the Hegseth Pentagon, which is why you won’t see any of it reported in US corporate media. As usual.

An Ecuadorian judge declared innocent this Wednesday 32 crew members of two fishing vessels that were intercepted and bombed by the United States in Pacific waters. The defendants had been accused of the crime of illicit association after being accused of allegedly collaborating with drug trafficking.

The decision affects eight crew members of the Conquista 2 and 24 of the María Candelaria, two of the eight fishing vessels sunk by the US military in cooperation with the Government of Ecuador between August 28 and September 16.

“Once the judge reviewed the evidence presented by the Prosecutor’s Office, she determined that it had not been possible to prove that these vessels and this crew had committed any illegal act. There was no crime,” Juan Alvia, lawyer for the defendants, told the EFE agency.

What the US authorities maintained

According to the US Southern Command, the vessels allegedly operated as floating stations to supply fuel to ships used to transport drugs in international waters in the Pacific.

The authorities also pointed out the crew members for alleged links to Los Choneros, one of the main criminal organizations in Ecuador, associated with the Sinaloa Cartel and designated as a terrorist organization by the US government.

However, during the trial the Prosecutor’s Office was unable to prove that relationship, according to the defense. Alvia assured that no US report was filed related to drug trafficking or fuel trafficking investigations involving its clients. “They are documents that do not exist,” said the lawyer.

The first of three trials

This decision represents the first ruling in three legal proceedings related to a total of 88 crew members of five ships bombed by the United States.

The second trial, involving 46 crew members, is scheduled to begin this Thursday.

The third corresponds to 10 other defendants. That process was to begin on October 1, but was postponed to the 20th.

The lawyer hopes that the decisions in the other two cases will be similar, considering that the facts are practically identical.

The ruling known this Wednesday is of first instance, so it can still be appealed. Alvia believes that the Prosecutor’s Office would not have sufficient elements to do so.

The fishermen’s complaints

After being declared innocent, the 32 crew members – who faced the process on parole – must decide what actions they will take.

According to their lawyer, they could ask the Prosecutor’s Office to investigate the destruction of their fishing vessels and what they described as a “kidnapping” before being handed over to the Ecuadorian military.

The case has also attracted the attention of international organizations. Last Friday, Human Rights Watch (HRW) called on the United States and Ecuador to make public the legal basis used for the attacks against the vessels and to immediately investigate complaints of abuse made by the crew members.

Context of cooperation between the US and Ecuador:

Security cooperation between Washington and Quito has deepened in recent months. In August, the Minister of Defense of Ecuador, Gian Carlo Loffredo, met in Quito with the commander of the United States Southern Command, General Francis Donovan, to reinforce joint actions against drug trafficking and transnational organized crime, according to a statement from the ministry.

The Ministry highlighted that “this alliance allows us to add capabilities, intelligence and cooperation to hit the mafias with greater force and protect those who matter most: our families.” The meeting took place two weeks after the creation of the Western Hemisphere Joint Working Group by SOUTHCOM, an initiative that involves the 18 member countries of the Coalition Against Cartels of the Americas, including Ecuador.

Ecuador joined that coalition, also identified as Shield of the Americas, in March. Since January 2024, the country has been experiencing an “internal armed conflict”, a statement made by President Daniel Noboa to counter various criminal groups, which the Government describes as “terrorists”.

Incidentally, if the Coast Guard procedures had been applied and the vessels seized and searched, there is every possibility that evidence of the US accusations might have been found. By blowing them out of the water, the US also destroyed all the most valuable evidence.

Trump Corruption Watch

Trump’s insider trades in August included $25 mn in Meta and millions in SpaceX Debt

CNBC

Scott: In August, Trump scored big stakes in Meta and SpaceX, in each case affecting his trades shortly before announcing major US Government decisions that were certain to appreciate the value of the equities (or debt securities) involved. The facts as set out in CNBC’s report would appear to be sufficient to open investigations predicated on felony violations of the STOCK Act of 2012 as well as Rule 10b-5 of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other federal and state statutes. Moreover, as these are not official acts, the immunity from investigation and prosecution conferred on Trump by the Roberts Court is not available. Count on it that Trump’s DOJ and SEC will neither investigate nor act on these crimes.

President Donald Trump disclosed more than 500 securities transactions in August, including a purchase of up to $25 million in Meta stock and an investment of as much as $5 million in SpaceX

debt two days before he signed a sweeping policy aimed at expanding U.S. commercial space transportation, according to a newly released financial disclosure.

The 517 purchases and sales totaled roughly $74.3 million to $273.3 million, according to a CNBC analysis of Trump’s August financial disclosure, which reports each item in a range of value. Purchases accounted for at least $44.2 million and sales at least $30.1 million, CNBC calculated.

The 18-page filing shows Trump’s portfolio remained highly active, even as trading slowed from June and July, when he disclosed more than 1,000 transactions in each month.

The largest transaction was an Aug. 21 purchase of between $5 million and $25 million in Meta shares, amid a broader portfolio reshuffling that day. Trump also reported buying between $1 million and $5 million each of AT&T, ConocoPhillips, Abbott Laboratories, Netflix and Chevron the same day.

Trump declares anyone who uses the term Artificial Intelligence to be ‘The Enemy!’

The Independent

The Odd Couple: Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump are now best of friends, and Trump is a heavy Meta investor. A new exposé on Zuckerberg entitled Social Responsibility opens in the US and UK tomorrow.

Scott: Trump struck a simple bargain with the tech bros during the run-up to the 2024 elections—they would support him unconditionally and with loads of cash and media manipulation. And in exchange, he would unfetter them from regulation and reward them with tens or hundreds of billions in government contracts, while making their duty to pay taxes much more theoretical than ever before. At his AI summit, Trump came through once more for them—as the illiterate (and nonbinding) document it generated showed. Now what will they do for him, particularly with the midterms in view?

President Donald Trump on Thursday opened up a new front in his ongoing war against commonly used terms and geographic names by warning that anyone referring to Large Language Models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude as “Artificial Intelligence” would earn themselves a place on his enemies list.

Writing on Truth Social, he declared that the White House “considers anyone that uses the term, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence,’ THE ENEMY!”

The president’s outburst-cum-veiled threat landed just over a week after he signed an executive order directing executive branch agencies to begin referring to artificial intelligence, which is now embedded across the federal government, as “super intelligence” following a lunch with leaders in the AI industry, including Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, Dario Amodei and others.

That widely mocked directive followed bizarre remarks to the U.N. General Assembly in which he declared that the U.S. “totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme” for regulating AI and declaring that the technology would be “hereinafter officially called super intelligence” because “use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake.”

“It makes it sound fake, and it is not fake. It’s actually amazing,” said Trump, who the week before had launched a poll in his Truth Social feed over the weekend asking respondents to vote for either “Super Intelligence,” “Superior Intelligence,” or “Extreme Intelligence.”

Trump’s Retreat: From the Gulf to Britain, American Forces Pull Back

New York Times

The RAF Fairford air base, from which a dozen American B-1 bombers were withdrawn last weekend, has been a mainstay of US-UK military cooperation since it opened in 1944. Photo: Craig Young/Reuters

Scott: In the midst of a war in which the US is projecting force into a battleground on the other side of the planet, the US has lost 18 military installations due to enemy attack—a fact Peter Hegseth appears to have decided that the Congress and White House don’t really need to know. He also withdrew B-1 bombers for reasons so absurd that they provoke laughter from military analysts when set out. What is all this about? On one level, it’s the most grotesquely incompetent military management America has seen since the Revolution. On another, it reflects the profound lack of seriousness that surrounds Trump’s warmaking, and his indifference to the safety and care of American service personnel—whom he derides as “suckers and losers.”

To hear President Trump and his aides describe it, the rush to withdraw 12 B-1 bombers from an air base in Britain over the weekend was a prudent precaution, in response to a threat they refused to describe.

It was no big deal, Mr. Trump insisted, and his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, tried to wave it away by noting that the Pentagon is “constantly reallocating resources where ​they need to be.”

But to anyone watching the deployment of American power around the globe in the seven months since Mr. Trump decided to attack Iran, it was another glaring example of how, time after time, Mr. Trump and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, have been forced into retreat, pulling back military forces that had been deployed to the Middle East and Britain as a deterrent.

Over the past several months, as the conflict has dragged on, the Iran war has come to reveal enormous new American vulnerabilities, forcing changes that the Pentagon was not contemplating a year ago. But it has also proved a bitter lesson in the unintended consequences that have flowed from Mr. Trump’s war of choice.

Mr. Trump intended the attack on Iran as another demonstration of the American military’s extraordinary power, following the successful bombing raid on three Iranian nuclear sites in June 2025 and the seizure of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela from his bed in Caracas in January.

But rather than enhance American power, the war has constrained it. The closing of bases in the Middle East and limiting the use of one in Britain have, at a minimum, vastly complicated the logistics of projecting power. American bombers can still reach their targets, of course, but only by flying from the United States, requiring more time and refueling. American carrier groups can still patrol in the Arabian Sea, outside the Persian Gulf, but now they must be resupplied from Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean 2,200 miles away, requiring additional weeks and huge costs.

But most importantly, the rapid withdrawals have taught a lesson to the Iranians — and potentially to other adversaries — that they hold the power to chase out a superpower. In Europe, Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth are thinking of reducing American forces on their terms and their schedule. In the Middle East and Britain, their hand was forced…

The subject of the bases is such a sore one for the Pentagon that it has refused to provide Congress with cost estimates to repair or rebuild the facilities, which lawmakers said could run tens of billions of dollars. It is unclear what is motivating the refusal to discuss the topic, though a price tag that big could become political fodder for candidates opposing the war.

Instead, there is now serious planning at Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, to reposition and reshape its facilities in the region.

“The financial costs have continued to climb by billions each month, even as the administration refuses to acknowledge the munitions crisis we face or admit the costs to rebuild bases heavily damaged by Iran,” Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said last month.

The Saturn System Smörgåsbord

Explanation: How was the Saturn system imaged so clearly? Astrophotographer Tom Williams captured such exquisite details due to one night of exceptional atmospheric conditions above the United Kingdom. This means more than a cloudless sky. Pockets of air at different temperatures and densities move around and bend light as it travels through Earth’s atmosphere, distorting astronomy images. This is called “seeing.” Less atmospheric turbulence means clearer images. The astrophotographer reduced the impact of seeing with the lucky imaging technique: thousands of short-exposure images are taken very quickly with a high-speed camera and the clearest images are added up. Which object in this smörgåsbord interests you? Perhaps Titan or the icy stripes of Enceladus? Maybe the gaps and spokes in Saturn’s rings? Saturn’s opposition, when Earth passes in between the planet and the Sun, occurred on October 4th. Due to the planet’s proximity and full illumination from the Sun, now is a great time of year to observe it!

Your Online Moment of Zen

Storm on the Sea of Galilee

Rembrandt

1633

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Boston

A Horse, An Eel, An Underage Girl, The Tate Brothers, and The Trump Brothers / The Most Racist Administration In A Hundred Years / Finland Halts Google Data Centers / Eternal War In The Middle East / Oil Shipping Costs Explode

English Prosecutors Reveal What the Tate Brothers Did to Attract the Loyalty of MAGA World

Daily Telegraph

Scott: Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan are super stars of the MAGA world. It’s not just that they have Mar-a-Lago access, they “pal around” routinely with all the Trump boys—Don Jr, Eric, and especially young Barron, who is a regular Tate groupie. An investigation into the circumstances of their release from house arrest in Romania shows that it followed from very heavy handed diplomacy (more accurately, threats) by the Trump administration. It was widely expected that Trump’s protection would secure them relief from all their legal woes—in Romania, Britain and the US. But that was not to be… at least not yet. Instead, prosecutors preparing the crown’s case against the Tates for trial at the Old Bailey have begun assembling and presenting their evidence. It’s unlikely that the Trump entourage have no inkling of what the evidence is. It’s far more likely that they know quite a bit of detail about it, and that’s precisely what makes the Tates so attractive to the Trump boys, and to MAGA world generally.

Andrew Tate took part in a sexualised video with a child, UK prosecutors have claimed.

The British-American influencer is accused of creating or sharing several indecent images of a child, including dozens of Category A videos – the highest risk level.

Court documents filed on Monday as part of an extradition request alleged that police found 168 indecent images and videos of a girl on Tate’s devices after he was arrested on July 18, 2015, on suspicion of rape and sexual assault.

The child is believed to have been 17 years old when the videos were taken, according to court documents. British prosecutors alleged on Monday that Tate, who was 28 at the time, was aware that she was underage.

The videos allegedly included 66 Category A images and 26 Category B images found on a Samsung mobile and a laptop reportedly seized from Tate’s home in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, following his 2015 arrest.

Multiple victims alleged that Tate repeatedly choked them before and during non-consensual sexual acts.

At least one of the videos involving Tate depicted the girl “in a sexualised context”, prosecutors alleged. The influencer is also accused of subsequently sharing the footage on WhatsApp.

Court documents said a Category B video seized by police showed Tate seated on a bed and speaking directly to the camera, with the underage girl “wearing lingerie and holding what appears to be a championship belt”.

She is shown in the video positioned behind Tate on the bed and kissing his neck, before a female adult joins and begins kissing the child.

The girl travelled to the UK in 2014 and began working for Tate’s webcam business “soon after her arrival”, court documents said. Her passport, which was also found in Tate’s home, confirmed she was 17 at the time of his arrest in July 2015.

A text exchange between Andrew Tate and the girl sent five months earlier appears to confirm the online influencer was aware she was underage at the time.

Tate is also accused of sharing videos of the underage girl with three other people in a WhatsApp group in June 2015. He allegedly boasted to them that the girl worked for his webcam business and that one man had offered to pay her $1,000 (£750) every day if she performed a specific sexual act on camera.

Other videos seized from Tate’s devices allegedly involved extreme pornography, including footage showing bestiality with a horse and an eel.

The bestiality allegations have prompted discussion of Kash Patel’s role. Patel enthusiastically greeted the Tates when they were released from Romania and is known to party with them.

An Investigation Only the Ku Klux Klan Could Love

Wall Street Journal

Charles: The virulent racism that permeates every domestic policy of this despicable administration has never been more obvious than it is in a newly revealed investigation by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Nine years ago, to compensate for decades of redlining and other forms of discrimination against Black borrowers, Wells Fargo announced it was committing $60 billion in loans to help at least 250,000 Black homeowners in the next ten years.

After a Bloomberg report revealed the bank had rejected half of all refinancing applications from Black homeowners in 2020, the bank promised to use its own money to help black homeowners refinance.

“These efforts are an important next step and will help close the homeownership gap between white and minority families created by decades of systemic inequities,” Wells Fargo said in 2022.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal yesterday, Dylan Tokar revealed that HUD had written to the chief executive of Wells Fargo to inform him the bank was now under investigation to determine whether it had violated fair-lending laws by favoring Black or other minority homeowners.

HUD officials said other banks would face similar investigations

This is the latest example of the Trump administration turning Civil Rights Laws upside down, to use them to discriminate against the very people they were supposed to protect.

The point is to return America to all of the worst practices that existed before the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s. The evisceration of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court is an integral part of this apostasy.

Scott Turner, the African-American ex-football player who is the HUD Secretary, issued this particularly revolting statement explaining the department’s actions:

“Even if Wells Fargo did not violate the law, its practice of dividing Americans based on race is immoral, unethical and un-American,” Turner said. “Wells Fargo and all of its employees that engaged in race-based decision-making should be ashamed of themselves.”

HUD Secretary Scott Turner

The shame Mr. Turner is yours, and and yours alone.

Read more

Trump: Still Hoping For His Own Reichstag Fire

Timothy Snyder

Charles: This is what I wrote in the very first Horton-Kaiser Report…

Read more

France: Wild In The Streets / The Kremlin Buries A New Plague / “Completely Unprecedented” Trump Corruption / Ken Paxton’s October Surprise / Crypto King CZ Flaunts It In Dubai

Special Report From France:

What’s Happening to La République?

Michael Finnegan filed this report from Paris to THKR:

Police in riot gear charging at protesters in clouds of tear gas are a familiar sight in France, but the state violence unleashed on high-school students in recent days has shocked much of the country.

A 15-year-old student had his hand torn off by a police grenade Monday at a high-school protest in Lens, near the Belgian border.

Last week it was a 14-year-old boy who was slammed in the face at close range by a police tear-gas grenade launcher, losing many of his teeth and suffering a double broken jaw at a school protest in Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône, a Paris suburb.

In Tours a couple days later, a 16-year-old student lost the use of his right eye permanently, and the local prosecutor said the injury was consistent with a rubber bullet strike.

All three tragedies prompted prosecutors to open police oversight investigations.

The protests have spread from one high school in Créteil, just southeast of Paris, to campuses all across France over the last two weeks. Rundown school buildings, overcrowded classes, and widely hated online systems for school-day schedules and university applications are among the many grievances.

A fire outside a secondary school in Seine-St.-Denis on Thursday.Credit...Lou Benoist/Agence France-Presse

It couldn’t come at a worse time for the outgoing President Emmanuel Macron, who is wrapping up his two terms with an epic budget shortfall that promises little or no relief.

With the presidential election now six months away, the aggressive police tactics have enraged the left in France, where a national demonstration of solidarity with the high school students will take place Tuesday.

In Libération, Sophie Binet, the secretary general of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), one of France’s biggest trade unions, expressed dismay that the government of Macron’s prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, was treating a youth movement like “a threat to be eradicated.” Sébastien Lecornu, was treating a youth movement like “a threat to be eradicated” — even as she condemned protester “violence committed against school staff or school buildings.”

“One high-school student has already lost an eye, another his teeth, and several serious — even fatal — accidents have been avoided by very little. This escalation must be stopped. Now. The government must stop fanning the flames. It must abandon this repressive headlong rush, genuinely guarantee public freedoms, and finally listen to what the high-school students are telling it.”

“For the high-school girls and boys are not asking to be brought to heel. They are asking that we stop stealing their future; they are asking for teachers, a school that works, accessible studies, decent learning conditions. They — girls and boys alike — are asking not to begin their adult lives with the certainty that they will live more precariously than their parents.

“These demands deserve a political response: not truncheons, custody, or a show of force!”

For more from labor leader Sophie Binet in Libération, go here.

The Kremlin Orders Russians To Ignore Reports About the Plague; In the Meantime, Reports of a First Death Are Confirmed

Meduza

An employee of a Russian plague research institute has died of a suspected pneumonic plague Credit: The Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and Far East/AP

Scott: A slipped vial in a lab in remote Siberia, and the plague is released. One death is already confirmed. The reaction of Putin’s Kremlin, predictably, is not to publicly announce a series of routine public health and safety measures, including quarantines and travel restrictions—instead it is to tell Russians to disregard all reporting about the plague outbreak, while the Kremlin waded in deleting warnings, notices and reports from social media. And all of this makes it extremely difficult to assess the threat posed by the plague outbreak in Irktusk. It also means that the Kremlin’s reassurances should not be credited. Remember Gorbachev’s glasnost’ policy? It was all a reaction to the sort of shenanigans we see the Kremlin playing now, coupled with advocacy of transparency about things when they go wrong.

Several hospitals in Irkutsk had imposed three-week quarantines, the news outlet People of Baikal reported on October 4. City Clinical Hospitals No. 1, No. 3, and No. 10 and the Ivano-Matreninskaya Children’s Hospital are closed, the outlet reported. Relatives of a woman giving birth at one of Irkutsk’s maternity hospitals told the outlet that it had also imposed a quarantine.

A health care source told the outlet that doctors in Irkutsk “are already openly talking about plague,” though documents sent to the hospitals do not mention that diagnosis. “With pneumonic plague, quarantine restrictions are not limited to selected facilities — they are imposed on all medical facilities at once,” the source told People of Baikal.

Shortly after People of Baikal’s report appeared, Russia’s public health watchdog, Rospotrebnadzor, issued a statement. The agency said “the public health situation in the Irkutsk region and the cities of Irkutsk and Shelekhov is stable” and that it had implemented “a series of special measures.”

The measures were prompted by a case of “pneumonia of unknown cause” in an employee of the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute. Rospotrebnadzor emphasized that no “microorganisms associated with her professional work” had been found in the deceased woman’s body…

Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov urged Russians to rely solely on official information about a possible plague outbreak in the Irkutsk region.

“The lead agency with expertise in this area is Rospotrebnadzor [Russia’s national public health and consumer protection agency]. People should rely on its official statements and disregard rumors, speculation, and so on. Rospotrebnadzor has highly qualified professionals in this field,” Peskov said.

Trump Corruption Watch

Krugman On The Cesspit of Trump Corruption

Charles: One of the biggest problems in journalism today is the near-impossibility of giving every Trump scandal the attention it deserves, because there are so many of them. This was top of mind for us when we founded The Horton-Kaiser Report.

No one contributes more to this battle than Paul Krugman. His decision to leave the New York Times and strike out on his own is one of the best things that has happened to journalism during Trump II. It made it possible for him to point his spotlight at all of this theft and desecration as often as he needs to.

Here are the highlights of his latest precis of the endless stream of high crimes and misdemeanors Trump and his minions are continuously flinging at us.

The level of corruption that Trump has engaged in and enabled in others is completely unprecedented – self-dealing that, as Trump would say, is like nothing anybody has ever seen before. America currently has a Republican president who, along with his family, has raked in billions, possibly close to $10 billion in personal gain from office in less than two years. He has effectively sold criminal pardons to scammers, invalidating the legal claims of their victims for restitution. His son-in-law Jared Kushner has become a billionaire running an investment fund for Gulf petro-state autocrats despite having no discernible investment skills. The Times just reported that Kristi Noem paid hundreds of millions over the reasonable price for 5 aircraft – one of which contains a marble bathroom and luxury bedroom – that were ostensibly for deportations but are instead sitting on the runway. And then there’s Trump’s Secretary of the Commerce, Howard Lutnick, whose family has doubled its net worth to over $7 billion, largely through its investments in Tether, the crypto-currency of choice by Iran, terrorists and rogue states.

And I shouldn’t omit the tragic fate of Simon Andriesz, the British banker and whistleblower, who recently died by suicide. Andriesz revealed to the Senate that Lutnick had lied about the extent of his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Right before his death, Andriesz spoke openly about how threats to himself and his family as a result of his testimony had ruined his life.

If the now widely-anticipated blue wave actually returns control of the House and Senate to the Democrats, focusing on this corruption needs to be a priority for every new committee chairman.

Through Congressional hearings and investigations, Democrats can vastly elevate the visibility of the extent of the outright looting and vandalism of this country by Trump and his gang.

Given the extent of the corruption, the rise of oligarchy in America, and the ever-rising flood of money in politics, many people may reasonably ask “Why will this matter?” Having elected Trump twice, can we trust Americans to vote for what is right rather than for lies? And can we trust Democrats, once in power, to be immune to the seduction of Big Money, as the Big Money will certainly try?

So, in a very real sense, once in power Democrats will have multiple battle fronts on their hands. In addition to battling Trump in his two remaining years of power, they will also have to prove to the American people that they will be immune to the inevitable attempts by Big Money to buy them off through campaign contributions and back-room deals. A couple of examples of what is already going wrong are the recent employment of Chuck Shumer’s daughter by OpenAI and the crypto billions raised by Kirsten Gillibrand’s 22-year old son for a new venture.

Granted, these two examples are exceedingly small potatoes in comparison to Trumpian corruption. But a significant number of voters won’t see it that way and will instead settle into a disaffected stance that both parties are equally bad. Furthermore, it’s a sure bet that once Democrats are in power, the Wall Street Journal and its ilk will revert to form, lambasting Democrats and elevating the Republicans.

So Democrats need to use this coming blue wave not only to clean out Trump’s corruption but to also put their own house in order. Because the forces that gave rise to Trump will not go meekly into the night.

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Trump’s Longest Enemies List / Arms Ban For Israel Gains Momentum / Kushner and Witkoff Want Russia’s Oil For Their Pals / Epstein Whistleblower’s Death Called Suicide / Immigrants Are Russia’s Newest Weapon

Palantir Offers a Major Upgrade to the Enemies List

WIRED

Scott: Between 1971–72, at the instigation of Richard Nixon, White House aides Charles Colson and George Bell began to compile a list of Nixon’s political opponents to enable the administration to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies,” as Colson put it. Today, Palantir is offering Nixon disciple Donald Trump considerably greater technological specificity in the preparation of an enemies list. Palantir will take photos of all people who appear in public protests against Trump (which by current reckoning is roughly 20 million Americans), scan them in and then use its proprietary technology to identify each and every one—including individual points of vulnerability, such as social security, medical needs, tax records and court filings. It’s a fascist dictator’s delight. And it marks the true unfurling of the colors of Peter Thiel’s Palantir operation.

An explosive and newly partially unsealed court filing alleges that the US Department of Homeland Security built up dossiers on ICE observers—including their photos, license plate numbers, and other information—and stored them in a system called the Investigative Case Management database, which was built by Palantir.

Palantir did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

A spokesperson for DHS calls the case “meritless” and says that “the underlying lawsuit is based on the lie that there is a database of ‘domestic terrorists’ run by DHS.”

Plaintiffs allege in the filing, which is heavily based on documents produced by the government and depositions of DHS agents, that agents had a practice of intimidating protesters and observers. They did this, the filing says, by doing drive-bys of the observers’ homes and, in the case of at least one observer, requiring that she be referred to secondary inspection any time she tries to cross the border until at least January 2027.

“The government is treating people who exercise their First Amendment rights and seek to hold it accountable as criminal suspects, and that’s what we’re asking the court to stop,” says JoAnna Suriani, an attorney at Protect Democracy who is representing ICE observers in the case.

The filing focuses on agents’ conduct during “Operation Catch of the Day,” an immigration enforcement surge in Maine this past January. It is part of a proposed class action brought in federal court in Maine by four observers: Elinor Hilton, Colleen Fagan, Polyxenia Pantos, and Carlyn Williams. It was filed under seal in September, and a redacted version was made public Friday.

In particular, it describes how one DHS agent, referred to as “Agent J.C.” in the filing, used the Investigative Case Management (ICM) database, which the government describes as the case management system the ICE component Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) uses to document its investigations, to flag observers.

According to the filings, J.C. created ICM records on at least six observers; the government puts the number of people at eight. He labeled two people he filmed at a Home Depot parking lot with “Threat to Law Enforcement, Professional Protestor,” according to the filing, and sent photos of them and others to a US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer so he could run a facial recognition search on them using an app called Mobile Query.

On January 20, Pantos briefly watched and photographed an arrest in Portland, Maine, standing a few car lengths away beside their spouse’s car. Hours later, per the filing, J.C. ran the car’s plate and pulled a report on the owner—Williams—from Accurint, a LexisNexis database for law enforcement, which listed her address, phone numbers, and cohabitants. J.C. then allegedly circulated her photo to his team, asking, “Was this the protestor.” Another agent, per the filing, replied that it didn’t match the woman he had dealt with at the scene; J.C. then told colleagues he was “adding them in ICM now.”

Pelosi’s Choice Favors Full Arms Ban for Israel

Al Jazeera

Charles: If you’re still wondering how deeply Bibi Netanyahu has damaged American support for Israel, consider Connie Chan, Nancy Pelosi’s choice to succeed her as San Francisco’s newest Congresswoman.

Nancy Pelosi and Connie Chan

In last week’s debate with her fellow Democrat, State Senator Scott Wiener, Chan called for a “full arms embargo on the Israeli government.” She promised on her first day in Congress she would vote to “end a genocide in Gaza and to end an apartheid state”.

While on Capitol Hill, Pelosi long supported Israel, condemning efforts to boycott or sanction the country and voting in favour of military aid.

Chan said humanitarian aid must be prioritised and told debate moderators she would not support funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence system.

Wiener has also described Israel’s assault on Gaza as a genocide and said he would oppose funding for the Israeli military and the provision of bombs or offensive weapons.

“This government, and it’s not just [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, is an absolute abomination, in my view, in terms of what it has inflicted on Gaza, in terms of Israel empowering settler violence and land grabs in the West Bank,” Wiener said.

Kushner’s and Witkoff’s LUKOil Grift, Explained

New York Times

The negotiations about the Lukoil deal show that personal business interests in President Trump’s inner circle are also in play. Lukoil is Russia’s biggest private oil company. Photo: Gianni Cipriano/NYT

Scott: For several months now, transcripts of Jared Kushner’s and Steve Witkoff’s conversations with their Russian interlocutors—largely held on WhatsApp and thus very easily intercepted—have been circulating among NATO intelligence services (minus, of course, the US). It was remarkable that these conversations actually contained very little discussion of the Kushner-Witkoff mission to the Kremlin, supposedly to broker a peace agreement with Ukraine. Instead they were centered on a steady drip of intriguing business opportunities from which Kushner and Witkoff could obtain personal profit. In his blockbuster New Yorker piece, former Timesman Dexter Filkins laid all of this out in some detail. And roughly a week later, in a series of stories, the Financial Times revealed that a brokered sale of key foreign assets of the Russian state oil firm LUKOil was at the core of the discussions. The key to make the LUKOil sale work was assurance that foreign regulators—notably the US Treasury Department—would be okay with it and would lift or modify sanctions to make it work. And for a price, this was precisely what Kushner and Witkoff were prepared to step in and assure. It’s classic corruption in a breathtaking form. Yet transactions of this sort are a weekly undertaking in the Trump era… and they go largely unreported in US media.

Now NYT has picked up on the FT’s reporting and considerably expanded and elaborated on it.

The Trump administration’s talks with Russia about ending the war in Ukraine have expanded to include a multibillion-dollar oil deal that would benefit Middle Eastern business executives with ties to the two main U.S. negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.

The deal, which is contingent on approval from the U.S. government and the Kremlin, is for a sprawling set of oil fields, refineries and gas stations around the world owned by Lukoil, one of Russia’s biggest energy companies.

The leading group seeking the deal includes an American investor, Todd Boehly, who has donated $2 million to President Trump’s political causes; two Middle Eastern groups that have done business with Mr. Kushner or Mr. Witkoff’s family; and an arm of the U.S. government itself.

The monthslong negotiations, which were described by eight people familiar with them, shed new light on Mr. Trump’s latest approach to settling a four-year war that has killed hundreds of thousands. The people spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiations.

There is no indication that Mr. Kushner and Mr. Witkoff themselves stand to profit. But the pending deal represents a striking intermingling of personal business ties with geopolitics, even for an administration that has regularly dismissed concerns about potential conflicts of interest.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia brought up the deal when he met with Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner at the Kremlin on Sept. 5, according to three people familiar with the meeting. Mr. Putin proposed it get done as a way of showing Russians that they can do business with the United States, according to one of the people.

The Americans responded that they would work on it, the person said, seeing it as a way to build good will with the Kremlin while also lowering global energy prices. But the deal is also a lucrative one for the buyers: U.S. approval for the sale would release the assets from American sanctions, instantly increasing their value.

In Moscow, the decision on the deal is widely seen as Mr. Putin’s to make, even though Lukoil is technically a private company. The upshot is that the giant transaction, involving assets as varied as oil fields in Cameroon, refineries in Europe and gas stations in New Jersey, comes down to Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump.

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Trump Orders Arrest of Bolivia’s Attorney General and Lead Prosecutor, Bolivia Does as Demanded

Bloomberg / El Diario

Scott: So what, exactly, is Donald Trump up to in Latin America? Today he has furnished an excellent demonstration of his intention to reduce the nations of Latin America to neocolonial dependencies. And, as ever, a “war on drug lords” is the pretext. Does this really have anything to do with drug lords? Journalists in Bolivia are more than merely skeptical.

Police have arrested Bolivia’s attorney general, Roger Mariaca, and the chief prosecutor in Santa Cruz, Alberto Zeballos, based on charges made by the Trump administration that they were involved with drug lords. This is reported in US media. But what isn’t reported is amazing.

Trump has launched an operation named MAGA SUR and placed it under the direction of his campaign chief, Brad Parscale. A lawyer who works for Argentine autocrat Javier Milei named Fernando Cerimedo is Parscale’s partner in the operation. Cerimedo was romantically entangled with Bolivian lawyer Nadia Beller, but thought she was talking too freely about MAGA SUR. So he hired a hit man to liquidate her. The assassin shot Beller three times, but she survived and went to the police, and in turn to the chief prosecutor of Santa Cruz, who concluded evidence was sufficient to open a criminal case against Cerimedo. Search warrants issued in connection with the probe led to discovery and the subsequent leaking to the public of a large cache of documents involving the Trump White House, Parscale, Cerimedo and their various plots and schemes all across Latin America. As today’s actions were going down, prosecutors disclosed to the press a series of further documents showing the criminal accused, Cerimedo, meeting and traveling with Trump’s son, Don Trump Jr, who has apparently taken a role in the MAGA SUR operations. Trump has been pressing the Bolivian government to shut down the whole criminal investigation and remove the prosecutors in charge. So he had the US Justice Department produce criminal accusations against both, insisting that all the embarrassing disclosures they made were simply at the behest of “drug lords.” And the US is, of course, battling “drug lords.”

Is there any validity to these accusations? They are just as likely to be accurate as the US Justice Department’s claims that an Olympic athlete was sabotaging the reflecting pool. As a retired senior DEA officer told me “throughout the history of our war against drug lords in Latin America, the US has consistently allied itself with other drug lords. You might think that’s counterproductive. You’d be right.”

Bolivia arrested Attorney General Roger Mariaca in an operation Wednesday night after the US government accused him of corruption.

Interior Minister Marco Antonio Oviedo said early Thursday that police dismantled a criminal organization embedded in the public prosecutor’s office that aimed to protect and encourage drug trafficking. A total of 14 people were arrested, including four senior officials from Mariaca’s office, the minister added. Santa Cruz Department Prosecutor Alberto Zeballos was also among those held.

Mariaca, who was named to the post during the administration of Bolivia’s left-wing former president, Luis Arce, is under investigation for criminal organization, money laundering and drug trafficking, Oviedo said.

The crackdown by President Rodrigo Paz’s government on officials labeled by the US as corrupt drew immediate praise from Washington. The Trump administration stands firmly with Paz and “Bolivia’s democratically elected government as it takes bold and decisive actions to combat narco-trafficking, systemic corruption and transnational organized crime,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a post on X.

Earlier this week, the US State Department revoked the visas of 17 Latin American officials, including judges and prosecutors, as well as other individuals it accused of corruption. Mariaca was one of those targeted for allegedly accepting bribes to facilitate drug trafficking.

The attorney general denied the US allegations at the time and said they were part of an attempt to influence the prosecutor’s office in cases involving outside interests, including the investigation into Fernando Cerimedo. Known as “MAGA’s man” in Latin America, Cerimedo served as an adviser to Paz and is at the center of an alleged assassination plot that’s roiling politics in Bolivia and across the region given the strategist’s ties to other right-wing leaders, including Argentine President Javier Milei and Jair Bolsanaro in Brazil.

Russian Bots Make David Corn Part of Their Disinformation Machine

Charles: The great David Corn, long time Washington Bureau Chief for Mother Jones, has just published a very important book: How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America.

So far the mainstream has mostly ignored it, which is outrageous.

You can tell how accurate the book is by the way the Russians have reacted to it: they have rewarded Corn by making him the star of its latest disinformation campaign.

Corn’s book summarizes the evidence that proves what those of us who have studied the literature have recognized for years: all the stories about Russian interference with American elections and collaboration with Trump and his minions are absolutely true.

Here’s Corn’s summary of his findings from an interview he did with Al Leston of Reveal, the investigative radio show heard by more than 1 million people each week on more than 500 public radio stations”

There have been many investigations of what happened in 2016. We know that Putin attacked by having his operatives hack Democrats and leak embarrassing material that impeded the Clinton campaign, and that throughout that campaign, Donald Trump denied this was happening. So in essence, he aided and abetted a Russian attack on American democracy. And for the last decade, he has continued to deny and say that there was no Russian attack. But key point here is that it didn’t stop then. It didn’t stop in 2016. As my book shows, in 2020 and 2024 and in the 2018 midterms, Russian intelligence ran disinformation and influence operations to affect the American elections and almost always to benefit Donald Trump. So what we have here is not a one-off in 2016. We have a continuous campaign, sort of a twilight war, gray zone warfare, the experts call it, that Putin has been waging against the United States in all this time, and Donald Trump and Republicans and others have failed to recognize it and they have helped by continuing to deny that anything of the sort is happening.

The Russians have redoubled their efforts to try to help the Republicans retain control of Congress in the currentelection cycle by inventing new libels about every Democratic Senate candidate in a swing state. Corn reported covert operatives were “posting fake videos that appeared to be CNN spots with damaging information on Democratic senatorial candidates. James Talarico (Texas) “despises” Hasidic Jews because they don’t allow gender affirmation treatment. Sherrod Brown (Ohio) owns a business that has “caused the bee population in Ohio to decline by a factor of nine.” Jon Ossoff (Georgia) has “called for a complete halt to military aid to Israel and for all resources to be redirected to Ukraine.”

David Corn

But then Corn discovered the Russians were just getting started:

On Friday, @antibot4navalny informed me that Matryoshka—through an obvious bot account on X—had posted a purported CNN video of me promoting a new book. But the book isn’t How Russia Won. It’s supposedly called Enemies of Democracy for Dummies, and the video declared, “The book will feature over 300 stories related to crimes committed by members of the Democratic Party.”

This counterfeit video displayed the text of a made-up quote from me: “Apparently, there’s a fissure somewhere in the US that leads straight to hell; otherwise, I don’t understand where all these devils from the Democratic Party are coming from.” That’s quite the analysis. The video noted that “information from David Corn’s book will further damage the Democrats’ reputation and standing ahead of the elections.”

So after writing a book about Putin’s disinformation efforts and noting they posed a threat to the current elections, I am being used by a Russian disinformation network to influence the midterms in Trump’s favor. This is a bizarre snake-eating-its-tail situation.

Trump Corruption Watch

Jared Kushner, Merchant of Death: Americans Get a First Glimpse at Kushner’s Commercial Relationship with Israel

CNN

Scott: As Le Monde observes today, Trump’s “diplomacy of family and friends” rarely assigns any role to defined national interests which are the subject matter of foreign relations theory. Rather it’s a donnybrook—a rush to obtain profits and rewards from foreign governments and businesses in exchange for delivering some US benefit or service. Jared Kushner is a perfect demonstration of how all this works. As we know, Kushner is Trump’s personal representative in every conflict that matters. And he simultaneously is the recipient of huge sums from Saudi Arabia (almost certainly a large multiple of the $2.2bn we’ve heard about) and understands his role to be that of an advocate for Israel and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Today for the first time, CNN has sketched out a bit of what his relationship with Israel means in strict terms of dollars and cents. All of this reflects a sweeping betrayal of confidence and trust, and certainly entails the breach of a long list of criminal statutes. But Kushner can count on Todd Blanche to insure the law is not upheld or enforced.

At the same time Jared Kushner has acted as a key negotiator in the war in Gaza, his private equity company, Affinity Partners, has held the largest stake in an Israeli firm backing businesses involved in Israel’s military campaigns, a CNN investigation has found.

Kushner has skirted deeper scrutiny of this potential conflict of interest by acting as a volunteer envoy, rather than accepting a government job that would require him to disclose his finances.

In the process, Kushner has carved out an unprecedented dual role under the Trump administration – one that blends lucrative business and high-stakes politics amid a devastating war.

CNN used Israeli financial transparency laws to trace some of the military-linked investments of Phoenix Financial, a Tel Aviv-based firm that Kushner’s investment group doubled its stake in last year, shortly before Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office. Kushner later described Phoenix as Affinity’s “best investment.”

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Bubble? What Bubble? The Six Trillion Dollar Question

Yahoo News

Charles: A new report from consulting firm Bain & Co. estimates that the artificial intelligence industry will need $6T…

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