“In the 2024 election, the sheer volume of tech and crypto money gave the first felon to occupy the Oval Office a massive boost, with at least $273.2 million flowing from tech figures into Trump’s coffers, according to the Guardian. That year, Gil Durán coined the sobriquet ‘Nerd Reich’ to describe the pestilent mishmash of hard-right ideologies fueling the Bay Area’s reactionary turn. A former California political consultant and journalist who ran the opinion sections at the Sacramento Bee and was an editor at the San Francisco Examiner, Durán turns his attention to the full panoply of Silicon Valley’s authoritarian class in his new book. The portrait is grim. ‘Tech fascism is the product of a venture capital system that has run out of unicorns and must now hunt Antichrists to meet its unquenchable thirst for acceleration,’ he writes. ‘Artificial intelligence companies hype the coming of a ‘godlike’ force capable of wiping out most jobs and, perhaps, all of humanity. Crypto companies peddle fantasies of digital salvation, shilling tokenized scams supposedly designed to survive the impending collapse of the US dollar and the liberal democratic order. . . . New crops of biotech start-ups promote delusional notions of eternal life while others launch the next generation of killer robot drones.’ Unlike most contemporary accounts of Silicon Valley, The Nerd Reich is not a biography, an inquest into a particular business, or a ‘true crime’ accounting; it is an urgent intellectual history of a seemingly inchoate political moment. His project, which connects the rapacious search for profits with the quest for total control over our political, economic, and social lives, reveals that the fever dreams of our tech overlords are borne of a eugenics-friendly, totalitarian current that has long run underneath the surface in the high technology sector. The difference today is that the nerds are done pretending they are beholden to, or accountable to, anyone other than themselves.” (Ali Winston/The Baffler)

“CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s brief trip to Moscow yesterday was unannounced but hard to miss: He flew in a C-17A, a large heavy-transport plane, that open-source analysts quickly identified and tracked. Within hours, he was already on his way home. The purpose of Ratcliffe’s visit remains unknown. In an interview with Glenn Beck this morning, President Trump described it as ‘sort of semi-routine,’ but such trips are rare. The previous time a director of the CIA went to Russia was in November 2021, when William J. Burns told Moscow that the United States knew of Vladimir Putin’s plans to invade Ukraine. A likelier explanation for this latest trip is that Russia is getting more dangerous and the Trump administration wanted to warn it against escalating. Ratcliffe’s visit comes at one of the most difficult periods in the war for the Kremlin. Thanks to its drone systems, Ukraine has been able to strike military targets and oil infrastructure deep inside Russia while also hindering Moscow’s advance on the battlefield, turning the front into a kill box in which anything that moves is struck within minutes. Despite making little progress, Russia has continued to take heavy losses. In May, the Russian death toll reached nearly half a million, according to Anne Keast-Butler, the head of GCHQ, the U.K. intelligence agency. Russia’s weakness could be making Putin more reckless. The Wall Street Journal reported a few weeks ago that the U.S. intelligence community is concerned that Russia could carry out a limited attack on a NATO state, possibly even launching a small land incursion. Such an assault might thwart Russia’s own interests, prompting Europe to accelerate its military buildup and target Moscow’s sovereign assets. But Putin may see attacking a NATO country as an unprecedented opportunity to break the alliance, by manufacturing a crisis in which the United States fails to act.” (Thomas Wright/The Atlantic)

“Sailing an oil supertanker from the Persian Gulf to China now costs around more than $500,000 a day, according to maritime data provider Clarksons Research; that is more than double the rate before Iran began attacking the strait. The increase has been driven by sharply higher expenses, including higher insurance costs, and a decline in the number of shippers willing to make the sometimes dangerous voyages. The routes are also longer. After the strait closed, Houthi militants, backed by Iran, announced a blockade of Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea, forcing some shippers to reroute via the Suez Canal—adding around 30 days to the journey to Asia … Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth estimated the latest cost of the Iran war at $37.5 billion in July before the most recent bout of strikes in August. Earlier in the war, when Hegseth was questioned over the cost of the conflict by lawmakers, he replied by asking them how much they would pay to ensure Iran doesn’t get a nuclear bomb. Higher oil, gas, fertilizer and transport prices have weighed on growth, hurting energy-importing economies in Europe and Asia the most. The IMF now expects global inflation to rise to 4.7% this year from 4.1% in 2025, interrupting a descent that had been under way since 2024 … Russia earned $12.7 billion a month at the height of the war thanks to higher oil prices and a temporary waiver on U.S. oil sanctions, according to European Union officials. The waiver ended in June.” (Omar Abdel-Baqui, Rebecca Feng and Georgi Kantchev/WSJ)

“Dolly Parton, the brilliant songwriter and beloved country singer who has died at age 80, wrote one of the great anthems of the American working class. The title song from 9 to 5, the 1980 classic about battling gender inequity in the workplace that starred Parton, Jane Fonda, and Lily Tomlin, spoke so much truth that it became a hit on the pop and country charts, gained an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song, and collected two Grammys. Workers everywhere knew what Parton meant when she sang about ‘barely gettin’ by, it’s all takin’ and no givin’,’ and complained, ‘They just use your mind and they never give you credit. It’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it.’ That song appeared on a remarkable solo album by Parton, 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs, which also included songs such as ‘Working Girl’ and ‘Poor Folks Town’ by Parton, along with a poignant cover of ‘Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos,’ Woody Guthrie’s reflection on the racist treatment of migrant farm workers. The album’s title track warned, ‘It’s a rich man’s game no matter what they call it. And you spend your life puttin’ money in his wallet.’ It also reminded working women, ‘There’s a better life and you think about it, don’t you?’ So it came as no surprise that the news of Parton’s death on Tuesday elicited heartfelt expressions of mourning—and respect—from unions that counted her as one of their own. ‘Dolly Parton knew what it was like to struggle as she fought for working families her whole career,’ recalled the AFL-CIO. ‘From providing free books to kids to giving working women our ‘9 to 5’ anthem, she was an icon and an inspiration. Rest in power to our union sister. We will always love you.’” (John Nichols/The Nation)

“The latest U.S. strategy in the Middle East is defined as one of ‘maximum pressure,’ combining military containment and economic sanctions in an attempt to compel Iran to accept a deal. But it lacks clearly defined, civilian-led outcomes, illustrating the persistent misalignment between military means and political ends. Military pressure can set conditions, signal resolve, and buy time for civilian action. It cannot determine political outcomes. When a civilian-led strategy rooted in clear end states is not determined ahead of sending military forces, those deployments turn into continuous rotations; it is how ‘forever wars’ get started. This essay is not an argument against the use of force. It is at times necessary, and even realist restraint doctrine says so. Instead, this essay is an argument that force is but one of many instruments of national security; when the other instruments of national security, like diplomacy, aren’t employed equally or greater than the military, it is service members who pay the greatest price. … On March 4, 2026, U.S. Army Vice Chief of Staff General LaNeve testified that more than 108,000 U.S. Army soldiers only (not counting military forces from the other services) were deployed or forwardly postured across 160 countries. Many, more than 50,000 personnel from all the services, are deployed to the U.S. Central Command area of interest in the Middle East. They include sailors still at sea aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. These forces have frequently been deployed to display U.S. resolve or apply ‘pressure’ but have remained overseas longer than they or others anticipated. Legendary deterrence theorist Thomas Schelling described a difference between using force to physically destroy an adversary’s capability and using force as a threat to change an adversary’s behavior. The former is a military task; the latter is a political strategy, effective only if a settlement is feasible. According to Schelling, ‘the power to hurt is bargaining power.’ But when pressure is applied without the possibility of a political settlement, force is all that remains.” (Andrew M. Leonard/Responsible Statecraft)

“Drones and explosives found in Germany linked to a suspected attack on Leipzig airport. A naval drone shot down near a gas platform in the Black Sea. An assassination plot targeting a European defense executive. Russia’s campaign against Europe looks increasingly brazen. Yet EU leaders remain reluctant to call it what a growing number of security officials say it increasingly resembles: war. Instead, they reach for a softer phrase — ‘hybrid war’ — that allows the EU and NATO to avoid a military response. A case in point: Earlier this week, when German investigators found a third drone along with explosives thought to be linked to a planned airport attack, Chancellor Friedrich Merz warned that his country was experiencing ‘very real threats’ amid ‘increased scrutiny from hybrid attackers.’ Europe faces ‘an escalating campaign of threats’ and ‘hybrid warfare,’ Commission President Ursula von der Leyen warned in an X post on August 20 after the Black Sea incident. Amid an ever-growing list of similar events — which some intelligence agencies argue may be building toward a direct attack by Russia on a NATO state — CIA director John Ratcliffe traveled to Moscow this week to warn the Kremlin against striking alliance members. ‘We are indeed in a hybrid war which is no longer all that ‘hybrid’ anymore,’ said Camille Grand, a former assistant secretary-general at NATO and now head of the European Aerospace, Security and Defense Industries Association. ‘My [defense industry] CEOs have all increased their personal security details in recent months,’ in the wake of threats against the head of Saab and an assassination plot against the chief executive of German defense industry giant Rheinmetall, Grand said. But EU leaders and officials want to avoid any suggestion Russia is on the cusp of a direct strike. That language is coming under growing criticism as Moscow steps up sabotage, cyberattacks and other operations across Europe. Security experts, diplomats and defense officials who spoke to POLITICO say the ‘hybrid’ label risks understating the severity of the threat — and obscuring just how far the confrontation with Russia has already escalated.” (Politico EU/Nicholas Vinocur and Antoaneta Roussi)

“The three Stars and Stripes staffers fired by the Pentagon last week are mounting a First Amendment challenge to their ouster. Editor-in-chief Erik Slavin, publisher Max Lederer and reporter Lara Korte sued the Defense Department yesterday, alleging they were unlawfully pushed out for publicly defending the outlet’s editorial independence — and in retaliation for recent reporting on the deteriorating conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. The trio is seeking to block their terminations and overturn the Pentagon’s repeal of longstanding rules protecting Stars and Stripes’ independence. The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.” (Liam Rellie/Reliable Sources)

“An air strike near Chad’s border with Sudan has killed at least 12 people, with Chad accusing the Sudanese army of launching it. Addressing Thursday’s strike, a Chadian security source said it ‘targeted a fuel market where the RSF [Rapid Support Forces] refuel. The strike killed 12 people and wounded seven’, AFP news agency reported about the attack on the paramilitary group. Chad’s accusation comes against the backdrop of a civil war between Sudan’s army and the RSF which has lasted over three years and displaced millions of people. Previously, Chad said that Sudan was responsible for an air strike that hit a military convoy in its territory last week. Chad’s army said the strikes took place more than 100km (62 miles) inside its territory in the eastern Ennedi region, and that there were no Chadian casualties. In response to threats posed by drones, Chad had raised its alert level in the area to its highest point, according to a security source. The country deployed about 100 armoured vehicles and signal-jamming trucks near eastern Tine, close to the Sudanese border, a local source told Reuters news agency. On Thursday, Sudan said it was surprised by the allegations against its army ‘before any professional and independent investigation into the circumstances of the incident’ … The US embassy in Khartoum also accused the Sudanese army of launching the recent strikes on Chad, condemning them on Thursday. The Sudanese army has previously accused Chad of being aligned with the RSF. Meanwhile, nearly one million displaced Sudanese people have fled to Chad, where they have been facing a water crisis.” (Al Jazeera)

“Among the politerati, there’s been much cogitating about what happens to Trumpism and MAGA once Donald Trump is gone. (The assumption is that, yes, one day he will not be here.) What might be next for this cultish movement without its godhead, especially given the cleavages that have emerged over the Iran war, the Epstein files, Israel, and other matters? Can any of Trump’s craven lieutenants win the support and devotion of Trump’s following? JD Vance? Marco Rubio? Some watchers of the right have speculated that Tucker Carlson might be the natural leader of post-Trump Trumpism. He has broken with Trump over the Iran war, but he remains perhaps the top influencer on the right, leading a rump group of conservatives (which includes former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and soon-to-be-former Rep. Thomas Massie) who once were full MAGA and Trump loyalists but now are…something else. Perhaps we could flatter them by calling this group America First conservatives, though that doesn’t truly capture their nativism and extremism. So it’s important to pay attention to Carlson’s peregrinations and associations. And he made a major move a few weeks ago, appearing for an hour on RT, the Russian state-controlled media outfit. RT is more than just Vladimir Putin’s propaganda mill. It runs disinformation operations, one of which was exposed two years ago when the Justice Department indicted two RT employees for funneling at least $10 million to pro-Trump media figures in the United States, including Benny Johnson and Tim Pool. (Johnson, Pool, and the others claimed they didn’t know the extravagant amounts they were paid originated in Moscow.) After that indictment was disclosed, Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of RT, went on Russian state television and boasted that RT worked ‘undercover’ and engaged in ‘partisan warfare, guerrilla warfare,’ and she claimed it had created in America a network of ‘bloggers with unbelievable audiences’ that had ‘an electorally significant influence’ … Carlson showed up on RT earlier this month as a guest on a show hosted by Rick Sanchez, a former CNN anchor who was fired in 2010 after making comments criticized as antisemitic. Subsequently, Sanchez put in a short stint at Fox News, and in 2019 he joined RT America, which shut down after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Three years later, he moved to Moscow and became the anchor of RT International’s flagship show.” (David Corn/Mother Jones)

“The Indy 500 is zipping around our capital, but the wheels of American justice are slow. Attorney General Todd ‘Boy Cohn’ Blanche – with the help of FBI agents flagging documents with the acronym POTUS for special review – has thrown enough roadblocks into the Epstein Files Transparency Act to defend his boss for now. Maybe not for long, since a judge is threatening him with contempt of court. And at least one other powerful man is feeling the heat. That man is Epstein’s biggest ‘tax client,’ master of the universe and Wall Street billionaire Leon Black, whose lawyers and fortune have managed to shield him from accusations, responsibility and questions for years. His imperial impunity may finally be reaching its limit, at least at the congressional level, where the House Oversight Committee is threatening to hold him in contempt of Congress if he continues to refuse to turn over nondisclosure agreements. Earlier this summer, when the NDA issue came up, Black stalked out of the Oversight Committee with his phalanx of lawyers. The Committee has been hashing out next steps with them ever since and has apparently ran out of patience: Black is now threatened with a contempt citation next week. ‘If Mr. Black refuses to provide the Committee with responsive documents or refuses to appear for his scheduled deposition on September 3, 2026, the Committee will use all tools at its disposal, including contempt,’ Comer said in a letter to Black’s lawyers. Black was Epstein’s biggest known client, having paid him about $170 million, according to Senate Finance Committee ranking member Ron Wyden … But there are also plenty of communications between the two men – or between Epstein and his recruiters referencing Black – to suggest that their relationship edged in the direction of Epstein’s side business trafficking women, and is worth further investigation.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)

“Late last week, volunteers working with the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, were inundated with calls about men being arrested and separated from their families. One of those detained was a pastor, Gilbert Joubert Adrien. Joubert Adrien, who is the minister of a church of 130 people, was, apparently, snatched by ICE agents while at a gas station. He is just one of several dozen Haitians to be targeted by ICE in Springfield in the past week, according to monitoring groups such as G92 and the Haitian Bridge Alliance. Haitians in Springfield have been the center of some of the cruelest xenophobic behaviors of the Trump era. Perhaps you will remember the 2024 presidential campaign, during which JD Vance and Donald Trump made up false rumors about Haitians in the city ‘eating dogs and cats.’ Trump doubled down on this outlandish claim during his televised debate with Kamala Harris; Vance admitted that the allegations were likely false but nevertheless went out of his way to justify his circulation of these slanderous allegations. Now the administration is unleashing the full force of ICE on this same community, launching what can only be described as an officially sanctioned pogrom against people whose offense seems mainly to be that they are members of a race and a nation that Trump regards with peculiar contempt and animus. ‘These are people who fled for their lives,’ Guerline Jozef, of the Haitian Bridge Alliance told me. ‘Some of them still have pending asylum claims, which means the government is violating due process.’” (Sasha Abramsky/TheNation)

“For millions of Sudanese, the war has reduced life to one agonising question: when will it end? Peace is no longer a political luxury but an urgent necessity. It is the only thing that matters to families who lost their homes, to communities pushed into mass displacement, and to all those wondering whether their relatives are still alive. I could feel the heaviness of our reality when Mahmoud and I met in Gallal café in Madinaty, Cairo. We chose the location simply because he lives in Badr and we wanted to head to Downtown Cairo eventually, so it made sense to meet near my place. It was the first time I had seen Mahmoud in three years. The way we greeted each other was so intense that it made an Egyptian woman at the next table start crying. Mahmoud was instantly embarrassed. He doesn’t know how to navigate a crying stranger, or emotions in general, so he simply stared at his phone. He muttered that she must be crying over a relationship as he watched a video of Khartoum burning on his social media feed. We didn’t talk much after that. We have become exceptionally good at silence.” (Ahmed Ismat/The New Arab)

RIP, Dolly

“The teenage boy’s hands and legs were shackled to the anti-aircraft gun mounted on a pickup as Sudanese warplanes attacked. He saw another child chained to the steering wheel. As their captors sought cover, the terrified children were ordered to stay and shoot down the jets over the capital, Khartoum. If they tried to flee, they’d be killed by their captors — if the planes didn’t get them first. The boy, now 17, told The Associated Press that those who ordered him strapped to the gun were Colombian mercenaries providing military aid to Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces against the army in the war, now in its fourth year. Another child said he was forced to carry out artillery strikes and beaten for disobedience. The rare, firsthand accounts show the perils faced by tens of thousands of children believed to have been conscripted into the war by all sides. Six former child soldiers who were abducted and forced to fight with the Rapid Support Forces, known as the RSF, spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. Two said they were trained by Colombians.” (Sam Mednick, Isabel Debre and Astrid Suarez/AP)

“Nathan Cofnas—a self-proclaimed ‘race realist’ whose ‘hereditarianism’ is scientifically condemned, and who has held only fixed-term academic posts (and that’s only part of the reason he seems mad)—is too useful to the movement to discard. While his work is published as philosophy, not science, it is indispensable to politics. He has been clear about his plan since at least 2024. Having already published that in a true meritocracy the number of Black professors would fall to almost none, after he was fired by Cambridge’s Emmanuel College, he informed donors to his Free Speech Union fundraising page of his effort to champion ‘the right of academics to express politically incorrect views about race.’ Politically incorrect—as if what he peddles were a rude opinion at a dinner party. Hereditarianism is not a suppressed viewpoint. It is a defeated one … Reporters and pundits seemed to pick at the account of Arday’s life for sport; spinning a plagiarism inquiry into hundreds of articles about a man’s childhood, and his account of himself. The media attention and incessant parasocial chatter has not stopped. Not even after his family begged them to, following his death. Respectable outlets that would never print a race scientist, perish the thought, took the racist premise of hereditarianism—barely scrubbed of its stench—and ran it in the pretense of due diligence. They laundered it and executed it. A Black scholar’s standing is counterfeit until a machine says otherwise.” (Jafari Sinclaire Allen/The Nation)

“Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff is, for the moment anyway, the Democratic Party’s living legend in effective rhetoric. And he struck a hell of a nerve this week just by stating the obvious: Trump, he said, ‘doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.’ On its face, that statement is difficult for any sentient political observer, right or left, to disagree with. It has been obvious for months that Trump would much rather spend his days on his Bob the Builder projects, take a few public naps, and spend the wee hours exulting and giggling over racist memes and AI renderings of himself as Genghis Khan or Jesus – delivered by Natalie Harp, the woman his own staff calls his ‘Binky,’ his security blanket. Natalie Harp’s arrival in Trumpworld is itself body-horror adjacent. She emerged, fully formed as a useful political prop, out of California around 2018, when she first tweeted support for Trump. The following year, she appeared on Fox and Friends, claiming she had a bone cancer that standard chemo was not helping. She credited Trump’s ‘Right to Try’ law with giving her access to an experimental treatment that supposedly saved her life. (Her story has been convincingly challenged, but letting facts get in the way of a good political story is not the MAGA way.) Trump, watching his favorite show, was enchanted by the Ivanka-Marla lookalike Liberty University graduate. He soon invited her onstage at one of his speeches. Before long, she was on national alt-right fake-news TV, spouting Bible verses and eventually Big Lie election trash as an anchor on OAN. She also landed a coveted speaking slot at the 2020 Republican convention. By the summer of 2024, she was bunking in the locker room at the Trump National Golf Course Bedminster, so as to not let too much daylight get between her and The Donald. Melania was said to be irked and the staff alarmed, but nothing put a dent in her clutch behavior, least of all the object of her devotion.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)

“For three days in early January, Fadia Bazzi’s house in the southern Lebanese border town of Bint Jbeil was filled with laughter as her family gathered to ring in the new year. When they all departed, Bazzi realised she had never photographed the house into which she poured her life’s savings. But that afternoon, looking at the glass walls that wrap over the rolling hills, she felt certain she was seeing it for the last time. Halfway down the road, she turned, raised her phone and took a picture. Soon after, war returned to Lebanon, engulfing Bint Jbeil and emptying the town of its 30,000 residents. Bazzi now fears that photo is all she will have left. Like most other towns along the de facto Israel-Lebanon border, Bint Jbeil has been devastated — first in clashes between Israel and Hizbollah and then by the Israeli forces who now occupy swaths of Lebanon’s south. Scattered around the country, Bazzi and Lebanon’s nearly 1mn displaced people have been reduced to studying satellite imagery for glimpses of their homes. But from the haunting remove of the sky, Bint Jbeil and other border areas look like dusty grey scars across hills once dense with centuries-old villages, traditional stone houses and olive groves — a moonscape of pulverised concrete. ‘We see nothing but destruction, the colour of ash,’ Bazzi, who was displaced from Bint Jbeil by Israel as a child in the 1980s and longs to return for good, said from her rented Beirut apartment. She is still unsure of the extent of any damage to her house. ‘We have become prisoners of satellites, prisoners of maps, waiting.’” (Raya Jalabi/FT)

“Uganda has this year seen a flood of exiled dissidents, harking back to the dark days of the 1970s and early 1980s. Among the latest is lawyer Eron Kiiza, and the brilliant former legislator Ibrahim Ssemujju Nganda, who left the country amid a wave of state-driven torture. They followed prominent opposition leader Robert Kyagulanyi (popularly known as Bobi Wine), who escaped a manhunt after challenging 42-year ruling President Yoweri Museveni in January’s polls. They join a growing number of exiled African dissidents. Rough estimates place the number of exiled dissidents, opposition politicians, journalists, writers, activists, academics and the like, at 20,000 to 50,000, not counting mass war or economic refugees. After the flow of exiled African dissidents dropped steadily from the late 1990s to around 2015, their numbers have begun rising again; this looks like one of the worst periods in a long while. Why? Recent years have seen an unusual wave of military coups, entrenched strongmen closing civic space further, and brutal post-election crackdowns. And yet this is also, arguably, the worst possible moment for autocrats to be driving their people out. The digital age means dissidents leave only physically: they remain very much present through blogs, social media and other online platforms. Exile itself draws attention to them, all while placing them beyond the reach of the repressive hands and instruments of the governments they’ve fled.” (Charles Onyango-Obbo)

“Russia’s Su-34 ‘Fullback’ twin-engine fighter-bomber is one of the Russian Air Force’s most important warplanes. A fourth-generation plane, this platform has become a key player in Russia’s ongoing air war against neighboring Ukraine. Russia relies upon the Fullback to launch massive volleys of cheap glide bombs against Ukrainian positions. Because of the significant amount of NATO-provided air defenses in Ukraine, the Fullback’s role in dropping glide bombs has been key for Russian forces in that the glide bombs do not have to be dropped directly over fortified targets. At the same time, Russia has been losing Fullbacks at what some are claiming is an unsustainable rate. Despite the losses, though, the Su-34 has become one of the most important warplanes for the Russians in the war. Think about it: yes, the Russians are losing the Su-34 in large numbers. But they’re fighting what many in Moscow–and certainly what the Ukrainians perceive to be–an existential war. Under such conditions, fighting will be fiercer, and loss rates will be high, too. Plus, the fact of the matter is that the Su-34 is not as expensive or irreplaceable as a fifth-generation warplane, like the Su-57 Felon. The Fullback can carry around 8,000 kilograms of weapons across 12 hardpoints, including guided bombs, air-to-surface missiles, and air-to-air missiles. Because of Ukraine’s air defenses, Russia had to adapt several aspects of its air war. When the war started, Russian warplanes operated at lower altitudes that exposed them to all manner of Ukrainian defenses, making them too tempting a target to pass up. More often than not, the Ukrainians took down swathes of low-flying Russian aircraft at the start of the war. So, Moscow had their planes attack from higher altitudes. The US-made Patriot missile batteries, though, could then threaten those Russian aircraft–and from farther distances, complicating the Russian attack plans from the air against Ukraine. Most painfully for Russia, the Ukrainians started attacking Russian aircraft parked at their bases. Four Su-34s were supposedly destroyed by Ukraine while sitting on the tarmac at the Marinovka air base in Russia’s Volgograd region.” (19FortyFive)

“Last month, Meghan appeared on Master Chef Australia as a surprise celebrity judge, and I am told it was a tonic to her mood. She finally realized how much easier - and more fun - it is to perform in a hit baked by someone else. She was back on the market, and it did not take long for Hollywood’s mega-deal machine, WME, the talent agency that still represents her, to get her a role. The move to the UK solves two identity crises for the Sussexes in one blow. It was Meghan’s fish-out-of-water misery in London that made a return to England so unlikely before now. Serial failure in Hollywood is a Harry Potter cloak of invisibility, but at least she didn’t have the impenetrable British class system to decode. Harry has never had a real power base there - what’s a penny-ante British prince in a town of $100 million Tom Hollands - and their joint irrelevance had reached a tipping point. A job for Meghan frees Harry to make a last run at staying royal before his father dies and his brother ices him out for good. As one of the least self-reflective people in the world, except about his own grievances, Harry is blessed with a naive obliviousness about the damage he caused his family with the Oprah interview, the Netflix documentary, and his scorching memoir Spare. It was a three-fer that I am told, Queen Camilla, any more than William, will never forgive him for. But she will tolerate however Charles chooses to proceed for the sake of her ailing husband’s peace of mind.” (Tina Brown/Fresh hell)

“Between 5 and 14 August 2026, Taiwan ran the forty-second iteration of its annual Han Kuang exercise, and for the first time it did so as a proper whole-of-society mobilisation. This is an activity that also aims to message Taiwanese readiness to Chinese military planners, and ensure that every morning, President Xi looks in the mirror and thinks “not today”. At the same time, the exercises like this send a message to national will to defend Taiwan to countries like the United States. The aim of this exercise is to explore how this iteration of Han Kuang was more ambitious than many previous versions, how the military were just one of many components, and how Western nations should be observing and learning from the whole-of-society drills the ten-day Han Kuang exercise incorporated. The military rehearsed the familiar list of missions: air defence and maritime targeting with an expanded set of missile systems, theatre fires kill-chain drills, an anti-airborne-assault exercise at Taoyuan International Airport with the newly delivered M1A2T Abrams tanks and Clouded Leopard infantry fighting vehicles, counter-mobility works by army engineers along the key approach routes to Taipei, a tunnel blockade drill at the Hsuehshan Tunnel in Yilan, and a first closure of the Danjiang Bridge in the north to test defensive blockades. The Littoral Combat Command exercised its consolidated set of anti-ship missiles, coastal forces, sensors and unmanned platforms in Penghu. President Lai Ching-te was moved by armoured vehicle to the National Political and Military Operations Command Centre in an anti-decapitation drill designed to test continuity of government.” (Mick Ryan/Futura Docrina)

“NYRB: I understand what you’re saying about the way this all gets reframed, but I don’t know that that answers my question. If you are someone who has suffered from evil fame, then is the Socratic interview a genre that lets you remember who it is that you were? Agnes Callard: That is very much how Socrates uses The Apology. He uses it to clear up this misrepresentation of himself from Aristophanes. He creates a set of accusations that he’s then going to respond to, so he is using this opportunity to clear his name. Now, the question is: Is he clearing his name in his own mind as well? I don’t think we can say Socrates had become confused about his own nature, but in social reality, the way that people represent you is part of what you are, so, in that sense, the rescuing of your name is the rescuing of yourself. When defending oneself, one is able to make their own representation of themselves. The Apology is Socrates’ reclamation of his own story.” (NYRB)

“In 2023, Donald Trump Jr. stood on a podium at the New York Stock Exchange to celebrate the debut of PublicSquare, a little-known online marketplace founded as a MAGA alternative to Amazon.com and other e-commerce sites. Company executives hoped Trump Jr., an early investor and board member whose father pushed to snuff out progressive politics in American boardrooms, would help drive business to their ‘anti-woke’ marketplace. They envisioned the marketplace as a place where American brands could sell household goods and family products to conservative, patriotic and religious consumers. Three years later, PublicSquare is struggling. The company’s marketplace failed to gain traction with consumers, and its underlying business model later fell apart, executives acknowledged, after President Trump embraced the tech companies he had attacked on the campaign trail. Financial losses began piling up following years of excessive spending. The company has reported cumulative losses of nearly $160 million since going public, through the end of July, and remains unprofitable. Its stock has cratered by 99% since it went public in 2023.” (Brian Schwartz, Dylan Tokar and Will Hobson/WSJ)

“Let’s stipulate here, right up top, that it’s probably not a smart idea, or a morally upright thing, to go to Central Park in broad daylight and make out with your younger colleague, especially if you’re married. This is, reportedly, what happened between two white-shoe lawyers on a recent summer day. It’s possible this sort of thing happens all the time in a city of 8.6 million; it’s possible it doesn’t. Frankly, it’s none of my business or yours. The only reason I know about it is that a TikToker named Jay Guapo, who has 3.6 million followers, happened to be walking by and decided to film the couple, and scold them (‘There’s kids around!’), and continue filming them over their distressed objections, and then post the video to his feed, where it has now been viewed more than 12 million times, becoming in the process an ongoing subject of investigation by The New York Post, which has published several stories about the incident, dubbing the pair the ‘canoodling lawyers.’ The TikTok commentariat was thrilled by the video. Viewers intuited from the mortified looks on the pair’s faces that they were profoundly unhappy to have been filmed — unhappy in a way that suggested the canoodling was unsanctioned. But some of the commenters seem more disturbed by Jay Guapo’s decision making, often arguing that, sure, maybe they were doing something wrong, but extramarital canoodling isn’t illegal. So why film it? And why post it? For some, it was comeuppance for a grave sin; for others, it was simply the latest reminder that smartphone cameras and social media platforms have together created a stochastic kangaroo court — one that can be summoned through an invisible portal to deliver swift justice, or at least its own version of it. (The Financial Times reported six days after the video was posted that the law firm had put the elder, male canoodler on leave.)” (Willy Staley/NYT)

“The Pentagon on Friday moved to fire the publisher and the editor in chief of Stars and Stripes, the U.S. military news outlet partly funded by American taxpayers, as well as a reporter who covers the Middle East, according to people familiar with the matter. The separation notices, delivered Friday, gave Publisher Max Lederer and Editor-in-Chief Erik Slavin five days to appeal their dismissals. Reporter Lara Korte also said she received notice that she was being fired. The cause cited was insubordination, Slavin and Korte said. In a statement to CBS News, Slavin said he will respond through the required process. ‘According to the notice, I am being fired for stating in a CBS interview that censorship of news for service members would constitute a red line. The Pentagon’s public affairs office has charged me with insubordination,’ Slavin said. ‘I stand by the principle that Stars and Stripes must remain editorially independent, as required by law and by the department’s own policies.’ Slavin spoke publicly about disagreements with Pentagon leaders in an interview with ‘CBS Sunday Morning’ that aired in July. In that piece, Slavin was asked if he had any red lines he would not cross. He replied, ‘Don’t run a perfectly accurate story, run this instead. Here it is, written by the Pentagon.’ That would be a red line.’ In a statement, Korte called the firings ‘a shame for the institution and service members, who swore to defend the Constitution and deserve the right to a free and independent press.’” (Jennifer Jacobs, Kathryn Watson/CBSNews)

“A decade ago, young adults were flocking to vaunted tech giants like Google and Apple in pursuit of exciting jobs on the cutting edge of tech. In 2026, however, the status quo of young people who are uncritically enamored with the tech industry and its billionaire overlords has gone completely out the window. A new survey conducted by CNBC‘s Generation Labs asked over 1,000 US adults aged between 18 and 34 to share their thoughts on politics, AI, and the country’s economy. A particularly interesting branch of questions polled participants on their views of nine executives overseeing AI companies, and the results were dismal. Asked ‘who do you trust to act responsibly on AI?’ the vast majority of participants said they “don’t trust’ any of the nine figures. Palantir’s extremely controversial CEO Alex Karp scored the lowest, with 81 percent choosing ‘don’t trust,’ while Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella fared the best — albeit with a pitiful 35 percent ‘trust’ score. Everyone else fell in between: 79 percent of respondents said they don’t trust Peter Thiel, while a whopping 71, 70, and 69 percent said they “don’t trust” Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman, respectively (Musk will probably be mad he didn’t get that 69 figure.) Those are some appalling approval ratings, reflecting the massive swing in popularity the tech industry has experienced over the last decade, driven by concerns around data privacy, the purposeful decay of once-useful platforms, and the erosion of democracy.” (Joe Wilkins/Futurist)

“Government forces have carried out dozens of attacks on Houthi positions across Yemen in the past 24 hours, the latest sign that a return to full-scale war in Yemen may be approaching. In the past day, government forces have carried out 81 attacks on Houthi positions that led to the ‘neutralisation’ of a number of Houthi fighters and field commanders, government spokesperson Majed Abdullah al-Nuzaili said Thursday. Also on Thursday, the Houthis carried out two drone attacks on targets in Saudi Arabia’s Najran province – which sits just across the border from Yemen – the group’s military ⁠spokesperson Yahya ⁠Saree announced. They ‘successfully’ hit a target at Najran airport and an Aramco facility in the province, Saree said. There was no immediate confirmation of the attacks ‌from Saudi Arabia. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which supports the Houthis, warned on Thursday that Saudi Arabia would be ‘unable to contain’ the Houthis as the rebels ramp up attacks on the kingdom. The Houthis have repeatedly targeted Saudi infrastructure and shipping since declaring a naval blockade on the country in July. Yemen’s internationally recognised government, now based in Aden, has also accused the Houthis of attempting to impose a blockade on Yemen and halting the country’s oil exports. Over the past month, fighting has intensified in Yemen, with the government reporting carrying out hundreds of operations against the Houthis, killing many of their fighters.” (Al Jazeera)

“Since MeidasTouch began reporting on conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, messages have poured in to MeidasTouch from military families and service members across multiple ships and even multiple branches. Taken together, they paint a picture of a crisis that extends well beyond a single carrier. All sources below are being kept anonymous to protect them and their loved ones from retaliation. One active-duty service member currently deployed alongside the Lincoln reached out to MeidasTouch to confirm that what’s being reported is real, and that it isn’t isolated to the Lincoln alone. ‘They are not making anything up on the Lincoln,’ the service member wrote. ‘We have it bad as well, but not quite as bad as them yet. It’s only month 5 going on 6 for us, but eventually it will be bad. We have not seen land since being out here due to the Iran conflict.’ One parent whose son recently returned from eleven months aboard the Lincoln, after finishing five years with an F/A-18 fire squadron known as the ‘Top Hatters,’ described conditions that had deteriorated badly by the time he got off the ship. Early in the deployment, the ship’s water system went down entirely, leaving sailors unable to shower or wash their clothes. When the system was eventually restored, showers had to be tightly rationed. Supplies ran low repeatedly, made worse when resupply ships were unable to bring materials back to the carrier. By the time this sailor left the ship, the parent said, toilets had backed up and overflowed, leaving roughly half a foot of human waste across restroom floors used by around 200 sailors at any given time. A separate message came from someone whose brother’s fiancée serves aboard the USS George H.W. Bush, a different carrier than the Lincoln. She was recently back in the U.S. for a family emergency and was able to describe conditions directly. ‘They have virtually no food, water, or soap,’ the message relayed. ‘They’ve been out at sea for 136 days with no end in sight. Morale is low and everyone is miserable. It’s heartbreaking.’” (Aaron Parnas/Meidas Touch)

“When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi invited AI leaders to a meeting in New Delhi earlier this year, security protocols allowed each executive to bring one additional person with them. Most brought colleagues, but Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei brought his wife, Cami Clark. Clark doesn’t work at Anthropic, but she is often seen sitting in the front row while Amodei talks at events such as Davos or can be found chatting up investors at gatherings such as the Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley. She acts as a sounding board and strategic adviser for Amodei, according to people close to the company. She also brought Anthropic a key early investor, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt—whom she had dated—as it was getting off the ground in early 2021, some of the people said. Despite her influence, there are scant details about Clark online​—and efforts have been made to remove references to her, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis and a person familiar with the matter. The pair married in 2022, but Amodei’s Wikipedia page didn’t say he was married until this summer, and still doesn’t say to whom. Searches for ‘Dario Amodei’s wife’ on Google often turn up a photograph of his sister, Daniela Amodei, who helps run the company. Even Claude, Anthropic’s AI chatbot, responds to queries by saying ‘Dario Amodei’s marital status doesn’t seem to be clearly confirmed.’ As Anthropic hurtles toward an IPO that could top $2 trillion as soon as this fall, Clark is one of the most influential voices shaping the decisions of a CEO at the forefront of the AI industry—a revolution remaking all aspects of work and life that simultaneously thrills and terrifies most of the public. It’s a remarkable rise for a woman who didn’t graduate from college, had a previous brief marriage, at age 20, to a man more than 40 years older and once declared bankruptcy. Her career has included co-founding a women-focused ‘free luxury porn’ company that she unsuccessfully tried to persuade convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to invest in, and starting a women’s ‘social dieting app’ that morphed into a women’s healthcare AI company.” (Keach Hagey and Luke Jerod Kummer/ WSJ)

“What does Liang Wenfeng want? The CEO of DeepSeek is now richer than either Dario Amodei or Sam Altman. Backed by his careful watch and the immense wealth of his hedge fund, a little-known group of researchers in Hangzhou has managed to consistently command the world’s attention — and they keep giving their work away for free. The motivations behind Liang’s theory of action have puzzled China+AI watchers since the beginning. In late July, leaked minutes from a four-hour meeting between Liang and investors circulated around the internet. Like everyone else, we’ve been pouring over the minutes to understand Liang the CEO, DeepSeek the company, and Liang the man … His is a confidently singular thesis: that there is an inevitable causal relationship between automated learning and generalized intelligence, and that the pursuit of such advanced machine intelligence is the only problem worth solving right now. Being Chinese means working within the constraints of current hardware limitations, but DeepSeek frames their own ambitions on a much farther horizon. Whether or not they can, of course, might not be up to them … Minor problems like keeping users around do not concern Liang. As long as the upper limits of machine intelligence are still out of view, there is more (technological, societal, and literal business) value in pursuing that than there is in building business models based on what is available today. More capable models easily pull the rug out from under competitors, especially when the latter have fallen into path dependencies based on older technology. Once truly generalized and convincingly superior intelligence arrives, creating to-C and to-B products will be trivial. Before then, the vast majority of DeepSeek’s resources will go into probing the upper limits of intelligence — and nothing else.” (Irene Zhang/China Talk)

“Barron Trump, the 19-year-old son of President Donald Trump, has amassed a net worth of approximately $150 million, surpassing his mother, First Lady Melania Trump. This financial milestone is primarily attributed to his active participation in the family's cryptocurrency initiatives.” (Unusual Whales)

“Making parmesan requires three main ingredients: milk, rennet and salt. And lots of time. Parmigiano Reggiano is legally required to age for a minimum of 12 months, but most wheels are aged even longer to develop their flavor and texture. However, farmers often can’t wait that long without seeing income. To bridge this gap, producers bring their wheels of cheese to Credito Emiliano, an Italian bank based in Reggio Emilia, which gives out low-interest loans secured against the value of the cheese. According to CNN, producers generally receive 60% to 80% of a wheel’s value upfront. Also known as Credem, the bank can also store the collateral cheese as it ages. This Fort Knox for cheese handles roughly 2.3 million wheels each year, Giancarlo Ravanetti, the big cheese at Credem’s cheese warehouse, tells CNN. Holding over 500,000 wheels at a time, the cheese within the bank is estimated to be worth 325 million euros ($382 million). Keeping all this cheese in a temperature- and moisture-controlled environment takes a great deal of energy, which rose 30% daily during the heat waves, Ravanetti tells Reuters. ‘To make our facilities as energy-efficient as possible, we have improved our cooling systems and boilers, upgraded building insulation and increased renewable energy production,’ he said. The extreme summer heat throughout Europe also threatens parmesan earlier in its production cycle, overheating dairy cows and causing them to lie down more and eat less. According to the University of Chicago, under these conditions, cows produce up to 10% less milk. ‘Extreme heat impacts milk’s quality and quantity,’ Nicola Bertinelli, president of the Parmigiano Reggiano Consortium, tells Reuters. Extreme heat also interferes with the grass and hay growth, the two primary food sources for the dairy cows in the region.” (Paul Kim/MoneyWise)

“The target was tiny Moldova, a country of about three million people that carries outsize importance for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. The Kremlin’s campaign included methods familiar elsewhere in the West, like hacking and disinformation. But in Moldova, its intervention went further than perhaps anywhere else outside Ukraine, and stands as one of the most extensive and audacious plots to date in Mr. Putin’s effort to destabilize the West, the three Western intelligence officials say. Besides the camp in Serbia, Russian agents ran training programs in Bosnia and Moscow that were designed to turn pro-Russian Moldovans into foot soldiers. Moscow paid hundreds of Orthodox Moldovan priests to recruit voters and to push Russian narratives from the pulpit. And it spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a sophisticated vote-buying scheme financed by a Moldovan billionaire in exile and conceived and operated from Skolkovo, the Kremlin’s knockoff Silicon Valley outside Moscow. Moscow’s campaign has not stopped. This spring, Russian missiles targeted energy infrastructure that provided service to Moldova, polluting waterways and disrupting electricity flows … Details about Russian efforts in Moldova have emerged in court cases and local reporting, but the scope and extent of the campaign, including the vote-buying scheme and role of Russia’s intelligence services, has not been previously reported. Publicly, Russian officials have denied interfering in Moldova’s affairs, and have dismissed accusations that Moscow is trying to undermine the West. Last December, Mr. Putin, in an address to military commanders, castigated European leaders for ‘stoking hysteria’ over the threat from Russia. Soon afterward, though, he gathered the leaders for a secret briefing to deliver the exact opposite message, according to officials from two countries with knowledge of the episode. Their goal for 2026, Mr. Putin told them, is ‘the collapse of NATO and the E.U. from within,’ the people said. Moldova is central to this effort. In the hierarchy of Kremlin priorities, the Western intelligence officials say, conquering Ukraine is first, and taking control in Moldova is second. Though it is not a member of the European Union or of NATO, it is strategically located, squeezed between NATO members and Ukraine.” (Michael Schwirtz, Adam Goldman and Aaron Krolik/NYT)

“The moral cadavers in the crypt that is the U.S. Senate have now confirmed Donald Trump’s personal attorney Todd Blanche as our next Attorney General. Raising their pale, bony hands in unison last week, they gifted Donald the lawyer of his dreams, a man he expects to finally fill the shoes of his great mentor in mob-style lawlessness, Roy Cohn. Blanche begins his new job as Chief Epstein Coverup Officer on an appropriately macabre anniversary. Seven years ago yesterday, Epstein was found hanging in his New York jail cell, leaving countless trafficked victims without justice, untold numbers of johns and habitual pedophiles shaken to the core and in danger of exposure, and a web of conspiracy theories that have powered whole political movements, including Donald Trump’s. Blanche has already proven his eagerness not merely to preside over the Epstein Files Coverup, but to personally engineer it – from executing an apparently illegal quid pro quo with sex monster Ghislaine Maxwell, to overseeing the redaction of names of rich predators in the files, to publicly promising to flout the Epstein Files Transparency Act entirely and withhold millions more pages of evidence that Congress has demanded be released. His primary purpose appears to be to protect the men.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)

“In 2021, while on a Mediterranean yacht trip, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump thought they had found heaven on earth in an unlikely spot: Sazam, a rocky island off of Albania. As Trump later recalled in a podcast interview. ‘We swam to the islands. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way, up to the top. And we were just captivated.’ Kusher, who had previously served as an adviser to his father-in-law, Donald Trump, during the president’s first term, was in the midst of turning the political connections he had made in government into lucrative business deals. Albania, a struggling post-communist country with a government eager to win powerful friends in the West, seemed a promising location. Seizing the opportunity, Kushner initiated a deal to purchase Sazam, as well as marshland in nearby Zvërnec that was home to scores of endangered birds, including flamingos. And Kushner’s investment fund, Affinity Partners, working with the family of Qatari billionaire Moutaz Khayyat, started buying more land, with plans to build luxury hotels. The scheme stank to high heaven from the start. Although Donald Trump was out of power, he was already indicating that he would seek the presidency again in 2024, which meant that foreign billionaires and political leaders had every reason to curry Kushner’s favor. (The president’s son-in-law would in fact return as a senior foreign policy adviser and emissary in Trump’s second term, making him an even worthier investment.) Further, land deals in Albania were inherently suspect because of the heavy influence of organized crime over the nation’s government. Writing in The Nation in June, Mitchell Prothero noted ‘Over the past two decades, Albanian clans have taken over much of Europe’s cocaine trade, which has immersed an otherwise poor country in illegal, hard-to-spend cash’ … Prothero was right to suspect that Kushner’s deal would inevitably be entangled in political corruption and mob ties. On Saturday, The Wall Street Journal published a detailed report on one of the key players in the deal, Artur Shehu, described by the newspaper as ‘a suspected gangster who fled to Miami after a gunfight at his bar.’” (Jeet Heer/The Nation)

“DONALD TRUMP PROMISED Americans a new golden age. Unfortunately, it turns out to be a golden age for diarrhea and white-collar crime. Biological, social, and financial parasites are all flourishing, because the Trump administration has destroyed the institutional capacity necessary to detect and eradicate them. In the latest (non-GI-related) development, the Department of the Treasury announced this week that it would destroy the government’s registry of shell-company ownership. This is an anti-corruption database that Treasury is by law required to maintain, so that law enforcement can more easily ‘follow the money’ when investigating crimes. Even worse, the Trump administration will also destroy all the data it has already collected, so that no future presidential administration or local police department can use it, either. ‘It’s like Trump ordering the deletion of the FBI’s entire fingerprint database,’ former congressman Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), a champion of the 2021 law that created the corporate registry, told The Bulwark. They’re effectively salting the earth, so that sex traffickers, scam artists, drug lords, money-launderers, and tax cheats can roam free not only through the end of Trump’s time in office but long after he’s out, too.” (Catherine Rampell/The Bullwark)

“Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and allied fighters have advanced into Al Kurmuk, a strategically important town in Blue Nile State bordering Ethiopia, according to reports by Al Jazeera and The National. Military and government sources told Al Jazeera on Thursday that RSF fighters and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N) entered the town as Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) troops withdrew and repositioned outside Kurmuk. The RSF separately claimed it had inflicted heavy losses on the army and seized weapons and ammunition. The RSF said in a statement that its fighters had captured Al Kurmuk after forcing SAF troops out of the town. The National reported that the group described the seizure as its second territorial gain in Blue Nile State this week, following the reported capture of Qayssan on Tuesday. Local authorities in Kurmuk said the town had come under intensive attacks for three days involving drones and artillery shelling. The administration said the attacks originated from ‘the regional neighbourhood’ but maintained that the army continued to defend the town, its residents and public institutions. Al Kurmuk’s location gives the latest fighting particular significance for Ethiopia. The town lies on an important cross-border route linking Sudan’s Blue Nile region with Ethiopia and is also relatively close to South Sudan. It is located less than 140km from Damazin, the capital of Blue Nile State, and about 160km from the Roseires Dam, a major source of electricity for Sudan, according to The National. The town has changed hands during the conflict. The RSF seized Kurmuk in March before the SAF recaptured it last month. The latest advance comes as the two sides continue to contest strategic positions across Sudan.” (Addis Standard)

“Isolated islands are fascinating laboratories for understanding ancient humans. Some islands feature wonders insulated from the machinations of human progress for hundreds—or even thousands—of years, while others were once home to entirely different species of humans found nowhere else on Earth. And then, some islands can challenge what we know about the capabilities of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. And in this regard, the Republic of Malta, a Mediterranean island located roughly 60 miles from Sicily, has been a real head-scratcher. The mystery began back in 2019 when archaeologists uncovered evidence of shellfish meals, limestone tools, and butchered deer that radiocarbon dating of the animal bone showed was at least 8,500 years old—roughly 1,000 years earlier than the first known group of farmers to settle the island. ‘We didn’t believe it,’ Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology archaeologist Eleanor Scerri, lead author of a 2025 study detailing the find, told Science. ‘It took us five additional extensive [field] seasons to convince ourselves … that this had to be what we thought it was.’ But before rewriting history, Scerri, along with her co-author James Blinkhorn at the University of Liverpool and other researchers from Europe, including Malta, endeavored to piece together how a hunter-gatherer community could live and thrive on such a semi-arid island. At first glance, the question may seem like a simple one: Just ferry boats back and forth from the landmass of origin, likely Sicily or Tunisia, to bring in additional food, supplies, and people. But this period in the Mesolithic is roughly one thousand years before the invention of sails, and frequent trips to and from the shore would have been remarkably difficult.” (Darren Orf/Popular Mechanics)

“… (T)his outstanding story by WIRED’s Kate Knibbs titled ‘Oh Lord, AI Reporters Are Actually Breaking Big News.’ Knibbs conveys how an AI newsroom called RuntimeWire ‘beat mainstream journalists — including WIRED — to a story about OpenAI and hacking.’ RuntimeWire is operated by Ryan Merket, who was camping in Big Bend National Park last week when his ‘synthetic team’ turned a conference livestream transcript into a story before the human competition. ‘I put out over 80 articles that week,’ Merket told Knibbs, by managing the site through iMessage. You can check out the site for yourself here. The limitations of an ‘AI newsroom’ are obvious — it’s only able to generate content about what’s already known and online. It can’t go out and gather new information or assess a source’s accuracy. But as Knibbs wrote, this is ‘just the beginning.’” (Brian Stelter/Reliable Sources)

“The question has popped up frequently in this election cycle. Even in the wins notched by left-leaning and socialist candidates, those candidates appear to have fared comparatively poorly among voters of the actual working class. There aren’t exit polls in primaries, so we don’t know how voters without a college education—the typical proxy for working-class—cast their ballots. But we can still tell a lot from geography: Cities are liberal and on average more educated, rural areas the opposite; some counties are dominated by universities or colleges; and finally, we know the demographics of the bellwether swing counties in every state. So in the Michigan Democratic senatorial primary, Abdul El-Sayed did best in urban and diverse Grand Rapids (Kent County) and where the University of Michigan is (Washtenaw). Haley Stevens won Detroit, where she did a better job of connecting to Black voters, and she tended to win the rural counties. In the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial, David Crowley won Milwaukee and most of the rural counties, while Francesca Hong took the counties with universities and colleges. Critics of the left like to sneer about this, saying it exposes a hypocrisy at the core of the current left resurgence—namely, that these candidates who claim to speak for the proletariat are doing a pretty lousy job of winning their votes. They’re obviously not wrong, factually. But I think they’re wrong, or mostly wrong, about why. These critics tend to argue that these results prove that the new populist politics doesn’t appeal to actual working-class people, who are, in the critics’ telling, more moderate in their politics. Therefore the right way to appeal to these people is with sensible, moderate positions. They also often point out with no small amount of schadenfreude that the inability of people like El-Sayed and Hong—this was also true, according to the polls, of Maine’s Graham Platner, the Hotchkiss oysterman—to win working-class voters is proof of what out-of-touch elitists they really are. Leftists shouldn’t delude themselves: There is some truth to the second point. There’s a long, long history here.” (Michael Tomasky/TNR)

That last month the President of the United States was whisked out of Turkey in a catering container like — and how does one put it kindly? — a Kebab. CNN reports that President Trump’s “Turkish Deception Operation” to sneak out of Ankara in an alternative jet, nestled inside a catering cart, was the result of a specific, credible threat of an Iranian shoulder-fired missile. The press, however, were left to fend for themselves on the decoy plane. Along with Marco Rubio, who has to be, at this point in the game, wondering where all the love has gone? What’s with the fall-off?

This is the same Turkey that in August signed the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, framed as a collective security hedge against regional instability and shifting U.S. commitments. Further, the public admission of this calculated misdirection is somewhat unusual, considering Secret Service operations involving POTUS seldom make A-1 above-the-fold. Maggie Haberman, Eric Schmitt and Zolan Kanno-Youngs of The Times, as you can imagine, were not amused at the fact that their ink-stained brothers and sisters were left as Persian missile bait:

Reporters on the older plane were not told that Mr. Trump had not flown with them from Turkey to an air base in Britain, making them unwitting participants in the ruse and leaving them, along with some White House staff members, to serve as unknowing decoys.

After Mr. Trump arrived in Britain, he was secretly moved back to the older version of Air Force One. He then disembarked in view of reporters and walked across the tarmac to the plane donated by Qatar, which he flew to Washington.

The elaborate plan appears to have been developed in a matter of hours after officials determined that a threat against Mr. Trump from Iran was credible. It came after years of threats against Mr. Trump from Iran and amid the war he launched against that country. And it was an unusual instance of the public being deceived about a president’s whereabouts.

Officials have not previously acknowledged that Mr. Trump was not where they claimed he was.

Because Washington DC is what it is, Haberman, et al, are making this all about: a) Themselves — and, b) the Horserace. Washington, man. Who, among those satelliting the Sun-King, is “In”? Who is “Out”? Gotta read Axios to get the answer! The power game as played by Nature’s most sophisticated apes. (Averted Gaze) “Trump had been accompanied to Turkey by several senior officials, including Rubio, Bessent, Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Dan Caine,” is how CNN’s Kevin Liptak begins, ominously. “But not all would join the president when he left.” *Shudders*

Status, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the coin of the realm in DC. So, yesterday my social media oscillated wildly with outrage — outrage! — that Trump would sacrifice the potential safety of journalists. Mamma says whaaa-a-at?! That Donald Trump would use Washington journalists as assassination decoys? Borborygmus was the pearl-clutching on Media Twitter yesterday evening.

But isn’t that on-brand for MAGA? At what point did POTUS ever, ever show loving-kindness for the safety and wellbeing of journalists? Trump is just too damn dusty to show any such grace. When one is in the midst of a 5-alarm democracy fire, its a far wiser thing to focus on the big stuff a blazing and leave the advocacy on behalf of the fourth estate to the White House Correspondents’ Association. Besides, what percentage of MAGA would just find amusing the notion of Trump potentially sending the Washington Press Corps into the line of fire of an Iranian shoulder-fired missile? The cruelty is the point, dear reader. MAGA is not a political philosophy — it is a sadistic mood. And it is flooding the zone with intentional misdirection.

That having been said, the court intrigue portion of the press corps overreaction — regarding Who-Is-Up-and-Down in TrumpWorld — is not entirely uninteresting. Says Liptak:

The aides with Trump on that smaller plane included Natalie Harp, an executive assistant who regularly accompanies Trump when he travels; Dan Scavino, a deputy White House chief of staff; and Walt Nauta, the director of Oval Office operations who also frequently travels with the president.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also traveled with the president on the smaller C-32A that took off from Ankara, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stayed on the larger plane.

Always, Natalie Harp. Always camera-ready, with meticulously styled hair as Daddy likes it. With her portable printer, rechargeable batteries and stacks of paper packed inside a bag soas to quickly provide POTUS with physical copies of MAGA fanfiction. The Human Printer. Her gold-leaf tresses matching the signature aesthetic of Trump family women, particularly Ivanka Trump …

But there are far more important issues to discuss. Like the fact that Iran was willing to go that far. An attempted assassination of the sitting US President can only be properly construed under the category of next level. Also, that it is showing an enormous pain threshold during the course of this war. Using asymmetrical leverage, Persia — where Chess, incidentally, was invented — is exacting a heavy price on Trump’s domestic audience as well as his international reputation in the run-up to midterm elections. Foreign Minister Araghchi’s cockiness speaks voilumes.

And Iran is not alone. In March, we learned that a fearless China was sharing intel with Iran about US troops. From Sascha Ingber:

The intelligence is mainly GEOINT from satellites, the person said. And it did not start immediately, when Operation Epic Fury began. Beijing started sharing intel about ten days to two weeks into the war, the person said. That would be March 10 onward.

According to CBS News, The U.S. State and Treasury departments sanctioned multiple China-based firms for supplying satellite imagery used to target —?! — American positions. Trump Spokeswoman Olivia Wales did not contradict or challenge Ingber’s intel. Instead, she told her by email, “Nothing provided to Iran by any other country is affecting our operational success.” Further, Russia is providing, according to WSJ, shared Satellite Imagery and Drone Technology with Iran.

All of this distressing news comes amidst an acute shortage of high-end precision missiles and air defense interceptors. Has the American Empire, like all Empires before it, simply overextended itself? With a little bit of calculated collusion from the Russo-Sino-Iranian bloc? We cannot fail to note here that these three anti-demorcatic actors, all determined to accelerate a multipolar age at the expense of American dominance, are working in confluence with one another and learning. “Where learning once took years to be absorbed into an organisation, and longer still to share between organisations and nations, members of (the authoritarian) community can now access a lesson almost as soon as one of them collects and analyses it,” writes Mick Ryan, of what he calls The Adaptation War. “When one competitor learns of an American or Western military weakness or vulnerability, all of them can benefit from the insight almost immediately (if they have the absorption capacity to do so).” Charmed, I’m sure.

Can we still deter China, if the need arises? And — most important — Do we even have the will to anymore? Does the anti-imperial far left? Does the America First-y far right? Further, the Center is a bloodless, ambitious beast; it has no chic. Did Trump’s hemispheric flex signal benign neglect of the South China Sea? The Russo-Sino-Iranian bloc, when in synchrony, is formidable in ways that Trump, a blunt-force instrument at best, wholly incapable of diplomacy, is not. And one of China’s top strategic goals vis-a-vis the United States is to neutralize American leverage in the Indo-Pacific region. By discretely helping to deplete America’s high-end precision missiles and air defense interceptors in the Middle Eastern theater contributes mightily towards that goal. Again: Just saying.

2. From Time’s Ariane Tabatabai and John Drennan:

   European intelligence officials disclosed that Iran shares information with Russia so freely that Russian officials knew of a strike that killed Ali Larijani, Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, before the news broke anywhere else. This information-sharing runs both ways: Russian intelligence has reportedly supplied targeting details for Iranian attacks on U.S. forces and partners in the region, using the Shahed drones Tehran had once sent to Moscow for use against Ukraine—but now fitted with Russian upgrades.

   Officials at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency indicated that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps had been planning missile and drone strikes using AI-annotated imagery of American bases published by a Chinese satellite firm. CNN reported, citing people familiar with American intelligence assessments, that Beijing was preparing to ship air-defense systems to Iran through third countries to mask their origin.

   Such collusion should not have come as a surprise.

   No, it should not. Not to a seasoned leader not learning on the job. But what, if anything, are we going to do about it? That is, of course, if we are even still able after Pete Hegseth’s slattern incompetence.

   ---

   “(Peter) Thiel originally delivered ‘The Straussian Moment’ at his 2004 self-funded conference Politics and the Apocalypse, and later published it as an essay. Ostensibly, it’s a response to the terrorist attacks on 9/11, but more accurately, it’s a series of philosophical loop the loops that weaves the work of René Girard, Leo Strauss, and Carl Schmitt into an argument for transforming the United States into an authoritarian Christian nation-state. Thiel begins by asking how the US, with all its resources, could be brought to its knees by the Taliban, failing to ‘deter a handful of crazy, determined, and suicidal persons.’ He concludes that it’s because ‘the new science of economics and the practice of capitalism filled the vacuum created by the abandonment of the older tradition.’ This older tradition, according to him, is straightforward Christian nationalism dragged through a fever dream of the Middle Ages. To put it plainly, Thiel thinks that the United States has abandoned religion and the Enlightenment has failed. The world has become a globalized, godless place where all choices are equally valid and we have fallen into a live-and-let-live passivity. This has brought an empty-headed peace, fanatically protected by liberals under the guise of multiculturalism, though in reality they’re dazzled by cheap consumer goods and driven by envy to protect the system that supplied them. In this anti-society, intellectuals are punished for even mentioning that cultures used to have distinct differences and, in his opinion, echelons. In Thiel’s mind, the Christian West must remember who they are if they are to defeat Muslims from the Middle East. They must realize their culture and religion are superior in order to reinvigorate themselves to fight for it.

   The title of Thiel’s lecture is never mentioned in Communion, but a professor would be within her rights to mark it as uncited source material.” (Elizabeth Harper/LARB)

“Sudan occupies a unique geostrategic position at the intersection of the Middle East, the Horn of Africa and the Sahel, linking the Red Sea corridor with sub-Saharan Africa. Its long Red Sea coastline, abundant agricultural land, mineral resources and proximity to some of the world’s most critical maritime trade routes make it a pivotal component of an increasingly interconnected security space stretching from the Gulf to the Horn of Africa. Rather than representing a peripheral African ‘forgotten conflict’, Sudan has become one of the clearest manifestations of the growing interdependence between Middle Eastern and African security dynamics. Paradoxically, Sudan’s growing strategic relevance has coincided with declining international attention. The war has been overshadowed by the conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza and, more recently, the military confrontation between the United States, Israel and Iran. Yet, these crises form part of the same evolving regional security environment in which developments in the Gulf, the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa increasingly shape one another … The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has emerged as the single most influential external actor in the conflict. Although Abu Dhabi continues to deny allegations of military involvement, multiple authoritative investigations – including by the UN Panel of Experts on Sudan – have documented extensive logistical and military support to the RSF through neighbouring countries, particularly Chad, Eastern Libya under Khalifa Haftar’s control and, according to several investigations, additional hubs in Ethiopia, South Sudan and Uganda.” ( Sara De Simone/ISPIOnline)

“Far out in the Pacific Ocean, Ecuadorean fishermen have been attacked by unidentified ‘gringos’ using drones, survivors say, spurring a mystery over whether the American military, the armed forces of another country or private military contractors were behind the strikes. One fishing boat has been lost at sea since January, the U.N. says, with eight people still missing and presumed dead. The survivors of two other vessels said they came under attack in March by English-speaking assailants wearing matching uniforms with American flag patches, but without any clear insignia to link them to an official government force. Some of the surviving fishermen said they had been hauled out of the water, questioned and then handed over to El Salvador’s navy before being released. The Pentagon has denied involvement, as has the U.S. Coast Guard. Survivors have also said that a plane followed and seemingly surveilled them before the strikes. The New York Times analyzed flight data and found that a maritime patrol plane — based out of a military base in El Salvador — flew in the direction of all three boats in the days before they were attacked. The pilots onboard spoke English with American accents, according to air traffic control communication recordings … Washington has not been shy about claiming the strikes, often publishing footage on social media of tiny fishing boats cutting through the water before being obliterated by American munitions. These attacks, however, have gone unclaimed. It is certainly possible that the U.S. or some other military has conducted clandestine attacks on boats in the region. But the many lingering questions surrounding the fishing boat attacks have led some experts to wonder whether a private military contractor has been hired by the U.S. government or one of its Latin American allies — possibly El Salvador, where the plane has operated.” (Maria Abi-Habib, Riley Mellen, José María, León Cabrera and Christiaan Triebert/ NYT)

“The US remains widely popular in Africa but is falling behind China, according to the most comprehensive bi-annual survey of public opinion across the continent. The flagship 2026 report of the Ghana-based Afrobarometer shows that positive perceptions of the US dropped by 10 percentage points between 2019-2021 and 2021-2023, from 59% to 49%, before only partially recovering to 53% in 2024-2025. Over the same period, Africans’ opinion of China has remained steady, with 62% of respondents approving of Beijing’s impact. ‘To the extent that there is an emerging winner in the contest for Africans’ allegiance, China appears to be coming out on top, holding steady in popular assessments, while the US is losing ground and Russia struggles to gain it,’ concludes the report, which was published on 5 August. Of the 38 countries included in the latest round of surveys, only nine were polled before President Donald Trump’s inauguration. They include South Africa, where negative perception of the US has almost doubled since 2019-2021 to 33% today, and Mozambique, where support for the US is down five percentage points, with 59% holding a positive view. While she avoids predicting future African attitudes, Afrobarometer senior adviser and former director of Analysis and Capacity Building Carolyn Logan says Trump’s policies can be expected to further dampen America’s image in many countries.” (Julian Pecquet/The Africa Report)

“The disintegration of U.S. power was well underway before Trump started his war on Iran, but the pace of decline has accelerated sharply since the magnitude of our defeat started becoming apparent. And when future historians write about this tale of self-immolation, they may well do so in Mandarin. China hasn’t been a direct combatant in the third Gulf war, and its support for Iran has, until recently, been discreet. (China is now reportedly preparing to send Iran advanced munitions — Phillips O’Brien suggests that it is ‘going in for the kill.’) But China has clearly relished our humiliation. And both the way the war has played out and China’s role have drastically shifted the global balance of power in China’s favor. China has been a serious geopolitical rival to the United States for some time. China’s manufacturing sector overtook the US in 2010, and the gap has continued to grow … A great deal has been written about the Trump administration’s attack on science, which is a topic largely separate from the Iran war. As one recent discussion put it, Trump officials have orchestrated a series of attacks on scientists and their laboratories, implemented through funding cuts, grant interruptions, and immigration restrictions. Scientists are gravitating to Canada, Europe, and China, and we are rapidly losing the depth of our innovative and essential scientific community. The undermining of other U.S. sources of strength was also underway before the Iran war, but the war has accelerated the downward spiral. Even before the bombing of Iran began, some observers worried about the state of the U.S. military. Had U.S. military leaders adapted to the new world — revealed by the war in Ukraine — of cheap, ubiquitous drones? How much damage had the pro-testosterone, anti-intellectual leadership of Pete Hegseth already done? Now we know the answers to these questions, and America’s military reputation has nose-dived. Oh, and as a December 2025 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies points out, a Chinese supply chain underpins ‘the architecture of modern drone warfare.’ America’s dollar-linked financial power has also sharply declined.” (Paul Krugman)

“Saudi Arabia has drawn two of the Muslim world’s most formidable military powers into its defense as the Iran war moves closer to the kingdom. Pakistan and Turkey signed a NATO-style mutual defense pact with Saudi Arabia in Mecca on Friday, consolidating their longstanding security ties into a collective-defense alliance that stipulates an attack against any of them ‘shall be regarded as attack on them all.’ That commitment could draw Pakistan and Turkey into a war they have carefully kept at arm’s length. The official rationale for the agreement is ‘to strengthen collective deterrence against any act of aggression’ and further provide ‘for the enhancement of all aspects of defence cooperation among the three states,’ according to a statement released by all three countries. More specifically, the pact gives Saudi Arabia a powerful new layer of protection beyond its longstanding security partnership with the United States amid growing regional doubts over whether Washington can still be relied upon to protect its oil-rich Gulf allies. Turkey has the second-largest military in NATO, behind only the US, while Pakistan is the only nuclear-armed Muslim nation. Such powerful allies strengthen Saudi deterrence and present a united Sunni-led military front against a mounting Iranian threat … The pact also comes as Israel expands its military reach across the region and Riyadh’s relations with the neighboring United Arab Emirates fray. Pakistan and Turkey each share a border with Iran and both have strong reasons to prevent the conflict from spiraling. Pakistan must manage its sizeable Shiite population and its sensitive relationship with Tehran, while Turkey and Iran share concerns over Kurdish separatism despite competing elsewhere in the region. Tehran repeatedly struck targets in Saudi Arabia during the war, including civilian infrastructure, energy facilities and US interests. Direct Iranian attacks on Saudi Arabia largely subsided after an April 8 ceasefire took hold, but Iran-backed groups in Yemen and Iraq continued targeting the kingdom.” (Abbas Al Lawati/CNN)

“Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed a joint defence agreement on Friday, connecting the three largest Muslim countries in the world under one security umbrella for the first time. The deal, which has been under negotiation since last year, creates a significant new trilateral framework amid a deepening regional crisis following Israeli and US attacks on Iran … The pact would link three of the region’s largest countries, each with unique advantages. Oil-rich Saudi Arabia is the Arab world’s only G20 economy and home to Mecca and Medina, the two holiest cities in Islam. Pakistan is the Muslim-world’s only nuclear-armed state. Turkey, which straddles Asia and Europe, boasts Nato’s second-largest army. Pakistan is historically close to both Saudi Arabia and Turkey, but the latter two countries have not always seen eye-to-eye. Turkey’s President Erdogan backed popular protests following the Arab Spring that Riyadh saw as a threat to its monarchical system of governance. A decade ago, Saudi Arabia and the UAE joined forces to battle Turkey in Libya. They also supported Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, a former general whom Erdogan once denounced. But the region’s alliances have whipsawed. Erdogan and Sisi are moving closer amid joint concerns over Israel’s war on Gaza - recognised as a genocide by the United Nations - and broader attacks on Lebanon, Syria and Iran. Saudi Arabia and Turkey began patching up ties around 2021.” (Ragip Solyu/MiddleEastEye)

“In the summer of 2024, sitting in the shade of an enormous mango tree on the veranda of an ageing villa in Omdurman, I learned to distinguish between the sounds of outgoing and incoming artillery and mortar fire. When an outgoing projectile was launched from the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) base in the city’s northern Wadi Saydna district, it made a thundering explosion that was interrupted within a second by a distinct metallic clink as the empty shell was expelled. By contrast, the incoming projectiles that the rebel Rapid Support Forces (RSF) fired from their positions across the Nile in Khartoum North made a whizzing sound as they dashed forward. If the sound intensified, it was closing in; if it faded, it had passed overhead. In either case, the whizz ended after a few seconds with a loud thud. What followed could not be measured in linear time: a silent interregnum in which time itself broke down, before reigniting in the gasps and shrieks of recognition, say, that a ceiling has collapsed. Omdurman is a town of predominantly sun-baked mud-brick houses, with distinct foci of concrete buildings. When war broke out in April 2023, the RSF had initially tried and failed to break into its northern districts, with the objective of besieging the Wadi Saydna base, which included a military college and airport. Next they resorted to firing on the area from a distance. After a year of shelling, its old, squat adobe structures, adequately designed for impending mortality, were left more shocked than shattered, while the new, taller concrete ones were aching and breaking. Throughout May and June 2024, I was on the receiving end of these daily RSF salvoes. I was with my parents, now in their late seventies, who had endured a year or so of life under rebel rule in old-town Omdurman, until the various inconveniences – a lack of running water, daily harassment at gunpoint – eventually forced them out, an undertaking that involved making generous bribes at RSF checkpoints. A friend of a relative generously offered them emergency lodging in his now-empty family home, built in the 1970s in a once-lush neighbourhood in the north of the city. His ailing mother had left town at the onset of war to join her older children, who were long settled in the Arab Gulf.” (Magdi El Gizuli/Equator)

“Ukraine’s long-range strike campaign has a clear lineage, one I have tracked across several articles here since the war’s early years. One of my earliest examinations was Striking Further, published in May 2023. In May 2023, two small drones exploded above the Kremlin’s Senate Palace. Whatever its precise origin, the strike signalled that the war Putin had started in February 2022 could reach the seat of Russian power. Writing in Striking Further at the time, I described Ukraine’s drone strikes on Moscow as a demonstration of the country’s ever-lengthening reach, part of a pattern of wartime adaptation that Ukraine has pursued more successfully than almost any other dimension of its war effort. By July 2023, strikes were reaching Moscow’s commercial and financial districts. Through 2024, the campaign broadened again, increasingly targeting the fuel depots, refineries and defence-industrial sites that sustain Russia’s war economy, as Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, established as its own branch in June 2024, matured into a sustained strike architecture. The scale of attacks accelerated markedly from 2025. A March 2025 strike saw more than 70 drones intercepted near Moscow in a single day, the largest attack of the war to that point. By March 2026, Ukraine was sending roughly 250 drones toward the Moscow region over three consecutive days, and had launched approximately 7,000 long-range drones against Russian targets that month alone, overtaking Russia’s own long-range strike volume for the first time. On 17 May 2026, Ukraine launched what Russian officials called the largest drone assault on the capital in more than a year, sending more than 500 unmanned systems into Russian territory and penetrating three of Moscow’s four air defence rings. President Zelenskyy described this campaign as Ukraine’s own ‘long-range sanctions’ against Russia. Those signals were deliberate. Two days before the strike, Zelenskyy said he had met with the leadership of the General Staff, military intelligence and the Security Service of Ukraine to discuss expanding long-range strike operations, a meeting that brought together most of the institutions the new command would later be built to unify. By mid-2026, the Ukrainian long-range strike campaign had become a continuous drumbeat of assaults on Russian targets.” (Mick Ryan/Futura Doctrina)

“If you step back, this bleak July jobs report means the labor market is stalling again.
Average job gains past 3 months: 20k
Average job gains past 6 months: 44k
Average job gains past 12 months: 26k
Average job gains in all of 2025: 10k
The strong jobs reports earlier this year have now faded. A ‘no hire’ job market is one with few opportunities and little dynamism.” (Heather Long/X.com)

“El-Sayed overcame the 12-to-one spending advantage of his establishment opponent, Representative Haley Stevens. William Lawrence, founder of the Sunrise Movement, also won the nomination for Michigan’s seventh House district, while Justice Democrat Donavan McKinney defeated centrist millionaire incumbent Shri Thanedar in the state’s 13th district. Coming off of big wins for democratic socialist candidates in New York and Colorado, the Michigan results not only demonstrate that insurgent left candidates are viable in statewide races in the Midwest; they also show a strong ability on the part of grassroots organizers to galvanize an activist base to a reform cause. That factor was notably lacking in the Democrats’ dismal 2024 showing, but became a vital source of strength in a low-turnout midterm cycle. One clear measure of this heightened grassroots enthusiasm: Jocelyn Benson, the winner of the gubernatorial primary who ran all but unopposed, garnered half a million votes more than the winner of the contested GOP primary did—a 60 percent increase in voter participation. Yet, at the leadership level, the opposition party continues to be stuck in doldrums mode. In political terms, Democrats are still on the back foot before the MAGA right’s multifront series of putsches yielding a brownshirt immigration police state, an open-auction model of Beltway corruption, and a concerted bid to place the toxic fable of a Christian nationalist ethno-state at the center of the country’s civic discourse. The Democrats’ fallback narrative is a pitch to return to normalcy—a fanciful evasion of the fundamental power shifts roiling the American polity since 2016, and an anemic overture to voters who crave basic changes to a top-heavy and oligarchic political economy.” (Chris Lehmann/The Nation)

“President Donald Trump is crashing out about a report that he confronted Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the U.S. military’s depleted munitions stockpile. Trump took to Truth Social less than an hour into Thursday to hit back at The Washington Post for reporting that tensions between Hegseth and the president had ‘boiled over’ on the sidelines of a Cabinet meeting at Camp David last week. ‘The U.S. has massive amounts of ‘munitions,’ especially of certain types,’ Trump wrote. ‘Additionally, large amounts are being manufactured and shipped to the U.S. as needed. Defense companies are building the largest number of plants and factories in our country’s history.’ ‘The ‘leakers’ of these treasonous statements are being hunted down. Long term jail sentences will be sought!’ Trump wrote. Notably, Trump didn’t deny unloading on Hegseth. This isn’t the first time the Trump administration has challenged reports that the country’s weapons stockpile is low, and still managed to threaten the leakers with jail time. If the story is false, then why would it be treasonous to tell it? The shortages of long-range guided missiles and air-defense interceptors caused Trump to pull back from launching any massive strikes against Iran, one source familiar with discussions told the Post. On Monday, the president claimed he’d changed his mind about launching ‘the biggest attack since World War II.’ Meanwhile, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted that the confrontation ‘literally never happened,’ but didn’t respond to the claims about the U.S. weapons stockpile.” (Edith Olmstead/TNR)

“Now that the Brits have charged the Tates and their long criminal history is out in the open and undeniable, Trumpworld wants to slither away from its old pals. But it can’t hide those long-standing ties to the pimp-pornographer rape cheerleaders for very long. The brothers are integral to the larger Trump Predators’ Ball: No White House in American history has been so packed with, or allied with, men accused of domestic violence, roofie rape, infidelity and pedophile protection. For years, the Trump team has cynically nurtured and profited from its connection to the Tates – to the detriment of American women’s health and safety, and with quantifiable political and economic gain. As we wrote last week, Barron Trump could and should be subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee. He is widely credited as the link that brought the Tates and their blinkered, insecure younger male followers into Trump’s orbit. Men under 30 swung toward Trump by 15 to 20 percentage points in 2024. But Barron is hardly the only Trumpworld character with Tate ties who should be hauled in. And the family’s relationship with them isn’t just political. Don Jr. – back in his weak-chinned, pre-beard days – first invited Andrew Tate to Mar-a-Lago in 2017.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)

“The times are officially changin’. Now that i3 production has begun, BMW’s oldest manufacturing facility, its home-turf Munich plant, will exclusively build electric vehicles starting next year. This marks a huge turning point for the brand, as it phases out internal combustion models for its Neue Klasse EVs. It isn’t only a production milestone for the brand but a symbolic one. Munich is the site of BMW’s HQ and its Bavarian home, and it’s about to be fully electric. ‘The start of production of the BMW i3 heralds a new era for our main plant. With the fully-electric BMW i3, we are bringing together what belongs together: The 3 Series embodies BMW more than almost any other model—and Plant Munich represents our brand more than almost any other production site,’ said Raymond Wittmann, BMW board member responsible for production.” (Nico DeMattea/InsideEVS)

“Elon Musk’s DOGE promised to slash $2 trillion in federal spending and to make the federal workforce lean and efficient. But even the cost savings it has claimed in an online ‘Wall of Receipts’ of the smaller amount of $110 billion didn’t check out, according to a report the Government Accountability Office published Thursday. The GAO evaluated $110 billion of savings DOGE claimed on a website with its ‘Wall of Receipts’ from cuts including federal contracts, grants and leases. The GAO said it found multiple ‘issues limiting the transparency and reliability of these reported savings.’ Including additional categories beyond contracts, grants, and leases, DOGE tallied $215 billion in cuts, the GAO said. The findings further undercut claims by Musk and President Donald Trump that they have made meaningful cuts in government spending and call into question the effects of the DOGE effort that slashed federal spending with little notice to agencies and slashed hundreds of thousands of government jobs. The GAO found that of the 13,476 contracts DOGE claimed it terminated, ‘no termination action’ was taken on 2,503 of them. The report also noted DOGE had claimed $113 million in savings from cuts to 264 leases, but GAO found that information overstated the savings. The leases cut and referenced on DOGE’s website ‘actually summed to $53.5 million’ in savings, the report found. Of the 264 leases, about 108 were already in the termination process before DOGE was formed after Trump began his second term as president, the GAO report also said. The report was requested last year by Sens. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) who are, respectively, ranking members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and of the panel’s investigations subcommittee.” (Lora Kolodny/CNBC)

“When African states emerged from colonial domination in the late 1950s and early 1960s, they inherited a map mostly drawn for imperial ends. The scramble for Africa (1884–1885), formalized at the Berlin Conference, produced borders that cut across deserts, forests, rivers and ridges without regard for local political realities. Many new leaders recognized that these borders were neither natural nor just; they also feared that redrawing them would unleash endless conflict. The newly independent countries thus adopted a powerful consensus: the colonial borders must remain inviolable. This principle was viewed through the prism of uti possidetis juris—the doctrine, first applied in Latin America, that colonial administrative borders become international borders upon independence. The International Court of Justice (ICJ), notably in the 1986 Burkina Faso/Mali case, explicitly linked the 1964 Cairo Resolution to uti possidetis, grounding African borders in colonial law, a jurisprudence that still shapes the African Union Border Programme (AUBP), which aims to delimit 80 per cent of African boundaries by 2027. Yet, conflating Africa’s principle with uti possidetis obscures important differences. The African principle is broader and more political: it prescribes neither how a border must be drawn nor how disputes should be resolved; it simply forbids the forcible alteration of borders and obliges states to settle disagreements peacefully. Moreover, only a minority of African borders resulted from a single colonial power’s internal administrative line; many were products of bilateral treaties between rival empires. In Central Africa, French, Belgian, German, British, Spanish and Portuguese claims intersected and overlapped. The practical effect, nonetheless, was to freeze the colonial map. Stability was purchased at an exorbitant price: 54 dysfunctional rump states. Borders that split ethnic groups created permanent minorities whose loyalty was always suspect; landlocked states depend on the goodwill of neighbours for port access; and infrastructure networks designed to extract resources toward imperial metropoles (with Beijing supplanting Paris and London) run parallel to borders rather than across them, fragmenting regional economies. From 2009 to 2011, according to the World Bank, these divisions cost Africa up to two per cent of annual growth, a figure magnified by climate shocks and migratory pressures.” (Andréa Ngombet/The Republic)

Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had won Best Picture and Best Director for Oppenheimer. We are, of course, talking about Christopher Nolan. And whether or not you agree that The Odyssey was an exceptional work of cinema, or over-woke, it is without question a significant cultural moment. I would go so far as to argue it is a triumph of the Humanities, if you’ll bear with me. Nolan used his post-Oscar blank check not to retreat into the safe nook of franchise territory, but to drag a nearly 3,000-year-old epic poem into the multiplex.

Let’s face it, Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury — It is a grim time for Classical Studies. “Annual US production of undergraduate degrees in Classics has fallen steadily, from more than 1,200 in the 2012-13 academic year to 736 in 2019-20,” writes Paul Basken for The Times Higher Education. “Over a similar pre-pandemic time frame, the total number of institutions with a Classics major or department shrank by more than a dozen.” Universities are shuttering departments. Funding is drying up. Student interest was until a few weeks ago evaporating. The modern world seems intent on burying the ancient past under a mountain of algorithmically generated content. Yet, here comes Nolan—a gigantically talented filmmaker obsessed with time, memory, and the crushing weight of legacy — breathing furious, IMAX-scaled life into Homer’s foundational myth. By drawing millions of viewers into the orbit of Bronze Age trauma, Nolan did something the academy has failed to do out of lack of interest for decades: he made the Classics, once again, urgent. The last time the Classics were this urgent was in the days of the Biblical sword and sandal epics of the 1950s and 60s.

Similarly, the American film industry has been hobbled since COVID. And the recovery has been slow. Overall ticket sales have been down, particularly for films that don’t feature superheroes soaring through the decline of American soft power. Massive theater chains are shedding their real estate portfolios parallel to corporate consolidations and mergers -- think: Paramount -- limiting the number of films that actually get greenlit. It is indeed a rarity to see an American film in which the lead character does not wear spandex.

If the Art of film began in Europe, it was perfected as profitable four-dimensional storytelling in America. And thus The Odyssey could not come at a more perilous moment in the history of American cinema and classical education. Further, the success of The Odyssey comes at a time where Hollywood is battling the disruptive expansion of generative AI., stagnant theater attendance, rising labor and production costs as well as international competition from global competitors, like Bollywood and Nollywood. From this nearly unnavigable port, Nolan steered his adaptation of between the Scylla of shrinking demand for serious films with real actors and the Charybdis of the consolidation of the industry.

The reception from Homer’s dedicated translators has been what can only be properly construed under the category of mixed. Despite the fact of the cultural largeness of this film — a $250 million budgeted adaptation of an archaic Greek text — classicists have not all been kind. Primarily we speak of Dr. Emily Wilson of the University of Pennsylvania, whose celebrated 2017 translation of the 2700 year old epic poem heavily influenced Nolan. Because her translation is so magisterial, her criticisms of the film are simultaneously the most biting and quixotic. Dr. Wilson’s primary grievance, delivered with the pinched anxiety of a library-bound academic, is that Nolan lacks "fidelity." Of course Nolan lacks “fidelity.” He did not spend a decade in near-monastic intensity studying ancient Greek, immersing himself into that wine-dark world. Nolan is not a classical scholar; he is a Hollywood filmmaker, and any attempt to judge him by those standards redounds upon the critic — and Dr. Wilson should know that.

We won’t entertain the possibility that the Dr. is positioning herself, in this Classicists Moment (created, we cannot fail to note, by Nolan) as the Head-Conservative-Classicist. One imagines its a well-paying position with lots of room for academic advancement and oodles of media appearances. Status is a hell of a drug. And so, Dr. Wilson — intentionally or not — has become the favorite Classicist of MAGA, as if that is something to be legitimately proud of. As if it were not a profoundly cynical (but lucrative!) exercise to demolish a sumptuous cinematic spectacle for not conveying the rigorous internal dialogue demanded by Homer’s text. Literary lioness Joyce Carol Oats, to her credit, took up Nolan’s cause on X:

yes, her tone of dismissal & haughty superiority strike a sour note. rather than disagreeing with interpretations of Homer in a collegial manner, this person, who has benefited enormously from Nolan's film, speaks in the crude language of MAGA folks attacking someone with ideas that differ from hers.

within the world of translators this seems all the more surprising since all translations are, presumably, subjective & not equivalent to the original text.
one would expect a translator, of all people, beholden to a text, in service to a text, to be just a wee bit more thoughtful & respectful of others who are acting in good faith just as (she would claim) she is.

Obviously I agree wholeheartedly with Oats. I wrote last week about the conservative freakout about the “Woke” Odyssey for not employing a Mediterranean-First hiring process. Well, not so much a conservative freakout as a reaction of traditional Edwardian Classical scholarship to a modern archaeology movement — or “woke archaeology” — that seeks to widen the lens of history’s camera beyond the male ruling classes of Athens and Sparta, &c, circa the eighth century BC. The pearl-clutching of the Edwardian Classical scholarship gang to a black Helen of Troy is laughable, in retrospect, considering the success of the film and the history of role-switching on the Shakespearean stage. There is, we cannot fail to note here, not an insignificant amount of +Edwardian classical pearl-clutching+ in Dr. Wilson’s plaintive plea for “fidelity” to the source material.

I remain somewhat bewildered as to why someone as tremendously knowledgeable as Dr. Emily Wilson would take out the paddle to spank Nolan so publicly here, when he is doing so much to enlarge the public conversation of the Classics. It is hard to conjure the name of another Westerner in the last half century who has done more to foster a greater cultural discussion of The Odyssey in so short a time. Or even to hazard the name of another Westerner attempting to open the door to an enduring legacy of the Greeks at the same time as academic interest in the subject has waned. There are probably discussions at this moment in LalaLand on the Iliad prequel! But Dr Wilson essentially scolds Nolan’s filmic Odyssey for the high crime of being, well, cinematic. Why isn’t Christopher Nolan’s two hour-plus film faithful to a text that would take eight to ten hours to read? (Again: Dr. Emily Wilson should know this!) Then there is the whole “tone of dismissal & haughty superiority” from the pages of the London Review of Books, which was clearly calculated to rasp, yes.

Or — perhaps, the teleological endpoint of Dr. Wilson’s argument is to hermetically secure all cultural conversation around Homer’s Odyssey to the monastic order of classicists? A PhD’s only affair. No one allowed until you have translated Oedipus Tyrannus. It sort of reminds me of the peak era of “quant” dominance over the capital markets, which occurred just prior to the 2007–2008 financial crisis. Whatever the case, it seems like such a bad faith argument, particularly for a denizen of academe, considering the clear and obvious benefits to the enrollment cliff facing Classics departments. Marina Dunbar of The Guardian brings the receipts:

At the popular independent bookstore Books Are Magic in Brooklyn, New York, last week, evidence sat just inside the front entrance. A display stacked with more than a dozen editions of The Odyssey – from Emily Wilson’s acclaimed translation to graphic novels and children’s story versions – was drawing a steady stream of browsers, many of them Gen Z readers who became interested after seeing Nolan’s latest blockbuster.

Just a month ago, the store sold only a handful of copies of Homer’s classic. In July, sales multiplied by several thousand per cent.

What percentage of these new readers will take classes in the Fall in Homeric Greek, in Ancient Greek Literature? How many will blog and podcast on the subject in the coming years? How many will get turned on by that and go on to the Romans? To Egyptology? Maybe Ancient Near Eastern Studies? (Maybe, dare I say it?) African Archaeology? Okay, I’ll admit African-Archaeology is a longshot, but there will be some spillover into the Classics, to Classical Literature — to the Humanities, in general — in the same way (but better) than in the 1980s, when law schools were inundated by applications from fans of LA Law (also known as the oft-forgotten sociological phenomenon “The LA Law Effect”).

Does a modern Hollywood film flatten the multi-layered historical discourse into contemporary pop-culture entertainment? Sure it does, and to a significant degree. Wilson pans Nolan’s flattened depiction of the women of the Odyssey, namely: the depictions of Penelope and Circe. Classicists Mary Beard and Daniel Mendelsohn offer more nuanced, analytical critiques. Both Mandelsohn and Beard explained their personal peccadillos with the film compared to the Odyssey that they have inhabited for decades (completely understandable; I share some of their concerns). Both, despite their instructive criticisms, seem to get the fact that Nolan was adapting an eight to ten hour ancient poem into a two hour plus visual spectacle and, in the end, recommended the film (As do I).

So why are conservative critics at the London Review of Books still crying foul from their ivory towers, ignoring the very enrollment cliff threatening the future of Classics? Why are they hurling poisoned spears at Mr. Nolan from the heights of the Scaaen Gates? If all conversation about The Odyssey were confined to well-appointed precincts like the LRB, then the future of the Classics would be in an even more precarious Enrollment Cliff, dear reader, than it is now.

“My first experience of the ancient world came in the mid 1980s in the form of the futuristic Franco-Japanese anime Ulysees 31 and the Jackanory Special: Odysseus, the greatest hero of them all, presented by Blackadder‘s Baldrick (the reason why I watched it in the first place), Tony Robinson, coming to you from a beach somewhere in the Mediterranean. I raced home from school to watch both on Children’s BBC. They are the reason why I went to university to study Classical Civilisation. The Odyssey was fundamental to what I ended up doing. After my anticipatory post from last week, I’ve now since watched Nolan’s Odyssey … I had anticipated that it would be epic. It is. There are some truly jaw-dropping set pieces. Film gold, as Nolan put it in his interview mentioned above. Scenes such as the Sirens, Hades, Scylla, Cyclops. CIRCE. I saw it in IMAX. In the shipwreck scene, the sound alone pulled me up by the hairs on the back of my neck. The storm was fully immersive. You could feel the power of the gods, if that’s what the sea and storm represent, as Odysseus’s men believe. If not, the power of nature (is that any different anyway?). A warning for our times? Unlike so many sword and sandal epics, this felt big. Bigger than the ground-breaking Gladiator. Much bigger.” (Sentinae Antiquae)

“For more than a decade, Andrew Tate has publicly advocated for and bragged about personally choking, slapping, and violently dominating women into submission across dozens of podcasts, interviews and online broadcasts. Rumble, the video hosting service backed by investments from the likes of Peter Thiel and JD Vance, paid Tate at least $6 million a year to spread his brand of propagandized violence against women. During that same period, at least eight women have publicly alleged that Andrew or his brother Tristan Tate strangled them during sex, several saying they lost consciousness. They include Lauren Southern, Brianna Stern, three women pseudonymously quoted in the New Yorker, and four anonymous women in a UK civil case. The brothers deny the allegations, but given their long public history of bragging about doing exactly that to unnamed women, their denials ring hollow. The Tate brothers are Sons of Epstein. There is an ideological and criminal lineage between the Boomer global sex trafficker and these Millennial monsters: shared misogyny, assumption of impunity, underage victims and of course, the pimping business model. Only the style has been updated. Every video of the brothers oozes psychopathy. Their brand of caricatured manhood is derangement on steroids. To our shame, the American government has treated these stranglers like international heroes instead of global pariahs and a significant threat to women and girls worldwide.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)

“When African states emerged from colonial domination in the late 1950s and early 1960s, they inherited a map mostly drawn for imperial ends. The scramble for Africa (1884–1885), formalized at the Berlin Conference, produced borders that cut across deserts, forests, rivers and ridges without regard for local political realities. Many new leaders recognized that these borders were neither natural nor just; they also feared that redrawing them would unleash endless conflict. The newly independent countries thus adopted a powerful consensus: the colonial borders must remain inviolable. This principle was viewed through the prism of uti possidetis juris—the doctrine, first applied in Latin America, that colonial administrative borders become international borders upon independence. The International Court of Justice (ICJ), notably in the 1986 Burkina Faso/Mali case, explicitly linked the 1964 Cairo Resolution to uti possidetis, grounding African borders in colonial law, a jurisprudence that still shapes the African Union Border Programme (AUBP), which aims to delimit 80 per cent of African boundaries by 2027. Yet, conflating Africa’s principle with uti possidetis obscures important differences. The African principle is broader and more political: it prescribes neither how a border must be drawn nor how disputes should be resolved; it simply forbids the forcible alteration of borders and obliges states to settle disagreements peacefully.” (Andréa Ngombet/The Republic)

“For decades, Ronald S. Lauder, the billionaire cosmetics heir and philanthropist, has been something like a one-man bank for Republicans in New York. He personally funded a campaign to impose term limits in New York City, helped pay for a lawsuit to overturn the state’s gerrymandered congressional map and, just four years ago, plowed close to $13 million into races that helped Republicans flip the House. Now, in the middle of another crucial midterm election year, Mr. Lauder, 82, appears to have abruptly closed his political checkbook, and the ramifications for the conservative movement he has nurtured in his home state could be significant. He has yet to make a single donation to Republicans in his home state this year, according to campaign finance records. The super PAC he long maintained to advance Republican candidates and causes is also sitting idle.” (Nicholas Fandos/NYT)

“When Trump rode his vengeance train back into the Oval Office in 2024, one of his first acts was to kill all the lawyers. At the suggestion of his personal legal Iago Boris Epshteyn, a man who validates the old expression that, after the age of 40, you get the face you deserve, Trump went after Paul, Weiss with Executive Order 14237, which, by depriving the firm of federal contracts, would have effectively put it out of business. The (former Paul, Weiss chairman Brad) Karp cave was instantaneous. His solipsistic rationale to himself and his critics was that the firm would have suffered an immediate brain drain had he resisted Trump. According to someone who was at a Yale management seminar hosted by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld a few days after the Paul, Weiss deal, Karp was questioned on this logic.

Q: ‘Brad, didn’t your partners average $7 million last year?”

Karp: ‘Actually, it was $7.5 million.”

Q: ‘So what if they had to take a haircut of a million or two for a year or two?”

Karp: “Half or more of them would have quit.”

Q: ‘And you call those partners?”

No answer.

It turns out that the only reason Karp et al. stood up to Trump in the first term was because there were no consequences for defiance. Moral courage was really moral vanity. The Trump reckoning moment exposed how costly the real work of morality can be. As one Karp friend put it, ‘It’s hard to call anyone making $20 million a year a tragic figure, but he is.’ Karp must know that his prostration to Trump will be the first line of his obituary.” (Tina Brown/Fresh Hell)

“As munitions streaked through the night sky, a plaintive cry like a whale song echoed in the darkness. U.S. troops grabbed their gear and headed for shelter as the warning sirens rang out, a leaked video shows. The military personnel, clad in a mix of combat fatigues and gym attire, piled into a bunker, huddling in the darkness. ‘Guys, off the walls if we can,’ a woman, likely a medic, advised, warning about the danger of traumatic brain injuries. The footage, reportedly from Jordan’s Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, where three U.S. troops were killed during Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks on July 17 and 18, offers a glimpse of the dangers faced by U.S. forces across the Middle East. The attacks are continued demonstrations of Iran’s ability to target U.S. bases across the Middle East and kill U.S. troops, despite months of claims by President Donald Trump and self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth that Iran’s military was annihilated. As this fiction has collapsed, U.S. Central Command has refused to discuss the number and scale of the strikes. ‘I have nothing for you on that,’ Maj. Emma Thompson, the command’s media operations chief, told The Intercept. Iran has attacked at least nine U.S. outposts across the Middle East since July 9, according to a U.S. official who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the press. Several of these bases suffered ‘significant’ damage in the attacks, the source said. Iran’s military managed to overwhelm U.S. air defense systems using a mix of attack drones and advanced ballistic missiles, according to the official. Numerous factors make the missiles difficult to defeat, the source said: They travel at hypersonic speeds, have complex navigational capabilities including methods to circumvent jamming, and some can be guided or steered. Stocks of advanced air-defense missiles, like Patriot and THAAD interceptors, are so depleted that U.S. forces are not shooting down all Iranian missiles and drones aimed at U.S. and allied targets across the Middle East, the official said, referencing a Friday report by NBC News that revealed the tactic. The official told The Intercept that the U.S. allows missiles through its defenses only in cases where a strike is judged not to imperil U.S. lives. The U.S. and its allies burned through more than 11,000 munitions, including large amounts of defensive missiles, in the first 16 days of the war alone, according to a March analysis by the Royal United Services Institute.” (Nick Turse/The Intercept)

“The United States military has started to draw down its last remaining forces from Iraq stationed in the vicinity of Erbil’s airport in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region, well-placed sources with close knowledge of the process confirmed to Al-Monitor. Patriot mobile air-to-surface air-defense systems that detect and shoot down incoming missiles, drones and other airborne enemy equipment have already been removed from the military compound, the sources said, without providing further details. The pullout started last week and is ongoing, with the bulk of the US forces and their heavy equipment out, the sources said. ‘All’ of the Patriot anti-missile batteries had been redeployed to an undisclosed destination, they said, adding that other defensive weapons systems remained in place as of the time of publication. Regional officials described the pullout as routine and in line with the US commitment to withdraw all its forces from Iraq by a Sept. 30 deadline that was agreed with Baghdad. However, coming amid sustained attacks by Iran and its Shiite proxy militias, and on the Kurdistan Region of Iraq in particular, the withdrawal has left the Kurds feeling badly exposed.” (Amberin Zaman/Al-Monitor)

“A new tech-sharing agreement allowing Ukrainians to make a British-designed radar jammer called Stone Cloak may soon help Ukraine accelerate drone strikes on Russian targets. Ukraine has been using British-built versions of the digital jammer—about the size of a computer tablet—on long-range strike drones already this year. But the agreement allows the country to mass-produce it themselves so it can be more rapidly scaled across their drone forces. The British government announced the existence of Stone Cloak for the first time on Saturday as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with the new prime minister at a naval base in Portsmouth. The occasion is the annual Sea Breeze joint exercise. Ukrainian, U.S. and British sailors paid ‘special attention’ to countering Russian air defenses during this year’s Sea Breeze according to Ukraine’s national news agency. ‘At this point, we don’t know the full details of Stone Cloak, but suffice it to say, the system will likely increase mission effectiveness against some of the Russian air defenses,’ Jeffrey Fischer, a retired U.S. Air Force officer, told Defense One via email. Ukraine uses a variety of electronic warfare systems as part of its drone operations. But the ones provided by partners like the U.K. are often backed by larger research budgets.” (Patrick Tucker/Defense One)

“The teenage boy’s hands and legs were shackled to the anti-aircraft gun mounted on a pickup as Sudanese warplanes attacked. He saw another child chained to the steering wheel. As their captors sought cover, the terrified children were ordered to stay and shoot down the jets over the capital, Khartoum. If they tried to flee, they’d be killed by their captors — if the planes didn’t get them first. The boy, now 17, told The Associated Press that those who ordered him strapped to the gun were Colombian mercenaries providing military aid to Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces against the army in the war, now in its fourth year. Another child said he was forced to carry out artillery strikes and beaten for disobedience. The rare, firsthand accounts show the perils faced by tens of thousands of children believed to have been conscripted into the war by all sides. Six former child soldiers who were abducted and forced to fight with the Rapid Support Forces, known as the RSF, spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. Two said they were trained by Colombians. Their accounts point to a wider deployment of Colombian mercenaries, who rights groups say were recruited by a state-linked firm in the United Arab Emirates to fight with the RSF. Human rights groups and Sudan’s military accuse the UAE of arming the RSF, and a U.N. panel said it had tracked weapons shipments to the RSF originating in the Gulf federation that includes Dubai. In a statement to the AP after this story was published, the UAE denied providing arms or military support to any warring party in Sudan. It also denied facilitating the movement of mercenaries or foreign fighters into Sudan or having links to mercenaries.” (Sam Mednick, Isabel Debre and Astrid Suarez/AP Live)

“During the recent youth uprising in India, some profanities and slurs that most Indians would hesitate to repeat made their way into a handful of popular slogans aimed at Prime Minister Narendra Modi. They shocked not only the older generations, but also some millennials, as well as seasoned members of civil society, the independent media and leaders of progressive rights movements, accustomed to a certain decorum and seriousness in protest language … The recent protests were initiated by the satirical Cockroach Janata Party. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) social media troll networks and the mainstream Indian media that toes the government’s line have previously vilified protesters and critics of the Modi government, but failed to portray this movement as the handiwork of foreign agents, because most protesters belonged to the mainstream Hindu middle class, the BJP’s core support base. Only after the protests ended with the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, a move aimed to contain the damage to Modi’s carefully crafted image after a decade in power, did a new line of attack emerge: discrediting the movement retroactively over the profanities used against Modi in its slogans, especially by young women. Shashi Shekhar Vempati, chairperson of the country’s Central Board of Film Certification, popularly known as the censor board, raised the issue of ‘mouthing of gender-demeaning profanities’ in a post on X. So did Kanwal Sibal, a former diplomat, who took offence at what ‘young girls’ were saying against Modi — language, he said, ‘only the most uncouth males would employ.’ Kangana Ranaut, an actor and member of Parliament, targeted ‘young Hindu women’ for their use of curse words, dismissing them as ‘generation gutter.’” (Surbhi Gupta/NewLinesMag)

“I had anticipated that it would be epic. It is. There are some truly jaw-dropping set pieces. Film gold, as Nolan put it in his interview mentioned above. Scenes such as the Sirens, Hades, Scylla, Cyclops. CIRCE. I saw it in IMAX. In the shipwreck scene, the sound alone pulled me up by the hairs on the back of my neck. The storm was fully immersive. You could feel the power of the gods, if that’s what the sea and storm represent, as Odysseus’s men believe. If not, the power of nature (is that any different anyway?). A warning for our times? Unlike so many sword and sandal epics, this felt big. Bigger than the ground-breaking Gladiator. Much bigger … I had also thought that Nolan might play with time. (In his interview he mentions that the different narrative timelines attracted him to the Odyssey in the first place.) He does and in ways that I hadn’t anticipated. He makes a good decision to follow the poem’s initial focus on Telemachus and Ithaca, through which he’s also able to do some important scene-setting for an audience who aren’t going to be familiar with a lot of the material. But what impressed me most was his adaptation of Odysseus’s experiences. Out go the Phaiakians. Instead, Nolan concentrates the retelling of all those set-piece events on Odysseus’s stay with Kalypso. And he makes the Lotus eating an integral part of the recounting, as we see him trying to remember and recover his identity. Identity was the third theme that I highlighted in last week’s post as a consistent interest of Nolan’s. The focus on Odysseus’s re-membering was a neat turn, not least because identity and storytelling are so closely bound in the poem and recent critics, including the host of this blog, have written eloquently about Odysseus through the lens of cognitive studies and, especially, trauma. Odysseus comes across as someone traumatized by his experience of war. That’s a fair reading of the Odyssey and a smart adaptation for modern times.” (Sententinae Antique)

“Almost every night in the White House, President Trump calls his fundraiser, Meredith O’Rourke, for an update. Trump asks O’Rourke which companies and donors have cut checks and which haven’t, and for how much. He often asks her to make much larger financial requests than she was planning—for some donors the ask is $5 million, for others it is $50 million. And the president gives her names to call, often including people who have recently met with him, according to people with knowledge of the calls. ‘This is very important to the president. He’s asked me to call you and ask you for this donation,’ O’Rourke has relayed on phone calls with companies, persistently following up with them. In some calls, she has referred to Trump as the boss, saying ‘the boss wants this money.’ In turn, Trump has called her the ‘princess of darkness’ because she is such a ‘killer’ with donors, according to people who have heard his comments. SoftBank donated $50 million toward Trump’s presidential library. Apple cut a check for around $25 million toward his White House ballroom project, while Microsoft gave around $10 million and Amazon chipped in around $5 million, according to people familiar with the contributions. Meta Platforms recently gave $10 million to a Trump-aligned political committee, people familiar said, on top of a multimillion donation to the ballroom and a prior $22 million payment to the planned presidential library. Trump stands out for taking personal control of the fundraising, and no sitting American president has ever raised these amounts for his pet projects. At the same time, companies have paid new attention to the White House as Trump has gotten involved in regulatory decisions that once were made by independent agencies, dramatically shifting the balance of power across Washington.” (Josh Dawsey, Dana Mattioli, Annie Linskey and Emily Glazer/WSJ)

“This is El-Sayed’s second statewide race. In both cases, he entered as the heavy underdog, a Bernie Sanders–aligned candidate seeking public office. This time, as he seeks to replace outgoing Sen. Gary Peters, El-Sayed has increased his viability from highly improbable to likely Democratic nominee for Senate. Most public polls and some private polls (including one of the last internal polls from the now-aborted campaign of state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, according to a Democrat with knowledge of those surveys) show El-Sayed winning the primary. Most recently, a late-July poll has him up on U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens 46-36, with another 14 percent undecided. Part of this surge is thanks to El-Sayed’s own populist skills: He’s a gifted orator who has managed to attract the affection of progressive Democrats. Part of it has been Stevens’s struggles to raise money or get comfortable in the spotlight, and McMorrow’s difficulty carving out a lane. But whatever the reason, with less than a week until Election Day and over 800,000 Michiganders having already voted, establishment and normie Democrats are engaged in a collective mass panic and a frantic effort to keep El-Sayed from winning the nomination with whatever they have in their arsenal. El-Sayed’s top surrogates have argued his nomination would send a larger message to the rest of the party. ‘Everybody is watching this race!’ Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), who traveled from Washington state to stump for El-Sayed, said during a rally on Saturday. El-Sayed’s political trajectory began in 2018 with an ultimately unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign, after serving as a bright-eyed health director for Detroit. I profiled him for Politico’s magazine during that primary. We were both young—him 32, me 29—childless, and recent graduates of the same college. Longtime political strategist for Barack Obama and others David Axelrod, who has praised El-Sayed as a candidate, often argues that politicians learn more by losing.” (Daniel Strauss/American Prospect)

“Hours after Wisconsin’s most respected pollster gave her a 22-point lead in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, Francesca Hong told a group of voters why she wanted to rein in AI. ‘We’re the only campaign that is supporting a moratorium on data centers,’ she told a special education teacher at a Black-owned small business hub. ‘The tax exemption for data centers is around $2 billion that the state is missing out on.’ Hong, a 37-year-old socialist legislator from Madison, is rolling toward the Aug. 11 primary as the clear favorite over a panicked establishment. Her rise started with her Jan. 8 announcement of a ‘Control-Alt-Delete’ plan for AI that started with pausing new data center construction. The issue emerged, she said, during conversations on the trail with rural voters who asked what they could do to stop the electricity-hungry facilities that have sprouted up nationwide to power the nation’s AI buildout. ‘I don’t know if I had a ‘eureka’ moment,’ Hong told Semafor. ‘I just knew that people were pissed.’ Grassroots opposition to data centers has exploded since last year, with the biggest political benefits accruing to fully opposed left-wing candidates like Hong — who’s aligned against labor unions and business groups that want to see construction, with limits. Democrats are eager to run against the Trump administration’s proposal to cede federal land to data centers, but just as with ‘Medicare for All,’ progressives have filled in the blanks with a marketable response faster than the center-left did. National Democrats, nervous about their left flank’s policies and electability, are now bracing for Hong to win her nomination, for Abdul El-Sayed to win the Senate nomination in Michigan, and for Sunrise Movement co-founder Will Lawrence to win a swing-seat House nomination in the middle of that state.” (David Weigel/Semafor)

“For more than a decade, Andrew Tate has publicly advocated for and bragged about personally choking, slapping, and violently dominating women into submission across dozens of podcasts, interviews and online broadcasts. Rumble, the video hosting service backed by investments from the likes of Peter Thiel and JD Vance, paid Tate at least $6 million a year to spread his brand of propagandized violence against women. During that same period, at least eight women have publicly alleged that Andrew or his brother Tristan Tate strangled them during sex, several saying they lost consciousness. They include Lauren Southern, Brianna Stern, three women pseudonymously quoted in the New Yorker, and four anonymous women in a UK civil case. The brothers deny the allegations, but given their long public history of bragging about doing exactly that to unnamed women, their denials ring hollow. The Tate brothers are Sons of Epstein. There is an ideological and criminal lineage between the Boomer global sex trafficker and these Millennial monsters: shared misogyny, assumption of impunity, underage victims and of course, the pimping business model. Only the style has been updated. Every video of the brothers oozes psychopathy. Their brand of caricatured manhood is derangement on steroids. To our shame, the American government has treated these stranglers like international heroes instead of global pariahs and a significant threat to women and girls worldwide. One of the Trump administration’s first acts was helping the brothers escape rape and trafficking charges in Romania by flying them to Miami. Ric Grenell, a ‘diplomat’ with the extra special title of Special Envoy for Special Missions of the United States, pressured Romanian officials to lay off the Tates, who had been released from prison but ordered to remain in the country. A month after Trump’s 2025 inauguration, they were out and delivered to Miami by private jet.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)

“Flying over the southwestern Amazon, archaeologists have discovered hundreds of ancient, monumental designs carved in the earth that hint at complex societies in the rainforest a millennium before Spanish and Portuguese colonists arrived. The research, published this week in the journal Nature, shows circles, squares and other geometric figures, some with connecting roads, beneath the forest canopy, with nearly 400 previously unknown earthworks in all. Many are formations that archaeologists call geoglyphs and date from between 600 B.C. to 850 A.D. All of them add to evidence contradicting the depiction of the Amazon as a largely untouched expanse before the arrival of Europeans in the 15th century. To see under the dense canopy near the borders of Bolivia, Brazil and Peru, the researchers used a laser-scanning technology called lidar — an acronym for light detection and ranging — which archaeologists and other scholars around the world have used to map sites invisible to the naked eye. The geoglyphs, shaped by embankments, mounds and trenches, vary in size. Most span seven acres, including many with ditches 30 feet wide and 15 feet deep. The biggest figure sprawls across more than 120 acres. ‘This is an important and ambitious study, based on exceptionally extensive lidar coverage for this region, which reveals the remarkable scale of pre-Columbian landscape modification in southwestern Amazonia,’ said José Iriarte, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter who was not involved in the research. Further excavation, he said, would be crucial in investigating the geoglyphs, which in many ways remain mysterious, including ‘how they were used and whether they were associated with residence, ceremonies or other activities.’ Drawing in part on oral accounts from the Apurinã nation, the Indigenous group that lives in the center of the earthwork area, the researchers said that the designs likely had several purposes. ‘We are quite sure that those are used for festivities, political occasions, ceremonies, dance, music and also competition like ball games,’ said Martti Pärssinen, the lead author and an emeritus professor at the University of Helsinki.” (Alan Yuhas/NYT)

“On Monday, the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece by Matthew Hennessey arguing that Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York, has enabled or signaled tolerance for anti-Semitism, despite his repeated condemnations of anti-Semitic hate. It was—unfortunately, predictably—laden with a casual Islamophobia that I, as a Middle Eastern American, have come to expect. Hennessey calls Mamdani a ‘zealot’ and describes him as ‘a rabble-rouser in a kaffiyeh.’ But what was most shocking was the appalling image that accompanied the essay: a photograph of a man holding an obviously doctored cut-out of Mamdani’s head with a green Hamas headband emblazoned with meaningless markings meant to imitate Arabic script. It’s difficult to imagine that the Journal would be comfortable publishing such overtly racist tropes about almost any other minority group. Anna Bahr, Mamdani’s director of communications, responded to the picture on X, writing that she spoke with Paul Gigot, the Journal’s editorial page editor, about ‘the incredibly Islamophobic image printed alongside this opinion piece. His take: ‘I don’t see it as racist.’’ Therein seems to lie the problem. (I reached out to both Gigot and a spokesperson for the Journal, but neither responded.)” (Susie Banikarim/CJR)

“Days after the US military started bombing Iran, Nick Fuentes looked into his camera and told his viewers, ‘Do not vote in the midterms, and if you do, vote Democrat.’ It’s hard to ever really know if the White Supremacist is being earnest, but he clearly wasn’t trolling. He told his audience of young right-wing men, ‘The Republicans have to lose,’ and ‘A cleansing fire is the only thing that will save us.’ It was an instruction nobody in the MAGA coalition had ever issued before. An act of this level of heresy in the pro-Trump MAGA media world usually brings rebuke and isolation. What was the consequence for his apostasy? His weekly Rumble views grew from about one million during the 2024 campaign to as high as eight million, per a New York Times analysis published Friday morning. The loudest anti-Trump stay-home message in right-wing media turned its messenger into the fastest-growing act in the business. What’s more revealing? Pro-Trump outlets are losing viewers. In droves. Which is much more concerning for Donald Trump and, by extension, the GOP, than the raft of terrible CNN and Quinnipiac polling numbers that the political media obsessed over this week. And fair enough, those are brutal. Writing for the NY Times, Stuart Thompson tracked audience data across YouTube, X, Rumble and podcasts for twelve of the biggest MAGA Media creators on the right. He describes a growing problem for Trump that no poll has clearly captured. After all, polling data measure if people agree with you; this data show if you are reaching them. Yes, Trump’s come back from ugly approval numbers before; but he’s never before faced a collapse of the pro-Trump media ecosystem. And it really looks like its collapsing.” (Colby Hall)

“My father, always preternaturally comfortable at social gatherings, struggled with anything resembling a real stage, and as he got into the car that morning, he announced that he felt like a lamb going to slaughter. Since childhood, he had contended with an intermittent stutter, which often presented as a sort of boarding school affect held over from his youth. But it became more vexing when he was nervous, and as we made our way down the winding streets of central Rome toward the larger thoroughfares leading to Cinecittà, I could hear it starting to surface. I dropped him off at the costume department and headed back to my office. His scene was first on the schedule, set to shoot right after lunch. In it, he was to play a television talk-show host interviewing Zissou and his crewmate, played by Seymour Cassel. The scene was short, consisting of only a brief exchange: my father, as the interviewer, was to ask a question; then Bill Murray was to shrug, and Cassel would give a one-line response. On my way up to my desk, I stopped in at the soundstage. At the far end of the vast space, a small set had been erected: a faux television stage, midcentury in style and outfitted in shades of orange and brown. In the middle, flanking a low, lacquered coffee table, were three tawny, padded swivel chairs, casually awaiting their occupants. Around lunchtime, I went to look for my father and found him sitting in a makeup chair in front of a bank of theater mirrors. His navy-blue blazer and scuffed Rockports had been traded for a roomy Italian suit, dove gray with white pinstripes, and sleek, honey-colored dress shoes. A white tissue had been fixed under his glasses to shield them from the buff makeup coating his face, and a stylist was coiffing his hair. It was hard to talk much amid these ministrations, but even in our brief exchange he imparted an air of deep dismay. Just as I was getting back to my desk, the phone rang. The voice was familiar: it was Bill Murray, and he had a question. He had known Anderson to cast people with no previous acting experience. He had worked with some of these people in the past. ‘Has your father ever acted before?’ he asked. His tone sounded somewhere between amused and alarmed. I explained, regretfully, that he had not. There was silence, followed by a long sigh.” (Molly Cooper/The Paris Review)

“Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin are drastically different men, but they do have one important thing in common: Each thinks he is the smartest person in any room he enters. Alas, though, because they have all done the dumbest thing you can do as a leader — surround yourself with sycophants — they have all blundered into dead-end wars from which they can extricate themselves today only by eating a banquet of crow. Watch out. There is nothing more dangerous than a reckless leader faced with a plate of crow: Sometimes his instinct is to double down on a losing strategy instead. Let’s start with the Israeli prime minister. The tell that Netanyahu has gone off the rails — and taken the leadership of the famed Israeli intelligence agency, the Mossad, with him — is reflected in two decisions he made that were flat-out crazy: The first is the idea that Israel could topple the Tehran regime with one big blow from the air, and the second was that it could choose Iran’s new leader. Before I explain just how crazy that was, some quick background: Ever since I saw up close how the Lebanese Christian militia, the Phalangists, helped sucker the Mossad in 1982 into thinking that through a quick invasion Israel could install the Phalangists’ anti-Palestinian leader, Bashir Gemayel, as president in Beirut, I have held the following rule when it comes to the vaunted Israeli intelligence service: If you want someone assassinated in Beirut or Tehran, call the Mossad. If you want to understand political and social trends in Beirut or Tehran, do not call the Mossad. Because the very reason it is good at the first also leads it to be bad at the second. The Mossad is very good at hunting and killing Israel’s foes, in large part because it is very skilled at recruiting disgruntled citizens in Lebanon, Iran, the West Bank and elsewhere in the Arab world — that is, people who hate their regimes and are willing to work with Israel to topple them. The problem is that these very same agents, motivated either by grievance or money, tend to exaggerate how weak their regime is and how easy bringing it down would be. They want Israel to do the dirty work for them. The result is that a dupe like Trump, who doesn’t know any history, assumes that because the Mossad is good at assassinating people, it is equally good at predicting what will happen the morning after they are dead.” (Thomas Friedman/NYT)

“The rapid pace at which the U.S. is expending some of its most advanced air-defense interceptors and precision-guided weapons in the Middle East is a point of great tension inside the Trump administration as President Trump’s war with Iran ratchets up again, according to U.S. military and intelligence officials familiar with internal assessments. And it’s raising broader concerns about America’s readiness for a potential conflict in the Indo-Pacific. The dwindling stockpiles of defensive interceptors and long-range missiles have become a pressure point for top military and civilian leaders who are weighing the demands of the war with Iran against maintaining readiness to deter other adversaries, including China. The U.S. officials, who spoke to CBS News on condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the topic, said the U.S. cannot sustain the rate at which it expended precision munitions early in the campaign against Iran. The defense industrial base is not equipped to produce missiles rapidly enough to replenish munitions that have been fired or transferred to U.S. Central Command, which is overseeing the conflict, leaving inventories under mounting pressure even as military operations continue … In an interview last month with ‘Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan,’ Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth denied that there was any crisis with the stockpiles.” (Jennifer Jacobs/CBSNews)

“The stark contrast between Donald Trump’s nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia and his nuclear demands for Iran would be comical if not so tragic. Trump has handed the Saudis the same nuclear options he swore Iran would never have. To make matters worse, Trump seems to have offered the Saudis this sweetheart deal to make amends for his disastrous war of choice with Iran. Meanwhile, he continues to bomb Iran in a push to open the strait of Hormuz, which was not closed until Trump launched his counterproductive war. As recently as this past April, Trump reiterated in discussing Iran: ‘There will be no enrichment of uranium.’ That goal had become more urgent because, once Trump ripped up the nuclear accord negotiated by Barack Obama, Iran stepped up its enrichment to near the level needed for an atomic bomb. When Israel and the United States started bombing Iran in June 2025, Iran also barred independent UN inspectors. So what does Trump offer the Saudis? The possibility, after a joint study, to enrich uranium (and reprocess spent atomic fuel) and to bar inspectors from certain sites that they might deem suspicious. The lack of inspectors would mean there is little to prevent the Saudi government from transforming a civilian nuclear program into a clandestine weapons operation, despite Saudi Arabia (like Iran) being a signatory of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The Saudi crown prince has said that his country would develop a nuclear weapon if Iran did. Notably, Trump’s deal is much less stringent than the 2009 deal negotiated by George W Bush and Barack Obama with the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia’s neighboring ally-turned-competitor. Trump describes himself as having mastered the ‘art of the deal’, but his agreement with the Saudis is likely to torpedo any more restrictive deal with Iran. Iran is already being asked to forsake a nuclear weapon while Israel has them. Any claim that Israel can be trusted to handle its weaponry responsibly is belied by its genocide in Gaza and its decimation of much of that occupied territory as well as southern Lebanon. Now Iran must consider that its Saudi adversary could also develop a bomb. Why would Trump agree to such a deal?” (Kenneth Roth/The Guardian)

“Donald Trump is publicly berating Senate Majority Leader John Thune. Thune is telling the White House to find its own votes. Mike Johnson is complaining that Republicans have made his House majority impossible to manage. Tucker Carlson is accusing Ben Shapiro of steering Trump into a suicidal war. Laura Loomer is attacking Tucker. Marjorie Taylor Greene is choosing sides. House Republicans are voting against Trump’s war while Senate Republicans keep it alive. It’s a stunning development for a caucus that previously walked in lockstep with whatever Trump insisted and goes against the famous 11th Commandment often attributed to Ronald Reagan, ‘Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican.’ But that old rule now sounds less like a commandment and more like an artifact from a simpler time. The party can very clearly see a midterm disaster forming around a deeply unpopular president, a deeply unpopular war, and prices rising at the precise moment voters are beginning to pay attention. Republicans are trying to avoid that disaster. They have also begun fighting over who will be blamed for it, creating the very circular firing squad forever tied to the ‘Democrats in disarray’ trope. The factions are no longer just arguing over what Trump should do. Each one is building an alibi showing that someone else misled, obstructed, or forced him toward the policy that ultimately looks to cost Republicans Congress. Iran is where the blame game is easiest to see because the war has left Trump and his party with no politically safe direction. On Thursday, the GOP-led House voted 214–208 to restrain the war, with four Republicans joining Democrats. The GOP-led Senate kept it going by two votes. Mitch McConnell, absent from the Capitol for more than a month, missed a vote decided by exactly the kind of margin that makes his disappearance more than a grim Washington parlor game.” (Colby Hall)

“As usual, the sudden death of a man who appears in the Epstein files more than 2,000 times immediately sparked conspiracy theories. Epstein was already acquainted with the Swedish-French-Algerian Siad during his Palm Beach years and by 2009, Siad was in regular communication with him about ‘scouting’ women. According to DOJ records, Epstein routinely wired money to Siad’s accounts in Sweden and Dubai, sometimes as much as $25,000 at a time. Although French, Siad, like many in Epsteinworld, seems to have had an unusual amount of connections in Russian circles. He apparently hung out with Russophilic French nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen. He showed up at Fidel Castro’s funeral in 2016 and later told Epstein that Castro’s son wanted to meet him. He also introduced Epstein to a Russian spy’s daughter, Svetlana Pozhdaeva, who went on to recruit for – and report on various prominent men to – Epstein. What makes Siad significant at this point in the ongoing Epstein cover-up and congressional inquiry is that, for at least a few years in the 2010s, he partnered with another Epstein associate and recruiter, a Russian woman named Victoria Housez. And, as we reported in a recent Freakshow, The Billionaire and the Recruiters, Housez had a financial – and maybe personal – relationship with billionaire Leon Black. Housez’s emails and other DOJ records indicate that Black repeatedly sent her money in 2011 and 2012, perhaps more than $50,000, while she was actively recruiting for Epstein and seeking to establish some kind of larger-scale ‘scouting’ operation.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)

“In Hungary in February 2024, Péter Magyar, then a little-known insider in the ruling Fidesz party, gave an interview to a leading independent YouTube channel called Partizán in which he accused Viktor Orbán’s government of systemic corruption. Hungary had become a ‘family-owned business,’ he declared, in what rapidly became a viral video. Within weeks of recording the exchange, Magyar began building an opposition campaign essentially from scratch. Just over two years later, in the April 2026 elections, he was elected prime minister by a wide margin, and the party he built, the Tisza party, gained nearly 70 percent of parliamentary seats in a record-turnout election. Magyar constructed his campaign around broad, non-ideological themes of inclusive nationalism and patriotism, telling Hungarians over and over that they should believe in the possibility of creating a ‘humane’ Hungary. Rooting out corruption and restoring the rule of law were central planks of his message. His focus on fighting corruption gained deep traction in a society roiled by a steady stream of shocking stories from credible independent sources about staggering levels of corruption among those in the Fidesz ruling circle and their families. In the United States, pro-democracy activists and politicians also are increasingly seeking to make corruption a primary focus, to blunt the Trump administration’s executive overreach and to highlight its disregard for the rule of law. House Democrats have launched a new task force to overhaul ethics rules and highlight the Trump family’s business deals. Several prominent Democratic politicians have made fighting corruption core to their political message. With the Hungarian election standing as a startling example of unexpected success for democratic forces, some U.S. activists and politicians are asking if they can and should emulate Magyar’s anti-corruption playbook. Various pro-democracy groups have highlighted the Hungarian election as a potential model. Can Magyar’s heavily anti-corruption focused political campaign be a successful model for those seeking to defend U.S. democracy?” (Saskia Brechenmacher/Just Security)

“The Atlantic says, and even the demographics that traditionally read the most — retirees, women, and college graduates — have seen ‘a collapse’ in their reading habits over the same period. If we dig down even a little bit, however, it becomes obvious that the point is not that people aren’t reading, it’s that they aren’t reading the right things. In the American Time Use Survey, The Atlantic says that ‘only 38 percent read a novel or short story.’ The horror! Also, the piece goes on to say that the books people do read are ‘simpler than they used to be.’ New York Times best sellers today apparently have sentences that are about one-third shorter than they were a century ago — although the piece immediately reassures us that longer sentences ‘aren’t inherently better’ (Hemingway would agree). But the fact that the sentences in books have shortened so much suggests there was a time when ‘Americans had the inclination and ability to read serious works of literature,’ according to The Atlantic. In 1958, for example, the English translation of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago was the best-selling novel of the year, and it included sentences like this one: ‘Zhivago felt sorry for the Tsar, was disturbed at the thought that such diffident reserve and shyness could be the essential characteristics of an oppressor, that a man so weak could imprison, hang, or pardon.’ This is a great piece of evidence if you are looking for a former Golden Age when almost all Americans read great works of literature, except for one thing, as more than one person has pointed out in response: Doctor Zhivago was a best-selling novel in 1958 in part because it was banned in Russia, since its author was a known critic of the October Revolution, and copies of the book had to be smuggled out of Russia to Milan. In 1958 Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, which no doubt helped sales of his book (and enraged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union). I don’t want to cast aspersions on the many millions of satisfied readers of Doctor Zhivago, but I would hazard a guess that many of those copies were purchased because it was famous, and some likely sat on bookshelves unread.” (Matthew Ingraham/The Torment Nexus)

“In April, Anthropic disclosed that its newest frontier AI model, Claude Mythos, could find and exploit security vulnerabilities in software better than ‘all but the most skilled humans.’ By way of example, the company noted that the model had uncovered a flaw that had gone undetected for 27 years in a secure operating system used to run firewalls that guard sensitive networks. The revelation jolted the cybersecurity and national security communities. Despite some allegations that Anthropic’s warnings about Mythos simply constituted marketing, leading commercial software companies given early access to the model have corroborated Anthropic’s claim. Work that long belonged to a small class of elite specialists can now be done by AI, faster and at a greater scale than human teams or earlier automated tools can match. As firms use Mythos to hunt and fix flaws in their products, a more urgent question looms: how to defend the United States and its allies from AI-powered cyberwarfare. The United States may only have nine to 12 months to protect its critical infrastructure from AI-powered attacks. Currently, two American companies, Anthropic (for which I consult) and OpenAI, have publicly demonstrated AI models advanced enough to detect flaws in software far beyond the human capacity to find, and they are restricting the use of these models to defensive cybersecurity work. But the United States’ adversaries, and the criminals in their orbit, will soon wield the same offensive tools. China, in particular, is already racing to build and acquire these AI capabilities and may be closer to developing its own Mythos than many U.S. policymakers hope. Advanced AI will sharpen an instrument that Beijing already prizes: the credible threat to deter a fight over Taiwan before it begins by disrupting the island’s critical infrastructure and that of any nation that seeks to defend it.” (Michael Sulmeyer/Foreign Affairs)

“In June, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) made a record forty-three thousand arrests—surpassing the previous high, which had been set in December during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis. In July, in the span of two weeks, ICE agents killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a fifty-two-year-old Mexican man, in Houston, and Joan Sebastian Durán Guerrero, a twenty-five-year-old Colombian immigrant, in Biddeford, Maine. The shootings have pushed ICE back into the national spotlight. But local reporters have been covering the impact on their communities all along. This week offers two powerful examples. On September 25, 2025, Delvin Francisco Rodriguez, an undocumented immigrant from Nicaragua, was arrested by ICE in Colorado while he was on his way to work. Just weeks later, he agreed to self-deport. But he never got the chance. Instead, he spent months being shuttled through ICE’s vast detention network, flown from Las Vegas to Phoenix to Louisiana before ultimately arriving at one of the country’s largest ICE detention facilities, the Adams County Correctional Center in Mississippi. By December, according to ICE, he was dead by suicide. Rodriguez’s story is told in an impressive and ambitious new documentary about ICE Air, the sprawling aviation network that ICE uses to move thousands of detainees around the country, from investigative journalists Chris Vanderveen and Chris Hansen of 9News/KUSA-TV in Denver, out this week.” (Susie Banikarim/CJR)

“The past decade has not been kind to Los Angeles’ entertainment industry. The combined shock of the 2023 labor strikes and the 2025 wildfires intensified fears that film and television production is migrating overseas, threatening a fragile ecosystem of below-the-line workers based in Hollywood. In the days after the wildfires, filmmaker Sarah Smith and writer Alexandra Pechman organized a WhatsApp group of showrunners and industry workers, drafted a petition, and launched the grassroots #StayInLA campaign. What began as an emergency effort to help Los Angeles rebuild grew into a broader political movement, drawing more than 20,000 petition signatures, endorsements from prominent actors and filmmakers, and even the fleeting attention of Donald Trump—an actor himself, best known for his performance in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. Having worked in the entertainment industry and lived in Los Angeles, I have long wanted to investigate this often-vague anxiety: to understand exactly where these productions are migrating and quantify the extent of Hollywood’s flight from, well, Hollywood itself.” (Daniel Parris/Stat Significant)

“The center, defined by policy answers, is a real constituency but a small one. Most Americans hold a few high-conviction positions and a handful of crossings. The median voter visits the center; they don’t live there.” (Cyrus Radfar)

“President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has again reshaped the top of Ukraine’s war effort. On 21 July, after six days of protests, he dismissed General Oleksandr Syrskyi as Commander-in-Chief and appointed Major General Mykhailo Drapatyi in his place. The change followed the earlier removal of Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, whose sacking set off the demonstrations and exposed a civil-military crisis within Ukraine’s government and military establishment. Fedorov has been offered a role overseeing defence technology, an acting minister, Yevhenii Khmara, is in place, and rallies on the street demand Fedorov’s return. However this is resolved, Ukraine now has a new military command team. It has a leadership pair whose fortunes are joined. Neither can win the war alone, and neither can afford to work against the other. Ukraine’s recent history shows how quickly civil-military relationships can break down. Since February 2022, civil-military relations at the top have at times been fraught. General Valerii Zaluzhnyi fell out with Zelenskyy over strategy, the failed 2023 counteroffensive and mobilisation, and was moved to London as ambassador in early 2024. Syrskyi, who replaced him, drew steady criticism for his top-down, Soviet-style command culture. Both previous commanders-in-chief had problems dealing with the civilian defence minister and bureaucrats. When Fedorov arrived with a reform agenda built on data exploitation, digitisation of command and control, drones and cleaner procurement, he and Syrskyi clashed so badly that, by Zelenskyy’s own account, they would only cooperate when the president stepped in to mediate. That is not a command team. It is two centres of power pulling in different directions while hundreds of thousands of soldiers fought to prevent Russia extinguishing Ukraine.” (Mick Ryan/Futura Doctrina)