Geopolitics

Germany has shown that it is willing to undermine international law and bend human rights principles in defence of what many countries increasingly view as indefensible. It has failed to convince the world that it is a beacon of diplomacy. Instead, it has exposed the very historical liabilities it has spent decades trying to overcome.

https://archive.ph/0Dn10

https://archive.ph/E71b2

There is a timeline where russia took up this partnership with India on building India’s next generation of airlift aircraft, the fact that we are not on that timeline is indicative how badly russia has failed at its geopolitical aims and of how irrelevant it has become to global heavy industry.

It has taken time for the Islamic Republic to respond to Israel’s campaigns on Gaza, Lebanon and itself as one war - which is what it is - but at last, it is being forced to do so.

link to paper open access preprint paper https://arxiv.org/html/2606.03673v1

This is the reality that the region has yet to wake up to. The agenda is not about normalisation with a country that does this. It’s not about disarmament. It’s about rearmament. 

A great discussion on Iran and how Trump’s cowardice and incompetence leads to more war not less as he is incapable of swallowing his pride and backing down.

After public rebukes of Ben-Gvir’s taunting of the predominantly European activists by the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Canada – and even Israel’s foremost allies in the US – Netanyahu understood the deep damage this was doing to Israel’s public relations image, and described the spectacle as “not in line with Israel’s values and norms”.

The similarities between Iran in 2026 and Iraq in 2003 are obvious, and have been commented on before, most thoroughly by Frederick Deknatel in New Lines magazine. Like Trump, George W. Bush promised a quick, easy victory, only to plunge the U.S. into a conflict much more protracted and bloody than the one he’d advertised. Like Trump, he slaughtered untold numbers of civilians.

Iran’s government on Monday condemned the European Union’s response to Iranian attacks on US military installations in the Middle East as “a masterclass in selective moral outrage” as the Trump administration launched new strikes against Iran over the weekend, with peace talks still at an impasse.

The disinformation about Iran should have been all too glaring back in 2006, had any of it been reported properly - just as it should be now, two decades later, were western journalists doing their job rather than acting as stenographers for Israel and the White House.

“The capabilities that are happening in space are far exceeding our expectations,” then-Air Force Maj. Gen. Christopher Niemi said at a hearing earlier this year as part of a response to a question about plans for the E-7. He declined to offer more details publicly. Niemi, who has since been promoted to lieutenant general, is currently Deputy Chief of Staff of the Air Force for Force Modernization, and the service’s Chief Modernization Officer

Prime minister says Israel is ‘squeezing Hamas’ in the enclave at the same time as escalating attacks in southern Lebanon

Consider the fact that if Trump didn’t find a reason to fire off the massive stocks of missile interceptors in a stupid, pointless war than Putin would have ZERO leverage right now as his military is collapsing.

This is where the recent evolution of the Apache becomes especially important. As previously reported by Army Recognition Group, the U.S. Army is moving the AH-64E beyond its Cold War identity as a tank-killing helicopter and toward a networked combat node, including experiments with launched effects such as the Anduril Altius-700. This transformation changes the operational geometry of attack aviation. Instead of relying only on the crewed helicopter to move forward, identify targets, and engage them directly, future Apache operations could use unmanned systems to scout ahead, relay communications, detect threats, disrupt enemy networks, or support strikes before the aircraft enters the most contested zone. For NATO forces in Europe, this evolution could be decisive, because survivability will increasingly depend on extending reach while reducing the exposure of crews.

This week on CounterSpin: It’s a safe bet that a majority of US citizens know that “we” are currently at “war” with Iran. I am equally confident that very few people could explain why. Or what “war” means. Or what it has to do with their day-to-day life, much less how it could possibly make it better. That’s a problem of this boldly anti-intellectual administration, and the, let’s say, incurious posture of so much of US corporate news media—the ones tasked with telling the truth and letting the chips fall where they may.

But this explanation is too limited. The Ahmadinejad fantasy cannot be reduced to the personalities of two leaders or the influence of a few advisers. It points to a deeper problem in the policy worlds of Washington and Tel Aviv: a wider regime-change imagination that repeatedly mistakes elite substitution for political transformation.

Data from Big Trade Data  reveals that at least 30 companies across China, India, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Thailand, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan exported aviation parts to Russia during the past year. China alone exported aviation components valued at least at $961 million between March 2022 and February 2026, marking a fourfold increase compared to the four years prior to the invasion.

“Optimisation problems are very common in defence calculations and in relation to resource allocation and logistics problems. It is a broad class of problems, and has at the same time been identified as a class of problems that today’s quantum computers may be effective for,” says Charlotta Bengtson in the press release.

“I would see this targeting of Nabatieh as part of that overall strategy to essentially cripple the Shia community in Lebanon and one way to do that is by destroying different economic engines and the capacity of that community and one of the largest economic engines of the south is Nabatieh,” Mohamad Bazzi, a DAWN fellow, told Al Jazeera.

Yes and if we aren’t clear eyed about it we are going to smash right into a genuine World War 3 situation.

Mission Accomplished for Trump, Netanyahu and rightwing warhawks everywhere who needed Iran to be the evil villain to in turn rationalize their evil politics. In that sense the Iran War has been a stunning unmitigated success.

What, then, are the current strikes going to achieve? Notably, the U.S. attack in northwestern Nigeria in December did not meaningfully alter dynamics there. Like the insurgency in the northeast, the long-running instability in the northwest — a mix of banditry, other organized crime, jihadism, and more — is a symptom of Nigeria’s intertwined political, economic, and security crises.

The development marks the first time a private Indian company has manufactured a military transport aircraft at this scale inside the country, in what officials see as one of the clearest examples so far of India’s “Make in India” and “Atmanirbhar Bharat” (self-reliant India) defence manufacturing strategy.

The United States has its own WIG development underway. Boston-based startup REGENT Craft is developing two seaglider platforms that exploit the same ground-effect physics as the Bohai Sea Monster. The Squire is an autonomous, uncrewed seaglider designed for cargo and logistics, while the Viceroy is a larger crewed passenger variant capable of carrying up to 12 passengers at speeds approaching 300 kilometers per hour just above the water surface. Both craft are designed to operate entirely in the ground effect zone, taking off and landing on water.

“We do not know Russia’s intentions or the capabilities of these particular satellites,” Gillinger wrote. “However, maneuvering into a co-planar orbit is alarming. Plane matching is the first (and most fuel expensive) step to conducting Rendezvous Proximity Operations (RPO), likely necessary for the Russian satellites to target (kinetically or non-kinetically) ICEYE-X36.

With the advent of the RCH-155, KNDS now represents the most important and powerful armored vehicle producer in the world.

With nearly two-thirds of the global body voting in favor, the eight countries that voted against the resolution were: Belarus, Iran, Israel, Liberia, Russia, Saudi Arabia, the US, and Yemen. Twenty-eight nations abstained.

The downing of the “Brothers to the Rescue” planes was not only used to demonize Cuba. It also reshaped US policy for decades.

The race metaphor is even less persuasive in the context of describing economic competition. The notion that “winning” the AI race will confer durable economic dominance misunderstands both the structure of technology markets and the specific characteristics of AI as a product.Various industry commentators, including Andrew Ng, have noted that “models are commoditizing the foundation-model layer.” A senior Google engineer drafted an internal memo titled “We Have no Moat, and Neither Does OpenAI.” The claim is that users increasingly treat models as interchangeable, switching between them based on cost and convenience rather than brand loyalty. Peter Salib and Simon Goldstein further argued recently that AI simply does not lend itself to becoming a natural monopoly. To be sure, there are strong arguments on both sides, and it is hard to know whether sustainable moats would emerge through differentiation on latency, cost, capability, or autonomy. However, in the present reality, where the labs reshuffle their positions on the leaderboards on a monthly basis, the potential commodification of AI should serve as caution against over-investment in an expropriable benefit.

Kind of seems like Trump is mad that Daddy Putin is getting his ass kicked in Ukraine and wants Europe to pay for it now by having less US support but what do I know.

Meta’s withdrawal from its contract with Sama is an example of a recurring dynamic: when workers in the Global South begin to challenge the organization of production, capital does not simply resist within existing frameworks but relocates or withdraws, using its cross-border mobility to evade emerging forms of accountability.

Bartov, who counts among erstwhile liberal Zionists, rejects this position. His argument about the Gaza genocide functions in a similar way as his argument about Zionism. He eventually found it difficult during Israel’s live streamed genocide to dismiss the charge of genocide. For him, the invasion of Rafah in May 2024 signaled Israel’s turn to genocide. This means that Israel’s campaign in its initial months — its deadliest phase — was not genocidal, according to Bartov, even as he acknowledges that Israeli political and military leaders expressed clear genocidal intent at the time. This qualification of the genocide determination reflects Bartov’s rosy view of pre-state Zionism, as it aims to conceal the historical continuity between the eliminatory logic of Zionism and the Nakba and the genocidal violence unfolding in Gaza since October 2023.

https://www.niradata.com/global-pulse-2026

https://archive.ph/dOt0c