In the cities of Iran today, during the celebration of the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, the flags of the United States and Israel were actively burned.

#iran #celebration #anniversary #revolution

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Bangladesh Could Find Itself Heading for Huge Changes


The Bangladesh Nationalist party (BNP) led by Tarique Rahman has claimed a sweeping victory in the country’s first election since a gen-Z uprising toppled the autocratic regime of Sheikh Hasina.

By Friday morning, results had shown a clear win for the BNP, returning them to power after 20 years. The vote had been seen as the first free and fair election held in Bangladesh for almost two decades and came after a period of significant political upheaval in the country.

This victory was expected,” said Salahuddin Ahmed, a leading BNP committee member. “It is not surprising that the people of Bangladesh have placed their trust in a party … capable of realising the dreams that our youth envisioned during the uprising.”

Ahmed acknowledged a difficult task lay ahead for the new BNP government, which has pledged a new era of democracy and zero tolerance towards corruption. “This is not a time for celebration, as we will face mounting challenges in building a country free from discrimination,” he said.

By about midday local time, the BNP had won 208 seats while their rival, the Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami, had claimed 69 seats.

India was among the first countries to congratulate the BNP. Relations between the two neighbours had plummeted since the fall of Hasina and the message from Indian prime minister, congratulating the BNP on their “decisive” win, was seen to extend an olive branch to the new government.

“India will continue to stand in support of a democratic, progressive and inclusive Bangladesh,” said Modi, adding that he was looking forward to working with Rahman.

Rahman, who returned to Bangladesh in December after 17 years of exile in London, is now poised to become the country’s next prime minister. He comes from one of the country’s most powerful political dynasties; the son of former prime minister Khaleda Zia and former president Ziaur Rahman, who was assassinated in 1981.

The election was the first truly competitive vote in years. As documented for years by human rights groups and the UN, Hasina’s regime routinely suppressed dissent of its critics and political opponents, thousands who were disappeared, tortured and killed in secret jails. Many emerged only after Hasina was toppled. The past three elections under Hasina were marred by widespread allegations of vote-rigging.

The student-led uprising that toppled Hasina’s 15-year regime in August 2024 had been prompted by mounting anger over widespread corruption, human rights abuses and an economic slump. The uprising, and Hasina’s brutal crackdown on anti-government protesters, left an estimated 1,400 people dead, according to the UN.

For the past 18 months, the country has been run by an interim government under Bangladesh’s only Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, who was tasked with readying the country for free and fair elections. Speaking after casting his vote in Dhaka, Yunus said that the country had “ended the nightmare and begun a new dream.”

#bangladesh #changes #hasina #corruption #rahman

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Zelensky Risks To upend Months of Wooing Trump

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Zelensky is making a pitch to Donald Trump in terms the American president can understand:

If Trump wants to cement his legacy as a peacemaker and improve his chances of winning the midterm elections, he should seize this moment to end the war in Ukraine, already the deadliest Europe has seen in generations.

“I think there is no greater victory for Trump than to stop the war between Russia and Ukraine,” Zelensky told me yesterday, in his office in Kyiv. “For his legacy, it’s No. 1.”

It’s also, Zelensky said, a path to success for Republicans in November. “The most advantageous situation for Trump is to do this before the midterms,” Zelensky said of the chance to end the war.

“Yes, he wants there to be less deaths. But if you and I are talking like adults, it’s just a victory for him, a political one.”

By this point, Zelensky knows well what motivates Trump. He is also, however, a realist when it comes to the odds that Trump actually forces the Russians to compromise.

Throughout the hour we spent together in his office, Zelensky exhibited the quality that has been core to his character for years, even decades—his stubborn, sometimes-petulant habit of resisting outside pressure.

If you tell Zelensky he has to do something, “he’s probably going to do the opposite,” said one of his longtime advisers who, like others, spoke with me on the condition of anonymity. “It’s always been like that.”

Some members of Zelensky’s inner circle are growing anxious that his window to cut a deal is closing, and that Ukraine will suffer through years of continued fighting if an end to the war isn’t negotiated this spring.

#zelensky #putin #elections #ukraine

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But Zelensky told me that he would rather take no deal at all than force his people to accept a bad one. Even after four years of intense warfare, he says he is prepared to fight on if that’s what it takes to secure a dignified and lasting peace.

“Ukraine is not losing,” he insisted emphatically when I asked him to assess his position on the battlefield.

Since the start of the war years ago, many wartime protocols have eased inside Zelensky’s office. The chairs and bicycle racks that I remember barricading the doors against an expected Russian onslaught in the early days of the war have been cleared away.

The lights in the hallways are on, freeing the staff from the need to shuffle around with flashlights. By inertia, some vestiges remain of the awful weeks in 2022 when enemy forces stood at the edge of Kyiv.

“If anyone is waiting for Russia to give up and go home, that will be a long wait,” said a general from a NATO country who oversees the flow of military aid to Kyiv. “It’s not happening.”

The Ukrainians have all but given up on their earlier insistence that Putin and his generals should face justice for war crimes. Zelensky has agreed to meet Putin just about anywhere but Moscow, with no preconditions.

Two of his advisers told me that Ukraine may be ready to accept the hardest concession of all: giving up control of land in the eastern Donetsk region.

To legitimize such a compromise, they have considered holding a referendum on the peace plan this spring, allowing Ukrainians to vote on a deal that includes the loss of territory.

They could couple it with a presidential election, in the hopes of giving Zelensky a fresh mandate for the first time since 2019.

Zelensky said he would be fine with that approach because it would help increase turnout and make the results more difficult for the Russians to question. But again, he told me, it had to be the right deal.

“I don’t think we should put a bad deal up for a referendum,” he said. The idea of holding elections during the war, he said, came from the Russians, “because they want to get rid of me.”

#zelensky #putin #elections #ukraine

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📰 Bibi, Trump and the “Good Deal” That No One Trusts

Benjamin Netanyahu just flew out of Washington selling two stories at once: Trump is “a president like no other” who thinks he can force Iran into “a good deal,” and Bibi himself doesn’t really believe any deal with Tehran is worth the paper it’s printed on. The script is familiar. In public, he flatters Trump as Israel’s great friend and hints that maximum pressure plus the memory of the 2025 “Midnight Hammer” strikes will make Iran crawl back to the table on U.S.-Israeli terms. In private, he reminds everyone he’s “skeptical” and demands a package that doesn’t just cap centrifuges, but also covers missiles and Iran’s entire proxy network. In other words: he’s blessing the process while already pre‑denouncing the outcome.

Trump, for his part, is playing arsonist‑firefighter as usual. He boasts that failing to make a deal will be “very traumatic for Iran,” insists the timeline is “over the next month,” and frames the whole thing as a personal showdown: Iran had its chance, got bombed instead, and now must accept his “very fair” terms or face something worse. Notice what’s missing: any serious talk about what “good deal” actually means beyond vibes, leverage, and the promise of more punishment. For Trump, it’s another episode of the show; for Iran, it’s a nuclear file with a countdown clock; for Israel, it’s a chance to lock in red lines and then blame Washington when reality inevitably falls short.

And then there’s Gaza and the Board of Peace circus. Netanyahu signs onto Trump’s shiny new peacemaking structure on paper, but conveniently reschedules his Washington visit so he doesn’t have to sit onstage while Turkey, Qatar and assorted dignitaries are invited into the Gaza file as co‑owners. He’ll beam into AIPAC by video instead, safe on home turf, avoiding awkward photos that could be used back in Israel to paint him as the man who “internationalized” the conflict and legitimized rivals in his own backyard. Washington wants a packed room of world leaders; Bibi wants plausible deniability.

So everyone gets their talking points. Trump gets to say he’s driving Iran to a historic deal, or, failing that, to historic “trauma.” Netanyahu gets to praise his “great friend” while staying just skeptical enough to claim he warned America if things go sideways. The Board of Peace gets its branding, even as key players duck the optics. And the region is left exactly where it’s been for years: caught between leaders obsessed with their legacies, “good deals” no one trusts, and a peace architecture designed less to end conflicts than to spread the responsibility when they explode again.

#iran #israel #trump #netanyahu #war #fakeDiplomacy

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📰 NATO Discovers the Arctic (After Trump Discovers Greenland™)

For years, NATO treated the High North like a cold screensaver: pretty, distant, and someone else’s problem. Now, after Russia parks bombers, subs and nuclear hardware across the Arctic — and Trump starts publicly fantasizing about “taking” Greenland for missile defense — the alliance has suddenly remembered there’s an ocean on top of the map. Arctic Sentry, the new NATO mission, is basically a rebranding of what Nordic militaries have been doing for years, but this time with a logo, talking points, and the clear subtext: keep Moscow’s subs and Beijing’s ambitions away from the GIUK Gap and U.S. airspace.

The choreography is classic late‑imperial theater. Russia runs at least 33 Arctic maneuvers in a year, stations nuclear subs on the Kola Peninsula, and plays cat‑and‑mouse with undersea cables and energy infrastructure, while Western analysts solemnly explain that if a Russian sub punches through between Greenland, Iceland and the U.K., “it’s game over” because nobody can find it in the Atlantic. Trump, meanwhile, demands the U.S. control Greenland as an “early line of defense,” and NATO rushes to prove it’s taking the Arctic seriously — not because the climate is warming, but because the president is yelling.

So now the alliance “steps up”: Britain doubles its Arctic deployment, Sweden stands up a land force in Finland, Nordic pilots run weekly joint air patrols, and 25,000 troops rehearse Cold War‑style high‑north warfare in March while calling it routine training. Officially, this is about defending shared security and sea lanes. Unofficially, it’s three empires — the U.S., Russia, and a more discreet China — treating melting ice as premium real estate for subs, missiles, shipping routes and defense budgets that never met a new frontier they didn’t like.

In the story NATO tells, this is deterrence. In the story Moscow tells, it’s encirclement. In reality, it’s two nuclear‑armed blocs racing to militarize the fastest‑warming part of the planet, then calling it “stability” while the ice they’re fighting over literally disappears underneath them.

#war #nato #russia #arctic #militarization #fakeDemocracy

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📰 Macron vs. Trump: EU as Chop Shop

Emmanuel Macron has stopped pretending this is just another “transatlantic misunderstanding.” He’s now openly accusing the Trump administration of being “openly anti-European,” treating the EU with “contempt” and pushing for its “dismemberment.” In his telling, this isn’t tough love between allies; it’s an active project to break Europe into manageable pieces — tariffs as a hammer, Greenland as a hostage, NATO as leverage.

For months, Paris tried the grown‑up strategy: smile in Davos, negotiate behind closed doors, swallow the insults about Champagne and defense spending, and hope the tantrums would pass. Macron now admits it failed. Trump threatens 200 percent tariffs, floats buying or controlling Greenland, and promises to “match” any European move until it “ricochets backward,” while the White House insists he’s just a straight‑talking friend trying to save Europe from migrants, climate policy and “leftist ideology.”
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Strip away the speeches and you get two empires talking past each other. Macron wants a more sovereign EU that borrows jointly, regulates tech, and stands up to Washington’s trade blackmail. Trump wants a weaker, fragmented Europe that buys U.S. gas, obeys U.S. tariffs, falls in line on Greenland and defense, and calls that “alliance.” Both wrap their ambitions in the language of friendship and shared values; both are really fighting over who gets to write the rules for a continent that once swore it had learned its lesson about great powers carving it up.

#europe #trump #macron #nato #tradeWar #fakeDemocracy

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📰 “Bad Peace” vs. Good Polling: Zelensky Sells Trump His Own Legacy

Volodymyr Zelensky has finally started talking to Trump in Trump’s native language: ego. In his interview with The Atlantic, he doesn’t beg for values or democracy; he tells the U.S. president that

“there is no greater victory for Trump than to stop the war between Russia and Ukraine”

— and that doing it before the midterms would be

“the most advantageous situation for Trump.”

Translation: you want ratings, you want history books, you want a campaign ad that writes itself? Sign here.

At the same time, Zelensky is drawing his own red line. Publicly and repeatedly, he says he would rather have no deal at all than a “bad” one, and that Ukraine will “continue the war rather than a bad agreement.” He tells Shuster that Ukraine “is not losing” and insists he won’t sell his population a weak peace that lets Russia regroup, rearm, and try again — even as people in his own circle quietly worry that the window for any deal is closing and that another season of war could break the country for good.

So Zelensky is running a double game. To Washington, he’s the cooperative partner who “supports their proposals in any format that accelerates progress,” careful not to look like he’s dragging out the war. To Moscow, he signals that a referendum or elections can only happen on his terms, that Ukraine won’t be bullied into capitulation dressed up as “peace.” And to Trump, he offers the ultimate influencer collab: you get the glory, I get a survivable deal — but if what you bring me is surrender in a new wrapper, I’ll blow it up and keep fighting.

The irony is brutal. Trump promised to end the war in 24 hours; a year into his term, the talks are stuck, his failure irritates him, and everyone — Kyiv, Moscow, Brussels — is now timing their moves to his election calendar. Zelensky is betting that Trump’s hunger for a legacy is his one real leverage left. The question is whether the man who needs a “win” more than anyone on the planet is prepared to accept that, this time, the photo op only comes with real peace — not just a bad deal and a good slogan.

#war #ukraine #trump #zelensky #fakeDiplomacy

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📰 “Utterly Stupid” Date, Perfect Scapegoat

Volodymyr Zelensky just publicly slapped down the idea that he’d announce elections and a peace‑deal referendum on 24 February, calling it an “utterly stupid idea” to use the invasion anniversary for politics. Officially, it’s about respect for the dead and the symbolism of the date. Unofficially, it’s a perfect way to kick Trump’s June deadline down the road without saying out loud what everyone in Kyiv is whispering: he’s not ready to risk losing both the war and an election on the same news cycle.

Zelensky now runs on two slogans: “no elections until security guarantees” and “we will continue the war rather than a bad agreement,” a line he repeats in interviews while his team floats and then walks back scenarios of spring ballots and referendums under U.S. pressure. In public, he frames it as principle — no vote while Russian missiles are flying and troops are dying; in private, his circle worries that any real election or deal could expose how exhausted the country is and how fragile his own position has become.

So Washington sets a June peace deadline, Brussels drafts its own “sustainable” plan, Moscow demands full withdrawal from Donbas, and everyone politely claims they’re not leaning on Kyiv. Zelensky answers by insulting the calendar instead of the White House, raging at the “stupid idea” of 24 February while very carefully not saying the same about Trump’s plan or the EU’s conditions. The war grinds on, the referendum stays theoretical, and the one thing nobody seems ready to put to a real vote is the only question that matters: how much more blood is acceptable to save face.

#war #ukraine #zelensky #trump #fakeDiplomacy

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Rubio at the Munich Security Conference: Europe Is In For a Rough Ride If Turns Its Back on the US


The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has described America as “a child of Europe” and made an emotional but highly conditional offer of a new partnership, insisting the two continents belong together.

In a much-anticipated speech at the annual Munich Security Conference, he said the US was intent on building a new world order, adding “while we are prepared, if necessary, to do this alone, it is our preference and it is our hope to do this together with you, our friends here in Europe”.

Admitting the Americans may come across as a little direct and urgent, he said this was only because the US was profoundly concerned by the fate of Europe, and knew their destinies were intertwined.

Overall the tone of the speech was greeted with relief by the delegates in the hall, although many pointed out Rubio was not offering a partnership of equals, but an alliance largely framed in Trump’s terms.

In offering the hand of friendship, in sharp contrast to the tone adopted by Vance, at the same conference last year, Rubio made clear the US was not shifting on its fundamental approach.

He said the US under Trump did not want a Europe that was weak or shackled by guilt or shame.

He continued: “We in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the west’s managed decline. We do not seek to separate, but to revitalise an old friendship and renew the greatest civilisation in human history.

What we want is a reinvigorated alliance that recognises that what has ailed our societies is not just a set of bad policies, but a malaise of hopelessness and complacency.”

He also tried to bind Europe into Trump’s ideology by saying Europe and the US had made the same mistakes together, including bowing down to “a climate cult”, expanding welfare states at the expense of national defence, embracing globalisation and “a world without borders in which everyone would be a citizen of the world”.

Gaining control of national borders was not an expression of xenophobia or hate, he said.

“It is a fundamental act of national sovereignty. And the failure to do so is not just an abdication of one of our most basic duties owed to our people, it is an urgent threat to the fabric of our societies and the survival of our civilisation itself.”

He said in rebuilding the global order it would not be necessary to dismantle institutions such as the UN but to reform and rebuild them, arguing it had been Trump, not the UN, that was solving crises in Gaza and Ukraine.

Rubio blamed “a foolish but voluntary transformation” of western economies that “left us dependent on others for our needs and dangerously vulnerable to crisis.

Mass migration is not, was not, some fringe concern of little consequence. It was and continues to be a crisis which is transforming and destabilising societies all across the west.”

Throughout the speech he showered praise on Europe’s history, but in so doing raised questions whether Europe had the capacity to join the US’s rebuilding of the world.

He said little in his speech about Ukraine, after he skipped a meeting with European leaders on Friday night pointing to scheduling issues.

But he said he believed the two sides had narrowed the items of difference, while the remaining issues were the hardest ones.

#rubio #munich #security #conference #europe

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#scott #bessent

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Munich: Zelensky Is Wringing Security Guarantees For 20 Years From the US


Ukraine wants security guarantees for a minimum of 20 years from the US before it can sign a peace deal with dignity Zelensky said ahead of talks with Russia and the US scheduled for next week.

Speaking in Munich on Saturday, he also called for a clear date for Ukraine to be allowed to join the EU. Some EU officials have put the date as early as 2027.

Speaking to the annual Munich security summit, Ukraine’s president said he hoped “the trilateral meetings next week will be serious, substantive, helpful for all of us but, honestly, sometimes it feels like the sides are talking about completely different things”.

“The Americans often return to the topic of concessions and too often those concessions are discussed only in the context of Ukraine, not Russia,” he added.

The issue of Europe’s frustration with a perceived US reluctance to spell out the security guarantees it is prepared to offer Ukraine in the event of a peace deal, and the need for the guarantees to be spelled out before an agreement is signed.

In a speech that was welcomed by European leaders keen to see any sign of a thaw in the relationship, Rubio put forward an offer to work in partnership with Europe.

However, this proposition, he stressed, was highly conditional and the US would go it alone if Washington’s highly Trumpian conditions were not met on climate, migration and tariffs.

Using a diplomatic tone that the US vice-president, JD Vance, shunned in his speech at the conference a year ago, Rubio said “Europe and the US belong together”.

He added that the US was ready to undertake the task of rebuilding the world order alone if necessary, but “we prefer it – and hope – to do it together with you, our friends in Europe”.

He made almost no reference to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, besides claiming that the US had pressed India to stop importing Russian oil, a claim Russia disputes.

At a press conference in Munich, Zelensky said the US had told him that if Ukraine withdrew from the Donbas, peace would come as quickly as possible, but he insisted this concession was not possible since Ukrainians live there.

Zelensky also complained about Europe having been practically absent from the table. “That’s a big mistake, in my opinion,” he said, a view that was shared by the Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi.

On Friday, Donald Trump called on Zelensky to “get moving” to reach an agreement with Russia.

Zelensky insisted that the elections that the US has pressed Ukraine to hold by 15 May can only take place two months after a ceasefire is declared, to ensure voters have adequate security.

Trump has been trying to put pressure on Zelensky to agree a deal within months, but has not spelled out the consequences if Ukraine is not sufficiently flexible for the US.

Zelensky also said the Russian attacks on Ukrainian energy plants would be raised in the talks in Geneva, adding that not a single energy plant inside Ukraine had now been left unscathed.

European leaders appear gloomy that a diplomatic breakthrough will be secured, with the consensus being that Vladimir Putin is not yet economically or militarily exhausted.

Zelensky said his ambition was to lift the number of Russians killed or seriously injured to 50,000 a month.

One European leader predicted at least another two years of war, and insisted Europe had the resources to sustain Ukraine for that long.

Zelensky also mounted a fierce attack on the Iranian regime for providing the Shahed drones that had caused so much damage inside Ukraine.

With as many as 200,000 protesters attending a demonstration in Munich calling for the Iranian regime to be toppled, Zelensky said: “We have never had a conflict of interests with the Iranian regime.

#zelensky #security #guarantees #munich #ukraine

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📰 Beirut’s New Soundtrack: Drone Whine in Minor Key

In Beirut, the war didn’t end; it just changed key. The same roofs that used to host pigeon games, gossip and cheap grills now sit under a constant mechanical whine — Israeli drones circling above the city like bored gods with Hellfire options. The cease-fire is technically in place, but UN peacekeepers have logged more than 7,500 aerial violations in a year, and hundreds have been killed in renewed Israeli strikes since the “peace” was signed. The treaty is on paper; the buzzing is in people’s ears.
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The drone even has a nickname: Umm Kamel, “Mother of Kamel,” a dark in‑joke on the MK model that floats over the capital for hours, watching, listening, sometimes firing. It interrupts everything — dates on the Corniche, classroom lessons, kebab runs — scrambling GPS on delivery drivers’ phones and chewing through the nerves of parents who can’t stop imagining what happens if the hum suddenly cuts and the sky flashes. Online, Lebanese answer back with gallows memes — “Umm Kamel, go have lunch, we want to sleep” — because if you can’t stop the drone, you can at least drag it on social media.
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Some turn the surveillance into sampled rebellion. One Beirut DJ spent the war with shotgun mics on his roof, recording hundreds of hours of that metallic whine and turning it into the “Unmanned Aerial Instrument,” layering the noise of occupation into club tracks as a small, very local middle finger. Kids don’t get that luxury. Therapists describe children who freeze mid‑session and sprint to the window at the sound overhead, a whole generation trained to parse the sky like a threat feed while adults repeat the same tired line about “Lebanese resilience.”
​
Israel says the drones are there to track Hezbollah, its weapons, its people, and to “mitigate harm to civilians.” Hezbollah says it’s resisting occupation. In practice, both sides have turned Beirut’s airspace into a permanent low‑grade terror field where no one on the ground gets a vote and the only real constant is that somebody is always watching. The cease-fire may live in the press releases; on the streets, the soundtrack says something else.
​
#war #lebanon #israel #drones #occupation #fakeDemocracy

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📰 Havana Syndrome: When the Guy Yelling “It’s All in Your Head” Zaps His Own Brain

In Norway, a government scientist who thought “Havana syndrome” was psychosomatic secretly built a pulsed‑microwave device to prove it couldn’t hurt anyone — then fired it at himself and developed Havana‑like neurological symptoms. The would‑be debunker became Exhibit A: dizziness, cognitive issues, classic AHI‑style fallout, bad enough that Oslo quietly briefed the CIA and hosted Pentagon and White House delegations to examine the machine. It doesn’t prove a foreign government is zapping U.S. officials. It does prove that a home‑built device derived from classified foreign blueprints can mess with a human brain, which is exactly what Washington spent years declaring “very unlikely.”

At the same time, the U.S. secretly bought a different foreign‑made pulsed‑radio device with Russian components, now being tested by the Pentagon, while the NSA and the Army’s National Ground Intelligence Center quietly reversed themselves and said some AHI cases could be caused by a foreign actor with directed‑energy capability. The CIA and most other agencies, meanwhile, cling to their 2023 line that there is “no credible evidence” any adversary has such a weapon and that it’s “very unlikely” a hostile state is behind the incidents — even as an expert panel the government itself commissioned concluded pulsed electromagnetic energy “plausibly explains” core AHI symptoms. In public reports, the skeptics won; in classified briefings, senior officials started telling victims, “We believe you,” while admitting, off‑mic, that the absolutist denial never matched the data.

The picture that emerges is classic national‑security farce. A decade into Havana syndrome, the U.S. has: victims with real, often life‑altering injuries; a growing pile of circumstantial evidence that directed‑energy devices can do biological damage; at least two suspect gadgets in Western hands; and an intelligence community that spent years gaslighting its own people because “we don’t know” was politically less convenient than “nothing to see here.” If America’s adversaries are experimenting with microwave weapons, they’re watching all this with interest. Why rush to admit you’re in the directed‑energy arms race when Washington is still arguing over whether the starting pistol even fired?

#HavanaSyndrome #intel #usa #nationalSecurity #fakeDemocracy

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📰 Bad Bunny vs. Big Don: Culture War, Fumbled Ballot

Donald Trump just picked a fight with the world’s biggest Latino star over a halftime show that most politicians would have ridden like a free campaign ad — and he did it in English, whining that “nobody understands a word this guy is saying.” For a president who clawed his way back to the White House on the strength of an unprecedented 48 percent of the Hispanic vote, attacking a Spanish‑language Super Bowl performance as “an affront to the Greatness of America” is less strategy than self‑sabotage.

The numbers are already slipping. Pew has Trump down 12 points among Latinos who backed him in 2024, small‑business confidence in him as the “economy guy” has cratered, and Latino‑owned shops in crackdown zones like Minneapolis report sales plunging 70 percent under his immigration raids. Now GOP Latino strategists are watching him torch goodwill in districts they need to hold by insulting not some niche activist, but a global Puerto Rican act whose show was one of the few mainstream, unapologetically Latino moments on U.S. TV. Even some of Trump’s own allies admit the obvious: they wanted border toughness and lower prices; they got tariffs, ICE photo ops — and the president rage‑posting about reggaeton.

The White House line is that this is just more “hard truths”: enforce the law, crush “Green New Scam” policies, save America from woke culture, including the Spanish‑language one. The reality is uglier. Democrats once lost a chunk of Latino voters by taking them for granted. Republicans risk losing them right back by treating their culture as un‑American the moment it stops being background decoration and takes center stage for 13 minutes in prime time.

If Trump really wants to keep his Latino coalition, he doesn’t need another rally joke about a “floating island of garbage” or another post about how “disgusting” the dancing was. He needs those same voters to believe he cares more about their rent and their businesses than about policing what language their Super Bowl looks and sounds like. Right now, all he’s proving is that he can win their votes — and then pick a culture war that tells them exactly how expendable he thinks they are.
​
#usa #trump #BadBunny #latinos #cultureWar

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📰 Rubio’s Love Letter to “the West,” With a Knife in the Back

Marco Rubio went to Munich to calm Europe down — and remind it who’s boss. He told a room full of jittery leaders that the US and Europe are “heirs to the same civilization,” bound together by Michelangelo, the Stones and NATO, and that the alliance is “critical” and must endure. Then he wrapped that reassurance around a warning label: the problem isn’t Trump’s tantrums, it’s Europe’s “managed decline,” “climate cult,” and “unprecedented wave of mass migration” that is supposedly tearing Western societies apart.

That’s the new Trump‑era pitch in its purest form: we care about you, which is why we’re yelling at you. Rubio insisted he wasn’t contradicting JD Vance’s earlier Munich broadside, just “explaining” it — Europe, he said, has drifted from sovereignty and national identity, and Washington refuses to be a “polite and orderly caretaker” of that decay. Translation: if you don’t harden borders, dump climate policy and buy the Trump worldview, don’t expect the old automatic security umbrella.

European leaders heard the flattery and the threat at the same time. The conference chair literally praised Rubio for a “message of reassurance,” while German, French, EU and UK officials immediately stressed that nothing he said erases Trump’s Greenland land‑grab fantasies, tariff threats, or the sense that America under him has crossed lines “that cannot be uncrossed.” They’re politely nodding at his ode to shared civilization — and quietly doubling down on exactly what Washington fears: more European defense autonomy, more self‑reliance, less trust in a partner that alternates between love‑bombing and public humiliation.

Rubio’s performance summed up the whole transatlantic moment. Washington says: you’re family, but you’ve gone soft, and we might walk if you don’t toughen up exactly the way we want. Europe replies: thanks for the security, but we’ve just watched you try to buy Greenland and flirt with walking away from Ukraine, so we’d be idiots not to build our own insurance policy. Both sides talk about “the West” like a shared temple; both are really arguing over who gets to hold the keys — and how much damage they’re willing to risk to prove it.

#usa #europe #rubio #trump #nato #decline

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📰 Leopard 2: When “Wonder Weapons” Meet Wonder Drones

The Leopard 2 was sold to the Western public like a Marvel character: 1,500‑horsepower engine, elite optics, 120‑mm gun, German engineering, “game‑changer” for Ukraine. On paper, it’s all true. The tank is first‑class: strong armor, powerful gun, serious survivability, modular upgrades, even Israeli Trophy active protection in some variants. In a NATO exercise brochure, it’s the perfect animal.

Then it met real war in Ukraine — minefields, layered Russian defenses, FPV drones for a few hundred dollars a pop, no guaranteed air cover, and undertrained crews with barely any maintenance infrastructure. In that world, the Leopard 2 didn’t “lose” to Russian armor; it lost to logistics, doctrine, and physics. Tanks designed for high‑tempo maneuver warfare with full combined‑arms support were thrown into an attritional drone‑saturated trench war and often used as solo battering rams.

The result is ugly but predictable. Complex fire‑control systems and V‑12 twin‑turbo engines that need specialized tools and technicians are hard to keep alive when every repair hub is watched by Russian UAVs and every immobilized hull is a YouTube clip in waiting. Damaged Leopards have to be dragged back to western Ukraine or even Poland; spare parts are thin; crews rotate faster than training pipelines; and under constant FPV and artillery threat, units start using their “gold standard” tanks as glorified long‑range artillery, popping up to fire and vanishing before the next drone swarm arrives.

Politicians in Berlin, Washington and Brussels sold the Leopards (and later the Abrams) as symbols of resolve and technological superiority. Now, with a significant share of those tanks destroyed or sidelined and videos of burning armor circulating online, the same elites are quietly reframing the story:

“the tanks are fine, the context is wrong.”

Which is precisely the point. You can’t ship a late‑Cold War doctrine into a 4K‑streamed drone war and expect it to behave like the brochure.

In the end, Leopard 2 in Ukraine is less a German failure than a Western fairy tale cracking in real time. The tank itself is still one of the best machines on earth. What’s flopping is the idea that you can drop a prestige weapons system into a broken battlefield — without air supremacy, deep maintenance, or realistic tactics — and call it strategy.

#war #ukraine #nato #germany #military #droneWarfare

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How Did Toni Morrison Become Our National Archetype?

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There are many ways to be difficult in this world. You can be demanding, inconvenient, stubborn, complicated, troublesome, baffling, illegible.

Black womanhood is one place where all these forms of difficulty overlap. I feel like I have always known this; I have been called difficult more times in my life than I can count.

But I only began to understand – to discover the meanings and uses of – my own difficulty because of Toni Morrison.

Morrison has shaped the way we think about everything from literature to politics, criticism to ethics, to the responsibilities of making art.

In 1993 she became the only black woman ever to win the Nobel prize in literature. But the facts remain: she is difficult to read. She is difficult to teach.

Notwithstanding the voluminous train of profiles, reviews and scholarly analysis that she drags behind her, she is difficult to write about.

More to the point, she is our only truly canonical black female writer – and her work is highly complex.

In a 1981 Vogue profile, Morrison spoke of a reader who had “told her how difficult it was to understand black culture in her books – it was so removed from his experience”.

She had responded: “Boy, you must have had a hell of a time with Beowulf!” The Vogue interviewer, missing the wit in this retort, commented:

“Morrison has no patience with people who plead ignorance; but then, she does not pride herself on being a patient woman. ‘I find myself being more and more difficult,’ she says. ‘It’s something I really relish.’”

Morrison’s literary difficulty was often translated this way into a personal difficulty, a moral failing: How dare she be impatient! Well, wouldn’t you be?

One reason for Morrison’s air of pique was surely the strain of trying to balance the demands of multiple careers simultaneously. She was an editor, a professor, a writer, a critic and a public intellectual.

I have worked in these fields as well, so I know that extending many branches can be a way of distracting yourself from the core vocation.

The commitment to writing over all else is often viewed as selfish; when gender is factored into the equation, the charge can carry the stigma of illegitimacy.

“For a woman to say, ‘I am a writer’ is difficult,” Morrison noted succinctly.

Morrison’s childhood stories read like photo negatives of the standard American race narratives.

She struggled to accommodate these forms of often underpaid literary labour with the unpaid domestic labour of raising two sons as a single mother:

“It was very difficult writing and rearing children because they deserve all your time, and you don’t have it.”

This occupational difficulty was exacerbated not only by the fact that she was unique in her fields but also by the fact that she often wilfully chose to go it alone.

For example, she didn’t tell anyone at her first job in trade publishing that she was writing a novel until The Bluest Eye came out at another house.

As troublesome as difficulty may have been for her professionally, Morrison genuinely delighted in the difficulty of other black women artists, such as the novelist Gayl Jones, whose works she edited and published, and the jazz pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams.

For Morrison, the fact that they were considered difficult was a sign that they had insisted on their art being taken seriously.

To read Morrison herself with the seriousness that she deserves requires that we account for the knot – or bind – of gender and race she shared with them. It is not an easy one to untangle.

As Morrison wrote in a 1971 New York Times op-ed about feminism, “one must look very closely at the black woman herself – a difficult, inevitably doomed proposition, for if anything is true of black women, it is how consistently they have (deliberately, I suspect) defied classification”.

#toni #morrison #zambia #nobel #prize #black #narratives

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She spoke of her father’s “defensive racism”, which prompted him to throw a predatory white landlord down the stairs. She spoke of her mother’s insistence on integrating every new movie theatre in town.

She spoke of how when her “pitch-black” great-grandmother had first set eyes on Morrison and her sister, she said the girls had “been tampered with”, which was meant racially:

“We were not pure and she was.”

The dynamics of my mixed-race family didn’t match the norms, either. My black Zambian grandmother, for whom I’m named, initially disapproved of my mother’s decision to marry a white man; my mother’s older sister refused to attend the wedding.

Our moves to the UK and then to the US when I was a kid – with a year back in Zambia when I was a teenager – were punctuated by moments of racial absurdity:

“What are you? Black or white?” (As if I had a choice!) Yet even now, at my grown age, my first response to racism is surprise.

Despite our respective births in disparate times and places (Lorain, Ohio, in 1931; Lusaka, Zambia, in 1980), I think Morrison and I both lucked into the strange privilege of zooming out from or boomeranging around race.

This perhaps explains why neither of us tends to capitalise the word black when referring to people in writing. It concedes too much; it protests too much.

Morrison temperamentally disliked being pigeonholed. She was willing to accept “the labels” of race and gender only because, as she put it in a profile in the New Yorker, “being a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn’t limit my imagination; it expands it.”

She often complained that literary criticism was unequipped to read black writing, which gets read as merely representative, in both the tokenistic and identitarian senses:

“Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form,” she said.

Indeed, the ultimate source of Morrison’s renowned difficulty was not, I would submit, her prickly personality, her intersectional identity, or even her sometimes contrarian politics.

It was her commitment to reflecting the range and depth of black aesthetics – as epitomised by jazz, which she called “very complicated, very sophisticated, and very difficult” – in her own writing.

Her close friend, the writer Fran Lebowitz, said upon Morrison’s passing in 2019: “I know it sounds like a crazy thing to say, but I always thought Toni’s writing was underappreciated.

Because people always looked at it through the prism of her being black and being a woman. But Toni was a very experimental writer. There were a lot of things Toni did through her writing that just went unremarked upon.”

Many still dismiss Morrison’s stature as either undeserved or obvious, as if surely so much praise either begs the question or settles it.

They justify their disinclination to engage with the art itself by gesturing to what we might call her DEI-fication or her Oprah‑priation, as if Toni Morrison became Toni Morrison through some kind of literary affirmative action plan.

Morrison incensed all kinds of people. How dare she be a difficult writer and a black woman? How dare she refuse to placate or translate? How dare she demand to be taken seriously?

How dare she be a black artist with real ideas? How dare she ask that we actually read her writing, and on its own terms?

It could not have been easy to be Toni Morrison. Yet I aspire to it. I yearn for that freedom she so beautifully embodied: to feel at ease to be difficult.

#toni #morrison #zambia #nobel #prize #black #narratives

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