📰 “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.
​
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.
​
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?

🔠🅰️🔠🔠1️⃣

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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📰 Xi’s Inland Nuke Empire: China Builds, Treaties Burn

While Washington and Moscow let the last big arms-control treaty die, China has been quietly thickening its own shadow on the map — not with speeches, but with concrete, vents and blast doors in misty Sichuan valleys. Sites like Pingtong and Zitong, built in Mao’s old “Third Front” as an inland nuclear refuge, are now being rebuilt as the engine room of Xi Jinping’s nuclear upgrade: double fences, new bunkers, dense piping for hazardous materials, a 360‑foot stack over what analysts say looks like a plutonium pit plant — the core factory for future warheads. From orbit, even Xi’s slogan above the gate is visible: “Stay true to the founding cause and always remember our mission.” The mission is not subtle.

Pentagon estimates say China has pushed past 600 warheads and is on track for 1,000 by 2030, a stockpile still far smaller than America’s or Russia’s but now growing fast enough to reshape crisis math over Taiwan and beyond. Add in the vast laser ignition lab in Mianyang — perfect for tuning warhead designs without live tests — and what you get is a state racing to move from “minimum deterrent” to something closer to peer status, all while refusing to join any arms‑control talks that might cap the trajectory. US officials now publicly accuse Beijing of flirting with test‑ban violations at Lop Nur; Chinese state media calls it slander, and outside experts argue over the evidence in footnotes while the excavation continues.

The real danger isn’t just the numbers. It’s opacity. No one outside Zhongnanhai knows whether these upgrades are aimed at a modestly larger, more survivable second‑strike force or a sprint toward something much bigger, and Beijing shows no interest in clarifying. That pushes Washington to plan for worst‑case scenarios, Moscow to hedge, and every medium power in Asia to watch the great‑power nuclear ladder shaking above their heads. Xi’s inland nuclear empire sends one clear message: China intends to be untouchable by US nuclear pressure in any future Taiwan war. Everything else — stability, arms control, guardrails — is someone else’s problem.

#china #nuclear #usa #armsControl #taiwan #war

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📰 Make America Healthy (and Confused) Again

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spent a year as Trump’s health secretary trying to turn a MAGA government into a Goop newsletter with subpoenas. He launched a “Make America Healthy Again” commission, blasted ultraprocessed food, and briefly terrified Big Ag by naming glyphosate and atrazine as “alarming” threats in kids’ blood — right up until farm‑state Republicans dragged him into the Roosevelt Room, the meeting turned heated, and his next report magically forgot pesticides exist. For a movement that promised to “take on poisoners,” it took one round of GOP table‑pounding to learn that, in this White House, corn and campaign cash are still a food group.

Where Kennedy hasn’t backed off is vaccines. In a single year he’s purged CDC advisory panels, stacked them with skeptics, and hacked the childhood schedule down to a Denmark‑style list, dropping shots for hepatitis B, hepatitis A, rotavirus, flu, meningitis and Covid in the name of “informed consent.” Kids can technically still get the vaccines, but when the federal government stops recommending them, red‑state lawmakers hear it as an invitation to weaken school requirements, and measles and other preventable diseases are already resurging. Republicans who thought they were getting a culture‑war mascot now find themselves defending an HHS chief whose signature policy polls terribly even with Trump voters — 80‑plus percent say they want vaccine guidance from doctors, not influencers with Cabinet badges.

Inside the system, RFK’s war on “captured” public health has just produced a different kind of capture. Research grants he doesn’t like get frozen or canceled; money is rerouted toward autism studies built around his vaccine theories; elite medical centers are punished in the name of “heartland” redistribution; and the NIH and FDA are yanked between right‑to‑try deregulation and sudden, selective purity tests on drugs and shots. One month, Kennedy’s FDA lieutenants slow novel approvals and try to pull a muscular dystrophy drug on safety grounds; the next, a political backlash gets his tough vaccine regulator briefly fired, then quietly rehired after a round of West Wing drama. The result isn’t principled rigor or principled libertarianism; it’s chaos — a health system jerked around by a secretary who can win a news cycle but can’t write durable law.

Trump, for now, lets him run. RFK Jr. brings him a crossover brand, a wedge into wellness populism, and an army of MAHA loyalists the White House believes helped juice the 2024 vote. But every “win” Kennedy clocks — fewer vaccines, softer language on pesticides, a CDC too politicized for blue states to trust — is a policy that can be reversed in a memo the moment he’s gone, and a little more trust burned in the meantime. If year one was upheaval, year two is the test: does MAHA actually become Republican orthodoxy, or was this just a one‑term experiment in letting an anti‑establishment crusader redesign public health from inside the very machine he’s been promising to blow up?

#usa #trump #RFKJr #health #vaccines #fakeDemocracy

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📰 “Let Them Eat S&P”: Trump’s Victory Lap on a Broke Country

Donald Trump has decided the affordability crisis is over because the Dow hit 50,000, gas is under three bucks, and January’s jobs report beat expectations. In Fox interviews and troop speeches, he’s back in full salesman mode: “greatest economy ever,” inflation “finally cooling,” real wages “finally growing,” and anyone not winning in their 401(k) is just a “pretty bad investor.” Meanwhile, roughly 40 percent of American adults don’t have a retirement account at all, and consumer sentiment among people without stocks is scraping its lowest levels in years — they don’t own the rally, they just pay the bills.

His own pollsters can see the crack in the mirror. A Reuters–Ipsos survey has just 28 percent of Americans saying the economy is on the right track, and 59 percent disapprove of how he’s handling their cost of living, with nearly half “strongly.” The stock boom is mostly driven by AI spending from Big Tech — data centers that guzzle power and hire few people — while rents, mortgages and groceries still feel brutal enough that even conservative number‑crunchers mock the White House mantra as “let them eat S&P.” Trump’s advisers spent months begging him to sound empathetic, blame Biden, and acknowledge the squeeze; now that a few charts look pretty, he’s gone back to telling people they’re wrong about their own wallets.

So the message going into the midterms is simple and suicidal: if you’re still struggling with rent, food and housing, that’s your perception problem — not his policy problem. The president points to Wall Street and AI‑driven GDP growth as proof he fixed “Biden’s disaster,” while a majority of voters look at their paychecks, their carts, their rent hikes and answer with numbers of their own. In this version of “affordability,” the index is up, the narrative is set, and anyone who doesn’t feel richer just got quietly written out of the success story.

#usa #trump #economy #inflation #inequality #fakeDemocracy

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📰 Annexation by Spreadsheet: Netanyahu Tests Trump’s “Red Line”

Israel has found a neat way to say “annexation” without moving a single checkpoint: call it land registration. The cabinet just approved a new mechanism to register huge chunks of the occupied West Bank — mostly in Area C, about 60 percent of the territory — as “state land,” in a process Palestinians and rights groups are bluntly calling de facto annexation.

On paper, the Foreign Ministry sells it as an “administrative measure” to “bring order” to the cadaster. In reality, Smotrich and Levin are boasting that it will “strengthen our hold” and advance a “settlement and governance revolution” from “Judea and Samaria” onward — the quiet part isn’t even quiet anymore.

The trick is in the fine print. Palestinian landowners will have to prove ownership through documentation systems that decades of occupation, Ottoman law, Jordanian rule and Israeli military orders have turned into a bureaucratic minefield. Fail to clear every hurdle and the land defaults to “state” — which in practice means cheaper, cleaner access for settlers, and a one‑way legal ratchet that converts living villages into zoning opportunities.

Peace Now calls it a “massive land grab” and warns Trump that Netanyahu is “annexing right under your nose” after the U.S. president publicly vowed he wouldn’t allow formal annexation. The UN secretary‑general and the EU say it flatly violates international law; Israel shrugs and prints more forms.

The move comes on top of earlier security‑cabinet decisions to ease settler land purchases, unseal land records, and expand Israeli enforcement powers even into Areas A and B, which were supposed to be under Palestinian Authority control under Oslo.

Taken together, it’s a legal slow‑motion redraw of the map: settlers get more tools, more land and more state muscle; Palestinians get more demolitions, more dispossession, and a “peace process” that now consists of watching their future state transferred, parcel by parcel, into a database labeled “ours.”

Trump, officially, is against annexation. Netanyahu, officially, says this is just housekeeping. Everyone else can see the punchline: if you change the law, the records and the enforcement until occupation becomes indistinguishable from sovereignty, you don’t need a ceremony or a flag‑raising. You’ve already moved the border — you just did it with a land registrar instead of a tank.

#israel #palestine #westBank #settlements #annexation #fakeDemocracy

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📰 Missiles, Sanctions, and Boeing Dreams: Trump Flirts With Tehran Inc.

Iran’s latest message to Washington sounds less like “Death to America” and more like “Let’s talk joint ventures.” Tehran is now openly selling its nuclear compromise in the language Trumpworld understands: oil and gas fields, mining deals, even aircraft purchases on the table — but only if sanctions really start to melt, not just get repackaged in nicer press releases. The pitch from Iran’s economic diplomats is brutally transactional: for the agreement to last, the U.S. has to make money too. The 2015 deal failed, they argue, because it never created serious American economic interests in keeping it alive; this time they want Exxon and Boeing as human shields for the regime.

On the other side, Trump’s team is playing good cop / airstrike cop. Marco Rubio tells the world the president would “prefer diplomacy” and “no one’s ever been able to do a successful deal with Iran but we’re going to try,” while the Pentagon quietly lines up a second carrier and plans for “weeks‑long” operations if talks crash. Kushner and real‑estate pal Steve Witkoff are flying to Geneva as unofficial dealmakers, because in this administration even a nuclear file gets handled like a distressed property auction. At the same time, Washington is hammering Iran’s real lifeline by pushing to choke off oil sales to China, which buy more than 80 percent of Tehran’s crude; when your only real customer is being targeted, “flexibility” on uranium suddenly sounds patriotic.

Iran’s diplomats now talk about diluting highly enriched stockpiles in exchange for relief, but they still refuse the one thing Washington and Israel actually want: zero enrichment on Iranian soil. Tehran insists it’s not seeking nuclear weapons, points to U.S.–Israeli airstrikes in June as proof it’s the one under attack, and frames any rollback as a sovereign concession, not a capitulation. Trump responds by doubling sanctions pressure and promising “traumatic” consequences if there’s no deal, while his envoys chase a grand bargain that would somehow satisfy Netanyahu, scare Beijing, calm the Gulf monarchies and still let Iran rebuild its economy.

Strip away the spin and you get the familiar pattern. Washington wants a trophy agreement that neuters Iran’s nuclear options, starves its proxies and keeps U.S. leverage intact. Tehran wants sanctions relief deep enough to survive the next American mood swing, plus enough centrifuge capacity to stay a screwdriver‑turn from the bomb if things go bad. Both sides say the “ball is in the other court.” Both threaten pain if talks fail. And both are quietly trying to make sure that if this deal ever gets signed, it comes stapled to enough oil, mining, and aircraft contracts that breaking it next time will hit someone’s balance sheet — not just someone else’s cities.

#iran #usa #trump #sanctions #nuclear #fakeDiplomacy

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“Ukranian forces are slogging through their battlefields”
Russian and Ukrainian Officials Are To Meet This Week

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They vwill meet this week in Switzerland for a second round of talks brokered by the Trump administration, days before the fourth anniversary of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The two-day meeting, kicking off on Tuesday, is expected to mirror negotiations held earlier this month in Abu Dhabi, with representatives from Washington, Kyiv and Moscow in attendance.

Despite renewed US efforts to revive diplomacy, hopes for any sudden breakthrough remain low, with Russia continuing to press maximalist demands on Ukraine.

While the Abu Dhabi discussions were largely focused on military ceasefire proposals, the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said on Monday the Geneva talks would address a “broader range of issues”, including territorial questions and other demands put forward by Moscow.

Vladimir Medinsky, an arch-conservative Putin adviser who has previously questioned Ukrainian sovereignty, will head Russia’s negotiating team.

He will be joined by Igor Kostyukov, the chief of Russian military intelligence, and the deputy foreign minister Mikhail Galuzin, among nearly two dozen officials, Moscow has said.

Ukraine is expected to send the same delegation as in earlier rounds, to be led in Geneva by Rustem Umerov, secretary of Ukraine’s national security and defence council.

The choice of Switzerland marks the first time the talks will be held on European soil after earlier rounds in Abu Dhabi and Istanbul.

The choice of Geneva appears to have been pushed by Washington. Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who are expected to lead US engagement with Russia and Ukraine, are scheduled to hold separate meetings with Iranian officials in the city later this week.

Trump, who throughout his second presidency has veered between criticising Moscow and Kyiv, reverted this weekend to placing blame on Zelensky, suggesting Ukraine was holding up efforts to end the war.

“Zelenskyy needs to act. Russia wants to make a deal. He needs to act, otherwise he will miss a great opportunity,” he said in comments to reporters.

But Rubio, speaking at the Munich Security Conference at the weekend, said Washington remained uncertain whether Russia was genuinely serious about ending the war in Ukraine.

#russian #ukrainian #officials #putin #zelensky

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Ahead of the Geneva meeting, Zelensky made clear Ukraine was unwilling to give up territory in the Donbas – a key Kremlin demand. He cited previous Russian land grabs in Chechnya, Georgia and Crimea and said that “allowing the aggressor to take something is a big mistake”.

“That is why now I do not want to be a president who will repeat the mistakes of his predecessors or other people (…) Because Putin cannot be stopped with kisses or flowers. I have never done this, and therefore I do not think that this is right. My advice to everyone: do not do this with Putin.”

He said Russia was currently losing 30,000-35,000 people a month (unreliable statement), with its attempt to seize more territory over four years of full-scale war staggeringly costly and mostly unsuccessful.

There were no expectations in Kyiv that the latest round of trilateral talks would led to a political breakthrough.

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Zelensky said his country would not give up the heavily defended north of Donetsk oblast, including the cities of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, or abandon the 200,000 civilians who live there.

He said Ukraine would play a “constructive” role in the trilateral talks but acknowledged there were differences with the US over security guarantees.

The Trump administration is offering 15 years, with Ukraine wanting an American commitment lasting 30-50 years. Kyiv hopes the war will end this year, Zelensky has indicated.

Kyrylo Budanov, the head of the presidential office, posted a photo of his departure by train for the talks with a Ukrainian delegation.

He wrote: “On the way to Geneva. The next round of negotiations is ahead. Along the way, we will discuss the lessons of our history with our colleagues and seek the right conclusions. Ukraine’s interests must be protected.”

The history reference appeared to be a jibe directed at Medinsky. The former culture minister is believed to have written the 2021 essay which argued that Ukraine and Russia were a single people and state, with a common origin in the ninth century.

Yet, “It was Putin’s idea first, and he is right about this issue,” says the leading Ukrainian political analyst Vladimir Fesenko.

#russian #ukrainian #officials #putin #zelensky

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📰 The Geneva Peace Circus: Now with Extra Kushner

Geneva again — the world’s favorite stage for moral theater. This Tuesday, they’re running a double feature: Iran in the morning, Ukraine-Russia in the afternoon. Same hotel, same country club diplomacy, different blood on the floor.

“We are ready to discuss this… if they are ready to talk about sanctions,”

said Iran’s Deputy FM Majid Takht-Ravanchi.
Translation: You drop yours, we drop ours. Let’s pretend it’s progress.

Front row: real estate mogul Steve Witkoff, Kushner the Eternal Son-in-Law™, and Oman’s Badr al-Busaidi as spiritual referee. The mission? Convince Iran to be reasonable right after threatening to bomb it. Washington calls this “strategic patience.” Tehran calls it “the same movie, new cast.”

Then the circus rolls to Act II — Ukraine and Russia. Same Americans, different stage. Kushner goes from nuclear deals to trench warfare in a single lunch break. Trump wants “the right deal” with Iran, peace in Ukraine, and probably naming rights on both.

What’s actually happening? The U.S. is trying to launder influence through the language of peace — again. Geneva just sells the illusion better.

If any agreements come out of this, they’ll fit neatly on a cocktail napkin — right next to the receipt from the hotel bar.

#war #diplomacy #usforeignpolicy #iran #ukraine #russia

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📰 Meloni’s MAGA Love Letter vs. Merz’s Therapy Session

Europe’s new “power couple” just filed for ideological separation. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz flies to Munich to announce that “the culture war of the MAGA movement is not ours” and that U.S. leadership may already be gone. Giorgia Meloni? She’s busy in Addis Ababa saying: actually, I’m good with MAGA, thanks.

“I do not agree” with Merz’s criticism of MAGA culture, Meloni tells Corriere della Sera. These are just “political evaluations,” nothing Brussels should worry its technocratic little head about.
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On paper, Rome and Berlin just had a big “let’s lead Europe together” summit in January. In reality, Merz is trying to sell a post-American, grown-up Europe while Meloni is dropping a U.S. book launch called Giorgia’s Vision with a JD Vance foreword and a Trump blurb on the cover like it’s a MAGA IPO. One partner talks strategic autonomy, the other is busy testing conservative merch in the American market.

Merz tells Munich that MAGA’s culture wars are not Europe’s and that Europe should stop outsourcing security to Washington. Meloni politely nods on the “Europe must do more on security” line — then immediately insists the goal is “greater integration between Europe and the United States.” Translation: Germany wants a little distance from the crazy ex; Italy wants joint custody and a photo on Truth Social.

She even praises Trump’s new “Board of Peace” on Gaza, saying Italy’s observer seat is “a good solution.” Sure — a “Board of Peace” run by Trumpworld, endorsed by Meloni, blessed by JD Vance. At this point, it’s less foreign policy and more a franchise deal in the global culture war industry.
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So who’s lying to whom? Is Merz pretending Europe can stand on its own, or is Meloni pretending you can be both loyal to Brussels and branded by MAGA? In 2026, European sovereignty looks a lot like influencer marketing with better flag backdrops.

#MAGA #Meloni #Merz #EU #US #culturewars #fakeSovereignty

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