On 21 October, the Russian General Staff successfully tested a 9M730 Burevestnik cruise missile. This weapon was announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin during his speech to Parliament on March 1, 2018. Seven years later, it is finally operational.

We wrote at the time:

"Russia has a nuclear-powered engine (i.e., a nuclear power plant) that has been miniaturized to the point where it can be equipped with a nuclear-powered cruise missile. Since cruise missiles have an unpredictable trajectory and this engine has an almost infinite range, they are invincible for the moment."[1]

☞ The commissioning of the 9M730 Burevestnik paves the way for the Status-6 Poseidon underwater drones. It reverses the balance of power since, from now on, Russia has a lead over its competitors. It is no longer militarily on an equal footing with the United States, but is ahead of them. During the war in Syria, Russia's new conventional weapons proved superior to those of NATO. During the war in Ukraine, Russia was able to mass-produce them. At the time of writing, it has become the world's leading conventional and nuclear power.

The tech giants agreed to extraordinary terms to clinch a lucrative contract with the Israeli government, documents show.

When Google and Amazon negotiated a major $1.2bn cloud-computing deal in 2021, their customer - the Israeli government - had an unusual demand: agree to use a secret code as part of an arrangement that would become known as the "winking mechanism".

The demand, which would require Google and Amazon to effectively sidestep legal obligations in countries around the world, was born out of Israel's concerns that data it moves into the global corporations' cloud platforms could end up in the hands of foreign law enforcement authorities.

Like other big tech companies, Google and Amazon's cloud businesses routinely comply with requests from police, prosecutors and security services to hand over customer data to assist investigations.

This process is often cloaked in secrecy. The companies are frequently gagged from alerting the affected customer their information has been turned over. This is either because the law enforcement agency has the power to demand this or a court has ordered them to stay silent.

For Israel, losing control of its data to authorities overseas was a significant concern. So to deal with the threat, officials created a secret warning system: the companies must send signals hidden in payments to the Israeli government, tipping it off when it has disclosed Israeli data to foreign courts or investigators.

The Israeli army announced that a soldier in Rafah had been killed by gunfire on Tuesday. Before the source of the gunfire could be confirmed, Netanyahu blamed it on Hamas, and gave the order for the army to launch "powerful strikes" on Gaza. The resumption of the Israeli bombing campaign killed over 100 people, 46 of whom were children, and 20 of whom were women, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health on Wednesday.

Hamas released a statement saying it had nothing to do with the incident and that it remained fully committed to the ceasefire agreement in all areas. Nevertheless, the Israeli army carried out the attacks across several locations in Gaza. An army statement later said that Israeli forces had struck "30 terrorists holding command positions" in the Strip.

A lot of questions and suspicions were immediately raised when on October 21 explosions and fires occurred at large oil refineries in Hungary and Romania. Eyebrows were raised given that both sites have links to Russia.

The Petrotel-Lukoil refinery in Ploiesti (owned by Russian company Lukoil) in southern Romania was damaged, while in Hungary a 'mystery' fire also occurred at the country's largest oil refinery (the MOL-operated Danube Refinery), located in the city of Szazhalombatta - some 17 miles from Budapest - which receives crude oil from Russia.

Despite long efforts of the European Union to phase out Russian energy, a tiny number of states still receive supplies. This is why many have suspected sabotage, possibly linked to Ukrainian intelligence, was behind the twin refinery fires, which had occurred within less than 24 hours apart.

But now, over a week later, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has revealed in a social media statement that authorities haven't ruled out the possibility of an external attack in investigating the fire at Százhalombatta.

A Maryland state senator has been indicted on federal charges including extortion related to her 2022 campaign for a state House seat for allegedly conspiring to threaten the release of an explicit video of a former consultant's affair.

State Sen. Dalya Attar, a Baltimore Democrat, was charged in a federal indictment unsealed Thursday that involves her brother, Joseph Attar, and Kalman Finkelstein, a Baltimore police officer who worked on her campaign.

The group conspired to silence a former consultant by threatening to make public a video of her in bed with a married man, according to the indictment. The alleged purpose was to obtain evidence that could be used to prevent her from saying negative things about the lawmaker's campaign.

The senator said in a statement that the case centers on "the allegations of my former disgruntled employee," and she noted that "we have yet to see any tangible evidence to support the claim that I knew of any illegal actions taken on my behalf."

"I look forward to sharing my side of the story, and believe the truth will be the arbiter of justice," Attar said. "In the meantime, I will continue to serve my community with humility and honor, and look forward to being as transparent as possible."

". . . the fake news isn't reporting on Operation Arctic Frost. It's not that they're trying to cover it up. . . but that they actually think it was totally normal and legitimate."
— Hans Mahncke

Surely you've noticed in recent years just how gruesome the Halloween townscape has become with our competitive yard displays of giant skeletons, shrieking ghouls, corpses seeming to emerge from the crabgrass, and miscellaneous body parts strewn about the property. The symbolism seems pretty overt: America yearns to become a death cult.

The world has seen this before and it generally doesn't end well. Something in their equivalent of the zeitgeist drove the Aztecs to sharply ramp-up the scale of their human sacrifices in the years just before Hernán Cortés came to their capital city, Tenochtitlán. Bernal Diaz, a foot-soldier in Cortés's legion, later wrote:

"I remember that they had in a plaza, where there were some shrines, so many places of dead skulls, which could be counted, according to the concert as they were set, that when they appeared they would be more than one hundred thousand; and I say again about one hundred thousand. And in another part of the square were as many rows of bones without meat, bones of the dead, that could not be counted; and they had in many beams many heads hanging from one part to another. And keeping those bones and skulls were three priests, who, as we understood, were in charge of them. . . . "

Cortés had arrived in Mexico in April of 1519 with an expeditionary force of about 500 soldiers and by August of 1521, it was all over. He defeated the empire of a million Aztecs and commenced the systematic demolition of their monuments, including the horrifying great rack-of-skulls (tzompantli) where they displayed their thousands of trophies.

The shocking arrest of British pundit and Israel critic Sami Hamdi is yet another example of how far-right commentators wield influence in the Trump administration.

Over the weekend, British pundit and Israel critic Sami Hamdi was detained by ICE agents at the San Francisco International Airport.

In a social media post, Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin announced that Hamdi's visa was revoked and that he was pending removal. "Under President Trump, those who support terrorism and undermine American national security will not be allowed to work or visit this country," she wrote.

The arrest is yet another example of how far-right commentators wield influence in this administration.

Days before Hamdi was detained, the Islamophobic right-wing activist Amy Mekelburg called on the government to deport him. She claimed:

"He was training U.S. Muslims in digital agitation, electoral sabotage, and political warfare in alignment with Muslim Brotherhood doctrine. Sami Hamdi is not a journalist passing through America — he is a deployed actor from an overseas cadre system that grooms Western Muslims for on-shore mobilization."

In a series of tweets, Islamophobic conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer took credit for the arrest, claiming that Hamdi was "an individual with Islamic terror ties."

So the latest incarnation of the much-hyped G-2 came and went. It did feel like a switch from Trump Tariff Temper Tantrum to Temporary Truce.

Naturally there has been an avalanche of spin focusing on the easing of "trade tensions"; but what really mattered in practical terms was the lack of a full "deal" after 1h 40mins of debate in South Korea - complete with a smiling handshake coda.

Well, anyone with an IQ over room temperature knew from the start what Trump wanted to extract from Beijing. Essentially 3 items:

1. Easing of restrictions on rare earth exports, because the whole, vast US industrial-military complex with its coterie of embedded high-tech industries simply cannot be "affected" by a supply chain rupture, and there's no way to build one in less than at least 5 years.
2. China should buy enormous amounts of US agricultural products, especially soybeans: otherwise Trump's voter base will be in revolt, then bye bye to mid-terms and even the next presidential victory. Toxic asset Steve Bannon has already announced, on the record, that Trump will run.
3. China should buy enormous amounts of overpriced American oil and simultaneously decrease, drastically, its energy imports from Russia; hence Moscow will be "forced" to be back to the "negotiating table" re: Ukraine.

There was never any chance that China would even contemplate discussing item 3 - considering the role of energy in the comprehensive Russia-China strategic partnership.

So what we had were minor concessions on items 1 and 2, still quite vague.

The Chinese Ministry of Commerce, for its part, officially announced that Washington will cancel the 10% so-called "fentanyl tariffs" and suspend, for an additional year, the 24% reciprocal tariffs levied on all Chinese products, including those coming from "one country, two systems" stalwarts Hong Kong and Macao.

Soybean concessions were expected. Brazil played a not very wise game by raising the price of their soybeans from $530 per ton to $680. Beijing started to have second thoughts on buying more from their BRICS brothers: China moreover is Brazil's top trade partner. Beijing combined the devaluation of the US dollar with the bumper US crop where farmers are willing to apply a discount of 10%, and in the end got out with a good deal - with the extra bonus of appeasing the Circus Ringmaster's domestic supporters.

The ghosts of the Cuban Missile Crisis are back, this time haunting Ukraine, Venezuela, and Washington's divided politics.

In world history, the Caribbean Crisis - or the Cuban Missile Crisis - refers to the tense October of 1962, when the US and the Soviet Union stood on the brink of nuclear war. The confrontation began with the deployment of American missiles in Türkiye, along the Soviet Union's southern border, and Moscow's subsequent decision to place nuclear warheads in Cuba, just off Florida's coast.

Through intense diplomacy between October 16 and 28, both sides agreed to withdraw their weapons, set up a direct hotline between Washington and Moscow, and lay the groundwork for future arms control deals. During those thirteen days, the air was thick with fear, yet the true scope of negotiations remained hidden from the world until long after the danger had passed.

In a striking twist of fate, sixty-three years later - in October 2025 - relations between Russia and the US have taken a hauntingly similar turn. On October 16, Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump held their eighth and longest phone call of the year. The key outcome was an agreement to prepare a high-level meeting between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to set the parameters for a summit between the two presidents, planned for Budapest, Hungary.

A new European Union deal to liberalize trade with Ukraine took effect Wednesday, but Poland, Hungary and Slovakia are defying it, maintaining their protectionist bans on imports from the country. Their defiance comes amid mounting grievances over EU prioritization of the West's proxy war on Russia over the prosperity of EU member states and their citizens.

Approved on Oct 13, the new EU arrangement expands tariff-free Ukrainian access to European markets, replacing a temporary lowering of trade barriers adopted after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. "We believe (the agreement) is a stable, fair framework, that can be reliable both for the EU and for Ukraine, to ensure a gradual integration in our single market, while providing stable trade flows," said European Commission spokeswoman Ariana Podesta. The European Commission (EC) is the EU's principal executive branch.