Amid a continuing status of martial law in Ukraine, one European headline underscores that President Zelensky's significant cabinet and defense ministry reshuffling has 'backfired'.

Public outrage and rare protests have ensued in the capital and across various cities after he sacked popular Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who many Ukrainians see as having turned the tide of the war with Russia, implementing an ambitious tech-focused drone strategy.

Zelensky has now confirmed the dismissal by appointing Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) chief Yevhen Khmara as acting defense minister.

Artificial intelligence may be driving headlines, but one of its biggest vulnerabilities is an obscure metal that few people have ever heard of. Yttrium, a rare earth element first identified more than two centuries ago, has quietly become an essential ingredient in advanced semiconductor manufacturing, according to the Financial Times. As demand for AI chips accelerates, securing reliable access to the metal has become a growing strategic concern.

"We're in the middle of a sea change in terms of how the global economy works."
— Daniel Yergin, vice-chair of S&P Global, describing the shift away from purely efficiency-driven global supply chains.

That concern stems from a simple reality: China dominates the processing and supply of yttrium, along with many other niche metals that modern industries depend on. Over the past several years, Beijing has tightened export restrictions on a number of critical minerals, giving it increasing leverage over global supply chains at a time when geopolitical tensions with the United States remain elevated.

The European Union persistently characterises China as a partner, a competitor, and a systemic rival — often within the same policy frameworks. This ongoing conceptual ambiguity has resulted in a fragmented and inconsistent approach that fails to advance Europe's core economic interests or respond adequately to the new geopolitical landscape.

The European Union's increasingly confrontational posture towards China exposes a persistent crisis of strategic direction, rather than the emergence of a coherent grand strategy. China insists on its right to industrial productivity and global ascension.

Recent sanctions, anti-subsidy investigations, and economic security measures are routinely framed as efforts to bolster European competitiveness and bargaining power. However, there is inadequate evidence that these initiatives address the underlying structural weaknesses eroding Europe's economic and geopolitical standing. Instead, they often serve as rhetorical gestures, masking the EU's ongoing inability to articulate a unified and effective foreign policy towards China.

In a new interview on the world's largest podcast, Vice President JD Vance warned that "elements" of the Israeli government want to keep the Iran war going "indefinitely," and were pursuing an aggressive campaign to manipulate US public opinion -- going so far as to vilify Vance for his role in pursuing a diplomatic solution. In his nearly three-hour interview on the Joe Rogan Experience, Vance also tried to gently distance himself from Trump's decision to join Israel in launching a war on Iran and said the White House had botched its communications regarding the Epstein files.

"There are some people within [Israel's] system, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt, who are manipulating and trying to change American public opinion to keep the war going on indefinitely. Again, not towards any objective, but just indefinitely."

He noted that the attacks have not only been directed against US policy, but against him personally.

China's territorial dispute with the Philippines, growing US military activity, and the EU's increasingly assertive Indo-Pacific posture point to a changing regional balance. What many see as mere support for international law may also deepen strategic polarization and reduce the prospects for compromise.

Chinese academics at a recent symposium in Guangzhou said the Philippines' northernmost province of Batanes is a "natural extension" of Taiwan and therefore belongs to China. The event, held by Jinan University and attended by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has angered officials in Manila.

Maritime watchdog SeaLight called the move part of a "lawfare" strategy - supposedly using legal and academic arguments to push China's position without making an official sovereignty claim. Meanwhile, new incidents involving fishermen near Scarborough Shoal are a reminder that tensions remain high in the South China Sea. Western countries and their allies are also increasing pressure on Beijing.

China dismisses the 2016 Hague ruling that rejected most of its claims in the South China Sea, calling it "null and void." On the 10th anniversary of that decision, the United States, Britain, Japan and other countries joined the Philippines in calling for Beijing to implement the ruling. The European Union (EU) in turn also issued a statement urging full implementation.

The war is back on and this appears to be one of attrition.

Trump and his supporters have never been interested in a negotiated end to the conflict.

They still demand Iran's surrender.

That is not going to happen. Iran can say no.

CrossTalking with Steve Jermy, Michael Scheuer, and Matteo Capasso.

I was recently watching footage of the NATO Summit held July 7-8, 2026, in Ankara, Türkiye. I couldn't help but notice how similar the gathering looked to the NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) shows I used to attend while working in the music business in Hollywood. Every year, all of us music nerds would get excited to head to the huge convention center in downtown L.A. to see the newfangled hoopla the music merchants were releasing that year. We gobbled it up, of course.

The NATO event looks like essentially the same thing — a trade show — except the newfangled hoopla is of a different kind. World leaders, all decked out in fine suits (nerds of a special kind), stroll the aisles admiring missiles and tanks engineered for maximum lethality. Billions are spent to make killing more efficient. While societies debate the cost of keeping one person alive in their final months, trillions flow into perfecting the technology of death. People who still think can see the terrible clarity in this inversion: when the soul recedes and the material world reigns, efficiency in killing becomes one of the highest values of our age.

Personally, I don't think there is a better definition of insanity than the way humans delight in war and death. Yes, there was a time when killing your neighbour because they wouldn't let you eat an apple growing on their side of the tribal fence made a tiny bit of sense. But what it has evolved into today is pure insanity. Humans are supposed to be capable of compassion. We are supposed to be able to sort out our differences with other tribes. We are supposed to care more about human life than we did in the cave days, when it was all about survival and who would or would not get the apple. What happened to all of that? For any of us to justify wholesale killing the way we do only proves we haven't gotten anywhere in hundreds of thousands of years.

It is all so screwed up, as is nearly everything. Nothing makes sense anymore. It is crazy to me that, for one small example, Canada can go ga-ga over its health system paying for the last months of a citizen's life — spending millions if necessary to keep them alive — yet the same government will spend roughly $2.2 million on a single Tomahawk cruise missile, a weapon designed to destroy high-value targets and capable of killing dozens of people (or more) in one strike. This is the kind of arithmetic they are running through their heads while strolling the aisles at their NATO war show: "Now tell me again — how many people will this weapon kill, and how much does it cost? That's some nice bang for the buck! I'll take 20 of 'em!" Insane.

The latest U.S. strikes on Iran have put one of Donald Trump's defining promises under pressure. He returned to the White House insisting that America could no longer keep paying for other countries' wars. During the campaign, he pointed to trillions spent in Iraq and Afghanistan while roads, factories, and communities at home were neglected. A long conflict with Iran would make that promise difficult to keep. The question is not whether the United States can defeat Iran conventionally. It can. The harder question is whether Washington can contain the fallout, absorb the cost, and keep a limited operation from widening. Presidents rarely stumble because their forces cannot win a battle. Trouble begins when war grows, bills rise, and its purpose becomes harder to explain.

Iran makes that distinction important. Discussion centers on missiles, air defenses, naval power, and Gulf force balances. But hardware superiority is not the same as success. Iraq and Afghanistan made that clear. The opening campaign can be swift; what follows is harder: sustaining forces, limiting instability, preserving support at home, and keeping costs from erasing gains.

Hamas's decision to relinquish governance of the Gaza Strip appears to be derived from domestic and international strategic needs, and to further weaken the Israeli propaganda.

Hamas's Administrative Withdrawal Amid Gaza's Humanitarian Catastrophe

After ruling Gaza for around two decades, Hamas recently announced that it was prepared and willing to hand over the Strip's governance to the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, the technocratic administration set up under US President Donald Trump's so-called Board of Peace. According to the spokesperson of Hamas, the decision was made to "remove any pretexts for the [Israeli] occupation." Indeed, the Israeli genocide, war crimes, occupation, and war of extermination against the Palestinian people persist despite the ceasefire, which took effect in October 2025.

According to a UNOCHA report, "nearly all of Gaza's current population of 2.1 million people has been displaced, lacking access to sufficient shelter, food, life-saving medical services, clean water, education, and livelihoods." According to some reports, the IDF has butchered more than 80,000 Palestinians from October 7, 2023, to January, 2025; the actual figure is estimated to be much higher, as many bodies are still buried under rubble.

Federal banking regulators have closed a long-standing loophole that allow illegal immigrants borrow money from U.S. financial institutions with little scrutiny of their legal status.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) jointly advised that banks "might consider" requiring customers to produce "evidence of continuing work authorization" and other documentation when assessing whether a borrower can repay a loan. The agencies also directed banks to watch for risky concentrations of lending in "geographic markets, employers or industries" that could be "disproportionately affected" by the Trump administration's expanded immigration enforcement.