“Keep our city out of your reckless war talk,” said San Diego’s mayor, Todd Gloria, Monday night after President Donald Trump’s rambling speech at a rally in Nebraska included a particularly violent mention of the California city. Gloria was among several Democratic political leaders who were incensed after Trump – moments after predicted the Republican […]
Iran’s economic adaptation over decades, marked by domestic production, regional trade and Asian partnerships, is on course to thwart Washington’s economic terrorism.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s prediction that Iran’s economy would soon collapse underscores the depth of delusion within the current American leadership.
“Iran is absolutely not sanctionable,” Deputy Economy Minister Mortaza Zamanian said this week as Tehran worked to keep trade flowing despite Washington’s latest sanctions campaign.
Zamanian cited Iran’s extensive borders, established commercial routes and longstanding trading relationships, saying that they make it impossible for external pressure simply to switch off the country’s economy.
His remarks came as Washington intensified its economic terrorism against Iranian oil, shipping, aviation, finance, technology and foreign companies supporting those sectors.
The new American campaign has been accompanied by extraordinary predictions from senior American officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s claim that Iran could have “nothing left to trade” within two weeks.
Speaking on September 27, Bessent claimed that Iran would probably make its final oil deliveries to China within two weeks, after which, he asserted, “they will have nothing.”
That prediction deserves comparison with history, because American administrations have imposed increasingly severe sanctions on Iran since 1979 while repeatedly expecting economic pressure eventually to produce collapse.
Yet the economy did not disappear, and Iran instead developed domestic industries, expanded regional commerce, strengthened trade with Asian powers and accumulated extensive experience operating outside Western financial channels.
The proposition that an economy which has absorbed American sanctions for almost half a century will suddenly disintegrate within two weeks therefore indicates the depth of delusion among the current US leadership.
Iran enters this confrontation possessing a large domestic market, extensive productive capacity, enormous energy resources and deeply established commercial relationships across Eurasia.
These are not temporary sanctions evasions assembled during the present crisis, but economic capabilities developed over decades through investment, industrial learning, regional integration and repeated adaptation to external restrictions.
The most important fact about Iran’s economic structure is its size, because a country with more than ninety million people possesses a domestic market capable of supporting extensive production independently of Western consumers.
The World Bank describes Iran as relatively diversified for an oil-exporting economy, with a substantial domestic market, a large workforce and significant activity across manufacturing, agriculture and services.
That domestic market sustains production across food, pharmaceuticals, construction materials, steel, petrochemicals, machinery, transportation, consumer goods and numerous intermediate industrial sectors serving Iranian households and companies.
Iran is therefore not an economy that must export continuously merely to keep its factories operating, because a substantial portion of its production already serves domestic consumption, investment and infrastructure.
That distinction becomes particularly important when external restrictions are designed around the assumption that cutting foreign trade will automatically paralyze domestic economic activity.
A country whose productive system is centered on domestic demand possesses an economic engine that continues operating even when international transactions become more complicated.
Iran has also spent decades building industrial capabilities specifically suited to its own resource base, population, infrastructure requirements and energy-intensive economy.
Steel production, petrochemicals, cement, refining, power generation, construction, food processing and pharmaceuticals represent substantial industrial ecosystems involving domestic engineering, manufacturing, logistics and skilled employment.
These capabilities have repeatedly expanded during periods when access to Western investment and technology was severely restricted, demonstrating that Iranian industrial development does not depend upon continuous Western participation.
Iran’s long exposure to sanctions has produced another asset that cannot be imposed or removed through a Treasury designation, namely a large body of accumulated technical and commercial experience.
When foreign manufacturers withdraw, Iranian companies have learned to redesign equipment, substitute components, develop domestic suppliers and work with companies from countries willing to maintain commercial relationships.
Academic research has documented this process in Iranian industries, including evidence that sanctions simultaneously restricted access to foreign technology while encouraging the development of domestic technological capabilities.
The resulting industrial knowledge extends beyond individual companies, because engineers, technicians, procurement specialists and managers have accumulated practical experience with restricted supply chains over successive decades.
A manufacturer that has operated under sanctions for years does not design its procurement system around the assumption that every international supplier will remain available indefinitely.
It develops alternatives as part of ordinary business planning, creating a commercial culture in which substitution, regional sourcing and domestic production are integrated into industrial decision-making.
This is one of the strongest reasons the prediction of sudden economic emptiness looks disconnected from Iran’s actual economic structure.
There is no single foreign supplier whose disappearance can remove Iran’s entire industrial capacity, because Iranian production is distributed across thousands of domestic enterprises and numerous regional supply relationships.
The system has been shaped by scarcity for so long that adaptation has become embedded within the operating methods of Iranian companies themselves.
Iran’s geographical position provides another form of economic strength that cannot be erased by financial sanctions, because the country physically connects several of the world’s most important commercial regions.
Iran borders Turkey, Iraq, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan, while its southern coastline provides direct access to the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman.
Those borders connect Iranian commerce with the Caucasus, Central Asia, South Asia, the Persian Gulf, Turkey and Iraq, creating commercial possibilities extending in several directions simultaneously.
This geography gives Iran direct access to neighboring markets while also placing the country along important transportation corridors linking Russia, Central Asia and the Indian Ocean.
The significance of Zamanian’s argument is therefore practical rather than rhetorical, because no financial authority can relocate Iran away from its geographic position.
Goods can move through different borders, suppliers can be found in different countries and exporters can redirect shipments towards different markets when commercial conditions change.
Iran has consequently developed a regional trading system that does not depend upon one border, one port, one customer or one foreign economic relationship.
Its trade with Iraq, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Caucasus, Central Asia and China represents an extensive commercial geography developed through years of interaction.
The World Bank has documented precisely this shift, noting that Iranian trade has increasingly pivoted towards neighboring countries and China as sanctions have restricted conventional international economic relationships.
That transformation is now an established feature of Iran’s economy rather than an emergency measure invented after the latest American escalation.
China gives Iran’s economic system another dimension because it combines enormous industrial capacity with sustained demand for Iranian energy and other commodities.
In other words, Iran possesses access to a major global market even while facing comprehensive American restrictions on its oil industry.
China also supplies Iranian companies with machinery, manufactured products, electronics, industrial equipment and intermediate goods required across the domestic production system.
The relationship therefore operates in both directions, with Iran supplying commodities and China supplying industrial goods, creating a commercial relationship considerably broader than the simple sale of sanctioned oil.
Iran consequently does not need unrestricted access to every Western market when it possesses substantial trade relationships with China and numerous neighboring economies.
Iran’s energy resources provide perhaps the clearest demonstration of the country’s underlying economic strength.
It ranks second globally in proven natural-gas reserves and fourth in proven crude-oil reserves, giving the country extraordinary resource depth beneath its existing industrial economy.
These resources provide not merely potential export earnings but also abundant domestic energy and petrochemical feedstocks supporting Iran’s manufacturing, electricity generation, transportation and industrial production.
Iran has consequently developed an extensive downstream economy that converts hydrocarbons into refined products, petrochemicals and industrial inputs rather than relying exclusively upon crude-oil exports.
The World Bank has specifically noted that sanctions encouraged additional processing of crude oil and hydrocarbons into petrochemicals, illustrating how restrictions have contributed to changes within Iran’s economic structure.
The country’s resource base also gives it a durable position in Asian energy markets, where large industrial economies require reliable supplies of oil and petrochemical products.
That is why American attempts to eliminate Iranian oil revenue confront persistent commercial demand rather than an absence of buyers interested in Iranian resources.
The financial system represents another area where Iran has developed substantial independent capacity after decades of exclusion from conventional Western banking.
Iran’s economic ties span a broad network of foreign entities, reflecting its commercial reach across banking, shipping, logistics, commodities, and manufacturing.
Against this background, Bessent’s latest prediction appears less to be an independent economic forecast than an expectation based on what the American campaign is intended to achieve.
His claim that Iran will have nothing left to trade within two weeks assumes that removing one major source of oil revenue effectively removes the economic foundations supporting the entire Iranian system.
Iran’s actual economic structure is considerably broader, because oil exports represent one component of national economic activity alongside manufacturing, agriculture, services, domestic consumption and regional commerce.
The World Bank estimates that Iran’s economy contracted during the Iranian year ending March 2026, while simultaneously describing an economy that has adapted to sanctions through changing trade patterns and alternative payment mechanisms.
Those facts should not be confused with economic collapse, because contraction in a particular period is fundamentally different from the disappearance of productive capacity, markets and commercial institutions.
The historical record is even more significant, because American sanctions have been imposed repeatedly since 1979 and have been intensified dramatically during successive administrations.
The sanctions regime has targeted Iranian banking, oil exports, investment, technology, shipping and foreign companies, with especially severe measures introduced during the 2010s and after Washington abandoned the nuclear agreement.
Iran nevertheless retained its industrial base, rebuilt oil exports after earlier restrictions, expanded non-oil exports and redirected a growing share of trade towards neighboring countries and China.
The American expectation that economic pressure would eventually produce decisive Iranian economic capitulation has therefore been tested repeatedly against an economy that continued adapting.
Predicting that a strategy that failed to trigger economic collapse over half a century will suddenly achieve it within fourteen days merits no serious consideration, because it reveals the naivety of its proponents.
Washington now possesses powerful financial tools, but financial power does not eliminate Iran’s factories, oilfields, farms, engineers, consumers, borders, ports, regional markets or established commercial relationships.
Iran enters the current phase with an economic architecture extending from domestic manufacturing plants to Chinese refineries, from Persian Gulf shipping networks to northern Eurasian trade corridors.
Its domestic market provides magnitude and size, its industrial base provides production, its energy reserves provide commodities and its geography provides access to several major commercial regions.
In other words, Iran already possesses the domestic capabilities and international relationships required to keep its economy operating beyond the reach of any single American economic sabotage.
Brazil’s presidential elections are approaching. And with them come controversies, debates, and different perspectives on what this event means for Brazil, for the BRICS, and for the future of the multipolar world.
In a recent article, respected Brazilian political analyst Valdir Bezerra argued that the 2026 elections represent a turning point in Brazilian history, potentially determining Brazil’s role in the world. According to Bezerra, the election pits, on the one hand, the “autonomist” tradition, represented by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, against, on the other hand, the “Westernist” one, represented by Flávio Bolsonaro.
With all due respect to Bezerra’s work, as one of the most highly regarded analysts in the Russian-Brazilian political debate, I would like to present a critical view of his position here. My intention is not to “refute” Bezerra’s argument, but merely to explain why I do not consider this opposition between autonomism and Westernism a valid premise for analyzing the current electoral dispute. Furthermore, I would also like to explain why I do not consider the 2026 election a decisive moment in determining Brazil’s international role.
Flávio is a Westernist, but Lula is not an autonomist
The umbrella terms used to define these two “traditions” of Brazilian foreign policy do not seem remotely applicable to the current reality. The terms through which many Brazilian thinkers once defined the opposition between those who support national sovereignty and development and those who advocate a subordinate position toward the Atlantic axis have long since become obsolete in the upper levels of Brazilian politics – where there is currently no figure worthy of the title of “autonomist.”
There is no need to comment here on the Westernist nature of Flávio Bolsonaro, who, like his father before him, advocates a foreign policy of total alignment with the United States and Israel, as well as an agenda hostile to the BRICS and multipolarist platforms. The central question, however, is to understand where Lula stands between Westernists and autonomists.
Brazil’s current president has governed the country on three occasions and played a leading role in some of the most significant events in international politics in the twenty-first century. He was a co-founder of the BRICS, built alliances with sovereigntist governments in the Americas – Venezuela, Bolivia, and Cuba – in the 2000s, maintained friendly ties with Iran, and, more recently, strengthened partnerships with Russia amid the Western-imposed sanctions regime, in addition to openly condemning the genocide in Gaza.
All of this is extremely admirable, but a fair analysis of Lula requires presenting the other side of his political profile: Lula has never been a “multipolarist,” but rather a skillful operator within the multilateralism of the Obama era in the 2000s. This is compounded by the fact that Lula was openly supported by the Democratic establishment in the 2022 elections. Indeed, Lula’s third government has been marked by controversies worthy of a classic “Westernist” leader: Lula did not recognize the Venezuelan elections, initiated tensions with Nicaragua, vetoed Venezuela’s accession to the BRICS, sidelined negotiations for a Mercosur-China agreement in order to prioritize a free-trade pact with Europe that is extremely detrimental to South American countries – an agreement that could even be described as neocolonial, turning Mercosur countries into commodity exporters and technology importers. This is without even mentioning the close, almost fully aligned relationship with the Macron regime in France.
Lula has certainly made several correct decisions, but if we go back a little in time, former President Jair Bolsonaro did as well: he refused to sanction Russia and to condemn the Special Military Operation – unlike Lula, who repeatedly condemned it -, strengthened partnerships with China, preserved the BRICS structure, and abandoned alignment with post-Trump U.S. foreign policy, becoming a target of Joe Biden.
In the end, weighing successes against successes and mistakes against mistakes, both sides appear very far from any “autonomist” ideal.
So, how should we define Lula and Flávio?
We can summarize this point in a single sentence: both Lula and Bolsonaro are, each in his own way, Westernists.
On several other occasions, I have commented in my column on how I view Brazil’s Sixth Republic – the current constitutional regime founded in 1988 – as a kind of “permanent color revolution.” On one side, an openly pro-U.S. and pro-Israel liberal right; on the other, an institutionalist liberal left, ideologically and financially connected to a major international lobby stretching from the U.S. Democrats to the European Union.
The current partial tensions between Lula and Trump are nothing new. Bolsonaro became an extremely troublesome figure in Brazil-U.S. relations as soon as Biden came to power. What many analysts fail to perceive is that Brazil-U.S. relations are defined by the dialectic between the left and right in Brazil and the Democrats and Republicans in the United States. Lula was Biden’s friend, just as Bolsonaro was Trump’s friend. If Lula wins the 2026 election, he will face many problems – at least until a possible Democratic return to power in the United States. If Flávio wins, Brazil and the United States will be in total alignment – but only as long as Trump remains in the White House.
It is this dynamic that allows the United States to keep Brazilian politics under stable control. Washington does not need to stage a Maidan in Brazil. Indeed, the formula of “coup + dictatorship” does not tend to work in large and diverse continental countries such as Brazil – and the greatest proof of this is Brazil’s own experience during its military regime, which was initially backed by the United States but later became an autonomous, non-aligned regime following an internal self-coup among the military. It is no coincidence that the United States endorsed Brazil’s democratization, helping to create precisely the political regime that exists today.
On one side, a right supported by the Republicans, Israel, and the transnational neoconservative lobby; on the other, a left that obeys the Democrats and the Europeans. Lula was a major multilateralist at a time when Washington, under Obama, encouraged precisely this kind of veneer over U.S. unipolarity; Bolsonaro was an open U.S. puppet at a time when Washington, under Trump, demanded precisely that. The difference is very small – or nonexistent.
And what does the 2026 election really represent?
At the international level, nothing or very little.
If he wins, Lula will come under pressure while Trump remains in power. And over the past four years, Lula has already shown that he compensates for American hostility by becoming even more closely aligned with the Europeans. On the other hand, if Flávio wins, we will have at least a period of total alignment with the United States, which could change following a possible Democratic victory in the next presidential elections. It is a very clear choice between Republicans-Israel and Democrats-EU. “Autonomism” is not part of the equation.
At the domestic level, however, many factors are at stake.
It is on the domestic front that the debate over the election should be concentrated. After all, no Brazilian will vote for one candidate or the other because of Palestine or the BRICS – which, although legitimate causes, are distant realities for the average citizen. Domestically, we have a Lula who is becoming increasingly weakened by the side effects of years of alliance with the Judiciary Branch – which is now being scrutinized and exposed in the context of the Banco Master corruption scandal. On the other side, Flávio is recovering ground that was once considered lost, and the two now appear statistically tied in the polls.
The Judiciary accumulated extraordinary powers under Lula, to the point of imprisoning peaceful protesters and elderly people on charges of “terrorism” simply because they participated in pro-Bolsonaro demonstrations. The hostility between the Judiciary and Bolsonarism cannot be reversed except through a victory by Flávio that culminates in the appointment of Bolsonarist judges to the Supreme Court – thereby reshaping the course of the Republic itself.
We can summarize the situation by saying that Lula would give the Sixth Republic a new lease on life, while Flávio would accelerate its collapse. As long as the Sixth Republic exists, no genuinely “autonomist” alternative will emerge in Brazil because the Brazilian constitutional system itself prevents such an alternative. But this does not mean that the imminent collapse of this system would result in a “multipolar dawn” in Brazil, since there is no political movement in the country – apart from the extremely “Westernist” Bolsonarist movement itself – with sufficient strength to establish a new state project.
The conclusion may be frustrating for the more optimistic and hopeful, but what appears to be about to happen in Brazil in 2026 is absolute nullity. With Lula or Flávio, little is likely to change. Brazil will remain a declining middle power, politically subordinate to the United States, but with a certain degree of freedom to engage multilaterally with the Eurasian powers – while domestically, the institutions of the Sixth Republic continue to destroy themselves.
Ian Proud’s arrest by secret police at a London airport marks a new low in how far the deep state can go to control a false narrative. But it also shows a new level of fear.
As mad as it sounds, it does appear that Western European nations at least are preparing themselves to go to war with Russia at some point in the not-too-distant future. What is particularly worrying is there seems to be a distinct vacuum in all areas of what we could broadly call ‘media’ in questioning this narrative. Thirty years ago it was considered normal for journalists to be the source of vexing questions towards state actors and to generally be a pain in the arse as they questioned every decision made and every idea presented. It was our job to be anti-establishment and to take a very cynical view of “policy”. There was nothing remarkable about this. It was what we did. Being despised by the greater powers was part of the job; working anti-social hours and having few friends also came with it.
Today there are no journalists in what we call ‘mainstream’ media doing this. They have been replaced by younger, more social-media-savvy ‘content creators’ who believe that journalism is more or less a grammatical role, where the raw material is handed to you with all the information therein, and the role of the journalist is simply to refine it to the style of the day for mass consumption.
The danger of this transition is that nearly all of what we are being presented with as news is actually fake, or at best heavily redacted to keep the masses where the elite want them to be: restrained, prepped and misinformed.
The Ukraine war is an excellent example. The main reason why people in the U.S. and UK are so fabulously biased against Russia and are so sympathetic towards the corrupt elite in Kiev is that for years they have been brainwashed with ‘news’ about Russia which has been negative and which cunningly feeds a racist bias – a prejudice which has been cultivated over at least a decade, if not more. The result is that now a number of lies have become established in newsrooms where journalists, even those who know, simply navigate around nuance and present a fairy-tale story, designed to be understood by the masses who have no other sources of information to even question it.
Just recently, Western news outlets reported a “plague” in Russia, with stories about a “lockdown”, following a case of a worker in a laboratory dying of pneumonia in circumstances which are still not certain. Western media, as part of their role to keep Russia-phobia at its peak, are so locked and loaded that their ‘hair-trigger’ reactions to bad news stories from Russia are understandable. They are also hungry for clickbait, and such stories feed a starved audience which has already had its first fix of such COVID hysteria stories and wants more. The truth is entirely immaterial. Hysteria and lies are what’s being fed at a feverish rate by ‘content creators’ red in tooth and claw, foaming at the mouth with their desire to serve the deep state and the elites who have invested so much in an agenda.
The contrast between Russia and the West is interesting, though, when we look at media. In Russia just recently, the BBC correspondent based in Moscow made the internet buzz on social media with his short interview with Russia’s foreign minister, who was kind enough to answer his loaded question about Russia’s war ideology with Ukraine. What absolutely no one noted was how Russia is happy to accommodate foreign journalists who have such a distinct agenda to feed the Russia-phobia back home, while Russian journalists have been banned in those EU capitals for years. Old Europe, which once held such values as a free press so dearly, has adopted the Soviet model, while Russia is actually more advanced when it comes to such tenets of what we expect in a democracy. Russia has no fear of the awkward questions, unlike the West.
We should be asking ourselves who really benefits from a war with Russia.
Is it too sceptical and ‘conspiracy theorising’ to assume that the industrial military complex has been successfully lobbying for such a war for AT LEAST a decade, and critically, it succeeded in convincing the intelligence and military establishment in the UK to use its leverage with media to provide journalists with the raw material which enhances a prejudice against Russia?
Normally such an idea could be dismissed as pure nonsense. But just consider how far the UK, for example, has gone to eradicate all media coverage which could be deemed as at least leaning towards Russia – or even simply just holding the UK government to account by asking the questions that British journalists have stopped asking. If the elite in the UK who control the loss-making newspapers (think about that) are so sure of their rationale that Russia is the enemy whom we must go to war with, why are they so terrified of journalists – or anyone, for that matter – simply holding a view which questions the narrative?
I can’t be the only Western pundit who believes that double agents Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were not poisoned with nerve agent Novichok in Salisbury in 2018, which was reported at the time as “sparking a huge diplomatic crisis between Britain and Russia”. Isn’t the real story that British security chiefs decided, upon discovering that Sergei Skripal was actually a triple agent who was feeding information back to Moscow, that he was dispensable? And what better way to supposedly teach the Russians a lesson, while blaming Moscow for his death, than to murder him and his daughter using a nerve agent which either was Novichok – which a British lab just down the road from where the Skripals lived had conveniently sitting in a fridge – or a similar poison? What’s important to note about Novichok is that the victims usually die instantly upon contact with it. What is likely is that the Skripals were not poisoned by the Russian drug but a British version of another nerve agent. It is a shocking example of how poor British journalism is that hacks in the UK simply report the Skripal incident of Novichok poisoning without a single shred of evidence to back it up. They don’t even add a note of scepticism in their reporting about the drug and who is “claiming” that it is Novichok.
We see the same shocking level of atrocious, biased reporting about the Ukraine war, which the British public were simply told through the media narrative was an “invasion” by Putin’s army. No background, no nuance, no glimpse of Russia’s perspective, as no one can cope, it would seem, with the story being clouded by facts.
And it’s the same with the Russia “plague” story, as it was with the RAF base “attack” story recently, which was probably just local thieves buying contraband gasoline from corrupt U.S./UK soldiers looking to make a quick buck at the UK base. Notice how quickly Trump used the story as a basis to move all U.S. bombers off the base and back to U.S. soil, where they are completely useless in his so-called Middle East war. For Trump it was an opportunity for another media stunt which keeps him on the front pages and everyone guessing. He was probably grateful to the British for being offered the raw material. Another problem of this new generation of journalists is how compliant they are to report “news” which isn’t news at all, but just material used as a distraction, one day at a time. Trump is a master at manipulating media with this game, usually saying something so stupid and so controversial, which draws journalists away from doing real journalism. If you can occupy journalists with writing up stories about the latest idiotic comment or statement by Trump, then you control them as you control their time.
Just look at how the Epstein story is not being reported and investigated. How Trump got off scot-free, as since February 28th journalists’ attention was diverted to the war with Iran – which is one of the reasons why Trump keeps this story alive with constant troop movements and talk of a massive attack after midterms. People have not made the link with the Epstein material being leaked and the war with Iran kicking off practically on the same day.
For the British, the “Russians are coming” story has no cynical write-up by journalists who are 100 percent compliant with its erroneous narrative. The fear of elites in London is palpable, though, that it will always be questioned by fringe actors taking up bandwidth on social media. In the past this was the RT correspondent in London, who was able to ask difficult questions and generally be a thorn in the side of the Westminster village which controlled journalists like rats held in a basket. The main reason why RT was kicked out of the UK was that it offered a style of reporting on UK politics which had since left us thirty years ago – such is the murky world of the deep state and how it saw how in Brussels journalists could be manipulated until they become stenographers for it.
Yet even with this new Stalinist style of media control in the UK, the state is wobbly. Even with the impressive set-up it has now of total media dominance, where journalists pump out total garbage about the Ukraine war or what they are told to write about the Middle East, still the fear is there.
The example of video blogger Ian Proud, a former UK diplomat once based in Moscow, is worrying but poignant. Simply going to Moscow to attend a conference where Putin was speaking was enough to have him get the full Stasi treatment at Heathrow airport – detained and all digital content seized.
Proud’s YouTube interviews, with his dowdy style of presenting, are proving to be popular as he simply offers a more sober view of both Russia and the UK Foreign Office, his former employer. These interviews are getting the attention of UK spooks, who are so nervous about the truth getting out about Russia and the shameful lies which are being packaged now for the British public, that they had to give Proud the American prison ‘shake down’ routine. Britain, a country which once was a beacon for the world with its view of liberty and in particular its passion for free speech, has fallen to a level which we can only compare to a West African country which has just had a new dictator installed, complete with black aviators and epaulettes. What the Proud Heathrow airport case shows is that this new regime in power will stop at nothing to control a narrative, and that the last bastion of free speech – YouTube podcasts – is the next target. The more successful Proud’s channel becomes, the more inevitable it is that he will be forced to leave the UK and settle in Russia to continue practising free speech. The shoulder tassels of Britain’s deep state will not sleep well until the country has a media narrative which would make Joe Stalin blush – and British journalists are helping them with this goal.
Originally published by Pacific Forum, this article is republished with permission. While operational planners in the United States, the Republic of Korea and Japan have made historic strides institutionalizing trilateral security cooperation, the credibility of deterrence ultimately hinges on a more punishing variable: wartime sustainment. Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo have expanded joint exercises, real-time missile […]
Washington is limiting the parts it licenses to the Commercial Aircraft Corp of China (Comac), the maker of the C919 passenger jet, triggering fears among Chinese pundits that it could ban the US-made engines the jet relies on. The Trump administration has been using China’s reliance on US aviation suppliers as leverage in trade talks, […]
Employees of Georgia’s largest healthcare system have until Nov. 1 to get the flu vaccine or an approved exemption, or they will be suspended without pay. If suspended employees don’t submit proof of vaccination by 4 p.m. Nov. 15, they will be fired.
According to the Emory Healthcare website, the vaccine mandate applies to all employees, including contractors and remote workers.
Employees suspended for missing the first deadline, Nov. 1, 11:59 p.m., will not be allowed to use their paid time off.
COVID-19shots are not mandated, but employees are “encouraged to engage in shared decision-making with their provider” on whether or not to get the vaccine.
A spokesperson for the healthcare system said the requirement is intended to protect patients and staff and to encourage everyone to get vaccinated.
Dr. Sherika Newman of Doctor in the Family, a physician-led patient advocacy and health consulting service in Atlanta, told CBS News that flu vaccine requirements are common in healthcare.
“Asking health care providers or people who interact with patients to take the flu vaccine early every year is what we always mandate so that we are protecting ourselves from spreading viruses to vulnerable populations,” Newman said.
She said everyone should get vaccinated, not just healthcare workers, although only healthcare workers will lose their jobs if they don’t get the vaccine.
Cleveland Clinic: 2024-2025 flu shot increased risk of getting the flu
Flu vaccine effectiveness can vary, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which cites studies since 2009-10 showing effectiveness between 19% and 60%. The major factors influencing vaccine effectiveness are a person’s age and health and how well the vaccines match the circulating virus strains.
It wasn’t the first study to find that flu vaccines could actually increase the risk of becoming ill.
A 2023 study co-authored by Dr. Anthony Fauci acknowledged that “viruses replicating in the respiratory mucosal environment continue to present a particular challenge for developing effective vaccines with strong protection.”
“The flu shot has never really prevented transmission of the flu and in some years (i.e., last year) the efficacy of preventing the flu is actually negative,” said Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer at Children’s Health Defense. “Flu would blow through a vaccinated population with nearly the same ease as it would an unvaccinated population.”
A 2012 peer-reviewed study published in Clinical Infectious Diseasesshowed that children who received the flu vaccine were at significantly increased risk of contracting non-flu respiratory virus infections.
Moderna’s mRNA flu shot added to the mix this year
According to the CDC’s FluView vaccination chart, as of Sept. 26, flu cases were at “minimal” levels across almost all 50 U.S. states, including Georgia.
Flu season typically begins in October and ends in May, with highest transmission rates in December and February.
The CDC recommends flu shots for people age 6 months and older, assuming they have no medical conditions that make vaccination risky.
Flu shot formulations differ each year based on information about which strains may circulate that year. The formulations aren’t tested for safety or efficacy before they’re distributed to the public.
In the past, most flu vaccines were made from a flu virus grown in eggs, and then inactivated and made into a vaccine. Or, they were made from recombinant protein vaccines, which have pieces of the flu pathogen that the immune system learns to recognize and fight.
Rates of U.S. healthcare workers who take the COVID-19 and flu shots have also been declining in recent years.
Numbers are lowest among health professionals who work in nursing homes. In the 2024-25 flu season, only about 42% of those workers got the shot, compared with about 81% of workers in acute care hospitals.
When Eric Leas, a public-health scientist, discovered packages of “magic mushroom” gummies for sale in a smoke shop, he wondered: Were these candies even legal? Had they been properly tested, and did anyone actually know what constituted a safe dose? This Aeon piece follows Leas down a rabbit hole as he investigates whether the Amanita muscaria products currently on store shelves are as safe as their candy-like packaging suggests.
I found a product with a very high reported amount of muscimol. It was a gummy product, one in a benign-looking package that did not have childproofing or clear warnings. I began doing the calculation no one wants to do. If a young child ate the entire package, mistaking it for candy, could they die? I took the reported amount of muscimol, the toxicology estimates (the LD50), a conversion used to translate dosing between species, and the average weight of a small child. The result looked bad. Bad enough that I did not quite trust myself. So, I called a friend, Matthieu Rouffet, a medicinal chemist and the dean of science at a local college, who does toxicology calculations more often than I do. I wanted him to tell me I had made an error. Instead, he was alarmed too.
Once again Karl W. Miller has put numbers to a problem that most of the commentariat still treats as a temporary price spike. His latest forward outlook, “The Five-Year Global Energy Crisis,” dated October 3, makes an argument that should alarm every finance ministry from Berlin to Jakarta. The war’s damage to Gulf energy infrastructure is not a disruption that ends when the shooting stops. It is a reconstruction problem measured in years and trillions of dollars, and while it is solved, the world will be short of the fuels that run its economy.
A ceasefire is not a repair crew
Miller’s central insight is simple. A ceasefire can reopen a shipping lane overnight. It cannot manufacture a compressor, mobilize commissioning engineers, or pay a contractor. The next phase of this crisis, he writes, is a competition for cash, equipment, qualified contractors and finished fuel.
His cost model is sobering. In his aggressive case, rebuilding the damaged Gulf energy system requires $1.16 trillion in total program funding. Under prolonged stress, with scarce equipment, rising prices and delays, the bill reaches $2.53 trillion. Even his most favorable case runs to nearly half a trillion dollars. He is careful to say these are model outputs, not contractor quotes, and that the true extent of the damage is the largest unknown. An April assessment put energy-related repair costs at only $34-58 billion. But the direction of his argument doesn’t depend on the exact figure. Every month of delay makes the same repair more expensive, because the global market for specialized equipment and crews is already stretched by LNG expansions, refinery maintenance and power projects elsewhere.
The timeline is just as stark. Weighted by cost, the rebuild averages almost five years from today. Only 60% of the work finishes by 2031, and the longest-lead packages run to seven years.
The money problem comes first
The most original part of Miller’s analysis is about cash. A damaged refinery may be worth rebuilding and technically repairable, and still sit idle because the government that owns it has to pay for food imports, salaries, electricity and water first. Lost export revenue doesn’t stop those bills. When a state borrows to keep paying them, that money can’t also pay an engineering contractor.
Iraq shows the problem in practice. In July, it faced a monthly public salary obligation of about $5.96 billion with a funding shortfall of $2.52 billion. A government in that position rebuilds nothing. It pays its people, and the export capacity that would restore its revenue waits. Miller’s warning is that this trap can stop reconstruction before it starts: without engineering funds and vendor deposits, factory slots go to other customers and delivery dates slip.
The fuel gap is the global transmission belt
For the rest of the world, the damage arrives through diesel and jet fuel. The figures Miller cites are already severe. Gulf diesel net exports in August were just over a quarter of prewar levels. Combined Gulf and Russian diesel exports were 1.6 million barrels a day below February. Global oil stocks had fallen 507 million barrels since February, and global refinery throughput in August was 4.2 million barrels a day below a year earlier.
Looking forward, Miller’s severe case assumes a shortfall of at least 3 million barrels a day of diesel and jet fuel, every year for five years. That’s about 1.1 billion barrels a year and 5.5 billion barrels over the period. He is explicit that this is a deliberate stress test, not a forecast, and that a faster-recovery path closes the gap by the fourth year. But the stress case is a plausible one. Restored capacity can be absorbed by refinery outages, deferred maintenance, recovering demand and delivery bottlenecks. Damaged refineries don’t come back at full capacity on the first day.
Inventories cannot fill a gap of that size for that long. Five and a half billion barrels is far beyond any country’s emergency stocks, which is why drawing down Europe’s reserves now, under pressure from Washington, only buys weeks. Without enough new supply, the balance can close in only one way: by using less fuel.
How the shortage reprices everything
The economic damage extends well beyond the missing barrels. When supply falls short, buyers bid for the marginal cargo, and that bid sets the price for all the fuel still being bought. Miller’s illustration: a $40-a-barrel premium across 10 million barrels a day of purchases adds $146 billion a year to fuel bills. Applied only to the 3 million missing barrels, it would add $43.8 billion and badly understate the real cost.
Scarcity also reprices credit. At $150 a barrel, a buyer purchasing 1 million barrels a day needs $2.25 billion to hold 15 extra days of inventory, and $3 billion at $200. Longer voyages tie up more fuel and more money in transit. A supplier can have the barrels while its customer can’t get a letter of credit. And a cargo that wins a bidding war for one country leaves another short. Competition redistributes the shortage before it eliminates it.
Who absorbs the shock
Diesel carries the crisis into the real economy. It runs road freight, farm machinery, mines, construction fleets and backup generators, none of which can switch fuels quickly. Higher diesel costs pass straight into freight rates and food prices, and when diesel isn’t available at any price, activity simply stops. Jet fuel carries the shock into aviation: higher fares, fewer routes and higher air cargo surcharges. Kerosene hits the households with the least room to adjust, in countries where it is still used for heating, cooking and lighting.
Miller’s regional assessment follows the money:
Europe competes for replacement diesel and jet cargoes while running its refineries close to their limits.
South and Southeast Asia face higher import bills, currency pressure and greater need for trade credit.
Africa and smaller importers are the most vulnerable. Tenders fail, credit lines run out, and small cargoes become uneconomic long before global stocks are exhausted.
The United States and other Atlantic suppliers face export demand competing with their own diesel needs, with refineries running so hard they have little tolerance for outages.
The ultimate balancing mechanism is demand destruction: freight deferred, low-margin factories idled, flights cancelled, and poorer importers losing every bidding contest. Miller warns against mistaking that for recovery. Lower consumption caused by rationing through price or credit is not a repaired energy system.
Case study: Europe
Europe shows what Miller’s framework looks like in practice. The continent burns about 5 million barrels of diesel a day, fuel for the trucks that move its goods, the tractors that plant its crops and, as winter approaches, the boilers that heat millions of homes.
How much does Europe produce, and how much does it import? Running flat out, EU refineries can produce roughly 4.5 to 5 million barrels a day of diesel and gasoil, and they are already operating close to their maximum. That leaves Europe roughly 85-90% self-sufficient at best. The remaining 10-15% comes from imports, and that margin sets the price for the entire market. Kepler puts the EU’s diesel imports from outside the bloc at about 580,000 barrels a day this year. Britain, which lost much of its refining capacity over the past two decades, is far more exposed: it imports more than half the diesel it uses.
The origin of those imports has changed dramatically. Russia was long Europe’s largest outside supplier until the EU embargoed Russian diesel in 2023. The Gulf filled much of the gap, until the war cut it off. Since March, the United States has supplied more than half of Europe’s diesel imports, and more than two-thirds in August and September. Europe has traded dependence on Moscow for dependence on Washington, and Washington has just shown it is willing to use that leverage, threatening an export ban unless Europe released its emergency stocks.
Europe’s diesel depends on imported crude as well. Its refineries run almost entirely on foreign oil: the EU imports about 97% of the crude it consumes. But the Gulf was never Europe’s main crude supplier. In 2025, Gulf Cooperation Council states supplied only about 7% of EU crude imports, Iraq another 5.8%. Europe’s crude now comes chiefly from the United States, Norway and Kazakhstan, which together supplied nearly half of EU petroleum imports in the second quarter of 2026. The volume has held steady; the bill rose 56%. But the crude isn’t the crude Europe’s refineries were built for. Much of Europe’s refining capacity was designed around medium sour crudes such as Russia’s Urals, with conversion units that turn the heavier part of the barrel into diesel. American shale crude is light and sweet. It refines readily into gasoline and naphtha, but it yields proportionally less diesel and jet fuel, the very products Europe is short of. As Miller notes, sour crude isn’t uniquely required to make diesel; the replacement barrels work, but not at the same yield or cost. The Gulf supply Europe really lost was finished diesel from Gulf refineries, and that is what the United States has replaced. The result is a double dependence: Washington is now Europe’s largest supplier of both the crude its refineries run and the diesel they can’t make. Even the non-American barrels carry risk. Most Kazakh crude reaches Europe through a Black Sea terminal at Novorossiysk, on Russian soil, a route that has already been hit by Ukrainian drones.
How long can Europe store diesel? This is where Europe’s apparent cushion turns out to be thinner than it looks. Unlike crude oil, which can sit in salt caverns for decades, diesel degrades. Under ideal conditions, conventional ultra-low-sulfur diesel can typically be stored for six to twelve months. With stabilizers, biocides and well-managed tanks, that can be extended to 18 to 24 months. Oxidation forms gums and sediment, water collects, and microbes grow in the fuel.
European diesel has an added problem. The EU standard, EN 590, allows up to 7% biodiesel in road diesel, and biodiesel oxidizes faster than petroleum diesel. Concawe, the European refiners’ research association, recommends a maximum storage time of six months for biodiesel and current blends containing it. Strategic stockholders can extend that by holding biodiesel-free product, but even then the reserve has to be rotated, sold into the market and replaced with fresh fuel on a cycle of a year or two.
That changes what Europe’s reserve really is. EU countries and Britain held about 52 million tonnes of gasoil and diesel in June, including nearly 38 million tonnes of emergency reserves, roughly two months of consumption. But a diesel reserve is not a stockpile Europe can fill once and forget. It is a stock that must be continually turned over, which means continually bought, and bought in the same tight market Miller describes. Every barrel released now to satisfy Washington has to be replaced later, at a higher price, from suppliers who are already short. And because diesel degrades, Europe can’t solve the problem by buying extra while it’s cheap and holding it for years. A reserve with a shelf life of a year or two cannot cover a structural deficit that Miller’s severe case puts at five years.
The conclusion for Europe is stark. It produces most of its own diesel but has no spare refining capacity. It depends on imports for the margin that sets prices, and those imports now come mostly from a single supplier that has shown it will use them as leverage. And its emergency reserve is both perishable and finite. In Miller’s terms, Europe is one of the buyers most exposed to the marginal cargo, and the least able to wait out a five-year shortage.
The implications for the global economy
Put together, Miller’s analysis describes a world economy facing a prolonged supply shock, not a temporary one. Fuel costs feed into nearly everything, so central banks fighting the inflation this crisis has already produced will face pressure for longer than they expect. Emerging-market importers face a combination of high fuel bills, weak currencies and tighter credit that has historically produced debt crises and unrest. And the reconstruction itself will absorb capital, equipment and specialist labor that would otherwise build new energy supply elsewhere, so the shortage may delay the investment needed to end it.
Miller’s strategic conclusion is the one policymakers least want to hear. Ending the conflict removes one source of disruption. It does not repair the energy system, which requires a separate sequence of financing, engineering, manufacturing, construction and commissioning that will take years. Until that is done, reliable fuel and the cash to buy it will determine which economies absorb the burden. Neither will be distributed evenly.
The Trump administration and its supporters – including the Wall Street Journal editorial page – are working overtime these days to spin the news around the Iran war to make it appear that the US is winning and Tehran had better submit to Washington’s demands before it is wrecked, maybe even “annihilated.” Indeed, Trump is preparing the option of bringing the military hammer down on Iran after the midterm elections if Tehran has not surrendered by then.
In effect, Trump and his supporters are waging a “maximum pressure campaign” against Iran in the mainstream media.
This campaign is sure to fail. If anything, it reflects the Trump administration’s desperation. The president started a war the United States was bound to lose, and there is little he can do now to change that basic fact.
Trump’s propaganda campaign has two dimensions – one economic and the other military.
First, the administration argues that Iran is being economically strangled by the US naval blockade coupled with Operation Economic Outcast, the strategy announced by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on 24 August 2026. At the same time, it maintains that oil is once again flowing out of the Gulf at rates not far below those that prevailed on 27 February 2026. The implications are obvious: the economic punishment being inflicted on Iran will force it to capitulate soon, while the US economy – and the international community more generally – is well on its way to recovery.
Second, the US is now building up its military forces for a massive military strike after the mid-term elections, when Trump will be free of electoral constraints. This growing threat of a devastating US attack, coupled with the economic pain being inflicted on Iran, is designed to get Tehran to quit now, before its situation becomes even worse.
There are huge problems with this strategy. It sounds persuasive when the mainstream media dutifully purveys it, but it falls apart when one looks closely at what is actually happening.
Consider the military dimension. The headlines say the US is sending 10,000 additional troops and a third aircraft carrier – the USS Theodore Roosevelt – to the Persian Gulf region, creating the impression that Iran will soon be confronting three American carriers. Moreover, the additional troops – on top of the roughly 50,000 US troops already in the region – are portrayed as evidence that Trump is seriously considering putting boots on the ground.
The aircraft carrier story, however, is quite different from what the headlines suggest. The Roosevelt is reportedly being sent to replace the USS George Washington, while the supposed third carrier, the USS George H.W. Bush, has already left the Middle East and is now in Thailand. Thus, there is presently only one carrier in the region. Indeed, this is the first time during the war that the US has only one carrier in the Middle East, and it is difficult to imagine that there will be more than two – if even that many – after the midterm elections.
The larger problem is that the Iran war is severely straining the US Navy. Its senior leaders warn that the current operational tempo is not sustainable indefinitely. Carriers and other warships are being rotated through extremely long deployments, which cause significant maintenance and readiness problems that will have to be addressed at some point. This problem is compounded by the fact that US ships have lost access to nearby logistics facilities and increasingly depend on a supply chain that reaches back to Diego Garcia, which is about 2,500 miles from the Persian Gulf.
But even if three carriers are available to strike Iran, what could they accomplish in a renewed air campaign that the US and Israel could not accomplish together during the failed 40-day bombing campaign between 28 February and 8 April 2026? Some might argue that the US could finally destroy Iran’s oil infrastructure. The problem, however, is that Iran retains a second-strike capability and could retaliate by wreaking havoc on the oil infrastructure of the GCC states. One shudders to think what the consequences would be for the international economy.
On top of all this, the US faces a serious shortage of high-end weaponry, which is one of the main reasons it ended the 40-day bombing campaign and has shied away in recent weeks from engaging in tit-for-tat bombing exchanges with Iran. One would think that the shortage of critical munitions – both for striking Iran and defending against Iranian retaliation – would limit the scope and intensity of any renewed strategic bombing campaign, thereby reducing its chances of success.
Regarding ground forces, simply counting the number of U.S. military personnel in the Middle East is misleading when assessing the possibility of putting boots on the ground. What matters most in a ground war is the number of troops in actual ground-combat formations. I estimate that, of the roughly 50,000 U.S. military personnel already stationed in the region, about 5,000 belong to such formations: roughly 2,200 Marines and sailors in the 11th MEU, 2,000 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne, and possibly another 800 Army personnel in Kuwait associated with Task Force Spartan. Of the roughly 10,000 additional personnel now being sent to the region, another 2,200 belong to the 13th MEU. Most of the remainder are sailors assigned to the Theodore Roosevelt carrier and its supporting warships. Thus, given present deployment plans, I estimate that by late November the United States will have just under 7,500 personnel in ground-combat formations in the Gulf region—roughly 4,400 in the two MEUs and 2,800 Army personnel.
There is no way a ground force that small provides a promising option against a country with Iran’s population and geography. Even tripling that number to roughly 23,000—which is highly unlikely—would not fundamentally alter the problem. Retired Army General Barry McCaffrey estimates that securing the Strait of Hormuz would require roughly 150,000 troops and three to six months of fighting. For comparison, Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 with roughly 190,000 military personnel, and that force proved insufficient to hold much of the territory Russia initially captured. Iran has more than twice the population Ukraine had at the beginning of the Russian invasion, and its geography is considerably more forbidding for an invading army.
Simply put, the United States has not assembled anything remotely resembling the ground force required for a large-scale invasion of Iran. Indeed, from Tehran’s perspective, an American decision to launch such an offensive with anything resembling the forces presently available would present Iran with an opportunity to fight the United States under exceptionally favorable circumstances.
At the risk of beating a dead horse, two further points are in order. First, given how unpopular the Iran war is with the American public, there would almost certainly be a huge uproar if large numbers of US soldiers began coming home in body bags. Second, how are the Marines, who are aboard amphibious assault ships, supposed to land on Iranian territory if the missile and drone threat from Iran is forcing the US Navy to keep those large and vulnerable ships far from the Iranian coast?
Let’s turn to the economic dimension. There is no question that the US is doing great damage to Iran’s economy and inflicting enormous hardship on the Iranian people. But that has been true for a long time. The key question is whether that punishment can coerce Iran into surrendering to American demands.
There is no evidence that Iran is caving in to American pressure, and there are three reasons to doubt that it will. First, it is exceedingly difficult to find a case in the historical record in which an economic blockade by itself caused the target state to surrender. Second, Iran sees the US and Israel as existential threats to Iran – hardly surprising given the genocidal language Trump has used when talking about Iran – and states that believe their survival is at stake are exceptionally difficult to coerce. Third, Iran has a formidable escalation option if the economic pain becomes too great: it can attack the oil and gas infrastructure of the Gulf states and Israel, as well as their highly vulnerable desalination plants.
In short, it is difficult to see economic pressure alone forcing Iran to accept Trump’s terms. That is probably one reason the United States is once again talking about using military force. But, as I argued above, that option holds little promise of producing a favorable outcome.
Finally, there is no question that more oil is flowing out of the Gulf today than was the case in early September. But both Iran and the Houthis are working hard to reverse that trend. Iran is attacking US-escorted tankers on a daily basis, while the Houthis are targeting vital oil infrastructure inside Saudi Arabia. Moreover, despite the increased flow of oil out of the Gulf, gasoline prices remain very high, and a host of other economic problems show no signs of easing anytime soon, including high diesel prices, persistent inflation, elevated mortgage rates, and dangerously high bond yields across much of the West.
All of this is to say that the Trump administration has powerful economic incentives to shut this war down as soon as possible. Indeed, it would hardly be surprising if there were a growing sense of desperation behind closed doors among Trump and his advisers.
This, of course, helps explain why the Trump administration and its allies are waging a media campaign designed to persuade Iran that its days are numbered and that it had better concede to American demands before it is too late. The facts, however, tell a different story. The success of this strategy therefore depends on Trump being able to bamboozle the Iranians into believing that Godzilla is closing in on them. There is little reason to think Tehran will be hoodwinked.
The White House is monitoring reports of a suspected plague case and related quarantine measures in Russia’s Irkutsk region and is assessing possible options, a Trump administration official said.
“The administration is aware, monitoring the outbreak, and assessing options,” the official told Axios.
A State Department spokesperson separately said the United States is aware of reports of a fatal case of suspected pneumonic plague in Irkutsk Oblast and is tracking developments with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other agencies.
“Many details have not been confirmed. We encourage Russian authorities to share accurate information quickly and openly,” a spokesperson said.
The reports center on the death of 28-year-old Darya Shipilova, a laboratory technician at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East. Independent Russian outlet Lyudi Baikala reported that she broke a test tube containing the bacterium that causes pneumonic plague on Sept. 25. She was hospitalized in Shelekhov on Sept. 29 with severe pneumonia and died overnight between Oct. 1 and Oct. 2, according to local accounts.
Russian authorities have not confirmed that Shipilova had plague. Rospotrebnadzor, the federal public health agency, said she was diagnosed with “pneumonia of unknown etiology” and that expanded testing found no microorganisms linked to her work. The agency said a review found no laboratory accident involving pathogenic microorganisms at the institute and that the sanitary and epidemiological situation in Irkutsk, Shelekhov and the wider region remained stable.
Alexei Tsydenov, head of the neighboring republic of Buryatia, said earlier on Telegram that the woman “died, maybe of the plague,” while adding that there were no plague outbreaks in Buryatia.
After the death, authorities placed nearly 200 people who had contact with Shipilova under medical observation, with most hospitalized for monitoring, Russian media reported. Irkutsk Gov. Igor Kobzev said those under observation showed no signs of illness and that laboratory tests were negative.
“All identified contact persons have been placed under medical observation. As of today, the contacts show no signs of illness, and their laboratory test results are negative,” Kobzev wrote on Telegram, according to The Moscow Times.
Several hospitals in the region imposed temporary restrictions or quarantines, and the director of an aluminum plant in Shelekhov ordered employees to wear masks, local reports said.
Pneumonic plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, can spread person to person through respiratory droplets and is the most severe form of the disease. The CDC says plague is potentially life-threatening but can be treated effectively with antibiotics if diagnosed and treated promptly. Natural plague foci outbreaks still exist in parts of Siberia, Mongolia and Central Asia, and Russia maintains specialized anti-plague institutes to monitor them.
No additional U.S. travel restrictions have been announced. There are currently no direct commercial flights between the United States and Russia.
A new US bill, Ban Flock Act, has been introduced, with the aim of stopping the federal government from using automated license plate readers (ALPRs).
“Flock is eviscerating the very notion of privacy by installing tens of thousands of cameras in communities across America without their consent,” said Senator Bernie Sanders, who is planning a Senate version.
“Going to the doctor? Flock knows. Dropping your kid off at school? Flock is tracking you. Flock is always watching,” he continued.
According to the text of the House bill, H.R. 10691, federal agencies and officials are to be banned from acquiring, possessing, accessing or using ALPRs, or data collected by these devices, without an Act of Congress that explicitly authorizes it.
This would include data collected by private security networks, homeowners’ associations, commercial parking operators, and data brokers.
Any such authorization must set data retention at no more than 48 hours, and “rigorous protections for due process, privacy, free speech and association.”
State and local governments that have ALPRs would not be eligible for grants from the Justice, Transportation, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, and Homeland Security departments.
The bill, whose sponsors in the House are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and in the Senate Jeff Merkley, also seeks to make sure that no federal money is used to buy, lease, or operate ALPRs, while evidence obtained in violation of the proposed legislation would be inadmissible in federal court.
Individuals would be able to sue for actual and punitive damages, while state attorneys general would be able to sue to enforce the ban.
Toll systems would be exempt from the ban, but the data collected would have to be deleted within 48 hours of payment, and could not be checked against a law enforcement hot list.
“AI-powered cameras are keeping track of our every move and weaponizing this data against working people to make record profits,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
Merkley noted that the right to privacy includes the freedom to move around the community without every move being monitored.
The Ban Flock Act is not the first attempt of its kind – in early September, Republicans Thomas Massie and Eric Burlison introduced the Flock-Off Act, H.R. 10221, that also seeks to cut federal funding to state and local governments that use ALPRs, as well as biometric surveillance cameras.
In August, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis ordered Flock cameras to be removed from state highways within 30 days, a year after the state approved $4.6 million for 440 of these devices.
Earlier in the summer, Senator Josh Hawley launched an investigation into Flock, and later expanded it to include Axon, Motorola Solutions, and Verkada.
“Flock does not stand alone in this industry; you and others are building large camera networks, assisted by artificial intelligence, that intrude on the privacy of all Americans,” Hawley said at the time.
Hawley has his own anti-Flock bill that has been announced but the text of the bill has yet to be filed.
Republicans and Democrats are now going after the same cameras, and the bill cuts off the federal money and the data trade, not just the cameras.
The artificial intelligence (AI) race between the United States and China has accelerated in model protection, supply chains and talent controls, even as the two nations’ leaders agreed last week to open a new dialogue on AI safety. A string of moves announced or uncovered this week shows that both sides are now guarding their […]
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Wednesday that three men will help lead a new Pentagon project on the “future of warfare,” even as he moves to eliminate hundreds of senior armed service leadership position, including many generals and admirals. Hegseth unveiled Project Meridian during his “State of the Force” address at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. The 120-day […]
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David Alm | Longreads | October 1, 2026 | 5,726 words (24 minutes)
I got off Interstate 81 to give my soul a break. The back roads of southwest Virginia wind, crest, and plunge through lush valleys of oak, poplar, birch, and maple trees. It’s easy to lose track of time and distance there. People drive slower. Cows graze in pastures. And there are no placards festooned with Motel 6 and Starbucks logos, flattening the American landscape into a homogeneous blur. Any signs you might see are low to the ground and handmade, protesting a data center, for instance, or thanking Jesus.
I’d gone to this rural pocket of the country for the 90th annual Old Fiddler’s Convention in Galax, an independent city of just under 7,000 near the North Carolina border whose population, for six days in early August, balloons to around four times that. They arrive in RVs and Casitas, camper vans and cars to stake out 20-by-35-foot plots in Felts Park, a 28-acre fairground in the heart of Galax, transforming it into a massive, muddy parking lot sprinkled with portable toilets and a cluster of food trucks, offering loaded potatoes, funnel cake, and blooming onions.
The Old Fiddler’s Convention—or just Galax, as the diehards call it—is the oldest and largest fiddlers’ convention in the world, a place where banjo pickers, guitar players, and other maestros of old-time strings gather to see how they stack up. Founded in 1935, Galax has been canceled only twice since then: once during World War II, due to travel restrictions, and again in 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many Galaxers have been going every year for decades, some for as long as they’ve been alive.
There are scads of rules: If you play clawhammer-style banjo in the bluegrass band competition, you will get disqualified. Same if you play bluegrass-style banjo in the old-time competition. If you break a string while performing, you must stop immediately. Playing time during competition is limited to two minutes and 30 seconds. And, crucially, no electric instruments of any kind are allowed, either on stage or in the tightly packed fairgrounds, where self-described hillbillies, accountants, firefighters, and session musicians pick day and night in blistering, impromptu jams amid the RVs.
Credit: Photos from the Galax Old Fiddler’s Convention, 1978, by Terry Eiler, Blue Ridge Parkway Folklife Project collection (AFC 1982/009), American Folklife Center, Library of Congress
One does not merely attend Galax. It’s not a music festival. There are no headliners, and no full-set performances. There is a single stage, and over the course of six days, contestants take it one after another to play one song for a panel of judges and a smattering of spectators. There are more than a dozen categories, little changed in the past century: old-time fiddle, guitar, dulcimer, folk song. Cash prizes for individual players range from $35 to $285; a campsite and contestant pass together cost $175. “The prestige of being judged a ‘winner at Galax,’ and the respect for one’s musical talent that goes along with it, far outweighs any monetary award,” wrote Fred Burton in the March 1984 issue of Bluegrass Unlimited.
In the 1980s and ’90s, cars lined up days before the gates to Felts Park opened. The fairgrounds got so full back then that people slept in the horse stables that used to line one end of them. Once, Elizabeth Taylor made a surprise appearance with her then-husband, Virginia Senator John Warner. Rumor has it that members of Old Crow Medicine Show and Leftover Salmon have shown up at Galax, under the radar, just to jam.
And yet, despite appearing well attended to my virgin eyes, the Old Fiddler’s Convention’s numbers are down from the pre-pandemic years, and way down from peak Galax. Folks say it’s not like it was. Maybe, as one long-time attendee speculated, it’s that more kids are choosing devices and passive consumption over face-to-face activity with other humans, or that more and more young adults are fleeing southwest Virginia due to the gutted coal, tobacco, and manufacturing industries. Or maybe it’s just that people around there are dying faster than they’re being born. Glen Alexander, a 55-year-old fiddler who’s been going to Galax since he was a child, put it bluntly: “We’re all scared to death this is gonna go away.”
Tara Linhardt, a professional mandolin player from Leesburg, Virginia, with thick, curly hair and a determined gaze, has been going to Galax since she was in high school, and was happy to advise me on how to survive my first time. Buy what you need locally, she told me; it was cheaper than New York. It will probably rain, so bring mud boots. Find a high patch of ground, because rainwater pools in the low spots. Afternoon jams were open to anyone, but unless I was dead good, I should just observe the nighttime ones, where the “thoroughbreds” play so fast that a newbie like me would only drag it down.
Tara and her husband, Ian, pulled into Galax late Saturday afternoon, just in time to get a bite before parking their Four Winds RV by the dumpsters behind the Applebee’s at the edge of town. She told me to sleep in my car there, since the church parking lot was already full, and Applebee’s, unlike Hardee’s, doesn’t mind. We’d need to queue up by the gates to Felts Park before seven o’clock Sunday morning to ensure we’d get decent campsites. First-come, first-served.
Credit: David Alm
I’d arrived earlier that afternoon, hours later than Google Maps had predicted, because I forsook the interstate. The day before, I’d left my home in Brooklyn only to spend two hours driving five miles to reach the Holland Tunnel to New Jersey. I was spat out onto I-78, which at some point blended into I-81, hauling me across Pennsylvania to Staunton, Virginia, where I slept in a former sanatorium. I had recently been laid off from a job I’d held for 13 years, editing reports for a geopolitical risk advisory firm, and needed reprieve. I sought my escape on Route 11.
In the trunk were a guitar and two banjos, instruments I was determined to spend the week playing in the Blue Ridge Mountains in lieu of applying for jobs and fretting about AI in my Brooklyn apartment. It was the first long road trip I’d taken alone in a quarter-century, and I’d hoped for a reset. Call it a midlife crisis if you want, but I drove cross-country a lot before I moved to New York, always on back roads. America is best seen up close.
After chatting awhile with Tara, Ian, and a luthier named John Hamlett, who’d also parked his RV behind the Applebee’s, I folded myself into the backseat of my Chevy Trax rental and more or less slept. I awoke at 6 a.m. to a downpour, rain pelting the roof of my car like fingertips on a conga drum.
The four of us caravaned into town, where we waited until almost 9 a.m. to enter the park. We figured it was due to the rain. In fact, it was because of an issue with the gate itself. My source for this intel was none other than the Galax chief of police, DeWitt Cooper, who was directing traffic into Felts Park that day and hails from the Bronx. I’d see Chief Cooper again a couple days later, at Willie’s Food Truck inside the fairgrounds, where we chatted over catfish and collard greens about his philosophy of policing. “Don’t judge based on appearances and treat people with love,” he told me.
I chose a plot on the far side of the fairgrounds, near a fence and a row of portable toilets, with Tara, Ian, and John all nearby. Our little commune wouldn’t last; the next day, Four Winds got stuck in the mud and Tara had to summon a Moose—one of the men of Moose Lodge No. 733, a fraternal organization that’s managed the Old Fiddler’s Convention since the beginning—to drag it out with a tractor. They found higher ground by the tennis courts and I stayed put. That night it rained again, and I awoke at 5 a.m. in a half-inch of water that had pooled in my tent overnight, soaking my sleeping bag, pillow, and clothes.
It’s no fun to wake up in a puddle, but when it rains in your tent, or the fairgrounds get so muddy that you watch a young woman lose a Birkenstock forever to the muck, or you start to stink because there’s only one public shower in Felts Park, it all feels incidental to what matters more: There’s pickin’ to do. You hear it all around, all the time. A lone fiddle at dawn, guitars easing into the afternoon, jams that grow in size and volume throughout the day, until night falls and Felts Park erupts in a surround-sound jamboree of syncopated banjos, arpeggiated fiddles, and bass notes so low and driving that they cut through it all at ground level. When it’s not raining, those jam sessions continue through the night, practically until the early morning’s still air is broken anew by someone’s fiddle.
My first jam came on Day 0, after the rain abated and I’d set up camp. The Old Fiddler’s Convention wouldn’t officially start until Monday night, with the astoundingly good kids’ competitions—the reigning bluegrass fiddle champion herself, Hollace Oakes, was 14 when she won the adult contest last year—but everyone in Felts Park was eager to pick.
Jimmy Kidd (left) has attended Galax since 1969, when he won the guitar competition. Ronnie Burroughs (right) opened the competition Friday night with an autoharp rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Photo by David Alm.
Tara wanted to introduce me to Bill and Nancy Sluys, a couple in their early 70s who’ve been going to Galax every summer for some 50 years. We walked to their site, where Bill, a towering figure with a steady voice and a long, white, braided ponytail, emerged from their Airstream to invite anyone who might “wish to partake” to join Nancy and a few others inside. I told Bill I’d thought of bringing edibles to Galax, but the convention website said state laws concerning drugs and alcohol are “strictly enforced,” and Google’s AI bot, Gemini, warned that law enforcement would be crawling Felts Park with K-9 units, even though recreational cannabis is legal in Virginia for adults over 21.
Bill laughed and said that hasn’t been true in more than 40 years, though it used to be, on account of a music festival that happened once, half a century ago, about 15 miles up the road. Stompin 76 featured Bonnie Raitt, John Prine, and other big names from the time. The festival attracted a huge crowd, including a motorcycle gang that allegedly wanted to keep the party going after the festival wrapped, so they rolled into Galax on their hogs, stocked with methamphetamine, moonshine, and guns. Mayhem ensued. The authorities cracked down after that, ostensibly to maintain law and order in fiddleland. By the mid-’80s, they realized that the Old Fiddler’s Convention really was a family affair and let the fiddlers be.
A group of six or seven people had gathered outside the Airstream by this point, all brandishing instruments. Bill, who grew up on Long Island, assumed his position behind an aluminum upright bass from the 1930s, while Nancy, a fiddler and banjo player roughly half Bill’s height who grew up in Connecticut, emerged from the Airstream with her fiddle. She sat down on a folding chair, called “Soldier’s Joy” in the key of D, and kicked it off at breakneck speed. This was an old-time jam, and “soldier’s joy” was a Civil War-era euphemism for morphine. Galax had begun.
An old-time jam goes something like this: Anywhere from two to umpteen musicians gather in a circle, knee-to-knee, and someone—usually the fiddler—calls a tune. Before you know it, you’re carried away by a cyclone of fiddles, mandolins, banjos, and guitars, all locked into a swirling rhythm that can, when it’s good, take you to church.
Ted McAllister (center, on bass) has attended Galax since 1975; his son, Caleb (to McAllister’s right, on fiddle), has attended since he was a child. Joining them is Katherine Emerick (right, fiddle); Elizabeth Holdren (left, guitar); and Elizabeth’s husband, Jacob, on banjo. Photo by David Alm.
The tradition dates to the mid-1700s, when Scots-Irish immigrants first settled in Appalachia. Even then, coastal property was for the elite, forcing poorer immigrants inland and south, through the Shenandoah Valley to southwest Virginia, where land was plentiful and cheap. Their music quickly took root. “The Scots brought fiddles and liquor,” Ted McAllister, one of my neighbors in Felts Park, told me. “The Germans brought church music and beer.”
Over time, Scottish fiddle tunes evolved, as oral traditions do, and began to mix with the musical traditions of enslaved Africans, who had brought with them gourd instruments that would evolve into the American banjo, along with rhythms the Scots had never heard before. Old-time music, in other words, is the music of diasporas, fed into a blender and then worked into a froth. A lot of traditional folk songs came out of this period, too. One that I learned at Galax, “Going to the West,” tells the story of a young man who leaves the mountains of his birth, “where labor is in vain,” to seek the fertile plains out west. It’s the story of my own Scottish forebears, who settled in South Dakota before moving to what is now suburban Chicago, and later, Florida.
Bluegrass, by contrast, was born in the 1940s, when Bill Monroe and The Blue Grass Boys took those mountain sounds, combined them with Southern church music and blues, and tightened it all into something you might call an uncle of rock ’n’ roll. There’s a reason that Billy Strings plays to sold-out arenas and pickers from around the world can play classics like “Blue Ridge Cabin Home” at the drop of a one-chord.
Where bluegrass is punchy and clean, designed for the stage, old-time is ecstatic, designed for participation. Bluegrass jams attract spectators who marvel at the players’ pyrotechnics; old-time jams get people on their feet. At Galax, some folks drag big pieces of plywood around the fairgrounds looking for old-time jams, where they’ll lay the board down at the edge of the circle and dance. Flatfooters they’re called: the percussion section.
The New York bluegrass community has a Signal thread, and through it I met Harrison Corthell, a banjo player from Queens who was camping in what he called the “gayborhood” of Felts Park: two tents and a rainbow flag. Corthell offered to introduce me to Tyler Hughes, who was also camping in the gayborhood. Hughes serves as the executive director of the Crooked Road Heritage Music Trail, a nonprofit founded by the Virginia Assembly in 2004 to boost tourism through music. Alsace has the Route des Vins, and Kentucky the Bourbon Trail. Southwest Virginia has the Crooked Road.
I found Hughes Thursday afternoon as he was setting up the Crooked Road’s information booth. Musicians were streaming by for the clawhammer banjo competition, which was set to begin any minute. As we sat on a park bench, I told Hughes that I’d begun to think of its music as the region’s chief international export of the past 100 years. “I think that’s a fair assessment,” he said, but stressed that he resists thinking of Appalachia’s musical traditions like a natural resource such as iron or coal. “We really try to stray away from an over-commodified, over-commercialized vision of southwest Virginia,” Hughes said.
Musical traditions can be packaged and sold, after all. Last winter, an Appalachian folk musician named Murphy Campbell discovered that her videos on YouTube had been used to create AI clones of her voice and banjo playing. Someone then used Vydia, a music distribution platform, to share those clones via streaming services and to make copyright claims on Campbell’s own videos. Campbell described her ordeal on Instagram, including trying to address the matter with “agents” at those streaming services: “I’m telling robots to take down music robots made,” she said. Her posts went viral, causing Vydia to ultimately withdraw the copyright claims and ban the user responsible, according to reports. “It’s the wild west,” Campbell said in one of her posts. “And it can happen to anyone.”
I asked Hughes what percentage of the people in southern Appalachia play an instrument of some kind. He guessed around 70 percent. I’d heard the same number from Daniel, a 32-year-old banjo player I’d met earlier in the week, who works at a sawmill in Grayson County. “It’s kinda the only thing goin’ on around here,” Daniel said. He explained that when the cotton mill in Grayson County closed in the late 1980s, “everyone” started using meth. Then opioids. Within the next 20 years, drug overdoses had become a leading cause of death in southwest Virginia. Getting together to pick, Daniel said, “helps you through real hard stuff.”
The guitar I took to Galax is a 1989 Takamine I’ve had since I was 14, when my parents indulged my desire to learn Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix songs on the condition that I take classical guitar lessons. I spent my first day or two in Felts Park carrying it around like a security blanket, but I was there to play the banjo. Upon arrival, I realized that I might have been the worst banjo player in Galax.
Performers in the Youth Bluegrass Band competition. Photo by David Alm.
I picked up the instrument in 2024, at age 48, in part because my maternal grandfather played one and I was always curious about it. More than that, I wanted to build a mountain banjo, the rustic kind people in Appalachia made from whatever wood they had nearby, animal skins for heads, and guts for strings. I liked their warm, thuddy sound, totally unlike the piercing banjos of bluegrass with their steel strings and resonator backs. So I learned everything I could about how to build one and called my dad to ask if he’d help. I knew the banjo; he knew wood.
That summer, we spent a week together in his shop in Illinois, building a fretless eastern Kentucky-style mountain banjo out of walnut and ash. Most people in New York ask what it is; everyone at Galax identified it instantly. I’ve since built seven banjos and acquired three more, all different styles. This spring, I carved a neck from a piece of walnut entirely by hand, no power tools, for a 19th-century-style tackhead, the kind played by enslaved Africans on plantations and by Civil War soldiers around the campfire. It’s not just that I’m fascinated by the instrument. As my actual trades—crafting sentences and teaching others to do the same—are increasingly devalued by technology and a society that no longer reads, building banjos gives me one thing that I can hold onto.
Shortly after my banjo obsession began, I started going to old-time jams in New York City, and later, bluegrass jams. I didn’t—and still don’t—actually listen to old-time or bluegrass music; my tastes trend melancholic. But I missed playing music with other people, something I hadn’t done since college and had begun to crave during the endless, isolated days of the pandemic. In early 2025, I started going to a regular jam session at a bar in Brooklyn called Sunny’s, whose owner has turned it into an institution of roots, bluegrass, and folk music. Some of the best pickers in the tri-state area turn up there each week, along with people like me, there to learn. It took me months to lead a song without blacking out. They call it “jamnesia,” and it’s humiliating.
After one week among the pickers of southern Appalachia, I got tighter, faster, as if the place itself does some of the teaching. A fiddler friend from New York, who’d been to Galax in the 2010s, was more succinct: “It seeps from the earth.”
Galax is hardly the first fiddlers’ convention; it’s just the oldest one still left. In the days before the railroad and automobile, let alone the World Wide Web, fiddlers’ conventions brought the people of Appalachia together, allowing songs and picking styles to spread like gossip over those hills. They could get pretty wild, and early-days Galax was no exception. Women and children did not go to Galax back then. It was a place where men gathered to let loose—“outside of the eyes of their preacher and their wives,” Rex McGee, a multi-instrumentalist from North Carolina, told me.
I’d heard of the McGee jams already, where “things get weird,” according to a woman I met Monday morning while I waited in line for the shower. Their camp sits right inside Felts Park, steps from the food trucks, identifiable by a 1974 Ford school bus painted an ominous matte grey. They call it the Muddy Creek Bus, for the band that Glen Alexander’s dad formed in the 1970s and soon became the back-up band for Rex and his brother Ralph’s grandfather, Ralph McGee the First, aka the Old-Timer. The Muddy Creek Boys could party as hard as the Old-Timer; it didn’t hurt that they could pick too. By the 1980s, the real show came after hours. Dozens of people would gather outside the bus to watch the Old-Timer, then in his 80s, fiddle with just about anything he could find: a toothpick, a comb, a “coon dick”—literally a bone from a raccoon’s penis. And it was loud. (For any curious fiddlers out there, you can buy four of these on eBay for $39.95.)
Felts Park is a galaxy of legacy camps like the Muddy Creek Bus. Almost everyone I met told me they’d been going to Galax for 40, 50, even 60 years. Their stories are legion, and they love to tell them: The year it rained so hard that one group holed up in an RV for six days with eight people, an upright bass, and “a little bit of cocaine.” The year a couple of young women got into a fight over a guy, went to fisticuffs in the mud, and ripped each other’s shirts off in front of scores of onlookers—“no one wanted it to stop,” one man recalled with a chuckle. The year several people went mudsliding on the tire tracks, which, for reasons unclear, were composed of raw sewage.
Jimmy Kidd, an 86-year-old Dobro player who’s been going to Galax since he was 29, regaled me with the time he won the guitar competition, in 1969, by playing the Dobro because there was no Dobro competition then. His daughter, Vicky, told me she met Elizabeth Taylor when she came through Galax, in 1977, when Vicky was 12. Taylor was in a wheelchair, Vicky said, and she wasn’t very nice.
Leo Lindblom sat on a low stool cradling a mandolin, his sister Lucy beside him. They’d taken the stage in the kids’ mandolin competition on Monday night, and Leo was focused. With flawless timing and dexterity, the 12-year-old picker dazzled the audience, Lucy accompanying him on guitar, for roughly two minutes. Then he rose from the stool, took a bow, and, with Lucy, exited the stage.
On Thursday, I met Leo, Lucy, and the rest of the Lindbloms—Marina, Jon, and their nine kids, all but one of whose names begins with an L—at their bus in a gravel parking lot just across the road from Felts Park, where it was a little quieter than Galax Central. The Lindbloms first went to Galax in 2021, after discovering bluegrass at a gift shop in North Carolina while on a family vacation five years prior. All nine of the kids responded instantly to the “happy, upbeat” music coming out of the speakers, and mom and dad bought the CD on the spot.
The Lindblom family. Photo by David Alm.
The kids, who range in age from 12 to 28 and were all homeschooled, each chose an instrument and formed their two bands, Headin’ Home and The Brothers Five. Now, when they’re not home in Bloomingdale, Georgia, they’re on the road playing festivals and gigs across the country. I asked what makes Galax special. Libby said it gives them a rare chance to slow down, to not have to be “on” all the time, and just spend time together.
As we sat outside their bus, all 11 of them and me, I asked: Why bluegrass? After all, Marina and Jon met at the Eastman School of Music and played in the Savannah Philharmonic for 10 years. They know Tchaikovsky and Brahms just as well as Bill Monroe and the Carter Family. They could teach their kids classical music, or any other kind. “Our goal, in everything we do, is to glorify the Lord,” Marina explained. And with bluegrass, she said, they are able to give people a bit of happiness, a chance to tap their feet and forget about their troubles for a little while. It’s an act of service.
Then I turned to Leo, the youngest, who was perched on Lucy’s lap, and asked what he likes about playing music that, surely, most kids his age don’t know anything about. “Everything,” he said, before checking my presumption: All the kids he knows play bluegrass or old-time, he said. He’s met them all through places like Galax.
I’d registered for the clawhammer banjo competition a month before Galax opened its gates, but by the evening of the contest, I was so worn out from five semi-sleepless nights, as many days packed with conversation and playing, and a dubious diet of beer, bananas, and cheese sandwiches that I decided to sit it out and trekked up the hill to Main Street for some Chinese food. Besides, I don’t even play clawhammer banjo. I’ve developed a hybrid style: I use finger picks, like bluegrass, but keep rhythm by striking the strings with the back of my middle finger, like clawhammer. After five days of watching virtuosos of both styles create magic on their instruments, I wasn’t about to do my mishmash in front of a panel of judges.
As I sat in my air-conditioned booth, hovering over a plate of garlic chicken, I got a call from Tara. Was I going to compete? I told her I’d spent the whole day interviewing people and was exhausted. “You have to participate!” she countered. “I triple-dog dare ya.” I was just delirious enough to bend. Thirty minutes later I was backstage rehearsing my song with John Garrison, who has gone to Galax each of the past 46 years. After a few runs through an instrumental version of “White Freightliner Blues” by Townes Van Zandt, I checked in, slapped a number on my chest, and took the stage. Tara squatted right in front to take video, smiling wide. Our pickin’ was clean, but we landed way outside the money: I bastardized the form and played a copyrighted song. We still got a big round of applause.
The author (left) with John Garrison, his accompanist on Townes Van Zandt’s “White Freightliner Blues.”
My style served me better in the jams, where more than once people assured me that if it sounds good, ain’t no reason to change it. Some of the best sessions I went to were inside an A-frame tent adjacent to the gayborhood and maybe 100 yards from my campsite. On Monday night, I played fiddle tunes and shared a jar of moonshine in that tent with three young guys who lived just down the road, near the town of Fries, in Grayson County. One of them built a fiddle from scratch; it took him years. I did my version of “White Freightliner Blues” with them, and when we finished, one yipped, “That’s how it’s done!”
Thanks to the moonshine, I forgot about Tara’s advice to sit out the nighttime jams and hopped over to a bluegrass jam that was really crackin’. At least 10 musicians stood in a circle, and the tempo was hot. I asked a guitar player if I could join. “You’ll have to ask him,” he replied, motioning to the only banjo player in the group. They did not expand the circle to let me in, and I hung awkwardly on the periphery for a song or two before going back to my tent.
It was one of only two times I felt unwelcome at Galax. The other came after the guys from Fries learned I was a journalist from New York City. I’d gone back to their tent Tuesday afternoon to jam but ended up talking with Daniel, the sawmill worker, instead. He was without his banjo, so while the other guys picked fiddle tunes, I told Daniel I was there to write about Galax and asked if I could record our conversation. He cheerfully agreed, but after that—and I could very well be wrong about this—I sensed that the other guys looked at me sideways.
Daniel, on the other hand, remained inviting and warm. One afternoon late in the week, I was sitting by my tent when he wandered over to say hello. He wanted to give me a leaf of galax, the rubbery, low-lying evergreen from which the town takes its name. “I thought you’d like this for your story,” he said, and stayed to visit awhile.
I broke camp Saturday afternoon and packed up my car. Before I left Galax, however, I dashed over to catch the “43rd Yearly International Kazoo Championship” a few campsites down from Bill and Nancy’s Airstream, as Tara had assured me it was “not to be missed.” Reporters don’t spend much time at the Old Fiddler’s Convention, and Tara was concerned that I might focus too much on the negatives in my writing—the mud, the gastronomic limitations, the attrition. Like everyone I met in Felts Park, she wanted me to return to New York with a real sense of why they keep coming back, year after year, and of what could be lost if they stopped.
Several dozen people were gathered at the “soup kitchen,” a community tent where, two nights prior, Chief Cooper had served hundreds of Styrofoam cups filled with venison stew, made by Nancy herself, from deer she and Bill had hunted on their property. Now, the ground was muddy and more rain was imminent. The contestants were undeterred, ready to blow their hearts out on plastic kazoos.
I soon understood Tara’s insistence. The International Kazoo Championship pokes a little fun at the rigidity of the main stage. One by one, each contestant was disqualified for breaking at least one of the competition’s 12 rules, which included “No Fun Not Allowed” and “All Participants Must Be Present In Order To Attend.” They were then each invited to perform again, and one by one, each was named the winner. Then all the contestants and judges second-lined through Felts Park in the rain, led by a trumpet and trailed by a banjo, blowing “When the Saints Go Marching In” on their kazoos.
The 43rd Yearly International Kazoo Championship. Photo by David Alm.
After a quick walkabout to say my goodbyes, I drove north on Route 221, past the Applebee’s and the Walmart where, at Tara’s urging, I did most of my shopping for the week. That night I met up with a friend from New York, who’d invited me to a 40th birthday party at a 19th-century cabin deep in the woods north of Roanoke. We stayed up late, drinking bourbon and talking about music. I’d rather have been playing it.
On Sunday morning, I got in my car and continued north on Route 11. As I wound through the mountains, catching the occasional glimpse of semis and cars streaming by on I-81, I played a recording I made of “Going to the West” through the car’s stereo. Brian Muller, who placed third in this year’s mandolin contest, led us in the jam, his plaintive baritone providing the perfect soundtrack to my drive: I leave you here, in this land that you love, ’mid scenes so bright and fair, where fragrant flowers are blooming and music fills the air. I imagined bringing the song to New York jams, and wondered if it would fly.
Passing through the town of Buchanan, a few hours from Galax, I saw a familiar face. Ted McAllister and his wife, Debbie, were getting out of their car just outside the Buchanan Baptist Church. I pulled alongside them, rolled down my window, and said, “Fancy seeing you here.” Ted, guitar case in hand, told me to come inside.
A few dozen people were gathered in the Fellowship Hall for a potluck lunch to celebrate the Buchanan Baptist Church’s 190th anniversary. A preacher named Bill Hartsfield welcomed me at the door. (“Like a field of hearts,” he said with a firm handshake.) Then he walked with me to the serving counter, where I fixed a plate of fried chicken, cheese casserole, and ambrosia salad. We sat down with the McAllisters and two other local musicians, Alan Berry and Mike Lee. “Galax is a subculture of a subculture,” Ted explained as we ate. Music is woven into everything from Sunday morning church services to holiday parties and family picnics.
We finished our plates and went into the chapel, where, for the next 90 minutes or so, Ted, Alan, Mike, and a banjo player named Kim Wood played bluegrass versions of church hymns for around 20 people. Two little girls danced in the aisle, swept up by the music. Halfway through their set, as I sat in my pew, Ted walked to the pulpit and introduced me. He explained that we’d spent the week as neighbors in Galax, talking, telling stories, picking songs, and he was delighted to show me a little more of “how we do things ’round here.”
I hadn’t been to church in decades, and a couple hours of Southern hospitality won’t make a believer out of me. But hearing Ted and the others play, watching children dance, and meeting people who looked me in the eye and didn’t rush the conversation felt deeply familiar. I may have spent almost my entire adult life in New York City, but I grew up on the Illinois-Iowa border, on the banks of the Mississippi. Church backrooms, potlucks, and ambrosia salad were all part of my childhood.
By 2:30, I really had to get going. For the second time in two days, I said goodbye to Ted, got in my car, and was on my way.
A week later, I was back at Sunny’s Bar in Brooklyn, playing songs with a dozen or so people in the bar’s backroom. I called “Going to the West,” and after a quick run through the chords on my latest banjo build, a resonator back with a dragon fretboard inlay that I’d played on stage in Galax, I started singing. It was a little shaky at first, but by the second verse everyone was locked in.
When we finished, one of the musicians remarked that it was a beautiful song. I agreed and asked if he knew it already. “No,” he said. “But I’m going to learn it now.”
David Alm is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor. His work has frequently been included in Longreads‘ Weekly Top Five and annual Best Features lists. He also teaches journalism at Hunter College-CUNY, where he focuses on feature writing and creative nonfiction.
The Hungarian conservative media landscape is in the process of being bankrupted, gutted, or co-opted by the new Hungarian government under Péter Magyar. However, there remain a few holdouts, including Daniel Deme, who serves as the editor-in-chief of the English-language Hungarian news outlet Hungary Today as well as the German-language Ungarn Heute. Deme describes a “dire situation” brought on by a climate of fear, radical purges, mass layoffs, and little to no aid from key allies, including the Trump administration.
What is the current state of the Hungarian media landscape? How does it compare to the situation under the Orbán government?
Under the Orbán government, there were claims from the left that there were no media freedoms here, that journalists were persecuted. None of that was true. I’d say there was already a 60-to-40 split in the media landscape toward the left’s benefit at that time. But a difficult situation arose from the fact that Hungarian conservative right-wing media wasn’t independent enough, and that was really the case. It was very much talking to its own bubble.
I don’t think it was controlled by the government or presenting a government-controlled narrative. I think it was voluntary. But I think the culture of Hungarian conservative journalists was such that they wanted to stick to the central narrative, which was very close to the government.
On the other hand, you had foreign-funded left-wing media outlets. There were a few exceptions that survived commercially, but in very many cases they were funded by the Open Society Foundations and by the Norwegian Oil Fund. There’s a Norwegian radical-leftist sort of fund that is feeding the Hungarian liberal and woke environment, NGOs, and media outlets.
EXCLUSIVE: The Trump administration has largely abandoned Hungarian conservatives after Viktor Orbán’s loss, warns @daniel_deme_HU in an interview with @RMXnews.
“So, I think the State Department of the Trump administration is shooting itself in the foot by leaving this… pic.twitter.com/vOAE8iajro
And of course they were funded by European funds as well—awards, grants. So after the elections, the money that came from government advertising—by the way, they advertised in the left-wing media very heavily as well—just stopped immediately. And from week one, there was a purge of Hungarian right-wing media outlets. It wasn’t just the money that was taken away; the institutional standing was as well.
For example, the largest media conglomerate, Mediaworks, immediately started firing hundreds and hundreds of staff. What we haven’t even seen during communism: it wasn’t just that they removed the former Orbán government’s media managers from these public media outlets—they actually destroyed them. They shut them down.
And it was just outright scary, as if a foreign occupying force had arrived and shot our TV towers to pieces. One day we turned on our TVs and there was a blank screen. There was a black screen with an inscription that the “public media shouldn’t lie, and we are sorry that we lied for years, and this is going to change.” And that was it. That was it for weeks and weeks on end.
At the same time, it also happened with Radio Kossuth, a national institution. That’s a radio station that we used to listen to even during communism. And suddenly they switched it off. They just put some classical music on 24/7, and old people have complained to me that they used to turn it on in the morning and switch it off in the evening when they went to bed. It used to be part of their lives, and then there’s nothing. And now the only public television is completely turned into a Tisza Party mouthpiece.
There are a handful of surviving right-wing publications that, frankly, have not learned their lesson, in my opinion, about how to analyze Hungarian public and political life, and are very much continuing in the same line as before.
There are new shoots, I would say. It’s very hard to tell which ones are going to survive and which ones are not. And this is the situation when you realize one staggering fact: if you find yourself a media manager or an editor-in-chief, you start looking for funds and trying to survive, and you realize that there are no foundations, no grants for national, conservative, patriotic media in the world—anywhere.
Meanwhile there are dozens and dozens of rich funds for liberal, woke media that is spewing propaganda from Brussels or from the Democrats’ set of opinion-makers. So it’s amazing. There were two Hungarian foundations that sponsored some of the patriotic and conservative media in the country. They have both been shut down now and are now controlled by the Péter Magyar government.
So the situation is dire.
On the one hand, the conservative media has completely disappeared. We do not have a single conservative political daily on the newsstands now. Not a single one. Magyar Nemzet, which used to be everywhere, is now nowhere to be found. It has gone into weekly print production. And on the other hand, when you go onto social media and LinkedIn, you see ubiquitous adverts for left-wing journalists at left-wing outlets everywhere. They’re expanding. It’s like a golden age for them.
That’s a pretty dramatic transition. How many people would you estimate have now been laid off in the Hungarian media landscape since Tisza, since Magyar, won?
I would definitely estimate it near 1,000 people. And you have to understand that the Hungarian media landscape is fairly small, and these are almost exclusively members of either the public broadcasters or conservative media—almost exclusively. People have been fired in a completely absurd manner, without any justification, without any wrongdoing on their side. Not even only people who had been biased toward the Fidesz government. Even when they fired the managers of the public media, MTI, they found replacements, a couple of media managers well known in the business, and they were appointed.
One of them was supposed to be the manager of the news department at the Hungarian News Agency, and someone pointed out on social media—I think on Facebook—that yes, he had worked for the left, and he had also worked for right-wing media like Hír TV. Péter Magyar left a single comment on Facebook under one of these comments saying, “I don’t think so.”
The next day, the guy was called into the office of his boss and fired on the spot. When they found out that he had worked briefly at one of the conservative news TV stations, he was fired on the spot and removed. That’s all it takes today: just a short comment on Facebook from our new neo-Stalinist leader, Péter Magyar.
You said there’s not a single foundation in the entire world that supports conservative media in Europe. Liberal institutions outside Hungary were pretty active supporting numerous liberal and left-wing institutions, media outlets, and so on with money—taxpayer money from Europe and corporate money from various corporations, foundations, and so on. Now, where are the Americans? Where is the State Department? Where are the foundations? What is your opinion on this particular issue?
Well, on the one hand, the State Department launched in July a grant for free, sort of conservative institutions in Europe—$5 million, I think, for the entirety of Europe. And I think they have received more than 1,000 applications. Whoever I spoke to, from Italy to Poland, everyone was applying. We applied as well. But it’s a ridiculous amount. $5 million is basically the price of a single bomb in Iraq. So this was just a drop in the ocean.
And I have managed to speak to members of the American State Department—I do not want to describe any more closely who they were—and I basically just asked what they thought about this. And they said, “You’re on your own. You have to fight this fight from your own resources. We have to respect the will of the people.”
And this is very gentlemanly, you know. This is a very noble position from the State Department. They do not want to interfere in other people’s countries. But I have to add very quickly that this is not the way the Democrats see it, or money groups and oligarchs connected to the Democrats. The left does not have these sorts of scruples toward Europe and is continuing to fund the Hungarian far-left media and NGO networks. There’s a glut of funds for them. So I think the State Department of the Trump administration is shooting itself in the foot by leaving this space empty, leaving the Hungarian conservative network to wither. In four years, when they come back, where they used to have allies—honest allies and friends—where they used to have an infrastructure of pro-American political and economic circles, they will have nothing. They will only find NGO networks and political networks that are 100% allied either with the Democrats or with networks funded from the other side of the world, from the East.
I’ve tried to explain this to American diplomats and opinion-makers: there’s been a huge void created after the elections. This void is going to be filled very, very quickly. And if you do not move fast enough, you will find that others will recognize the potential in this network—and so they did. And I do not want to mention the names of the countries, but they are not the United States’ geopolitical allies, let’s say that.
What do you think the motive is from the State Department there? Is it that there are still a lot of left-wing holdouts in the State Department who are directing policy, or do you think this is the conservative mindset of letting the free market work? If the conservative outlets can generate ad revenue and play in this kind of private market, then those are the outlets that deserve to survive. And if they can’t, then they deserve to die.
I think there could be some of this, but the State Department is very well known to be the bastion of the Democrats in the international field. It is still completely dominated by left-wing activist foreign policy. You just have to look at U.S. embassies and their appointments from local talent, or the communications of some of their ambassadors.
We don’t even have an ambassador in Hungary, which kind of shows that our status is not as important for Washington as it probably used to be, or as it should be. You have to remember that Viktor Orbán stood up for Donald Trump in the darkest years and months of the lawfare, when he was being photographed in police stations, when he was getting his mugshot taken by police. Viktor Orbán was the only foreign leader who stood up and paid enormous political capital, invested a lot of political capital, into defending Donald Trump personally and stood by the Republicans in these dark periods.
With Hungarian conservatives face growing persecution, where is Donald Trump?
"You have to remember that Viktor Orbán stood up for Donald Trump in the darkest years of and months of the lawfare when he was being photographed in police stations, when he was getting his… https://t.co/Wtlujt32u2pic.twitter.com/HmHbkdVx9H
And yes, there was a lot of support from the United States before the elections, from JD Vance and Marco Rubio, even from Donald Trump himself. Not the support that we needed. What we needed, first of all, was a good look into the far-left financial networks that are tilting the Hungarian political sphere toward the left, toward Brussels, and toward the Democrats. And the other thing was action on the giant tech firms like Facebook, Google, etc., who are openly censoring Hungarian and European media content, influencers, etc. And they’re doing it so blatantly that we expected the new White House to crack down on this undemocratic, biased behavior. And this didn’t happen.
Do you feel that now that Orbán is out of power, the US is actually betraying the Hungarian conservatives?
I don’t think they’re betraying us explicitly. I think there is a recognition of the seriousness of the situation, but I haven’t heard a single word from Republican circles expressing dismay or concern about what is happening in Hungary, and there’s plenty to be concerned about regarding what has happened in the last four months.
What we’ve seen in Hungary being done by the Tisza government is unprecedented in Europe, even in left-wing countries, even in partial democracies like Germany. There’s persecution of right-wing influencers, etc. I’m not going to go into details, but the U.S. State Department is completely silent about this, and I would say now is about time to open their mouths and take a hard look at what’s going on in Hungary.
Orbán invited JD Vance at a sort of inopportune time for his own election campaign. This had already been after the bombing of Iran, and there was a pretty big energy price increase right before Orbán went to the polls. Some people even said that this may have contributed to a larger loss for Orbán in the end. What is your opinion?
Whether the visits by JD Vance or Marco Rubio helped or not, I think they didn’t sway Hungary either way. They were very much welcomed by the Hungarian conservative networks, and I don’t think any of the Tisza Party’s potential voters changed their minds about voting for Fidesz because they understood how important the support of the American administration is. It is very, very important, but they had their minds made up already, and I don’t think these high-level visits changed anything in any way.
You have to separate Fidesz’s campaign performance from what really happened, the result of the elections. There was such an incredibly violent, intensive, and aggressive communication campaign from Tisza’s international and domestic supporters that throughout my 25 years in communications I have not seen anything like this.
We had the Ukrainians close our oil pipeline, Brussels withheld the European funds from the Orbán government, the Polish secret services were spreading fake news about Viktor Orbán, the British intelligence services were fairly active in Hungary, and on Facebook and Google the salvos of thousands of comments in our comments sections and everywhere else were coming from bot farms and paid influencers. And it was just amazing. I don’t think any society could have resisted this intensity of disinformation and demagoguery that we saw in the elections.
Of course, the other side of the coin is that Fidesz had a terrible election campaign, and it’s kind of universally understood even among conservatives that they really messed up their election campaign, and everyone is paying a very high price for this.
Since the election, I’ve seen polling that shows Fidesz tanking even much further than their election results, and Tisza seems to be more popular than ever. This is about four months in now. What realistic chances do you see of the conservatives coming back to power, and how will the Hungarian media landscape—without a real conservative voice, or not much of one going forward—even present the conservative or right-wing viewpoint?
I think some of those polls are right, and maybe not to the extent that they are showing, but Tisza’s popularity has actually grown since the elections and Fidesz has fallen back. That’s partly because Viktor Orbán was such an incredibly dominant personality in Fidesz, and his removal from the political scene is a huge hit for Hungarian conservatives.
And his replacement, János Bóka, is a young and very well-informed and competent person, but I don’t think he’s a full replacement for Viktor Orbán, and some are skeptical about his charisma, etc.
Fidesz’s performance since the elections can only be described as sketchy, and we are expecting Fidesz to do much more than they are doing. And there’s, of course, the other right-wing party, Mi Hazánk, Our Homeland. They are to the right of Fidesz, and very brave and vocal, and they are organizing demonstrations and are very active in parliament as well. They are getting into debates with Péter Magyar, but when it comes to voting, they almost always vote with Tisza.
They even voted for the so-called Asset Recovery Office, which is an absolute betrayal not just of their voters, but of conservative Hungary as well. That’s just a huge misstep. So they are not to be relied on. I think the only solution we can hope for is the emergence of a new conservative party, but we do not even see the sign of anything happening yet, and it seems Hungarian conservative circles are still in shell shock post-election.
Israel continues to face isolation in international forums as it continues its multi-front war on the peoples of West Asia. On Thursday, September 24, delegations from at least 77 countries walked out or left their seats vacant during the address of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly.
The move was interpreted as opposition to Israel’s three-year genocidal aggression on Gaza, and atrocities across multiple parts of West Asia.
Arab nations that walked out included: Algeria, Comoros, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen.
Asian states involved: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Brunei, Darussalam, Indonesia, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Maldives, Myanmar, North Korea, Pakistan, Türkiye, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
From Africa the following left the chamber: Angola, Botswana, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo (Republic of the), Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Eswatini, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Senegal, South Africa and Uganda.
Countries of Latin America and the Caribbean: Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Dominica, Guyana, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Saint Lucia, Suriname, and Venezuela.
European countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ireland, North Macedonia, San Marino, Slovenia and Spain.
From Oceania: Tonga and Tuvalu.
Meanwhile, thousands of protesters took to the streets of New York City, where the UN headquarters is located, to protest Netanyahu’s visit and address, calling for US officials to comply with the warrant issued for his arrest from the International Criminal Court.
Netanyahu defies the world, vows to continue Israel’s multi-front regional war
Netanyahu began his defiant, combatant speech by calling the departing delegations “moral cowards”.
“If there are any other moral cowards who haven’t yet left this hall, please do so now,” the Israeli PM said, addressing an almost empty chamber.
During the rest of his speech, which lasted for around 40 minutes, he defended Israel’s military campaigns – including the strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities – and vowed “to continue to win” Israel’s muti-front regional war, claiming his government has “no other choice”.
Netanyahu categorically rejected international accusations of genocide in Gaza, labeling them “the greatest lie of the century”. He sharply criticized his vocal opponents, naming Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and the government of Qatar.
Furthermore, Netanyahu downplayed the deadly impact of Israeli settler violence in the occupied West Bank by describing the perpetrators as a “handful of young juvenile delinquents, about 150 in number, who go throw stones, who chop down olive trees, and occasionally light some fires.”
He also minimized the total number of Palestinian casualties resulting from settler attacks saying “maybe two or three dead” per year, although the UN reported in August that at least 23 Palestinians were killed and more than 1,040 others were injured in the context of settler attacks since the beginning of 2026.
Responding to statements made by Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa concerning Syria’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, Netanyahu firmly asserted Israel’s permanent claim over the territory, invoking a biblical narrative.
“Jews have been on the Golan Heights since the days of Moses,” Netanyahu declared, asking Al-Sharaa to “read it in the Bible”.
Abbas continues to appeal to the US despite its sanctions on PA
For the second year in a row, the US State Department has denied entry visas to the President of the Palestinian Authority (PA) Mahmoud Abbas and a high-level delegation, preventing them from attending the United Nations General Assembly session in New York.
According to media reports, the Trump administration justified the revocation of visas by accusing the PA of pursuing legal action against Israel in international courts, and failing to meet past peace commitments. The decision drew wide international criticism for violating UN host-country agreements.
The US action put Abbas on the spot before the Palestinian grassroots, especially as his administration is known for appeasing Washington at the cost of the Palestinian people’s sacrifices.
Opening his pre-recorded speech delivered remotely, Abbas strongly condemned the revocation of US visas for Palestinian officials – including himself – as “punitive and unlawful”, rejecting the justifications provided by Washington.
He urged the US to lift the sanctions and restrictions it imposed on the PA, resume dialogue, and work alongside the international community to back the two-state solution.
Abbas stressed that the PA has fulfilled its governance and reform commitments, and reaffirmed his leadership’s dedication to international law and its ongoing stance against “violence and terrorism”.
In terms of the situation on the ground, Abbas cautioned that Palestinians are confronting the most dangerous phase in their modern history.
He detailed the repercussions of the ongoing Israeli genocide and the severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza, in addition to settlement expansion, land seizures, and the escalation in settler violence under the protection of Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.
The Palestinian President warned that these systemic practices are designed to fragment the territory and forcibly displace the Palestinian people.
“We have, for long, warned the international community through the UN General Assembly and the Security Council that these Israeli policies that operate outside international law will destroy the two-state solution,” Abbas asserted.
The head of the PA slammed some countries for their silence and their continued supply of weapons to Israel.
While acknowledging the 20-point plan brought forward by US President Donald Trump for post-war Gaza, the related UN Security Council resolution and the Mladenov 15-point roadmap, he lamented the lack of tangible progress and called for the immediate expedition of phase two of the ceasefire deal.
Abbas also expressed hope that phase two of the deal would unify Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem under the mandate of the Palestinian state.
Concluding his address, Abbas called on Trump to abide by his previous commitments made to Arab and Islamic leaders regarding the prevention of land annexation and forced displacement of the Palestinian people.
He further demanded the immediate, unconditional release of more than USD 6 billion in tax revenues withheld by Israel, alongside an end to the financial siege on Palestinian institutions.
With regard to the long-awaited legislative elections, Abbas affirmed that it will take place on November 28, followed subsequently by presidential elections.
He closed by reiterating the vision of a democratic, unarmed Palestinian state grounded in human rights and the rule of law, living side-by-side with Israel in “mutual security and peace”.
Visa revocations show concessions yield zero results, says Omar Assaf
Palestinian political activist and former prisoner in Israeli jails, Omar Assaf, argues that the denial of US entry visas to the Palestinian delegation highlights two critical realities.
First, it exposes a deep-rooted US hostility toward the Palestinian people and their leadership, actively blocking them from reaching the United Nations to make the World hear their grievances, assert their rights, and bear witness to the crimes of the occupation.
Second, it serves as a stark wake-up call for Palestinian leadership that the US administration cannot be relied upon, nor can it be viewed as an honest broker, or a mediator of any kind.
From his point of view, the incident makes clear that a policy of concessions, compliance, appeasement, and pleading yields zero results. Instead, the World only respects the language of strength, unity and upholding rights. Consequently, this must serve as a definitive lesson for Palestinians to close ranks under a unified national stance.
“We must firmly adhere to our people’s rights, stand resilient against challenges, and confront any aggression targeting our land and existence, including our fundamental right to make our voices heard globally to halt these ongoing crimes,” Assaf emphasized.
China’s President Xi Jinping concluded his three-day state visit to the US on Friday, September 25, with hopes of enhanced cooperation and partnership between the world’s two largest economies.
Xi arrived in the US on Wednesday and received a large-scale welcome from President Donald Trump. Though this was their third in-person meeting it was Xi’s first state visit to the US in over a decade.
On Thursday, the leaders had a long in-person conversation in the White House and finished the day with a state dinner with 130 guests, including tech executives. Though the US is yet to release its version of the official proceedings, reports indicate they discussed a range of outstanding issues such as the dispute over trade and tariffs, cooperation in Artificial Intelligence, the issue of Taiwan, and the US-Israeli war on Iran.
During the meeting with Trump, Xi called for strategic stability in the China-US relationship which will benefit both countries and the people around the world, Xinhuareported.
“China and the US should be partners, not rivals,” Xi said.
Xi’s statement comes at a time when the two countries are negotiating a longer trade deal after briefly facing each other in a tariff war last year. Both countries agreed to extend their temporary trade truce which halted the tariff war till January to give their negotiators more time.
The so-called Busan Trade Truce was set to expire in November this year.
Xi hoped that “both sides would stay committed to the principles of mutual benefit and win-win cooperation and promote the sustained, stable and sound development of China-US economic and trade relations.”
Technology and AI
Successive administrations in the US have characterized China’s advancements in technology and other economic sectors as a threat to American interests and have tried to curb them by restricting its access to technology.
In his attempt to address such apprehensions, Xi proposed that “both sides work towards a relationship featuring cooperation as the mainstay, moderate competition, manageable differences, and the promise of peace.”
Talking about the competition in the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Xi offered increased coordination and cooperation between the countries as a way of mutual benefit.
While emphasizing that “two sides should maintain human control over AI technologies, uphold people-centered approach and the principle of using AI for good” he proposed greater exchange of information to “prevent any misuse and abuse of AI.”
Xi also expressed hope that Chinese companies “are treated fairly in the US” while inviting more US companies to invest in China. “Working together, we can lengthen the list of cooperation and shorten the list of issues” he underlined.
The US has sanctioned or put a large number of Chinese companies, including its AI firms on various watch lists in recent years, after accusing them of working with the Chinese armed forces or being involved in the so-called technology theft.
Notably, however, major US tech and finance executives such as Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Eric Yuan of Zoom, Kelly Ortberg of Boeing, Larry Fink of Blackrock, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Sundar Pichai of Google, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Elon Musk of SpaceX and Tesla, were present at the state dinner for Xi’s visit hosted at the White House on Thursday, September 24, though no details of cooperation between US and Chinese tech firms have emerged.
Taiwan
Reiterating China’s resolve to “safeguard national reunification and territorial integrity,” Xi expressed hope that the US will “adhere to the correct position on opposing ‘Taiwan independence’ and handle the Taiwan question with caution.”
China has repeatedly accused the US of promoting the separatist cause in Taiwan, despite officially adhering to “one China policy.” The US under Trump has sold or agreed to sell billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Taiwan in complete disregard of China’s objections.
China has also accused the US and its allies in the region of promoting an arms race by deploying advanced weapon systems close to its borders.
Xi said if the US follows the correct position on Taiwan it “will enable both the countries to lay a solid foundation for their strategic cooperation and the development of their bilateral relationship.”
US-Israeli war on Iran
China has refused to intervene or get involved in the US-Israeli war on Iran, despite Trump’s repeated calls for them to do so. China has maintained the war was unnecessary and repeatedly warned against its prolongation. It has supported the interim peace deal signed in June under international mediation.
Xi reiterated this position during his visit to the US, expressing hope that both Iran and the US would soon return to the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) and end the war.
Xi claimed that “China-US cooperation may not solve every problem in the world, but without it, it would be hard to solve many of the world’s problems” and proposed more dialogue and “mechanisms of crisis communication and prevention” between their armed forces.
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