At a protest against a bill to legalize Waymo in Washington, D.C., earlier in October, the main tagline was: "Robotaxis don't vote; we vote." Little is known about the group behind it, raising questions about who's fueling the pushback against robotaxis in America's major cities.

People First Transportation Alliance (PFTA), the organization in question, describes itself as a "statewide coalition of labor unions" dedicated to putting "people over untested technology." The PFTA states it's a "coalition of community organizations, safe-streets advocates, and faith leaders." However, as The Washington Post reported on Monday, the group appears to have overstated its affiliation with four of the 13 individuals and organizations listed as its founding members.

"Several groups and individuals said statements made about them on the Transportation Alliance website were inaccurate," the Post reported, adding that PFTA "appears to be newly formed, with a minimal social media presence. Its website domain was created in late April, according to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers." The group created its social media accounts in May, but it has no posts and no followers. 

Apart from its recent interest in the nation's capital, the PFTA lists New York and Philadelphia as its priorities, two cities led by lawmakers who publicly oppose Waymo's presence. Yet for a relatively unknown, recently created organization, the PFTA has found success in its campaign to shut autonomous vehicles like Waymo out of America's Northeast.

In February, the New York Post reported that Gov. Kathy Hochul (D–N.Y.) withdrew her own proposal—which would have allowed commercial robotaxi services such as Waymo to operate in smaller cities in upstate New York—after a PFTA-led coalition prompted enough backlash to kill support for the measure. A Hochul spokesperson told the Post that it was "clear that the support was not there to advance this proposal." 

The PFTA told the Post that the organization would urge the state to "pass legislation requiring a human driver behind the wheel in every vehicle and a comprehensive study leading to a plan to address the impact driverless cars would have on New York State." 

The group's resolution comes despite customer support for autonomous vehicles: A 2025 study on Waymo, Uber, and Lyft by Obi—a company that aggregates real-time rideshare prices—found that 70 percent of riders who've used Waymo preferred it over Lyft or Uber and 42.7 percent of all respondents were willing to pay Waymo's premium price (up to $10 more) to use the service.

Despite consumer support, autonomous vehicles can't count on a fair shake from lawmakers in some of the country's largest cities. In New York City, Waymo's permit to operate a pilot program on public streets expired in March. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has so far been noncommittal on renewing the company's permit. At a press conference that same month, he said his administration would be prioritizing workers such as the city's taxi drivers who "for far too long, have been sold a dream of being able to work their way to the middle class, only to have the rug pulled out from under them." 

Despite the mystery surrounding the PFTA, its D.C. protest drew enough public support to elicit a statement from a person who will likely be the city's next mayor, current D.C. Councilmember Janeese Lewis George. In a post on X, Lewis George said D.C. was "facing a jobs crisis" that would be exacerbated by "rushing the legalization of autonomous vehicles." She urged the D.C. Council—which is currently considering a punitive proposal to legalize commercial autonomous vehicles—to "get this right and not rush Waymo legislation this year."

It's unclear how much longer Lewis George wants the District's residents to wait before autonomous vehicles are available for use. D.C.'s approach to legalizing commercial robotaxis hardly seems rushed. 

Waymo began testing its vehicles in the city nearly two and a half years ago, in spring 2024. The company's co-CEO Tekedra N. Mawakana said its fleet has driven "more than 300,000 miles in Washington, D.C."Meanwhile, the District Department of Transportation (DDOT) has been conducting studies and organizing working groups on autonomous vehicles for nearly a decade. Still, the agency has been unable to draft a regulatory framework that would eventually enable commercial robotaxi use in the nation's capital. In March, UrbanTurf reported that DDOT would be conducting a long-awaited study on autonomous vehicles—originally due in 2022—and "expects to propose recommendations on AV deployment later this year."

Opponents of autonomous vehicles, such as Lewis George and the PFTA, often cite job loss as a reason not to legalize the tech. Still, with only 200 full-time ride-share drivers in a city of roughly 400,000 workers, as Lewis George has reportedly stated, the situation is a far cry from a crisis.

As for PFTA's public safety claims, Waymo's independently reviewed data show that, compared with an average human driver over the same distance, its vehicles caused 95 percent fewer serious-injury-or-worse crashes and 93 percent fewer pedestrian crashes with serious injuries.

PFTA claims it represents the people most directly affected by transportation policy. The little publicly available information suggests the group is more focused on protecting its members' position in the ride-share market than enhancing the experience of riders, who are increasingly opting for robotaxis when given the opportunity.

The post A Months-Old Anti-Robotaxi Group Is Steering Transportation Policy From Albany to D.C. appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Recent media reports projecting South Korea’s per capita GDP to surpass Japan’s have generated considerable excitement across the regional countries that see Korea as a role model. According to the IMF’s October 2026 projections, South Korea’s nominal GDP per capita could reach approximately $49,000 in 2027, compared with Japan’s $37,000-38,000. Its achievements in semiconductors, advanced […]

The post South Korea: A growing national crisis and a strategic warning appeared first on Asia Times.

The world’s first supersonic passenger airliner—the Soviet Tu-144—may have become history after a brief but troubled stint that ended in commercial failure. However, some Russian volunteers refuse to let it vanish into oblivion and are reportedly advancing efforts to restore the aircraft for static display.

At the height of the Cold War, the Tu-144 “Concordski” was seen as an answer to the Anglo-French supersonic aircraft, Concorde.

The Russian airliner beat the Concorde in the skies twice: first with its maiden flight on December 31, 1968, two months before Concorde, and second with its first supersonic flight in June 1969, about four months before Concorde.

To preserve this legacy, a group of Russian volunteers has spent years coaxing life back into a Tu-144 airframe on the shared grounds of the Gromov Flight Research Institute and Zhukovsky Airport.

Interestingly, though, these volunteers are neither engineers from Russia’s state design bureau nor museum-paid technicians, but enthusiasts with limited resources aiming to restore a retired Tupolev Tu-144D. 

The aircraft, registered CCCP-77115, is parked on the shared grounds of the Gromov Flight Research Institute and Zhukovsky Airport outside Moscow. It served as a static exhibit at the MAKS air show for several years, but its fate remains unclear, as the air show has been suspended since 2021 due to the war in Ukraine.

Passionate volunteers have carried out extensive external and internal restoration work on the aircraft. One volunteer involved, Pavel Efter, has posted videos of the work on both airplanes on his YouTube channel, “Restorer144,” since 2023.

In the videos, volunteers can be seen turning on the electrical power supply and batteries, testing the fuel gauge, fuel pump, and fuel pressure indicator in the cockpit, checking the landing gear lights and inflating the tires, testing the cabin lighting, repairing the analog navigation system, examining the electrical schematics, cleaning the outside of the aircraft, inspecting the SSP-2A fire detection system and smoke sensors, raising and lowering the nose, testing the retractable canards, testing the APU’s bay doors beneath the aircraft, and actually installing the TA-6A Auxiliary Power Unit (APU).

In Instagram comments, Efter told enthusiasts and followers that the Tu-144D is being refurbished only for static exhibition and will not return to flight.

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Notably, the TA-6A and other mechanical and electrical modifications to the Tu-144D (as seen in the video above) have recently been made, sparking rumors that the volunteers may be preparing the aircraft for another static exhibition at MAKS, probably in 2027.

Nonetheless, the volunteers have been working on restoring the aircraft for several months. In July 2026, media reports noted that the volunteers had already started the electrical system and connected a ground power source, adding that even the well-known nose-lowering mechanism had become operational.

Another Russian state-funded news website, Mir24, provided more details on the volunteers. “There is a problem with such glass fuses now. They aren’t used anywhere; you can’t always find them in old stock. We throw out a cry on the Internet: who has something, who can help with what,” Sergey Chechetkin told the publication at the time. Sergey is a former aviation engineer who devotes all his free time to the Tu-144.

The report also noted that volunteers have completely recreated the plane’s cabin. Volunteers collected the missing devices from across the country and began restoring the aircraft by tidying the service panels and lamps and installing the original chairs. Initially, the 77115 board wasn’t a passenger deck; it served as an experimental testbed. “We find it in different places. Old blocks are transmitted at the bases; you can find something here. Here we are installing the blocks on the mounts,” a volunteer named Alexey told Mir24.

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The project carries no grand political statement. The volunteers do not frame their work as resistance or protest. Instead, they speak of history. “This is not just a museum exhibit, but a legend that we should be proud of. You can still learn a lot from it; many developments aren’t available on other planes yet. It is still ahead of its time,” said Alexey Amelushkin, an engineer at the training and methodological center of PJSC Tupolev, earlier. 

Needless to say, returning this legendary airframe to flight is widely regarded as impractical, especially since Kolesov RD-36-51 engines are long out of production, spare parts are scarce, and certification requirements would be formidable.

Therefore, Efter and his colleagues are only restoring the aircraft’s ability to present itself: nose down in the classic pose, canards extended, cabin lights on, systems powered by its own APU.

First Into The Air, But Not The First To Succeed

The Tupolev Tu-144 was the world’s first supersonic passenger airliner.

Designed by the Tupolev Design Bureau, the aircraft was rushed into development after the then-Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, demanded a supersonic transport that would fly before its Western counterpart.

The prototype made its maiden flight on 31 December 1968 near Moscow, beating Concorde into the air by more than two months. Subsequently, the aircraft went supersonic for the first time in June 1969 and became the first commercial aircraft to reach Mach 2 in May 1970.

The Tu-144 was built to be larger and faster than Concorde, and featured a distinctive double-delta wing and a drooping nose for better landing visibility. Later models also added retractable canards to improve low-speed handling.

However, Western experts and officials claimed the Soviets stole the Concorde plans, which may have helped them build the Tupolev Tu-144 before the Concorde.

These claims reportedly stemmed (at least in part) from the uncanny design similarities between the world’s first two supersonic passenger aircraft.

Despite its early successes over the Concorde, the airplane faced technical issues.

For example, Tu-144’s early Kuznetsov NK-144 engines required constant afterburner use to sustain supersonic cruise, making it extremely noisy, fuel-thirsty, and shorter-range than Concorde, which could supercruise without afterburners. Moreover, reliability problems emerged during testing and maintenance, and the cabin was very noisy and vibrated a lot.

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On June 3, 1973, during a demonstration flight at the Paris Air Show, a production Tu-144 broke apart in midair and crashed into the French village of Goussainville, killing all six crew members along with eight additional people on the ground.

Although the most widely accepted explanation is that the crew overstressed the airframe during fast maneuvers, the precise cause of this disaster remains uncertain.

The Tu-144 entered limited commercial service with Aeroflot in 1975, initially carrying mail and cargo on the Moscow–Almaty route, followed by passenger flights in Nov 1977.

However, the aircraft flew only about 55 passenger services before a second major incident. In May 1978, a fuel-line rupture and fire during a test flight claimed the lives of two crew members and formally ended passenger operations.

After this debacle, the aircraft continued brief cargo and experimental work even as its rival program—the Concorde—struggled with its own set of issues.

Both programs were eventually canceled because of poor safety records and concerns about economic viability. However, Concorde was far more successful than the Tu-144 and wasn’t discontinued until 2003.

The Soviet Union, for its part, built only 16 airframes before operations ceased in 1983. A few surviving examples later trained pilots for the Soviet Buran space shuttle, and one modified aircraft served as a flying laboratory in a joint NASA–Russian research program from 1996 to 1999, conducting its final flights in support of future supersonic transport studies, as earlier explained in detail by the EurAsian Times. 

Though neither the Tu-144 nor the Concorde survived, both programs have inspired people worldwide to make supersonic commercial travel a reality. Earlier this year, United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) CEO Vadim Badekha confirmed that the Zhukovsky National Research Center is working on a supersonic airliner prototype. He said the effort had moved beyond paper studies into “hardware,” with UAC providing active support, and expressed confidence that the center would complete the work.

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“Yes, such work is underway at the Zhukovsky Research Center, and we are actively assisting. The work is no longer confined to paper – it is already being carried out in hardware. A prototype of such an aircraft is under development, and we believe the Zhukovsky Research Center will successfully complete this work,” he told TASS.

Meanwhile, NASA is advancing work on the X-59, an experimental aircraft in the agency’s Quiet Supersonic Technology (Quesst) program that could go supersonic without generating a sonic boom or a loud, thunder-like sound when it exceeds the speed of sound.  In addition, China is developing a supersonic passenger aircraft that could make its maiden flight by 2027. Last year, reports noted that the Chinese commercial aerospace company leading the project conducted the first test flight of a detonation ramjet engine. 

As for the Tu-144, this aircraft is remembered as a bold but ultimately unsuccessful engineering achievement. It is, perhaps, for this reason that the volunteers outside the state machinery of Russia are doing everything they can to ensure that the supersonic airliner does not get lost in pages of history.

• Contact the author at sakshi.tiwari13 (at) outlook.com
• Follow EurAsian Times on Google News

 

The post Russia’s ‘Concorde’ is Back: World’s 1st Supersonic Passenger Airliner Lives On as Volunteers Fix Tu-144 appeared first on EURASIAN TIMES.

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• Macron criticises ‘unbridled violence’ after 2,400 arrests across France

French PM Lecornu says he has asked prefects to implement “a number of partial curfews” in certain “localised” urban areas to stop further disorder, which he attributes to “the extreme-left” and some criminal elements.

We will no doubt hear more on this from local authorities, as in the example of Marseille (10:32).

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Guillaume Saligot/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Guillaume Saligot/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Guillaume Saligot/AFP/Getty Images

The “forced digital detox” delivered by Ukraine’s Armed Forces has hit the most profitable part of Yandex’s business: search and AI. The long-term fallout from the attacks on the company’s data centers has yet to be assessed, but supercomputing experts consulted by T-invariant are confident that all three of its supercomputers — Chervonenkis, Lyapunov, and Galushkin — were badly damaged by fire and smoke. Soot and ash may have reached the machines’ microelectronics through their direct free-cooling systems, which use outside air. In the best case, cleaning them will take many months; in the worst, Yandex will have to buy new, extremely scarce NVIDIA chips or their equivalents, which will take years. The company owns Russia’s best supercomputers, which, according to its financial reports, had recently become key drivers of its growth. On the eve of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Chervonenkis ranked 19th on the global Top500 list of supercomputers, competing with leading systems from the US, China, Japan, and Germany. After the Ukrainian drone strikes, Russia risks falling behind Kazakhstan in the performance of its top supercomputers as early as November.

Top news on scientists’ work and experiences during the war, along with videos and infographics — subscribe to the T-invariant Telegram channel to stay updated.

All three of Yandex’s supercomputers have been knocked out of service indefinitely by drone strikes on the company’s data centers. The first attack came overnight on October 8 in Sasovo, in the Ryazan region. That site houses Chervonenkis, the IT giant’s flagship machine and the most powerful of Russia’s publicly listed supercomputers, as well as Lyapunov, the third most powerful. The following night, Ukrainian forces struck the data center in Kaluga — Yandex’s largest and one of the biggest in Russia. Overnight on October 11, a data center in Vladimir, home to the Galushkin supercomputer, came under attack.

Four specialists interviewed by T-invariant are confident that the company’s computing capacity has suffered serious damage. In their view, the main reason the equipment was so vulnerable to the drone strikes and the fires that followed is the direct free-cooling system, which cools the equipment with outside air (supply fans push the air through filters, and it then flows through the server racks).

Even if the fire didn’t spread to the supercomputer racks directly, air laden with soot and ash could have reached the server boards, and the finest particles could have settled on the board substrate (a lot also depends on the condition of the filters). Carbon conducts electricity. Because the traces on the boards are packed so densely, these particles can act as conductive “bridges” between contacts, causing widespread short circuits and burning out motherboards. What’s more, combustion byproducts can corrode conductors and contact joints.

In the summer of 2026, Yandex announced that it was starting to roll out liquid cooling. “To integrate the technology into existing data centers that operate on free-cooling principles, the company’s engineers developed a specialized solution: sidecars. The sidecars are additional racks fitted with liquid-to-air radiators. They make it possible to introduce liquid cooling without large-scale, costly renovation of the buildings. The hybrid of air and liquid systems provides efficient thermal management for high-load racks and speeds up the adaptation of the infrastructure to the needs of internal services and external partners,” the company said. However, according to the experts interviewed by T-invariant, although liquid-cooled components fare better in a fire, the company is unlikely to have finished this retrofit at all of its data centers.

One of the experts, who works at a global AI tech giant, was skeptical of the technology Yandex uses to cool its supercomputers. “Nobody in their right mind has used free cooling for ages,” the source told T-invariant. Most operators rely on liquid cooling systems (which is what NVIDIA uses), and, less often, on immersion cooling.

According to the specialists, cleaning smoke, soot, and grime off the supercomputers’ components could take up to six months. And if parts need to be replaced — including expensive and, above all, scarce NVIDIA chips or their equivalents — getting the machines fully back up and running could take one to two years.

Up-to-date videos on science during wartime, interviews, podcasts, and streams with prominent scientists — subscribe to the T-invariant YouTube channel!

Yandex has not commented on the condition of its supercomputers after the attacks. T-invariant asked leading Russian supercomputing specialists — both those working in Russia and those who left to work for global AI giants — for a detailed assessment of the situation and of all the threats and challenges facing Yandex (all of them asked to remain anonymous).

Why the Fate of the Supercomputers Matters Most

The strike on Russia’s IT leader had a digital blast radius far beyond its data centers. For more than a week now, Russian users have been dealing with outages in services run by Yandex’s many cloud customers and other B2B clients. They have also been hit by outages in Yandex’s own services — above all, Yandex Disk and Yandex Pay. The Russian internet is flooded with videos from users who have lost access, possibly only temporarily, to their data or their money.

T-INVARIANT BACKGROUND

How Many B2B Clients Depend on Yandex’s Services

According to the company’s financial results for Q2 2026, Yandex Cloud’s total client base grew to 64,000. AI and information security services remain the key growth drivers: they are already used by 37% and 53% of large clients, respectively — up 10 and 9 percentage points from a year earlier. Consumption of commercial tokens via the API on the Yandex AI Studio platform reached 398 billion tokens in Q2 2026 — double the figure for the first quarter and 70% more than in all of 2025. Yandex 360, the company’s cloud office suite, keeps growing: it now has more than 117 million users and 185,000 organizations. At the end of Q2 2026, Yandex 360 had a total of 8.9 million paid accounts, 2.4 million of them at large companies.

Yet the main problem for Yandex itself after Ukraine’s strikes on its data centers is the partial or total loss of computing capacity. And there are at least two reasons why. Yes, the disabled data centers will weigh on Yandex’s market capitalization, but something else matters more: these problems could stall the development of its AI, on which the company’s core business depends, for months or even years.

After the first drone strikes on Yandex’s data centers on October 8 and 9, many investors remained cautiously optimistic about the company: the cloud accounts for only a small share of revenue, and workloads can be redistributed among data centers. The share price dipped by a few percent at the time. The third attack, and the likelihood of further Ukrainian drone raids, made financial forecasts gloomier.

Yandex does not break out AI figures in its financial reports, so one has to go by the Search and AI Services segment. It has the highest adjusted EBITDA margin of all the segments Yandex reports. In Q2 2026, that margin was 46.3%, and for the first half of the year, 44.8% (by comparison, the City Services segment had a margin of 16%, and the contribution of the entire B2B segment, including Yandex Cloud, is far smaller than that of search and AI). The Search and AI Services segment also generated the largest adjusted EBITDA in absolute terms.

The reports also show that AI is already making a measurable contribution to advertising revenue growth: according to the company, its ARGUS recommendation technology accounted for almost half of that growth in Q2 2026. And although Yandex doesn’t disclose the profitability of its AI products separately, its reports make clear just how important AI is to the company’s financial health.

“Yandex remains one of the world’s first companies to expand its experiments with AI-based promotion formats for businesses — in Alice AI, both within Yandex Search and on its own website and app. These formats take a fundamentally new approach to audience targeting. The algorithms take into account not only the query but the entire context of the conversation with Alice AI. This makes it possible to identify a user’s potential interest even before they formulate a specific query. Promotion on AI surfaces is already showing measurable results: the cost of customer acquisition is comparable to that of promotion in Search. In chats with Alice AI, the ad system has already displayed ads from more than 460,000 advertisers — three-quarters of all advertisers on the platform. Alice AI remains the most popular AI assistant among Russians. In the second quarter, the number of weekly users who turn to Alice AI for tasks and conversation grew 39% quarter over quarter to 33.2 million. The number of monthly active Stations with Alice [Yandex’s smart speakers — T-invariant] rose 31% year over year to 22.5 million. More and more users own multiple devices: the number of people who own two or more Stations grew 44% to 4.7 million,” Yandex’s report states.

Clearly, the main risk concerns AI. It is these three supercomputers at two data centers that power the development of the company’s neural networks and other parts of its AI ecosystem. If the computing capacity has to be shut down so the equipment can be cleaned after the fire and smoke, the infrastructure behind almost half of the growth in ad revenue will sit idle for months. If the supercomputers are damaged even partially, development will be set back by years. First, sanctions restrict deliveries of NVIDIA A100 accelerators to Russia. Getting around them is extremely expensive and difficult, as shown by the cloak-and-dagger operation to build MSU-270, a closely guarded supercomputer at Moscow State University (see T-invariant’s investigation). Second, there is a global shortage of cutting-edge NVIDIA chips: orders are booked two to three years in advance, as confirmed by a T-invariant source at NVIDIA and by another specialist at a global AI giant who asked that the company not be named.

As a result, the development of YandexGPT and Alice AI is effectively on hold indefinitely — even as demand for them is growing explosively: according to Yandex B2B Tech data cited by the financial portal Finam, token consumption in Yandex AI Studio grew 18-fold year over year in the first half of 2026. Yandex’s service status page currently lists Yandex AI Studio as unavailable.

[[socialnetworks]]

Why Yandex’s Data Centers Weren’t Ready for War

“Yandex built its data centers and its supercomputers in peacetime, for peacetime. Everything was designed for normal life; it never even crossed anyone’s mind that drones would come crashing through the roof. The Ryazan, Kaluga, and Vladimir regions don’t get earthquakes or other natural disasters, so nobody even thought about investing in physical protection for the buildings,” explains one of the supercomputing industry experts T-invariant spoke to.

Yandex’s public descriptions of its infrastructure (in particular, a post the company published in 2020) reveal the logic behind its design: low energy consumption, redundant power, simple and cheap cooling, and the ability to shift workloads between sites.

According to a BBC source, Yandex regularly practiced taking one data center offline and shifting its load to the others. But the successive loss of several large sites was probably never rehearsed. The BBC’s source also says that Yandex’s services may have treated two separate buildings in Vladimir as backups for each other: losing both at once was considered impossible.

“In Russia, data centers are usually built as fairly basic ‘boxes’: no serious walls, no fencing, nothing like that, almost no liquid cooling, no sophisticated fire suppression systems — even though advanced technologies exist, including Russian-made ones. All of that is considered insane capex by Russian business standards. Nobody could afford it. On top of that, there’s the extreme centralization. About 70–80% of all data centers are located around Moscow and St. Petersburg,” explains the supercomputing expert.

The first public calls in Russia to improve data center security came literally a couple of days before the first attacks. The BBC cites examples: “One of the main tasks now is how to move computing capacity, how to move all the useful IT load out of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the Moscow region somewhere farther away… somewhere beyond the Urals, where, fortunately, things aren’t landing yet,” Deputy Minister of Digital Development Yevgeny Filatov said on October 6 at the Digital Solutions forum. And on the evening of October 7 (a few hours before the first attack), RBC published a report that representatives of the IT industry and the Ministry of Digital Development were discussing the possibility of placing AI data centers in “friendly countries” [the Russian government’s term for countries that have not imposed sanctions on Russia — T-invariant].

The BBC also points out that by then Russian forces had already been striking data centers in Ukraine. From September 23 to 28, they damaged at least six such facilities. The attacks left people without internet access and disrupted TV broadcasts. The Russian Ministry of Defense even posted an image on its social media channels that read “Digital detox… by force.” As early as October 4, two days before Filatov’s remarks, Volodymyr Zelensky warned of retaliatory strikes: “Do they really think we won’t respond?”

Other striking examples — in every sense of the word — emerged in 2026, showing that data centers are among the top-priority targets in wartime. Civilian data centers were also hit by drones and missiles during the conflict between the US and Iran. Amazon’s data centers in Bahrain and the UAE were attacked several times after Washington launched its bombing campaign against Iran. Amazon advised customers to move their data to sites outside the region, since there was no telling when the facilities would be back online. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) also threatened to completely destroy OpenAI’s Stargate data center in Abu Dhabi.

“In Germany, I took a close look at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre near Munich. It’s a windowless cube with a moat around it, so nobody can ram it with a car. The entrance is a small suspension bridge. The cube itself is essentially a building within a building, a Faraday cage [an example of architectural radio-frequency shielding — T-invariant]. So they’ve literally put serious physical and other protective measures in place. And that supercomputer ranked below Yandex’s Chervonenkis on the Top500. Still, the Germans invested very seriously in protection. That kind of protection won’t stop ballistic missiles, but against drones it works just fine. We also know of incredible underground data centers in Norway and Finland. Then there’s Alibaba’s supercomputing center in China. Almost all the Top500 leaders don’t skimp on capex; they install sophisticated liquid or immersion cooling systems. Russia’s IT leaders cut corners on all of it,” the expert explains.

T-INVARIANT BACKGROUND

In Norway, Lefdal Mine Datacenter houses its data halls in a former mine, about 700 meters in from the entrance to the mountain. It combines a sheltered location with cooling by cold fjord water. Some of the supporting infrastructure, including the generators, remains above ground.

The Finnish data center The Rock, located in the Pori area, uses nine tunnel halls originally carved out for military use. The underground facility, covering about 8,500 square meters, combines the natural protection of solid bedrock with segmentation into security zones and specialized engineering infrastructure, including direct liquid cooling.

Who Ultimately Gets the “Forced Digital Detox”

Of Russia’s six largest supercomputers, only the two belonging to the banking giant Sber are located at a site relatively well protected from drone attacks. Christofari and Christofari Neo are housed in Skolkovo, which has better air defense coverage. GROM, the supercomputer owned by the telecom operator MTS, is in Lytkarino, outside Moscow. Yandex’s remaining data centers are also in the Moscow region, in Mytishchi and Ivanteyevka. All of these towns near Moscow regularly come under massive Ukrainian drone raids.

“Restoring supercomputers of this caliber just isn’t going to happen, not now and not anytime soon. And it’s not even about having the money. The main problem isn’t even sanctions, it’s the shortage of chips and other components: there’s a huge waiting list for them worldwide. That said, gray- and black-market imports are very costly, too. So things are pretty Sucksovo these days [a pun on Sasovo, the town where Yandex’s flagship data center was hit, and the Russian slang verb sosat’, ‘to suck’ — T-invariant],” says a supercomputing specialist who spoke with T-invariant.

The next update of the global Top500 list of supercomputers will be published in November. Chervonenkis currently ranks 101st, and Kazakhstan’s Alem.Cloud is 104th (Kazakhstan’s second machine is 122nd, ahead of all of Russia’s other supercomputers). The experts T-invariant spoke to have no doubt that Ukraine’s retaliatory “forced digital detox” will push Russia’s leading supercomputers below Kazakhstan’s on the Top500 as early as this fall. Competing with the US, China, and Japan is out of the question altogether: Russia already lags behind them by two orders of magnitude.

As T-invariant reported earlier, the Netherlands is among the countries ahead of Russia on the Top500 list. Two machines registered to the Netherlands belong to Nebius, the company led by Yandex co-founder and former CEO Arkady Volozh: ISEG (which ranked 16th when it debuted) and ISEG2, with a combined peak performance of about 425 petaflops. According to the government’s Concept for the Development of Mathematical Sciences through 2036, Russia’s five machines on the Top500 together deliver less than 100 petaflops of peak performance. In other words, Arkady Volozh’s company alone has more computing power than all of Russia’s Top500 systems combined.

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The post Bad Air Day: Drone Strikes on Yandex Set to Push Russia Below Kazakhstan in the AI Race appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.

In recent days, a Ukrainian drone strike hit Russia’s largest data center, owned by bank and technology company Sberbank. The strike came after Ukraine hit three data centers belonging to the tech giant Yandex, which is often referred to as “Russia’s Google.” After those attacks, Yandex’s traffic dropped 94%. Its users experienced heavy disruption to […]

The post Data centers in the line of fire of Ukraine war appeared first on Asia Times.

There is now a growing debate over what constitutes war and whether it should include strikes on data centers. They represent a new front in warfare, in which facilities powering the technology behind many critical industries have become targets.

As it is, the definition of a military attack seems to be changing over time.

Conventionally, it was understood to occur when tanks or fighter planes crossed a border. Then it was expanded to include the use of missiles that were fired without crossing the border but hitting a city and causing physical destruction of “vital infrastructure and death”.

Such attacks justified a country retaliating under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which legitimizes a war under “Right to Self Defense” if an “armed attack occurs.”

Now there is a growing school of thought that “vital infrastructure” must include any disruptive attack on data centers, whether kinetic or non-kinetic, amounting to significant loss of function. It should be treated as a use of force and trigger the affected country’s right to self-defense under Article 51, the argument goes.

Apparently, vulnerabilities in modern digital infrastructure have turned data centers into primary targets in contemporary warfare. As society becomes deeply integrated with cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and automated logistics, data centers have evolved into the nervous system of modern statecraft.

Attacks on digital infrastructure are no longer limited to cyberattacks (non-kinetic) that cause banking collapses and disrupt vital systems like power grids and hospitals by cutting off Internet access; they now include kinetic strikes on data hubs that affect nations’ military capabilities and expose financial vulnerabilities.

After all, modern defense systems rely heavily on cloud-based logistics. Data centers process satellite imagery, coordinate drone operations, run predictive maintenance algorithms for fighter jets, and host classified communication networks. Thus, taking down these nodes effectively blinds an adversary’s command structure.

This has been noticed in the recent conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine. For instance, on September 23, Russian Geran-5 jet drones hit the Inkom Business Center in Kyiv,  housing Datagroup’s data center. Four people died, and internet service for 100,000 households was down for hours.

On September 27, Kyivstar — Ukraine’s central mobile operator — and Vodafone Ukraine’s data centers were hit. Russia’s Defense Ministry  justified this by saying that “Data centers were being used for the benefit of the Ukrainian military.”

Two weeks later, Ukraine returned the favor. It launched highly targeted long-range drone strikes hitting major data hubs across Russia, inflicting significant disruption on the country’s digital economy.

Between October 8 and October 14, 2026, Ukrainian forces carried out a series of “symmetrical responses” to counter earlier Russian attacks on Ukrainian internet and telecommunications assets. The strikes specifically crippled infrastructure belonging to Yandex (often called “Russia’s Google”) and Sberbank, Russia’s largest banking and technology conglomerate.

Similarly, in February-March 2026, during US-Israeli strikes on Iran, the latter hit back not only at oil but at data centers — Google, Microsoft, and Oracle cloud infrastructure in the Gulf, particularly those located in Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.

Apparently, when Amazon Web Services’ Bahrain facility suffered “physical damage to cooling infrastructure from debris”, it became the first known case of an AWS data center damaged in an interstate war.

Iranian missiles near Al Udeid Air Base damaged an Oracle Cloud data center in Doha. Microsoft also confirmed “connectivity issues” in the Qatar Central region.

The same happened to the Google data center in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, which hosts Aramco cloud.

G42 [UAE AI company backed by Microsoft] data center in Abu Dhabi was also affected, forcing it into blackout mode.

In other words, from Kyiv to Bahrain, a pattern is clearly apparent  — belligerents no longer distinguish between cloud and command. Data centers that host banks and brigades are treated as brigades. They have officially transitioned from commercial tech infrastructures to critical national security assets.

As Omar Sultan Al Olama, the UAE’s Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Digital Economy, and Remote Work Applications, said the other day,  “Unfortunately, they’re more important than bridges. They’re more important than roads. They’re more important than tunnels because our whole lives are on these devices that we’re using”.

Incidentally, the UAE is revising plans for a 5-gigawatt AI data center project following the Iranian strikes. The original plan envisioned a 10-square-mile campus in Abu Dhabi, to be built in partnership with American tech companies like Oracle, Nvidia, and Cisco. Now the data centers will likely be spread out across the UAE. Sultan Al Olama said, “ The UAE will change its data centre rules and stop promoting where they are”.

According to Kirk Cameron, founding director of the Institute for Advanced Computing at Virginia Tech, “Data centers are now on the critical path for modern digital infrastructure. The loss of key data centers could collapse economies, disrupt public and private transportation with loss of GPS, and affect government essential services for health, emergency dispatch, and power grids.”

Many agree with him when he argues that  “Data centers are competitive advantages in warfare. Knocking out capabilities means potentially crippling combat operations for an adversary. It’s also a form of economic warfare and could lead to longer-term competitive challenges for the target.”

All this brings the question of whether bombing a data center constitutes an act of war.  Does the definition of war need to change?

The main challenge to this question lies in what is called the “Gray Zone” of conflict, particularly in non-kinetic attacks. Unlike a missile launch, which leaves clear radar signatures and identifiable points of origin, cyber operations offer plausible deniability.

Under International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, attacking a dual-use target is governed by the principles of distinction and proportionality.  Here, attacking a dual-use target is legal only if the military advantage gained outweighs the civilian collateral damage.

If an attack on a data center shuts down military communications but also disables the life-support monitoring systems of dozens of regional hospitals, the strike violates proportionality. Such an operation can be classified as a war crime, reinforcing the argument that major cyber infrastructure operations carry the same legal weight and consequences as traditional warfare.

But any clear distinction in such cases is neither easy nor free from contention. For instance, when Russia attacked data centers in Ukraine, it claimed that these were being used by Ukrainian intelligence and military. However, Ukraine denied the charge.

As  Kasia Klonowska, an authority on international law, says, “Due to a lack of a definition of the treaty- terms weapons, means or methods of warfare, it is unclear whether non-weaponized AI decision-support systems should be subjected to a legal review prescribed by Article 36 of the Additional Protocol I. It remains a challenge to determine exactly what should be subjected to review beyond weapons.

“You have very limited situations in which they would actually qualify as lawful targets when they’re used by the military, and even then, it’s very difficult for the attacker to know whether that’s happening or not. If they are purely processing military data, they could be legitimate targets. But many, if not most, are dual-use.”

To address the legal ambiguity surrounding digital warfare, Prof. Ben Hines has proposed what he calls a “Substantive Necessity” framework, reinterpreting international law under Article 51 of the UN Charter.

Under this framework, a non-kinetic cyber attack amounts to an armed attack when the victim state, based on clear and convincing evidence, apprehends a hostile act that has fundamentally compromised, or is imminently poised to compromise, the functioning or security of infrastructure crucial to the state’s ability to function.

The framework argues that traditional international legal thresholds for “force” and “gravity” do not inherently require physical destruction or kinetic weaponry. Under this test, taking down a country’s primary data center cluster that hosts banking, health, emergency dispatch, GPS — even without an explosion — is an armed attack. Because effects equal or exceed kinetic.

Viewed thus, it is not surprising that Western nations like the US, the Netherlands, and France are clearly asserting that a disruptive attack on data centers that causes significant loss of function will be treated as a use of force and may trigger the right to self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter.

In sum, as the line between the physical and digital worlds disappears, international law is adapting to treat high-consequence infrastructure attacks as equivalent to an armed attack.

Data centers are now firmly on the front lines of global conflict, where a single breach can serve as the definitive catalyst for war. The lines between civilian infrastructure and military assets are dangerously blurring.

• Author and veteran journalist Prakash Nanda is Chairman of the Editorial Board of the EurAsian Times and has been commenting on politics, foreign policy, and strategic affairs for nearly three decades. He is a former National Fellow of the Indian Council for Historical Research and a recipient of the Seoul Peace Prize Scholarship.
• CONTACT: prakash.nanda (at) hotmail.com

The post Iran Hit Amazon. Russia Struck Kyiv’s Data Centers. Ukraine Hit Yandex. Can Such Attacks Trigger Article 51? appeared first on EURASIAN TIMES.

An “extremely reliable” informant told authorities about the missing murder weapon, according to newly unsealed records. The informant’s brother told The Times his sibling was at the crime scene.

© Sam Mircovich/Reuters

For more than three decades, Michael Gove has been a leading figure in British Conservatism. As a journalist, government minister and now editor of the Tory bible the Spectator, he has helped shape the right even as it has moved further rightwards. In the latest episode of Radical Thinking, Gove joins Aditya Chakrabortty to discuss the future of the right, his record on Brexit and austerity, and the Spectator’s position on Islam

Watch the full episode with Michael Gove here.

Aditya’s suggested reading:

To read the fruits of Michael Gove’s dalliance with the Marxism Today gang, look up his essay in a 1998 collection called The Moderniser’s Dilemma: Radical Politics in the Age of Blair

For a slalom ride through Michael Gove’s years in power, read The Demented Dalek by the historian Richard J Evans in the London Review of Books

To learn more on what’s become of the British right, there’s a Guardian column by Aditya

Phil Burton-Cartledge analyses in depth why the most successful political party is now failing in his book The Party’s Over: The Rise and Fall of the Conservatives from Thatcher to Sunak

Phil also writes a very good blog on British politics, which keeps a close eye on how each party is trying to marshall a coalition of voters. Here he is on Kemi Badenoch

Geoffrey Wheatcroft does an entertaining short narrative in Bloody Panico!:

or, Whatever Happened to The Tory Party

For more on the economics of the Cameron years, this paper is acute on how the Tories failed to move the UK away from being a country of renters towards a country of makers. Two of its authors will join us for a podcast later in the series.

And if you want to read how Brexit may have cost the UK 8% of GDP, there’s this paper based on data from the Bank of England

Finally, on the Spectator, read Nesrine Malik’s recent Guardian column

Why has Britain’s oldest political magazine become such a rabid cheerleader for Islamophobia?

Continue reading...

© Photograph: James Tindale/The Guardian

© Photograph: James Tindale/The Guardian

© Photograph: James Tindale/The Guardian

Indonesia, Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo together hold more than half of the world’s tropical rainforests. In 2022, when Indonesia hosted the G20 summit in Bali, the three countries pledged to cooperate on how to pay to protect those forests. The promise was one of South-South cooperation: developing countries working together rather than […]

The post Indonesia primed to lead a Global South forest protection bloc appeared first on Asia Times.

Climate change is making your home uninsurable! That's the headline, but look behind it and you find a press release by a PR outfit touting some very dubious claims about floods and finance, says Tilak Doshi.

The post No, Climate Change is Not Making Your Home “Uninsurable” appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

Understanding the history of human societies is part of God’s design for how we tend and keep his creation and fill the earth with civilization that glorifies him. And this understanding isn’t limited to professional historians. The Bible calls us all to do the priestly work of stewarding the past. On the one hand, this... Continue Reading

In a bizarre incident, Japan’s Meteorological Agency (JMA) issued a warning about what could have been the world’s worst earthquake ever. The agency retracted the warning a few minutes later, but it still alarmed large parts of the country and unsettled people who had witnessed horrifying disasters.

The JMA estimated a magnitude 9.9 earthquake in the Kuril Islands off Hokkaido on October 16, 2026, but quickly rescinded the alert on account of an error.

The early-warning system had incorrectly placed the earthquake’s epicenter in the Kuril Islands (Chishima Islands) off Hokkaido and calculated a magnitude of 9.9. However, JMA officials later said the system wrongly assumed the quake was about 680 kilometers farther from Japan than it actually was, near Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula.

The JMA, which has a near-flawless warning system, warned that Hokkaido and the Tohoku region in northeastern Japan would experience shaking up to 7, the highest intensity on the country’s seismic scale. However, a magnitude 6.9 earthquake near Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula produced only intensity 1 shaking in Hakodate, Hokkaido.

The JMA withdrew the alert just eight minutes after issuing it, marking the first full public retraction of an emergency earthquake warning.

Officials said the magnitude was overstated because its computer system misidentified the earthquake’s focus, though they ruled out a cyberattack. Some local reports noted that one contributing factor may be applying magnitude-calculation methods designed for earthquakes within Japan’s dense observation network to a distant event outside coverage.

Ayataka Ebita, director of the agency’s Earthquake and Tsunami Observation Division, apologized to the public at a news conference, saying, “We deeply apologize for causing great inconvenience.” Meanwhile, Chief Cabinet Secretary Minoru Kihara told reporters that the government regretted the incident. “We caused a great deal of worry and placed a burden upon those who took shelter or took action to ensure their safety, as well as on others such as transport systems and businesses that were affected,” he said.

Several Japanese citizens had learned about the alert through municipal public address systems, TV and radio broadcasts, or their smartphones.

As expected, the false alarm sparked chaos in several parts of the country, disrupting daily life and domestic transit. In Sapporo, Hokkaido, for example, 14 trams stopped for a few minutes after the warning until their operator decided it was safe to continue service. Additionally, bullet train operations between Shin-Yokohama and Toyohashi stations on the Tokaido Shinkansen Line were briefly halted, although the operator later noted that the suspension was not directly caused by the earthquake warning.

Moreover, people sought shelter unnecessarily in some places, and social media later buzzed with netizens expressing confusion after the alert was retracted.

A false magnitude-9.9 earthquake warning jolted people because it is exceptionally scary, and no instrumentally recorded earthquake has ever reached magnitude 9.9.

According to publicly available information, the largest instrumentally measured earthquake in history—magnitude 9.5—was the 1960 Valdivia earthquake in Chile that killed more than 1,600 people, injured at least 3,000, and left two million people homeless. The rupture zone stretched 500 to 1,000 kilometers along the country’s coast.

A rupture zone is the area along a fault or rock mass where stress exceeds the material’s strength, causing it to break or fracture during an earthquake.

The false warning could have triggered panic because Japan’s geography puts it in an area of extreme seismic risk.  Japan sits at the convergence of four major tectonic plates—Pacific, Philippine Sea, Eurasian, and North American—along the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” making it one of the most earthquake-prone places on Earth.

In fact, about 20% of the world’s magnitude-6.0 or larger earthquakes occur in or around Japan.

Initially, the system located the epicenter near the Kuril Islands off Hokkaido, where a possible magnitude-9-class event is believed possible. Official scenarios for such an event have earlier predicted tsunami heights of up to 30 meters in some places; possible death tolls of close to 100,000; and widespread destruction of buildings and infrastructure.

The so-called erroneous warning predicted intensity 7 shaking across northern Japan. If it had come true, nearly all buildings would have suffered severe or total damage, and landslides, ground cracks, and infrastructure collapse may have occurred.

In a country where even moderate earthquakes bring an otherwise bustling country to a standstill by triggering automatic train halts, elevator shutdowns, and immediate public action, a maximum-intensity alert over such a wide area may have shaken the people.

The eight minutes that the alert was live may have brought back the trauma of 2011 when Japanese people stood witness to the worst natural disaster to hit the country.

The Shadow of the 2011 Disaster

In 2011, Japan suffered its worst natural disaster when a magnitude 9.0 to 9.1 megathrust earthquake struck off Tohoku’s Pacific coast, about 130 kilometers east of Sendai.

The earthquake hit on March 11, 2011, at 2:46 p.m. local time. On that fateful day, a massive undersea megathrust earthquake measuring 9.0–9.1 occurred in the Pacific Ocean some 72 kilometers east of the Oshika Peninsula in Japan’s Tohoku region.

According to publicly available information, the quake was relatively shallow, at about 24-32 kilometers deep, and lasted six minutes. However, it was so violent that it shifted the seafloor and generated a series of powerful tsunami waves.

The waves hit the coast about 30 to 40 minutes after the main shock, toppling seawalls and inundating about 561 square kilometers of land along Japan’s northeastern Pacific coast. In places such as Miyako, these waves attained a maximum run-up height of 133 feet.

The tsunami swept entire towns and coastal communities in Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima prefectures, among others, leaving widespread devastation. 

Following the tsunami, hundreds of people were reported dead, and hundreds more were reported missing.

As rescue efforts began and the scale of the destruction—particularly in coastal areas—became apparent, the numbers in both categories sharply increased. After two weeks of the disaster, about 10,000 people were officially counted as deceased by the Japanese government, and about 1.5 times as many were still listed as missing and believed dead.

Finally, the official Japanese government or Reconstruction Agency figures were reported to be more than 19,729 dead, more than 2,553 missing, and about 6,200 injured.

The vast majority of fatalities resulted from drowning in the tsunami rather than the earthquake shaking itself. Over 120,000 buildings were completely destroyed, with hundreds of thousands more severely or partially damaged. Furthermore, the disaster also severely damaged and disrupted critical infrastructure, including roads, railways, ports, airports, power lines, and water systems.

Adding to this massive toll on the country’s people and economy, the disaster also triggered a major nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.

Although the earthquake triggered an automatic shutdown of the reactors, floodwaters inundated the facility and disabled both off-site power lines and emergency diesel generators. Without cooling, three reactor cores melted down, triggering hydrogen explosions and releasing radioactive material, which sparked evacuation en masse.

The event was subsequently rated Level 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale—the highest level, shared only with the 1986 Chornobyl disaster.

The earthquake and tsunami following the disaster had long-term social, economic, and environmental impacts across northeastern Japan. In fact, recovery and reconstruction from the accident took more than a decade, including rebuilding communities, infrastructure, and coastal defenses, and managing the Fukushima site going forward.

Against this background, the recent false warning was uniquely unsettling because it briefly presented the public with a scenario worse than 2011, as it would have released roughly 20 times or more the energy of the Tohoku quake. Moreover, the predicted location lies along the same subduction zone system that produced the 2011 disaster.

The recent false alarm did not trigger an earthquake, but it may have forced the country to briefly confront the scale of another possible disaster.

• Contact the author at sakshi.tiwari13 (at) outlook.com
• Follow EurAsian Times on Google News

The post Tsunami, Then Nuclear Disaster: World’s Biggest Earthquake Alarm Revives 2011 Memories in Japan appeared first on EURASIAN TIMES.

A military-backed operation shut down a major illegal gold mining site in Gashaka-Gumti National Park, driving more than 4,000 miners from Nigeria’s largest national park, according to the Africa Nature Investors Foundation (ANI). The miners had already fled by the time Nigerian soldiers arrived at the Kila mining area in July, according to Tunde Morakinyo, executive director of ANI, a Nigerian conservation organization working with the government to manage Gashaka-Gumti. He said no shots were fired during the operation, and bulldozers were brought in to fill the mining pits and shafts. As world leaders and conservation practitioners head to Armenia for the U.N. biodiversity summit Oct. 19-30, with the goal of protecting and conserving 30% of land and waters by 2030, the crackdown spotlights the complexity of safeguarding some of the most biodiverse places on the planet. Gashaka-Gumti is a stronghold for one of the rarest primates in the world: the Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes ellioti). The park is also home to more than 1,000 plant species and hundreds of bird and butterfly species, with some of the highest rates of endemism on the continent. A ranger patrols Nigeria’s Gashaka-Gumti National Park, where the Africa Nature Investors Foundation says it employs more than 180 rangers to help protect the park. Image courtesy of Africa Nature Investors Foundation. The operation followed years of growing friction over mining in the park. Tensions came to a head in late 2025. Two rangers were killed by miners in October 2025, according to Morakinyo. The…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Another oil-rich region is at the center of political tension. This time, the region is not in the Middle East or South America (Venezuela), but in North America. 

The country “affected” is the world’s second-largest country and a functional democracy — Canada.

Ahead of a Monday vote on whether the oil-rich province of Alberta should begin the process toward a binding independence referendum, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is aggressively campaigning for national unity.

Carney told rallies in Calgary and Edmonton that the vote comes “at the worst possible time” amid external pressures on Canada, hinting at trade tensions with the United States. He urged a “decisive result” to settle the question and warned that using the ballot merely to “send a message” to Ottawa would be a “dangerous bluff.”

“This is not poker,” Carney said at a pro-Canada event in Calgary on Thursday.

“A vote against Canada is a dangerous bluff that will lead to years of deep division and great uncertainty.” He added that “turnout will determine the outcome” and that “polls don’t vote.”

Alberta holds most of Canada’s proven oil reserves, the fourth-largest in the world.

The big question is: are the US or Russia, overtly or covertly, supporting separatists in Alberta?

Role of the US & Russia

Donald Trump has previously called Canada a potential 51st state. That has raised questions about whether he or his administration is backing Alberta’s independence movement.

Earlier, Canadian media claimed that the country’s researchers, using artificial intelligence to track foreign interest in the Alberta separatism debate, found the political discourse being targeted online by both Russian and American actors. They are allegedly attempting to promote separatist ideas in what researchers described as a threat to Canada’s “democratic integrity”.

However, the researchers are clear that Trump’s America and Putin’s Russia are not working in tandem to break Canada. They work in parallel for very different reasons.

This pattern of parallel action by Washington and Moscow is not new.

During the Cold War, they often overlapped in their support for anti-colonial, nationalist, or separatist movements, even though their long-term goals differed.

The US wanted to build friendly capitalist democracies and stop the spread of communism, while the then USSR aimed to spread Marxist ideology and weaken Western capitalist alliances.

Both propped up separate local leaders with funds and weapons. Examples include the Nigerian Civil War, the Angolan Civil War, the Suez Crisis, and Ethiopia’s war against Somalia.

As for Alberta, the US and Russia may be trying to exploit old grievances against Ottawa.

Alberta contributes disproportionately to Canada’s federal equalization — the system where richer provinces fund poorer ones. It has oil, gas, beef, and a frontier self-image. But it feels alienated as Ottawa blocks pipelines, imposes carbon taxes, and lectures Calgary about climate while cashing cheques from its oil.

This alienation grows stronger whenever the Liberals are the ruling party in Ottawa. After all, Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau introduced the National Energy Program in the 1970s.

Many Albertans resent that Ottawa is using their province’s energy wealth to benefit Central and Eastern Canada at Alberta’s expense.  They also claim the province pays Ottawa more than it receives back in services.

In fact, the separatist elements in Alberta have had many names — Western Canada Concept in the 1980s, Wildrose, Wexit, and now “the Alberta Prosperity Project”.

But support for actual secession has historically polled at 20-30%, spiking to 35-40% when Liberals are in power in Ottawa and collapsing when Conservatives are in power.  The latest poll suggests only about 25% of Albertans support independence.

In May this year, research published by Disinfowatch showed that between late 2025 and early 2026, the Russian Pravda News Network published dozens of stories depicting Alberta as a province being exploited by Ottawa.

An influence campaign known as Storm 1516 reportedly went further, creating websites such as albertaseparatist.com to circulate fabricated claims—including the assertion that the federal government fleeces $20,000 a year from every Alberta family.

Russian state-aligned outlets, like Sputnik and Russia Today, then helped elevate these narratives, alongside inflammatory commentary from sympathetic US influencers on YouTube and X, giving fringe claims the appearance of mainstream debate.

Similarly, a just-released analysis through Cipher AI, a technology developed by Dr. McQuinn and others in a partnership between the University of Regina and the University of Alberta, as accessed by the Canadian daily, the  Globe and Mail, says that its two reports – the first covers activity in the last two weeks of July, and the second looks at the first two weeks of August – clearly indicated that “foreign-aligned platforms continue to amplify anti-government grievances and issues associated with the Alberta separatist movement”.

Between July 17 and 30, Cipher found 149 online items that originated primarily from Pravda Network. Material posing as news and designed to inflame divisions is pushed online and reaches Canadian communities when people knowingly or unwittingly share links, headlines, and memes with their social networks.

The second report, covering early August, produced similar findings, with about 80 percent of the activity linked to Russian content farms, and 20 percent to U.S. sources.

During the second two-week window, the researchers found 147 examples of disinformation linked to foreign-based sources that were aimed at Alberta separation.

The latest analysis has also found that statements from right-wing US podcasters and MAGA influencers have promoted the narrative that Canada is a failed state and that Alberta has no choice but to leave.

Such narratives followed statements from Alberta separatist leaders this year who said they met with Trump administration officials in Washington on three occasions, and comments from US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent who, when asked about Alberta in January, said he had heard “a rumor that they may have a referendum” and called the province “a natural partner for the U.S.”

Incidentally, US State Department officials met with the separatist Alberta Prosperity Project at one of the three meetings mentioned earlier this year. The group reportedly sought a $500 billion (US) line of credit from the US to support Alberta if it won a referendum.

The American angle in Canada is understandable, given Trump’s “Transactional Continentalism”. Though the Trump Presidency has not officially endorsed Canada’s breakup, the Trump ecosystem seems to have. Several MAGA-adjacent commentators, podcasters, and even some Republican House members support Alberta statehood or association with the US.

After all, Alberta holds the world’s fourth-largest proven oil reserves. For a Trump administration obsessed with energy dominance and lowering domestic fuel prices, direct access to Alberta oil without Ottawa’s environmental regulations is, it is said, a dream.

Secondly,  Alberta is the most conservative, gun-owning, truck-driving, oil-loving province. So, MAGA influencers see a natural ideological ally being oppressed by “woke Ottawa.”

On the other hand, Russia’s motive is viewed as far more strategic. Two possible  reasons could be the following:

One is “Payback for Ukraine”. Canada, after all, is one of Ukraine’s most hawkish supporters. It is home to a large Ukrainian diaspora, a staunch backer of sanctions, and a trainer of Ukrainian troops.

Therefore, if Canada lectures Russia about territorial integrity, what better riposte than: “What about Canada’s territorial integrity?” It is whataboutism as a weapon.

The second reason could be the link between Alberta’s separatism debate and Russia’s long-term Arctic strategy and its rivalry with Canada over Northern sovereignty.  Canada is actively upgrading its military footprint in the North. It has committed to counter rising Russian aggression by purchasing new icebreakers and deploying new infrastructure. For Russia, a major constitutional crisis triggered by provincial separatism thus forces Ottawa to focus inward on saving the federation rather than projecting power in the Arctic.

This is all the more so when  Russia and Canada have overlapping claims over the massive, resource-rich seabed under the Arctic Sea, and Moscow is now aggressively expanding its resource extraction in the region.

Viewed thus, Trump and Putin are not exactly partners in Alberta. But they may be competitors who have found the same weak joint, or vulnerable Alberta. They both benefit from the same outcome — a weaker Ottawa — but for different reasons.

Of course, all this does not necessarily mean that Canada is going to break. As pointed out above, separatism in Alberta is still a minority voice. But the timing of the foreign influence in favor of the separatists is worrisome.

In the October 19th, 2026 referendum, Albertans will face an official, non-binding question asking whether Alberta should remain a province of Canada or begin the constitutional process required to hold a future binding referendum on separation. This is not yet an independence vote.

There are other constitutional hurdles too.

Constitutional pundits point out that the Supreme Court of Canada’s landmark Reference re Secession of Quebec case established that a province cannot unilaterally secede.

Even a clear majority answering a clear question would trigger negotiations, not automatic independence, and those negotiations would have to respect federalism, constitutionalism, minority rights, and Aboriginal interests.

But Canada is witnessing a global phenomenon: “Sovereignty” is not just about borders; it is about narrative sovereignty. If you do not control your domestic narrative, someone else will. And that is precisely what Trump and Putin seem to be doing.

• Author and veteran journalist Prakash Nanda is Chairman of the Editorial Board of the EurAsian Times and has been commenting on politics, foreign policy, and strategic affairs for nearly three decades. He is a former National Fellow of the Indian Council for Historical Research and a recipient of the Seoul Peace Prize Scholarship.
• Original Article Published on 27th August 2026. The article has been updated with the latest information.
• CONTACT: prakash.nanda (at) hotmail.com

The post Are Both Putin & Trump Supporting Alberta Separatists to Break Canada? Here’s What the Evidence Shows appeared first on EURASIAN TIMES.

For more than three decades, Michael Gove has been a leading figure in British Conservatism. As a journalist, government minister and now editor of the Tory bible, the Spectator, he has helped shape the right even as it has moved further rightwards. In the latest episode of Radical Thinking, Gove joins Aditya Chakrabortty to discuss the future of the right, his record on Brexit and austerity, and the Spectator’s position on Islam

Watch the full episode with Michael Gove here.

Aditya’s suggested reading:

To read the fruits of Michael Gove’s dalliance with the Marxism Today gang, look up his essay in a 1998 collection called The Moderniser’s Dilemma: Radical Politics in the Age of Blair

For slalom ride through Michael Gove’s years in power, read The Demented Dalek by the historian Richard J Evans in the London Review of Books

To learn more on what’s become of the British right, there’s a column by me for the Guardian

Just why the most successful political party is now failing is analysed in-depth by Phil Burton-Cartledge in his book The Party’s Over: The Rise and Fall of the Conservatives from Thatcher to Sunak

Phil also writes a very good blog on British politics, which keeps a close eye on how each party is trying to marshall a coalition of voters. Here he is on Kemi Badenoch

Geoffrey Wheatcroft does an entertaining short narrative in Bloody Panico!:

or, Whatever Happened to The Tory Party

For more on the economics of the Cameron years, this paper is acute on how the Tories failed to move the UK away from being a country of renters towards a country of makers. Two of its authors will join us for a podcast later in the series.

And if you want to read how Brexit may have cost the UK 8% of GDP, there’s this paper based on data from the Bank of England

Finally, on the Spectator read Nesrine Malik’s recent column in The Guardian

Why has Britain’s oldest political magazine become such a rabid cheerleader for Islamophobia?

Continue reading...

© Photograph: James Tindale/The Guardian

© Photograph: James Tindale/The Guardian

© Photograph: James Tindale/The Guardian

For Nyaradzo Auxilia Hoto, one of the most memorable moments of becoming a wildlife ranger was a trip to town. She and her fellow recruits walked through the streets in their new uniforms, on their way to open bank accounts. Soon, they would receive their first salaries. For a woman who had struggled to make ends meet in rural Zimbabwe, it was an extraordinary moment. “We were very proud,” she recalled. Hoto, 34, grew up in Huyo, a village in Zimbabwe’s Lower Zambezi Valley, where her family depended largely on growing and selling vegetables. Money was scarce, and although she had done well at school, she could not afford to continue her education beyond secondary school. Marriage, she hoped, might offer a better life. Instead, she says, she endured nearly four years with a violent husband before deciding to leave. She returned to her parents’ home with her young daughter and resumed working in the family garden. Her fortunes changed in 2017, when the International Anti-Poaching Foundation began recruiting local women for Akashinga, a new wildlife protection initiative. Hoto was among 16 women selected from roughly 100 applicants. Many men in her community doubted that women could confront poachers or withstand the demands of ranger work. She went anyway. Within a few years, she had become a ranger sergeant, leading other women on patrol. She later returned to university, graduating in 2023 with a degree in wildlife, ecology and conservation. Today, she works as a biodiversity officer with Akashinga, using…This article was originally published on Mongabay