In political campaigns’ waning days, candidates behind in their races may hope for an October surprise, like a news story or a gaffe in their favor, to propel them to victory.

Particularly panicked campaigns, however, may reject waiting for the organic October surprise in favor of tossing a Hail Mary. I’ve been in journalism for more than 40 years, and I’ve never seen a Hail Mary as desperate, vicious and vile as the one released this week in Ohio by gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

The Republican nominee has spent his campaign portraying his Democratic opponent, Dr. Amy Acton, as a mentally unstable and violent drunk who is unfit for office.

Portraying an opponent as trigger-happy or lying about her faith is one thing. Going after a sexual abuse survivor is quite another.

In a normal election cycle, that would be repulsive enough, but this week, a video appeared on social media featuring Donna Arthur, Acton’s estranged mother. In the video, after touting her work with sexual abuse survivors, Arthur says her daughter has a “serious problem: She is a liar … She has lied her entire life.”

Writing what Arthur said doesn’t do justice to the wickedness of the spot. Acton is a victim of sexual abuse. Her stepfather, Cledith Arthur, was arrested and indicted by a grand jury in 1978 for raping Acton, who was 12 at the time. Donna Arthur lost custody of Acton and her brother, but she stayed married to Cledith Arthur, who reportedly fled after the indictment and died in 2004 in Pennsylvania. Donna Arthur had not spoken to Acton or her brother in nearly 50 years.

That’s the cliff notes version of a painful family history — and Ramaswamy is looking to capitalize on the agony. Back in April, he appeared to criticize Acton for being sexually abused when he said that he had “a positive vision for our state versus a governor who has none at all other than to complain about what someone else did to her.”

The video caused a firestorm that repulsed Democrats and Republicans. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine asked Ramaswamy to take down the ad. Sen. Jon Husted, R-Ohio, who is in a close race against former Sen. Sherrod Brown, said that he “would not have run” the ad.

The backlash seems to have only fueled Ramaswamy, however. He acknowledged his campaign was behind the video and will spend $4 million to further advertise it. At a rally for Ramaswamy and Husted, Vice President JD Vance said he was “disgusted” by Republicans “whining” about the ad. Republicans should be more concerned with winning, he argued, echoing remarks Ramaswamy made about the domestic abuse allegations against Rep. Max Miller, R-Ohio. And on Thursday, President Trump defended the ad while calling DeWine “disloyal to the Republican Party.”

Perhaps Ramaswamy has no other tactic. A recurring pattern in his campaign is an emphasis on character assassination instead of issues.

Sometimes Hail Mary ads work. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson’s campaign commissioned the “Daisy” ad, which showed a little girl holding a flower before she’s killed by a nuclear blast. It only aired once, but subsequent news coverage frequently repeated the commercial, spotlighting Republican Barry Goldwater’s controversial views on the use of low-grade nuclear weapons. “Daisy” was the nail in the coffin of Goldwater’s campaign, and a landmark in political advertising.

But most times, Hail Marys fail. In 2008, the campaign of Republican Elizabeth Dole released an ad attacking Democrat Kay Hagan, her challenger for a North Carolina Senate seat. The ad questioned Hagan’s faith in God and featured statements from atheists. That might have been effective, but Hagan was a Sunday school teacher and elder in her church. The ad backfired, and Hagan won.

Portraying an opponent as trigger happy or lying about her faith is one thing. Going after a sexual abuse survivor is quite another.

Donna Arthur calls the daughter she had not seen in decades a “liar,” using the same innuendo Ramaswamy did when he said Acton was simply complaining about what happened to her before she was even a teenager. Doubting victims of sexual assault is bad enough, but using their pain and suffering for political gain is a low point in American politics.

Yet perhaps Ramaswamy has no other tactic. A reoccurring pattern in his campaign is an emphasis on character assassination instead of issues. One ad featured a woman accusing Acton, who ran the Ohio Department of Health during Covid-19, of being responsible for her 88-year-old mother’s death. The mom, however, lived in Kentucky. Other ads from Ramaswamy-aligned PACs have accused Acton of lying on her medical license application and abusing alcohol and prescription drugs. The Acton campaign has rebutted the allegations, and media outlets have found multiple claims “that are unsupported by the facts.”

“It’s not surprising that Vivek Ramaswamy has stooped to such a despicable low as to attempt to turn the sexual abuse Amy endured at 12 years old from our birth mother’s husband into a political talking point,” Philip Stearns, Acton’s brother, said in a statement.

But it should be surprising. Men continue to marginalize women who have experienced an unimaginable violation. These women demand support. Full stop.

I’ve been a reporter and editor, run the largest (at the time) journalism organization in the country and covered my share of elections. The Ohio gubernatorial contest is gutter politics at its best. The Ramaswamy ad featuring a mother who supported her husband over a preteen daughter who said he raped her is the worst I’ve ever seen. Let’s hope it doesn’t get worse from here.

The post Ramaswamy’s new ad is the most vile Hail Mary I’ve seen in my 40 years of journalism appeared first on MS NOW.

Earlier this week, EU officials said in unusually staunch terms that they would not buy Arctic oil and gas.

Even if someone (Norway) decided to drill new oil or gas wells in the Barents Sea, which is well above the Arctic Circle, the EU would not purchase it.

The goal is to dissuade investors. It costs many billions of euros to develop gas or oil at scale in the harsh conditions of the far north.

If there is no offtake market in continental Europe, no-one is going to take the risk.

The thing is, EU buyers already buy gas (and oil) from the Arctic. A lot of it.

Most of the gas, some 12 million tonnes so far this year, comes from Russia’s Yamal LNG plant, which sits on the shore of the biggest estuary you have never heard of, the Gulf of Ob (Obskaya Guba in Russian).

But that will end 10 weeks from now, when the EU ban on Russian LNG kicks in.

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In today’s Backstory, the new Holmes film takes issue with our profile, Nikole Hannah-Jones unpacks her viral essay and a professor shares why he thinks we apply “conservative” and “liberal” labels inconsistently.

Trump’s grotesque rerun of the Gilded Age demands a rebuke.

I don’t hear Republicans saying the same thing to Catholic candidates, or Christian candidates — there are extremist organizations within both religions.  

Another day, another series of warnings from Democratic and liberal media figures that they are going to try to put their political opponents in jail if they take back control of government.  

Can Congress meaningfully constrain presidential tariff authority when an older, less restrictive statute offers an alternative route to achieve the same goal? 

Thousands of years ago, people were living where you live, walking where you walk; talking, singing, and laughing like you. They were your greatest grandparents, yes, your ancient ancestors. Though

The post Travelling through time in the Algarve appeared first on Portugal Resident.

Last week, Elsene became the fifth  municipality to vote for an end to fossil-fuel advertising, joining Saint-Gilles, Jette, Schaerbeek and Molenbeek.

Four of those five votes came in the space of just four months, and together, these municipalities are home to roughly 370,000 people: one-third of the Brussels-Capital Region’s population.

All five are making the same demand: that the Brussels region bans fossil-fuel advertising across the entire city, from metro stations to regional roads. More motions are already being tabled, and by the end of the year, a majority of Brussels’ 19 municipalities could be on record calling for a ban.

While local politicians are taking the lead, the outlook a little higher up the chain looks less promising. 

Europe’s ad town and the EU’s lobby town

Everyday tens of thousands of officials, MEPs, assistants and diplomats brave Brussels morning rush hour on their way to work on the laws that will decide whether Europe meets its climate targets.

Along the way they pass numerous temptations, bus shelters and metro walls selling them petrol cars, weekend flights and gas contracts, normalising the ongoing mass-consumption of these products. 

Once they reach their offices, they meet the same industry again, this time in person. The seven biggest oil and gas companies alone have declared lobbying budgets of almost €64m.

Fossil Free Politics research shows EU Commissioners and their cabinets had nearly 900 meetings with fossil fuel lobbyists in the last term. That’s nearly once every working day, showing just how embedded the industry is in the daily rhythm of Brussels life.

Some files come under particularly heavy pressure, with one egregious example being how a secretive alliance of eleven large multinational enterprises worked to tear down the EU’s flagship human rights and climate law last year, the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD).

The fossil fuel industry is currently mounting an extremely intense lobbying campaign to delay and dilute the EU Methane Emissions Regulation over the past year.

Over 80 percent of all commission meetings with external interest representatives on this regulation involved fossil fuel lobbyists, and the European Parliament is no better. All 17 MEPs who called for the methane regulation to be reopened in an April 2026 letter to the commission had met with fossil fuel lobbyists in the preceding year.

And those are only the declared figures.

Lobbyists roaming the corridors

Safe to say, the real total is almost certainly higher. According to new research by Reclaim Finance, on two out of every three days, the fossil-fuel lobbyists present at the European Parliament had no meetings scheduled with MEPs. They roam the corridors and cafés in the building, aiming to bump into the MEPs they wish to influence.

The councillors behind these fossil ad ban motions are not pretending that a few billboards will single-handedly solve the climate crisis, but they refuse to continue letting public spaces be misused by the fossil, automotive and aviation industry to freely promote their propaganda; as for the latter, especially since the advertised destinations are often precisely those places that have been the victims of severe climate disruptions..  

“The summer of 2026 was a painful awakening to the harsh reality of the consequences of the climate crisis,” said Mathias Gyselen, the Ecolo-Groen councillor who tabled Schaerbeek’s motion in September.

“Heatwaves, heat islands and heat deaths are unfortunately becoming the new normal in the city. Doing nothing is no longer an option.”

They are right. Advertising is how the fossil fuel industry keeps its social licence, presenting itself as part of the solution while expanding the very products driving the crisis.

Not just the five sub-municipalities of the Brussels capital acknowledge this, but over 70+ cities worldwide have taken steps to clear their streets from fossil fuel advertising, among them Amsterdam, Sydney, Stockholm and Edinburgh.

The problems with advertisements, and multi-million euro lobby strategies, are not just that they very much harm the planet, they are also fundamentally undemocratic. 

Residents, community groups and civil society organisations cannot match the industry’s firepower. They do not have the budgets, the staff or the open doors that put them across the table from lawmakers week after week.

Europe has dealt with this before.

‘Godfathers of climate chaos’

Tobacco lobbyists no longer get privileged access to health ministers, nor can cigarette brands buy billboards. For many similar reasons the world wants to end fossil fuels, the EU banned tobacco advertising because promoting a deadly product was incompatible with public health.

UN secretary-general António Guterres made the same comparison in 2024 when he urged every country to ban fossil fuel advertising, naming fossil-fuel companies as the “godfathers of climate chaos”

Municipal motions are not binding, so the decision now lies with the Brussels-Capital Region, which controls advertising in the metro, along regional roads and on its own infrastructure. A first obvious step is that it should listen to its municipalities and introduce a city-wide ban.

But the message is also addressed to the institutions on the other side of the Rue de la Loi.

If the streets of Europe’s capital are being cleared of fossil fuel promotion, the corridors of its institutions should be too. That means limiting the industry’s access to decision-makers, closing the revolving door, and rejecting fossil fuel sponsorship and partnerships, just as the EU did with tobacco.

The municipalities of Brussels have shown what local democracy looks like. Now it is up to the region and the EU institutions to show that Europe’s capital is not for sale; not on its billboards, and not in its corridors of power.

In the new Times/Siena poll, 70 percent of young voters identified as Democrats or leaned that way — a jump from just two years ago.

© The New York Times

When MSCI floated the idea of downgrading Indonesia to a Standalone Market, anxiety quickly swept through Jakarta’s financial community. Predictably, alarming headlines immediately pointed to foreign capital flight, stock prices dropped and local regulators quickly moved to calm jittery investors. Yet, treating this stock market tremor as a proxy for Indonesia’s overall economic health represents […]

The post Don’t mistake Indonesia’s MSCI scare for economic weakness appeared first on Asia Times.

Ten years ago, ‘Project Fear’ was at the heart of the ‘Remain’ campaign’s inept efforts to persuade Britons not to vote to leave the EU. 

Voting for Brexit, according to David Cameron’s government Doomsday forecasts, would cost every household £4,300 (€5,000) per year from 2030, lead to an immediate recession and mean lower house prices. 

It was a huge mistake. That all the pro-EU camp could say about being members of the club was that it would be very expensive to leave was a jarring admission of failure. And the promised economic apocalypse of instant recession and house price warnings didn’t happen. Most people simply didn’t believe the figures or that the politicians behind them were being honest about them. The result, as we know, is that more than 17m Brits gave the ‘establishment’ – or what they perceived it to be – a big kick up the arse. 

Fast forward to 2026 and newly-minted UK prime minister Andy Burnham has put all options for UK-EU relations – including rejoining – back on the table. 

The UK Treasury, which drew up the prophecies of doom, is now expected to publish a study analysing the potential economic benefits of Britain moving closer to the EU ahead of November’s EU-UK summit.

Personally, I think Brexit and the piecemeal trade and cooperation agreement that governs EU-UK trade has resulted in a small but significant economic hit.

The hope is that the treasury won’t promise milk, honey and gold-paved streets if the UK rejoins the EU or its single market.  

If over-promising increases the speed at which voters get disappointed with governments, the Brexit vote is proof that trying to frighten people is the fastest way to lose an election.  

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Student protests across Europe are a desperate cry for help, an appeal to governments to build a brighter, hope-filled future. Instead of paying attention, European politicians have decided to manhandle the protesters, misrepresent their demands and manipulate public opinion.

Different narratives are now competing to explain what the protests are really about.

They want to be taught properly. They want more teachers, an end to overcrowded classes, dilapidated buildings and inadequate school meals and an admissions system that sorts young people by class and postcode.

In Belgium, students have protested education cuts and fees. Greek students occupied Syntagma Square over rents, student housing and energy bills. Italian students demanded money for schools rather than war.

But politicians seem intent on telling a different story.

For many EU leaders it is – yet again – all about migration.

Hungarian prime minister Péter Magyar has decided that the chaos in French cities makes it “clear to everyone why Hungary advocates the strictest possible approach to migration.”

Poland’s Donald Tusk, who insists he will not repeat the mistakes of other European countries, joined the leaders of Denmark and Italy at the EU leaders’ meeting in Brussels last week to push for an even tougher Fortress Europe.

Together, they almost succeeded in getting others in the EU to agree to a statement linking crime and “irregular” migration.

On the other side of the Atlantic, US president Donald Trump instructed Europe to “close your borders and take control, before it is too late!” while his deputy JD Vance criticised Western liberals for bringing the “third world” to France.

Parts of the media focused on the violence, particularly the looting and destruction carried out by those who have joined the protests to create chaos, rather than on the demands that brought students onto the streets in the first place.

In France, meanwhile, it was the presidential campaign that shaped the political response, with Marine Le Pen from the National Rally calling for law and order and blaming “decades of immigration” for the violence while her protégé, Jordan Bardella, said the police should have more weapons and greater powers.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon of France Insoumise, Le Pen’s leading rival in the elections next year, was accused of fuelling student anger. French centrists struggled to find their footing and their voice. President Emmanuel Macron made an angry television appearance before heading to the Middle East with a delegation of business leaders.

So far, very predictable.

Old playbook: one enemy, no solution

Divert, distract, dehumanise and scapegoat are the oldest tricks in wily politicians’ playbook. The well-worn recipe is simple: take a social crisis, remove its economic content, replace it with a face, a religion, a border. Then offer an enemy, not a solution.

When public services fail, blame the outsider. When wages stagnate, blame the foreigner. When housing becomes impossible, blame the newcomer rather than the landlord, the investor or the government that stopped building.

And when young people take to the streets, describe them as manipulated, criminal, alien or dangerous. Treat their anger as a threat to public order rather than a warning that something is profoundly wrong. Say there has been foreign manipulation and disinformation.

Then turn the full force of the state against the symptoms of the crisis while leaving its causes untouched and change the the subject from justice to fear, from schools to borders, from the future to the past.

Meanwhile, the money goes elsewhere.

Europe is pouring resources into defence and rearmament. Governments speak endlessly of competitiveness, productivity and strategic autonomy. But these questions cannot become excuses for neglecting the social foundations on which Europe’s future depends.

Seriously, who is going to make an ageing Europe competitive if the people expected to build its future cannot afford to have one? Who will run Europe’s basic services if migrants go “home”? What does strategic autonomy even mean if young Europeans cannot get a decent education, find secure employment or afford a home?

Contradictions

We should know by now that security cannot be measured in weapons alone. It also depends on how secure citizens feel, and whether they believe they have something worth protecting. Security demands that people have politicians they can trust and institutions which work for them.

A Europe that invests in its military capabilities while allowing its schools, housing systems and public services to deteriorate risks hollowing out its own strength.

Believe me: I know. I was born in Pakistan, a country which thrives on war and conflict and neglects the well being of its citizens.

There is another contradiction. As young people struggle to make their voices heard, the EU is planning cuts to funding for civil society organisations that defend rights, support communities, hold power to account and help turn public anger into democratic participation.

The EU has always – rightly – backed citizens’ calls for democratic participation, equality and inclusion when it happens in Tunisia, Egypt or Hongkong. How can our leaders close down such calls for participation when they are made at home?

Sadly, politicians and parts of the media have lost young peoples’ trust – and when that faith goes, so does democracy.

The EU can and must offer young Europeans a story of hope, inclusion and progress towards equality. Leaders who prefer to hallucinate about migrants should spend more time living up to the EU’s values by investing in education, affordable housing, decent jobs and public services.

We must give our young people a meaningful voice in decisions that will shape their lives. Our collective future quite literally depends on it.

This article was first published on Shada’s Substack. You can subscribe for free to receive new posts and support her work here.

In late September, China and Laos opened a Beijing-funded training and support center and an aviation academy at Ban Keun airport, about 50 kilometers north of Vientiane. China’s Ministry of National Defense says the facility will train Lao Air Force pilots and is “not directed against any third party.” Even so, much of the commentary […]

The post Cambodia and Laos are not pawns in a Chinese encirclement appeared first on Asia Times.

Over coffee, an Israeli woman I know began to cry. “I’m 42,” she said, “and I’ve spent my entire adult life held captive by Bibi.”

Benjamin Netanyahu has not been Israel’s prime minister for every one of those years. Yet even out of office, Israeli politics rarely escaped his gravitational pull.

For him or against him, public life kept arranging itself around his presence.

Netanyahu is Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, having previously held office from 1996 to 1999 and from 2009 to 2021, and from 2022 onward.

Hungarians know something about that feeling. For 16 years, Viktor Orbán was not merely Hungary’s prime minister but the organising fact of Hungarian politics. Institutions bent around him, opponents defined themselves against him, and arguments somehow ended up being about him.

On 12 April, that era ended.

Péter Magyar’s insurgent Tisza party defeated Fidesz after 16 uninterrupted years in power. The final results gave Tisza 141 of parliament’s 199 seats, a two-thirds majority.

The temptation is to tell a simple story of liberation: the dominant leader fell, the spell broke, democracy returned. But political systems leave habits behind, and Orbán’s most durable legacy may prove to be the way Hungarians learned to imagine politics itself.

That is also Magyar’s dilemma.

Opposition movements confronting personalised systems often conclude that they, too, need a protagonist capable of gathering diffuse grievances into a political force.

Yet the qualities that help an insurgency win are not necessarily those needed to build a pluralist order afterwards. Campaigns reward concentration, and democracy depends on dispersing authority.

A challenger may have to become indispensable in order to win. Governing democratically requires eventually proving that he is not.

For people my age, Orbán’s rise was a rupture because we remember other governments and possibilities. Many of my students, now in their 20s, do not. Their political adulthood unfolded almost entirely under Fidesz. Orbán was simply there, as unavoidable as the weather.

Power can come to look distant and durable, participation noble but futile, and institutions captured or irrelevant. Politics becomes something done to you rather than something you do.

Conversations with Orbán

I know how deeply that can lodge itself in the mind. For five years, I have had countless conversations with Orbán in which I argued with him and tried to persuade him to change course. All of them took place in my dreams.

Supporters and opponents experienced Orbán’s system differently, but both learned to orient themselves around the same centre of gravity. Loyalists read its signals, while critics watched it constantly and defined themselves against it.

Parties that spend years confronting a dominant machine tend to centralise themselves. Message discipline becomes existential, disagreement can look like sabotage, and restraint like something to discuss after victory.

That is why Hungary’s challenge is larger than reversing Orbán’s policies.

A government elected to repair democratic institutions has to accept restraints precisely when it can most easily avoid them: strengthening parliament even when it dominates it, protecting independent media when they attack the government, and creating institutions whose authority does not depend on proximity to the prime minister.

Older Hungarians understandably speak about restoration: rebuilding institutions, restoring judicial independence, returning to democratic normality.

But “return” means something different when you are 25. You cannot return to a political world you never inhabited. For younger Hungarians, democracy cannot merely be recovered; it has to become real for the first time.

That distinction matters beyond Hungary. Opponents of personalised populism often offer restoration as their programme.

Yet generations raised amid democratic erosion may have little memory of the normality they are being asked to recover. Democratic politics has to show that dispersed power need not mean ineffective government, that disagreement need not threaten the state, and that losing an election need not mean losing the country.

Success should also mean making politics less consuming. Most democratic life is not election night but local meetings, newspapers and arguments about schools, budgets and public space.

A healthy political order allows citizens to pay less attention to the leader because fewer things depend on what that leader wants. Personalised rule teaches the opposite lesson. Even resistance can become dependence.

This is where Hungary’s experience returns me to my conversation about Israel.

Israelis are due to vote on 27 October in an election in which Netanyahu once again occupies much of the political landscape.

Whatever voters decide, Hungary suggests a question that will remain whenever his long political era eventually ends: can political life be reorganised around institutions and competing interests rather than around the presence, or absence, of one man?

Removing a dominant political figure does not remove the habits formed around him. Supporters have to imagine their politics without the leader they regarded as indispensable, while opponents have to decide what they stand for when opposition to him is no longer enough to bind them together.

Hungary’s experience suggests that this is where democratic renewal really begins – not with replacing one dominant figure with another, but with building institutions and political movements that no longer require one.

My friend’s tears were for the time she felt had been taken from her. Hungary’s younger generation, now free of Orbán, cannot mourn in quite the same way, because many have no memory of political adulthood against which to measure what was lost.

Their challenge, now, is not to recover an old normal but to create something they have never experienced: a public life in which politics belongs to citizens without consuming them, and in which no leader becomes so indispensable that an entire country must organise itself around him.

In July 1971, Henry Kissinger developed a convenient stomachache in Pakistan, vanished from public view and turned up in Beijing. The secret trip that led to Nixon’s opening to China rested on a simple piece of geometry: in a world of three great powers, the smart move is to stand closer to each of your […]

The post A Trump-Putin-Xi summit would put Xi at the apex appeared first on Asia Times.

The war in Ukraine can be ended permanently on terms that protect Ukraine’s statehood, meet Russia’s security concerns, and lay the foundation for a durable European security order. As another round of negotiations gears up in Norway, I propose a settlement concluded as a single package, signed by Ukraine and Russia, adopted by a vote […]

The post A viable path to peace in Ukraine appeared first on Asia Times.

We must rally constitutionally-minded Christians and Americans to the polls to take back our country and restore the vision of our Founding Fathers. And we also must persist in prayer. The Lord has moved through broken systems and people throughout the history of the world, and we can learn to trust His voice as we... Continue Reading