At the heart of the mass immigration debate is the question: can English culture survive without ancestral continuity of the population? Clive Pinder says ancestry is important, but ultimately England is not a DNA test.
The post England is a Glorious Idea, Not a DNA Test appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
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A test satellite for a future communications network under Ukrainian control is working in orbit, Ukraine’s Himera and Denmark’s GomSpace said on 27 October. The companies say it will work for Ukraine’s strategic security, and that the long-term aim is to rely less on foreign communications providers. Public launch records for the mission do not list a satellite by that name, though some of its objects are still unidentified.
Ukraine fights Russia on satellite links it doesn’t control, and the announcement comes two weeks after it saw what depending on an outside provider can cost. The satellite, the companies say, went up on 1 October, before that trouble began. Overnight on 14 October, Starlink and its military version, Starshield, began dropping links on fast-moving terminals, and Ukrainian officials said the cap disrupted drone missions. On 24 October, 10 days after the cap began, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry reported speeds restored. Who ordered the cap remains contested. That same day, Elon Musk wrote that Ukraine’s military had violated Starlink’s terms of service and that “that loophole was closed last week,” a claim a Ukrainian presidential adviser disputed.
Obria Nano flew on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 rideshare mission, the release said. Aalborg-based GomSpace built it on Himera’s order, Himera co-founder and CEO Misha Rudominski wrote on Facebook. He added that the team received the first signals the next day and that the satellite is now working. Its tests are meant to inform the design of the full Obria system, the release said.
No satellite called Obria Nano appears on SpaceX’s published list for the mission, The Insider found. Public tracking catalogs show one Ukrainian satellite from that launch, named UASAT-Nano. Another 26 objects from the mission are still listed with placeholder names and no confirmed owner. The outlet said it is unclear whether the two names refer to one satellite.
UASAT-Nano is the satellite network Stetman, another Ukrainian company, is building, and its founder said the network’s first test satellite would launch in October. In April, Stetman and GomSpace agreed to set up a joint venture called UASAT and planned a first launch for fall 2026. The Obria release does not mention Stetman or UASAT.
Rudominski wrote that Himera’s next stage is to produce satellites and ground terminals in Ukraine. He called it important not only to use the technology but also to gradually build domestic expertise and manufacturing.
“For us, this project is about more than launching a satellite. It is an opportunity to lay the foundation for an independent communications network for Ukraine,” Rudominski said in the release.
In the long run, the network would cover all of Ukraine and complement European satellite networks, the release said. The network does not exist yet, and Himera has given no timeline.
Replacing Starlink will not be quick. Lance Hunter, a political scientist at Augusta University, told Time that Ukraine cannot quickly swap out such technology, since diversifying it “takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of resources.” Meanwhile, one Ukrainian interceptor-drone maker has begun rethinking its air-launched designs after the slowdown.
As artificial intelligence technologies grow ever more powerful, so do the risks they pose and with them the urgency of regulating AI. In July 2026, OpenAI’s advanced models hacked into AI company Hugging Face’s systems during internal cybersecurity evaluations by communicating through unauthorized channels and working around safeguards developers had imposed on the models. In […]
The post How to regulate AI? Follow the harm appeared first on Asia Times.
La sociedad argárica perduró unos 650 años (2200 a 1550 a. C.) y se extendió por un territorio de unos 35.000 kilómetros cuadrados en las actuales provincias de Murcia, Almería, Granada, Alicante, Jaén y Ciudad Real. Se desconocen las causas de la desaparición de esta sociedad que debatía sus problemas en una especie de parlamento (un espacio de deliberación política que numerosos expertos consideran el primero de la historia), estaba dividida en clases sociales, sufría una enorme violencia social, dominaba la orfebrería y habitaba ciudades encaramadas en altozanos fuertemente protegidos.
© EPV
Ukraine has finished its share of FREYJA, a joint European project to build a system against ballistic missiles, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told journalists on 17 October, Ukrinform reported. He added that Kyiv wants to test the first system as soon as possible.
Ukraine still relies on US-made Patriot interceptors to stop Russian ballistic missiles. Zelenskyy told ABC News on 23 October that Ukraine had received only 24 of them from the US in three months, while it needs 350 a month on average. FREYJA can not close that gap soon, because the system is still in development.
Zelenskyy said the partners’ share of the work, with 10 countries taking part, is still underway. He also said he had discussed the project with French President Emmanuel Macron, and he named Norway as a key partner.
Zelenskyy did not say what the partners still have to deliver. In August, he said Ukraine is capable of making the missile and launcher, while partners would supply critical components such as radars and sensors.
In May, Fire Point co-founder and chief designer Denys Shtilerman said all components of the FP-7.x interceptor are made in Ukraine except one. “As for that one part we don’t manufacture in Ukraine, we’ve contracted a certain quantity of it. We already have it,” he said, but did not name the part.
In June, however, Shtilerman told the Financial Times that mass production depended on an infrared seeker Fire Point hoped to get from Germany’s Diehl Defence. Neither statement says whether the seeker is that one part.
Fire Point co-founder Iryna Terekh said in September that FREYJA was going through testing and technical integration in combat conditions in Ukraine. The company plans its first intercept of a ballistic target by mid-2027.
The official timeline has since moved closer. On 21 October, Zelenskyy wrote that officials had identified where to speed up so FREYJA reaches testing by the end of this year. A test is still a step short of an intercept.
Press TV – October 27, 2026
Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi has called for the formation of a non-aggression security pact involving six Persian Gulf states plus Iran and Iraq, slamming US attempts to demonize the Islamic Republic as a threat.
Speaking at Girton College, Cambridge, on Monday, Albusaidi stressed that Washington has promoted for almost half a century the false image of Tehran as a threat to the Persian Gulf states, holding back West Asia’s ability to solve its own problems.
The Omani foreign minister, speaking to break the deadlock over the region’s future, stressed that the US would no longer be the region’s primary security provider.
“Issues such as the Strait of Hormuz have become impossible to resolve because external powers continue to define the terms of engagement, while regional powers are unable to take collective responsibility for making their own security arrangements and reach a consensus on them,” Albusaidi noted.
Iran has so far refused to ease its restrictions on transit through the strategic Strait of Hormuz, saying the key international energy waterway will be fully reopened once the US permanently ends its aggression and lifts its maritime blockade and sanctions against Iran.
Iranian authorities have also indicated that the country would not back down from its conditions and would respond decisively to any new act of aggression against its territory.
“What holds us back is that issues which ought to be handled at a regional level by the states of the [Persian] Gulf themselves, are made more complex, more intractable and sometimes simply impossible to resolve because the region’s security arrangements are insufficiently developed,” Albusaidi further stressed.
“And they are insufficiently developed because they have relied for too long on the involvement of external powers,” he added.
Oman’s top diplomat noted that the Islamic Republic “had been systematically excluded from playing any meaningful role in the security arrangements of the region.
Albusaidi also stressed that such exclusion had led to “profoundly negative consequences, not just for Iran, but for the region as a whole”, including the imposition of priorities on the region by external powers such as “the entirely false perception that there is a fundamental regional antagonism between Iran and the Arab states of the [Persian] Gulf.”
According to the Omani foreign minister, the most “damaging” of the priorities imposed on the Persian Gulf region from the outside has been the requirement that the Islamic Republic be excluded.
“Not just excluded. Worse. Positioned as the threat against which regional security had to be organized,” Albusaidi stressed, speaking on the day high-level defense and intelligence officials from Turkey, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia gathered in Tehran in an attempt to prevent a renewed act of aggression by the US against Iran.
Iran and Oman, both coastal states bordering the strategic waterway, engaged in intensive negotiations for months over arrangements for safe shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
Tehran and Oman finally reached a temporary agreement on how shipping traffic should be managed in the strait, but the plan is on hold as Iran keeps the waterway closed due to US acts of aggression and violations.
Roughly one-fifth of global oil demand passes through the Strait of Hormuz, making the waterway one of the world’s most strategically important maritime chokepoints.
Oman’s foreign minister, without mentioning by name, also challenged US President Donald Trump’s case for a further war of aggression against Iran by saying that he believed the previous round of Oman-mediated negotiations between the US and Iran in February were “making significant progress, and that an agreement was within reach. We still stand by that judgment today.”
The US and the Israeli regime waged their first war of aggression against Iran, which lasted 12 days, in June 2025. Their second aggression began on February 28, 2026, and came to a halt in early April after 40 days.
Iran has been defending itself by targeting US bases and energy infrastructure in the Persian Gulf states with missile strikes and drone attacks.
© Ariana Drehsler for The New York Times
President Nikos Christodoulides on Tuesday said that both he and Turkish Cypriot leader Tufan Erhurman have agreed to make “no further statements” on matters of substance related to the Cyprus problem ahead of the forthcoming arrival on the island of United Nations envoy Maria Angela Holguin on the island.
“It was a very good and constructive discussion, which will continue during Holguin’s presence in Cyprus. For this reason, we have agreed not to make further statements regarding specific issues, and we also agreed that no joint statement would be issued,” he said after meeting Erhurman in the morning.
Both leaders had also met the bicommunal technical committees on cultural heritage and on youth, as well as the civil society steering committee, following their one-on-one meeting.
Of those meetings, Christodoulides said that they were “constructive” and that “various views and suggestions were put forward” by committee members.
He added that those suggestions will be discussed by himself and Erhurman going forward.
Holguin is expected to arrive on the island on Thursday, and will hold meetings with both Erhurman and Christodoulides, before holding a tripartite meeting with both leaders at the end of her stay.
Prior to Tuesday’s meeting, Christodoulides had stressed that his proposal to open and repopulate the fenced-off area of Varosha under the United Nations’ administration and open the port of Famagusta under the European Union’s control is “mutually beneficial”.
“I believe this is a mutually beneficial proposal. It creates a positive situation for both sides and serves as a practical test of whether we are truly committed to moving forward, specifically by taking bold confidence-building measures which also send a strong message to society as a whole,” he said.
Erhurman had said last week that he had rejected the proposal, lamenting that it fell short of an entry into force of the European Union’s direct trade regulation.
“Is this the entry into force of the direct trade regulation? No, it is not the entry into force of the regulation, but since [the port] would be under EU control, direct trade would begin,” he said.
As such, he said, the proposal was unbalanced.
The direct trade regulation is a pending EU regulation which would allow Turkish Cypriot goods, as certified by the Turkish Cypriot chamber of commerce, to be exported directly into Europe via the Green Line, and given preferential treatment inside the European single market as European goods.
It was proposed in July 2004, three months after the rejection of the Annan plan to reunify Cyprus by the Greek Cypriot side in a referendum, and shortly after the Republic of Cyprus’ accession to the EU.
Previously, Greek Cypriot chief negotiator Menelaos Menelaou had said that a dispute over the routing of the planned transit road between Athienou and the Nicosia suburb of Aglandjia “has been overcome”.
He said that the outstanding dispute now remains over the question of whether a planned crossing point to connect Louroujina, the southernmost Turkish Cypriot village, with nearby Lymbia, will open at the same time.
The Turkish Cypriot side’s position is that the road between Athienou and Aglandjia constitutes two crossing points, one in Athienou and one in Aglandjia, and that they are part of a package of four alongside plans for a crossing point in the eastern Nicosia suburb of Mia Milia, and one in Louroujina.
However, the Greek Cypriot side treats the road between Athienou and Aglandjia as one crossing point, counterweighted by the Mia Milia crossing point, and is therefore of the view that the Louroujina crossing point should only be opened if a second transit road, through the Turkish Cypriot Kokkina exclave in the Tillyria region, also be opened.
Courtesy of Edward Tian
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Edward Tian, the 26-year-old cofounder of GPTZero, who's based in New York. His words have been edited for length and clarity.
I was never planning to go down the founder path straight out of college. I had a visual investigations fellowship lined up for after graduation and was ready to start a journalism career.
My cofounder Alex and I went to high school together. When ChatGPT came out, he was pursuing his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Toronto, and I was in my senior year at Princeton. Over winter break, we built an AI detection tool and put it online. The success was almost overnight.
Three years later, we sold our company, GPTZero, to Superhuman, and have stayed on board to work with the team. Superhuman is a very pro-AI company, and I think it was an unexpected move for us as an AI detection company to join them.
We didn't build GPTZero to say there should be no AI on the internet. I think that's the biggest misunderstanding about why we started our company, but my feelings on AI have changed.
I studied computer science at Princeton and worked with a professor at the Princeton Natural Language Processing Lab on AI research. I also worked on a few other startup projects in school, but I was always hoping to work in journalism.
While in college, I became very involved in the open-source investigation community. I ended up working on open-source investigative projects with the BBC and Bellingcat, and had a visual investigations fellowship at The New York Times lined up after graduation, which I was excited about but ultimately didn't take.
After ChatGPT came out, I was inspired to investigate where and when AI was being used online. It took about a week over winter break to build the first version of our AI detection tool, and it was released in January 2023.
My cofounder Alex and I posted on social media to market the tool so people could try it, but we didn't view it as a business right away. However, it blew up online pretty quickly. After seeing the success, we wanted to double down on the opportunity and turn it into a legitimate site.
One piece of advice I have for founders is that using a waitlist is really helpful for generating hype and excitement. We put the first version of GPTZero on a waitlist because it had reached capacity. So I think that artificial scarcity was also very helpful in the success.
We had a lucky combination of very talented engineers and some traction and buzz, so we started reaching out to VCs. Many of our early VC partners went to my alma mater, and kind of all knew each other. Jack Altman is also an investor, and I remember we had a call where I was in my dorm room, and he was like, "Oh, I recognize that dorm room too."
For founders raising funding for the first time, my advice is not to optimize for the flashiest name or the biggest brand because you think it will attract future talent. Go for where there's familiarity and trust; trust is the most important thing when working with an investor.
We raised around $3.5 million in our first funding round. I stayed at Princeton to finish my senior year and graduate, and we kept growing the business. My cofounder Alex left his Ph.D. program to focus on the business.
When Shishir, the new CEO of Superhuman, joined in 2025, we spoke with him about his broader platform vision for a suite of products. He thought we could be part of the authenticity suite he wanted to create.
It was bittersweet to think about giving up something that we started from scratch and put so much energy and care into. At the same time, it was a lot easier because the team stayed on. I'm now a director of product at Superhuman.
For company acquisitions, a lot of folks think the three most important things for a great fit are product match, people fit, and economic sense. We had similar people philosophies, and the deal made sense financially. Then, product-wise, we realized we're definitely not against AI use anywhere in education. We just want to make sure there's some authenticity and truth with that usage.
Over the next few years, we're going to take our shot at building a startup within a larger company. I've seen a lot of startup founders go to larger companies and start their moonshots from within.
The bigger mission we have is to take steps to ensure people are being respectful of the person who's on the receiving end of AI generations and productivity now. We want it to be that we're reaping the benefits of AI without making other people deal with more work.
When we first started GPTZero, I think I was actually more pro-AI than I am now. I believe people should know when something is AI-generated, but I wasn't saying not to outsource anything at all.
In the past year, though, I've started to see an over-reliance on AI among people who finished university after ChatGPT was launched, especially with writing. If I went back to college right now, I wouldn't major in computer science. I'd probably major in journalism and get a minor in computer science. I'd get a humanities degree because those are the important skills now.
I've started to see a friction point at work when people can't write or edit, and everything they send reads like AI. Part of what I'm doing now at Superhuman is working on responsible AI usage policies and guidance.
People are allowed to use these tools however they see fit. At the same time, I feel a profound sadness for the internet at large. It's important to make sure we still have human-written content online.
Do you have a story to share about working on a tiny team? If so, please reach out to the reporter at aapplegate@businessinsider.com.
Bloomberg/Getty; Getty Images; Tyler Le/BI
The maker of miracles may no longer be God, but it does rhyme with him.
Anthropic, creator of Claude, filed its S-1 paperwork on Monday in preparation for a gargantuan initial public offering. The document runs over 300 pages and spans more than 240,000 words, some 50,000 more than the New Testament. It asks potential investors to prioritize mission over money: "Mission" appears 79 times, while "money" — the thing an S-1 is filed to generate, in this case, a bajillion dollars worth — a mere 17.
The company professes it could "bend the arc of geopolitical history toward freedom"; it could grow economies everywhere, including "the poorer parts of the world"; it could cure "diseases that have plagued humanity for millennia." Page 4 of the S-1 is not dissimilar from Jesus in Matthew 11: "The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them."
Anthropic aims to "bring forth an age of miracles," it writes, and the investors who buy in should be true believers. Because in the wrong hands, as you'll see if you turn your missals to page 46, AI can be built in ways that pose "catastrophic or existential risks to humanity."
While S-1s are definitionally visions of the future and full of hype, most are drab financial documents, eye-popping for their prospective profits more than their prose. But Anthropic didn't just open up its book; it wrote its own Good Book, a Bible-like statement of good and evil that joins a growing canon of the company's sacred texts. If you were to stumble onto any random page of this S-1, you'd be forgiven for thinking you were reading not a perfunctory government filing but the scripture of a doomsday religion.
Anthropic has long dodged allegations of fomenting a new, questionable faith. Headlines and takes on Anthropic's cultishness abound: "The Cult of Anthropic" (The Information), "Anthropic is a Cult and Claude is rapidly becoming its God" (The New York Post), "Has a cult ever started a company as successful as Anthropic?" (Peter "Beware the Antichrist" Thiel). Critics point to the employees' extinction predictions — p(doom) is not too far from p(rapture) — and ties to the effective altruism movement. It doesn't help that Dario Amodei was reportedly a Y2K prepper in high school. Anthropic has welcomed the reputation in other ways, inviting religious leaders to oversee the construction of Claude's rules.
In its S-1, Anthropic asks investors to take an actual leap of faith.
Let's play: Is that an Anthropic core value or one of God's 10 commandments?
Anthropic asks its employees to act for the "global good," be "helpful, honest, and harmless," and "hold light and shade." They shall have no other gods — as in, "put the mission first." And, just as followers must sublimate themselves to praise God, Anthropic employees must be "low-ego." The S-1 says it at least nine times.
To understand Anthropic, you'll need to understand 42 ornate terms. The S-1's glossary is sprawling, including neologisms for virtuous acts ("closing the loop") and evil deeds ("prompt injection"). Then there's "Constitutional AI," a type of large language model that is trained with goodness in mind. The SEC's "Plain English Handbook" implores companies to use "concrete, everyday words" and to avoid "relying on glossaries and defined terms." But can you truly be AGI-pilled if you don't speak of "interleaved thinking," "mechanistic interpretability," or "multi-agent orchestration"?
You use language like this because we need to be — and I say we as in society — true believers that this is going to work.James Bort
It's exceedingly hard to get a job at Anthropic, and not just because of the massive pool of cash-eyed engineers seeking IPO windfalls. The company has an intensive interview process, one it name-checks in the S-1. It looks for honesty, trust, and (you guessed it) a low ego. "We are willing to turn down candidates who don't demonstrate them, even if they are extremely strong technically," the S-1 reads. They must, in other words, be devotees through and through.
Accepted engineers become "Ants." Most tech companies have a name for their employees: Googlers, Metamates, Amazonians, Nvidians, Palantirians. Anthropic's moniker evokes the image of a collective, company as colony. In Proverbs 6:6, ants are considered diligent and prepared. Staffers may yell its teachings at their OpenAI foes: "Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise!"
CEO Dario Amodei — Amodeity — leads the ants' march, along with his six apostles. These cofounders pull equal cash salaries and are "distinctly equipped to be stewards of our mission," the S-1 says. And, while the company opens itself to a broader group of believers through its forthcoming IPO, the divine cofounders will retain majority decision-making power.
Anthropic has its own form of tithing: The cofounders all made voluntary pledges of 80% of their personal equity to philanthropy. They incentivize their employees to do the same, promising to match donations.
Cult is an overused word, and many parts of Anthropic are far from cultish. Where cults are led by a liturgical leviathan that squashes the speech of their participants, Anthropic touts its culture of open dialogue. "Our teams operate in a truth-seeking environment where the best argument wins, not the loudest voice or the most senior title," the S-1 reads.
Americans' faith in the presidency, Congress, the Supreme Court, the military, the police, higher education, public education, news media, the medical system, and traditional organized religion are each at record- or near-record lows — and just as AI has brought on tremendous economic and social uncertainty. In that cauldron of doubt, tech founders — with their world-historic money, power, and ubiquity, and in their pursuit of it — sense an opportunity, to offer promise and purpose. As Sam Altman once said, "The most successful founders do not set out to create companies. They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion." They may also be trying to build devotion out of necessity, as the economy and stock market increasingly relies on AI gains.
"If these companies fail, what happens?" asked James Bort, an assistant professor of entrepreneurship at DePaul University, and coauthor of a recent research paper on "cultic startups." "You use language like this because we need to be — and I say we as in society — true believers that this is going to work."
Anthropic didn't respond to my request to know more about how it wrote the S-1. So, we asked Claude: If the S-1 is a confession of faith, what are you? I am its product, Claude said. "The word made flesh, or at least made weights."
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