© Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times
Al menos cuatro personas han muerto y otras 11 han resultado heridas este jueves al estrellarse un helicóptero del ejército de Italia en Bosnia y Herzegovina, ha informado el Ministerio de Defensa italiano.
© klix.ba (via REUTERS)
For more than half a century, federal officials have classified drugs into legal categories that determine who can manufacture, prescribe, or study them, and who goes to prison for possessing or selling them. Those classifications carry enormous consequences. They also reflect decades of political pressure, moralization, myth, and stigma.
Rep. Steve Cohen (D–Tenn.) proposes to change that. His Public Health and Research Reforms in Controlled Substances Act of 2026 would substantially overhaul federal drug scheduling, shift key decisions from law enforcement to health officials, ease research restrictions, deschedule marijuana, and reduce mandatory prison penalties.
While the proposal preserves too much of the drug prohibition infrastructure, it represents a major step toward a more rational, evidence-based, and humane drug policy.
The Controlled Substances Act currently combines judgments about a drug's potential for abuse with judgments about its medical usefulness. Congress vested scheduling authority in the attorney general, who generally exercises it through the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) evaluates the scientific and medical evidence, but the DEA makes the ultimate legal determination of whether a drug has a "currently accepted medical use" for scheduling purposes, as the Justice Department explained in a 2024 legal opinion. Schedule I, the most restrictive category, includes substances deemed to have a high potential for abuse and no currently accepted medical use. These restrictions impede research, while officials cite insufficient evidence of medical usefulness to justify continued restrictions.
Cohen's bill would transfer authority to assess medical usefulness and drug-related risks—and to make scheduling decisions—from law enforcement to HHS, where those judgments more rationally belong. Under the new system, controlled substances would receive two classifications: a Roman numeral, I through IV, reflecting risks associated with misuse, substance use disorder, and threats to public health; and a letter, A through E, reflecting therapeutic value.
A substance could therefore be classified as high risk while still recognized for substantial medical benefits. That reflects an everyday reality of medical practice. Fentanyl, for example, can cause fatal respiratory depression and remains an indispensable anesthetic and analgesic. A drug's dangers do not erase its benefits.
The bill would also replace the vague "potential for abuse" standard for adding substances to the schedules with a standard based on the potential to develop a substance use disorder, expressly excluding isolated or occasional nontherapeutic use. Taking a substance for pleasure would no longer, by itself, satisfy that threshold.
Among the proposal's most consequential provisions is a requirement that officials consider whether scheduling a substance would itself threaten public health, including by encouraging people to substitute other drugs. They must also consider whether people use a substance to help control problematic use of another scheduled drug, as well as the harms associated with that other drug.
That would force federal officials to confront consequences that drug warriors routinely ignore. Banning a substance does not eliminate demand. Consumers may turn to underground suppliers, face uncertain potency and contamination, or switch to more dangerous products. Making a particular drug harder to obtain can leave its users worse off.
These requirements could be critical in disputes over kratom and its alkaloids, such as 7-hydroxymitragynine (7-OH), which some consumers report using for pain or to reduce their use of other opioids. Such reports should be part of an honest assessment of what consumers stand to lose when the government closes a legal supply channel.
An expert committee would evaluate each substance and publish its evidence and reasoning, making scheduling decisions more transparent and easier to challenge.
HHS would also assume from the DEA responsibility for registering researchers who study controlled substances. Qualifying researchers would gain an expedited registration pathway, with faster decisions for eligible small preclinical pilot studies. Federal officials currently demand evidence that these drugs have medical benefits while imposing restrictions that make it harder for researchers to obtain the drugs and conduct the studies needed to generate that evidence.
Cohen would require officials to reconsider existing classifications, setting a two-year deadline for 32 named substances and an eight-year deadline for most others. If officials miss those deadlines, statutory fallback classifications would apply.
The bill would also repeal the legal obligation of the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the "drug czar," to oppose specified legalization efforts—a remarkable requirement for an office supposedly focused on evaluating drug policy.
Marijuana and tetrahydrocannabinols (THCs) would come off the controlled substance schedules altogether. The bill expressly makes that change retroactive, extending it to past offenses, pending cases, convictions, and juvenile adjudications.
Its sentencing reforms also merit praise. The proposal would remove the quantity-based trafficking provisions that impose five- and 10-year mandatory minimums and eliminate specified mandatory penalties when death or serious injury results. The bill would also limit certain repeat-offender sentencing enhancements to prior convictions that meet the narrower definition of a "serious drug felony." Among other requirements, the person must have served more than a year in prison and been released within 15 years of the new offense. Eligible prisoners could receive reduced sentences, and the Bureau of Prisons would be required to identify them, notify them, and file motions on their behalf.
These changes could spare people years of imprisonment. They deserve support even from those of us who would go much further.
The shortcomings remain significant.
First, the bill preserves criminal penalties for peaceful conduct involving drugs that remain controlled. It leaves the general federal simple-possession statute intact, including mandatory minimum jail terms for repeat offenses. Congress would continue to authorize imprisonment for possessing a substance without government permission.
Second, transferring power to HHS offers no guarantee against political interference. The secretary would appoint the expert committee in consultation with the drug czar. Its required membership emphasizes addiction medicine, toxicology, and substance-use services, without expressly reserving seats for pain patients, ordinary consumers, or civil liberties advocates.
The bill would allow emergency scheduling to bypass the new expert committee's review. It would also retain features of the current system: Temporary restrictions could last two years, with a possible one-year extension, and the statute would expressly exclude those orders from judicial review.
The bill would also transfer production quotas to HHS rather than abolish them. As I have argued before, presuming to know how much of each opioid more than 320 million Americans will need in the coming year exemplifies what economist Friedrich Hayek called the "fatal conceit." These quotas have contributed to shortages of injectable opioids in hospitals, jeopardizing care for surgical patients and those on ventilators. Transferring that power to a health agency does not solve the underlying knowledge problem. Congress should abolish the quotas.
The proposal substantially increases many maximum fines even as it reduces mandatory prison penalties. For an individual convicted of Schedule I or II trafficking without a qualifying prior conviction, the fine ceiling would rise from $1 million to $10 million. Congress should question this punitive expansion.
Finally, marijuana descheduling would leave Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authority intact. The bill expressly preserves the agency's powers under federal food and drug law, allowing it to regulate cannabis products that qualify as drugs, foods, or other products within its jurisdiction. It provides no explicit protection for a recreational cannabis market from FDA restrictions.
Those weaknesses warrant amendments. Scientific evidence can help people understand risks, but it cannot, by itself, justify depriving competent adults of the freedom to decide which risks they will accept. Autonomous adults should remain free to make informed choices about what they put into their bodies.
Cohen, who is retiring from Congress at the end of his term, is unlikely to see this sweeping reform pass during the brief post-election lame duck session. But his proposal can serve as a benchmark for reforming the Controlled Substances Act in the next Congress. Providing his successors with a framework that places greater weight on scientific evidence, recognizes the harms of prohibition, and reduces unjust punishment would leave Cohen with a substantial drug policy reform legacy.
The post Rep. Steve Cohen Thinks the DEA Shouldn't Be Practicing Medicine appeared first on Reason Magazine.
This is the Oct. 29, 2026, edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday.
“These are not serious people. They don’t have solutions to actual problems, so they’d rather have the media and you talking about the Cheesecake Factory. That’s the game they’ve been playing for the last two years.”
— Former President Barack Obama, criticizing the Trump administration at a rally outside Atlanta yesterday
Modern political history offers few closing arguments as out of touch, self-defeating, or downright bizarre as the one President Donald Trump has made on the behalf of his fellow Republicans ahead of next week’s midterm elections.
As I write in my latest piece for The Atlantic:
Trump’s primary rationale for why voters should support the GOP, as best I can tell, is that the affordability crisis is a “hoax,” Bill Maher is a “loser,” and Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio has a nice physique.
That easy-to-mock message has been accompanied by a staggering number of missteps. Just for starters, he’s belittled the impact of his stalled war with Iran, sided with Russia as it continues to pummel Ukrainian cities, defended an attack ad from the GOP candidate for Ohio governor that repulsed other top Republicans, downplayed high energy prices while boasting that U.S. oil and gas companies are “making a freaking fortune,” embraced AI as the nation turns against it, obsessed over White House construction projects, and spent a lot of time talking about handsome men, Husted being just one.
I took a look at some of Trump’s recent rallies, and very few of the arguments he makes are actually helpful — or even relevant — to Republican candidates.
He’s broken key promises to drive down costs, deport only “the worst of the worst,” and stay out of foreign wars.
He’s on the wrong side of many of the day’s top issues.
And he now lives, even some Republicans privately think, in a gilded bubble, palling around with billionaires, oblivious to — and, even worse, uncaring about — the problems facing so many voters.
His approval rating has slipped to the low 30s, and he’s become so politically toxic that some Republicans in tight races don’t want him anywhere near their state or congressional district, fearing his rallies will do more harm than good.
Yet the president plans to spend much of his time on the campaign trail in the coming days, largely in deep red states now suddenly in play.
CHARTS OF THE DAY
Source: Gallup poll of 1,200 U.S. adults, conducted Oct. 1-19, 2026. Margin of error: ±4 percentage points
A new investigation in The Atlantic documents the suffering of civilians in Russian-occupied Oleshky, Ukraine — and warns of a Kremlin propaganda spectacle as American journalists prepare to visit under a humanitarian ceasefire credited to Melania Trump.
Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and staff writer at The Atlantic, joined “Morning Joe” today to discuss the upcoming media visit, the Trump administration’s approach to Ukraine, and her recent reporting from Venezuela.
JS: Your colleague Zarina Zabrisky has written about the horrors of Russian occupation in Oleshky. What happens to Ukrainians living under Russian control?
AA: When the Russians go into a piece of Ukraine and take it over, they murder the leaders. They arrest people who have Ukrainian flags or symbols. They set up concentration camps — they call them filtration camps — to interrogate people and sometimes torture them. They remove the Ukrainian language and change the school curriculums.
And they shoot dogs. Why? Because the dogs make noise and might attack soldiers, and the Russians want control. And of course, they also kidnap children.
JS: Ukraine has repeatedly sought a humanitarian ceasefire. Why is Russia agreeing now, just days before the midterms?
AA: Oleshky is a town that’s been deprived of food and outside medical supplies since December, so people have been starving. The Russians have finally agreed to a ceasefire, and they’ve credited Melania Trump. It seems to have been negotiated by her PR guy who did her documentary. They’re allowing in some reporters from Newsmax, and maybe Fox News.
JS: And what do you expect those American journalists will see?
AA: The belief is that there’s going to be a kind of propaganda show where people say, “Oh, we’ve always been well treated by the Russians.” These are all Ukrainians, and the concern is that they’ll be taken to Russia rather than allowed to cross the river to Kherson, which is under Ukrainian control.
It’s a real test of the integrity of those journalists. Will they help cover up what’s happened in places like Oleshky, or will they tell the real story?
WG: Can Ukraine survive with President Trump effectively throwing his lot in with Putin?
AA: This war is over when the Russians decide to stop fighting. What the Trump administration has done for the last year and a half is give the Russians the feeling that it’s worth continuing. In other words, the Kushner and Witkoff negotiations have prolonged the war. Having said that, the Ukrainian front line is holding. They are not about to collapse, and there’s no indication that they will stop fighting.
JS: And what about the pressure on Ukraine to give up territory?
AA: This is not a real estate deal. It’s not like, “Oh, we’ll give you this block for that block, and you can build your building.” When you give up territory, it means giving up people to this totalitarian regime. If surrender means the Russians come in, kill your leaders, kidnap your children, and destroy your culture, why would you stop fighting?
JL: You recently traveled to Venezuela. How does what you saw compare with the Trump administration’s account?
AA: What we’ve created is a coalition of two kleptocracies. You have the Trump administration doing very opaque oil deals with what was the Maduro regime. Now Venezuela is run by Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s former vice president.
But opposition leader María Corina Machado has just returned, and the scenes of joy show Venezuelans’ desire for democracy. They want to make their own decisions and have their oil benefit them.
Katty Kay: And what has changed in daily life for ordinary Venezuelans since Maduro’s departure?
AA: Not much. There’s still very high inflation. I went to a market in Caracas where the prices were written on a whiteboard because they have to be changed every day. People talk about the difficulties of paying for education for their kids. Everybody still thinks about emigration. The feeling is that they’re trapped and waiting for a change.
This conversation has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.
The post In the closing days, few of Trump’s arguments are actually helpful — or even relevant — to Republican candidates appeared first on MS NOW.
Three maritime drones struck a container ship sailing in the Black Sea off the coast of Bulgaria on Wednesday, the country's defense minister said, the latest in a string of such incidents on NATO's eastern flank
The post Drone Attack Hits Container Ship Off Bulgaria’s Black Sea Coast appeared first on Breitbart.
La Commissione europea sta esaminando l’allargamento della flat tax per le partite Iva da 85mila a 100mila euro di ricavi e compensi, inserito dal governo Meloni nella manovra per il 2027. Qualche indicazione in più potrebbe arrivare il 24 novembre, quando Bruxelles presenterà il pacchetto d’autunno del semestre europeo. Non è un caso: nelle raccomandazioni specifiche per l’Italia del 2025 è stato messo nero su bianco che la proliferazione dei regimi a imposta sostitutiva erode ulteriormente la già svuotata base imponibile Irpef, affossa l’equità del sistema tributario – contribuenti con lo stesso reddito sono sottoposti ad aliquote molto diverse – e riduce la redistribuzione. Oltre a scoraggiare la crescita delle imprese, eufemismo dietro cui si nasconde il chiaro incentivo a nascondere redditi per rimanere sotto la soglia.
Poco importa per la Lega, che ha chiesto e ottenuto di ampliare ulteriormente il regime forfettario già applicato da più del 50% degli autonomi a favore di una piccola platea di partite Iva con redditi alti e nonostante il limite europeo per l’esenzione Iva fissato proprio a 85mila euro. Per i ricavi che superano quella cifra scatteranno quindi gli obblighi Iva (applicazione in fattura, versamento allo Stato, gestione della contabilità), complicando ulteriormente il quadro. Il tutto al costo di 260 milioni di euro l’anno, che si aggiungono ai 3,49 miliardi di minori entrate annue determinate dalla flat tax secondo l’ultimo Rapporto annuale sulle spese fiscali del ministero dell’Economia, che considera sia gli effetti sulle imposte dirette sia sull’Iva.
La tassa piatta, dicono tutti gli osservatori, è un grave danno per l’equità orizzontale. In base alla Costituzione, cittadini con la stessa capacità contributiva dovrebbero essere sottoposti a un prelievo comparabile, mentre il forfettario riserva un trattamento di favore solo perché la fonte di reddito è il lavoro autonomo. L’Ufficio parlamentare di bilancio a fine 2022, quando la soglia è stata portata a 85mila euro, ha calcolato che i nuovi aderenti avrebbero ottenuto un risparmio di imposta medio di circa 7.700 euro l’anno rispetto a un lavoratore dipendente con lo stesso reddito e un quarto dei professionisti avrebbe beneficiato di uno sconto superiore a 13.264 euro. Con le novità previste per il 2027, attacca Maria Cecilia Guerra, capogruppo del Pd in commissione Bilancio alla Camera, “chi resta in Irpef può ottenere un taglio fiscale da zero a 500 euro, mentre un professionista che passa alla flat tax può beneficiare di uno sconto da 7.237 a 9.890 euro, oltre a non pagare più le addizionali Irpef, che possono superare i 2.000 euro”. Il che rappresenta anche un problema non da poco per le casse degli enti locali.
Il segretario confederale della Cgil Christian Ferrari calcola che un professionista benestante con compensi lordi da 100.000 euro pagherà, nel 2027, “8.658 euro. Un lavoratore dipendente con un reddito da 51.000 euro lordi ne pagherà invece 14.030: pur percependo la metà, avrà un’imposta quasi doppia. Il primo risparmierà circa 10.000 euro all’anno, il secondo 100 euro all’anno” con l’aumento a 55mila del limite dello scaglione a cui si applica l’aliquota del 33%. “Inoltre, l’autonomo sarà completamente esentato dal pagare le addizionali locali, il dipendente continuerà a pagare in media 1.428 euro per finanziare i servizi pubblici regionali e comunali”. Va ricordato che i 100mila euro di compensi lordi non coincidono però con il guadagno effettivo, che viene stimato applicando ai ricavi coefficienti di redditività stabiliti per legge, differenti a seconda dell’attività, e sottraendo i contributi previdenziali obbligatori. Nel caso delle attività professionali, a fronte di 100mila euro di ricavi il reddito forfettario è di 78.000 euro.
Il regime forfettario era nato nel 2015 con soglie di ricavi differenziate per attività, con un massimo di 40mila euro. Nel 2019 il governo Conte I, su spinta del Carroccio, ha introdotto il tetto unico di 65mila euro. Nel 2023 il governo Meloni ha portato la soglia a 85mila euro, con uscita immediata dal regime nell’anno per chi supera i 100mila. La giustificazione politica per ogni nuovo innalzamento è che sottoporre i redditi ad aliquote più basse dovrebbe incentivare i contribuenti a dichiarare tutti i ricavi, facendo emergere il nero e consentendo di recuperare almeno in parte il gettito perso. Promessa che non ha riscontri, anzi. Nel 2022 la Commissione di esperti indipendenti incaricata dal Mef di stimare l’evasione fiscale aveva segnalato il rischio di un “effetto di autoselezione“. Se superare una certa quota di introiti comporta la perdita di un trattamento fiscale vantaggioso come la tassa piatta, il contribuente è indotto a non oltrepassarla dichiarando meno di quanto incassa. Far salire il tetto a 100mila euro ma con la tagliola dell’Iva che scatta sopra gli 85mila peggiorerà la situazione.
L’economista Alessandro Santoro, già presidente della Commissione, nel libro Evasione fiscale – Ridurla (molto) si deve e si può ha confrontato i redditi medi dichiarati dai forfettari e dai contribuenti Irpef prima e dopo l’innalzamento della soglia per verificare se si sia materializzato un effetto emersione. Dopo che nei primi anni di applicazione, tra il 2016 e il 2018, la media di chi aveva la flat tax era cresciuta più di quella dei contribuenti Irpef, dopo che (nel 2019) il tetto è arrivato a 65mila euro la dinamica si è invertita. Considerando i redditi dichiarati nel 2023 e nel 2024, il reddito medio dei forfettari risulta aumentato del 23,7% rispetto al 2019, a 17.190 euro mentre per gli autonomi e gli imprenditori individuali rimasti nell’Irpef l’incremento è stato del 21,1%, fino a 40.900 euro. Una differenza troppo contenuta per dimostrare che l’allargamento del regime abbia ridotto il nero.
Ciliegina sulla torta, c’è il nodo operativo. La soglia di 85mila euro è anche il limite massimo previsto dalla normativa europea per la franchigia Iva delle piccole imprese. Portarla a 100mila euro ai fini delle imposte sui redditi non significa automaticamente estendere anche l’esenzione dall’Iva. Il governo intende separare i due trattamenti: mantenere la flat tax al 15%, o al 5% per chi ne ha diritto, anche per chi fattura tra 85mila e 100mila euro, facendo però scattare gli obblighi Iva oltre la vecchia soglia. Chi vende servizi direttamente ai consumatori dovrà quindi aumentarne il prezzo finale, a meno di non voler comprimere il proprio margine. L’imposta pagata sugli acquisti potrà essere poi detratta da quella da versare allo Stato. Ma il tutto comporta una serie di nuovi adempimenti amministrativi che potrebbero rendere dubbia la convenienza.
L'articolo Per le partite Iva flat tax fino a 100mila euro (con pasticcio sull’Iva): risparmi fino a 10mila euro. Nuova picconata del governo all’equità fiscale proviene da Il Fatto Quotidiano.
Some European diplomats in Seoul are weighing whether they can still trust South Korea as a like-minded partner if it grows closer to Russia, the Financial Times reported on 28 October, according to South Korea’s Financial News. One European diplomat also told the FT that Seoul wants to resume trade with Russia as soon as the war ends.
As Russia presses its war against Ukraine, Kyiv’s partners count on each other to keep up the pressure on Moscow. The doubts about South Korea now come from its European partners, not only from Kyiv. The report lands eight days after Seoul said it would withdraw about half its staff from Kyiv over a dispute about two North Korean prisoners of war.
According to the FT, European diplomats saw a South Korean pilot voyage along Russia’s Arctic sea route as a sign of a tilt toward Russia, since the voyage required extensive cooperation from Moscow.
Meanwhile, on 1 October, South Korean President Lee Jae-myung appointed Song Young-gil, a six-term lawmaker and former chair of parliament’s foreign affairs committee, as his special adviser on peace diplomacy. Song once served as a special envoy to Russia, the FT noted.
On 20 October, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Rudenko said Seoul had signaled it wants to normalize relations but says full normalization can come only after a change in the geopolitical situation, which he said means the end of the war in Ukraine.
The FT also cited reports of fuel shipments to Russia. A Guardian analysis published on 6 October found that more than 176,000 tons of fuel, mostly diesel, were loaded at South Korean ports in July and August. The fuel went onto seven tankers bound for Russia’s Far East, three of them under UK and EU sanctions. The Guardian said the trade does not appear to breach South Korean law.
On 8 October, South Korea’s foreign and trade ministries and customs service said no diesel, jet fuel, or gasoline had been exported to Russia through customs. They said they would examine the tankers’ routes and any divergence from their declared destinations before judging whether the law had been broken.
Ukraine’s sanctions commissioner Vladyslav Vlasiuk said the shipments helped Russia offset refinery losses caused by Ukrainian strikes. South Korea’s presidential office called the claim inaccurate and inappropriate, saying the key facts of the transactions had not been verified.
In a statement to the FT, South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said concerns in some quarters that the country was leaning too far toward Russia were not based on fact. It added that Seoul supports international efforts to end the war in Ukraine.
At the same time, relations with Ukraine have deteriorated over the transfer of two North Korean prisoners of war to South Korea, which Zelenskyy disclosed at the UN General Assembly in September. Seoul says the disclosure broke a confidentiality understanding. Dmytro Lytvyn, Zelenskyy’s communications adviser, wrote in a Facebook comment on 25 September that “there was no such agreement.”
On 20 October, Seoul said it would withdraw roughly half its diplomatic staff from Kyiv, citing Kyiv’s failure to take “positive steps” on the POW dispute and continued Russian airstrikes, Yonhap reported. A chargé d’affaires and all consular staff will stay.
Ninguno quiere el premio, o así lo parece. Como si se hubieran contagiado. Lo tiene a tiro Nikoloz Basilashvili hasta cuatro veces, pero el georgiano se adorna —ese exceso de confianza en la volea no tocaba— y termina pagándolo caro, muy caro. Tanto que le cuesta el set (o sea, el partido) después de que Carlos Alcaraz, igualmente errático, haya desperdiciado tres opciones de cerrar el duelo; una de ellas con toda la pista para él, clamorosa. Al final no lo lamentará. El murciano vence en un episodio de contrastes (6-1 y 7-6(11), después de 1h 41m) y progresa en Viena, donde se las verá este viernes en los cuartos de final (no antes de las 15.00, Movistar+) con un rival sobradamente conocido para él: será el décimo pulso con Tommy Paul, con un balance favorable de 7-2.
Jódar, primerizo en la élite, continúa en pleno crecimiento y descubriendo los entresijos del máximo nivel. En este proceso de aprendizaje, uno de los aspectos a mejorar es su rendimiento en los tie-breaks, en los que la experiencia resulta fundamental.
Este curso, el madrileño ha tenido que dilucidar 24, de los cuales ha ganado 11 y perdido 13. Empezó con fuerza —ganó siete de los diez primeros que jugó—, pero últimamente ha menguado; en concreto, se ha hecho solo con dos de los diez últimos.
Precisamente, si alguien domina esa zona terminal es Djokovic (39), que empezó bien contra Struf y al final se diluyó. Conforme transcurrió el partido fue perdiendo vigor y el tenista alemán, que se había inclinado en los ocho precedentes entre ambos, lo apeó. Dejó, pues, escapar una magnífica oportunidad.
Quien no lo hizo fue Alexander Zverev, que el próximo lunes abrirá oficialmente su reinado al derrotar en Viena a Tallon Griekspoor (6-4 y 7-5). El triunfo anticipa su ascenso a la cima. Allí también, el italiano Flavio Cobolli abandonó lesionado y entre lágrimas ante su compatriota Matteo Berrettini.
Cabe recordar que actualmente es sexto tanto en el ranking como en la carrera anual, así como que debería ser el referente de su país en las Finales de la Copa Davis. Se resintió de unos problemas arrastraba desde la semana previa en Lyon.
Por otra parte, Elena Rybakina confirmó que finalizará el año en lo más alto. Su triunfo contra Yulia Putintseva en Tokio (6-2 y 6-3) le garantiza la posición, que obtuvo tras el US Open. La kazaja, de 27 años, ha ganado este año en Australia y Nueva York.
© Lisa Leutner (REUTERS)
Confronto vivace a Battitori liberi, su Radio Cusano, tra il leader di Futuro Nazionale, Roberto Vannacci, e Savino Balzano, conduttore della trasmissione insieme a Gianluca Fabi. A far scattare il battibecco è la posizione dell’ex generale sull’Unione europea e sull’euro: a Balzano che lo incalza sulle sue dichiarazioni contestandogli una posizione poco incisiva rispetto alle aspettative del suo elettorato, Vannacci replica con tono piccato, respingendo la ricostruzione del saggista (“Sbagliato, è una falsificazione”) e chiarendo che l’uscita dall’Ue e dalla moneta unica resta una possibilità, anche se non figura tra gli obiettivi programmatici del suo partito.
Il politico invita Balzano a leggere il programma di Futuro Nazionale: “Né nel programma né nelle nostre intenzioni c’è quella di mettere in piano un’uscita dall’Ue e dall’euro come punto programmatico del partito. Abbiamo sempre avuto un approccio critico nei confronti di questa Unione europea e di questa Unione monetaria, che vogliamo cambiare”. L’obiettivo, spiega, è “andare a ridiscutere i trattati principali dell’Unione europea”. E cita AfD in Germania, Rassemblement National in Francia, Vox in Spagna e altre forze politiche europee che, a suo giudizio, possono favorire una revisione degli accordi di Maastricht. Poi precisa: “Non escludiamo tuttavia, nel caso di impossibilità di cambiare questa Unione dall’interno, la possibilità anche di uscire“.
Una risposta che non convince Balzano: “Mi sembra una posizione un po’ vaga”.
Vannacci replica: “Non è vaga. È una questione di tempi, di fattibilità e di possibilità di intervenire”.
Ma il conduttore torna alla carica: “Io parlo da cittadino. Mi sembra una posizione vaga. Alla fine questa Unione europea non piace a nessuno, non piaceva neanche al Pd. Pure il Pd vuole cambiare l’Unione europea. Uno da lei si aspetterebbe una posizione più tranchant”.
Il leader di Futuro Nazionale rivendica allora la differenza tra il proprio progetto politico e quello dei democratici: “Il mio partito non si chiama Italexit, quindi già uno se ne dovrebbe essere accorto prima. Il Pd vuole cambiare questa Unione europea nel senso di una maggiore integrazione. Noi invece vogliamo l’Europa delle patrie, delle nazioni e dei popoli sovrani, che è una cosa ben diversa”.
Per Vannacci, tentare di modificare l’Unione dall’interno è una strada più praticabile rispetto all’uscita immediata attraverso l’articolo 50 dei trattati europei. “L’uscita dall’Unione europea è una cosa che gli sprovveduti tirano fuori così, tanto per prendere qualche voto. Chi ha seguito almeno il percorso della Brexit sa che è una cosa tutt’altro che facile e sa che molti in Inghilterra oggi se ne stanno pentendo. Vedasi la Scozia, che sta cercando un percorso alternativo. Quindi bisogna pensarci bene”.
Il discorso si estende anche all’Alleanza Atlantica. “Non escludiamo la possibile uscita anche dalla Nato – afferma Vannacci, che indica come priorità il rafforzamento del peso dell’Italia nelle organizzazioni internazionali – Vogliamo rafforzare la posizione nazionale all’interno di queste organizzazioni e non più subirle da succubi. Vogliamo diventarne attori che riescono a perorare l’interesse nazionale”. E contesta le direttive e i regolamenti che, a suo dire, la Commissione europea impone agli Stati membri.
Balzano, però, torna a punzecchiarlo e chiude con una battuta: “Faccia attenzione a non cascare nel ‘ma anche’ di Veltroni, però. Glielo do come consiglio da cittadino”.
Vannacci non lascia cadere la provocazione: “Veltroni fa un altro lavoro rispetto al mio. Io quello che dico lo mantengo e l’ho sempre fatto nella mia vita”. E ribadisce che la linea del partito è sempre la stessa: “Chiunque abbia letto il programma di Futuro Nazionale sa che questa è stata la posizione sin dall’inizio”.
L'articolo Botta e risposta tra Vannacci e Balzano. “Non escludiamo di uscire da Ue e Nato”. “Posizione vaga” proviene da Il Fatto Quotidiano.
In merito al Kids Act, l’iniziativa volta a vietare l’uso dei social network ai minori di 13 anni, “abbiamo avanzato una proposta molto chiara, che prevede un approccio graduale e l’obbligo di integrare la sicurezza fin dalla fase di progettazione (‘safety by design’) per tutti i servizi online. La nostra proposta armonizza le norme per garantire che tutti i minori nell’Ue godano di un pari livello di protezione, poiché un problema europeo richiede una risposta europea unitaria. Per questo motivo, posso confermare oggi che la Commissione ha deciso di rinviare di 12 mesi l’iter di qualsiasi progetto di legge nazionale che si sovrapponga alle future norme armonizzate”.
La dichiarazione arriva da Thomas Regnier, portavoce dell’Esecutivo comunitario per il Digitale, nel corso del consueto incontro con i giornalisti. Motivando il rinvio, il portavoce ha spiegato: “Perché è importante? È assolutamente fondamentale per evitare una frammentazione del nostro mercato interno e per salvaguardare il lavoro dei nostri colegislatori. Dobbiamo ora concentrarci sui negoziati relativi all’Eu Kids Act e garantire un’efficace applicazione delle nostre norme”.
Entrando nel dettaglio dei provvedimenti già presentati, il portavoce ha poi evidenziato: “Ci sono già alcune leggi nazionali – sottolinea il portavoce – che sono state notificate alla Commissione europea” oltre all’Austria come “Slovenia,Italia, Belgio, Francia e altri Stati membri” e “i lavori su tali provvedimenti sono in corso, ma ciò non modifica la nostra posizione di fondo: non intendiamo frammentare il nostro mercato interno.
Se si procedesse in tal modo, si verrebbero a creare normative e requisiti differenti nei vari Stati membri, rendendo l’applicazione delle norme praticamente impossibile. Le piattaforme non sarebbero in grado di conformarsi a un mercato così frammentato e, in ultima analisi, ci ritroveremmo privi di qualsiasi livello di tutela. È proprio per questo che abbiamo presentato una proposta armonizzata volta a proteggere tutti i minori”.
L'articolo Kids Act, la Commissione Ue frena le leggi nazionali: stop di 12 mesi ai progetti dei Paesi membri proviene da Affaritaliani.it.
Dopo il divieto social per i minori approvato dalla Grecia, primo paese in Europa a varare il ban, arriva lo stop di Bruxelles. “La Commissione ha deciso di rinviare di 12 mesi qualsiasi progetto di legge nazionale che si sovrapponga alle future norme armonizzate, ritenendolo fondamentale per evitare una frammentazione del nostro mercato interno”, ha dichiarato Thomas Regnier, portavoce della Commissione Ue. “Per salvaguardare il lavoro dei nostri co-legislatori, dobbiamo ora concentrarci sui negoziati relativi all’EU Kids Act e garantire un’efficace applicazione delle nostre norme”, ha aggiunto il funzionario di Bruxelles. Come effetto del rinvio, l’avvocato Stefano Bertone e Antonio Affinita (Moige) indicano i rischi sulla salute pubblica, ricordando la sanzione inflitta a Meta dal tribunale del New Mexico.
In attesa del provvedimento europeo per proteggere i più giovani, Regnier ha citato il Digital service act come strumento di tutela. Il portavoce della Commissione ha lanciato lo stop alle cancellerie del Vecchio Continente esprimendo il parere di Bruxelles sulla proposta di legge austriaca, con il ban previsto fino a 14 anni. La decisione del rinvio si ripercuote anche sull’Italia. Pochi giorni fa la presidenza del Consiglio dei ministri aveva lasciato trapelare sulle pagine di Repubblica la linea di Giorgia Meloni. La premier “non è contraria o ostile” al divieto per i giovanissimi. Tuttavia mai hai espresso il suo favore esplicito verso il ban dai social network, contenuto nel disegno di legge 1136, fermo da oltre un anno in attesa dei pareri del governo, ma con il via libera incassato proprio dall’Europa. Fratelli d’Italia, con Lavinia Mennuni, aveva esortato il Parlamento ad approvare il provvedimento, anche un emendamento per tutelare i giovani. Invito subito raccolto dal Partito democratico e Italia Viva. Ma ora il progetto bipartisan potrebbe arenarsi, dopo la decisione annunciata da Bruxelles.
Il portavoce Ue ha indicato l’Italia tra gli Stati che hanno già notificato le proprie leggi alla Commissione, insieme a Slovenia, Belgio e Francia. “Il lavoro è in corso”, ha detto Regnier, precisando che “questo non cambierà la nostra posizione di base: non frammenteremo il nostro mercato interno. Se lo si fa, con età diverse e leggi diverse nei vari Stati membri, diventa quasi impossibile far rispettare le norme”. La Commissione europea punta ora ad approvare la sua proposta di regolamento battezzata Kids act, accelerando il trilogo dei negoziati con Consiglio e Parlamento europeo.
Il divieto social è fortemente sostenuto dalle associazioni delle famiglie promotrici della class action contro Meta e TikTok, per i possibili danni ai minori. Tra le sigle c’è il Moige, Movimento genitori italiani. Il direttore generale Antonio Affinita, interpellato da ilfattoquotidiano.it esprime stupore per la mossa di Bruxelles: “Molto grave lo stop al divieto, si tratta di una ingerenza nelle politiche sulla salute pubblica degli Stati membri, un tema su cui gli i governi nazionali restano sovrani. Di fatto è impedito di legiferare in attesa di un provvedimento europeo”, ha dichiarato Affinita. “Del resto siamo perplessi sul Kids act, a partire dalla soglia troppo bassa fissata a 13 anni, come è già ora”, conclude il direttore generale. Il Moige aveva elencato 8 profili critici del provvedimento in discussione a Bruxelles, per tutelare i giovani dalle conseguenze dei social network. Ad esempio, l’assenza di responsabilità economica, penale e civile per i danni che un minore può subire. Oppure il parental control, eludibile, difficile da comprendere per i non esperti e interamente a carico dei genitori. I limiti di sicurezza da imporre alle piattaforme, secondo il Moige, troppo lasco e senza garanzie concrete. Infine, l’incertezza sulle sanzioni.
Anche l’avvocato Stefano Bertone, tra i legali del team della class action contro Meta e TikTok, si concentra sui rischi del rinvio di Bruxelles sulla salute pubblica: “La sopravvivenza e la salute mentale dell’età adolescenziale è una pretesa dell’oggi, non di dopodomani o tra 12 mesi”. L’avvocato ricorda il precedente legale negli Stati Uniti, con la maxi sanzione per i danni ai minori inflitta alla casa madre di Facebook e Instagram: la priorità è “evitare che si moltiplichino e aggravino anche da noi gli effetti di quella ‘tempesta’ che ha investito la salute mentale di milioni di adolescenti nel Nuovo Messico, come ha dichiarato il tribunale locale poche settimane fa, condannando Meta a quasi un miliardo di dollari di sanzioni”.
L'articolo Divieto social ai minori, stop della Commissione Ue: “Leggi nazionali rinviate per un anno, prima il nostro regolamento Kids act” proviene da Il Fatto Quotidiano.
Drones attacked Sterlitamak in Russia’s Bashkortostan on 29 October, and smoke rose over the Bashkir Soda Company, Russian Telegram channel Astra reported, citing its open-source analysis. The city’s mayor admitted debris fell on an unnamed plant.
Ukraine’s long-range drones keep reaching deeper into the industries that feed Russia’s war. In the past five days, a nitric acid maker in Tula Oblast, a rocket-fuel rubber plant in Samara Oblast, and a titanium plant in the Urals came under attack. The Sterlitamak plant lies about 1,310 km from the front line. Drones also attacked it on 27 August, Astra says. Ukraine has not commented.
The Bashkir Soda Company is Russia’s largest producer of soda ash and baking soda, and part of the Roskhim chemical holding. It is also Russia’s only maker of terephthaloyl chloride, The Insider reported, citing the company’s website. The website also mentions deliveries to the defense industry.
The compound goes into aramid fibers, Kevlar-type materials used for body armor, helmets, and armor for military vehicles and aircraft, Astra said. Astra also says the company sits on the Russian Industry and Trade Ministry’s closed register of defense enterprises.
The attack began around dawn. Ukrainian Telegram channel Exilenova+ posted footage of a drone over the city. Supernova+, another Ukrainian monitoring channel, posted the plant’s coordinates and photos of smoke. Russia’s aviation agency restricted flights at the airport of Ufa, the region’s capital. Pro-Ukrainian X account Maks 26 shared footage of the attacks on Sterlitamak and Luhansk. It also suggested that Sterlitamak’s Syntez-Kauchuk rubber plant may have been the target, and claimed a fire at the Marinovka air base in Volgograd Oblast.
— MAKS 26
Mayor Emil Shaimardanov claimed air defenses downed all seven drones over the city. An earlier version of his post, quoted by Russian state news agency TASS, said eight.
“Debris fell on the territory of one of the enterprises. Minor damage was caused, the plant is operating normally,” Shaimardanov claimed.
He did not name the plant.
The Insider said NASA’s FIRMS fire map confirmed a fire at the plant. But the map shows only the weak heat source its satellites record there almost every night, the last time hours before the drones came, and nothing new after the attack.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin claimed that 613 drones flew toward the Moscow region overnight, that most were downed on the far approaches, and that 231 were downed on approach to the capital. Russia’s aviation agency restricted flights at Vnukovo, Domodedovo, and Zhukovsky airports. Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed it downed 1,214 drones over 19 regions overnight.
Ukraine’s General Staff said its forces hit a depot of Geran drones, Russia’s version of the Iranian Shahed, along with a drone launch site and a fuel depot near Navlya in Bryansk Oblast, about 70 km from the Ukrainian border. The Atesh partisan movement reported a loud explosion near Oryol’s airfield and a large fire in Lipetsk, about 285 km from the border.
Subscribers of Crimean monitoring channel Krymsky Veter reported drones and then a strong explosion with Russian air defenses firing in Krasnoperekopsk, in occupied Crimea, about 95 km from the front line.
In occupied Luhansk, about 105 km from the front line, residents reported another attack on Lugacom, the occupation’s mobile operator, and internet outages followed, Exilenova+ said. The channel named only Lugacom. The operator sits in the seized Ukrtelecom building. Exilenova+ also posted footage of a fire in the city.
— Exilenova+ (@Exilenova_plus) October 29, 2026
Leonid Pasechnik, the Russian-installed head of the occupied part of Luhansk Oblast, claimed that 150,000 customers in six municipalities lost power after attacks on energy facilities.
FIRST ON FOX — Angel Studios is drawing a line in the sand against Hollywood's approach to entertainment, announcing sweeping new content standards that ban on-screen sex, nudity and certain profanity while promising millions of paying members the power to decide which movies and television shows make the cut.
In an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital, Angel Studios co-founder and Chief Content Officer Jeff Harmon said the entertainment industry has increasingly lost touch with the families it once served, prompting his company to establish what it calls "The Angel Promise."
"I think Hollywood generally kind of lives in a bubble," Harmon said. "These are excellent craftsmen. They're the best storytellers in the world. Hollywood has built the best storytelling infrastructure in the world."
"But at the same time, they've kind of drifted more and more away from the values-based audience that they used to serve," Harmon said. "And with that, in our view, as brothers and as fathers, as a father, Hollywood hasn't been giving me consistently what I need. Once in a while, you get a good one, but you have to sift through all these things to find your good movies and your good stories."
The new initiative, announced Thursday, establishes three core commitments governing Angel's entertainment offerings, namely, audience approval of content, strict standards involving sex and language, and expanded parental controls.
"We promise there's never going to be nudity, and there'll never be sex on screen," Harmon said, explaining that families participating in the Angel Guild will not have to worry about encountering such material when evaluating potential projects.
The company is also drawing a firm boundary around profanity, pledging that Angel's original productions will not misuse God's name.
"This is a completely unique one," Harmon said. "This has never really happened in Hollywood history."
Harmon described the restriction as part of the company's effort to build trust with religious families.
"What we promise our viewers is that this timeless principle that's thousands of years old, and we're a very faith-friendly studio, is that we're not going to have misuse of God's name on the system on any Angel original content," Harmon said. "So any content we create. Where we are originating, meaning it comes to Angel first, those shows, those TV shows and movies, will not have misuse of God's name, so that families of faith, 'cause we're a faith-friendly studio, can trust that language won't be there."
Under the new standards, the company also prohibits use of the F-word in its stories and profanity in titles submitted for children ages 12 and younger.
HOLLYWOOD PRODUCER BEHIND 'APOLLO 13' REJECTS POLITICS IN HIS MOVIES, SEEKS TO UNITE AUDIENCES
The announcement represents a significant effort to distinguish Angel from traditional Hollywood studios, with the company placing its audience at the center of decisions about what gets produced and distributed.
Harmon said the Angel Guild, which has approximately 3 million paying members, gives viewers an opportunity to approve or reject projects before they enter the company's entertainment ecosystem.
"This is the first time in history that a major Hollywood studio, or top 10 studio in the United States, has come and said, we're going to let the audience have a veto right," Harmon said.
Under Angel's stated policy, films and television series must receive a score of at least 70 out of 100 from Guild members to qualify for inclusion in its entertainment ecosystem.
Harmon said the founders' experiences raising children helped shape the new standards.
"Angel was co-founded by four brothers and a cousin," he said, adding that the founders have 34 children between them.
CREATING THE DEFINITIVE MOUNT RUSHMORE OF PIXAR MOVIES FROM A PARENTS' VIEWING PERSPECTIVE
The goal, he explained, was to create entertainment that parents could trust without having to sift through potentially objectionable content.
The third component of the Angel Promise focuses on parental controls. Angel says Guild members will help establish recommended age ratings and plain-language descriptions of potentially sensitive material, while new controls in the Angel app will allow parents to tailor viewing choices to their families.
Harmon said the broader ambition is to reshape the relationship between filmmakers and audiences.
"Our goal was to set out and try to fix this problem of kind of stepping out of the Hollywood bubble and stepping into middle America's shoes," he said.
The company says its Guild has paid out nearly $300 million to filmmakers, while Harmon said more than 100 films were available for members to vote on at the time of the interview.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP
For Harmon, the new promise is about establishing permanent standards that will outlast any individual film, filmmaker or executive, and give families greater influence over the entertainment they consume.
Some of the studio's prominent recent films include "David" and "The King of Kings."
Nella newsletter di ieri avevo formulato osservazioni critiche sulla richiesta di convalida del fermo e di custodia cautelare nei confronti di Youssef Siher, che avevo definito «il malintenzionato». L’ordinanza della gip di Milano Tiziana Landoni lo ha rimesso in libertà, suscitando la reazione della presidente del Consiglio, che ha deplorato la decisione come «mortificazione insopportabile del lavoro delle forze dell’ordine, degli inquirenti, del ministero degli Interni».
È un’argomentazione che fa dubitare della sua piena consapevolezza nel sostenere, in passato, la separazione delle carriere tra il magistrato che accusa e il giudice chiamato a decidere.
Youssef Siher è ascrivibile alla categoria dei nemici dell’Occidente e della democrazia. Le sue affiliazioni politiche non lasciano dubbi: ha aderito al nucleo milanese dei Giovani Palestinesi d’Italia ed è in relazione con il movimento anti-israeliano BDS (Boicottaggio, Disinvestimento e Sanzioni), il Fronte della Gioventù Comunista, comitati sindacali di base di Firenze e Brescia, centri sociali del Nord-Est e altre sigle dello stesso genere.
Si può non condividere nulla di ciò che Siher pensa – e mi auguro siano in pochi a farlo. Si può trovare ambiguo o peggio il vademecum che invitava a «provare a sfondare» i cordoni di polizia, anche se non suggeriva di opporre resistenza ma di arretrare. Ma la responsabilità penale è personale, la libertà personale è inviolabile e il carcere prima del processo richiede indizi gravi. Se la Procura li ritiene presenti, ha un rimedio: l’impugnazione, come Meloni sa.
La giudice non ha assolto Siher. Ha respinto la convalida del fermo e la richiesta di custodia cautelare, ritenendo che mancassero un concreto pericolo di fuga e gravi indizi per i reati contestati. Ha lasciato espressamente aperta la possibilità di ulteriori acquisizioni investigative. L’indagine può proseguire. La privazione della libertà deve avere, già oggi, una giustificazione.
Ieri Il Giornale ha rivelato che la gip Tiziana Landoni aveva firmato, nel settembre 2025, l’Appello dei giuristi per Gaza promosso da “Giustizia Insieme”, dove si legge che «di fronte alle notizie sulla violazione sistematica e protratta del diritto alla vita e degli altri diritti fondamentali della popolazione civile di Gaza, il silenzio ha smesso da tempo di essere un’opzione». Questo ha rafforzato i sospetti di parzialità da parte della destra. Però nello stesso elenco dei 3.135 firmatari compariva anche Francesca Crupi – Procura Milano, cioè la pubblico ministero che ha chiesto il carcere per Siher. Accusa e giudice hanno firmato lo stesso testo e sono arrivate a conclusioni opposte. La duplice firma non prova niente.
Semmai pone una domanda che la cultura liberale ha rivolto spesso ai magistrati: è opportuno che firmino appelli pubblici su temi che dividono l’opinione pubblica? Il testo di “Giustizia Insieme” chiede di leggere in aula lo Statuto della Corte penale internazionale. Un’altra corte, la Corte europea dei diritti dell’uomo, ripete da decenni che la giustizia non deve solo essere imparziale, deve anche apparire tale. L’imparzialità percepita è un bene fragile, e chi indossa la toga dovrebbe custodirlo con una certa avarizia. Vale per la pm come per la gip.
La presidente del Consiglio ha pieno diritto di contestarne le decisioni. Ma presentare il controllo giudiziario come una mortificazione di chi protegge i cittadini significa mettere sotto accusa la funzione stessa della garanzia. La regola liberale è altra: indicare un passaggio, discuterne la logica, domandare se gli elementi siano stati valutati correttamente.
La magistratura non è sottratta al giudizio pubblico, ma chi sostiene la terzietà del giudice deve accettarne le conseguenze quando il giudice dice di no alla Procura. Altrimenti la separazione tra accusa e giudizio si riduce a una formula da pronunciare soltanto nei processi che coinvolgono persone politicamente vicine.
Uno Stato liberale protegge i negozi dalle devastazioni, gli agenti dalle aggressioni e gli indagati dalle detenzioni prive dei presupposti di legge. Deve fare tutte queste cose insieme. Il giudice che verifica quei presupposti esercita un potere di controllo indispensabile anche quando la sua decisione irrita il governo. È soprattutto allora che l’indipendenza smette di essere una parola cerimoniale e diventa una garanzia concreta.
Sullo stesso tema, leggi gli articoli di Carmelo Palma e di Mario Lavia.
L'articolo La decisione su Youssef Siher, la reazione di Meloni, il senso della separazione tra accusa e giudizio proviene da Linkiesta.it.
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Aube Rey Lescure | Longreads | October 29, 2026 | 5,562 words (20 minutes)
When my father proposes a road trip to admire fall foliage along the Yalu River, the natural border separating parts of northeastern China from North Korea, I am skeptical for several reasons. First, it appears his inspiration comes largely from Douyin, the Chinese TikTok, which has been feeding him videos of regional autumnal splendor, with hypersaturated reds that carry more than a whiff of artificial enhancement.
Secondly, I don’t know how to drive, and neither, really, does my father. He would dispute this, as he did earn a driver’s license recently from a shoddy driving school in Dandong, a border town on the Yalu and our ancestral bastion. He’s already bought a brand new car, a Chinese domestic bestseller, for the bargain price of eight thousand US dollars. In the days since owning it, he’d only gotten into one accident (ramming into a neighbor’s parked car, as captured on the compound CCTV).
Thirdly, our visit to northeastern China (my father lives in Shanghai) is largely for the purpose of seeing my grandmother, who is minded by Sanshu, my youngest uncle, and I’m fairly sure neither has heard of a fall foliage road trip in their lifetimes. Furthermore, my grandmother is allergic to most forms of financial expenditure. At home, she plugs the bathtub and gathers water from a faucet dripping at a volume feeble enough to go undetected by the water meter. With that reservoir and a plastic bucket, she flushes the toilet and fools the utility company. Imagine how she will feel about gas money.
Fourthly, at the time he raises this idea, my father is recovering from cancer, one month post-op from the removal of a malignant tumor in his colon. He did not tell me until after the operation.
“We’ll just drive very slowly,” he says.
Weeks before my visit to China, my father had called me from a hospital bed to let me know about the cancer. This was our first phone call in years—usually, our exchanges are constrained to happy birthdays on WeChat or confirming the travel logistics of my infrequent visits. After I arrive in Shanghai, despite his efforts at dissuasion, I accompany him to the Fudan University Cancer Center for a follow-up appointment. The cancer is diagnosed, retroactively, as stage II. The doctor recommends preventive chemotherapy to deter recurrence. My father says no. The doctor recommends chemo pills. My father says no again.
When the doctor notices my increasingly discomfited expression and asks, “Who’s this?” my father says, “This is my niece.”
“It’s too complicated otherwise,” he tells me afterward. I am half-white; he is Chinese. I want to retort that it’s not complicated; I am his daughter. But I bite my tongue.
Since my teenage years, after my parents divorced, a distance had wedged itself between my father and me, further exacerbated by my move to the US at 16 years old. You might say we are estranged. Once or twice in the past decade, he’s given me a stiff hug, but mostly he greets me with a quick wave at airport arrivals, then hurries off to find a taxi. At his home in Shanghai, I dine and go on outings with my stepmother and sister while he sits out most communal activities. We barely make eye contact, him perpetually positioned in front of his computer screen, watching political commentary videos, me mumbling a greeting as I skulk by. The road trip proposition is, for all these reasons and more, preposterous. The two of us, in a car for days, physically proximate despite the emotional Mariana Trench between us? Maybe that’s why the idea also feels strangely enticing.
I am half-white; he is Chinese. I want to retort that it’s not complicated; I am his daughter. But I bite my tongue.
When he feels recovered enough, though his stomach is still bandaged, my father and I fly north to Dalian. Nainai, my 81-year-old grandmother, is unaware of my father’s illness. She knows he’d been hospitalized, but he paid a copy shop man to photoshop a report saying he had a stomach infection, not cancer. (The copy shop is located right outside the hospital, and business is booming.) The first evening we arrive at the apartment my grandmother shares with Sanshu, Nainai cooks a feast of homemade fennel dumplings and pork trotters. This is a special occasion: Usually, she spends her days holed up in her apartment, watching reels of web soaps and fake news on her phone at high volume while Sanshu shuts himself in his room. Her ideal granddaughterly visit would be me sitting next to her at home, force-fed like a foie gras goose during intermissions from the reel-viewing.
This can be arranged on the road as well, and my father, as eldest son, has his sway: To take his family on a car trip, or “self-driving tourism” as it’s known on the Chinese internet, is the new pinnacle of the Chinese dream. For a family that once subsisted on meal tickets, whose children collected metal to sell at a scrapyard, car ownership still feels like a fantasy. “Don’t you want to see me practice my driving, Ma?” he asks Nainai, and this seems to erode her defenses. Sanshu listens with quiet eagerness. His days as Nainai’s caretaker are monotone in this seaside city, and like my father, he spends most days on the internet, his only portal to a larger world. Now, here was a chance to drive through it ourselves. Finally, Nainai sighs and agrees. “But we have all this food at home,” she adds with petulance.
On the train trip to Dandong, where the car is to be retrieved (from the compound, scene of the accident), we carry plastic bags of grapes, cabbage, steamed taro, sweet potatoes, and corn. The pork trotters are in there somewhere. The train travels north, making stops at rural towns in the waning light of dusk. The land is mostly flat, low hills hazy in the distance. The moon rises in the pale blue sky and the wind turbines are still; herons graze the glassy surface of a low-lying river.
At the train station in Dandong, my father announces he has “booked a leg of lamb.” It turns out he spent the entire three-hour train ride on Douyin, where he learned that a Mongolian restaurant’s leg of lamb had gone viral. He tried ordering it for takeout, but it has to be spit-roasted at the table. He announces our dinner plans to Sanshu and Nainai. “But what about all the food we have with us?” Nainai says, pointing to all the plastic bags. “Why spend money?”
“We’ll eat those later!” My dad commandeers a cab by the roadside as we exit. I can see he wants to start the trip on a high note, with a proper feast. I remember the childhood vacations when he sat pale as a restaurant bill arrived. Once, on Hainan Island for Chinese New Year, we ate instant ramen in the hotel room to save money. This is different. He is trying.
The Mongolian restaurant is in the city center, dingy and depressing. The tables around us fill up: each with a crate of beers next to it and an ashtray for the chain-smokers. I order some er’guotou for $2. The liquor tastes like synthetic ethanol, but goes down well with the roast lamb, which is succulent. I also order a cold salad of jellyfish and cucumber strands in vinegar, as well as Korean cold noodles in a kimchi-gochujang broth. This is a true borderland meal. Nainai sits with arms crossed across from me, refusing to eat a single morsel of lamb. “We’ve got food to eat at home,” she repeats.
Ignoring her hunger strike, my dad announces the plans for tomorrow: We will drive to Donggang, a nearby city, where Nainai will obtain some medicine she’s entitled to from her health insurance. This was, it is revealed, her primary motivation for agreeing to this trip.
After dinner, I hail a taxi, shamefully, to go to a hotel. I tried to convince Nainai to spend the night at the hotel with me, as I’ve booked myself a “superior riverside room.” I feel guilty for acting like I’m too good to stay at the housing project with the rest of my family. The apartment is small, with a single bathroom. There are not enough beds, I say, a wan excuse. “I’m not going to a hotel,” Nainai says. “And you could sleep in a bed with me.”
“Let her go,” my dad says. “She wants to see North Korea.” I am grateful for this diplomatic intervention. On the riverside avenue in Dandong, many hotels, including mine, are high-rises, which offer views across the border to North Korea. (On a review page for my hotel, someone asked: Do the rooms come equipped with binoculars? Sadly, they don’t, was the answer.)
After failing to convince me to take pears and boiled peanuts, my grandma shoves a mooncake my way before I close the cab door. The car drives along the riverside boulevard and its nighttime plaza dance. This is also an area of nightclubs, rent-by-the-hour karaoke, and entertainment centers. Hotels that double as banquet halls. The agricultural bank runs an LED message against border-zone money laundering.
Furuide, my hotel, is past this seedy stretch. When I walk in with my disintegrating REI backpack and tote bag (containing a plastic bag of Korean noodles doused in lamb soup, and the er’guotou), the reception staff eye me with suspicion. I show them my booking number. Since I’d reserved the superior riverview room, it turns out I’m on the top “executive” floor. They dutifully note my visa number, take a picture of the border entry stamp on my American passport, none of it casual. In my room, I find a free unrefrigerated peach yogurt, a little tub of cookies, and four bottles of water.
Someone sets off fireworks outside the window. And there it is, North Korea, across the bank. I can see deep into its dim night from the height of my 28th-floor room. As I stand by the window, I feel bewildered. It is perverse, this voyeurism into the pariah state, and yet I cannot help but look.
Instant coffee, powdered creamer, dense fog outside. I take a deep breath, put on my sneakers, and go down for a morning run along the river. The wind is fierce, and my Spotify running EDM playlist feels wrong—the soundtrack of American college parties. The North Korean shore has been built up tremendously in the six years since I was last here. A curious massive round tower, shaped like a rising moon, dominates the skyline. There are many new white towers nearby: modern condominiums. A lot of them are purportedly just for show, built for the Chinese to see, ghost towers with no lights at night. They call Kim Jong-un “Kim Three Fat” here, and word is that this year he’s come into some fortune shipping North Korean weapons to Putin, funding these real estate flexes. Along the Yalu River, here on the clean, wide promenade, there are panda-shaped binoculars you can use to look at North Korea by scanning a QR code. A little girl runs up to one, but she’s too short to reach the lenses.
The fog begins to recede, and the river sparkles in the sunshine. I shower quickly at the hotel and get a call from Sanshu that they are in the car downstairs, waiting. My father is cleaning the windshield of his grey SUV while blasting a groovy dance-pop Calvin Harris track on the stereo. I’ll come to learn he won’t drive without EDM, though I’ve never known him to be aware of the genre’s existence, let alone listen to it. Nainai is in the backseat propped against three pillows, and hands me a plastic bag of soy milk and fried dough sticks. She doesn’t have her seat belt on. I force her to buckle up. “But why?” she whines loudly. “Why are you tying me up?”
“She won’t want to take the car again if you do that,” my dad says. But I remain adamant. As retribution, she begins sending and reciting a series of voice memos on WeChat to her old medical school classmate: “Your daughter has found a partner? Wonderful! She’s 30 already? They’ll be married next year! Soon you’ll have a grandson in your arms!” She shouts into her phone over the music. I am 31, unwed, and childless, facts she likes to bring up often.
We drive south along the Yalu River. There is a new bridge into North Korea, but no cars driving across it. As we leave town, the compounds morph into fields and factories. On the riverside is a continuous barbed-wire fence. Every hundred meters I’m blinded by a sharp white flash: security cameras. “Foliage!” I point to a red shrub on the roadside. Besides occasional skinny trees, there are only mounds of dredged sand and stones along the road, stray corn stalks lining canals, shipyards clotted with destitute, rotting fishing boats. Men in faded camo pants search for crawfish in the swamp.
Dad drives at about 30 miles per hour, which I learn is his highest speed. Air that smells like fish and shrimp rot gushes through the open windows. We turn onto a small country road and drive through rural development zones before reaching the city of Donggang, where my father’s cousin Yin lives. She is helping us with Nainai’s medicine haul today. My dad parks, half his SUV jutting out into the sidewalk, in front of a hotel advertising “upscale, middle-scale, and low-scale rooms by the hour,” and an LED sign flashing no to drugs Yin and her husband arrive. They haven’t seen me since I was 3. “Lunch is on me,” my dad announces. We buy pounds of crab, clams, shrimp, jellyfish, giant sea slugs. Now, where to cook it?
We drive back to cousin Yin’s compound. It turns out my dad has never driven in a city, doesn’t know how to turn at a large intersection, or park in moderately narrow spaces. He drives with his foot on the brake the whole time, stopping and starting. Eventually we make it to the compound, and he and Nainai immediately park themselves on the couch. Sanshu goes into the guest bedroom to look at his phone. Who is going to help cousin Yin steam all this seafood we’ve invited ourselves to her house to eat? Me, of course.
The shrimp are ready first, then bowls of crabs, and clams and sea mollusks. We eat without plates, mounds of shells amassing in front of us as we hurl crabs at each other: “You eat, you eat.” Yin’s husband is a taxi driver who sometimes works for North Korean organizations that bring laborers to Chinese factories where they process seafood. They live in military-style dorms and are not allowed to mingle with the Chinese. He shuttles them from the factories to the dorms. “Do they prefer China, or do they want to go home?” my dad asks. “Home,” the cousin’s husband says. “They cannot stay here; there’s no future of marrying and settling. They’re not allowed.”
It is unsettling to think of the North Korean women living here as forced laborers, not quite emigrants, not quite immigrants. I know that for a long time, while growing up in this border town, the only North Koreans my father knew were ones rumored to work at restaurants or night halls. They had successfully gone west of the Yalu River, to the comparatively prosperous land of their Communist big brother. He himself had harbored dreams of going further west, leaving China, crossing borders, forging a life for himself in America, which he saw as a beacon of limitless opportunity.
The feast winds down, and my dad clamors that it is time to go. We are not going, I tell him, before we help clean up the mounds of trash we’ve just created on these relatives’ tables. Nainai is happily recording videos of the food and the leftovers, arranging the crab shells and cakes to fit her directorial aesthetic. I know she will mass-send the videos to every contact on WeChat. After a few tussles over us not taking the leftovers (“we already have many bags of food,” I promise cousin Yin), it is finally time for us to hit up the pharmacy. Nainai has 150 renminbi (RMB) to spend on her medical insurance allotment, except not on prescription medicine, only over-the-counter supplements. Still, she is like a child in a candy store. She peddles it all: TUMS equivalent? Caffeine pills? We end up with two enormous tubs of protein powder (which, alarmingly, she keeps calling “milk powder”), a dozen boxes of cough drops, and a jar of honey.
“Enough! Enough!” my dad is shouting. “I don’t want to drive when it’s dark!” It’s 4 p.m., and we left Dandong at 10:30 a.m. At his driving speed, we have a long journey back.
He himself had harbored dreams of going further west, leaving China, crossing borders, forging a life for himself in America, which he saw as a beacon of limitless opportunity.
My dad hooks up a video of hardcore techno from Douyin for our drive back. He meets my amused gaze and explains: “Driving is more epic this way.” I don’t tell him I feel the same about thunderous bass, a soundtrack to so many of my runs. Nainai reveals to cousin Yin, on WeChat, that she’s hidden 200 RMB under a photo frame on their dresser, for the trouble of our lunch. She hates spending money, but is constantly hiding it in others’ houses. In the oncoming dusk, we drive past the same decrepit shipyards, swampy riverside, canals behind barbed wire. “Is your grandma asleep?” my dad asks over the techno.
I look over at her. Her eyes are nearly closed, but her thumb is swiping up the screen in a familiar motion. “No,” I say. “She’s watching reels.”
It is getting deeper into autumn, and the night comes fast. They drop me off the highway by the hotel, stopping illegally as I dart off. Alone in my room, I watch a show on salmon farming in the western borderlands, a movie on old Shanghai mobsters, and a dubbed documentary on “the most lethal animals in Africa.” I watch a giant iguana eat a snake, and a scorpion dissolve a grasshopper with acid. Something, perhaps the magpie I saw this morning, periodically whacks against my window. I drink last night’s er’guotou. Where am I, I think, where am I? I look across the river, but there isn’t much to see in the darkness. A Chinese island called Moon Island—a slim landmass of condominiums, a luxury hotel with a name that translates to Venice Country-Building Hotel, and one viral coffee shop—stands between my line of sight and North Korea. Its bridge is illuminated in bright blue. place of wellness, it says in red neon characters.
On our second day in Dandong, my dad has mapped out an itinerary that will take us into Manchuria. “Can we do that in a day?” I ask shortly after we’ve set off in the car.
“Probably not. We’ll find a hotel.”
“Does Nainai have her overnight medicine?”
Silence. I repeat the question. Finally, my dad says: “Ask your Sanshu.”
“Sanshu?”
He shrugs. “How would I know?”
“How are we going to sleep away if she can’t take her pills?”
“We’re sleeping away?” Nainai looks up from her phone. “Why?”
“A road trip, Ma. The fall foliage, remember?”
We turn the car around, back to the housing project in the Eight-way Ditch neighborhood, so that Nainai can assemble an overnight bag. The apartment is on the 20th floor, with an exposed communal balcony that gives me vertigo looking down. The staircase is blocked with discarded household items, a disastrous fire hazard. Nainai packs a towel in a plastic bag and asks Sanshu, “Three Baby, did you bring clean underwear?”
I dart out of the apartment before the ensuing scene. We drop back down in the elevator and hop into Dad’s car. It’s a gray and rainy day. We set out from Dandong, north along the Yalu River and the sinister towers under construction on the North Korean side. The river is a muddy greenish gray, but the skinny gingko trees along the road are turning gold. We pass by impoverished farm compounds, restaurants boasting North Korean specialties. The river banks are strewn with huge amounts of trash. The roadside eateries are decrepit, mostly empty or closed. There is a sign saying, we collect toads, make toad oil. My dad pulls a rotisserie chicken out of his backpack, and I tear into a thigh as we drive along. He must have bought it this morning, before picking me up from my hotel. My love for rotisserie chicken is a longtime family joke, but not one he nor I have mentioned in over a decade.
The two of us, in a car for days, physically proximate despite the emotional Mariana Trench between us? Maybe that’s why the idea also feels strangely enticing.
We enter an area known for its peach orchards, and the river widens. There are mountains on the other side, terraced fields, not lovely exactly, as the slopes look brown and vegetation poor, but it’s a relief to see what resembles normal nature after the hellish construction. The barbed-wire fence continues all along the river. The only actual North Koreans I see are along a river jetty some miles earlier, many of them laboring in dark clothes. We stop at a rural compound with gates open and three cars but no one around. My dad wanders through an empty banquet hall with tables pushed to the side. We stand outside in the lot. Everyone eats a peach. Finally, we stop by a decent hotel restaurant. There is no one in the dining hall except for a table of cleaning staff, sitting and gossiping. We eat a simple vegetable-heavy meal: shredded cucumber, sour cabbage and pork, salted duck eggs, and a chicken-and-mushroom stew. “I’m craving noodles,” my dad announces. “Simple noodles in clear broth.”
His tone has a childish insistence. The drive has made him hungry. He’s never hungry in Shanghai, where he eats leftovers alone late at night in front of his computer. So we order him noodles, and he slurps them with contentment. When was the last time I’ve seen him content? Maybe when I was 16, when we went to a beach and a wave slapped into him so suddenly he’d let out a peal of laughter and turned to me, bewildered. For a flash, I’d seen the little boy in him. That memory always makes me sad, the rarity of such a glimpse of defenselessness.
After leaving the restaurant, we wind along a narrow road, climbing in altitude, and some orange foliage begins to appear. It’s three in the afternoon when we turn inland, west toward the mountains, toward the Manchurian nature preserve area where we will spend the night. The cloud cover is gray and low, the rain intermittent. There are corn fields everywhere, and little hut-like mounds made from harvested stalks. Fog shrouds the bases of dark mountains. The atmosphere is gloomy and melancholy, but in the car, an EDM remix of “My Heart Will Go On” is blaring, and spirits are decent. My grandmother is off her phone because she’s received a message that she’s used most of her data. I’m directing and co-piloting my dad, and it occurs to me that this—right now—is probably the most we’ve talked in decades: Turn left, turn right, merge onto this state road.
He’s driven a long time now, probably more hours than he’s ever driven since learning, but he is in a good mood. He’s on a road trip in his home province where he grew up in poverty. He’s following open roads, taking his family on an adventure, a foliage tour.
In his 20s, my father met an American missionary who helped sponsor his visa and brought him to Bridgewater, Virginia, where he cleaned the hallways of a community college. He never learned how to drive there. America, it turned out, was not the place he thought it to be. Something had happened during his few years there, a fractured fantasy. After I was born, he returned to China. He never left again. He has, so far, survived his cancer; the operation had removed a 12-centimeter tumor. He paid for lunch, he’ll pay for the hotel tonight, they’ll be the nicest places we can find, which in this area won’t amount to much cost. Within these borders, he can summon a version of infinitude. I feel it, too, this freedom of a loose itinerary, of just driving north along the Yalu River, meandering among these tiny hamlets, chasing the sights of leaves in this bizarre borderland. So much bleakness, and yet when a mountainside is covered in layers of reddening leaves, a spark of yellow, a cluster of orange, there is beauty nonetheless.
We must get on bigger highways to cut west, into the Kuandian Manchu Autonomous County, and the fog gets heavier and the rain denser. I scroll on my phone to find a hotel near the park and show it to my dad, who nods. I plug it into his GPS. As night falls, it seems like the reserve and the hotel will never appear, but suddenly, a sharp left turn, and we enter through a gated kiosk. It is raining hard. At the visitor center, we are able to book a whole villa for less than $200, four rooms, each with our own bed, part of a gargantuan lakeside development. Cheap construction, no gas, water running rusty red out of the taps, waterbugs everywhere. But a whole house just for us! Three floors! We run up and down and up and down, Sanshu is taking a video, even Nainai is curious, wandering, climbing down stairs, opening every drawer. “How much?” she asks, and my dad lies: “400 RMB,” or $65 dollars, past acceptability for Nainai already. But we each get a breakfast voucher, and we have a massive dining table to eat at—no need to consume outside. We’ve brought our plastic bags of leftovers from lunch, the rotisserie chicken, and Nainai produces a plastic shower cap full of steamed taro. There are no plates or cutlery here, so we eat with our hands and out of mugs. A detached house is a foreign structure in these parts, where people are used to narrow apartments in towers. Nainai and Sanshu cannot stop commenting on the scale of the kitchen. There is clear wonder on their faces, and I can tell my father is pleased.
No one else wants to go into the national park tomorrow because tickets cost too much, so I’ll go alone. He brought us all the way here, and I will see some fall foliage. Since the water runs brown, I wash my face upstairs with bottled water, like a princess. The lampshades are a coarse imitation of a Coach handbag’s two-tone, brown-checkered fabric. Downstairs, an imitation fireplace. Outside, a man in a neighboring villa’s yard smoking, staring into the night.
It’s a cloudy, frigid morning, but there it is: fall foliage on the mountains around the artificial lake, right outside my bay window. It’s 7 a.m. and people are already outside, bundled up, posing for photos. We drive bright and early to the visitor center with our breakfast vouchers, just in time as tour buses unload hundreds of other diners. Breakfast is a feast for Nainai: braised tofu, seaweed salad, fermented cabbage, salted duck eggs, sweet potatoes, and hot soy milk, into which I mix a pack of instant coffee. Under duress, I eat the mooncake Nainai gave me two nights ago, while she watches triumphantly. I’m planning for a run in the national park, and since I’m the only one going in, the rest of the family returns to the villa (which Nainai keeps calling “the dorm”). I’m under strict orders to return in two hours—we have to drive back to Dandong and then make the train to Dalian.
Being one of the first visitors in the park, I have the fall foliage all to myself. It’s freezing cold, but the river flows over mossy rocks, and fiery red maples line the banks. The walkway ascends deeper and deeper up the valley, and I’m slow-jogging up the wet leaves. The employees opening up the morning stalls look at me with curiosity. This is it! Fall foliage! Nature! It’s marvelous. Suddenly I feel very proud of my dad and his TikTok vision, his months-old driver’s license. This may not be the most famous national park in China—it’s ranked only 4A, though every display outside the park is a genius advertising sleight-of-hand of striving 5A national park—but it’s beautiful. I run uphill until I have no signal. It’s foggy and drizzly up here. Downhill, downhill then. The scent of pines in the cold air. I’m flying. I make it back to the park gate by 10:30 a.m. The SUV pulls up. I’m ravenous and exhilarated. I hurl myself at the rose cake and red bean bread in the trunk. Then I buckle up Nainai, who cries: “I’m being tied up!” “That’s the whole point!” I shout. This is our bit by now.
I’m directing and co-piloting my dad, and it occurs to me that this—right now—is probably the most we’ve talked in decades: Turn left, turn right, merge onto this state road.
We drive back toward Dandong, this time under a resplendent blue sky, the cornfields and multi-colored mountains a cinematic bucolic backdrop. Sanshu tells Nainai: “Ma, stop looking at your phone, look at the leaves outside!”
“My eyesight has gotten better these past two days,” Nainai says, “because I’ve been looking at my phone less, and the scenery more.”
“Then look!”
“Look at what? I’ve seen enough leaves.”
Basking in the sun, I could doze off. My dad’s driving is smoother and faster now, more confident. There is an ease to the SUV’s rumble. Soon we’re back along the Yalu River, and the hilly shore on the other side is also in bloom with a fall palette. The way back goes by fast. We return to Dandong by 1.30 p.m., up on the 20th floor of the housing project, and Sanshu is dispatched to bring back freshly boiled dumplings, chive and egg filling, from a hole-in-the-wall my dad likes downstairs. A sense of accomplishment hangs around the room, though no one says anything out loud. I eat a glutinous rice zongzi dipped in sugar. I could eat the whole world. Nainai looks on approvingly.
I did have one last wish for this trip, before our borderland jaunt concludes. We drive to the cemetery where my grandfather is buried. He died when I was a freshman in college, and I have never been to his tomb. “Row 14, number 11,” Nainai calls after us. She doesn’t go because it’s considered dangerous for older people to visit cemeteries—they may get pulled in by the ghosts beckoning from the underworld.
We stop by a flower shop at the bottom of the compound, where a young man carefully arranges 11 chrysanthemums. We drive in the brisk, cloudless afternoon to the cemetery up on a hill, semi-feral dogs scampering off the wide paths. It is golden hour when we descend a staircase bisecting rows of densely packed tombstones. My dad and Sanshu, not having listened to Nainai, meander into row 12, searching and scanning each headstone for their father.
I’m carrying the flowers, and I walk straight to row 14, number 11. There he is. Wang Mingjun. I call my dad and Sanshu over. They are in a terrible rush because we have to catch the train, but Sanshu brushes some pine needles off the grave. I set down the flowers, and my dad tells me to kneel and touch my head to the tombstone. I do, feeling the cold black marble. I am his child then. I remember the old, smiling man who waited for me outside school gates when I was small, his face the face of my father and my own. I breathe in deep and start back up the stone stairs after my uncle and my father, who are waiting under the pines.
In the following weeks, back in Shanghai, my father returns to his computer, to long hours staring numbly at internet videos, his SUV parked tightly in a compound up north, thousands of miles away. But something has shifted between us. In the final days of my visit, he brings me plates of peeled pomelo. Sliced apples await on the dining room table. We return to another hospital by bike, and though he mostly doesn’t wait for me at intersections, occasionally he glances back as I pedal to catch up. In the examination room, when the doctor gazes at me curiously and my father opens his mouth, I brace myself.
“My daughter,” he says.
Again I stay silent. And I know what has shifted: the winding road along the Yalu River, a fast-coming bend, a flash of crimson in the hills. When he was a young man, this might have been the essence of what my father dreamed of: open roads, miles and miles of unknown potential ahead. No true destination. Handing his mother a peach, watching his daughter race down a slope, amid splendid leaves, back to her family. I don’t know if I had ever seen him more alive than on that drive.
And I was alongside him the entire time. Carefully reading out instructions for the road as he listened. Navigation, the only mode of speech we shared, unfamiliar but safe.
Turn right, turn left, slow down. It’s coming up ahead. We are here.
Aube Rey Lescure is a French-Chinese-American author and editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Off Assignment. Her debut novel, River East, River West, was shortlisted for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Carol Shields Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award, and the Maya Angelou Book Award, among others. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, Guernica, AFAR, LitHub, Electric Literature, and more. Her essay “At the Bend of the Road” was selected for The Best American Essays 2022.
Editor and fact-checker: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copyeditor: Carolyn Wells
Christine Lagarde lascia la presidenza della Banca Centrale Europea. Lo ha comunicato in una nota diffusa giovedì 29 ottobre nella quale informa il Consiglio direttivo e il presidente del Consiglio europeo António Costa che lascerà l’incarico nel 2027, precisamente il 7 febbraio.
L’addio arriva in anticipo rispetto alla scadenza naturale del mandato, fissata al 31 ottobre 2027. La notizia arriva a poche ore dalla decisione sui tassi di politica monetaria e in un momento nel quale l’UE deve fare i conti con un’inflazione che viaggia su percentuali elevate.
In un comunicato arrivato a Francoforte nella mattinata di giovedì 29 ottobre 2026, Christine Lagarde ha annunciato le dimissioni dalla presidenza della Banca Centrale Europea.
Lascerà l’incarico il 7 febbraio 2027, con circa nove mesi di anticipo sulla scadenza del mandato. Infatti Lagarde si era insediata il 1° novembre 2019 e avrebbe dovuto chiudere i suoi otto anni di mandato, non rinnovabile, il 31 ottobre 2027.
Per la nomina del successore di Christine Lagarde bisognerà attendere gli svariati passaggi burocratici della macchina europea. La nomina finale, come indicato dall’articolo 283 del Trattato sul funzionamento dell’Unione europea, spetta comunque al Consiglio europeo.
Il percorso però ha diversi passaggi. In breve:
Il parere dell’Eurocamera non è vincolante e alla fine la scelta avviene a “maggioranza qualificata”.
La Bce ha già spiegato in una nota che “il successore della presidente Lagarde sarà nominato dal Consiglio europeo secondo la procedura di nomina prevista dall’articolo 283 del Trattato sul funzionamento dell’Unione europea”.
Fino a febbraio 2027, non dovrebbero esserci cambiamenti nella linea della BCE dettata dalla presidente dimissionaria. In genere un cambio al vertice potrebbe portare una temporanea volatilità sui mercati, soprattutto per comprendere al meglio quale potrebbe essere la linea futura del successore di Christine Lagarde.
Per mutui e risparmi, non ci sono effetti dovuti alle dimissioni della presidente della BCE. Si tratta di fattori che vengono stabiliti in base all’andamento Euribor per i tassi variabili e IRS per i tassi fissi e ovviamente anche a seconda delle decisioni prese dal Consiglio direttivo.
La silla económica más importante de Europa está vacante. La presidenta del Banco Central Europeo, Christine Lagarde, dejará su cargo el 7 de febrero, casi nueve meses antes de que venza su mandato, el 31 de octubre de 2027. El movimiento, anunciado por el banco este jueves, ya estaba en los corrillos políticos y financieros de Europa desde hace meses y obliga a los miembros de la eurozona a pactar en pocas semanas la renovación casi al completo de la cúpula de la institución económica más poderosa del continente. El 3 de enero abandona su puesto la alemana Isabel Schnabel, consejera del banco dedicada a mercados financieros, y el 1 de junio lo hará Philip Lane, irlandés que ejerce como economista jefe.
© BCE
Il prossimo inverno sarà “duro” per i cittadini europei. Oltre 50 milioni di persone potrebbero non essere in grado di “riscaldare adeguatamente” le proprie abitazioni, a causa degli elevati prezzi dell’energia causati dalla guerra in Medio Oriente. È l’allarme lanciato dal commissario europeo all’Energia, Dan Jorgensen, a Lussemburgo, a margine del Consiglio Ue Energia che discuterà una proposta di regolamento per adeguare alle esigenze future la componente delle bollette destinata a remunerare i costi delle reti. Ieri il prezzo del gas sul Ttf di Amsterdam, piazza di riferimento per l’Europa, ha sfondato la soglia dei 100 euro a megawattora tornando sui livelli del 2022 dopo l’invasione russa dell’Ucraina. “In un anno qualunque, purtroppo, quasi cinquanta milioni di europei non riescono a riscaldare adeguatamente le proprie abitazioni a causa degli elevati prezzi dell’energia in Europa”. Secondo Eurostat, nel 2025 la quota di popolazione Ue che non riusciva a mantenere la propria abitazione adeguatamente calda è scesa all’8,8%, a circa 40 milioni di persone. “Quest’anno, probabilmente, il numero sarà ancora più alto. Dobbiamo quindi fare tutto il possibile per alleviare queste difficoltà”, ha dichiarato.
“L’Ue è in una posizione migliore per affrontare questa crisi” rispetto al 2022, quando la guerra in Ucraina e il taglio delle forniture russe avevano provocato una crisi dei prezzi, ha spiegato Jorgensen, “perché abbiamo ridotto il nostro consumo di gas ma questa crisi è anche più grave, perché riguarda anche il petrolio e i prodotti petroliferi”. Per il momento, ha precisato il commissario, l’Unione non prevede una crisi di approvvigionamento dei carburanti. Ma la distinzione vale poco per chi non riesce a sostenere i costi. “Per i cittadini che non possono permettersi di acquistare la benzina per la propria auto o per riscaldare le case” la situazione non è diversa da una crisi di approvvigionamento, ha sottolineato Jorgensen, chiedendo di “discutere ulteriori misure su ciò che si può effettivamente fare per alleviare questa grave situazione”.
La linea di Bruxelles è duplice: da un lato, aiutare nell’immediato le famiglie più esposte ai rincari. Dall’altro, accelerare la riduzione della dipendenza dai combustibili fossili. Gli Stati membri, ha ribadito il commissario, dovrebbero adottare misure “mirate e temporanee” per sostenere gli utenti più vulnerabili. Ma il messaggio politico rivolto ai governi guarda soprattutto alla transizione energetica. “Fate tutto ciò che è in vostro potere per abbandonare i combustibili fossili il più rapidamente possibile”, ha detto Jorgensen. Questo significa, ha aggiunto, puntare maggiormente sulle energie rinnovabili e sull’efficienza energetica, favorire l’elettrificazione, sostituire le caldaie a gas o a olio combustibile con pompe di calore elettriche e passare dai veicoli con motore a combustione a quelli elettrici. “Sono tutte misure che possono essere sostenute e che, già nel breve periodo, sono in grado di fare una differenza concreta”, ha concluso.
Il problema è come affrontare la fase di transizione mentre famiglie e imprese continuano a fare i conti con bollette e carburanti costosi. A riconoscerlo è anche il ministro dell’Energia irlandese Darragh O’Brien, il cui Paese ha la presidenza di turno dell’Unione. “È bene essere chiari: né l’Ue né gli Stati membri hanno la bacchetta magica per far sparire gli aumenti dei prezzi”, ha affermato a margine del Consiglio. I governi sono già intervenuti sul fronte fiscale e con misure di sostegno di breve periodo, ha ricordato O’Brien, citando la riduzione delle accise su diesel e benzina e gli aiuti a settori come quello dell’autotrasporto. Ma vanno individuate soluzioni più strutturali. “L’obiettivo di oggi è capire come superare queste misure, puntando a soluzioni più sostenibili. È per questo che le reti e i relativi oneri di rete rivestono un’importanza cruciale, ed è per questo che vogliamo promuoverne lo sviluppo durante la nostra presidenza”.
Il nodo è anche quello dei costi delle infrastrutture elettriche, indispensabili per sostenere l’aumento della domanda legato alla diffusione delle auto elettriche, delle pompe di calore e delle altre tecnologie alimentate dall’elettricità. “Non c’è tempo da perdere: stiamo attraversando una crisi energetica molto grave che minaccia la competitività dell’Unione e richiede un intervento adeguato”, ha detto il ministro irlandese. “Dobbiamo fare tutto il possibile per intervenire sugli oneri di rete, sulle infrastrutture e sull’accelerazione dell’elettrificazione, per garantire il nostro futuro”.
Sul tavolo del Consiglio ci sono i principi per definire le tariffe e la tassazione dell’elettricità riducendo gli oneri di rete e il costo delle bollette, ma anche gli obiettivi di efficienza energetica, resilienza, interconnessioni ed elettrificazione da integrare nel quadro successivo al 2030, in vista dell’obiettivo climatico europeo per il 2040 e della neutralità climatica entro il 2050. Le discussioni, finora mantenute a livello tecnico, iniziano in salita, con quasi una decina di Paesi che hanno sollevato preoccupazioni sull’intervento per garantire all’elettricità un regime fiscale più favorevole rispetto al gas. La misura era stata proposta dalla Commissione lo scorso luglio nel quadro del pacchetto di revisione delle tariffe di rete per ridurre i costi dell’energia. Diverse capitali – tra cui Svezia, Finlandia, Polonia, Lettonia e Repubblica Ceca – spingono per eliminare l’intervento, contestando la base giuridica scelta da Bruxelles, che consentirebbe di adottare la disposizione a maggioranza qualificata in quanto misura accessoria alla revisione delle tariffe di rete, evitando l’unanimità normalmente richiesta per le decisioni in materia fiscale.
I servizi giuridici del Consiglio Ue hanno definito la proposta di Bruxelles ‘legale’ dal punto di vista procedurale. Ma resta il nodo politico, che potrebbe spingere Palazzo Berlaymont a ritirare la misura nel caso in cui l’opposizione tra i Paesi dovesse allargarsi ancora.
L'articolo Il conto della guerra: per il commissario Ue all’energia oltre 50 milioni di europei non saranno in grado di scaldare casa. “L’inverno sarà duro” proviene da Il Fatto Quotidiano.
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