Just as Vladimir and Estragon waited for Godot in Beckett’s famous play, the world may now be waiting for Xi Jinping in the present political drama. America is stuck in two wars. In Ukraine, it would like to reach a compromise with Russia. In the Middle East, it is trying to bring down Tehran’s regime, […]

The post Wars and the oil blockades may be waiting for Xi’s party congress appeared first on Asia Times.

India’s largest initial public offering (IPO) opens October 21, and investors in Tokyo, Singapore and Hong Kong are being asked a simple question: What is a Jio customer’s monthly bill worth? Jio Platforms, the Reliance-owned mobile carrier with some 524 million India-based customers, is selling 270 million new shares at 1,065 to 1,119 rupees each […]

The post Jio’s IPO seeks a tech multiple for old-school mobile business appeared first on Asia Times.

The Australian government has introduced its digital duty of care legislation to parliament today. The bill includes an “off switch” to allow social media users to opt out of recommender algorithms. If passed, Australians could choose to switch off their algorithmic recommendation and consume a news feed populated by the accounts they subscribe to. It’s […]

The post China previews a world where the algorithm is switched off appeared first on Asia Times.

On a recent episode of the Bulwark podcast, journalist Ron Brownstein described the election as a contest between “the wave versus the wall.” The wave being voter anger and President Donald Trump’s plummeting popularity. The wall being structural impediments to voters’ voices, such as gerrymanders and the Republican Party’s stark spending advantage. Now we know […]

The post Don’t let Musk and the billionaires buy America’s elections appeared first on Asia Times.

The U.S. Army now has at least five named programs seeking new anti-air interceptors of various tiers to collectively address everything from advanced hypersonic missiles to small weaponized drones. In the process, an important central theme is emerging: the service’s days of fielding air defense systems that can only use one type of interceptor look to be increasingly over. For the U.S. military, the impacts from the war with Iran have made clear that diversifying munitions stockpiles and supplier bases is no longer just valuable, it is critical.

Army Lt. Gen. Frank Lozano, the service’s Portfolio Acquisition Executive for Fires, highlighted this growing trend yesterday during a panel discussion at the Association of the U.S. Army’s (AUSA) main annual convention, at which TWZ has been in attendance.

To provide some immediate context, with the exception of Patriot, the main ground-based air defense systems in Army inventory today are fielded with just one type of interceptor. In the case of Patriot, the service’s procurement of new interceptors had also been increasingly limited to just one type, the PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement (MSE). Production of the preceding PAC-3 Cost Reduction Initiative (CRI) missile ended in 2023. Just earlier this year, the Army placed its first order in decades for new PAC-2 Guidance Enhanced Missile-Tactical (GEM-T) missiles, an older interceptor design for Patriot that has remained in production primarily for U.S. allies and partners.

Separately, the Army is in the process of fielding Enduring Shield, a new middle-tier air defense system designed to handle multiple interceptor types. However, the service is currently only acquiring AIM-9X Sidewinders to load into them. We will come back to this later on.

“We have the capabilities we need to have to fight and win, but it’s our job to ensure that victory is achievable in the future inside of any dynamic environment scenario fight we might find ourselves in,” Lt. Gen. Lozano said yesterday. “So, it’s incumbent upon Mr. Ingraham [Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology Brent Ingraham] and I to continue to be creative and looking at, well, should we buy GEM-Ts because they’re being produced?”

“GEM-Ts are a really good missile in the battlespace within they operate. I mean, they’re being employed today by air defense brigades around the world,” he continued. “So if we have the opportunity, it’s probably something we should take advantage of, and we’re looking at doing that.

“We’ve had a lot of discussions about even more interceptors. From a PAC-3 MSE perspective, our goal has always been to get to 2,000 [per year],” he added. “Why we’re running programs like LCI [Low Cost Interceptor], and NGSRI [Next-Generation Short-Range Interceptor], and NGCM [Next-Generation C-UAS Missile], and Second Interceptor, is because I think the easy button answer is just buy more of a great missile. We’re going to buy more [PAC-3 MSEs], but when we start talking about overall missile output, we start looking at numbers like is it 4,000, is it 6,000, is it 8,000, we’re looking at a diverse set of capabilities.”

The LCI program is seeking a lower-cost and lower-tier interceptor for Patriot with a unit price of no more than $1 million. PAC-3 MSE’s average unit cost has been around $4 million in recent years.

NGSRI is the Army’s program to find a replacement for the venerable Stinger. The new missiles have to be compatible with existing vehicle-based and man-portable launchers.

The Army is working to field a new counter-drone interceptor through NGCM. Those missiles will be integrated into launchers the service has now for the Coyote interceptor.

The Second Interceptor effort is for Enduring Shield, which is also known as the Indirect Fire Protection Capability Increment 2 (IFPC Inc 2). The main goal there is to provide increased capability against incoming cruise missiles compared to the AIM-9X.

There is also the Army’s Future Interceptor effort, which also came up separately at the panel yesterday, and is also for Patriot. Unlike LCI, the aim here is to acquire a new interceptor with improved capabilities against hypersonic missiles and other upper-tier threats.

Historically, Army programs like these would eventually result in the selection of a single winning missile design. Lozano’s remarks yesterday point to the service increasingly taking a very different approach.

On “second interceptor, obviously, we just moved into phase two of that program. We’ve got Lockheed Martin competing with Boeing, who was teamed with Anduril,” Lozano said. “But we wanted to turn up the heat on that program. I constantly get frustrated when a funding profile emerges over the FYDP [the Future Years Defense Program], and then magically we lay in a five-year program.”

“I’m like, no, I actually need that capability now,” he continued. “So, have we thought maybe what if we ran a 24-month program or a 36-month program, right? And so, in that vein, what we have decided to do is, while those two companies continue to compete, we’re going to create a shoot-off opportunity in [the] fourth quarter [of Fiscal Year 20]27, and I want to run an in-parallel, what I call an in-stride competition.”

“We just held an industry day, and we basically just said, hey, if there’s any other company who didn’t make the first cut in the phase one, but, oh, by the way, who continued to invest in the IFPC Second Interceptor capability, we’d love for you to come out to the range,” he added. “We’ll give you range time, we’ll present targets, and we’ll allow you to recompete with an opportunity to get back into the program folder.”

The Army is doing the exact same thing with NGSRI, where Lockheed Martin and Raytheon have been competing face-to-face. That program is also now planning to hold a new shoot-off that will be open to other vendors in the fourth quarter of Fiscal Year 2027.

There are signs the Army is moving in a similar direction with NGCM, where it previously selected AeroVironment to supply its Freedom Eagle-1 (FE-1) interceptor. The service put out a request for information seeking new NGCM options in August, with a goal of holding an initial evaluation again in the fourth quarter of Fiscal Year 2027. A deeper operational assessment could then follow in Fiscal Year 2028.

To reiterate, on top of all this, the Army is also now pursuing at least two new interceptor options for Patriot.

“We have to address the threat, and we need to address the threat in a complementary way, meaning we need to fight on a cost curve that’s affordable for the U.S. Army to maintain and sustain that warfighting capability abroad,” Lozano stressed yesterday.

This gets to the crux of the matter. It is not at all a new observation that just having a stockpile of any particular munition on day one of a conflict is not enough, especially if the fight becomes drawn out. There needs to be sufficient depth to those stocks at the start and the ability to readily replenish them in line with expenditures. The war with Iran, compounded by other crises in the Middle East and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, has made clear that these core truths apply to all armed forces, even the U.S. military.

Lower-cost munitions are part of the solution, but they also need to be producible at scale on reasonable timelines. The lead time for higher-end munitions today is often measured in months, if not years. Furthermore, being locked into a single vendor has been shown to not just be undesirable, but a potential national security risk in an actual conflict. Lozano’s remarks yesterday, and how the Army is now pursuing new anti-air interceptors, reflect larger trends, not just in the acquisition of larger volumes of munitions overall, but also from a broader array of total suppliers.

There has also been a push across the U.S. military to bring in new and non-traditional firms, including in partnership with established prime contractors. An example of this is the Boeing/Anduril team-up for Second Interceptor. This was also underscored by new framework agreements the Pentagon announced back in May regarding the planned purchase of thousands of lower-cost cruise missiles.

The @DeptofWar has reached new framework agreements with a slate of disruptive new entrants to aggressively expand the United States military’s lethal cruise missile and hypersonic missile strike capabilities.
 
Low-Cost Containerized Missiles (LCCM) Program:
• Anduril
•… pic.twitter.com/Fr2xAnBM7y

— Department of War CTO (@DoWCTO) May 13, 2026

With regard to the LCI program, specifically, Lozano highlighted an additional aspect of all of this yesterday.

LCI has “a unique twist to it because we’re looking for companies who have all-up rounds, but I’m also asking for companies to come in at the component level,” he explained. “We typically don’t do that, right? There’s a lot of risk in managing components and generating all-up round systems. But we’re also looking for weapon system integrators, because I want to be able to create two or three teams who can compete with the all-up round guys to see if we can generate some momentum behind the fact that we need to thicken our inventory with low-cost, affordable munitions.”

The U.S. Navy is now pursuing a roughly similar approach with its Naval Modular Missile (NMM) program. NMM envisions an entirely new family of sea-launched surface-to-air missiles that offer very different capabilities, but that all feature certain common components, as you can read more about here.

The Army is also eyeing a new family of launcher vehicles, as well as containerized options, all capable of firing various types of surface-to-air and surface-to-surface munitions. Autonomy is also an important aspect of what is aptly dubbed the Common Autonomous Multi-Domain Launcher (CAML) program.

It is also important to note here that the underlying aim is not to eliminate more exquisite munitions, or the capabilities that they offer, but to create a more affordable, complementary mix of options.

“What I would say is we’re solely focused on delivering on the programs we are executing now,” Lozano said in closing at the end of the panel yesterday. “We have to deliver, and if we deliver on that wide variety of capability, then we can increase and ramp that capacity. And that would be my wish list, that we have enough resources and we achieve programmatic success in the way that we’re planning to, so we can deliver in mass.”

All signs point to the diversity in munitions that Lozano is talking about here being particularly pronounced in future Army air defense capabilities full of systems firing multiple types of interceptors.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

The post The Days Of Army Air Defense Systems Firing Just One Type Of Interceptor Are Ending appeared first on TWZ.

Daniel Barnum | Longreads | October 15, 2026 | 4,116 words (15 minutes)

The Hyrtl Skull Collection is the first exhibit you notice when you walk into the Mütter Museum at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. This is by curatorial design: The skulls face the main entrance, staring steadily at each person who crosses the threshold. All 139 are evenly spaced in long lines behind the glass doors of a towering cherrywood cabinet. Each one rests in a wire frame on top of a thin balsa box with a tag at its center. I recall tracking them with glances as I shuffled nearby with two friends, as part of a large crowd. Small bright lights illuminated them from inside the cases, making them glow dully from my angle. Seeing them for the first time, I was both mesmerized by this effect and intimidated by the skulls’ great number. I tried not to look for too long, but the density of people on the narrow walkway made that impossible: I was soon stuck in the dead center of the exhibit. Almost in spite of myself, I scanned the wall text and learned how they had been brought together to disprove a piece of 19th-century race science, which seemed like one of the better reasons to collect skulls. 

Most of the exhibits in the Mütter Museum have similarly odd origins. Tucked into a corner of the College of Physicians’ stately New Beaux-Arts building, the Mütter is a 19th-century medical teaching collection/cabinet museum with an annual visitorship of almost 150,000 people. Its staff goes on late-night talk shows with specimens in tow, hosts YouTube series. The gift shop sells soaps and keychains in the shapes of its artifacts. Coming out of a death-obsessed past into an incongruous living present, the exhibits are caught somewhere between scientific exemplar and exploitative spectacle. The museum acknowledges its reputation as a freak show and, in response, doubles down on the meanings of curiosity. Signs we saw at the main gate declared the place’s ethos: disturbingly informative. 

The text beside the skulls explained itself: Brought together is a euphemistic way of saying, assembled by grave robbing. Dr. Hyrtl dug up a lot of his collection, or had assistants do it for him. Or paid other collectors, other doctors. The graves were attached to hospitals, madhouses, prisons. Some of the people these skulls belonged to surely had surviving relatives, though none could afford or cared to pay for burials and upkeep, and no one has made any claims on them since Dr. Hyrtl sold his collection to the College of Physicians in 1873. The College has the distinction of being the oldest professional medical organization in the United States, and was thus a trusted member of the international buyers’ network for bodies, whole and in parts. 

I barely recall that history when I’m called in for a job interview. I quickly look up the museum online, which is why I have something to say about the Hyrtl Skulls during the interview. But I can’t keep up the pretense. I begin to ramble about the real reason I went that first day. There was a special exhibit of tsantsa (shrunken heads) on view, reported to be the most extensive group ever brought together, most on loan from private collectors. The Hyrtl Skulls were on the upper level, set opposite the entrance. We looked lost—so a security guard pointed us toward the stairway’s descending brass banister and red carpet. Across from the melting skeleton, she told us. 

---

Downstairs, we watched a middle-aged white woman wearing a fanny pack and soft baseball cap peer around curtains and squeal before turning away. We entered where she wouldn’t into a columned salon crowded with the museum’s teratology collection and displays of sundry wet specimens. Fetal variations. Rows of organs jellied into translucence, bound by webs of blood vessels dyed blue and red. At the far wall, the tsantsa were tiered on stands in a wide, purpose-built wood case. There were dozens: small, leathery heads still recognizably human though passed out of identity. The shrinking process had exaggerated some features, vanished others, and blackened the flesh. Many had long, black hair braided with beads and strung with bright parrot feathers. They were beautiful and horrible, familiar and strange. I could not stop staring. Their eyelids had been sewn shut. 

The poet Mary Ruefle writes about shrunken heads in her essay “My Private Property.” She reflects on growing up in Brussels and regularly skipping school to commune with a particular shrunken head in the collection of the Congo Museum, “that horrific monument of smashed lies and beautiful things.” The ruminations lead her to realize she “wanted to die.” My own day with the tsantsas felt like the opposite: It was initial, not iterative; it was a whole bunch of heads, not a singular one; I was happy, adult, new in town, not alone, truant, or passively suicidal. That first time in the museum, I by no means “wanted to die.” The life I was starting in the city was meant to be the cure for a bad ending, a bad boyfriend. For being a bad boyfriend. For Boston. When I got to Philly, I could believe that the last years of my life just hadn’t happened and here I would begin a real life in a real city. And even though, when I sit for the interview at the Mütter and have cause to answer the question Have you ever been here before?, I do indeed want to die, I am not, despite all my wanting, dead yet, so I need the job. 

They were beautiful and horrible, familiar and strange. I could not stop staring. Their eyelids had been sewn shut.

Needing the job came from wanting to die. A month earlier, I quit the copy shop where I worked since coming to Philly. There, weeks earlier again, an unknown number with an area code I recognize—Tucson, Arizona’s—comes over my phone while I’m at the counter sending a fax. The call I’m expecting from my aunt. It’s been 15 years or more since we last spoke, and longer since we saw each other. She found me online and emailed late at night, while I was sleeping. I arrive for my shift, log onto a work computer—it’s a little before noon—and her note is waiting: Danny, I have to talk to you about something. Please send me your number. I type it into the message bar, then work keeps me distracted for the next few hours. The fax goes through. I charge the guy $4.27 and he calls me a criminal. I tell my boss, I’m gonna take off for a sec, then cross the counterline, snake between the customers, and open the door. 

---

Outside, I walk the block, not ready for the call. My mom’s family has been estranged my whole life and generations back before that. Growing up, hearing stories, it felt odd that any of my people should have found each other to begin with. They were from all over the map. Most were fleeing unimaginable things. They never stayed together, barely knew each other to begin with. Brothers, husbands, mothers, children, grandparents—all were lost again and again in life, and then in death. Was grief resounding? Some stories my mother told me about her childhood made her very sad (an angry father gone, her spine turning in on itself, the inheritable tragedy of her psyche), but many were happy. Her sister fit somewhere in the middle. I met her only a few times I could ever remember, and knew her best by her semi-regular phone calls with my mom, though I heard only my mother’s end of those conversations and was young when the two were still on speaking terms. What I knew of her was mostly my mom’s eye rolls, the gesture of her fingers forming a gun against her forehead and her deadpan expression as she cocked her thumb and pulled the trigger. This would make me laugh so loudly my aunt would ask, What’s so funny?—or so I supposed, hearing my mom’s response: Nothing. He’s watching a movie. 

I thumb the buttons on the side of my phone crossing the street to the main quad of campus. A spot appears on the open lawn, half under a plane tree’s shade and a bit beyond the arcs of a frisbee thrown between three people. I sit down. I know what this call will be, what she has to tell me. Though I feel certain, I hope for the best, or at least that she’ll deliver a line I’ve heard before: My mom is in the hospital, she’s in a psych ward, she’s in jail. No. I call my aunt, and after quick, strained How are yous, she confirms my worst thoughts in swift, worsening terms. Your mom is dead. She was murdered, and soon, Threw her body in a dumpster. After all the other details she knows: A month ago. She has waited a month to find me, to tell me. She cannot explain why. We don’t have much more to talk about. I make a plan to check in over the next few days about coming out for the memorial they’re holding where my grandma lives in New Mexico. We already had two here in Tucson, she tells me. I say, Okay, gotta go, and lie down in the grass. 

For three days I lie in bed, alternating between barely being able to move and being violently wracked with sobs. I toss back and forth between the numbness of certainty—of believing I knew before I heard—and supernatural disbelief. I wail like the wounded animal I am. On the third day, it’s my birthday. I ask for a new world. My boyfriend and my housemate take me to the trails through the forest above the little cliffs along the Wissahickon. The bright August light comes through the trees on the top of a rise, and my boyfriend takes my picture, but I have no awareness of this until the film comes back. I spend the hike trying to smile whenever I realize someone is looking at me, or, short of that, trying very hard not to cry. In my sunglasses, slumped into my boyfriend’s shoulder in the backseat on the way home, I feel like Bernie in Weekend at Bernie’s. Like the actor playing Bernie. 

---

I’m lying down in the grass again, in the front yard of my childhood home, visiting with my oldest friend, when she says something about how truly wretched the world is, and I laugh. Not at what she says, but how she says it. It’s the first time I’ve laughed since I talked to my aunt. Which is a euphemistic way of saying since I heard my mom was murdered. When it happens, my laugh feels like a betrayal. I do not know how I am going to live in this world. You get it! I tell my oldest friend. My boyfriend holds my hand on the flight from Philadelphia to Albuquerque, and on the bus down to Las Cruces. He holds my hand in the church hall at my mom’s third memorial service, except when I have to stand up in front of the room full of strangers to give a eulogy. On the ride from the service, sitting next to me in the back-backseat of an SUV so cavernous it swallows my aunt’s soft voice in the front, he pulls his hand back when he gets a text meant for me from our housemate back in Philly. Bad timing/great gig, it reads, with a link to a Mütter Museum job listing that closes the following day. 

In a few days, I’ll be in the Pima County Courthouse in Tucson, sitting across from the murderer, and, that evening, my aunt will hand me the small black plastic box containing my mother’s ashes. My mother as ashes. My mother in the form of ash.

There’s no grass to lie down in at my aunt’s hotel, where she’s having our family gather for a post-memorial pool party, so I update my CV in the computer lab. More betrayal. When I finally get in the water, I race my youngest cousin, whom I have never met before. I stay under as long as my breath holds. In a few days, I’ll be in the Pima County Courthouse in Tucson, sitting across from the murderer, and, that evening, my aunt will hand me the small black plastic box containing my mother’s ashes. My mother as ashes. My mother in the form of ash. Time and places are spiraling, have been since I heard. I’m still hearing, still seeing. The next week, in Philadelphia, the copy shop welcomes me back, but I can’t last more than 40 minutes of my shift. I do not know how I am going to live in this world. The world going on: the worst betrayal. 

I don’t say all that in my interview. Nobody is prepared to hear Devastating tragedy made life as I knew it incomprehensible in answer to Why did you leave your last position? A month has passed since I quit, two months since I heard about my mom (a euphemistic way of saying since I heard my mom was murdered), three months since her murder. As with her ashes, putting the murder into her possession feels off to me. Did she own it? Was it part of her? It wasn’t something she could claim, like a package or a piece of luggage. She didn’t have too much to do with it; she was the one with too much done to her. Too much: a euphemism my brain conjures to replace images of actual violence, conjured from police reports and testimony from eyewitnesses and the man I sat across from in the courtroom. This pattern—unbidden images, then banishing language—I can’t seem to control. 

---

In the interview, it’s just me and my broken brain and a copy of my CV I ran off on 24-pound cloudy-gray stock that last day at the shop. Bullet points about things someone with my name did, all the stuff I’m supposed to know how to do. I thought those shrunken heads were really cool, I tell the woman, and she says she thought so too. Gasps, Wasn’t that incredible?, when I mention the green and blue iridescent beetle wings braided into their hair. I understand her as someone who loves her job, which is something I have always thought questionable, if not impossible, but she is an adult goth on payroll with full benefits at a 19th-century wunderkammer of death, mourning, and human oddities, and that constellation of person and circumstance has never before formed in my mind. Although it should have, as I am, in my way, an adult goth, and all the more lately with mourning and death so readily in my thoughts. I would soon come to learn that most of the staff of the Mütter Museum and its parent organization, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, were, each in their way, adult goths. Where else would we go? 

They were really controversial. Holly, my new boss after the interview, tells me that the museum got a lot of heat for the tsantsa exhibit’s perceived disregard of ethical practices. It wasn’t always clear where the heads came from or how people got ahold of them in the first place. Plus they just really freaked people out. I laugh, then stop laughing, because I don’t want to seem like I’m laughing at ethics violations or shrunken heads. I’m laughing at people being freaked out by shrunken heads, although I understand. Really I was laughing in response to the tone in her voice which indicated humor in the phrase freaked people out. My focus was on cues: Smile when someone smiles at you. People like to complain, Holly says. 

You’ll be dealing with a lot of people, hundreds on the weekends. They’ll either love it or hate it, and they’ll let you know. If anyone asks for a refund, if they’ve been in the museum longer than 15 minutes, tell them no. Holly points to the red refund button on the museum’s ticketing screen, then clucks her tongue as she clicks and the amount on the screen turns negative. She touches a big gray button and a receipt prints on a scroll of paper as the cash drawer jolts out. Make sense? she asks, and I nod, mmmhmming in unison with the two other hires. It’s my turn. She has me pull closer to the screen and the chair’s wheels twirl beneath me. Gray button, red button, gray button, drawer. See? So easy. 

---

It’s a little after 3:30 p.m. on a Wednesday, one of the slowest times of the week, perfect for training. This is our first shift. We’ve been walking and talking since 11 a.m., and have been at the register for over an hour now with Holly explaining shortcuts and the various branchings of ticket types. Erin, Christina, and I take turns selling to dwindling bursts of visitors. Erin and Christina are nice, but nervous, and I assume I must be assumed as such too. I am smiling on cue and exhibiting a genius for point-of-sale software, but not making a big deal about it. I am trying hard not to cry, and I will somehow succeed at this during work hours for years. That morning I told myself in the mirror, NO CRYING!—which made me feel foolish, which made me start to cry. And then laugh. Early on in the shift, Holly mentions the possibility of this gig going full-time, and I take this as a reason to live. My survivor benefits end in a year; I’ll need the insurance to pay for the therapy I’m about to start after the predetermined date when the state of Arizona says grief should stop, or at least that their obligation to pay for it is over. I’ll need the therapy because it’s where my brain gets good at going to work, at living in the world. Once a week, I’ll feel normal, allowed to be wholly in grief. After each session, I’ll walk the mile home, and pass the same patch of grass I lay down in when I first heard. Everything I don’t want to think about will rise up from the ground all around me. Too much. 

My survivor benefits end in a year; I’ll need the insurance to pay for the therapy I’m about to start after the predetermined date when the state of Arizona says grief should stop, or at least that their obligation to pay for it is over.

Training overloads us with information. There are dozens of people on staff with names to memorize and departmental relations to understand, hidden wings of the building to explore, intricate calendars to master. Novelty begins to balance out my psychic deadweight. I touch the grid of buttons on-screen, and even that slight activity pushes the unwanted sights to the edge of my mind, even out of it. I’ve barely thought of my mom (mom becoming a euphemism for her murder) since I started this shift, but how long can that last? The number of minutes between visitors is increasing. When the museum closes at five, we’re to refill the brochure stand and empty the plexiglass cube people drop their guest badges into as they leave, but for the next hour, there’s not much to do. Why don’t you guys take a break and check out the collection? You’ll get a real tour next shift, but for now, just spend some time in there. Holly lists some of the exhibits she loves—The Soap Lady, Harry Eastlack—and tells us to go wild. 

We walk a diagonal across the College’s marble entry hall, where a classical statue that I’ll learn is Asclepius, the Greek god of the healing arts, carries a big club with a snake wrapped around it. There are thick curtains to duck under, and suddenly we’re in a deep red chamber faceted in brass, glass, and wood. Bodies and parts are everywhere we look. The shelves are covered with objects and specimens in a curatorial vision bordering on horror vacui. Whoa! It feels totally different, Christina says. She’s never been here when the museum was empty like this, and neither have I. With no living bodies standing between us and the other bodies, there’s a lot to look at all at once. I turn to follow the balcony’s open ring around the stairs, my eyes passing over a bezoar, some bloodstained lengths of gauze . . . but I can’t fix on anything. Then: skulls. 

---

One hundred thirty-nine. I do not try to count them. They range in size, in general and specific shape. The color of each varies: gray, amber, yellow, ivory, gleaming white. There are different bumps and divots in the bone to take in, small details differentiating each one from the next. Many are missing teeth, a few have cracks or slashes or holes left from when something outside forced its way in. Knives and sabres and bullets. The trace of bone plates’ fusion remains in jagged lines like black lightning. Labels below each head form a piecemeal map of Europe, the Levant, Western Asia, and North Africa. Places people I come from came from. I stand for a long time in front of the case, thinking about how they all ended up here, together, these people who would likely never have met in life. The 19th century is long gone; phrenology is and was always bunk—so what lesson can the specimens teach me? My vision relaxes the longer I stare, and the skulls begin to blur into one another. When I catch myself and sharpen my sight, I see my face reflected in the glass, eye-level with the center row. My ghost between two skulls in a long line. 

Despite the claims of collectors, a skull can only belong to its own person, not a museum or any other buyer on the market.

For the next few years, I see these sights almost every day. Not like the images I try to block out: The skulls are real, not a secondhand reality become trauma, making life feel over while it’s still going on. My grandma tells me she has bad dreams. My aunt has religion. I have a diagnosis and a steady job at the goth factory. I see the skulls every day I work—five days a week when full-time comes through. Whenever security calls me into the museum over the walkie talkie, whenever I’m just strolling on shift, or passing through to use the secret door on my lunch break. Sometimes, I linger at their case and read what I can make out of the lettering on a few of the frontal bones. Some skulls were engraved with the names of their former owner, if known, along with ethnicity, occupation, age, and cause of death, as these were the pertinent details Dr. Josef Hyrtl needed for making his case against phrenology. Despite the claims of collectors, a skull can only belong to its own person, not a museum or any other buyer on the market. 

I appreciate the attention to detail. I’m close enough to read the incised black letters on one of the skulls. Despite wanting Philly to overwrite Boston, the German that I learned at an old job in Massachusetts is still good enough to let me make out most of the inscription. The tag on the base fills in the rest: Geza Urmenyi, 80. Romania. Protestant, shepherd. At age 70, attempted suicide by cutting his throat. Wound not fatal because of calcified larynx; laryngeal fistula remained. Lived until 80 without melancholy. There are no teeth in his jaws, and the sockets have smoothed over. I take a step back from the case, focused on the blank space where his mouth would have been. I can see him in the story engraved in his forehead. Clear hazel eyes set into two deep bruises. His nose’s sunburnt flesh. The lips, folded in to cover where his teeth should be. Very thin but leanly muscled; his body grown solid from a lifetime walking the herds up and down the mountains. Face sliced with wrinkles. He is exhausted. He doesn’t know how to live in the world. He draws his best knife across his neck as fast as he can, but something in his own body stops it. Won’t let it cut deep enough to do more than hurt and make a mess. 

Ten years without melancholy. It will take me just as long to become something like myself again. A decade on, releasing my mom’s ashes at last, I’ll know it’s over. No more dreams. If I hadn’t declared an end date, it could have gone on forever. Sometimes, I wanted it to. I didn’t know how else to live in the world. I only knew how I wanted to die: to draw my best knife across my brow and pluck my skull from my head. To hold it in my lap and sand down the spot where my story was engraved. To blow away the dust and polish the bone with a fine cloth. To set it gently back within the flesh of my head. To be born whole again into the world, a new world—a world without melancholy. To live there, beyond the glass. My skull looking out from behind my face, smiling, like all skulls.

---

Daniel Barnum’s poems and essays appear in Prairie Schooner, Guernica, Seneca Review, New England Review, Ninth Letter, The Offing, and elsewhere. Their writing has received support from the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and the Hambidge Center. They live in Athens, GA, where they are at work on a novel.

Contact Longreads senior editor Cheri Lucas Rowlands for co-publishing opportunities.

Uma onça-pintada prenha foi flagrada sobre o galho de uma árvore na região da Estância Caiman, em Miranda (MS), no Pantanal de Mato Grosso do Sul. Nas imagens, o abdômen do animal aparece bastante volumoso e pressionado contra o galho.

A cena chamou a atenção pela raridade do comportamento e pelo aspecto físico do felino. O biólogo Milton Longo analisou o registro e apontou que o tamanho da barriga indica algo além de uma refeição recente.

O registro foi feito pelo técnico em agropecuária Adriel Abreu, que mora na região e trabalha no Pantanal diariamente. Ele disse que acompanha o animal há algum tempo e percebeu os sinais de gestação.

Foto: Adriel Abreu

The post Onça-pintada prenha repousa sobre galho no Pantanal de MS appeared first on Diário da Manhã - O Jornal do leitor Inteligente.

Feedback from the U.S. Army has led to an improved A1 version of the service’s still very new 6.8x51mm M250 light machine gun. Manufacturer Sig Sauer has shortened and lightened the barrel, reduced the overall weight, changed the buttstock, and made various other improvements to improve reliability and ease of use. The evolution of the M250 mirrors the transformation of Sig’s M7 rifle for the U.S. Army into the M8 carbine, where weight and bulk were major points of criticism of the original design.

Jason St. John, senior director of strategic products for the Defense Strategies Group at Sig Sauer, talked about the new M250A1 with our Howard Altman at the Association of the U.S. Army’s (AUSA) main annual convention today. The U.S. Army has already been acquiring and fielding baseline M250s as part of its Next Generation Squad Weapons (NGSW) program. The NGSW family also includes the M7 rifle and now the M8 carbine from Sig, both also chambered to fire the 6.8x51mm round. The Army chose Sig as the winner of the NGSW competition in 2022. The service is still in the early stages of fielding the NGSW family as replacements for a substantial portion of its existing 5.56x45mm M4A1 carbines and M249 Squad Automatic Weapons (SAW).

“We continuously and constantly evaluate and evolve our designs, and we discover things,” St. John told us. “Parts that might be able to be manufactured a little bit easier with a little bit of a design change. They might be more reliable, more durable than you currently have. You might look at the system and say, hey, we have an ability to make these recommendations because we see this from other customers across the board. We hear it from our inputs of soldiers that are in our ranks, and you know maybe old relationships out in the field.”

“The [NGSW] program office represents the entire formation, so they get feedback in the totality of every single unit that has them [M250s and other guns in the NGSW family] in their hands,” he continued. If “a systemic issue or something that needs to be addressed, then they run the soldier touchpoint events, which we’re fortunate enough to be a part of. And then we get unfiltered feedback from soldiers that day in the field while they’re encountering something that they have a concern about.”

As noted at the start, the most immediate standout feature on the M250A1 being shown at AUSA this week is the new 13-inch barrel. M250s entering Army service now have roughly 16-inch-long barrels. The Army’s official fact sheet says the machine gun was originally expected to come with a 17.5-inch barrel.

“We shortened the barrel to 13 inches, but the Army’s also buying the 16-inch barrel,” St. John explained. “So in some ways, you could consider it mission-configurable, whether they want to utilize a 13-inch barrel or a 16-inch barrel, to what they’re doing.”

“You’re going to maintain the same basic ballistics that you had with the M7 [rifle’s] 13-inch barrel, and then you’re going to have more maneuverability because you’re going to have a shorter weapon system,” he added. “You add the 16-inch barrel, and you get that lethality requirement with the length of barrel that they originally required. So you have some flexibility there.”

“You shorten the barrel, you’re going to lose velocity,” St. John did acknowledge. “We did not change the ammo. The Army had determined with the barrel change that they were meeting their ballistic and lethality goals with that length of barrel.”

With the current 6.8x51mm ammunition, “we’re operating in the mid-70s [sic; 70,000 pounds per square inch] as far as pressure, and the case has 125K psi potential,” he also noted. “If you wanted to shorten the barrel and you did have some lethality concerns or wanted more performance, all you need to simply do is just increase the little bit more pressure in the cartridge case, and you overcome that shortness.”

“We didn’t do that. The Army said it wasn’t necessary, but you know, as the battlefield evolves and defensive postures change, if that becomes necessary, one of the great things about the NGSW program is the ability for the weapon systems and the ammunition to grow in their performance capacity,” he continued.

In the case of the 13-inch barrel, “we tapered the barrel down a little bit to add a little bit of weight savings,” he noted.

TWZ has reached out to Sig about getting more complete specifications for the M250A1, including overall length and total weight with different barrel options. The baseline version weighs some 13 pounds, empty, and without optics and other accessories, according to the Army’s fact sheet. As already mentioned, the M7 rifle also got progressively shorter and lighter before giving way fully to the M8 carbine, in part through reprofiling of the barrel. The empty weight of the M8 with its 10-inch barrel is close to one pound less than that of the 13-inch barreled M7.

Different barrels can be readily swapped out on the M250A1, as well as the baseline M250. However, the new variant features significant changes to the quick-change barrel arrangement on the gun and associated elements of the design.

“It was interchangeable before, but it didn’t have a quick-change barrel handle. It wasn’t meant to be changed, and therefore it didn’t need the insulation of [sic; for] a hot barrel like you get with a barrel with a quick-change barrel handle,” according to St. John. “I think initially with the [M]250 program, it wasn’t necessary, and potentially might not have been desired initially. And why put that weight burden on there if we weren’t going to utilize it, right?”

St. John did not elaborate further on why these features were initially deemed unnecessary.

“When you look at the top cover of the forearm, that used to be loose, and now it’s captured, meaning that when you change the barrel, it actually came off completely in your hand,” he also noted. “We utilized a similar design to our .338 MMG [Medium Machine Gun], and then we make it captured now, so you’re not going to lose it.”

“We added a funnel to guide your gas piston in, so that when you’re doing barrel change operations, you don’t have to be precisely lined up,” he added. Now, “you have something that’s going to guide it in a stressful environment, to get that into position to do your barrel change.”

The M250A1 features a host of other changes that are unrelated to the barrel.

Sig also “improved our gas system a little bit, just to make it more reliable and durable,” to include modifications to keep it better “insulated from carbon and things like that.”

“We opened up the trigger guard to incorporate the Arctic fight, the Arctic glove, more so than just the operational normal tactical gloves,” according to St. John. “We opened it up a little bit more to accomplish that.”

The Arctic is an ever-more strategic region where the U.S. faces growing geopolitical competition, especially from Russia and now China. Army officials also regularly point out that the harsh environment presents challenges when using standard equipment designed around use in more temperate locales.

“We improved the buttstock, and we improved the interface … to the receiver,” St. John explained. “We’ve made the interface between that more robust because through IMTing, and over time, and the buttstock getting slammed on the ground, and just normal military training and operations, we noticed that we had a tendency for some of them to loosen up and have some play in them.”

“The entire buttstock is a different buttstock than they had,” he added. “They [Army soldiers] preferred that buttstock over the buttstock that we had on it. So we just put soldiers’ preference on there. … It’s just a commercially available [design from] Magpul that they thought was better than the other Magpul that day one we were using.”

Changes were made to points where the M250 is designed to be attached to tripods on the ground or pintle mounts on vehicles.

“We put cross-bolts through the receiver to provide more durability,” he explained. “Initially, it was like an M-LOK type of lockup, and you can just think of a steel nut on an aluminum receiver being vibrated over a life cycle of the weapon system, it has some unfortunate wear characteristics. So, putting these cross pins redirects that force, and the way we lock it down with a saddle screw prevents that from happening and provides long-term durability to the receiver in the pintle and T&E [traverse and elevation] tripod-mounted configuration.”

The continued evolution of the M250 is not new. Sig talked to TWZ at AUSA last year about changes, including to the bipod and top cover, that were already making their way into the design.

The Army has yet to formally adopt the M250A1 configuration, and further changes could be made before service moves to officially acquire an improved version of the gun.

“This is likely to be the accepted configuration. We anticipate that acceptance,” Sig’s St. John told us. “We just finalized the acceptance on the M8, and they’re moving into the acceptance of the [M]250s. We anticipate right now, with the feedback that we’re getting from the program office, that the majority, if not all, of these changes are likely to be accepted.”

It’s important to reiterate that changes to the M7 rifle, and then the Army’s decision to transition fully to the further evolved M8 carbine, followed significant criticism of the core design of those guns and their ammunition, as well as the underlying doctrine. Sig has repeatedly pushed back on those critiques, and the Army continues to push ahead with the entire NGSW program.

Despite the steadily shortening barrels on guns in the NGSW family, the Army’s position remains that the weapons chambered for the new 6.8x51mm round offer essential additional accuracy, range, and terminal effectiveness over existing 5.56x45mm types. The genesis of the NGSW program had been heavily informed by the war in Afghanistan, where there were regular reports of U.S. ground units being outranged by their opponents. Adversary body developments were also a factor.

It is also important to point out that teething troubles are not at all uncommon in major weapon system programs, including when it comes to small arms. Sig has drawn attention to the less than positive reception that the AR-15/M16 family initially received in the mid-1960s, which led to a host of changes to that design. Rifles and carbines in that pattern are now in widespread service across the U.S. military and with dozens of armed forces and security services globally.

Regardless, even with the Army still very early on in the process of fielding the entire NGSW family of guns, the M250 light machine gun’s design is now evolving significantly.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

The post Sig Sauer’s M250 Machine Gun Gets Shorter And Lighter After Army Feedback appeared first on TWZ.

Anthropic, the maker of the Claude AI models, is preparing what could be the largest initial public offering in history, raising more than $100 billion, according to The New York Times, at a valuation near US$2 trillion. According to Reuters, which reviewed the draft prospectus (the document has not yet been made public), the company […]

The post Postpone AI public offerings until US Congress acts appeared first on Asia Times.

Lockheed Martin has unveiled the PAC-3 Edge, a new interceptor that would represent the top tier of the U.S. Army’s Patriot air defense missile family. The missile is being developed to deliver greater performance against advanced threats than the current PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement (MSE), as the Army advances a competition for its next-generation interceptor.

The company says PAC-3 Edge will offer improved performance against increasingly challenging aerial threats, including advanced ballistic and hypersonic missiles. The design builds on the PAC-3 MSE’s existing technology while incorporating a new seeker, an upgraded control system, and a more advanced solid rocket motor developed with Northrop Grumman.

In terms of appearance, PAC-3 Edge differs significantly from the PAC-3 MSE. It does away entirely with the mid-body strakes. The missile body also lacks the distinctive tapered section that separates the narrower forward section from the broader rear section on the MSE version.

Lockheed announced on October 9 that it had been selected to advance to the next phase of the Army’s Future Interceptor program. Company officials said testing is expected to begin in 2027, with initial deployment targeted for 2031.

The Army’s selection of Lockheed and another unnamed competitor marks a significant development in the service’s effort to improve the Patriot system’s ability to deal with more sophisticated threats. The Army previously abandoned its Lower-Tier Future Interceptor (LTFI) program in 2024, citing cost concerns, and instead emphasized incremental improvements to the existing PAC-3 MSE. The subsequent emergence of the Future Interceptor competition points to renewed interest in a more substantial leap in capability.

A More Capable Patriot Interceptor

PAC-3 Edge is intended to preserve the advantages of the existing PAC-3 family while improving the missile’s ability to engage targets at longer ranges and higher altitudes.

One of the central changes is a new seeker being developed by Lockheed Martin’s Strigo Product Center. The company says the technology will improve target detection and tracking, helping the interceptor deal with more demanding threats. The company has not disclosed the seeker’s technical details, but one possibility is a dual-mode or multimode configuration, combining different sensing methods to improve target acquisition and tracking in challenging conditions. Such an approach could help an interceptor maintain a reliable track against maneuvering targets and better distinguish real threats from decoys or other countermeasures.

Tim Cahill, president of Missiles and Fire Control (MFC) for Lockheed Martin, told TWZ that the same seeker technology that will be used in PAC-3 Edge will also find its way into future offensive and defensive systems going into the future. “So it isn’t just a one single seeker solution, but it will be a family of seekers that will operate across a number of regimes,” Cahill explained. “Frankly, I’d like to not tell everybody exactly what we’re doing, but it is clearly different from what is out there right now,” Cahill said, adding that hardware assemblies and components are now being tested in the lab, and that seekers have been flown on aircraft testbeds.

The missile will also use a three-pulse (as opposed to two-pulse) solid rocket motor designed by Northrop Grumman. Unlike a conventional motor that provides most of its thrust in a single sustained burn, a multi-pulse design can deliver thrust at different points during flight. That can help preserve energy for the terminal engagement, when an interceptor may need to maneuver aggressively to reach a target.

Lockheed says the combination of the new seeker, propulsion system, and control system improvements will provide greater maneuverability and improve performance at extended ranges and higher altitudes. To ensure greater agility, Jason Reynolds, vice president and general manager of Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD) at Lockheed Martin, explained that the new missile adds a greater number of more capable attitude control motors (ACMs), compared to the PAC-3 MSE. These small thrusters ring the missile’s forward body.

The new characteristics could be particularly important against maneuvering ballistic missile warheads and hypersonic weapons, which can pose difficult interception problems because of their speed, altitude and dynamic flight profiles. However, the company has yet to demonstrate PAC-3 Edge’s performance in flight testing.

The extent to which PAC-3 Edge could overlap with, or potentially augment, the capabilities of the Army’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system also remains unclear. THAAD is designed to intercept ballistic missiles at higher altitudes and longer ranges than Patriot, where midcourse window bleeds into the terminal intercept window. If PAC-3 Edge delivers a substantial improvement in engagement range and altitude over PAC-3 MSE, it could potentially provide at least some backfill for THAAD.

The announcement did not provide detailed performance figures for the new interceptor, including its maximum engagement range, speed, or specific target set. It also did not establish how much better the missile will perform than the PAC-3 MSE in operational conditions.

Addressing An Air Defense Force Under Pressure

The Army has a pressing need to improve its air and missile defense capabilities while expanding the number of interceptors available to its forces.

TWZ has been reporting on the strain facing the Patriot force and its interceptor supply for years. In July 2025, we reported on the Army’s plan to expand its Patriot air defense force by roughly a quarter, adding four battalions as the service sought to meet growing operational demands. More recently, we have detailed the challenges of replenishing interceptors after intensive combat operations, including the scale of U.S. missile and drone engagements in the Middle East, as well as transfers to Ukraine.

Related to this, the push for a more capable Patriot interceptor comes as the system faces increasingly sophisticated threats and adversaries that have learned from years of combat. Russia has improved its ballistic missile tactics to pierce the Patriot’s protective umbrella, while Iran has demonstrated ways to exploit gaps in layered missile defenses, including introducing extremely high-speed ballistic missiles and cluster warheads that open at high altitude.

PAC-3 MSE is currently the most advanced operational member of the PAC-3 family. It is designed primarily as a hit-to-kill interceptor, destroying targets through the force of direct impact, but it also incorporates a small explosive charge known as a “lethality enhancer,” as TWZ has previously detailed.

PAC-3 Edge is intended to push those capabilities further still. Lockheed says the new missile is being designed to work within the Army’s existing and future integrated air and missile defense architecture, including the Integrated Battle Command System (IBCS) and the M903 Patriot launcher. The company has also identified containerized launchers and HIMARS Flex among the systems with which it intends to integrate the interceptor.

Such compatibility could allow the service to retain much of its existing infrastructure while improving the performance of the weapons used within it.

The precise extent of that compatibility, however, will depend on development, testing, and integration work that remains ahead.

Production And Cost

Lockheed is developing PAC-3 Edge as the company and the Pentagon work to expand production of the existing PAC-3 MSE.

In January, Lockheed Martin announced a seven-year agreement with the Pentagon to more than triple annual PAC-3 MSE production capacity, initially targeting an increase from roughly 600 interceptors to 2,000 a year. The effort subsequently received a major funding boost in July, when the U.S. government awarded Lockheed a contract modification worth up to $53.86 billion, bringing the total multiyear contract value to $58.62 billion. Lockheed says the effort is intended to more than triple production by the end of 2030, while expanding its workforce and investing in manufacturing infrastructure and its supply chain.

Those efforts could provide a foundation for producing PAC-3 Edge if the missile completes development and enters service. Lockheed has said the new interceptor will be manufactured on its existing PAC-3 production line in Camden, Arkansas, with factory modernization expected to support the eventual transition.

The company has also highlighted substantial internal investment in the new missile and its seeker technology. That investment could reduce development risk and give Lockheed greater control over critical components, although the program’s final cost and production schedule remain important unknowns.

The broader challenge is not simply developing an interceptor with better performance. Advanced missiles can be expensive, and air defense forces must balance the capabilities of individual weapons against the number they can afford to procure and keep available. Sustained combat operations can rapidly consume interceptor inventories, making production rates and replacement costs central considerations.

Cahill says the company has also identified the opportunity to mix and match components between PAC-3 Edge and other missile offerings from Lockheed Martin. “We are getting increasingly modular, and increasingly we’re mixing and matching pieces and parts,” he said.

Ultimately, if it chooses PAC-3 Edge, the U.S. government will decide exactly how to handle production of the PAC-3 MSE and the new missiles. “We would expect the typical thing is you’ll feather them, so you would expect that over time MSEs would come down,” Cahill continued. “We’re still talking, seven, eight, nine, 10 years away. You would expect that the Edge production would go up, but there’s plenty of capacity in the factory to manage whatever surges are going to be needed there.”

At the same time, it should be noted that Lockheed Martin is also working on a lower-cost PAC-3 development, the PAC-3 Adapted Capability Effector (ACE). The company says that this interceptor will cost less than half as much as the PAC-3 MSE, meaning it would have a price tag of around $2.5 million. The company says that the PAC-3 ACE will preserve two-thirds of the capability the PAC-3 MSE had, and it has already generated considerable international interest.

Future Interceptor Competition

Lockheed has confirmed that it is one of two companies selected to continue in the Army’s Future Interceptor competition. The identity of the other competitor has not yet been disclosed, and the Army has not publicly provided a complete account of the competition’s requirements.

The effort follows the cancellation of the earlier Lower-Tier Future Interceptor (LTFI) program, which had involved Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. At the time, the Army opted to focus on upgrades to the PAC-3 MSE and on better integration of its existing air and missile defense systems.

Gen Lozano, PEO Missiles & Space, tells @JenJudson that they have cancelled the Lower Tier Future Interceptor program, which would have succeeded the PAC-3 MSE. Instead they will upgrade MSE, and want to move forward with THAAD integration into IBCS. #AUSA2024 pic.twitter.com/NZMPgDH4KP

— Colby Badhwar (@ColbyBadhwar) October 15, 2024

The renewed competition suggests that incremental upgrades alone may not be sufficient to address the Army’s longer-term requirements. The development of faster, more maneuverable missiles and other advanced aerial threats is driving demand for interceptors capable of operating across a wider engagement envelope.

For PAC-3 Edge, which is designed to address emerging threat requirements, the planned 2027 testing start and 2031 deployment target leave substantial development work to complete, including demonstrating the seeker’s performance, validating the propulsion system, and proving the missile’s ability to engage representative targets.

For now, the unveiling establishes the direction Lockheed wants to take the Patriot interceptor family. Whether PAC-3 Edge can deliver the promised increase in performance, while meeting the Army’s cost and production requirements, will become clearer as the program progresses. Regardless, from what is being experienced on the battlefield, a more capable, higher-reaching Patriot would be a very welcome addition to the Army’s Patriot family.

Contact the author: thomas@thewarzone.com

The post PAC-3 Edge Will Be The Most Capable Patriot Interceptor Ever appeared first on TWZ.

Raytheon is developing a new iteration of its Coyote Block 2 counter-drone interceptor powered by a solid rocket motor rather than a small jet engine. This pushes the Block 2C+RM version, which also comes with a new seeker and warhead, into the surface-to-air missile side of the interceptor spectrum. With a significant boost in speed, range, and terminal intercept performance, it is designed to address evolving one-way-attack drone threats. The Coyote Block 2 series is already a combat-proven system, with more than 600 kills in the course of operational U.S. military deployments to date.

The unveiling of the Coyote Block 2C+RM came today around the start of the Association of the U.S. Army’s (AUSA) main annual convention, at which TWZ is in attendance. The rocket-powered version has been in the works for some 15 months now, and three successful live test launches have been conducted. That followed static test fires of the new rocket motor, which an unnamed subcontractor is supplying, and other testing.

The Pentagon and the U.S. Army have been engaged with Raytheon (now formally RTX) on the development of the Block 2C+RM, but whether there are formal U.S. military contracts to buy this version now is unclear. The U.S. Army is the largest known operator of Coyote Block 2-series interceptors now, with previously stated plans to buy at least 6,000 of them between Fiscal Years 2025 and 2029. We will come back to this later on.

As mentioned, existing versions of Coyote Block 2 are powered by a turbojet engine. A small rocket booster is also used to launch these interceptors, but does not propel them through the entire course of their flight.

With the rocket motor, “you get upgraded propulsion for faster launch and higher velocity flight,” Tom Laliberty, President of Land & Air Defense Systems at Raytheon, told TWZ and other outlets during a press call last week ahead of today’s announcement. “In terms of range and so forth, I can’t really get into any specifics about that, for obvious reasons.”

“What I would just say is it’s significant in terms of the range difference, and in the [sic] what I call end-game capabilities of the missile, where velocity might come into play,” he added. “Then with the seeker [and] warhead [upgrades], it really gets after the sort of more cutting-edge drone capabilities that we’re seeing from the adversary.”

Laliberty also did not elaborate on the specific improvements to the seeker or warhead. Existing Block 2-series Coyotes use on-board radio frequency seekers to find their targets in the terminal phase of flight after first being cued via radars and other sensors on the ground. They also carry blast-fragmentation warheads.

During last week’s call, Laliberty was asked about whether new faster-flying jet-powered one-way-attack drones, like Iran’s Shahed 238 and Russia’s Geran-4 and -5 derivatives, had prompted Block 2C+RM’s development. He was also queried about Block 2C+RM’s ability to defeat traditional cruise missiles.

“Unfortunately, I can’t get into the specific threats, but I can tell you the intention is to have this cover all types of Class 3 drones,” he said in response. “If you think about the Class 3 drone kind of ‘spectrum,’ there’s a pretty good overlap there with the capabilities of cruise missiles, as well, right? So it all depends on the specific[s] of the cruise missile.”

The U.S. military defines Group 3 drones, whether they are weaponized or not, as designs that weigh anywhere from 56 to 1,320 pounds, are able to fly up to an altitude of 18,000 feet, and reach a top speed of no more than 250 knots. The Shahed 238’s combustion engine-powered predecessor, the Shahed 236, is a prime example of a Group 3 kamikaze drone. The claimed top speeds of the jet-powered derivatives (approximately 270 to 320 knots) actually push the upper boundaries of this broad middle-tier category. TWZ regularly highlights the additional challenges that jet-powered kamikaze drones like the Shahed 238 and Geran-4/5 present. We also routinely note how the line between longer-range one-way-attack drones and cruise missiles has become increasingly blurry. The Block 2C+RM itself also further blurs the definition between a drone-like counter-drone interceptor and a more traditional surface-to-air missile.

RFE/RL takes apart a Russian Geran-4 drone to uncover what makes the jet-powered unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) faster, harder to intercept, and capable of operating deep inside Ukraine — from its turbojet engine and advanced camera to foreign-made communications and navigation… pic.twitter.com/WGNdlpS9w1

— Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (@RFERL) September 25, 2026

The conflict with Iran, as well as other crises in the Middle East in recent years and the ongoing war in Ukraine, make clear that even slower-flying Group 3 kamikaze drones present real dangers now. Those threats are magnified when these one-way attacks are employed in large volumes and/or in complex attacks mixed in with ballistic and cruise missiles.

As noted, Raytheon has highlighted how Coyote Block 2C+RM also has a faster overall response time compared to its predecessors, offering additional flexibility for engaging incoming waves of drones. The new version also works with all existing four- and eight-cell launchers, which can be variously mounted on vehicles and static positions on the ground, as well as on ships.

As mentioned earlier, the U.S. Army is the primary operator of Coyote Block 2s today, with the interceptors being used in both vehicle-based and palletized versions of its Low, Slow, Unmanned Aircraft Integrated Defeat System (LIDS). The U.S. Air Force has also been at least involved in the operation of fixed-site versions of LIDS at forward-deployed locations. The U.S. Navy has integrated launchers for Coyote Block 2s on several Arleigh Burke class destroyers, as well.

It’s also worth noting here that Coyote is generally described as a lower-cost interceptor, with a unit cost reported in the past to be around $100,000. How the new rocket-powered version will compare to existing types price-wise is unclear, but this is an increasingly important factor for the U.S. military and others, especially when considering the cost curve against the expected target set. As an example, the estimated cost of a Shahed 236 is in the $50,000 range.

To be clear, Coyote Block 2C+RM is still in development, and when it might start to enter operational service with any user remains to be seen.

“We’ve got additional tests scheduled into the first half of next year, and we’re working with the Department of War,” Raytheon’s Laliberty said last week. “We’ve got an ongoing investment from Raytheon, but now essentially received some government sponsorship as it kind of transitions into the program of record, and that’s still kind of ongoing with the Department of War in terms of how all of that is going to be structured. Certainly, in follow-on contracts for Coyote, this can be cut in.”

Raytheon has no plans to stop producing jet-powered Block 2 versions, either, at least for now. Beyond the U.S. military, there are now contractors to supply these interceptors to Qatar and Jordan.

The Block 2 series is just one part of the larger and still growing Coyote family of drones. A separate series of Coyote Block 3 drones, which evolved from the original electric motor-driven pusher propeller Block 1 design, is also steadily expanding. This includes versions configured as loitering munitions and as counter-drone interceptors carrying still unidentified “non-kinetic” payloads. The U.S. Army is already in the process of acquiring Block 3 types in addition to Block 2 interceptors.

As an aside, the U.S.-based subsidiary of Germany’s Rheinmetall is currently competing in the Army’s XM30 Mechanized Infantry Combat Vehicle (MICV) competition with a design that will be capable of employing Coyote Block 3. The launchers on American Rheinmetall’s Lynx-based XM30 offering will also be able to fire anti-tank guided missiles like the TOW and Javelin. You can read more about the XM30 competition and the other design in the running, General Dynamics Land Systems’ Wolf, here.

More broadly speaking, Coyote Block 2C+RM will be entering a hugely expanding market space for lower-tier and lower-cost counter-drone interceptors globally. The U.S. Army alone is already pursuing several new lower-tier anti-air interceptors to expand its capabilities against Group 3 drones, as well as other types of uncrewed threats and cruise missiles.

If nothing else, the newly unveiled Coyote Block 2C+RM reflects continued high demand, broadly speaking, for new interceptors, and more of them, to address ever-more capable longer-range kamikaze drones.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

The post New Coyote Anti-Drone Interceptor Swaps Jet Engine For Rocket Power appeared first on TWZ.

Anduril has unveiled Steelfin, a family of surface-to-air interceptor missiles designed to share a common architecture and manufacturing process while being configured for different air and missile defense missions. The company says this approach will enable high-volume production at significantly lower cost than existing weapons, though it has not disclosed prices or detailed performance specifications.

The announcement comes as the U.S. military seeks to expand air defense inventories against an increasingly diverse range of threats, from inexpensive drones to cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and advanced maneuvering weapons, including hypersonic ones. Recent experiences from Ukraine and the Middle East make it abundantly clear that the challenge is not simply developing interceptors capable of defeating those targets but producing enough of them to sustain operations without exhausting stocks of more expensive weapons.

Using high-end interceptors against comparatively inexpensive threats can rapidly consume limited inventories, as it has in the Middle East, especially, even when engagements are necessary to protect personnel and critical infrastructure. A broader range of defensive weapons, matched to different threats and engagement requirements, could help ease that burden.

Anduril’s answer is a family of missiles built around a common two-stage design. The first stage consists of a booster, while the second is a terminal interceptor intended to share a baseline airframe, avionics, software, flight control system, and interfaces across variants. Different boosters and terminal-stage components would allow the company to tailor individual configurations to specific missions without developing an entirely new missile for each requirement. Both hit-to-kill and blast-fragmentation terminal-stage interceptors will be offered, Anduril says.

“It is an open system, so the ability to fly it with different rocket motors, different seekers, to be able to swap these components out, to be able to reconfigure the system for a range of different threats is a feature that we built into this,” explained Christian Brose, who serves as the president and chief strategy officer at Anduril. He was speaking to members of the media, including TWZ, ahead of the official unveiling of Steelfin.

The company says the family is intended to cover missions ranging from point defense and lower-tier integrated air and missile defense to upper-tier ballistic missile defense. It also identifies cruise, ballistic, and hypersonic missiles among the threats the broader family is designed to address. Overall, it is an extremely ambitious goal, and something that has not been attempted previously to this degree.

The announcement does not specify which variants would address individual threats or provide engagement envelopes and performance figures with which to assess those claims.

Brose did clarify that the different ranges that the various Steelfin variants will achieve will be based on the booster sizing. “Right now, we’re looking at integrating on 10-inch, 18-inch, and 21-inch boosters, but we’re also looking at quad pack and dual pack for the Mk 41 Vertical Launch System as well for different installations, which imply different range and altitudes.”

Anduril’s emphasis on commonality is also intended to address the industrial challenges associated with conventional interceptor production. Different missile programs traditionally require specialized tooling, manufacturing processes, suppliers, and facilities, limiting opportunities to shift production rapidly as operational requirements change.

Steelfin variants are intended to use shared production lines and equipment, with mission-specific boosters and terminal-stage components incorporated during final assembly. Anduril says this would allow manufacturing capacity to be redirected toward whichever variant is in greatest demand. The company is planning near-term production on the order of several thousand missiles annually, with capacity designed to expand or shift according to requirements.

That remains a production ambition, and Anduril has not provided a detailed production schedule or contracted quantities demonstrating how quickly it could reach that scale.

The company also says Steelfin is designed to be compatible with existing land- and sea-based launch infrastructure, including the M903A2 launcher used by newer PAC-3 series interceptors, the Mk 41 Vertical Launch System, and Typhon, as well as emerging containerized launchers. It cites compatibility with established fire-control systems, including AEGIS and the Army’s Integrated Battle Command System (IBCS).

When it comes to cost, Steve Milano, the lead for Air Dominance & Strike at Anduril, suggested that the “more exquisite version” of the Steelfin would sit somewhere above the PAC-3 MSE and below THAAD, but would accomplish “100 percent of the THAAD mission at a fraction of the cost.” In a different configuration, tailored for the PAC-3-type mission, Steelfin would accomplish 80 percent of that mission at less than 50 percent of the cost, Milano added.

While THAAD is aimed at taking out short, medium, and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in the terminal phase of flight, PAC-3 provides high-altitude, hit-to-kill air and missile defense against tactical ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and aircraft.

Milano continued: “Looking at the lower end of the spectrum, as far as low-cost interceptors are concerned, I just saw an article on the [aircraft carrier USS Abraham] Lincoln coming back with all of the Shahed markings on the side, and I was contemplating the number of SM-2s that were fired against those assets. When I think of that cost exchange, the Steelfin enters into that market and provides greater than 80 percent of the capability of an SM-2 for a third of the cost.”

For reference, a single THAAD interceptor costs around $15.5 million. The unit price of each PAC-3 MSE interceptor now stands at approximately $5.3 million, according to the Army’s latest proposed budget for the 2027 Fiscal Year. Meanwhile, the price of a single SM-2 Block IIIC interceptor, the most advanced version of that missile currently in service, is around $2.5 million. 

Steelfin is entering a market in which the U.S. military is already pursuing several approaches to expanding its low-cost interceptor inventory.

In May, the U.S. Army sought industry proposals for a Patriot-compatible interceptor with a target unit cost below $1 million. The effort reflects the service’s desire for a less expensive weapon for appropriate engagements, preserving higher-end interceptors for targets that warrant their cost and capabilities. The Army’s solicitation also emphasizes component-level cost targets and competition among suppliers, including for rocket motors, seekers, and guidance systems.

Lockheed Martin has offered a separate industry response with its PAC-3 Adapted Capability Effector (ACE), a lower-cost interceptor intended to operate within the Patriot ecosystem. Unveiled in July, the weapon is intended to cost less than half as much as the PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement (MSE), according to the company. The MSE’s unit price is approximately $5.3 million in the Army’s fiscal 2027 budget request, putting the ACE’s implied price at around $2.5 million if Lockheed’s comparison holds.

Its projected price would still be well above the Army’s separate sub-$1 million target, reflecting the different objectives and requirements behind the two efforts.

The Navy, meanwhile, is pursuing a potentially broader shift toward modular interceptor architectures. Its Naval Modular Missile initiative envisions a family of surface-to-air weapons built around a common Terminal Stage Interceptor, with different boosters and canisters producing configurations for different missions and platforms. The plans include variants intended to fit multiple missiles within a Mk 41 launcher cell, as well as a version designed for launch from Virginia class submarines equipped with the Virginia Payload Module.

The Navy’s longer-term vision is to replace its existing Standard Missile family with modular variants, although the effort remains in development. The concept highlights potential operational benefits beyond manufacturing: smaller interceptors could increase the number of weapons carried aboard ships, while other configurations could preserve longer-range capabilities. The Navy has also outlined an ambition to reach production of 1,000 missiles annually within five years of a contract award.

Both the Navy’s modular missile initiative and Steelfin reflect a push toward common architectures that can support multiple interceptor configurations without requiring an entirely new missile for every mission. Steelfin’s stated scope is particularly broad, with Anduril pitching the family for missions spanning point defense through lower-tier air and missile defense to upper-tier ballistic missile defense. That would cover much of the air and missile defense spectrum, although it does not extend to exoatmospheric midcourse interception. Whether the family can deliver that breadth of capability at the promised cost and scale remains to be demonstrated.

Anduril says it has been developing Steelfin for several years with investment from multiple customers and has completed ballistic testing using representative air vehicles. Flight testing of Steelfin variants is planned for 2027.

Already, Anduril says it is working closely with “a number of different customers to get into the field.” Brose continued: “We feel like this is going to be a critical component of the U.S. and allied inventories to complement the range of exquisite capabilities that all of us are familiar with and know by name.”

Steelfin underscores what is now a broader trend toward lower-cost interceptors that can be manufactured at scale, and plugged into existing ecosystems, often with at least a degree of modularity to tackle new and emerging target sets. Steelfin adds to Anduril’s proposal to combine that modularity with a common production system designed to support thousands of weapons annually.

Anduril has yet to develop or produce a surface-to-air missile, although its Roadrunner system gives it experience in the related field of countering aerial threats, including loitering munitions. The company’s ambitions for Steelfin are significant, and modular architectures are certainly attractive. After all, a common baseline should simplify production, reduce costs, and allow interceptors to be tailored to different missions. In practice, however, realizing those benefits has historically proved difficult, and fraught with compromises. Whether Anduril can avoid those pitfalls while delivering the promised combination of capability, affordability, and production scale remains an open question. If it can, Steelfin could put the company in a strong position in the future surface-to-air missile market.

Contact the author: thomas@thewarzone.com

The post Anduril Unveils Steelfin Family Of Modular Surface-To-Air Missiles appeared first on TWZ.

A weather deterioration in Greece is forecast for the next couple of days and the National Meteorological Service (EMY) has issued an “orange” warning, that is Category 4. The main features of the new spell of bad weather will be intense weather phenomena locally, a drop in temperature, and strengthening winds over the seas. According […]

The post Greece Weather Warning: Intense phenomena with heavy rainfalls, thunderstorms, high winds appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.

Thomas Sankara had a signature look: a natty red beret, worn with military fatigues. A striking figure, Sankara was a military officer and the radical, anti-imperialist prime minister of the Republic of Upper Volta. His arrest in 1983 led to demonstrations, followed by a coup, after which Sankara was released and installed as president. By the following year Sankara had given the country he now led its new name — Burkina Faso. He fashioned a Burkinabè identity in his own anti-imperialist image, eschewing French for local languages, promoting economic self-reliance and national pride. 

In 1986, he famously took the then French president François Mitterrand to task in a fiery speech broadcast both in Burkina Faso and France. Sankara’s dashing uniform played an outsized role in how his words were interpreted. Here was Africa’s own Che Guevara. But by October 1987, Sankara was dead, killed during a military coup led by his former friend and ally Blaise Compaoré.

France, the old colonial power, backed Compaoré. Soon after the coup, French officials once again flocked to Ouagadougou, helping to prop up Compaoré for decades. 

This potted history is important to understanding the phenomenon of Ibrahim Traoré, Burkina Faso’s current president, an authoritarian head of state who in his charisma and self-presentation so deliberately echoes Sankara.

On September 30, thousands of Burkinabè gathered in Ouagadougou’s Place de la Révolution to hail Traoré on the fourth anniversary of the coup that brought him to power. As the second coming of Sankara, Traoré — whatever their entirely different political ideologies – is arguably the face of contemporary African anti-imperialism. It is a meticulously cultivated image that has almost nothing to do with Traoré’s actual record, or his achievements in Burkina Faso. 

Traoré is a pan-African leader for a digital age, an autocrat who has suspended his country’s constitution, dismantled its admittedly fledgling democratic institutions and been accused of crimes against humanity, but who has used artificial intelligence, particularly deepfakes, to bury that record beneath a highly effective cyber cult of personality.

How do Burkinabè reconcile the man with the persona? And is Traoré a triumph of the algorithm, the kind of politician increasingly familiar from Ouagadougou to Delhi, Berlin, Buenos Aires, and of course Washington, DC?

The man, the myth, the algorithm 

Ibrahim Traoré came to power in September 2022. In his own telling, while Sankara was installed as president, Traoré led the putsch himself. By January 2023, Burkina Faso terminated its military accord with France, giving French special forces one month to leave the country. In June this year, Burkina Faso ended all diplomatic relations with France. 

As Traoré turned away from France, he strengthened relations with Moscow. It’s in keeping with the pattern across the countries of the Sahel — Burkina Faso and its neighbours Mali and Niger — as the region’s colonial history with France has been swept clean by a broom held first by the mercenaries of the Wagner Group and latterly the Russian state itself, represented by the Africa Corps. 

But in April and May 2026, Africa Corps forces were dealt a humiliating defeat in northern Mali by a combination of Tuareg separatists and allegedly Al-Qaeda linked Islamists. The Malian defence minister was assassinated in a suicide bombing at his home near the capital Bamako. With Russia so involved militarily in the Sahel countries, Ukraine has admitted to assisting rebel forces. Both Mali and Niger have cut diplomatic ties with Kyiv. And Burkina Faso has described Kyiv as a destabilising force in the region, making the Sahel effectively a front in Russia’s war with Ukraine. As recently as September, Traoré named Ukraine as a part of Burkina Faso’s “map of enemies” for which, he added menacingly, “we need to prepare.”

Russia, as Coda Story has reported for years, has used everything from weapons sales to mercenaries to paying African influencers to both spread Russian narratives and hold Moscow up as the alternative to continuing to rely on exploitative economic relationships with the West, particularly erstwhile European colonialists.

Despite the extent of Russian attempts to influence the Sahel, it’s not Moscow that is signing the most consequential deals with the military juntas it helps prop up. It’s Beijing. And the deals being signed with China to mine the region’s extensive mineral wealth — the lithium, gold, copper, zinc, bauxite and uranium — have served as a reminder to the United States that it too should resume stalled relationships in the Sahel. Early in 2026, Burkina Faso signed a near $150 million healthcare deal with the U.S. in exchange, it appeared, for favourable access to minerals. Both Zambia and Zimbabwe backed away from similar deals, expressing concern about U.S. demands for data and minerals that amounted to an infringement of sovereignty. 

The deals with China and the United States are being negotiated alongside a drive to reduce reliance on foreign loans and grants and ramp up domestic production, particularly of gold. Traoré claims his economic policies emphasise nationalisation and self-reliance. His government has taken over major mining operations and increased state stakes in other industries. In early 2024, his administration suspended export permits for small-scale gold production to crack down on smuggling and keep mineral wealth inside the country. Last month, he inaugurated Burkina Faso’s first gold refinery. 

Some of this has had positive economic effects. The World Bank, in a June 2026 update, said the country had an estimated 5.3% growth in 2025, up from 4.8% in 2024, and its fiscal deficit narrowed from 5.8% of GDP to 1.8%. Inflation was also negative, 0.5%, compared to 4.2% in 2024. Reports by the World Bank and IMF have ascribed these growth to external factors such as the gold rally, climate-driven increase in agricultural outputs, and reduction in energy prices. 

Economic growth, though, is part of a larger story that includes a crackdown on the press, particularly critical coverage of alleged human rights violations. Human Rights Watch documented 1,840 civilian deaths between January 2023 and April 2025, over 1,200 of which were directly attributed to government forces. Even as the report acknowledged widespread violations by Islamist groups, the actions of the Burkina Faso military, it said, “amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity.” At the same time, Traoré has clamped down on Burkinabè civil society, banning over 100 human rights organizations and dissolving all political parties.

None of it appears to have affected his carefully-honed image in certain online spaces.

A pan-African hero 

Traoré is everywhere. In Accra, the capital of Ghana, his image is pasted onto buses and in parks. In January 2025, at the swearing-in of the Ghanaian president John Mahama, it was Traoré who the crowd responded to, cheering for a rockstar rather than a head of state. Even Mahama joked that Traoré had stolen the show. Artwork celebrating Traoré is frequently posted online. The commentary that accompanies the art is gushing. “Through this artwork,” reads one Facebook tribute, “I celebrate the spirit of a man who stands for sovereignty, truth, and the rise of a self-determined Africa.”

Meanwhile, the Ivory Coast government has granted refugee status to at least 69,000 Burkinabè fleeing Burkina Faso.

In May, when I travelled to Ghana and Ivory Coast to talk to people displaced from Burkina Faso, at least five sources decided they no longer wanted to speak. Guaranteeing anonymity didn’t seem to matter. A Burkinabè journalist who was helping me find people to speak to, stopped responding to my messages the day after I arrived in Accra. Those who did speak to me refused to be quoted for fear that harm would come to family and friends left behind in Burkina Faso.

Reporters have been intimidated into silence. “Today, any journalist living in the country is forced to practice self-censorship to avoid being arrested,” says Harouna Simbo Drabo, disinformation analyst and Director of Programs & Partnerships of Faso Check. “Burkinabé journalists have two options,” he told me, “either practice self-censorship or go into exile.” After threats to his life, Drabo has left Burkina Faso.

He’s one of the luckier journalists. Since 2022, at least seven Burkinabè reporters have been forcibly conscripted into the army after criticizing the Traoré junta's crackdown on the press. Guezouma Sanogo, Boukari Ouoba, and Luc Pagbelguem were abducted days after their union denounced state media as "instruments of propaganda." Atiana Serge Oulon, editor-in-chief of L'Événement, is among the disappeared. Many, like Drabo, have either left Burkina Faso or quit their jobs. 

As conditions deteriorate, what information is becoming available is government propaganda amplified by social media linked to Russian misinformation. In the absence of accurate, verified information, there is inevitably only disinformation. For instance, one of the most persistent pieces of disinformation is the story that Traoré — a supposedly avowed anti-imperialist despite his kowtowing to Moscow, Beijing and Washington — rejected billions of dollars in International Monetary Fund handouts because he believes, à la Thomas Sankara, in economic self-reliance. It is a story that has been debunked but was repeatedly told to me by Traoré supporters, including at least one journalist.

The claim was cited more than 700 times in a single three-day window in January 2025 alone, racking up millions of views across Facebook, X, and TikTok. Dubawa fact-checked the story and found that rather than rejecting money from the IMF, the Burkina Faso government had negotiated a 48-month IMF loan program in September 2023 and drew on World Bank financing in 2024. 

By mid-2025. Code for Africa's analysis found social media in sub-Saharan Africa flooded with AI-generated videos casting Traoré alongside Beyoncé, Rihanna, and, in one particularly unhinged iteration, Pope Leo XIV, all of whom supposedly endorsed him as a Pan-African hero holding the line against the West. After US AFRICOM commander Michael Langley criticized Traoré's handling of Burkina Faso’s gold reserves in a Senate hearing, a network of 165 Facebook accounts began posting identical language claiming Putin had deployed special forces to protect Traoré from an American assasination plot. In ten days it pulled 10.9 million views. 

In Accra, I caught a bus with a picture of Traoré emblazoned on the side. The driver, who only identified himself as Kofi, insisted that before we spoke I should tell him what I thought of Traoré. I say I am not Burkinabè, that I have not visited Burkina Faso but that I have spoken to many people whose lives have been upended by Traoré’s strongman politics. I told him about Burkinabè journalists in exile, forced to join the army, or even disappeared. I told him that when asked about a transition to democracy, Traoré said it was important for Burkinabè to “forget” about democracy. “We have to tell the truth,” Traoré said, “democracy isn’t for us.” I told him about the Burkinabè refugees I met in Treichville, a district in Abidjan, the Ivory Coast capital.

Kofi listened and then told me that “good things take sacrifice,” including the death of a free press. When I asked what he meant by good things, he showed me AI-generated videos of a smart city Traoré had supposedly built.

African identity is tightly wound around the belief that the continent has more potential than it has achieved. The deficit can be attributed to a lot of issues, but chiefly to Western exploitation and the complicity of African leaders. “African countries have also fallen into autocratic democracy,” Sanusi Sanusi, Research Analyst at the Digital Tech, AI & Information Disorder Analysis Centre, DAIDAC, tells me. “There is an election every couple of years but it isn't free or fair.”

Neil Postman, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, writes that “disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information — misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information — information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing.”

Many Traoré supporters I spoke with, most of whom were men, were convinced they knew things I did not. They told me to educate myself more on Western hypocrisy in Africa. They said they did not have faith in those who appointed themselves arbiters of what was fact and what was disinformation. In Lagos I met Lemi Ghariokwu, who designed album covers for the iconic Nigerian musician Fela Kuti, a revolutionary figure. Ghariokwu, who has a portrait of Ibrahim Traoré hanging in his studio, told me that “Western education and propaganda has made our elite class toothless bulldogs.” Listening to them, it seemed as if a successful Africa needed strongmen, needed autocrats.

In Abidjan, the last person I spoke to about Traoré was Oumar, a Burkinabè taxi driver who had moved to the Ivorian capital in 2021. He told me he “supports Traoré with all my heart.” But as we talked, he admitted he had not been back home because “things are only getting worse.” Three Burkinabè refugees I spoke to told me they thought I might be a government agent planted among them to find out what they really thought about Traoré and that I would then report those thoughts back to Ouagadougou.

Many of the Traoré supporters I spoke with thought I was brainwashed by Western media or, worse, too docile to participate in an African revolution. For my part, I thought they were ill-informed and unable or, worse, unwilling to see through propaganda.

The fundamental curse of the age of information and connection is that we rarely confront how the mediums meant to unite us have fractured us. An unprecedented flood of data has shattered shared reality into millions of customized, mutually hostile subcultures.

With the help of AI and social media, Traoré has managed to decouple national and anti-imperial pride from government performance. By the middle of next year, Burkina Faso will no longer be part of the International Criminal Court, denounced by Traoré as an “instrument of neocolonial oppression”, and thus no longer accountable in any international forum. His government has said it is “decolonizing” the school curriculum. Cheered on by social media, Traoré has used anti-imperial grievances and resentments to argue that authoritarian military rule is the only safeguard for sovereignty.

As some Burkinabè exiles told me ironically, they thought both I, so sceptical of Traoré, and the Traoré die-hards in the African diaspora could use a few months living in Burkina Faso. We should, they said, experience the country Traoré has made IRL. See past the carefully curated myth of the man himself, the largely online fantasy of the pan-African, anti-imperial revolutionary who needs to break a few eggs to make the omelet, and assess the country he runs unchallenged.

The post The cyber-fueled cult of Ibrahim Traoré appeared first on Coda Story.

Nigel Farage has pledged to shut down the asylum system for five years and deport 90,000 applicants immediately.

The post Farage Pledges to Shut Down Asylum System appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

Artificial intelligence is rapidly making its way into national defense. Reconnaissance, early warning, target detection, mission planning—everywhere, machine-learning systems promise faster analysis, faster responses, and faster decision-making. In a military context, this sounds like progress. In reality, AI exacerbates a security problem that cannot be solved technically. Anyone who attempts to do so anyway risks […]

The post When AI takes control of weapons systems appeared first on Asia Times.

British imams are openly preaching that husbands can beat wives who refuse sex – and the police are doing almost nothing about it.

The post The British Imams Telling Men to Beat Their Wives for Refusing Sex appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

from Man in America: TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

from The Duran: TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

This article is from Food for Feed, a series investigating the global fishmeal industry. It is produced by the Outlaw Ocean Project, a news organization based in Washington, D.C., and excerpted by Mongabay. In late August 2025, a company named Marine Impex Pvt. Ltd. contacted the city council of Cuncolim, a city in southern India, to propose constructing a new fishmeal processing plant. Each month, the 1.6-hectare (4-acre) facility would process at least 2,400 metric tons of fishmeal, a protein-rich, dark-yellow powder made by pulverizing and cooking wild-caught fish, which is used as feed for farm-raised seafood like shrimp, salmon, and tuna. The proposal sparked outrage. In media coverage, local environmental advocates and politicians voiced strong objections. “If this project is allowed, it is as if we have killed the people of Cuncolim,” said city councilor Landry Mascarenhas. State lawmaker Elvis Gomes drafted a letter to the governor of Goa state, where Cuncolim is located, asking him to intervene and explained that the stench from existing plants chokes “the lungs with such foul air that the effect of it pervades for a prolonged period.” He added, “It is simply beyond a normal human’s capacity to endure.” The outcry in Cuncolim cast a spotlight on a powerful industry with a history of wrongdoing. Between 2018 and 2024, at least 30 Indian fishmeal plants were involved in a range of environmental violations and other legal infractions, such as dumping waste into waterways and boreholes, evading taxes, using illegal timber to fuel boilers,…This article was originally published on Mongabay