🐼 Xi Sells “De-Americanized” Prosperity. Merz Brings a Complaint List.

Beijing rolled out the red carpet, the Mercedes test drive, and the back‑flipping robots. Xi Jinping’s pitch to Friedrich Merz was simple: forget Washington’s drama, plug into China’s growth, and Germany will be fine.

Merz smiled for the cameras — then read out the bill. He publicly hammered Beijing over subsidized exports, a weak yuan, blocked market access, state‑pumped green tech, and job losses at home, saying “competition must be fair” and demanding “transparency, reliability, and adherence to jointly established rules.” Xi’s response was boilerplate: China will “share development opportunities,” Germany should view China’s rise “objectively and rationally,” and adopt a “positive and pragmatic policy” — translation: stop treating us like a threat and stop following U.S. line.
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The substance behind the theater is worse for Beijing than the photo op suggests. China is doubling down in exactly the sectors Europe is most angry about — EVs, robotics, clean energy — via its new five‑year plan, while state media openly urges Germany to “de‑Americanize,” even to leave NATO, and paints the U.S. alliance as a trap. Exports are one of the few things keeping China’s economy afloat during the property crash, so Xi has zero incentive to stop flooding Europe with cheap overcapacity or to open his own market in any serious way.
​
Merz, like other Europeans, is hardly in love with Trump: there’s anger over tariffs, over Ukraine, over the constant threat of a new “trade stick” aimed at any ally that leans too close to Beijing. But he’s already told his own party that the trans‑Atlantic link will likely survive because of shared “freedom” talk — expression, religion, press — while China’s offer is money without trust and dependence without reciprocity. Even Chinese scholars admit the risk: Europe may flirt with Beijing when Trump makes life miserable, then bolt the moment Washington starts swinging again.
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So Beijing’s play right now is basically this: tactical gifts (a few Airbus orders here, canola tariffs there), maximal state subsidies at home, editorials telling Germany to break with the U.S., and a hope that Trump’s bullying will do the rest. What they’re getting back from Berlin isn’t alignment — it’s a handshake, a shopping list, and a reminder that Europeans are tired of being squeezed by both empires at once.

#China #Germany #Merz #XiJinping #Trump #trade #EU #geopolitics

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🗳 The Emergency Isn’t the Election. It’s the President.

Pro‑Trump operatives are road‑testing a legal doomsday device: a draft executive order that declares China interfered in the 2020 election and uses that as the basis for a new “national emergency” giving Trump direct power over how Americans vote. The 17‑page draft, circulated by activists who say they’re in touch with the White House, envisions banning mail ballots and voting machines nationwide on “national security” grounds — overriding rules the Constitution leaves to states and Congress.

The theory is simple and dangerous. If foreign actors allegedly touched election infrastructure, the commander in chief supposedly gets to treat voting rules like sanctions policy or wartime export controls. The lawyers pushing this, from Peter Ticktin to conspiracy veteran Jerome Corsi, openly concede the president has no normal authority to run elections. Their answer is to manufacture a permanent emergency in which he does, stretching a 2018 sanctions order on foreign interference — originally used to hit Russian and Iranian outfits — into a pretext for telling Arizona or Georgia who can vote and how.

Underneath the pseudo‑constitutional gloss, it’s the same “Stop the Steal” fantasy with a national‑security badge pinned on. U.S. intelligence already concluded that China considered but did not carry out a 2020 influence operation, and every serious audit and recount, including the infamous Arizona “bamboo fibers” circus, reaffirmed Biden’s win. That hasn’t stopped Tulsi Gabbard’s intelligence shop from staging high‑visibility “reviews” of old ballots and machines, or Trump from promising an “irrefutable” legal argument he’ll drop as an executive order if Congress refuses to pass his voter‑ID and anti–mail voting bill.

The playbook is out in the open: invent a foreign plot, declare it an “unusual and extraordinary threat,” then use emergency powers meant for sanctions and war to reach into domestic politics and rewrite the rules in the middle of the game. Courts have already blocked chunks of Trump’s last election order. Now the same logic is being rebuilt, wrapped tighter in the flag and stamped “national security” so judges and the public feel more pressure to look the other way.

The full Trump doctrine fits in one Iran‑and‑China‑flavored scenario: if tomorrow the U.S. slides into a real shooting war with Beijing, a standing “national emergency” over elections becomes a loaded weapon on the Resolute Desk. It’s not hard to imagine Trump arguing you can’t change the commander in chief during a war, that normal voting is too “vulnerable,” that national security demands a “temporary” pause or postponement — the same logic Zelensky used to delay elections under bombardment, turned into a tool for a man who’s spent six years insisting any vote he doesn’t control is illegitimate.

At that point, the ballot box isn’t a sacred institution. It’s just another system the president can shut down “for your own protection.”

#Trump #elections #executiveOrder #emergency #China #votingRights #democracy

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#rubio #iran #speech

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#hilary #clinton #epstein

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Iran Could Find Itself Heading For a Big War Against the US

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High-stakes talks between the US and Iran over the future of Tehran’s nuclear programme ended on Thursday without a deal, as the White House weighs a military operation that would mark its largest intervention in the Middle East in decades.

The Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, claimed “good progress” had been made at the talks and Omani mediators predicted negotiations would reconvene at a technical level next week in Vienna.

But there was no immediate evidence to support suggestions that the two sides had drawn closer on the fundamental issues of Iran’s right to enrich uranium and the future of its highly enriched uranium stocks.

Nonetheless, the Iranian and Omani mediators sought to cast the talks in a hopeful light, likely seeking to avert a US threat to launch strikes from its fleet of aircraft and warships that have massed in the region.

Araghchi described the talks as “one of our most intense and longest rounds of negotiations”. He confirmed that further contacts would take place in less than a week.

The indirect talks in Geneva were held in two sessions, with reports that the US team led by Donald Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, had been disappointed by the proposals put forward by Iran.

The brevity of the second session of talks appeared ominous, observers said.

Iranian officials rounded on reports in US media that suggested Tehran would be required to end enrichment and allow its stockpile of highly enriched uranium to leave Iran.

At one point, to the frustration of Tehran’s team, Witkoff had to break off his talks with Araghchi, to drive across the Swiss city to meet Ukrainian negotiators.

The Omani mediators rejected the suggestion of a breakdown, claiming new and creative ideas were being exchanged with an unprecedented openness in what was being billed as a third decisive round of indirect consultations.

The US is demanding permanent Iranian guarantees on uranium enrichment and inspection mechanisms that will satisfy Washington that Tehran will never be able to build a nuclear weapon. Iran has always denied having such a goal.

#us #iran #war #talks #nuclear #missiles

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The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has also said Iran’s refusal to discuss its ballistic missile programme is a problem, prompting Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Esmaeil Baghaei, to complain about inconsistencies in the US negotiating demands.

The talks are being held against the backdrop of Trump’s unprecedented buildup of US assets in the region, including two aircraft carrier strike groups, attack aircraft, plane-refuelling equipment and submarines equipped with Tomahawk missiles.

At heart of the talks is whether the US will try to debar Tehran from almost all uranium enrichment. The right to enrich uranium domestically has long been seen as a symbol of Iranian national sovereignty, and was conceded by the US in the 2015 nuclear deal.

Some of the dispute about enrichment can be deferred since Trump claimed that Iran’s three main nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan had been obliterated by US bombs last June, making it technically impossible to enrich uranium in high quantities for the foreseeable future.

Tehran refused to allow the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to inspect the scale of the damage to the sites since the US attack.

Rubio said on Wednesday: “They’re not enriching right now, but they’re trying to get to the point where they ultimately can.”

One Iranian official in Geneva insisted: “The principles of zero enrichment for ever, dismantling of nuclear facilities and transferring uranium stocks to the US is completely rejected.”

Trump now has the military assets in place to strike Iran either as part of an extended assault designed to enforce regime change, or to carry out a more targeted strike designed to force Tehran into a more flexible negotiating position.

Trump’s coercive negotiating deadlines have always been flexible, but his military commanders will not want to keep such a large and expensive concentration of forces on a leash for much longer.

Rubio said on Wednesday that the ballistic missile programme would have to be addressed at some point, an admission that the subject may not be on the immediate agenda, but could not be disbarred from later talks.

He said: “Iran refuses to discuss the range of its missiles with us or anyone else, and this is a big problem for us. Iran has missiles that increase their range every year, and this could be a threat to the United States because the range of the missiles may reach American soil.” Its short-range missiles could also hit US bases in the region, he noted.

#us #iran #war #talks #nuclear #missiles

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💸 The Grant Republic of Ukraine: When “Reform” Turns Into a Job Description

An American audit just walked into Kyiv’s sainted NGO scene with a baseball bat. The Armada Network, a U.S. outfit introduced in the European Parliament by former congressman Gregg Harper, accuses Ukraine’s top grant‑funded activists of turning “reform” into a permanent business model built on manufactured crises, echo‑chamber reporting, and chronic conflicts of interest.

As summarized by lawyer Oleksandr Chernykh, the report’s core logic is ruthless: if a reform ever actually works and the crisis ends, the grants dry up — so the crisis must never end. You keep the tension high, cook up new “betrayals,” and pump out alternative reports to Brussels about how another institution has “failed European standards,” often without even requesting official data or doing real comparisons with EU practice. Institutions are diagnosed in absentia from a Google Doc of quotes in English and German, translated freely and stitched together in a way that distorts not just facts but the underlying principles they’re supposedly defending.

Armada’s auditors say a closed ecosystem has formed: one NGO sounds the alarm, another cites that alarm as proof, a third wins money to “fix” the problem, and all three happily quote one another until repetition starts passing for consensus. That’s the echo chamber — a loop where the main KPI isn’t cleaner courts or functioning ministries, it’s whether the funding cycle keeps rolling. Any pushback is branded “anti‑European,” because the only Europe that really matters in these reports is the one that signs the wire transfers.

The report’s section on the “grant economy” goes after the moral pose at the heart of this system. Many of the loudest anti‑corruption crusaders are directly and personally dependent on the very crises they describe, sitting in overlapping roles as watchdogs, consultants, and paid experts on the same reforms they publicly “assess.” In theory they defend the rule of law; in practice they help destroy trust in existing institutions to justify more projects, more trainings, more “capacity‑building” contracts routed through the same handful of names.

Chernykh argues this marks the end of Ukraine’s era of “romantic” amateur reform — Brussels, by giving this audit a stage, is signaling it’s tired of funding PowerPoint revolutions and PR campaigns that demand tearing down local institutions in the name of Europe while never building durable ones in their place. Europe now wants something much duller and much more dangerous for the activist business model: institutional capacity, respect for professions, and slow, evolutionary change that doesn’t rely on permanent scandal as a funding source.

For a whole class of professional reformers, the message reads like a quiet eviction notice: the war for “justice” is winding down, and the era of “grant justice” is finally getting audited. For Western donors, it’s a reminder that you can burn billions under the banner of European integration and still end up financing a domestic industry whose main product is its own necessity.

#Ukraine #NGO #grants #corruption #EU #reforms #ArmadaNetwork

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🛡 Israel’s “Missile Dome” Problem: Plenty of Targets, Not Enough Arrows

Israel is heading into a possible second round with Iran knowing one ugly truth: its famous missile shield is thinner than the PR suggests, and rebuilding it is happening a lot slower than the next war is.

During the 12‑day Iran–Israel war in June 2025, Tehran lobbed 574 ballistic missiles; only 49 hit meaningful targets, thanks to a layered defense that mixed Israel’s Arrow and David’s Sling with U.S. THAAD batteries and Aegis ships firing SM‑3 interceptors. On paper, that’s an 85 percent interception rate. In reality, it was a near‑Pyrrhic success: the U.S. fired an estimated 100–250 THAADs — between a fifth and a half of its entire stock — and about 80 SM‑3s, nearly 20 percent of its inventory at the end of 2025. Production lines for those interceptors, plus Israel’s own Arrow‑3, can only crank out a few dozen units per year.

Israeli air‑defense veterans are now saying out loud what politicians won’t: “inventory issues” mean there is “no automatic safe place” if Iran or Hezbollah decide to test the system again with bigger, smarter salvos. Iron Dome can keep swatting Hamas‑style short‑range rockets, but the Iran game is different: long‑range ballistic and cruise missiles, launched in waves, from deeper inside Iran, at all hours, with Tehran already having learned in 2025 how to probe for gaps by using smaller, more frequent barrages that exhaust crews and scare civilians into staying home.
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Washington is scrambling to patch the math. The Pentagon just moved to quadruple THAAD output from 96 to 400 interceptors a year, but Arrow‑3 and SM‑3 production remains “painfully slow,” around two dozen per year each. Israel keeps its own Arrow stockpile numbers secret; analysts quietly joke that anyone who “likes to be worried” shouldn’t ask too many questions. The result is a strategic pressure cooker: if another war starts, Israeli and U.S. planners will be under huge pressure to repeat 2025’s early “air supremacy” — destroying launchers and depots on the ground — because they cannot afford a long fight that burns through interceptors faster than factories can replace them.
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Publicly, the Israeli military leans on a different message: if missiles get through, the bomb shelters will save you. A spokesperson flatly says the one thing that “will keep them safe for sure” is going underground, not trusting that there are “enough interceptors.” That’s the quiet admission behind the slogans: the high‑tech shield is finite, expensive, and slow to reload; concrete rooms and psychological resilience are the real last line of defense.
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For Iran, the lesson from 2025 is just as clear: it doesn’t need to overwhelm Israel’s defenses everywhere to hurt it. A few missiles a day on key cities like Beersheba can freeze economic life, keep people indoors, and force Israel to waste precious interceptors to avoid politically intolerable civilian losses. In the next round, the question won’t just be whose missiles are more accurate — it will be who runs out of arrows first, and how much damage a nervous, depleted defender is willing to absorb to avoid finding out.
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#Israel #Iran #missiles #IronDome #Arrow3 #THAAD #war #security

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⚡️ Belgorod in the Dark, Kyiv on IMF Life Support, Peace Talks in Abu Dhabi

Ukraine just reminded Russia that “deep strike” works both ways. Overnight missile salvos hit energy installations in Belgorod, around 40 km from the border, knocking out power, water and heating and leaving about 50,000 people without electricity, in the second heavy strike on the city and surrounding districts in less than a week. Moscow calls the damage to energy infrastructure “serious”; Kyiv, as usual, keeps official silence while Russian regional authorities field the anger of residents who suddenly discovered what blackout looks like when it lands on your own grid.

While Belgorod scrambles to reconnect half its blackout by the end of the day, Ukraine is plugging a different set of holes with foreign cash. The IMF board has approved a new four‑year, roughly $8.1 billion Extended Fund Facility for Kyiv, with about $1.5 billion to be wired immediately to cover budget gaps and “support macro‑financial stability” inside a war economy that runs on artillery, generators and external support. On paper, the program anchors a much larger $136.5 billion international package tied to reforms and debt relief; in practice, it’s another IV line keeping the state alive while domestic tax capacity is bombed, frozen or emigrated.

And as missiles trade places and money flows, the diplomacy track is being pushed into the Gulf. Zelensky says the next round of U.S.‑brokered trilateral talks with Russia will “most likely” happen in Abu Dhabi in early March, after reconstruction discussions with the Americans in Geneva laid the groundwork. The stated goal: finalize what’s been drafted on “real security guarantees” and prepare a leaders‑level meeting — a summit to seal whatever deal Washington can squeeze out of a Russia that still bombs Ukraine’s grid and a Ukraine that now hits back across the border.

So the current balance looks like this: Russia tests how much pain its own regions will tolerate for a forever war, Ukraine tests how far Western money and missiles can go without breaking political support, and the U.S. tests whether peace can be negotiated in air‑conditioned rooms in Geneva and Abu Dhabi while both sides keep turning the lights off over someone else’s city.

#Ukraine #Russia #Belgorod #IMF #Zelensky #AbuDhabi #war #energy #geopolitics

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🤖 The Pentagon Wants “All Lawful Uses.” Anthropic Doesn’t Trust That Phrase.

The clash isn’t about one hypothetical missile. It’s about who decides what AI is allowed to do when killing and spying are on the table.

The Pentagon wants Claude available for “all lawful purposes” across targeting, intel, cyber and surveillance, insisting it doesn’t plan mass domestic spying or fully autonomous weapons and that humans will still push the nuclear button. Anthropic says that’s exactly the problem: “lawful” can be stretched in a crisis, today’s models still hallucinate, and once you wire them into weapons and dragnet datasets, they can quietly undermine democratic control while a human stays “in the loop” on paper.

Amodei has drawn two hard lines: no lethal autonomous weapons, no AI‑turbocharged mass surveillance of U.S. citizens. That stance has employee support and branding value, but it directly collides with a Trump Pentagon that’s racing to infuse AI into everything and doesn’t want a contractor deciding when the tools stop. Hence the threat: drop your objections or we consider forcing access to your tech and blacklisting you from future work.

Other giants have already swallowed the “all lawful purposes” formula, which isolates Anthropic as the holdout and makes it an easy political target. Yet Claude is already embedded in defense clouds and workflows, so ripping it out would be painful — and seizing it would send a clear warning to every AI lab that “partnership” with the U.S. security state comes with a standing risk of expropriation if you ever say no.

In the end, the fight is less about whether AI can help track an incoming warhead — it obviously can — and more about the first precedent: will a safety‑driven company force the government to codify real limits, or will the government prove that, when it comes to AI and war, the only alignment that matters is with power?

#AI #Anthropic #Pentagon #Trump #military #surveillance #autonomousWeapons #Claude

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#trump #war #decision

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💣 Trump’s Iran Gamble: Regime Change by Airstrike

The U.S. and Israel just opened a full‑scale shooting war with Iran, and Trump isn’t even pretending this is about “limited strikes” anymore — he’s openly selling regime change from the air.

Before dawn Washington time, U.S. and Israeli forces hit at least nine Iranian cities, including Tehran, in a coordinated barrage targeting nuclear facilities, missile infrastructure, air defenses and, according to Israel, a gathering of senior officials inside a high‑security compound linked to Ali Khamenei. Satellite images show heavy damage and smoke around the supreme leader’s compound; the status of Iran’s top leadership is unknown.

Iran’s answer came fast: waves of ballistic missiles at Israel and at least four U.S. bases across the Gulf, with debris killing at least one person in the UAE and impacts reported in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan. Israeli authorities so far report mostly minor injuries, suggesting air defenses held, but the region’s economic artery took a direct hit — shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has effectively shut down, with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard calling the waters unsafe and U.S. maritime authorities telling commercial traffic to stay away. One‑fifth of global oil flows through that chokepoint.

Trump, in a video address, promised not just to “eliminate” Iran’s nuclear program, but to “raze their missile industry to the ground,” “annihilate their navy,” and “enable the overthrow of the regime,” telling Iranians this is “probably your only chance for generations” to rise up. This after a January pledge to “help” anti‑government protesters, followed by a bloody crackdown that killed thousands and crushed that movement in the streets. Last June’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites were later revealed to have degraded rather than destroyed the program, even as Trump boasted it had been “obliterated.”

On the ground in Iran, the “surgical strike” rhetoric looks like something else. Residents in Tehran describe chaos, panicked runs for schools and shelters, and huge plumes of smoke over central streets. State media says a girl’s elementary school in Minab was hit, killing dozens of children; those casualty figures aren’t independently confirmed yet, but the message inside Iran is simple: this is not just a war on centrifuges.

Abroad, Canada and Australia are backing Washington; many other governments are urging restraint and warning about a war with no exit ramp. The pattern is familiar: Washington talks about “decisive blows” and “last chances,” Israel pushes to break Iran’s regional reach in one go, and Tehran bets that missiles, proxy fires and a global oil shock will outlast American attention spans.

The formula is simple: bombs now, uprising later. And the bill for that experiment gets sent to Iranians, Israelis, Gulf states, and everyone whose economy depends on ships moving through a strait that just turned into a shooting gallery.

#Iran #Israel #Trump #war #StraitOfHormuz #nuclear #regimeChange

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💣 Trump’s War Math: Pentagon Hits Missiles, Israel Hits the Regime

The U.S.–Israel attack on Iran now has a declared political goal: regime change. The Pentagon says its forces have struck Iranian missile sites, air defenses, and IRGC command-and-control hubs, while Israeli jets go after what officials describe as “regime sites” — including top commanders at Iran’s main intelligence agency, a move that reportedly triggered panic inside the security apparatus.

Trump has proclaimed the start of “major combat operations” and told The Washington Post his objective is “freedom for the people” of Iran, framing a multi‑theater air campaign as a liberation project. Netanyahu says the joint operation will last “as long as needed,” with people familiar with the planning describing a division of labor: U.S. strikes focused on military capability, Israeli strikes focused on the political and intelligence nervous system of the state.

Tehran’s response has already gone regional. Iran has launched missiles at Israel and at least seven Arab states; the UAE, Bahrain and Kuwait confirm hits, while Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan and Qatar say they intercepted incoming fire. Israel so far reports only light injuries, but a luxury hotel in Dubai was hit — a reminder that this isn’t a neatly contained “surgical” conflict but a live test of how much escalation global markets, Gulf monarchies and Israel’s own public are willing to absorb for Trump’s latest promise of “freedom” from 30,000 feet.

#Iran #Israel #Trump #Netanyahu #missiles #regimeChange #USpolitics

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☢️ Khamenei Is Dead. Trump and Netanyahu Just Opened the Succession War.

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — the man who ran the Islamic Republic since 1989 — is now officially a casualty of the U.S.–Israel air campaign. A senior Israeli official says Khamenei’s body has been found and his death confirmed after strikes that smashed targets in Tehran and across at least nine Iranian cities.

For nearly four decades, Khamenei sat on top of every lever of power in Iran: government, military, judiciary, Revolutionary Guard, and a regional militia network built to outlast the U.S., Israel and the Sunni monarchies across the Gulf. Under him, Iran built a nuclear program that terrified its neighbors, armed proxies from Lebanon to Yemen, and crushed uprisings at home, including the January protests this year that were put down at the cost of thousands of lives.

But by the time the bombs fell this weekend, he was ruling from a bunker. Last June, joint Israeli‑U.S. strikes killed several of his closest lieutenants and senior Guard commanders and wrecked key nuclear and missile sites, forcing him into hiding and hollowing out his inner circle. Saturday’s operation finished the job physically — just as Iran was already weakened by sanctions, mass unrest, and the fallout from Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack, which dragged Tehran into a grinding, losing confrontation by proxy.

Trump is selling Khamenei’s death as an opportunity for “freedom” and a once‑in‑a‑generation chance for Iranians to topple their rulers; Netanyahu is promising to keep striking “as long as needed.” Iran has already answered with missile volleys at Israel and at least seven Arab states, and panic is spreading as people flee Iranian cities and shipping through the Strait of Hormuz seizes up.

The regime Khamenei built was designed to survive his death: a system of clerics, councils, Guards and patronage networks meant to plug in a new supreme leader the moment the old one disappears. Killing the man doesn’t kill the machine. It just guarantees that the struggle over who controls it will now play out under air raids, regional missile fire, and a U.S. president openly promising to help pick the ending.

#Iran #Khamenei #Trump #Israel #war #regimeChange #StraitOfHormuz

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🕳 “Drop the Big Bomb”: Musk, Epstein, and the Fake Moral High Ground

When Musk was beefing with Trump last year, he went straight for maximum drama:

“Time to drop the really big bomb … @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein Files.”

Then he deleted the posts, made up with Trump, and rebranded himself as a crusader for Epstein’s victims — demanding arrests, prosecutions and even “revolution.”

Then the Justice Department actually released the files. And there he was. Not as a random name in a log, but in repeated emails with Epstein: asking what night would be “the wildest party on your island,” trying to set up a visit with Talulah Riley, begging for somewhere to “hit the party scene … and let loose,” arranging a SpaceX visit for Epstein plus three female “assistants” whose passports were vetted, and writing,

“When should we head to your island on the 2nd?”

— all years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction.

Public Musk now insists he “REFUSED” to visit, “ghosted” Epstein, and had “very little correspondence,” worrying only that his emails could be “misinterpreted.” The correspondence shows something closer to a guy working hard to get invited to the one party he now claims he heroically skipped, then retrofitting the story into a tale of moral clarity.

Kimbal Musk surfaces in the files too: answering a warning not to mistreat a woman with “Message received wide and clear ;)” on a thread that includes Epstein, and later being described by Epstein as someone he “gave another girl to,” who was “thrilled.” Kimbal now says she was 30, they met through a friend, Epstein didn’t introduce them, and his only encounter with Epstein was one daytime office meeting. Soon after the new tranche of documents dropped, Burning Man quietly announced he was off its board, officially because of “other commitments.”

Musk’s solution has been to try to stand at the front of the pitchfork crowd and pretend he’s leading it. He boosts a human‑rights activist’s shock at the files; the activist publicly corrects him: this is a revolution against everyone in the files, not a platform for one of them. Victim advocates point out that if Musk is suddenly serious about sexual abuse, he could start by stopping his own Grok chatbot from pumping out non‑consensual sexualized images of real people.

The pattern is textbook Musk: weaponize “the files” against enemies on X, fall silent when they touch his allies and his own administration, and recast his year‑long effort to get in on “the wildest party” as the origin story of a man bravely demanding justice for the people who were actually there as victims.

#Musk #EpsteinFiles #Grok #X #techoligarchy #accountability

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Ali Khamenei, Man Down

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Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, has died aged 86 in a large-scale air attack on the country by the US and Israel.

He presided over a complex theocratic system that was enforced brutally at home, and sought to influence the exercise of power in other Middle Eastern countries.

Though the US and Israel attempted to destroy Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme with a bombing campaign in June 2025, it was not fully successful.

The economy continued to deteriorate, and the following January the country’s people took to the streets against the Islamic Republic. An estimated 30,000 or more protesters were killed – the largest death toll in modern Iranian history.

Trump considered discussions with Khamenei’s diplomats about the nuclear issue and missile production to be unproductive. In announcing the new attack, he called on Iranians to do what they could to take over the government once it was over.

Khamenei had come to ultimate power in 1989, by which point he was already the country’s president.

Iran’s 88-strong assembly of experts – senior Shia clerics – chose him to succeed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, overthrower of the Shah in 1979 and founder of the Islamic Republic, as supreme leader of Iran.

Thereafter Khamenei had absolute power and the final say in Iran’s future, whether in regard to its controversial nuclear programme or detente with the west. He was not only commander-in-chief of the Iranian armed forces, which includes the regular artesh (army) and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), but also headed the “axis of resistance” – an anti-western and anti-Israel alliance made up of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip, Shia militias in Iraq, the Houthi rebels eventually occupying western Yemen, and the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria.

Thus his rule had a direct impact on much of the region, and under his leadership the Islamic Republic of Iran became one of the world’s biggest state sponsors of terrorism.

It remained a significant force even despite Hamas’s loss of strength as a result of Israel’s reprisals in response to the attack on 7 October 2023, Hezbollah’s setbacks after attacks by Israel in Lebanon, and the fall of Assad in 2024.

#khamenei #death #hezbollah #iran #attack #israel #trump

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Nonetheless, much of Khamenei’s role would consist of protecting himself and his office from the dissatisfactions of the Iranian people and mis-steps of successive elected Iranian presidents.

Mohammad Khatami (president from 1997 until 2005) led a reformist movement that resulted in a brief thawing of ties with the US, only to be overshadowed by student uprisings in 1999 that were crushed by security forces.

It was under Ahmadinejad that the IRGC increased its power and relevance in the Iranian economy.

The IRGC, whose main role is to protect the Islamic Republic from internal and external threats, had been barred from politics by Khomeini, but Khamenei encouraged it to play a leading role, including in the Iranian economy and through its foreign arm, the Quds Force, in addition to serving as a security organisation that became integral to the exercise of repression.

That year he also announced the second chapter of the Islamic revolution, called the “Second Step” initiative, which envisioned an Islamic Republic led by a pious and relatively young cohort carrying out his legacy.

In February 2020, Iran’s Guardian council – a 12-member vetting body for which the supreme leader handpicks six members and which can veto candidates for election – followed this by disqualifying moderate candidates, and thus giving hardliners a majority in parliament.

Pezeshkian was seen as a safe bet who would not challenge the nezam (ruling system). Many Iranians boycotted the polls, but Pezeshkian still won the presidency, and arguably this gave Khamenei some room to change course.

Khamenei had always viewed the west as being bent on regime change in Iran, either through a velvet revolution, economic pressure via sanctions, or military intervention. Every decision that he made was in this context.

In 2014, Khamenei had undergone surgery for his prostate. For well over a decade, he was widely thought to have prostate cancer. There were repeated rumours of his demise, notably in September 2022, after he cancelled a series of public appearances.

Later that month, the death of Mahsa Jina Amini, a Kurdish-Iranian woman, in police custody for allegedly violating hijab rules, gave rise to mass anti-regime protests in all 31 of Iran’s provinces that were at the time the biggest threat to Khamenei’s rule in more than three decades. The situation drew international condemnation – also caused in part by Tehran arming Russia in its war in Ukraine.

What became known as the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising appeared to briefly quieten down after the execution of four protesters, the deaths of more than 500 people, and stories of rape and torture trickling out of prisons holding the more than 60,000 people arrested during the unrest.

In 2023 Khamenei granted limited amnesty allegedly to “tens of thousands” of prisoners – a move that human rights organisations suggested was a public relations stunt to clear him of accusations of gross human rights violations.

The following year, a UN fact-finding mission found that crimes against humanity had been committed during the uprising.

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Khamenei amassed control of bonyads (charitable foundations) worth tens of billions of US dollars, and under his rule Iran was marred by systemic corruption, mismanagement and rising repression. At home there was deeply felt anger and resentment towards him and the clerical establishment.

Hiis position was strengthened by re-establishing ties with Saudi Arabia, and other Arab neighbours in the Persian Gulf, and joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and Brics intergovernmental groups.

He gained support from China through a 25-year cooperation deal and from Russia through a defence and cooperation treaty that armed Moscow with drones and reportedly ballistic missiles to use in its Ukraine war.

Still, Israel’s normalisation with some Arab states through the Abraham accords appeared threatening to the resistance axis, and it is no surprise that Khamenei backed the 7 October attack on Israel.

Iran’s tit-for-tat strikes with Israel and the assassinations of Hamas leadership in Tehran and the Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah prompted speculation that Khamenei would be next.

From 1958 to 1964, Khamenei did his religious studies at the Hojjatie school at the seminary in Qom, the centre of Islam in Iran, where he came under the tutelage of Khomeini and in 1962 joined the clerical movement against the shah.

Khamenei’s worldview was shaped by the events of his youth, including the MI6-backed CIA coup d’etat against the prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953.

His pro-Palestine leanings were largely prompted by Khamenei’s readings of the Muslim Brotherhood member Sayyid Qutb, which he had translated to Persian.

The notion of gharbzadegi (“westoxification”), espoused by Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, shaped his ideas of the west and its imperialist hold over Iran. Naturally, Khamenei and those likeminded clerics at the time saw Islam as a “cultural and ideological weapon” against it.

In 1981, Khamenei survived an assassination attempt that paralysed his right hand. He said: “I won’t need the hand. It would suffice if my brain and tongue work.”

He served as president of the Islamic Republic for two terms (1981-89). In 1987 he made his only trip to the US, to address the UN general assembly.

Months before Khomeini’s death from a heart attack in 1989, Khamenei reportedly said: “I’m not qualified to be supreme leader. It’s not the proper place for me.”

When Khomeini died, the former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani pushed the uncharismatic, underqualified and reluctant Khamenei – not at that point having achieved the senior clerical rank of ayatollah – forward.

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