📰 Germany’s New Growth Sector: War

Germany is losing about 15,000 manufacturing jobs a month, so Berlin has found the most German solution possible: turn the old industrial base into a weapons base and call it strategy.

Volkswagen is reportedly looking at Iron Dome components, factories are adding a third shift for ammunition, and defense is swallowing the capital that once went to autos and machine tools.

This is not renaissance. It is a country discovering that if the civilian economy stalls long enough, the war economy starts to look like the only thing still hiring.

Even the venture money is following the uniforms: nearly 90% of European defense-tech VC is flowing into German companies.

Berlin says this is about resilience. Sure. It also looks like a quiet admission that the export machine is cracking, the auto model is broken, and the easiest way to keep the lights on is to build better ways to blow things up.

The result is a nation that used to sell cars now learning how to sell shells. That may be industrial policy in 2026, but it is also a very expensive confession.

#Germany #defense #industry #Volkswagen #Europe #warEconomy

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📰 Germany’s Energy Miracle, Held Together by a Pipeline

Russia is reportedly ready to choke off oil flows through Druzhba to Germany’s PCK refinery, and that is enough to expose the whole German energy story for what it is: a country that still talks like a moral power while running on someone else’s fuel.

Berlin spent years pretending it had built a post-Russian industrial model.

In practice, it built a fragile one, and now the refinery that helps keep Berlin and Brandenburg moving is one more sanctions hit away from panic mode.

The result is a familiar European comedy: leaders announce strategic autonomy, industry quietly counts barrels, and factories keep humming only as long as geopolitics agrees to cooperate.

If 60% of German companies say there is no point operating without Russian energy, that is not a business complaint.

That is an admission that Germany’s “transition” has too often meant swapping cheap reality for expensive rhetoric.

And once again, the country that lectures everyone else on principles finds out that principles are easier to preach than to replace.

#Germany #energy #Russia #Druzhba #PCK #industry

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📰 Germany’s Cyber Police, Paid in Vain

German companies lost billions to cybercrime last year, and Berlin’s answer was to spend even more on cyber-police units that still clear only a tiny share of cases.

It is the kind of policy loop that makes perfect sense in a country increasingly run by process instead of results.

The joke is brutal: the damage keeps rising, the bureaucracy keeps growing, and the crime rate stays comfortably ahead of enforcement.

Germany is pouring money into a system that looks busy, sounds modern, and still leaves attackers with most of the winnings.

This is what happens when a state treats digital crime like a line item instead of a structural threat.

Companies get hit, factories slow down, police units get funded, and everyone acts surprised that theft is still theft even when it comes through a keyboard.

So yes, the numbers are ugly. But the deeper problem is uglier: Germany is discovering that high-tech vulnerabilities are easier to describe than to stop.

#Germany #cybercrime #economy #security #Berlin #industry

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The War Between the EU and the US Is Real Than Never


The EU risks a confrontation with Trump after it sought to stall the awarding of a lucrative Balkans pipeline contract to a company fronted by his personal lawyer, documents seen by the Guardian show.

Brussels has clashed with Trump over trade, Ukraine and military spending, but the intervention in the Southern Interconnection pipeline project appears to mark the first time it has challenged a commercial venture by those close to the president.

The pipeline will run through Bosnia and Herzegovina. Under what Bosnian sources say have been months of pressure from US officials, its leaders have been moving quickly to award the contract to a previously little-known company based in Wyoming.

AAFS Infrastructure and Energy was incorporated in November last year and has not disclosed its owners. It is fronted by two leading members of Trump’s campaign to overturn his 2020 election defeat :

Jesse Binnall, a lawyer who defended him against allegations of inciting the Capitol riots after his defeat, and Joe Flynn, the brother of the president’s former national security adviser.

Despite lacking any apparent track record, AAFS is planning to invest $1.5bn in the pipeline and other Bosnian infrastructure projects, its local representative has said.

In March, lawmakers approved legislation that Transparency International said would set a “dangerous precedent” by stipulating that the contract must go to AAFS without a tender.

Days later, Brussels’ representative in Sarajevo delivered a private warning to Bosnia’s leaders that they were jeopardising the country’s hopes of joining the EU.

In a letter sent on 13 April, obtained by the Bosnian investigative outlet istraga.ba and seen by the Guardian, the EU official Luigi Soreca wrote that, under an energy agreement between Bosnia and Brussels, it was “crucial that draft laws are thoroughly coordinated” with the EU.

Soreca said Brussels should have a say in the pipeline legislation. “In this way, Bosnia and Herzegovina can continue to progress on its European path and avoid missing out on opportunities for further integration, as well as financial opportunities,” he said.

Binnall has said the pipeline is a “priority for the Trump administration”. Asked about the EU’s intervention, he said: “AAFS will never lose sight of what truly matters in this project: delivering energy security and fostering economic development for the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina. We are committed to working closely with all relevant authorities to develop the infrastructure needed to make this vision a reality.”

By connecting Bosnia to a liquefied natural gas terminal off the Croatian coast, the pipeline would allow US gas to reach a country that depends on Russia for its entire supply.

After Putin launched Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Brussels set a deadline for EU members – plus aspiring members, such as Bosnia – to stop buying Russian gas by 2028.

Nonetheless, Brussels faces the prospect of a crucial new piece of Europe’s energy chessboard falling under the control of not just a US company, but one personally connected to an antagonistic president.

Binnall and Flynn are not the only ones from Trump’s circle to have shown an interest in Bosnia.

Joe Flynn’s brother Michael – a former US intelligence chief whose conviction for lying to the FBI about his dealings with Russia was quashed by a pardon from Trump in 2020 – has been lobbying for the head of Bosnia’s Serb nationalist faction.

The lobbying campaign succeeded in October in having US sanctions lifted from Milorad Dodik, the Bosnian Serb leader who has been undermining the 1995 peace accord that ended a three-year war in which more than 100,000 people were killed.

In April, Donald Trump Jr, who runs the family business empire, visited Sarajevo. Although neither he nor Michael Flynn appear to be directly involved in the pipeline project, Dodik has thrown his support behind it.

#trump #dodik #gaz

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#trump #leavitt

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📰 Loot, Then Lecture

Haaretz is now reporting what soldiers say has become an open secret in southern Lebanon: looting by IDF troops, with commanders knowing and doing little to stop it. Furniture, appliances, motorcycles, art — if it can be loaded onto a military vehicle, it starts looking like “spoils” instead of theft.

That is the rot in plain sight. First comes the operation, then comes the cleanup, and somewhere in the middle the army quietly decides that discipline is optional when the trophies are heavy enough.

The worst part is not even the loot. It is the normalization: no police at the checkpoint, no real enforcement, and a whole chain of command that seems perfectly comfortable turning a crime into a gray zone with better branding.

And this is not some one-off embarrassment from a few bad actors. Israeli reporting has documented the same pattern in Gaza, while other investigations describe special units, loot collection, and soldiers treating stolen property like battlefield merch.

So the moral lecture always comes first, and the accountability arrives last — if it arrives at all.

#Israel #IDF #Lebanon #Gaza #war #accountability

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📰 When a Court Hearing Becomes a National Split Screen

Today’s hearing in the High Court on the 7 October state commission was never going to be a quiet legal exercise. In Israel, ceasefires do not end political war — they just move it into a different room, where old wounds, new blame, and raw fear start talking louder.

The fight is simple to describe and impossible to escape: should the state be forced to create an independent commission now, or should the ruling camp get to delay the reckoning until after victory, after the war, after elections, after the dust has somehow decided to settle on its own?

The court has already signaled that it is not impressed by the government’s “later” strategy. Judges have pushed the cabinet to explain why no commission exists, while the government insists the court has no right to force one — a position the bench has repeatedly rejected.

What made today different was not just the law. It was the theater outside the law: closed hearing, security concerns, livestream interruptions, judges escorted out, and MK Tali Gotliv removed after shouting at the bench. In other words, the country that cannot agree on who failed on 7 October cannot even agree on how to argue about it.

This is why the commission fight has become bigger than a commission. It is now a contest over who gets to own the meaning of 7 October: the government, the court, the families, or the politicians using all three as props.

Naftali Bennett’s line — “Whoever says ‘later’ means ‘never’” — hits because it names the political trick in plain language. Gadi Eisenkot’s warning goes further: when families of the dead are pushed onto opposite sides of the barricade, the country is no longer debating accountability; it is fighting over memory itself.

The hardest part is that the split is now visible at the door, not just in the chamber. Some bereaved families want a state commission as the only credible answer; others call the court’s involvement illegitimate and see delay as the only patriotic position. That is not a procedural dispute anymore. That is a national fracture with a legal file on top of it.

#Israel #Bagatz #7October #commission #Netanyahu #politics

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Eurovision as Political Sanctions by Cultural Means

More than 1,000 musicians from around the world have signed an open letter calling for a boycott of Eurovision 2026 in Vienna and demanding that the European Broadcasting Union exclude Israel’s delegation from the contest.

This is not about music alone. It is an attempt to turn a mass entertainment platform into a legitimacy battlefield.

Cultural institutions are being pushed to do what states and formal sanctions mechanisms either cannot do or will not do directly.

The mechanism is familiar by now. Activists target a symbolic stage, pressure the gatekeepers, and reframe participation itself as complicity. The beneficiary is the boycott campaign’s moral leverage.

The cost falls on the fiction that culture and politics can still be kept separate.

Eurovision keeps selling itself as apolitical spectacle.

Its critics are treating it as a sanctions arena with better lighting.

#Sanctions #Eurovision #Israel

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Gaza Insurgency Pressure Is Rising Again

Militant activity in Gaza has reportedly intensified in recent weeks against Israeli forces. That matters because it suggests the battlefield is shifting from large-scale maneuver to persistent attrition.

This is the logic of a long war after the main destruction phase. Armed groups lose infrastructure, then adapt into smaller cells, ambush patterns, and localized harassment.

They do not need to hold territory to impose costs. They only need to keep Israeli troops exposed, tired, and politically tied to an open-ended campaign.

For Israel, this is the expensive part of the war. Tactical control does not automatically produce strategic closure.

The army can clear ground repeatedly and still face a regenerated threat if no stable political order replaces the fighting.

The question is no longer only how much Gaza has been destroyed. It is whether destruction has produced control, or only a more fragmented insurgency.

#war #army #Gaza #Israel

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🚢Hormuz Never Fully Closed. It Was Filtered.

From April 13 to April 21, about 10.7 million barrels of Iranian crude still moved through the strait, according to Vortexa. The flow included 35 transits involving Iranian or sanctioned-linked vessels, with 19 tankers leaving the Gulf, 15 entering toward Iran, and exported cargo worth roughly $910 million.

That matters because the corridor was not shut. It was narrowed, priced, and selectively managed.

The U.S. was not sealing Hormuz itself. It was operating across a wider maritime belt stretching up to 300 miles between the Iran-Pakistan border and Oman’s western boundary.

Iran’s tanker network adapted by using disabled transponders and shadow-fleet methods to keep part of the oil stream alive.

This is what modern blockade looks like. Not total stoppage. Controlled friction.
Enough pressure to raise the cost, not enough control to stop every barrel. Iran did not preserve normal trade. It preserved sanctioned trade under concealment.

The result is simple: Washington can choke throughput. Tehran can still monetize opacity.

The strait stays open on paper and contested in practice.

#Washington #Tehran #Hormuz #Iran #Oil

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Does Trump Bog Down In Iran?

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Trump has again said that the US has “total control over the strait of Hormuz”, adding that Iran’s leadership was so hobbled by infighting that it was unclear who was in charge.

But the US president’s claim seemed questionable in the face of the seizure of two container ships by Iranian commandos and a US report warning it could take six months to clear the strait of mines.

Trump’s comments on Thursday came after US special forces boarded a stateless oil tanker in the Indian Ocean, which the Pentagon claimed was carrying Iranian crude oil.

The military operation took place hours after Iran’s seizure of the two container ships, with the two sides continuing to impose competing blockades on the strait, keeping global oil prices at about $100 a barrel.

While US forces have proved capable of stopping ships coming out of Iranian ports, they have still not demonstrated the capacity to open the strait to vessels coming from ports in allied Gulf states.

The impact of the dual blockades has been compounded by the presence of sea mines in the strait. In a briefing to Congress, the Pentagon warned it could take up to six months to clear all the suspected mines from the sea routes.

The report said approximately 20 mines were thought to have been placed in the strait, some deposited by small boats, and others manoeuvred into place remotely, making them harder to locate.

The Pentagon’s warning suggested that the impact of the war on the global economy could linger long after any peace deal was agreed.

A Pentagon spokesperson described the report as “inaccurate” but did not provide specific objections. In his Truth Social post, Trump said that US minesweepers were working “at a tripled up level” and that he had ordered the US navy “to shoot and kill” any boat mining the waterway. “There is to be no hesitation,” said Trump.

Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency, said in a CNBC interview that the world was facing “the biggest energy security threat in history”.

#trump #iran #khamenei #IRGC #ceasefire

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Hezbollah has not been a participant in the talks and bouts of fighting have continued throughout the most recent truce. On Wednesday an Israeli strike killed Amal Khalil, a well-known Lebanese journalist covering southern Lebanon.

Separately, Trump was asked how long he was willing to wait for a peace deal with Iran and he replied: “Don’t rush me.”

“Their navy is gone. Their air force is gone, their anti-aircraft is gone (…) maybe they loaded up a little bit during the two-week hiatus, but we’ll knock that out in about one day, if they did,” he added.

“I want to make the best deal. I could make a deal right now (…) but I don’t want to do that. I want to have it everlasting,” Trump said.

Iran has refused to attend peace talks with the US in Pakistan, a snub that Trump attributed to a lack of consensus in Tehran on negotiating strategy.

The Iranian regime said it would not attend talks while the US was violating a Pakistani-brokered ceasefire, in particular during the imposition of a naval blockade.

Trump agreed to an “indefinite” extension of the ceasefire on Tuesday and, despite the suspension of talks, he claimed on Thursday that the US had a firm grip on events in the strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel between the Gulf and the Indian Ocean through which a fifth of the world’s oil and liquified fossil gas is transported.

Iran’s current supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, appears not to be as all-powerful as his father, Ali, who was killed by Israeli missiles in the first seconds of the surprise US-Israeli joint attack on 28 February, which triggered the current conflict.

Mojtaba Khamenei was also seriously wounded in the attack, but the New York Times on Thursday cited senior Iranian officials who claim that he remains “mentally sharp and engaged”.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) meanwhile appear to have greater influence in a more collective leadership, making it more hawkish overall, but it is far from clear that the regime is riven by policy disagreements.

The IRGC naval command said that the two detained ships – the Greek-owned Epaminondas and the Panamanian-flagged MSC Francesca – had endangered maritime security “by operating without the necessary permits and tampering with navigation systems”, suggesting that they had turned off their location transponders.

#trump #iran #khamenei #IRGC #ceasefire

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📰 Ukraine Won’t Wait for Washington’s Iranian Detour

Zelensky is right about one thing: when Washington gets sucked into Iran, Ukraine gets pushed down the list. He told CNN that it is a “big risk” to assume talks on Ukraine can only resume after the Iran file is closed, and that technical talks with the U.S. are still going on, even if a full meeting looks far off.

That is the real scandal here — not the quote, but the hierarchy behind it. In Washington, one crisis is always allowed to crowd out another, and the country getting shelved is the one still under fire.

Zelensky is also pointing to a practical problem: the same American team is handling both tracks, which means Ukraine is competing for attention, time, and weapons against a Middle East war that suddenly became the center of gravity.

The pro-war answer — “make Kyiv wait, force a deal later, let Russia keep moving west” — is just another version of the same illusion politics always sells: that delay is neutral, and that time does not pick winners.

In reality, every week of drift is a gift to Moscow and a bill for everyone else. Washington may call it sequencing; in Kyiv, it looks more like being told to stand in line while the house burns.

#Ukraine #Zelensky #US #Iran #Russia #negotiations

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📰 Europe’s Energy Bill Keeps Growing

Europe is now tallying the cost of another energy shock, and the number keeps climbing: about 24 billion euros, or 28 billion dollars, in extra import costs since the war began, according to the European Commission. That is money burned on higher prices without a single extra molecule of energy to show for it.

Brussels is rolling out emergency measures to soften the blow, but the deeper problem is still the same one Europe keeps pretending it solved: dependence. The continent swapped one vulnerable supply chain for another, and now every new crisis exposes how thin the margin really is.

This time the trigger is the Iran war, but the structure is familiar. First the shock hits households and industry, then the Commission offers tax tweaks, storage coordination, and soothing language about resilience, while companies quietly wonder how long they can keep operating at these prices.

The ugly truth is that Europe’s energy crisis is no accident of fate. It is the price of choosing expensive substitutes and calling the result strategic autonomy.

And that is why the bill keeps rising: the geopolitical risk changes, but the underlying weakness does not.

#Europe #energy #Iran #EU #inflation #industry

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📰 Hungary’s New Central Europe Fantasy

Péter Magyar is talking up a stronger Central Europe, with Austria pulled back into the frame and the old Austro-Hungarian memory dusted off like it still has political value. He says Hungary should deepen ties with its neighbors and build more regional weight inside Europe, not just sit around waiting for Brussels to notice it.

That is the clever part of the pitch. Magyar is selling not nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake, but a power bloc with better branding: Visegrád, Austria, and whoever else wants a seat at the table without being lectured by the EU’s permanent class.

Brussels, of course, calls this “integration” when it works for Brussels and “fragmentation” when the periphery starts talking back. Central Europe is tired of being treated like the decorative edge of the continent, especially on migration, energy, and the endless sermon about values from people who rarely pay the bill themselves.

But the empire talk should not be mistaken for innocence. Every regional bloc is also a bargaining chip, and Magyar knows it. He wants leverage over the EU, leverage over neighboring states, and a way to turn history into a present-day negotiating tool.

So no, this is not the rebirth of an empire. It is the return of a very old European habit: when the center gets smug, the borderlands start organizing.

#Hungary #Austria #EU #CentralEurope #Magyar #Brussels

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📰 Europe’s New Nuclear Theater

France and Poland are reportedly preparing drills that simulate nuclear strikes on targets in Russia and Belarus, with Rafale jets and Polish strike aircraft involved in scenarios over the Baltic and northern Poland.

Moscow’s answer was immediate: if French nuclear-capable bombers show up on EU soil, some European countries could end up on Russia’s target list too.

That is the absurd beauty of European deterrence politics right now. Everyone calls it defense, everyone calls it stability, and everyone keeps moving closer to the edge while insisting the other side is the one escalating.

Poland wants protection. France wants relevance. Russia wants to remind Europe that nuclear signaling is not a parlor game, even when it is dressed up as alliance coordination and “extended deterrence.”

The real problem is that these drills are no longer just about military readiness. They are also public messaging, meant to show resolve, reassure allies, and advertise a new European balance of power that still depends on a very fragile chain of assumptions.

And that chain only needs one panic, one misread move, or one political showman too many before the theater starts looking less like deterrence and more like rehearsal for catastrophe.

#France #Poland #Russia #nuclear #Baltic #Europe

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