👨‍💻 🇺🇸 🇮🇱 Colette Kress, named Nvidia’s interim chief executive, has long coordinated with the chipmaker’s Israel operations.

“My day starts with Israel meetings, and only then continues to California,” she told Globes in 2023.

At the time, Globes reported that about 3,200 Nvidia employees — 12% of the workforce — were based in Israel, at centers in Yokneam, Tel Aviv, Ra’anana, Tel Hai, Kiryat Gat and Beersheva, after the purchase of Israeli networking company Mellanox.

Kress called that deal “one of the best acquisitions I saw in the industry.”

https://clashreport.com/world/articles/nvidia-names-kress-interim-ceo-amid-a-growing-israel-business-a6mwjy7x88

📢 🇺🇸 🤖 House Foreign Affairs chair: ‘Very likely’ chips restrictions make it into defense bill

Rep. Brian Mast said the Nvidia scandal has added momentum to the effort to pass tighter guardrails on exports of advanced U.S. chips.

Mast also said Thursday that he still has confidence in Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who is facing growing scrutiny over his handling of the Trump administration’s chips policy. But he declined to say the same for a key Lutnick deputy, Jeffrey Kessler, who heads the Commerce Department bureau in charge of export controls.

Mast is pressing for Huang to testify soon about the scandal.

“We want to see him basically in a week,” Mast said. “Sooner rather than later.”

“If negotiations shut off and we don’t think they’re in good faith, OK, fine, do that,” he said. “I’ll just subpoena you for the next day. No big deal.”

https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2026/11/12/congress/nvidia-chips-export-controls-mast-trump-huang-defense-01162557

📝 🇺🇸 🤖 Brivael Le Pogam argues that Jensen Huang's personal scandal is being strategically exploited to enact strict federal AI regulations, including a Department of AI with licensing powers over model development. The author contends that this regulatory capture, following recent congressional wins by Democrats, will crush open-source AI—a stance previously defended by Nvidia—while benefiting large tech giants who can afford compliance costs. This shift, the post claims, effectively creates a state-controlled information monopoly, a trajectory already seen in Europe, while China continues to advance through open-weight distribution. - Cocoon AI Summary

Brivael Le Pogam: Make no mistake. The Jensen Huang scandal isn't just a story about someone's private life.

It's a lever. And it's going to be used for one thing: taking control of AI.

I'm not saying the facts are made up. Jensen admitted the affairs, and the investigation should run its course. I'm saying: look at what's being built on top of it.

Look at the sequence.

Early November, Democrats win both chambers of Congress. Right after, they announce a flood of AI bills.

One congresswoman calls for a pause on advanced AI development and a ban on superintelligence, on day one. A bill introduced in the House would create a federal Department of AI with the power to decide which companies are allowed to build advanced models. A senator wants a federal AI Safety Board with mandatory standards. Others want mandatory testing before any model is released.

Translation: tomorrow, to release a model, you'll need permission.

And who was standing in the way? Jensen.

He fought export restrictions he saw as counterproductive. He fought the state-by-state patchwork of AI laws. His very first post on X was a letter signed by Nvidia on a single topic: why open models matter. Safety, innovation, sovereignty. The world needs both closed models and open models.

Nvidia is one of the most powerful companies on the planet publicly defending open weights.

And now, in Washington, analysts are saying it out loud: the scandal has broken Nvidia's ability to slow those bills down.

For those who want to lock everything up, the timing is perfect.

Why does this matter so much? Because open source is the only thing standing between AI and a tool of control.

If AI stays open, anyone can download a model, inspect it, modify it, run it on their own machine. A student in Lagos. A small business in Ohio. A dissident in Hong Kong. No one can switch it off. No one can decide for them what the machine is allowed to say.

Kill open source, and what's left?

A handful of closed models. Licensed. Tested, approved, monitored by a federal agency. And when an agency decides what an AI is allowed to say, it decides what billions of people will read, learn and think.

That's not a technology anymore. That's a Ministry of Truth with an API.

And don't believe for a second these rules will hurt the giants.

George Stigler, Nobel laureate in economics, showed it: regulation almost always ends up captured by the very players it claims to rein in. A multimillion-dollar license? The giants pay it without blinking. A ten-person open source lab can't. Bureaucrats write the rules, the biggest players write them alongside them, and everyone else disappears.

A caste of bureaucrats, backed by a few billionaires rich enough to buy their ticket in. That's what the closed world looks like.

Europe already went down this road. The result: models launch in the US and China, and reach Europe months later. If they reach it at all.

And while America gets ready to handcuff itself, China is shipping open-weight models one after another and giving them to the whole world.

My read: the Huang scandal will be the first pretext. Not the last. Every incident, every fear, every headline will be used to close one more door.

If AI stays open, it belongs to everyone.

If it closes, it belongs to whoever hands out the licenses.

And that day, it's game over.

📎 Brivael Le Pogam

🇺🇸🤝🇮🇱 The likely future House majority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, couldn't answer if the Democratic Party would stop the process of merging the Pentagon & U.S. military industrial complex with the IDF.

Hakeem Jeffries did not say whether he supports removing provisions deepening U.S. defense cooperation and intelligence sharing with Israel from the National Defense Authorization Act when asked at his Thursday press conference.

“I haven’t had a conversation with Senator Van Hollen,” Jeffries said, referring to the senator leading the charge for their removal.

He called for “dramatic change” in Gaza, the occupied West Bank and the U.S.-Israel memorandum of understanding “as it winds down,” without specifying what changes he would seek to the agreement.

🔗 Drop Site (@DropSiteNews)

🇸🇦🇪🇺🇾🇪 Saudi Arabia Presses EU to Designate Yemen’s Houthis as Terrorists

Saudi Arabia is pressing the European Union to designate Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis as a terrorist organization, six European officials told Reuters on Thursday, but most member states remain unconvinced.

The campaign has not overcome European fears that a listing would close limited channels with the group and undermine a future Yemen peace process.

A listing requires the unanimous support of all 27 EU member states. Only a small number back the step, one of the officials said, declining to identify the countries because the talks were private.

The Houthis already face an EU arms embargo and asset freezes on 12 commanders. The bloc has listed Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization, but has not listed the Houthis themselves.

The United States designated the group, also known as Ansarallah, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in March 2025. Australia and Canada have taken similar steps.

The European Parliament last month adopted a largely symbolic resolution calling on the EU to list the Houthis as a terrorist group.

Joana de Deus Pereira of the Royal United Services Institute said European governments wanted to show solidarity with Saudi Arabia but remained hesitant, and that a designation would have limited practical effect.

She also cited possible Houthi attacks on European vessels near Yemen and complications for aid groups in areas the movement controls. Officials added that a designation is hard to reverse, because lifting it would also require unanimity.

🔗 https://clashreport.com/world/articles/saudi-arabia-presses-eu-to-designate-yemen-s-houthis-as-terrorists-ukaxjo31tie

🇮🇱❌🇫🇷🛠 Israel banned French politicians Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his deputy, Mathilde Panot, from setting foot on Israel territory.

Mélenchon and his supporters are passionate supporters of the movement for Palestinian statehood and have called repeatedly for Israel to be held accountable for the genocide in Gaza and the West Bank and for Israel to return land seized from Palestinians and neighbouring states (Lebanon and Syria).

🔗 BFM (@BFMTV)

🇮🇷🇮🇶🇵🇰🇹🇷🇺🇸 The U.S. has tried and failed to pressure Iraq, Turkey and Pakistan into sealing off their borders with Iran

The first step in the United States’ campaign to economically strangle Iran was a naval blockade of its ports, cutting off Iranian trade by sea. Next came a raft of new sanctions, grounding much of the country’s air transport network.

Now, the United States is going after Iran’s last economic artery: its land routes. Only there, Washington has hit upon a problem.

For weeks, U.S. officials have tried — and failed — to diplomatically pressure Iran’s neighbors into shuttering their border crossings, according to three Iraqi officials and one U.S. official with knowledge of the talks, who requested anonymity to speak candidly.

Those neighboring states, primarily Turkey, Iraq and Pakistan, are increasingly wary and disgruntled by U.S. policies they say could hurt them as much as Tehran.

Many of those countries were already frustrated with Washington for ignoring their pleas not to start a war with Israel against Iran in February, a conflict in which they have suffered economic costs and physical destruction.

So, on Saturday, the U.S. military joined the effort, announcing Task Force Iron Gate, which it says will work on “preventing the movement of advanced weapons systems, dual-use technologies, sanctioned materials, and illegal revenue streams across Iran’s land borders and the Caspian Sea.”

It is unclear how the task force will operate in practice, and it is unusual for such an economic and security campaign to be run by U.S. Central Command, known as CENTCOM, which oversees military operations in the Middle East.

Former U.S. military officials and analysts say the move was likely aimed at taking advantage of CENTCOM's intelligence capabilities and resources, which were already focused on Iran amid the war. CENTCOM, they said, could sharpen the focus and organization of previously uncoordinated efforts among diplomats, anti-money laundering units and intelligence agencies to clamp down on land routes.

After months of stalemate, the Trump administration was widely expected to launch renewed strikes on Iran after the midterm elections. But momentum for that has fizzled as officials took stock of a sweeping Democratic victory that many of them, including Vice President JD Vance, linked to the war’s unpopularity with American voters.

The Trump administration is now casting about for other options to pressure Iran to accept a deal more favorable to the United States.

By deepening the blockade, the hope is “it just weakens the system so much from within that there will be implosion,” said Alex Vatanka, a Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington. Analysts say U.S. officials are hoping to turn the economic screws until domestic turmoil forces Iran’s clerical rulers to capitulate to U.S. demands, or the government simply collapses.

📝 Anon: Cuba is still holding out after 66 years of U.S. embargo, refusing to capitulate in spite of all the misery and poverty the U.S. blockade imposed on the Cuban people. Iran isn't an island nation like Cuba, nor surrounded by the U.S. itself or its proxies. It has its own resources and has powerful allies which are connected by land and sea to Tehran. The White House is incredibly foolish to believe that what didn't work on Cuba will work on Iran.

🔗 https://unwall.app/www.nytimes.com/2026/11/11/world/middleeast/us-blockade-iran-taskforce-iron-gate.html

🇧🇾🌐❌🇦🇲 Belarussian foreign minister, Maxim Ryzhenkov, called for Armenia's access to classified information related to the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) be restricted

Ryzhenkov noted that in recent years Armenia has demonstrated a passive approach to its participation in the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and the CSTO.

“All these steps that are being taken amount to passive participation and the use of certain knowledge and advantages derived from membership in these associations for one’s own selfish interests, which, let us say, do not align with the goals of the integration associations. Because we want to be strong, we want to show solidarity on political issues, economic issues and security matters. But you know what the situation looks like? I will take what interests me from you — certain prices for gas and oil, and, well, the transportation of my goods to the end consumer. The rest does not concern us,” Ryzhenkov told Belarus-1 television.

The head of Belarus’s Foreign Ministry said Armenia’s attitude could not go unnoticed.

“For a certain period, the allocation of staff positions under the quota system and participation in the decisions of certain organisations have been suspended,” Ryzhenkov said.

He reiterated his position, questioning why a pseudo-ally should be granted full access to highly classified documentation. He noted that he was speaking hypothetically about the possibility that such access could be used in ways contrary to the interests of countries seeking to further develop the integration association in a spirit of solidarity and unity.

At the CSTO summit in Moscow on November 11, Armenia was stripped of its voting rights in the organisation over “failure to fulfil its obligations,” according to reports.

🔗 https://reform.news/en/ryzhankou-proposes-denying-armenia-access-to-csto-documents/

🇺🇸🇷🇺🇺🇦🇪🇺 What’s on the table in Abu Dhabi? Ukraine, Russia attempt the outlines of a new European security deal

The US-brokered Russia-Ukraine talks beginning in Abu Dhabi on November 10 may represent the best opportunity yet to end the war before Russian President Vladimir Putin completely destroys what is left of Ukraine’s economy. Kiev is already almost totally blacked out and temperatures are just above freezing. A mass exodus from the capital is now on the cards.

There will be no breakthrough today – that’s not the plan. Unlike previous rounds, these talks have started with a pragmatic frame of mind: build a step-by-step process to get to settlement. The delegates are meeting to sketch out a wireframe of a potential deal, and a series of meetings are planned building up to a final Putin-Zelensky tête-à-tête when a final bargain could be struck.

But it’s going to be hard. Putin goes into the meeting under mild pressure as the Russian economy is feeling real pain now, but not enough to force his hand. Zelensky goes into the talks in a desperate situation: he has run out of defence ammo completely; his corruption scandal has metastasized to Stage 4 and will kill him soon; society is on the verge of revolt thanks to plunging quality of life and the aggressive conscription campaign; and the EU has run out of money to help him.

Zelensky has run out of time. He has been touring the world to get more interceptors and money and failed in both endeavours. He has already run out of men. Putin has also just taken his “Pandora’s box” campaign up a level and is now talking about the “total destruction” of Ukraine’s infrastructure. That is manifest by the systematic targeting of substations that cut cities off from the NPPs, the last source of power in the country. Blackouts in some cities are already lasting 22 hours.

But there is a lot more common ground than usual. The big changes include:

🔶 The US offered a real security deal as part of December’s 27-point peace plan (27PPP) and this seems to still be on the table;

🔶 Russia is also being offered a real security deal, which was mentioned before but is now centre stage;

🔶 Having been excluded before, everyone, including the Kremlin, agree that Europe (but not the EU) has to be involved in the deal;

🔶 Everyone agrees that Zelensky will have to give up some land (Donbas) and Zelensky has signalled that he is willing to think about it – provided his security deal is good enough; (this is the potential dealbreaker).

🔶 What this all boils down to is they are discussing a new post-Cold War pan-European security deal – something we have been calling for, for more than a decade. This whole war started because of Putin’s concern (paranoia) over NATO’s expansion to the Ukrainian border and Russia’s de facto exclusion from the European security architecture which designated it a de facto “enemy”. This was Putin’s “Cuban missile crisis” moment, whatever you think about it.

The World Health Organisation has warned of a looming humanitarian crisis. Countries like Germany are quietly preparing for a fresh million-strong wave of refugees. Electricity, heating, water supplies and essential healthcare, are all being targeted, even schools, potentially leaving millions of Ukrainians without any basic services during the coldest part of the year. This was all entirely predictable, but despite Zelensky best efforts he has been unable to avoid the looming missile barrage.

The disaster to come has focused everyone on more realistic goals. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio made that change explicit on November 9, saying out loud that, “any security guarantees for Ukraine must also be acceptable to Moscow,” which is new.

🔗 https://www.intellinews.com/moscow-blog-what-s-on-the-table-in-abu-dhabi-ukraine-russia-attempt-the-outlines-of-a-new-european-security-deal-483497/

🇺🇸⚡️ — Senate Banking Committee ​Chairman Tim Scott has summoned U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and former Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to testify before the Senate Banking Committee next month over national security concerns following revelations that Huang had a relationship with Alice Huang, whom U.S. intelligence suspects of being a Chinese spy.

The committee is ready to issue a subpoena if Huang doesn't show up.