People have been asking me all week, “What the hell is going on?” And that’s because I’m a professional editor and an award-winning journalist who’s been covering toxic disasters like this for years. Also, I’m from Orange County, and my family lives in Garden Grove, about 10 minutes from the GKN Aerospace facility, so I’ve been watching all of this very closely.
If you haven’t been obsessively investigating these kinds of stories like I have, the recent rapid-fire bombardment of headlines can make it seem like all these toxic disasters are coming out of nowhere. An explosion here, a toxic spill there, a fire there. “Why is this happening? And what the hell do we do?”
So, right off the bat, the most important thing to understand is that this is not all just happening now. It’s been happening, and most of the time you just haven’t been hearing about it.
I promise you, this is just the tip of the iceberg…
All the craziness this week actually gives me extreme deja vu that goes back to the first toxic disaster I covered while it was unfolding: The 2023 Norfolk Southern train derailment and chemical disaster in the small town of East Palestine, Ohio.
From the train derailment itself to the disastrous and unnecessary decision three days later to empty five rail cars’ worth of toxic vinyl chloride and set it on fire—releasing a massive black death plume into the air and exposing communities for miles to deadly toxins—that story was so horrific and unbelievable that it drew the attention of the public and the media, and then the public and the media started noticing that more train derailments were happening all over the place.
And it felt then exactly then like it does now. People were rightly asking, “What the hell is happening? Is the sky falling? Is this all part of some big conspiracy or what?”
But because I had been interviewing so many railroad workers, I knew the reality that the US averages over 1,000 train derailments a year. Which is a big problem, but it’s not a problem the media had covered much before East Palestine, so when they finally did start covering derailments, it felt like it was all happening suddenly and it was all coming out of nowhere.
But, again, because I’ve spoken to railroad workers across the industry, I also knew that this is part of a larger problem that is the result of decades of deregulation, corporate consolidation, and ruthless, profit-seeking, cost-cutting railroad executives and their Wall Street shareholders destroying the rail industry and our supply chain so they could rake in record profits. Cutting jobs, year after year. Piling more work onto fewer workers and working them to the bone. Making the trains longer, heavier, and more unwieldy. Automating human jobs and removing layers of security designed to keep workers safe and the communities those trains are blazing through safe as well.
This all comes down to these companies obsessively trying to lower their operating ratios, year after year, and sacrificing long-term safety for short-term profits.
Don’t forget that, throughout 2022, railroad workers were preparing to go on strike for the first time in decades, and they were warning me and anyone who would listen that, if these greedy rail giants and Wall Street bloodsuckers weren’t reined in, it was only a matter of time before a deadly catastrophe happened on the rails. Then, President Joe Biden and both parties in Congress conspired to break the potential rail strike in early December of 2022, workers had contracts shoved down their throats, and nothing on the rails fundamentally changed. Then, two months later, the derailment in East Palestine happened.
There are two really important lessons here that we need to learn to understand what’s happening now, in 2026, with these toxic disasters around the country.
First, like with the train derailments, there is a similar dynamic going on here where a high-profile disaster has people and the media just paying more attention to these things now.
As a journalist who covers these kinds of disasters year round, all over the country, in red states and blue states, in cities and rural areas, I can tell you that: These disasters aren’t just starting now and they’re not freak accidents coming out of nowhere. And if you think you’re safe and far away from the danger, I have some bad news for you…
You may be living in or near a “sacrifice zone” and not even know it. You could be breathing in toxic exhaust from nearby factories and trash incinerators, your pipes may have lead that’s poisoning you, your local water supplies may be contaminated by runoff from industrial plants, nuclear facilities, fracking operations, coal mines, landfills, massive industrial farms and concentrated animal feeding operations. A truck or train or ship, operated by exhausted and exploited workers and hauling hazardous chemicals, could crash by your home. A military base or government-owned plant could be polluting your body and blood with PFAS/PFOS or radiation. Or a giant damn data center could be moving to your town.
Again, this shit is everywhere.
And if you’re only seeing this in Democrat or Republican terms, if you’re only looking at the headlines and not the history behind these toxic disasters, then you are not gonna see the full picture here. This is not a red state or a blue state problem, this is a working-class problem. Corporations and the government are turning more of America into one giant “sacrifice zone,” and more of us are being set up for sacrifice than we realize.
Just like with the corporate behemoths and Wall Street vultures who destroyed the railroad system with the help of their bought-off politicians in both parties, the crisis we’re in now developed over time. And while every toxic disaster is different, I often feel like I’m investigating a serial killer because I hear the same stories coming from different disaster zones around the country.
And if I had to name that killer, its name would be: Profit. Specifically, it’s our political and economic system that prioritizes private profits over the public good and working people’s lives.
That has been the driving force behind decades of policy measures to deregulate industries, corrupt the very government agencies that are supposed to regulate them, defang the penalties for polluting our community, and disempower the workers and local residents affected by them so they can’t do anything about it. And, of course, that is the driving force behind all these greedy executives and Wall Street shareholders across industries obsessively cutting costs while simultaneously speeding up production, ignoring safety protocols and removing safety measures, and almost always choosing short-term profits over long-term investments in safer facilities, stronger worker protections, and less outdated equipment until and unless a catastrophe happens.
Basically, all this dangerous, life-threatening, environmentally hazardous stuff has ended up all around us, and it’s all gotten less safe, over many years of corporations and politicians “fucking around” for their own gain at our expense. Now, America is in the “find out” stage, and working people are the ones getting stuck with the toxic bill.
"If you’re only seeing this in Democrat or Republican terms, if you’re only looking at the headlines and not the history behind these toxic disasters, then you are not gonna see the full picture here.
Dopo una lunga trattativa e diversi rinvii, il Parlamento europeo e il Consiglio dell’Unione Europea hanno raggiunto un accordo sul nuovo regolamento rimpatri, il provvedimento destinato a completare il quadro...
Pro-Trump lawyer Aberaldo de la Espriella pulled ahead as a leader in Colombia’s race for the presidency in the first round of elections over the weekend, capitalizing on a growing appetite for heavy-handed crackdowns on criminal groups across Latin America. Speaking with FRANCE 24's Mark Owen, Christopher Sabatini, Senior Research Fellow on the Americas at Chatham House, says that "this is really again a part of what's unfortunately called the 'Donroe' doctrine asserting itself in partisan politics in Latin America".
Relations between Tehran and Washington have reached a critical point following a sharp escalation of tensions in the Middle East.
Iran has announced the immediate suspension of its negotiation process with the United States, accusing Washington of enabling the actions of the Israeli military. The decision comes amid intensified fighting in Lebanon and Gaza, effectively nullifying previous ceasefire understandings.
The conflict now risks expanding beyond regional clashes and developing into a large-scale maritime blockade of strategically vital waterways.
The Pentagon's decision not to mention Taiwan at a major security forum has sparked discussion about shifting US priorities, military-industrial challenges, and the future balance of power in the Asia-Pacific region.
Pentagon Forgets About Taiwan
Behind Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's diplomatic silence on Taiwan lies a systemic crisis within the American military-industrial complex and tactical doctrines.
Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth pointedly avoided mentioning Taiwan in his keynote speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue forum in Singapore on May 30. Western analysts believe this was done to avoid unnecessary confrontation with Beijing.
Years after conflicts fade from the headlines, the weapons used to fight them often continue to circulate – crossing borders, fuelling crime and undermining an often-fragile peace. Now, ghost guns, 3D-printed firearms and increasingly sophisticated trafficking networks are creating new challenges for governments worldwide.
Le Conseil de sécurité s’est réuni lundi après-midi à la demande de la Roumanie pour examiner l’intrusion présumée d’un drone russe transportant des explosifs dans son espace aérien dans la nuit du 28 au 29 mai. La demande avait été soutenue par les membres européens du Conseil. Le Département des affaires politiques et de la consolidation de la paix des Nations Unies (DPPA) a présenté un exposé aux États membres. Suivez le compte rendu des discussions grâce à l’équipe de la Section de la couverture des réunions des Nations Unies.
Un expert* indépendant des Nations Unies a exprimé, lundi, sa vive inquiétude face à la poursuite de la violence, de l’insécurité et des violations des droits humains dans plusieurs régions de la République centrafricaine.
Des milliers de personnes fuient la banlieue sud de Beyrouth après de nouvelles menaces de frappes israéliennes, tandis que le Conseil de sécurité doit se réunir en urgence à la demande de la France face à l’aggravation des combats dans le sud du Liban.
To document the importance of subliminal messages in movies, let’s turn to one of the most memorable movies ever: Schindler’s List, a fiction by Jewish director Steven Spielberg. Our intention is to show how Jewish owned Hollywood hides and falsifies facts to sully White culture. [1] As noted by Mark Weber of the Institute for...
Iran’s response to the American provocation made it crystal clear that the current incarnation of the proposed 60-day ceasefire framework does not hold. MOSCOW – Iran holds an insurmountable escalation dominance in contrast with the U.S. And that’s driving the vociferating Emperor of Barbaria absolutely nuts. Let’s quickly recap the highlights of the past week....
When the first Remigration Summit went forward last year in a small town near Milan, Italy, organizers had to count as a success that it managed to happen at all, so fierce was opposition from leftist groups and establishment politicians. This year’s event in the small Portuguese town of Figueira da Foz demonstrated that the...
The revelation that Israel established secret military bases inside Iraq during the recent war against Iran is far more than another episode in the region’s long history of covert operations. It signals a deeper transformation in Middle Eastern geopolitics: the normalization of clandestine cross-border military infrastructures, the erosion of Iraqi sovereignty, and the increasingly blurred...
The Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) found more than 500 million rubles’ worth — roughly $7 million — of real estate, cars, and luxury goods belonging to the family of Valery Fedorov, director of the Russian state polling agency VTsIOM. FBK reached that conclusion after reviewing financial records, leaked data, and the Instagram account of Darya Vasilyeva, Fedorov’s 30-year-old second wife.
Fedorov has headed VTsIOM since 2003. The agency, among other things, publishes research on Russians’ trust in the current government. Meduza and other independent outlets have reported repeatedly on how the center utilizes such publications to manipulate public opinion. VTsIOM uses those surveys to shape the perception that a “majority” of Russians support Vladimir Putin and his political decisions.
Consider a recent case: Putin’s approval rating has been falling since late March, amid mobile internet shutdowns in Russia, bans on Telegram, and rising food prices. As the rating continued to fall, the center changed its polling methodology and began conducting not only phone interviews but also door-to-door surveys. However, after a brief reversal, poll results published on May 29 showed that 67.5 percent of respondents approved of Putin’s performance as president — down 1.9 percentage points from the previous week.
Until recently, Fedorov’s wife kept an Instagram blog documenting her high-society life and foreign travels. She and the VTsIOM director traveled to France, Italy, Germany, and Azerbaijan as early as 2018, when Fedorov was still married to his first wife. He later divorced and married Vasilyeva in 2021. The couple has a child together.
On her Instagram account, Vasilyeva posted, among other things, photos and videos of expensive cars and other luxury items. According to FBK, she owns:
A Porsche Cayenne worth 12.5 million rubles ($173,600)
A Zeekr minivan worth 9 million rubles ($125,000)
A collection of Hermès handbags (at least 24) worth roughly 53 million rubles ($736,100)
A collection of Cartier and Bulgari jewelry worth 19 million rubles ($263,890)
Vasilyeva also owns a 170-square-meter (1,830-square-foot) apartment in Moscow’s Smolensky De Luxe residential complex and four parking spaces, with a combined value of roughly 230 million rubles (about $3.2 million).
The Fedorov family has also invested in real estate at two other Moscow developments — Luzhniki Collection and Slava Residences — both still under construction, so the exact units they purchased remain unidentified. FBK put the value of 75-square-meter (800-square-foot) units at those developments at roughly 200 million rubles (nearly $2.8 million).
In 2023, Vasilyeva launched her own fashion label, DV. She rented store space in one of Moscow’s most expensive buildings — 12 Kutuzovsky Prospekt — where retail space costs 1.5 million rubles a month ($20,800). Soon after, DV also opened a boutique in Dubai.
The brand lasted about a year. DV’s social media accounts are now dark, and the website is defunct. Vasilyeva now describes herself as an “executive coach,” a “personal development trainer,” and the “author of a philosophical book about the joy of the soul.”
FBK notes that Vasilyeva has no significant income of her own, and Fedorov’s official earnings fall well short of accounting for his family’s wealth. According to VTsIOM’s financial filings, the center’s director earned roughly 14 million rubles ($194,450) in 2022, roughly 22 million ($305,560) in 2023, and roughly 15 million ($208,340) in 2024.
“That’s an enormous amount of money,” says Maria Pevchikh, head of FBK International, in the group’s report. “And it raises a separate question: why is a government official in this country — someone who handles public opinion polling — earning that much? To be fair, Fedorov does teach, write books, and make public appearances, and presumably gets paid for those too. But let’s be generous — even with all of that, he could have earned maybe 55 million [$763,925] over three years.”
FBK alleges that Fedorov “enriches himself by serving the interests of those in power” and runs “fraudulent contracting schemes” using government funds allocated to VTsIOM for sociological research. The foundation found that VTsIOM-affiliated entities transferred hundreds of millions of rubles to a network of independent contractors — many of whom, FBK says, have no connection to sociology whatsoever. Among the recipients were a photographer who now manages a water park, a retiree, and employees of travel agencies and car dealerships.
This story originally appeared in Professor Richard Wolff’s Substack on May 21, 2026. It is shared here with permission.
By the end of World War 2 in Europe, that continent’s extremely violent self-destruction had killed tens of millions and wrecked many economies. Its politically dominant employer classes had driven their national governments to a clash that had produced those results. By 1945 the war’s outcome had proved far worse than many in those classes had imagined or wanted before the war. Europeans had struggled after 1917/1918 to overcome their self-destruction in World War 1. In the short span between the end of the First and the beginning of the Second World War, Europe destabilized itself via its reparations program, Germany’s staggering inflation, and then global capitalism’s worst ever collapse in 1929. The consequences of those destabilizations ramified across Europe and undermined the League of Nations effort to prevent a second world war.
In 1945, for most Europeans, the greatest urgency attached to recovery from the war. For Europe’s employing classes, more urgent still were defenses against certain immediate threats. Russia’s army had been crucial to defeating the Nazis and to forging Russia’s post-war alliances with Eastern Europe. The mass of the USSR’s military forces, potentially supplemented by those of its new Eastern European allies, struck western Europe’s employer classes as existential threats. After 1945, western Europe’s employer classes smoothly and quickly refocused their hatred from a dead Hitler to the living Stalin and to their nations’ communist parties allied to Stalin.
Western Europe’s employer classes were threatened domestically by communist and socialist political parties whose militants had often led underground anti-fascist or anti-Nazi resistances. Thereby those militants often became broadly popular leaders. Across Europe national communist parties collaborated in various ways with one another (including the powerful Soviet party). Some post-war European heads of state such as France’s Charles de Gaulle included communist party leaders in their governments. In reaction to such developments, Europe’s employer classes quickly became obsessed with the great twin dangers of “communism at home and abroad.”
A parallel development had happened across the Atlantic in the US. There the Great Depression after 1929 had provoked a mass political shift leftward by the US public. Employees in unprecedented numbers had joined industrial unions allied in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Tens of thousands joined two socialist parties and one communist party. Because the socialists and communists were often the militants in the CIO’s successful organizing drives across major industries, employers in the US were all the more alarmed by those successes in the 1930s and the 1940s. The CIO, socialist and communist parties also formed a far more powerful coalition within the Democratic Party than they had ever been before 1929.
The alliance between the Democratic Party under Franklin Roosevelt and the CIO-socialist-communist collaborations – the so-called “New Deal” coalition – terrified the employer class. The coalition’s key 1930s achievements included establishing the Social Security system, federal unemployment insurance, the nation’s first minimum wage, and a federal public jobs program that hired many millions of the then unemployed. What terrified the employer class even more was how the New Deal coalition paid for those achievements. It reformed the federal tax system in a sharply progressive direction. Because corporations and the rich were especially taxed, US wealth and income inequalities dropped sharply. Then in the 1940s, the same US government that took huge steps against economic inequality at home allied itself with the Communist Party leadership of the USSR (Stalin) to fight World War 2 against fascism.
By 1945, with the war over and Roosevelt dead, the US employer class had become, like its European counterpart, obsessed with the great twin dangers of “communism at home and abroad.” Parallel obsessions in western Europe and the US converged in a joint plan. Employers and their political supporters and dependents attacked Communist parties everywhere, depicting them as mere agents or dupes of a foreign power, namely the USSR. They demonized the USSR as the epitome of evil, a dark empire threatening democracy, freedom, Judeo-Christian values, religion per se, civil liberties, and so on. A Cold War was declared between the former allies, NATO emerged, and the Warsaw Pact followed as did arms races and geo-political confrontations. The US would lead NATO to “contain the Soviet threat.” The US organized alliances across other continents while locating hundreds of military bases across them. Beyond means of “containment,” the bases marked and enforced a new informal US global empire that replaced much of the old British, French, Dutch, Belgian, Japanese, and other expiring colonialisms.
“Anti-communism” ideologically unified the domestic and international strategies of the employer classes in Europe and the United States. Under that ideological banner, those employer classes mobilized their governments to collaborate with them to destroy national communist parties and the USSR. As global hegemon, the US went further. It demonized socialism and socialist parties by defining and treating them as nearly identical with their communist counterparts. It also used anti-communism as a major ideological weapon to replace formal European and Japanese colonialisms by the informal, US-dominated “rules based international order.”
The US-western Europe connection helped employer classes in both regions to repress or at least weaken their nations’ communist and socialist parties. The US moved very aggressively (as in the Taft-Hartley law of 1947) also to destroy labor unions at home and collaborated with anti-union forces across Europe. Where war-weakened Europe lost its colonies, a strong post-war US could and did rush in to integrate the ex-European colonies into a US empire. The new US empire had to be informal. It had to allow the ex-colonies formal political independence even as it subordinated them to US economic, military, and political dominance across most of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Europe sank into the role of the US’s very junior partner.
The US-western Europe connection brought the US valuable allies against the USSR. Given the military technology of the two world wars – reliance on huge armies fighting across immense terrains – Europe was a land buffer usefully located between the US and the USSR. It provided added protection to the Atlantic ocean’s water buffer. European colonialism had created a genuine world economy that the US could take over. Within that world economy’s particular hierarchy, Europeans were dominant nearly everywhere (except, of course, in the case of Japanese colonialism). Non-Europeans were integrated as subordinated people (economically, politically, culturally). As the Europeans’ formal empires gave way to the US informal empire, colonialist hierarchies persisted with the only real changes occurring at the top. There the civilian and military chiefs of the US (and their delegates) chose, elevated and enriched local elites to direct its informal empire’s development.
The Marshall Plan funded postwar Europe’s recovery in ways that also secured its subordinate role in the new US empire. Funds distributed by the US Central Intelligence Agency since 1947, by the US Endowment for Democracy since 1983, and by other public and private groups supplemented the Marshall money. The advisers who often came with the funds gave Europe’s anti-communist political parties, mass media, labor unions, academic and cultural organizations, many means to use against their domestic enemies. The post-1945 US-western Europe alliance mounted an immense, richly-funded, never ending campaign to shape and control world history. It worked well, overcoming numerous challenges, for 70 years until internal and external forces combined to end it. Now, as the US-western Europe connection dissolves, the contours of its totality and historical significance become clearer.
The relentless rise of China’s economy outgrew the economies of all parts of the US-western Europe alliance over recent decades. China thereby contributed crucially to that alliance’s dissolution. So too has China’s ability simultaneously to forge a new global economic coalition, the BRICS (initially Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). The BRICS’ establishment and growth (with new members and partners) responded to their felt needs for mutual support and less economic dependence on the US. The BRICS passed a milestone in 2020 (downplayed in Europe and the US) when their aggregate GDP surpassed that of the G7. The former has continued without interruption to outgrow the latter through the present.
The anti-colonialism that inspired the transitions from colonies to independent nations over the last century has survived that transition. It sometimes infuses rebellions against the hegemony of the US. At other times and places it coalesces with religious movements and populist social movements. In these and other ways, it too helps shape changing patterns of global trade and investment. Ex-colonies seek and engage alternatives to trade and investment with former colonial masters in London, Paris, Berlin, etc. They form new economic partnerships with China and increasingly with other BRICS. Increasing competition and lost economic opportunities challenge western Europe, Japan and the US. They also reduce the role of the US dollar as world currency.
The Trump regime represents both the extent of that decline and extreme efforts to stop or at least slow it. Hitting nearly the whole world with tariffs, suddenly and massively without warnings or negotiations, is a desperate act. Offering subsequently to lower initially high tariff rates in exchange for tribute (foreign nations’ commitments to spend and invest $ hundreds of billions in the US) is a blunt, stark, and hostile act. That European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen accepted it is a craven act of Europe’s even more desperate submission. The war on Iran with Israel without consultation or preparation with its European and other allies, coupled with demands for massive, risky support for the US war effort, was also a desperate act. Its goal was to reverse the decline of the US empire; its result was the opposite. The decline accelerated.
The decline, still not admissible publicly in most US politicians’ discourses, nonetheless lurks everywhere in widespread feelings of lost national direction and/or impending social doom. Trump bitterly reproaches former allies like Mexico, Canada, South Korea, Japan, and, above all, western Europe. For example, he rewrites post-1945 history as a story of western Europeans, among others, cheating and abusing the US economy because weak US governments failed to resist and fight back. Trump presents his tariffs as the overdue fight back heroically ending the previous weak governments. Trump was so invested in such political theater situating him as “the strong leader,” that his sudden, rushed tariff program was intolerable even to a Supreme Court he otherwise controls.
Abducting Maduro from Venezuela, the 12-day war on Iran with Israel in June, 2025, and their longer one begun in March, 2026: these are also pieces of the same political theater. They are made-for-the-media distractions: not just from the hovering Epstein scandals or the deeply-troubled inequalities of the domestic US economy, but from the deeper threats of a declining empire. Thus a reaction formation type of neo-colonialism inspires many of Trump’s favorite distractions. So far from admitting decline, those distractions construct a US empire as strong and growing, taking over nations like Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran while planning the same for Panama, Canada, Greenland, Mexico and others. When charged with violating international law and the whole United Nations project, Trump proudly rebrands both actions as bold signs of US strength.
Now again, as in 1945, western Europe and the US find themselves at crossroads. The declining empires then were the Europeans’. Now in 2026 it is the decline of the US empire that has become both the US’s and Europe’s problem. In its desperate moves to slow or stop that decline, the US has turned on its subordinated European partners. That problem and that turning derive from the empire decline shaping this historical moment.
In Trump’s second presidency, he withdrew much of the US’s support for Ukraine in its war with Russia. This not only weakened the Ukrainian side in that war but also left a militarily underdeveloped Europe to rely even more on economic sanctions against Russia. Europe thus lost access to cheap Russian oil and gas. High energy prices resulted, drove up European export prices, and thus damaged its competitiveness. Meanwhile, China’s relentless growth miracle (fast-rising productivity and low inflation) continued its many years of outperforming both Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder and European competitiveness generally. China’s GDP growth far exceeded that of the entire West for the last few decades. Volkswagen’s crisis was so severe it seriously considered the US invitation to move its immense company to the US from Germany. Deindustrialization now deeply disturbs all of Europe’s economies.
The global economy looks increasingly like a great contest between China and the US with Europe increasingly out of the picture or merely a footnote to it. Trump’s massive tariffs on or demands for tribute from Europe combine both abandonments and assaults by the US on its former allies. NATO trembles and faces growing forces of dissolution. Trump demands European nations fund their own defenses in part because the declining US empire needs to enlarge its own military as an offset, Trump hopes, to that decline.
The Europeans are stuck in that metaphorical room whose walls are closing in on them. Their subordination is reflected in their passage from junior partners in US led Coalitions of the Willing to the 2026 Iran war that Spain and Italy have refused to join. Trump openly threatens to leave NATO. The employer classes of Europe are most worried about the combination of no more US-funded defense protection via NATO and the compensatory need to fund expanded European military spending. That will likely mean reducing European spending on its social welfare model of capitalism. Employer classes who do that risk triggering massive opposition from the left (labor unions, socialist, communist and anti-capitalist parties increasingly working together).
So far, Europe’s employer classes have tried to cope with this situation by a quasi-hysterical campaign to demonize Russia as a threat to invade and conquer its European neighbors. Europe’s current, mostly low-in-the-polls heads of state position themselves as great bulwarks against the Russian danger. This strategy aims to justify the increased spending on defense that in turn necessitates reduced government welfare spending. The latter is then rationalized as the whole society’s necessary sacrifice for safety from the Russian demon. The employer classes hope that this way of retaining their wealth, income and power will not be opposed by their working classes as the political issue of our times. The employer classes prefer that the great hyped Russian danger be the political issue.
While the Russian danger discourse might secure Europe’s employer classes a few more years of sitting atop Europe’s wealth and power distributions, it fails to address Europe’s long-term decline. That promises to continue and quite possibly accelerate because little is being done in Europe to directly oppose that continuance. Indeed, the disagreements inside Europe on whether to join the US/Israeli war on Iran coupled with fear of being singled out for retaliations by Trump heightened the competitive pandering among Europeans to curry favor with him. Such divisions have always weakened European unity. Rebuilding that unity is surely a necessary, albeit insufficient, component of any imaginable rescue of Europe from its deepening decline.
The long, uneven, and sometimes frustratingly slow historical shift from capitalist colonialism to today’s anti-imperialism undermined first Europe’s and now the US’s empires. A new crossroads beckons. One way leads toward a new Chinese global empire. Another leads toward a multi-national program of mutual accommodation, a kind of socialism with global characteristics.
The United States has designated two of Brazil's largest criminal organizations as foreign terrorist groups, a move that could reshape migration policy, security cooperation, and the country's political landscape ahead of presidential elections.
Trump Administration Draws Brazil Into a New Political Dispute
The United States has added Brazil's criminal organizations Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) and Comando Vermelho (CV) to its list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO). Washington argues that both groups operate beyond Brazil's borders, extending their activities across Latin America and into the United States.
The administration of sitting President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva opposed the measure, maintaining that these organizations are criminal enterprises rather than terrorist groups because they lack a political or religious ideology.
Dalle intenzioni ai fatti. Dopo aver aperto nelle scorse settimane alla possibilità di utilizzare i fondi della politica di coesione per contrastare il caro-energia, Raffaele Fitto passa alla fase operativa....
On Monday, Russian users found they could no longer reach PyPI, the package repository that Python developers rely on for code libraries.
Reports began appearing on the Detector404 website after 1:00 p.m., Moscow time, on June 1. A Habr user named freehabr was among the first to flag the issue; by evening, the volume of complaints had tapered off.
According to freehabr, the access problems hit both end users and hosted servers alike. Commenters confirmed they had run into the same issues.
Access problems with the repository affect everyone who writes Python code, because PyPI is the core infrastructure underlying the language, according to Kod Durova, a Russian tech news outlet.
The outlet reported that its own diagnostics showed the site behaving like resources blocked by Roskomnadzor, Russia’s federal media regulator:
A check using a tool for diagnosing internet blocks showed that the connection to pypi.org drops at the TLS stage — the encryption protocol that establishes a secure channel between a client and a server. This behavior is characteristic of resources blocked by Roskomnadzor via DPI (deep packet inspection).
Roskomnadzor told the Russian business daily Vedomosti that it had not restricted access to PyPI and was not aware of any problems with access to the site.
At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.
If you find any errors in this translation, please contact us at reports@meduza.io.
The global smartphone market is on track to record its most significant annual contraction since 2013, according to a new report from research firm Counterpoint Research.
Following a reassessment of market conditions, analysts revised their forecast for 2026. In February, the firm projected a decline of 12.4 percent for the year. The latest estimate now points to a steeper drop of 13.9 percent.
Counterpoint Research described the projected downturn as the largest annual decline since it began tracking the smartphone market in 2013.
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