Bloomberg:

The EU is proposing removing all tariffs on US industrial goods by the end of the week in attempt to meet Trump demand.

The European Union will seek to fast track legislation by the end of the week to remove all tariffs on US industrial goods, a demand made by President Donald Trump before the US will lower its duties on the bloc’s automobile exports.
The commission will skip conducting an impact assessment — the normal procedure in these situations — on the proposal in a bid to move forward quickly.

EU has became a US colony thanks to Ursula Von Der Leyen & her dictatorial incoherent policies.

But so many Europeans refuse to acknowledge that truth, and are living in a fantasy world of imagined strength.

Politico:

Von der Leyen’s critics were quick to assert that accepting Trump’s 15 percent tariff on most European goods amounted to an act of “submission,” a “clear-cut political defeat for the EU,” and an “ideological and moral capitulation.”

If she had hoped that would keep the U.S. president at bay, a rude awakening was in store. With the ink barely dry on the trade deal, Trump doubled down on Monday by threatening to impose new tariffs on the EU over digital regulations that would hit America’s tech giants. If the EU didn’t fall into line, the U.S. would stop exporting vital microchip technologies, he warned.

Trump called for holding George Soros, father of colour revolutions, accountable for supporting protests in the U.S.

#Nord Stream terrorism. #Ukraine

Zeit:

All members of the commando that attacked the Nord Stream pipeline have now been identified, and there are "indications of state involvement," raising unpleasant questions for the German government.

The German government faces difficult questions.
Important questions remain unanswered: Who are the masterminds behind the attack, and who ordered it? How high up in the state do the connections extend? And what does this mean for Germany's relationship with Ukraine?
Federal Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig (SPD) praised the "truly impressive investigative success." However, the new federal government wants to keep the case as far away from itself as possible. The Chancellery currently prefers to pretend it was an outrageous act of vandalism. Given the fragile talks between Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Europeans about Ukraine's future, any additional disruption can only be damaging. Nord Stream doesn't fit the political picture right now.

According to a new poll by the Századvég Foundation, an overwhelming majority of EU citizens oppose sending troops from their own countries to Ukraine.

#NordStream terrorism

Russias representative Dmitry Polyanskiy
criticizes Germany at the UN over the Nord Stream investigation, warns of global security risks Nordstream is the crime the victim doesn't seem to want solved.

This astonishing find went under the radar, last December, but it's worth circling back to it now. A suppressed 1994 diplomatic cable which tried to warn Bill Clinton's US government that its policy towards Russia would lead to disaster.

Imagine a document as prophetic as George Kennan’s Cold War “Long Telegram,” but buried for three decades. That’s Wayne Merry’s submission of March 1994; a blistering critique of U.S. policy in post-Soviet Russia, which was eventually pried loose only by a Freedom of Information battle.

Merry was a political officer at the US Embassy in Moscow. He had seen enough of Russia up close to know the country was listing badly. Boris Yeltsin had sent tanks to smash his own parliament, rewritten the Constitution to concentrate power in the presidency, and watched as Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s nationalists surged at the polls. Russia was fragile and Merry warned that Washington’s answer (“shock therapy” economics) would only make things worse.

His cable said what few in Washington wanted to hear: America’s crusade for market liberalization would alienate ordinary Russians, destabilize their new quasi democracy, and seed hostility toward the West that could last for generations. Clinton’s White House buried it because it told the truth. The young diplomat was told that it "would give Larry Summers a heart attack."

Merry’s warnings were stark; he wrote that Western policy was shifting the blame for economic misery directly onto the US. In his words, “an intrusive Western effort to alter the economy can help recreate an adversarial relationship between Russia and the West.” He argued that Russia’s history and institutions weren’t ready for the kind of radical economic surgery being prescribed. The results, he predicted, would be oligarchs entrenched, inequality rampant, and faith in democracy eroded.

He advocated for Russia to be allowed the dignity of making its own choices: “If Russia elects to follow a non-Anglo-American school of economics, it will be in excellent company.”

Instead, Washington doubled down on privatization and austerity and Russians saw their savings vanish, their industries looted, and their politics hollowed out. The goodwill of 1991 was squandered. Merry’s cable proved prophetic but the high ups made sure his career was quietly strangled, the memo was shelved, and only now, thirty years later, has it surfaced.

The comparison to Kennan’s “Long Telegram” is unavoidable; both were written by men steeped in the realities of the region and spoke uncomfortable truths about the likely consequences of US policy. But where Kennan’s telegram was seized on as the blueprint for containment, Merry’s dissent was silenced.

In 1996, Americans helped rig a Russian election to make sure Yeltsin defeated the resurgent Communist candidate Gennady Zyuganov. If there had been a peaceful handover of power then, who knows what relations between Russia and the West would be like today? But Washington's cynicism helped wipe out any chance of that.

Veteran reporter Fred Kaplan, writing in Slate, called the cable “eerily prescient.”

@27khv (X)

#Ukraine desertion

🇺🇦 Ukrainska Pravda reports the number of criminal proceedings that took place for deserters from the Ukrainian Armed Forces. According to their information, citing data from the Unified Register of Crimes, the following figures were recorded:

2022: 6,988 proceedings
2023: 17,658 proceedings
2024: 67,840 proceedings
2025: 110,511 proceedings (from January - July)
Total: 202,997 proceedings

They also published the number of proceedings in which charges were filed:

2022: 3,471 (49.67%)
2023: 7,883 (44.64%)
2024: 23,343 (34.41%)
2025: 15,361 (13.90%) (from January - July)
Total: 50,058 (24.66%)

This means that this year, on average, 524 criminal proceedings for desertion were opened every single day.

Japan's top trade negotiator cancelled a visit to the United States at the last minute on Thursday, further delaying talks designed to finalise a $550 billion investment package offered by Tokyo in exchange for relief on punishing tariffs.

In the early hours of this morning, a Russian BEK (sea drone) struck the Ukrainian Navy's medium reconnaissance ship “Simferopol” at the mouth of the Danube River near the southern tip of Odesa Oblast.

The Russian MOD claimed that the ship sunk, while the Ukrainian Navy Spokesperson Dmytro Pletenchuk confirmed the strike and stated that efforts to extinguish fires are ongoing. He reported that the "vast majority" of the crew are safe, but that one was killed, and several others are injured and missing. Search and rescue operations are ongoing.

The vessel is one of the largest in the Ukrainian Navy, even before 2022.

💥 Using a high-speed uncrewed surface vehicle, the Ukrainian Navy's Simferopol medium reconnaissance ship was defeated at the River Danube mouth. As a result of the attack, the Ukrainian ship sank.

Two Russian missiles struck the Turkish drone maker Baykar's drone factory in Kiev early Thursday, causing severe damage to production facilities in the fourth attack on the plant in six months, according to a Ukrainian city council member.

#Israel genocide in Gaza.

The list Israel announced tonight is a hoax:

Imad Al-Shaer is a rescue worker

Omar Abu Tiem & Muhammad Abu Hadaf were killed the day before the strike on Nasir hospital

Barbakh is the family that attacked Hamas recently

Jum'a Al-Najjar is a known junkie (per his neighbours)

Sky News reports that of the 6 people Israel claimed were “terrorists” killed in its double-tap strike on Nasser Hospital, only 1 appears to have been a fighter — and he was killed elsewhere.

🔵 The IDF insisted the dead were Hamas and Islamic Jihad members. But Sky examined obituaries and social media for each person and found only one, Omar Abu Teim, had evidence of being a combatant.

🔵 However, a neighbor told Sky that he died in an attack on an IDF position east of Khan Younis, not at the hospital. A Hamas-branded obituary also described him as a “hero” of that assault, though his body has not been recovered.

🔵 For the other 5, obituaries and family testimonies all tie their deaths directly to the Nasser strike.

🔵 Euro-Med’s team confirmed seeing Abu Teim’s family searching for his body the day before the hospital was hit.

Austria's potential loss of its non-aligned status raises pressing questions about the future of its role in international diplomacy.

The Chairman of Russia's Security Council Dimitri Medvedev warned that abandoning Austria’s neutrality and joining NATO could entail significant diplomatic costs, including the possible relocation of key international organizations’ headquarters from Vienna to countries in the Global South and East.

"It’s clear that the time has come to explore relocating the headquarters of international intergovernmental organizations to countries of the Global South and East, where optimal conditions for their work can be assured."

#Russia #Ukraine

New footage of the high-speed uncrewed surface vehicle defeating the Ukrainian Navy's Simferopol medium reconnaissance ship at the River Danube mouth.