– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine.
The Leak That Arrived Right on Cue
By Larry C. Johnson | SONAR21 | November 10, 2026
In the intelligence business, timing is everything. On February 5, 2026, Finland’s National Defence University, which is hardly a Kremlin front, posted a paper by Alexander Grable titled “Irretrievable Losses: Casualties in the Russo-Ukraine War (2022–present).” Grable concluded that Ukraine’s dead far outnumber Russia’s and that Kyiv is losing the war of attrition. In polite Western company, that is heresy.
The paper was presented at the university’s Russia Seminar a week later. It was folded into the seminar’s proceedings volume this fall and began circulating widely in late October. Then, right on cue, the cavalry arrived. Two hacker groups announced they had breached Rosstat, Russia’s state statistics agency, and come away with numbers showing between 393,881 and 450,100 Russian dead. The Moscow Times and Euronews ran the story on November 8. Narrative restored. Everyone can relax.
I don’t relax that easily. I spent enough years at the CIA to know what a planted story smells like. This one smells. But before I get to the leak, let me get to something the casualty accountants keep leaving out of their spreadsheets: who has been shooting more.
The math nobody wants to do
Weapons cause casualties, so a casualty estimate that ignores the weapons is guesswork. In this war, Russia has held a lopsided edge in nearly every category that kills soldiers: artillery, mortars, missiles and FAB glide bombs. For most of the war it also led in drones.
Start with artillery. Estonia’s foreign intelligence service, no friend of Moscow, estimates that Russia produced or refurbished about 400,000 rounds in 2022 and 4.5 million in 2024, an elevenfold increase. That same year the United States and Europe together managed about 1.2 million. Then add North Korea: leaked South Korean intelligence, reported in the press last year, put Pyongyang’s deliveries at 12 million rounds of 152mm ammunition. By my count, that adds up to roughly 24 million shells on the Russian side since 2022, against about 7 million for Ukraine. That is better than three to one.
The glide bombs and missiles tell the same story. Ukraine has nothing remotely comparable to Russia’s FAB-500s and FAB-1500s fitted with wing kits, dropped by the thousands on Ukrainian positions from beyond the reach of air defenses.
Timing matters here too. Artillery was the main killer at the start of the war, causing roughly 80 percent of casualties, and that is exactly when Russia’s lead in shells was widest. Drones did not overtake artillery until 2024. The widely quoted estimate that drones cause 70 to 80 percent of battlefield casualties dates from 2025, not from 2022. Kyiv now insists it outproduces Russia in FPV drones. Maybe so. But even a Ukrainian official has conceded that Ukraine was far from parity with Russia in strike drones through the first half of 2025.
The drone race is also being fought at the factory. Russia has repeatedly hit Ukrainian drone production: assembly sites around Kyiv for the Liutyi long-range drone, industrial zones in Kharkiv and Dnipro that make guidance and communications parts, and in October a plant belonging to the manufacturer General Chereshnya. Ukraine has hit back, striking the Atlant Aero drone plant in Taganrog three times between January and April and repeatedly targeting the Alabuga zone in Tatarstan. Yet Russian output keeps climbing. By Ukraine’s own intelligence estimates, Russian drone production in April was up 117 percent from a year earlier, and Moscow plans to build 7.3 million FPV drones this year. Kyiv’s raids have not bent that curve.
The standard Western reply is that attackers lose more men than defenders, and Russia has been attacking. That rule of thumb assumes both sides can shoot back at roughly the same rate. When one side fires three or four shells for every one it receives, the rule goes out the window. Defending under that kind of fire is how armies get ground down.
What Grable actually found
Grable worked from amputations, which is a clever approach because amputees are harder to hide than the dead. He applied historical ratios of deaths to amputations to the amputation counts for each side. For Ukraine, 93,566 to 120,000 amputations yield an estimate of 403,269 to 517,200 dead by November 2024. He also cites body exchanges in which Ukraine got back about 12.5 of its dead for every Russian returned.
Grable also puts Russian dead at about 35,264 by mid-2024. I’ll be candid: that figure is too low. It sits below the number of Russian dead that Mediazona and BBC Russian had already identified by name at that point. His Vietnam-derived multiplier for Russia doesn’t hold up, and his critics are right to hammer it.
But notice what the critics do next. They take one weak number and use it to throw out the whole paper, including the half that matches the firepower. If Russia has been firing three or four times as much ordnance, Ukrainian dead running several times higher than Russian dead is not a wild claim. It is what the physics predicts. Grable’s Ukrainian estimate fits the weight of fire. That is the part that had to be buried.
Consider the source
Now the leak. Look at who delivered it. One group is Silent Crow, which claims about 450,100 Russian dead. The other is the Belarus Cyber Partisans, which claims 393,881. Neither is a neutral archivist. Both are openly at war with Moscow and Minsk, and they say so with pride. We are asked to believe that these partisans pulled 23 terabytes out of Rosstat, sorted it and produced clean totals, all within days. Then Western newsrooms printed the result as “official data.”
Official according to whom? Meduza and Mediazona, which have no love for the Kremlin, say they are still checking whether the data is genuine. Nobody outside the hackers themselves has verified the totals.
The Moscow Times reports that it checked 50 names from the Mediazona list of named Russian dead and found every one in the leaked files. That is supposed to settle it. It settles nothing. The Mediazona list is public. Anyone building a forgery would start by seeding it with names a fact-checker can find. Matching names proves the forger did his homework. It does not prove the totals.
How an influence operation is built
The defenders of the leak have one more argument: the timing is too tight. Grable’s paper went viral on October 26 and 27, and the hacks are dated October 29 and November 1. Nobody, they say, could build a 23-terabyte operation in a week.
That argument assumes the people who counter inconvenient research learn about it from Substack. They don’t. The paper sat in a Finnish government repository from February 5. Anyone working Russia for a Western service, and certainly anyone in the information-warfare shops, had it in hand within days. That gave them eight months, not one week. Public attention is when an operation launches, not when the planning starts.
I worked on this kind of thing at the CIA. My assessment is that this leak has the classic hallmarks of an influence operation. There is a source that cannot be checked, delivered through a cutout with a cause. The material is laundered through outlets that readers trust. It drops just as an unwelcome analysis starts to gain traction. And it comes with a big round number that ends the debate before anyone asks about the weapons. I can’t prove who wrote the script. I have seen enough scripts to recognize one.
The question they’d rather you not ask
Here is the test I’d put to anyone waving the Rosstat numbers. Explain how an army that has been outgunned three or four to one in artillery, with no answer to glide bombs and, until recently, outmatched in drones, somehow lost fewer men than the side doing most of the shooting. If you can’t answer that, a spreadsheet from a hacker collective won’t answer it for you.
Grable got the Russian number wrong. He got the big picture right, and the big picture is what the leak was built to bury. Ukraine is bleeding faster than Russia because Russia has more guns, more shells, more bombs and, for most of this war, more drones. No amount of stolen data changes the ballistics.
No, New York Times, California’s Climate Has Always Been a Land of Flood, Drought, and Fire
By Anthony Watts | ClimateRealism | October 22, 2026
The New York Times article “Latest Climate Report Warns of Major Upheaval to California Way of Life” by Soumya Karlamangla, claims California faces a future of bigger storms, more extreme floods, longer droughts, destructive wildfires, disappearing snowpack, and major disruption to everyday life because of climate change. This is highly misleading if not outright false. The historical and observational record shows that extreme storms, catastrophic floods, prolonged droughts, enormous wildfires, highly variable snowpack, and coastal erosion have always been defining features of California’s natural environment, while many of the Times’ most alarming claims are projections from climate models rather than observed trends.
The Times opens with a confident description of California’s future:
“Floods will become more widespread and extreme.”
It then warns of “more wildfires, bigger storms, longer droughts,” claiming California faces “major upheaval to long-established ways of life.”
Those are dramatic predictions. What the Times largely fails to provide is the historical context necessary to understand them.
California has always been a land of meteorological extremes. Its Mediterranean climate naturally produces long dry periods punctuated by episodes of tremendous precipitation. Atmospheric rivers carrying Pacific moisture into the state are not a recent creation of climate change. They are fundamental to California’s hydrology.
Perhaps the most obvious omission from the Times article is the Great Flood of 1861-1862.
Image courtesy of US Geological Survey.
According to the United States Geological Survey’s history of California storms and floods, a succession of powerful storms battered California for weeks. Rivers overflowed, levees failed, Sacramento flooded, and enormous portions of the Central Valley disappeared beneath water. The USGS describes the event as remaining “unparalleled in its magnitude.”
The storm sequence lasted approximately 45 days. The Sacramento Valley became an inland sea. The flooding was so severe that California lost roughly one-third of its taxable land, and Governor Leland Stanford reportedly traveled by rowboat to his inauguration.
This happened in 1861 and 1862, when atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were far below today’s levels. Even that disaster wasn’t unprecedented.
The USGS ARkStorm project reports geological evidence of six megastorms larger than the 1861-1862 event during the past 1,800 years. The agency explicitly states that the Great Flood “is not a freak event,” and that there is no reason similar events will not happen again.
Another USGS review concludes that truly massive rainfall-driven California floods appear in the geological record roughly every 200 years.
That is rather important context when the New York Times tells readers that future extreme flooding represents a newly emerging climate threat.
The same applies to atmospheric rivers. The USGS calls them California’s primary storm mechanism and notes that just a few large atmospheric river events can determine whether a particular year is wet or dry. Researchers are studying sediment records precisely because the approximately 70-year instrumental record of atmospheric rivers is far too short to describe the full range of natural variability.
Climate change may alter the intensity of future atmospheric rivers. The USGS and climate-model studies project that possibility, and it should not be dismissed. But a projection of future change is not evidence that California historically lacked catastrophic atmospheric-river storms.
It plainly did not.
This is also why the Times’ presentation of flooding is so incomplete. Climate Realism has previously documented that major California flooding long predates modern warming, including the 1862 catastrophe and evidence of still larger prehistoric events.
More importantly, the observational precipitation record does not resemble the steadily worsening picture implied by the Times.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s California State Climate Summary shows enormous year-to-year variation in winter precipitation since the late 19th century. Its record of two-inch extreme precipitation events since 1930 likewise shows substantial variability rather than a simple upward march toward ever more extreme rainfall.
The Climate at a Glance California State Climate Summary, using NOAA data, similarly reports little overall change in California’s average annual precipitation since 1900 and no sustained increase in extreme precipitation events.
California’s drought history is equally inconvenient for the Times’ narrative.
NOAA’s reconstructed Palmer Drought Severity Index, seen in the figure below, extends California drought history back approximately 1,000 years using tree-ring and other proxy evidence. It shows repeated prolonged wet and dry periods centuries before industrialization.
California does not alternate between drought and deluge because its climate has suddenly become unstable. Alternating between drought and deluge is normal for California’s climate.
Climate Realism recently made precisely this point in response to similar claims about Highway 1: California’s pattern of drought followed by heavy precipitation is not historically unusual. Massive swings between flooding and drought have occurred for as long as historical and paleoclimate records allow us to examine.
Wildfires deserve the same historical perspective.
The Times tells readers that several destructive fires have occurred during the past decade and presents them as evidence of the trends Californians are supposedly beginning to experience.
But “destructive” is not synonymous with “climatically unprecedented.” Put millions more people, homes, power lines, roads, businesses, and expensive property into fire-prone landscapes, and the economic consequences of fires can increase even without a corresponding increase in the underlying natural hazard.
Fire itself is not an aberration in California. It is an integral part of the landscape.
A peer-reviewed study in Forest Ecology and Management estimated that approximately 1.8 million hectares, about 4.4 million acres, burned annually in prehistoric California before 1800. The researchers concluded that California’s skies were probably smoky through much of the summer and fall long before modern industrial emissions.
California’s own Fish & Wildlife agencies acknowledge the same history, explaining that the state’s ecosystems evolved with fire and citing estimates of approximately 4.4 million acres burned annually before 1800 through lightning and Native American burning.
Climate at a Glance reports that modern California wildfire counts and acreage do not show the simple steadily increasing pattern often implied by climate coverage, while emphasizing the importance of vegetation management, ignition sources, and California’s naturally fire-adapted ecosystems.
None of this means temperature and moisture have no influence on fire behavior. Of course they do. It means that portraying California wildfire as some novel product of modern climate change requires ignoring thousands of years of California fire ecology.
Then there is snowpack. The Times states that Sierra Nevada snowpack is projected to decline 40 percent by midcentury and 60 percent by 2100.
Notice the operative word: projected.
NOAA’s State Climate Summary shows observed Donner Summit snow-water-equivalent record shows tremendous natural variability. April 1 snowpack has ranged from almost nothing to more than 80 inches of water equivalent during the observational period. Record-high values occurred in 1952 and 1983, while extremely low values occurred in 1963, 1988, 2014, and 2015.
The Fifth Climate Change Assessment cited by the Time does not measure California’s snowpack in 2050 or 2100. It cannot. Its future hydrology estimates are produced by feeding downscaled global climate model output into additional hydrological models. California’s own technical documentation describes precisely that modeling chain.
There is nothing illegitimate about using models to explore possible futures. Policymakers need scenarios for planning.
But scenarios are not observations, and newspapers should stop writing about modeled conditions decades from now as though they were measurements already taken.
The Times even acknowledges that the state assessment contains multiple scenarios based on different future greenhouse gas emissions levels, and quotes a state official saying, “The future is not predetermined.” Yet most of the article is written as though it is.
The same problem appears in the claim that as much as three-quarters of California’s beaches “could disappear” by 2100. Latest Climate Report Warns of … Again, “could.”
California’s coastline has been eroding, uplifting, subsiding, sliding, and rearranging itself for millennia. Local relative sea level also varies substantially because California is tectonically active. NOAA tide gauges presently show trends ranging from 5.08 mm per year at North Spit to minus 0.76 mm per year at Crescent City, where the land is rising faster than the ocean. Los Angeles’ long-term gauge shows approximately 1.07 mm per year, equivalent to about 0.35 feet per century if that linear trend continued unchanged.
That is considerably more complicated than “climate change will erase California’s beaches.”
Finally, the Times warns that California agriculture could suffer dramatically, including fruit-yield reductions and less irrigated acreage. Latest Climate Report Warns of … Yet actual agricultural data do not show California agriculture collapsing under recent warming. Climate at a Glance reports, for example, substantial long-term increases in almond production and yields and increased strawberry production.
Again, observations and projections are different things.
California has warmed. Additional warming can affect snow levels, heat extremes, ecosystems, and water management. Those are legitimate subjects for research and prudent planning. But that is a very different proposition from the New York Times’ portrayal of a state approaching some historically unfamiliar climatic upheaval.
California was experiencing catastrophic floods before automobiles existed. It endured megadroughts centuries before coal-fired power plants. Millions of acres burned annually before European settlement. Atmospheric rivers battered the coast long before anyone coined the term “climate change.” Beaches eroded, mountains shed landslides, Sierra snowpack swung wildly from year to year, and Californians learned to build reservoirs, aqueducts, levees, firebreaks, and flood-control systems because this has always been an extraordinarily variable and sometimes violent environment.
The lesson of California history is not that nature was once benign and humans somehow broke it. The lesson is that California has never been climatically benign.
The New York Times could have used California’s Fifth Climate Change Assessment to discuss sensible adaptation to a state naturally prone to flood, drought, fire, erosion, and enormous weather variability. Instead, it largely presents model projections as an approaching climate reckoning while giving readers almost none of the historical context needed to judge those projections.
California doesn’t need another climate horror story. It needs reporters willing to look backward at the data before confidently telling readers what catastrophe awaits them ahead.
The ‘Gaza Treatment’: How Media Headlines Obscure Who is Bombing Yemen
By Robert Inlakesh | The Palestine Chronicle | November 10, 2026
As Saudi airstrikes are increasingly inflicting civilian massacres across Yemen, the corporate media are employing various rhetorical tricks to downplay the atrocities. A very similar playbook to that utilized to downplay the Gaza genocide is now being used to cover up war crimes in Yemen.
On Friday, Saudi airstrikes targeted a packed marketplace in the Waziyah area of Yemen’s Taiz Province. Yemen’s Health Ministry reported that the initial death toll was 30 killed and eight wounded, all of whom were civilians. The footage released of the incident showed the extent of the crime that had been committed.
Then, on Saturday, Saudi fighter jets bombarded residential homes in the village of al-Shariya within the Bani Hashish district, located to the east of the Yemeni Capital City of Sana’a. Not only did the Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF) bomb civilian homes in the village, but it also launched double-tap strikes that impacted the first responders. At least 44 civilians were killed, with another 40 having been left wounded. Of those killed, 21 were children and another 10 were women.
While the corporate and mainstream media have all but ignored the daily bombings targeting civilian infrastructure and populated urban areas, these massacres were too big not to merit articles.
“Airstrikes on a market in southwestern Yemen kill at least 30, Houthis say”, reported the Associated Press on the Friday massacre, mirroring the language of using “Hamas says” to undermine the authenticity of the event. Al-Jazeera meanwhile ran with the headline “Yemeni gov’t forces, Houthis trade blame for deadly strikes on Taiz market”.
Both reports cite officials within what they called Yemen’s “Internationally Recognized Government” claiming that no airstrikes were carried out in that location. While AP does mention that the “Yemeni Government” officials it is citing are Saudi-backed, Al-Jazeera fails to do the same. What is striking about this, however, is that both fail to mention the simple fact that it was Saudi Arabia’s air force that was responsible; nobody blamed Yemeni forces.
Also, why would a so-called “Internationally Recognized Government” be speaking on behalf of and claim to have precise knowledge of a foreign country’s air strikes? In the past, some corporate media outlets have even gone as far as labeling Saudi bombings as airstrikes carried out by a “Yemeni Air Force” belonging to the Saudi-backed forces, although no such thing exists.
There is, of course, no evidence presented to suggest that the Ansarallah-led Yemeni Armed Forces – what the AP and Al-Jazeera incorrectly call “the Houthis” – had carried out this massacre. In fact, the area struck was under the Sana’a-based government’s control; there is extensive documentation of the event, all suggesting Saudi airstrikes.
However, the next day’s massacre was simply undeniable, as the actual Saudi airstrikes were recorded as they struck residential buildings, killing 44 civilians near Sana’a. Yet, the BBC produced the headline “Houthis say at least 33 killed in Saudi air strike”. The British-State Broadcaster even manages to fail in correctly implementing the English language, as air strikes, and not a single “air strike”, were carried out.
You will also see across the mainstream media the phrase “Houthi-run Yemeni Health Ministry”. This language is eerily similar to the “Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry” propaganda that the public has been subjected to for over three years now. However, in Yemen the phrase is not even at least partially accurate; there is no political movement or entity calling itself “the Houthis”; instead, it is Ansarallah that they are describing.
At least Hamas is actually the real acronym for the movement that has governed Gaza since 2007. In Yemen, left is right and up is down when it comes to the corporate media’s coverage. This is so much the case that the news that the public is consuming on the issue barely even resembles what is transpiring inside the country.
Take, for example, this Reuters headline, explaining how the Saudi-Yemen ceasefire was broken in July earlier this year: “Houthis fire missiles at Saudi Arabia, breaking years of calm.”
Not only does the article title suggest that it was Ansarallah that was responsible for breaking the ceasefire, but it also does so while embedding the video of the Saudi airstrikes that actually ended the ceasefire inside the article. This leaves no doubt as to the intentions of Reuters here; they simply lied in favor of promoting the Saudi narrative.
When Reuters covered the civilian massacre committed near Sana’a on Saturday, its headline began with “Houthi-run health ministry says…”.
Here I have provided examples from some of the most trusted and reputable news sources in the English-language media, all of which exhibit a level of bias that greatly distorts the reality in Yemen.
Even the insistence on calling Ansarallah “the Houthis” is not a measure taken against IS by the mainstream media. Take Al-Jazeera in Arabic and English as an example here; both use “the Houthis”, yet for IS they have avoided using the pejorative acronym “Daesh” to describe them.
In Arabic, Al-Jazeera calls them “Dawleh al-Islamiyyeh” or “Tanzeem al-Dawleh”. In other words, IS has been afforded more favorable terminology to describe them than Ansarallah.
It suffices to say that the reporting on Yemen has been utterly dreadful, not just since July, but for well over a decade now. The reason why such propaganda persists is that there is little popular objection to it.
France’s ‘Cold War’: Paris blames Tehran for supermarket fridge hacks
RT | November 10, 2026
The French government has accused Iran of hacking refrigerators in hundreds of supermarkets, claiming that the “cyber campaign” was the work of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
The attack, which took place in October, affected fridges and freezers at nearly 700 distribution sites across France. Hackers reportedly targeted the fridges’ internet-connected control units and forced them to overheat, destroying tons of food and forcing several stores to temporarily close. A wave of similar attacks took place in Belgium, Ireland, Sweden, and at least six other EU countries three weeks later.
“This was a cyber campaign of unprecedented scale and aggression,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said on Monday. “Today, thanks to the work of government agencies, we know who is responsible: the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
Iran’s ambassador has been summoned, Barrot said, adding that France will “sanction those responsible and take all measures we deem necessary and proportionate to respond.”
Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said that investigators discovered the hackers used Farsi and IP addresses linked to Iran, and that three IRGC members are suspected of carrying out the operation “to serve the interests of a foreign power – in this case, Iran.”
Although Beccuau’s accusation is stronger than that of British Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who stated “we can confirm our belief that we believe Iran” was behind a bungled “terror plot” at an RAF airbase in September, it is still not entirely watertight. WikiLeaks’ 2017 ‘Vault 7’ disclosures confirmed that the CIA had developed sophisticated hacking tools capable of leaving behind false digital ‘fingerprints’ in foreign languages, including Russian, Chinese, and Farsi, to implicate other countries in cyberattacks.
The accusations mark a dramatic turnaround from the climate of mid-October. Then, despite it taking place at a time of daily riots and anti-government demonstrations, almost every commentator speaking to European media outlets accused Russia of committing the attack. “We strongly believe this activity could be attributed to a Russian state-sponsored threat actor,” cybersecurity executive Xavier Bellekens told Politico last week, in an article that portrayed the hack as something straight from the pages of “the Kremlin’s hybrid playbook.”
“When we pull on the thread it does look like it could well be Russia. So, that is basically where we’re at,” Bellekens told Euronews – which, like Politico, is funded by the EU – two days later. Russia is “looking into where the weaknesses in the systems lie,” former Dutch intelligence officer Tim Bosch told NU.nl. “Right now it concerns refrigeration, but next time it might be a hospital.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed the claims as “baseless,” “absurd,” and “backed up by no reasoning.”
Neither Iran’s Foreign Ministry nor the IRGC has commented on Tuesday’s accusation. However, Iran’s state Mehr News agency has dismissed it as “baseless and unsupported by evidence.”
Wrong, Newswise, Irresponsible Climate Messaging, Not Climate Change Itself, Is Fueling Student Anxiety
By Anthony Watts | ClimateRealism | November 6, 2026
Newswise, cites a University of Utah article “How Anxiety Over Climate Change Affects Students,” to claim that that hundreds of undergraduates feel powerless, frustrated, and anxious about climate change, arguing that universities need more resources to help them cope. The anxiety may be real, but the implication that physical climate change is causing it is false, and unsupported by the study. The study itself points toward a different explanation: generalized anxiety, political ideology, and repeated exposure to alarming climate information in classrooms and online.
University of Utah researchers surveyed 547 students and found that 54 percent frequently or strongly felt powerless about climate change and 55 percent felt frustrated. Yet the researchers explicitly caution that their findings do not establish a causal connection between climate change and anxiety. One author acknowledges the relationship could run in either direction, with people already prone to generalized anxiety potentially being more susceptible to climate anxiety.
That distinction is crucial. A student saying, “I’m terrified of climate change” demonstrates that the student is frightened. It does not demonstrate that the physical climate caused the fear.
In fact, the study itself provides evidence that climate messaging may be the biggest part of the problem. Students with greater exposure to stories about climate change in classrooms and online reported greater climate anxiety. Students holding more liberal political views also tended to report greater anxiety. The researchers found a “strong positive correlation” between exposure to online climate information and climate anxiety.
That should have been the headline.
The survey didn’t examine temperature, sea level, hurricane, flood, drought, or wildfire incidences or trends. It measured what students believe about climate change. Its Climate Anxiety Index asked students about propositions such as “The things I most value will be destroyed,” “The future is frightening,” and “Humanity is doomed.” Those are measurements of beliefs about catastrophe, not measurements of knowledge of real climate information.
There is another revealing number. Only 14.8 percent of respondents listed climate change among their three greatest concerns. The sample was also drawn from three Environmental and Sustainability Studies courses and one communications course, and 63 percent of respondents leaned politically left. The researchers themselves caution against broadly generalizing the results.
Other research points directly toward the media’s role. A 2024 study in the Journal of Health Communication examined climate anxiety and media exposure among college students. Media-exposure variables explained about 33 percent of the variance in climate anxiety, with frequency of media use and attention to climate news significantly predicting greater anxiety.
Students aren’t simply looking out the dormitory window, observing modest long-term warming, and spontaneously descending into despair. What they are being told is what makes them anxious.
After years of headlines warning about a “climate emergency,” an “existential threat,” tipping points, disappearing coastlines, civilization-threatening weather, and only a few years left to “save the planet,” why would anyone be surprised that many young people are frightened?
Climate Realism has documented this problem before, noting that climate anxiety is routinely presented as evidence of how dangerous climate change is without asking whether relentless catastrophic messaging helped create the anxiety. Another Climate Realism analysis discussed the widely cited survey in which 56 percent of young respondents said they believed humanity was doomed.
Humanity is not doomed. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report doesn’t say that. It identifies risks, largely manageable risks, from additional warming, but that is worlds apart from telling students civilization has no future or that having children may be irresponsible.
Another peer-reviewed study makes the point even more sharply. Hannes Zacher and Cort Rudolph examined 2,066 people in a 2023 Climatic Change paper, “Environmental knowledge is inversely associated with climate change anxiety.” They found that greater general environmental knowledge and greater climate-specific knowledge were both associated with less climate anxiety, even after controlling for demographics, personality, and environmental attitudes.
In plain English, the people who knew more of the facts and had a better understanding of science were less anxious about climate change.
That matters because much of the popular conception of the world’s climate future comes from computer projections, including extreme emissions scenarios presented as likely futures. RCP8.5 is the classic example. Climate researchers warned in Nature against treating that very high-emissions pathway as the most likely future. Roger Pielke Jr. and Justin Ritchie likewise documented the misuse of extreme climate scenarios as “business as usual.”
A hypothetical worst case escaped the scientific literature and became, in popular culture, a forecast. Then adults seem surprised when young people believe it.
Watts Up With That has addressed the same issue in; “A Generation of Kids Thinks They Have No Future. Science Just Admitted Why” asked whether adults had frightened young people by presenting extreme projections as their expected future. “Worry About Climate Fearmongering, Not Climate Change” noted that young people already face academic pressure, social media, finances, relationships, and uncertainty about their futures. Adding repeated warnings that Earth itself is becoming uninhabitable hardly improves their mental health.
Meanwhile, real-world indicators don’t suggest a planetary apocalypse. Our World in Data shows that death rates from natural disasters have fallen dramatically during the past century. Better forecasting, infrastructure, communications, agriculture, emergency response, and rising wealth have made humanity far more resilient to environmental hazards.
Students should be taught the difference between observations and projections, plausible scenarios and extreme scenarios, manageable risks and planetary doom. They should also learn about adaptation, technological progress, uncertainty, and human resilience.
Instead of merely creating climate-anxiety support groups and steering frightened students toward climate advocacy or psychiatric care, universities might try something more fundamental: report the state of the climate accurately. Tell them humanity isn’t doomed. Tell them computer models are not observations. Tell them the worst emissions scenario are in fact impossible. Tell them humans are remarkably adaptable. Better yet, buy them a copy of Climate at a Glance and assign it as required reading.
The University of Utah study has identified a real problem, but Newswise has the diagnosis backwards. It does not demonstrate that climate change is psychologically harming students. It shows that students who are generally more anxious, politically predisposed to climate concern, and more frequently exposed to climate information in classrooms and online report greater climate anxiety.
If young people are repeatedly told that their planet is dying, their future is frightening, humanity may be doomed, and having children might be irresponsible, we shouldn’t be astonished when surveys discover that they’re anxious.
Perhaps before universities create another climate-anxiety support group, educators and journalists should consider whether the first treatment for climate anxiety ought to be less alarmism, more context, and a much larger dose of reality grounded in real world data, which with regard to extreme weather and human health, is generally positive.
Sunset on the Quality of Western Propaganda: Arrival of the Dr Strangelove Moment
By Greg Simons | Propaganda In Focus | September 30, 2026
Propaganda has a complicated history and relationship with the West, shaped by ideological presumptions, moral and ethical evaluations, definitions, and assumptions. These frameworks have the effect of producing dilemmas and contradictions within an idealised conception of society. In part, this is due to embedded assumptions about identity and the cultural myths that accompany idealised notions of a morally and socially superior Western society. Such myths function to construct the façade of a value- and ethics-based consensus, reinforcing in-group identity and cohesion as a means of generating political unity. At the same time, they define and contrast this in-group against an oppositional out-group perceived as lacking the ‘desired’ mythical attributes of a ‘good’ society.
One of the enduring myths of Western propaganda, which virtue signals the assumed values and ethical principles of a so-called democracy as an in-group, is that democracies do not engage in propaganda. This myth is based on the assertion that the values and virtues of free human will are cherished, where facts and reality prevail in a rational and informed society. Conversely, non-democracies are presented as the idealised out-group that regularly engages in heavy-handed and overt propaganda to prime and manipulate their ‘unfree’ population. The in-group is often thought to be virtuous and ethical while the out-group is subversive to the free human will and spirit: emotional logic dictates loyalty and empathy for the in-group, suspicion and fear of the named out-group.
This fear, of something bad happening and the personal aspect of it happening to you, is driven by mainstream politics and media. Fear is the first step toward compliance. A false sense of unity is driven by the façade of an external threat to an idealised projection of democracy in Western society and the notion that it is under threat from the propaganda of authoritarian forces seeking destroy the presumed cultural and identity foundations of ‘our’ society. See, for example, recent hyperbole about “anti-democratic propaganda” taking over the world.
However, does this cognitively nice and neat image reflect reality? Far from it. There are those who admit propaganda was an invention of the West, that it is a ‘necessary’ tool for the effective governing of democratic society, and that it is the very foundation of liberal democracy. Adolf Hitler admired the ‘quality’ and effects of British propaganda in the First World War to such an extent he praised its excellence in a chapter of his autobiography Mein Kampf. Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels also admired the quality of Western propaganda, such as Hollywood Westerns. He also infamously quipped that the West accuses its opponent of that which they are guilty of doing.
However, in the wake of the Cold War and the general march into the era of what some term as the New Cold War, there is a distinct decline in the quality and effectiveness of Western propaganda. The New Cold War concerns the growing geopolitical tensions between the in-group ‘democracies’ of the Global North and the out-group ‘autocracies’ of the Global South (especially China, Iran and Russia). The motivation is to justify and legitimise a desperate, reckless, and increasingly militarised foreign policy of the West, one which requires political capital and public consent, or at least no significant resistance. Western mainstream political leaders from the liberal democracies lack public approval and consent and are the most unpopular generation according to opinion polls. The propaganda used by Western leaders to justify and legitimise an increasingly aggressive stance against China, Iran and Russia, as a means to contain and weaken these three pillars of the Global South, is ever more heavy handed and overt.
In its current iteration of desperation and decline of operational standards and effects, Western propaganda now seems akin to the satirical anti-war masterpiece Dr Strangelove. Unfortunately, the stakes are increasingly high for the world as compromised and incompetent political leaders seek to maintain an idealised public image and retain their political office, and the Western geopolitical hegemony desperately seeks to cling to its 500 years of a leading global role. Both of these aspirations have run out of time and talent, but the show must go on!
The propaganda of fear is being cultivated to maximum levels among publics throughout the Western world, and especially in the EU and US. This no longer concerns the positive propaganda of attraction, but the negative propaganda of fear and hatred. Furthermore, following Edward Bernays observation in 1947, there is no coincidence in terms of the timing and nature of this propaganda masquerading as news. The engineering of public consent as a means to prime and mobilise mass public audiences for an act that contradicts their objective interests is well under way.
There is a great deal of Orwellian influence in the language of vague wordings used to construct the Russian ‘threat’ – both in military and ideological terms. There is a “good” practical reason and desired outcome for this approach, which is that the sloppy, vague, and dishonest language actively corrupts the public’s ability to think clearly, which in turn enables political oppression and propaganda to be conducted. There are numerous examples of this, such as Russian “grey zone activities,” or “hybrid warfare,” and the threat of a Russian invasion of the whole of Europe should Ukraine lose the war. Here the propagandists refer to Ukraine as a “shield” for Europe, the same terminology used by Nazi Germany’s “crusade against Bolshevism”.
These propaganda constructions of the Russian ‘threat’ make use of fear, card stacking and bandwagoning – An information environment of selective information that is attempting to create a herd mentality, where emotional and knee-jerk decisions are engineered in the interests of the communicator. These desired emotional reactions are objectively against the audience being primed and mobilised. The basis of fear in the audience is to be operationalised to push the ‘solution’, a reckless and aggressive policy.
That policy is to prepare for war with Russia, even if the West is not in a financial or industrial position to effectively do so. Thus, the propaganda narrative is regularly repeated in the “speak with one voice spirit” by the political and media establishment. This includes a massive rearmament programme in an economy that is deindustrialising and running out of public funds, and where the standard of living is dropping and the cost of living rising. A war with Russia is presented as being imminent and inevitable, which among other things requires the public to be “psychologically ready” or, in other words, in an emotional state of fear and compliant to the state dictates. Even though citizens are not willing to fight and die for the vanity of the political establishment and a hegemon in severe decline, conscription is pushed as being necessary and a collective duty of citizens. Various countries are bringing back conscription amidst this massive propaganda campaign of fear, attempting to psychologically groom their citizens who lack the will to fight and lack trust in the political system. This is exemplified in the outrageous demand by politician Jacob Rees-Mogg that Britons need to do their duty to fight and die for the British government, a regime that has actively worked against the objective interests of its country and its people.
Every propagandistic accusation by the West regarding the alleged imminent and inevitable Russian threat reads more like a confession, as noted by Goebbels many years ago. The Western propaganda is not up to the same standards that it used to be when it was so much admired by Hitler; it has become everything that democracies have accused non-democracies of doing and being in terms of their idealised myths and notions of binary constructions of culture and identity between the in-group (liberal democracy) and the out-group (authoritarian). It comes at a time of Western political and geopolitical decline and, as the war in Ukraine seems to be in the process of decisively moving towards a Russian victory on the battlefield, this means that time is short and desperation is setting in to try and save imagined political reputations and a geopolitical hegemony that is all but lost.
Thomas Fazi: NATO’s Hybrid Warfare – Deception & Permanent War
Glenn Diesen | October 31, 2026
Thomas Fazi is an Italian journalist and author focusing on economics and geopolitics.
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Wrong, AP and NPR: Europe’s 50,000 Heat Deaths Are a Computer-Model Estimate, Not a Real Body Count
By Anthony Watts | ClimateRealism | October 28, 2026
National Public Radio (NPR), reprinted an Associated Press (AP) report from climate reporter Seth Borenstein titled “Europe’s heat claims 50,000 lives. Climate change blamed for two-thirds of deaths,” which claims that summer heat killed 50,391 Europeans in 2026 and that human-caused climate change killed 32,619 of them. This is false. Modeled numbers are presented by NPR as observed deaths when they are not. The data show that neither number is a count of actual people medically determined to have died from heat or climate change; both are statistical constructs produced by computer models.
Here is the basis of the false headline:
Researchers modeled heat-related deaths for different age groups in 854 European cities during repeated heat waves in June, July and August and found that 50,391 people died from warmer temperatures, and of those, 32,619 died because of the extra heat caused by the burning of coal, oil and gas, according to a study in an upcoming issue of Nature Health.
The 50,391 “heat deaths” are imaginary in the literal sense that neither AP nor NPR can produce a list of 50,391 people whose deaths were determined to have been caused by heat. The researchers did not count them, they modeled them. NPR eventually admits exactly that: “The scientific team also had to use statistical modeling to come up with the base count of 50,000 heat deaths.” That sentence demolishes the impression created by NPR’s headline.
There is no observed body count of 50,000+ heat victims. Instead, there are mortality records, temperature records, statistical relationships between temperature and mortality, and a mathematical model that estimates how many deaths might be associated with temperatures above a calculated optimum. The resulting number is merely an estimate. AP and NPR irresponsibly report it as though there is an actual body count.
Then the researchers take that imaginary statistical population of 50,391 heat deaths and run another modeling exercise to determine how many were supposedly caused by climate change. Again, the story admits how this was done: “They ran computer simulations of a world without climate change and compared it to the deaths that happened this summer. The difference is what was caused by global warming.” Except NPR’s wording is misleading even there. The researchers weren’t comparing their imaginary climate with 50,391 individually identified heat deaths that “happened this summer.” The base heat-death number was itself produced statistically.
So, we have a model estimating how many people died from heat, followed by another model estimating what temperatures would have existed in a hypothetical world without human-caused climate change, followed by a calculation estimating how many of the first model’s estimated deaths would not have occurred in the second model’s imaginary world.
Out comes the wonderfully exact number of 32,619 climate-change deaths. Not approximately 30,000 or somewhere around 33,000, but exactly 32,619. That precision is almost comical considering that the people represented by the number were never individually identified as climate-change fatalities in the first place. There are no 32,619 death certificates saying “climate change.” There aren’t even 50,391 death certificates saying “heat.”
That doesn’t mean nobody died during Europe’s heat waves. Of course people died, and some deaths may well have been caused or hastened by heat. Elderly people and those suffering cardiovascular, respiratory, and other illnesses can be especially vulnerable to extreme temperatures. More than half of NPR’s modeled deaths were among people aged 85 and older. But that is very different from claiming, as NPR’s headline does, that “Europe’s heat claims 50,000 lives.”
This distinction becomes even more important because the calculation depends upon assumptions about how mortality responds to temperature. The researchers used mathematical temperature-mortality relationships for different ages and cities, identifying an “optimal” temperature associated with minimum mortality and calculating additional deaths when temperatures departed from it. It makes sense on the surface, but those relationships are not scientific laws. Humans adapt to make themselves safer, like by simply buying an air conditioning unit. Physicians are better at treating heat stress, buildings improve, work schedules change, and vulnerable elderly residents are checked by relatives and social services.
Adaptation works. A 2024 Nature Medicine study estimated that European heat-related mortality during 2023 would have been 80 percent higher without adaptation since 2000. Among people over age 80, estimated mortality would have been more than twice as high without adaptation. It should be obvious that there is a problem with taking temperature-mortality relationships developed from previous years, and treating them as though the conditions remain fixed. The Watts Up With That analysis, “Climate Death Toll: Batteries Not Included,” points directly to this problem. The calculation starts with historical temperature-mortality relationships, extrapolates them to hundreds of European cities, applies them to current temperatures and populations, and then compares the result against an imaginary counterfactual climate. Each stage adds assumptions, yet by the time the number reaches NPR, most of those assumptions have vanished and the model output has become a supposedly real death toll.
There is another glaring omission: cold. A major 2021 study published in The Lancet Planetary Health examined temperature and mortality across 750 locations in 43 countries. It estimated that 8.52 percent of deaths were associated with cold compared with just 0.91 percent associated with heat. By the same sort of statistical reasoning NPR is willing to accept for heat, cold was associated with roughly nine times as many deaths. More importantly, from 2000-2003 to 2016-2019, declining cold-associated mortality more than offset increasing heat-associated mortality. The result was a net decline in temperature-related mortality.
Climate at a Glance discusses the same research and notes that the decline in cold mortality associated with modest warming produced an estimated net reduction of approximately 166,000 premature temperature-related deaths from 2000 through 2019. Curiously, NPR doesn’t produce a headline saying, “Global Warming Saves Thousands of Lives by Reducing Deadly Cold.” That apparently isn’t considered newsworthy.
The broader historical record is even more devastating to the suggestion that humanity is becoming increasingly helpless against climate. Climate at a Glance reports that deaths from weather-related disasters have declined by more than 99 percent during the past century. Average annual deaths from extreme weather disasters fell from approximately 485,000 during the 1920s to fewer than 8,000 around 2020. That is not what an escalating climate mortality crisis looks like.
Indeed, NPR’s own experts call for heat-warning systems, cooling, and neighborhood programs to check on vulnerable residents. Those are sensible measures that can save actual lives during the next heat wave, and they demonstrate something the climate narrative routinely obscures: people adapt.
There is nothing inherently improper about epidemiologists constructing statistical estimates. Such models can be useful tools for identifying risks, allocating resources, and developing public-health policy. But statistical estimates aren’t observational data.
If NPR wants to report that researchers estimate approximately 50,000 excess deaths statistically associated with summer temperatures, say so. If researchers further estimate, using a counterfactual climate model, that anthropogenic warming contributed to some fraction of that statistical mortality, say that too. But don’t tell readers that Europe’s heat “claims 50,000 lives” and that climate change killed exactly 32,619 people when nobody counted those deaths. A model can calculate an estimate, generate a counterfactual, and assign statistical probabilities, but a computer model cannot examine a body, determine a cause of death, sign a death certificate, or count a dead person.
NPR’s dead Europeans are imaginary people generated by a model, and the 32,619 supposedly killed by climate change are imaginary people generated from the imaginary people.
Lies, Damn Lies, and Ukraine News
By William Dunkerley | Ron Paul Institute | October 29, 2026
It’s been said that truth is the first casualty of war. What about the Ukraine war? I’ve followed the news closely, and have found ample evidence in headlines and storylines that the old adage holds true today. Too often the Ukraine news stories we see are misleading instead of informative.
For instance, in March 2014 CNN reported that Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution was “standing up on behalf of democracy.” A month earlier, The Week cited many pundits and policymakers also characterizing events as a victory for democracy. It was a clear and compelling news theme.
But what’s misleading about that? It creates an impression that is contrary to reality. The truth is that the immediate result of the revolution was an abrupt end to constitutional democracy, not a victory for democracy.
The uprising totally dismantled the constitutional democracy that Ukraine had operated under since its independence from the USSR in 1991. The sequence of events makes it clear. Out went the democratic constitution; in came rule by force under the unelected revolutionaries. That’s what Ukrainians were stuck with for months. The stories about a boost for democracy were completely misleading.
This is a good example of truth being a casualty of war. The news celebrated an advance of democracy while in reality democracy itself had been lost.
Media distortion like that is not unique to the Ukraine war. Here’s an example dating back to the Cold War.
The issue was Soviet missiles showing up in Cuba in 1962. Upon discovery, President Kennedy railed against their presence.
On national TV he demanded that en route Soviet ships presumed to be carrying still more missiles be turned around. And Khrushchev complied.
Still there was the issue of removing the missiles from Cuba. How did that turn out?
“We’re eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked,” reportedly said Secretary of State Dean Rusk. News reports characterized JFK as staring down the menacing Soviet leader and winning this round with the communists. The imagery seemed to play upon the title of Kennedy’s book, Profiles in Courage. It all was emblematic of the American Way. The story was almost poetic.
Indeed, this story seems so perfect that it is hard to believe it was actually a hoax. True, there were missiles. But here is a factual account of how that crisis really unfolded:
In late 1961 President Kennedy began placing nuclear missiles in Turkey, strategically close to the Soviet border. Full deployment was completed in 1962. It would take less than 15 minutes for the missiles to hit Moscow.
Then in July of that year Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev sealed a secret agreement with Cuba to deploy Soviet nuclear missiles there, just 90 miles from Florida. It would take them less than 15 minutes to hit Washington DC.
What ended this standoff was something far less poetic than the Kennedyesque example I cited earlier. Khrushchev proposed a quid pro quo: He would remove his missiles from Cuba if Kennedy would remove his from Turkey. Kennedy privately agreed. But he insisted on a significant proviso: the quid pro quo must be kept secret. Khrushchev conceded and Kennedy’s fanciful story of standing tall in the face of a threatening adversary prevailed.
The Cuban missile story thus joins the Ukraine democracy story as another example of truth being a casualty of war.
Now consider this next example from back in Ukraine.
“Parliament votes 328-0 to impeach Yanukovych” reported the Kyiv Post on February 23, 2014. A day earlier the New York Times claimed, “Ukraine’s Parliament voted to remove President Viktor F. Yanukovych from office hours after he abandoned his office.”
Both reports further demonstrate how truth becomes a casualty of war. Neither accurately portrays what really happened.
Radio Liberty was quick to set things straight. In a report titled “Was Yanukovych’s Ouster Constitutional?” staffer Daisy Sindelar presented an in-depth analysis showing that parliamentarians tried to remove Yanukovych from the presidency but failed to achieve a sufficient vote.
She also pointed out that Yanukovych’s alleged abandonment of the presidency was not even a possible basis for declaring the office vacant. Radio Liberty’s corrections are backed up by Constitutional Coup in Ukraine in 2014, a thorough academic study published under the auspices of the Polish Parliament.
Clearly all the examples cited above represent fabricated stories masquerading as the truth. But the news stories are also examples of something much more insidious: the collective impact that a persistent manufactured narrative can have on a given public.
They paint a picture, a vivid narrative, that shapes the cultural schema through which people understand and interpret future events.
This can be seen in how the media have portrayed the fates of Crimea and Donbas. At issue is the question: Did the revolutionary government automatically inherit all the territorial authority of the constitutional democracy they had overthrown?
Crimea, for example, has been a significant stumbling block in discussions of a peaceful settlement of the war. In March 2014 Secretary of State John Kerry told CNN, “Crimea is part of Ukraine. Crimea is Ukraine.” But how is that true? What made Crimea part of revolutionary Ukraine?
Before the revolution, Crimea’s place within Ukraine was established by the democratic constitution. But the revolutionaries abandoned that constitution and claimed authority through force. Their rule by force never extended into Crimea. What, then, was the basis for their claim to Crimea? There was none that holds up to scrutiny. Even the eventual election of Poroshenko as president did not undo the constitutional destruction caused by the revolutionaries.
Why didn’t CNN challenge Kerry’s story? The assumption behind his statement illustrates how an ongoing series of fabricated stories can predispose us to interpret each new story in a particular way. If one can believe that a takeover by force is an advancement of democracy, why question an unsupported claim regarding Crimea? This shows that a lack of scrutiny can lead to creating or reinforcing a cultural schema that impedes our understanding of what is really happening.
The same principle applies to Donbas, but the words are different. Here Ukraine news stories portrayed the situation as “Russia invading Donbas.” But the facts show that notion to be a sensationalized misdirection from the truth.
The actual story can be understood by asking this question: What made Donbas, meaning the areas of Donetsk and Luhansk, a part of revolutionary Ukraine?
The logic that clarified the status of Crimea applies here too. Donetsk and Luhansk were not part of revolutionary Ukraine for the same reason. Additionally, their populations actively rejected revolutionary rule. They fought against it when the revolutionaries attacked them. If there were, as reports claimed, Russian volunteers, mercenaries, or regulars helping the population defend their territories, it does not alter the basic scenario.
Calling the territories breakaway regions is a misnomer, as is calling the people separatists. It is not possible to break away or separate from something to which one was not attached in the first place. The Russia invades Donbas story is just sensationalistic fabrication.
What’s worse is that this obscures what really happened there. February 2022 is often cited as the start of the Ukraine war. The facts tell a different story. The hostilities in Donbas beginning in 2014 marked the actual start of the Ukraine war, years before the massive escalation in 2022. Reports say that this Donbas phase of the conflict claimed over 14,000 lives and displaced roughly 1.5 million people.
“Truth is the first casualty of war?” Once again we see that axiom is borne out. The mainstream story about Donbas leaves out the critical parts of the truth. But who will notice that? The facts are obscured from view by the now well-established, yet fundamentally misleading cultural schema.
The false claim of a democratic revolution. The lie about how Yanukovych was dismissed. The false and misleading narratives about the status of Crimea and Donbas. These and other stories have given the American public and our leaders a politically contorted view of the entire Ukraine war dilemma.
These narratives — and the false cultural schema they help create — can also lead people to draw unwarranted conclusions about the reasons behind political leaders’ decisions. As peace-treaty talks approach, there is a danger that proposals and decisions about ending the war might be built on a house of cards — that is, the series of misleading Ukraine news stories and the dysfunctional cultural schema that they helped to create. Together they distort perceptions of how the war began and what is at stake. If negotiators fail to break free of that schema, any resulting peace could prove unsustainable for Ukrainians and their country. What a waste that would be. Haven’t the Ukrainian people suffered enough?
Financial Times rejects Nordic demands to correct Putin call story – media
RT | October 29, 2026
The Financial Times has refused to correct an anonymously sourced article about a recent phone call between Russian President Vladimir Putin and the leaders of Norway and Finland, despite objections from both Nordic governments, according to media reports.
Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store and Finnish President Alexander Stubb spoke with Putin earlier this week, drawing criticism from some of Europe’s more Russia-hawkish politicians.
The British newspaper claimed that Putin spent much of the conversation “lecturing” the Nordic leaders on “medieval Slavic history” and its relevance to the Ukraine conflict, rather than discussing ways to end the hostilities. Citing three anonymous sources described only as “familiar with the conversation,” the FT portrayed the Russian president as “fixated” on history.
Store’s government told Norwegian daily Verdens Gang (VG) that the characterization was inaccurate and that Finland had contacted the FT on behalf of both countries to challenge its account, the newspaper reported on Thursday. Finnish media also covered the joint objection, with the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat citing its own sources to dispute the British paper’s description of the call.
Putin’s foreign policy adviser Yury Ushakov said later in the day that the FT article is “some invented information, or rather disinformation” and that the Nordic leaders were correct to call out the publication.
The FT, however, rejected the request, telling VG that it stood by its reporting.
Its article, published on Tuesday, was written by three journalists.
One of them, American national Christopher Miller, previously worked for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a US government-funded international broadcaster originally established with covert CIA funding to conduct anti-communist propaganda operations during the Cold War. Miller went to Ukraine in 2010 as a volunteer with the US Peace Corps.
His co-authors, Max Seddon and Henry Foy, head the FT’s bureaus in Moscow and Brussels, respectively.
Last week, the newspaper published a lengthy article by Seddon titled “The Putin whisperers,” recounting a dramatic but difficult-to-verify story of American and German nationals attempting to avert a “nuclear Armageddon” through backchannel diplomacy with Moscow.
Foy, meanwhile, broke a story in 2025 alleging that a plane carrying European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had experienced suspected Russian GPS jamming. The FT journalist was himself aboard the aircraft when it landed in Bulgaria, as he subsequently revealed on the newspaper’s podcast. His original report, citing anonymous officials, suggested Russia may have deliberately targeted the top EU executive with electronic interference.
Key elements of the story were challenged almost immediately by flight-tracking service Flightradar24. Bulgarian authorities subsequently debunked the core claims relayed by FT.
Despite the discrepancies, the FT insisted it stood by its reporting. Foy did not respond to requests for comment from fellow journalists who questioned the account.
Trump peddles fresh falsehoods, claims Iran ‘started the war’ as US aggression drags on
Press TV – October 27, 2026
US President Donald Trump has again resorted to brazen falsehoods while defending Washington’s ongoing war of aggression against the Islamic Republic of Iran, claiming Tehran initiated the war and dismissing an earlier ceasefire as a “waste of time.”
Speaking at a campaign rally in Corinth, Mississippi, on Monday, ahead of the November midterms, Trump echoed the talking points of hardline Republicans by asserting: “We didn’t start the war with Iran. Iran started the war with us.”
He further claimed the Islamic Republic had developed missiles capable of striking American cities, declaring that “they’d hit San Diego, they’d hit Los Angeles, they’d hit our cities too,” and argued that the military offensive “should’ve been done a long time ago.”
Trump’s remarks stand in stark contradiction to the established record. On February 28, the United States and the Israeli regime launched the unprovoked so-called “Operation Epic Fury,” a coordinated assault that assassinated Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, senior military commanders, and hundreds of civilians, including schoolchildren in Minab.
The aggression followed months of escalating threats and came amid stalled diplomatic efforts, consistent with the pattern of the earlier 12-day US-Israeli war in June 2025.
Iran responded immediately and decisively with Operation True Promise 4. In successive waves of precision missile and drone strikes, the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps and allied resistance forces targeted US military installations across West Asia, including bases in Qatar, Bahrain, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait.
These retaliatory operations inflicted significant damage on American radar systems, tanker aircraft, command facilities, and naval assets, exposing the vulnerability of the US military footprint in the region and forcing a recalculation in Washington.
A ceasefire was secured in early April after nearly 40 days of intense fighting, largely on Iranian terms and in the face of sustained resistance. Far from a “waste of time,” the pause reflected the failure of the initial US-Israeli maximalist objectives — unconditional surrender, elimination of Iran’s defensive missile capabilities, and control over the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump’s own administration has repeatedly shifted its stated justifications for the war, from preventing a nuclear weapons program (despite Iran’s longstanding fatwa and the absence of evidence of a military nuclear effort) to claims of imminent attack, regime change, and reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which Tehran had restricted only to vessels linked to the aggressors.
Trump’s missile claims are equally baseless. Iran’s ballistic missile inventory, while advanced and regionally capable, consists primarily of systems with ranges of roughly 1,000–2,000 kilometers. These weapons have proven effective against US bases and Israeli targets in West Asia. They do not include intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the continental United States.
Independent assessments and US intelligence have consistently confirmed that Iran does not have the missiles to strike cities such as Los Angeles or San Diego. Trump’s assertion appears designed to manufacture fear and justify continued aggression rather than reflect military reality.
The economic consequences Trump now seeks to downplay stem directly from the US-initiated war of aggression and the resulting disruption in the Persian Gulf. Iranian officials have repeatedly stated that any naval blockade or further attacks on civilian and energy infrastructure will be met with proportional and stronger responses.
President Masoud Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi have emphasized that diplomacy remains possible only on the basis of mutual respect and an end to aggression, while warning that renewed strikes will not alter Iran’s positions.
Trump’s latest comments also highlight a deeper hypocrisy. He campaigned as a president who would avoid new wars, yet authorized a major military offensive that has neither achieved its shifting goals nor ended.
His repeated declarations of victory earlier in the year have been contradicted by Iran’s continued ability to conduct retaliatory operations and the persistence of the conflict more than seven months after it began.
As midterm elections approach, such rhetoric appears aimed at deflecting domestic criticism over rising costs and the lack of a clear exit strategy rather than presenting an accurate account of events.
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Are There 50,000 ‘Israeli-born’ Individuals Living in the UK?
By Professor David Miller | August 18, 2026
Recent disclosures by the Zionist regime show that some 2,069 British nationals were serving in the IDF as of March 2025, according to Freedom of Information (FoI) requests submitted to the occupation forces (1,686 dual British-Israeli, plus 383 multinational). We cannot tell from the figures how many of these were already settler colonists and intend to stay in the colony, and how many will return or have returned to the UK. Presumably, those returning to the UK will number far fewer than 2,000, since many are known to have become permanently residents of the colony.
Additionally, the IDF figures only provide a snapshot, and do not tell us how many have served in the Jewish supremacist military either before or after March 2025. One way into the question of how many genocidaires are living in Britain is to ask how many current British residents were born in the Zionist colony. There is data on that, as we shall see. … continue
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