By Bas van Geffen, senior macro strategist at Rabobank

The situation in the Middle East remains on an escalatory path, with Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia now a regular event. Attacks have already damaged the east-west pipeline, which allowed Saudi Arabia to bypass the Strait of Hormuz.

The damage to the pipeline increases Iran’s leverage. It forces Saudi Arabia to pivot back to oil exports through the Strait of Hormuz. Bloomberg reports that the country is already increasing sales of spot cargoes for ship-to-ship delivery in the Gulf of Oman, which means that the Saudis are taking the responsibility and risk of transporting the crude through Hormuz.

Saudi Arabia has been loading 8.7 million barrels of crude oil today (2026-09-15) at its east coast terminals.#OOTT #IranWar #Tankers pic.twitter.com/Md6iM6ehgi

— TankerTrackers.com, Inc. (@TankerTrackers) September 15, 2026

Further supply risks follow from the Houthis taking key areas around the Bab el-Mandeb strait and rumors they have laid mines in the waterway, which puts new constraints on tanker movements. Following the unfolding escalation in the Middle East, we have updated our energy forecasts.

The energy market had already shifted higher on the news of re-escalation, and prices of crude and refined products are drawing new attention from motorists and lawmakers. Yesterday, US Senate Majority Leader Thune said he is “open to exploring” a diesel export ban if that helps ease domestic price pressures. If this idea gets more traction, it would predominantly be at the cost of Europe and South America. Or could these new supply chain disruptions be the catalyst for more countries to send military assets to the region?

The energy supply shock is also creating an increasingly difficult situation for central banks. Interest rates continue to rise in tandem with energy prices. Our US strategist still believes that the nature of the shock does not warrant a hike, but a credibility problem is pushing the Fed into a corner.

Markets expect much more than a one-and-done hike, but the same goes for expectations embedded in curves where central banks have shown a more proactive response. Yesterday, EUR money markets priced more than four additional rate hikes on top of the two the ECB has already delivered.

Policymakers probably do not mind some financial tightening that follows from rate hike expectations, but markets have probably gotten a bit too far ahead of the central banks – which are increasingly struggling to balance inflation and growth risks, and growing uncertainty.

If rate setters do not give any pushback, the market could wag the central bank into further rate hikes and more restrictive policy than they may deem necessary. Yet, pushing back is difficult. Inflation risks remain to the upside, and central bankers don’t want to sound complacent since this could affect inflation expectations.

In her press conference last week, ECB President Lagarde already refused to reaffirm that markets “understand the ECB’s reaction function well,” which we construed as a hint that the market may be moving faster than the policymakers like. Even though energy-driven inflation is set to increase further, price pressures are still mostly driven by that supply shock and there is no evidence that inflation is spreading.

Yesterday, anonymous sources “leaked” to MNI News that any next move would probably not be in October, but in December. Market-implied odds for the October meeting dropped from a likely hike to a coin toss after the news broke. And interestingly, the story also suppressed pricing for the next 12 months – suggesting that the pushback helped to dampen expectations of a more forceful response across the board. We imagine there may be more leaks in the coming weeks to at least lessen the expectations for the October meeting.

Likewise, the market pared back expectations for the Bank of England somewhat after today’s inflation data. UK inflation was in line with expectations, with higher energy and fuel prices the main cause of the rise to 3.1% y/y. Beyond that, there is very little that may alarm the MPC ahead of their meeting: core CPI and services CPI are both unchanged, and food CPI is also not doing what was expected.

Combined with yesterday’s labor market report, which showed slack continuing to rise, and survey evidence from the DMP that showed relatively muted selling price expectations, this all suggests that second-round risks remain contained. The data clearly support a hold tomorrow at 3.75%, which is already around 50bp above economists’ estimates of the UK’s neutral rate.

Whereas the ECB provided some hints about their next move, the central bank has yet to provide clarity on its leadership. The central bank’s staff have reportedly urged President Lagarde to state whether she does or does not intend to serve her full term, so that uncertainty does not undermine the institution. Rumors of Lagarde’s early departure still rampant, and Ms. Schnabel has also been tipped to leave early to fill a vacancy at the IMF.

In addition to personal motivations, the prospect of Le Pen winning the French presidential elections is fuelling speculation that European leaders want to fast-track key decisions to avoid that the Eurosceptic can delay or derail them.

Indeed, France may have started horse trading for the three soon-to-be-vacant seats in earnest. Reuters reported that President Macron may support Klaas Knot’s candidacy for ECB president if the chief economist job goes to a French candidate. We can certainly name a couple of French economists who would be suitable. However, Germany may also eye the economist role instead of Schnabel’s current focus on market operations.

Internal divisions already complicate decision making on multiple fronts. European diplomats poured some cold water on PM Carney’s hopes to strengthen the ties between Canada and the bloc, to strengthen the countries’ position versus the US and China. Unsurprisingly, the countries that rely most on NATO’s deterrence are wary of the damage this could do to EU-US ties.

Diesel futures and refining spreads climbed to record highs as worsening supply disruptions in the Gulf and Russia tightened availability of the industrial fuel that powers the global economy.

Potential export restrictions, or at least extending risk, are compounding the squeeze: Moscow is reportedly considering extending its diesel export ban, while Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters Tuesday he was “open to exploring” a US diesel export ban.

Nymex heating oil futures, the US benchmark for diesel, jumped 6.1% Tuesday to their highest settlement in records dating to 1986. European gasoil futures climbed 6.2% to a record in data going back to 1989. 

The squeeze was even more severe in refining spreads. The US heating oil crack, which measures the difference between fuel and crude prices, surged to $117 a barrel on Wednesday morning, the highest level in Bloomberg data going back to 2009.

Moves in diesel and refining spreads show the energy shock isn’t necessarily in crude available on global markets but is, in fact, festering deep inside the industrial fuel market as a global refining crisis. 

Russia is considering extending its diesel export ban through October, potentially adding pressure as the Northern Hemisphere approaches winter.

Barclays refining and midstream analyst Theresa Chen commented to clients on Tuesday about Thune’s comments on a potential US diesel export ban. She said, “Given renewed discussion surrounding a diesel export ban, we discuss the potential implications across our refining coverage. We continue to view the possibility of an export ban as both detrimental to the US refining complex and unlikely to provide the intended price relief.”

At the start of the week, Bloomberg Intelligence senior commodity strategist Mike McGlone warned that the diesel price shock echoes similar moves gasoline made during the 2008 energy shock.

Yemen’s Ansar Allah (Houthi) movement has claimed to have shot down a Saudi fighter jet in a Wednesday statement, saying they utilized domestic made munitions to do it.

“The Yemeni Armed Forces, with Allah’s aid and grace, succeeded in shooting down a Saudi F-15 fighter jet while it was carrying out hostile operations,” Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree announced.

He said the fighter jet had been targeted “using a locally made” missile over Marib – after the Saudi coalition has launched some 450 strikes. The area of the alleged downing is some 75 miles east of Sanaa.

Saudi authorities have not acknowledged any shootdown and have not immediately commented on the claim.

Overnight, the big news out of the conflict focused on Saudi claims that it had intercepted a Houthi drone targeting Yemen in a “heinous” act targeting Islam’s holiest site.

However, the Houthis are vehemently denying sending a drone on Mecca. “Our operations target its oil facilities and military bases, which are far removed from the sacred sites,” Saree said further.

The Houthi military spokesman called out the “fabrications and lies propagated by the criminal al-Saud regime cannot deceive anyone.”

Missile alerts had been issued for the population of Mecca, and plenty of old and fake social media videos purported to capture footage of a drone inbound on Mecca, but so far no clear evidence has emerged of the alleged targeting.

But the Saudi claims were enough to get Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to condemn Wednesday “in the strongest possible terms the dastardly and heinous” the alleged attack on Mecca.

“The people of Pakistan are saddened and perturbed by this outrageous act,” he said on X.

Unconfirmed image of downed jet posted by Iranian state media:

On Wednesday morning, Yemeni Army confirmed that it had shot down a Saudi F-15 fighter aircraft over Marib Province. pic.twitter.com/4nk1d1DYi6

— IRNA News Agency ☫ (@IrnaEnglish) September 16, 2026

Pakistan and Turkey just recently this summer signed a comprehensive “Mecca Defense Pact”, and the Saudi claims that Mecca was targeted by drone are perhaps intended to secure the help of allies in dealing with the advancing Houthis menace while a Red Sea ‘siege for siege’ policy is still in effect. As for the lates developments to emerge Wednesday, via Newsquawk:

Houthis say they carried out two military operations, targeting Saudi Aramco in Yanbu with dozens of ballistic missiles and drones and Khamis Mushait Air Base with a number of ballistic missiles.

The damaged Saudi East-West pipeline could still take five to six weeks to come back online, according to some estimates.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

Speaking to TMZ DC on Monday, the South Carolina Republican called Clancy a “serial killer” and demanded the death penalty as a public spectacle.

“Her children are dead. She should be dead too,” she said. “She should get the death penalty. It should be public. It should be a public execution.”

I didn’t know you could bleep the word retarded?

— Nancy Mace (@NancyMace) September 15, 2026

When the reporter asked what that would look like, Mace did not retreat. “It could be by a firearm; it could be the electric chair. I don’t really care. Not an injection.”

Pressed again on whether she wanted Clancy in the electric chair in front of a crowd, she answered, “A hundred percent.” Then she put the point in the plainest English available: “She’s a serial killer. She should get the electric chair. She should get the death penalty. It should be public. It should be a warning to women everywhere. You don’t kill your kids.”

She later posted on X that Clancy “doesn’t deserve to live.” After TMZ bleeped a slur she used for Clancy’s lawyer, she posted again: “I didn’t know you could bleep the word retarded?”

Massachusetts has not carried out an execution since 1947. Its highest court struck down the state’s capital statute in 1984. First-degree murder there means life without parole.

Clancy’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington, has spent the trial arguing postpartum psychosis and a lack of criminal responsibility for the murders. Prosecutors said she cleared the house, chose a method (strangulation) that worked on the children, and chose a different method for herself that failed.

After 21 days of testimony, more than 80 witnesses and roughly 38 hours of deliberations, the jury hung. Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial on September 4. The defense has said the split was 11-1 for not criminally responsible.

One juror – described in coverage as a Black man in his 30s – would not sign that finding. Reddington tried to have him ejected. The judge refused. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court denied an emergency appeal. Outside court, Reddington said the other jurors had been “robbed by one man, for whatever his agenda was,” and added, “I hope that guy can sleep well at night.”

In mid-August, hundreds of women in pink gathered outside Plymouth Superior Court for a “Stand in Peace.” They cheered when Clancy’s transport arrived. Organizer Renee Kimball said, “I think that every one of us women believe that it could be any one of us.” Another supporter put it more bluntly on camera: “It could be me.”

Online, the same cohort poured money into a GoFundMe for Clancy’s parents that raced toward seven figures. TikTok mothers filmed themselves “relating” to the confessed killer while holding their own infants. Some insisted Patrick must have done it, in spite of Lindsay’s admissions, her lawyer’s opening, the 911 tape and the lawsuit that says she killed the children.

After the mistrial, Patrick Clancy’s lawyers said he and his family had been hit with “a relentless, escalating and destructive defamation campaign” from “minor celebrities, so-called influencers and outright conspiracy theorists” selling the lie that the father was involved.

Attorney Howard Cooper said the smear sat “at a fever pitch,” with real threats to Patrick’s reputation, livelihood and life. “Enough is enough – this spread of blatant and baseless falsehoods must stop,” Cooper said.

Law enforcement was notified. Patrick has said before that he forgives Lindsay and calls her ill rather than evil. That distinction has not interested the people targeting him.

While the Clancy jury was still out, an Illinois mother named Corie Walsh hanged her 2-year-old son, Barrett, from a basement rafter in Frankfort. She told police the boy was the “devil” and the “anti-Christ.” Witnesses said she had become “very invested” in the Clancy trial and was still texting friends about it hours before the child was found.

Her lawyer reached for the same word the pink shirts have been rehearsing: psychotic episode. Prosecutors said she spoke of harming the remaining children and her husband.

Then Oprah flew in for a “watershed” taping branded as understanding postpartum psychosis. A doctor in the room demanded “the same passion for people who don’t look like Lindsay,” complained about “melanin” and “privilege,” and asked the audience to keep “the pink shirts and the energy” for other women in prison “for this same thing.” The room cheered.

When a young woman stood up and said, “I do believe she’s a murderer,” Oprah answered: “After all you’ve heard today?”

That is the moral arithmetic this case has been selling. The children are scenery. The mother is the cause. The man who will not play along is the problem.

Last week Reddington went on Good Morning America and asked President Trump to pardon his client. “Mr. President, I would hope that you would consider this young lady and the person she is, what she’s been through, and consider a pardon,” he said. A president cannot wipe away a Massachusetts murder case. Reddington knows that. Mace called the stunt “nasty” and “ugly.”

Trump has not played chaplain to the fan club. After the mistrial he said Clancy “did a horrible, horrible thing,” that “there’ll be a price,” and that it would be “mental institution or jail or something.”

Asked again after the pardon plea, he said it is “a state situation, not a federal one.” “There is no winner there,” he added. “There’s no win no matter what you do. Three children are dead.”

Mace added child rapists to her list of public executions and asked the only follow-up that matters in a culture that medicalizes everything except the bodies in the basement: “If people can get away with murdering children, what else can they do? … There are no rules. There are no laws.”

Following last month’s ugly decline (“see the consumer is getting crushed because of Trump”), August’s retail sales is expected to rebound strongly (“see, Trump’s war is causing Americans to spend more on gas and less on Louboutin shoes”). BofA’s omniscient analysts agree with consensus, seeing a 0.8% MoM jump…

Quick reality check – July retail sales weakness was driven by a plunge in non-discretionary spending by higher income households…

So, what did August bring?

Headline US retail sales rose a shocking 1.2% MoM – the biggest jump since March, pulling sales up 6.0% YoY…

…driven by a big reversal in non-store retailer (online) sales…

Core (Ex-Autos & Gas) soared 1.4% MoM – its strongest month since Sept 2024

The Control Group – which feeds into the GDP calculation – jumped almost triple expectations (+1.4% MoM vs +0.5% exp).

Under the hood, Building Materials Sales were the only component that declined MoM…

Finally, Real retail sales – admittedly roughly adjusted for CPI – continues to trend higher…

“August’s retail sales mirror the strong payrolls report, dispelling worries about a slowdown anytime soon. Even if higher prices are making consumers unhappy, they’re not doing much to hurt the economy yet. Higher important and export prices also showed inflationary pressures,” says David Russell, head market strategist at TradeStation.

“The data is hawkish and the case for a rate hike keeps growing.”

So, the consumer is strong and spending after all… despite near record low sentiment?

Real data versus Democrat-biased sentiment? Is it really worse than the very trough of the COVID pandemic?

Authored by Nick Giambruno via International Man,

THAAD is one of the military-industrial complex’s most expensive boondoggles – and most Americans have never heard of it.

The Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system ranks among America’s most advanced ballistic-missile defenses. It aims to intercept ballistic missiles during their terminal phase, as their warheads reenter the atmosphere from space and descend toward their targets.

According to the GAO, it took decades and roughly $12.5 billion in research and development to get THAAD off the drawing board. Today, each interceptor costs an eye-watering $13 million. So every time the US military fires a THAAD interceptor at an incoming ballistic missile, taxpayers spend at least $13 million – and each engagement can require more than one interceptor.

The system had troubled origins.

After a string of failed tests in the 1990s, THAAD looked like it might become an expensive embarrassment.

The failures triggered reviews, redesigns, and mounting questions over whether the Pentagon was throwing good money after bad.

After years of improvements, THAAD entered operational service. Yet despite the billions spent developing it, the US military has acquired just eight batteries – not much of a vote of confidence in the system.

In short, THAAD is expensive – and it is no panacea against ballistic missiles.

Yet THAAD remains a key part of the front-line defense protecting US forces and allies in the Middle East from Iranian ballistic missiles. Few systems can do what THAAD attempts: track and destroy an incoming warhead as it reenters the atmosphere from space and plunges toward its target.

THAAD can intercept conventional ballistic missiles, but maneuvering hypersonic weapons pose a much tougher challenge. Iran has developed missiles that can maneuver at hypersonic speeds during the final stage of flight, making them harder for missile-defense systems to track and destroy. Even the Houthis in impoverished Yemen claim to field missiles with similar capabilities.

At the start of the June 2025 war, analysts estimated that the US had around 534 THAAD interceptors in its global inventory. By the end of the conflict, some estimates put the stockpile near 400, though the US military does not disclose the actual number for obvious reasons. In less than two weeks of fighting, the US burned through roughly 25% of its THAAD interceptor stockpile.

In other words, the US fired around 134 THAAD interceptors during the June 2025 conflict. At roughly $13 million per interceptor, that puts the cost above $1.7 billion – despite an interception rate well below 100%.

It’s also crucial to understand the state of THAAD production. The US will not receive new interceptors until 2027. Even then, current production capacity stands at just eight per month.

That was the state of THAAD – a crucial part of US and allied missile defense – when war with Iran erupted again in February 2026. That war continues today.

The US military does not disclose its THAAD inventory, but months of combat appear to have pushed the stockpile to dangerous levels. The 12-Day War in June 2025 consumed around a quarter of the US supply, with no new deliveries to replace those losses. Since February 2026, a longer and more intense war has drained the stockpile further.

And interceptor losses tell only part of the story. Iran has demonstrated that it can strike US missile-defense infrastructure across the Middle East with precision missiles and drones, putting THAAD batteries, radars, and other equipment at risk.

When you put it all together, it’s not hard to see the problem. Even if THAAD performs as intended, the US cannot sustain this rate of interceptor consumption for long. Months of combat have strained the missile defenses protecting US forces and allies in the region. If another round of intense fighting starts, there is a real possibility they could find themselves almost naked in front of Iranian ballistic missiles.

Iran still has thousands of long-range drones and ballistic missiles in its arsenal – and can replenish them at a much faster rate than the US can replace the interceptors needed even to try to shoot them down.

And that brings us to the real problem…

The bottleneck isn’t money…

As the leader of the world order and issuer of the world’s reserve currency, Washington can print or borrow more than any other country on the planet.

The real bottleneck is physical production capacity – factories, skilled labor, rocket motors, electronics, and the critical minerals needed to build the interceptors.

Congress can appropriate another $10 billion overnight. It cannot build a rare-earth processing plant, missile factory, or trained industrial workforce overnight.

That is where rare earths enter the story.

Modern weapons systems like THAAD depend on small quantities of rare earths and other critical minerals for high-performance magnets, guidance systems, sensors, actuators, electronics, and other components.

The amounts involved can look trivial next to the cost of the finished weapon.

A missile-defense system worth $150 million can depend on critical-mineral components worth only tens of thousands of dollars. But take away those materials, and the $150 million system becomes an expensive collection of parts that cannot do its job.

That makes rare earths one of the strangest choke points in the global economy. In short, rare earths have become indispensable to the US military and the modern American economy.

Measured in dollars or tonnage, the rare-earth market looks small. Yet this tiny physical market sits underneath trillions of dollars of economic value – from advanced weapons and aircraft to semiconductors, electric motors, robotics, data centers, and other high-tech industries.

Think of it as an inverted pyramid.

At the top sit trillions of dollars of military hardware, technology companies, industrial equipment, and economic output.

At the bottom sits a sliver of obscure elements that most investors could not name.

Remove that sliver and parts of the pyramid start falling apart.

And China controls much of it.

That dominance did not happen by accident. China spent more than three decades building mines, processing capacity, engineering expertise, equipment, supply chains, and manufacturing know-how around rare earths.

The West went in the opposite direction.

For decades, the US and Europe embraced the cheapest available supply while environmental restrictions, permitting obstacles, high costs, and public opposition made domestic production less attractive. China built the industrial base while the West consumed its output.

Now Washington wants to reverse that process.

But opening a mine solves only one piece of the problem.

The US also needs processing facilities to separate rare-earth elements from ore. It needs plants that turn those materials into metals and alloys. It needs factories that manufacture high-performance permanent magnets. It needs specialized machinery, engineers, metallurgists, chemists, technicians, and workers who know how to operate the entire chain.

In some cases, China also leads in the equipment and processes needed to perform those steps.

You cannot recreate 30 years of accumulated industrial knowledge with an executive order and a pile of money.

And China has shown that it understands the leverage this gives Beijing.

During its trade confrontation with Washington, China tightened controls over exports of critical minerals and processed materials. The message was hard to miss: the US may control the world’s reserve currency, but China controls physical inputs that parts of the American industrial and military machine cannot function without.

That exposes a weakness few investors appreciated until recent years.

The US can create dollars. It cannot create dysprosium, terbium, neodymium magnets, processing plants, or experienced engineers with a keystroke.

Washington now understands the problem. The Pentagon has poured money into domestic critical-mineral projects, and the US government has pushed defense contractors to remove Chinese materials from their supply chains.

That will create opportunities, but it will not solve the shortage in time to meet today’s military needs. Building a Western rare-earth supply chain will take years, while war is consuming weapons faster than American factories can replace them.

That mismatch between what Washington can spend and what American industry can produce is the heart of the problem.

The THAAD shortage exposes a much larger problem. Washington can create as many dollars as it wants, but it cannot print the resources, factories, or skilled workers.

The consequences will reach far beyond the battlefield. Inflation, shortages, and political turmoil could threaten your savings and personal freedom.

Athens is emerging as an unlikely contender in the competition for Europe’s hedge fund money, with Greece using favorable tax treatment, an improving economy and Mediterranean living to attract financiers looking beyond London and other established financial centers, according to Bloomberg.

That campaign has already produced some notable converts. Millennium Management has established an operation in Athens, while billionaire hedge fund manager Chris Rokos is heading to Greece after deciding to leave Britain. Greek officials are betting that attracting firms of that caliber will make it easier to persuade smaller funds and finance professionals to follow.

It is a striking development for a country that spent much of the previous decade synonymous with sovereign debt problems and economic instability. Greece has since repaired its public finances, regained investment-grade credit ratings and posted stronger economic growth than much of Europe. Its government can now borrow at lower yields than several much larger economies.

That turnaround is central to the sales pitch.

“Greece is fiscally healthy, it constantly produces surpluses and, as a result, it provides tax predictability and macroeconomic stability,” said Vasilis Karatzas, an adviser to Finance Minister Kyriakos Pierrakakis.

Bloomberg writes that there is also plenty of financial incentive to make the move. Greece continues to offer qualifying wealthy newcomers a €100,000 annual flat tax on foreign income, a program that has remained unchanged since 2019. By comparison, Italy has repeatedly increased the cost of its competing program. Greece has now sweetened the deal for the investment industry specifically, allowing eligible fund managers who become Greek tax residents to pay 5% on carried interest and bonuses.

The government says it isn’t simply trying to become another European parking lot for wealthy foreigners. The larger ambition is to get investment firms to actually operate from Athens, bringing well-paid finance jobs, encouraging talented Greeks working abroad to return and creating the foundation for a domestic money-management industry.

Timing could be working in Greece’s favor. Higher taxes have made Britain less attractive to some wealthy financiers, while geopolitical instability has introduced another consideration for people who had been looking toward financial centers in the Middle East. Athens suddenly finds itself competing for people who might previously have considered London, Milan, Dubai or Abu Dhabi the obvious choices.

There are still practical obstacles. Athens will need more luxury housing, strong private schools and the broader infrastructure expected by highly paid international finance workers and their families. And a couple of prominent arrivals hardly make Greece the next Mayfair.

“The country won’t become a wealth hub overnight. It will take years,” Karatzas said.

Still, Millennium and Rokos give the Greek experiment something more important than another tax incentive: validation. Once major funds demonstrate that Athens is a viable place to operate, Greece’s hope is that the next wave of managers becomes considerably easier to convince.

Via Remix News,

For years, the right across the West has noted that mass immigration has been a boon for left-wing parties, which are essentially importing a new voting base. Sweden’s latest election appears to once again affirm this view, with the left narrowly winning the election, in large part due to their overwhelming support from those with a non-European background in Sweden.

Sweden’s 2026 election produced one of the narrowest results in recent memory. With roughly 94.7 percent of votes counted, the center-left opposition holds 176 seats against 173 for the parties backing outgoing Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson.

The left-wing Social Democrats remain the largest party at 28 percent, enough to put Magdalena Andersson in position to try to form a government.

A striking pattern in SVT’s VALU exit poll helps explain how the result took shape, with 70 percent of voters of non-European origin backing the left-wing bloc of Social Democrats, Left Party, Greens, and Center.

“VALU shows a very clear political dividing line. Among voters with non-European backgrounds, S, V, MP, and C together receive 70 percent, while the Tidö parties receive 27. This is a voter group whose party sympathies differ sharply from the electorate as a whole – and which therefore has significance for the long-term electoral math,” wrote Swedish political scientist and author Daniel Schatz on X.

VALU visar en mycket tydlig politisk skiljelinje. Bland väljare med utomeuropeisk bakgrund får S, V, MP och C tillsammans 70 procent, medan Tidöpartierna får 27.

Det är en väljargrupp vars partisympatier skiljer sig kraftigt från väljarkåren som helhet – och som därför har… pic.twitter.com/m6J7pz2ySV

— Daniel Schatz (@drdanielschatz) September 13, 2026

VALU defines the group as people who themselves, or whose parents, grew up outside Europe. Their votes broke down for the Left at 21 percent, Social Democrats at 38 percent, Greens at 7 percent, and Center at 4 percent.

Before the election, the leader of the right-wing Sweden Democrats, Jimmie Åkesson, also wrote that the left’s strategy is to gain votes from Swedes with a foreign background even as they lose votes from native ethnic Swedes:

“It’s about power. The Social Democrats’ decades-long campaign for increased immigration from the Muslim world has never been a coincidence. On the contrary, it seems to be a long-term strategy. The election promise from Magdalena Andersson to grant citizenship to up to 100,000 immigrants, based on the old and undemanding regulatory framework, should be seen in the same light,” he wrote.

Det handlar om makt.

Socialdemokraternas mångåriga kamp för ökad invandring från den muslimska världen har aldrig varit en slump. Tvärtom tycks det vara en långsiktig strategi.

Vallöftet från Magdalena Andersson att ge uppåt 100 000 invandrare medborgarskap, utifrån det gamla… pic.twitter.com/Tz2jrUfzVP

— Jimmie Åkesson (@jimmieakesson) August 26, 2026

“When Swedish voters flee the party, you need votes from elsewhere, and mass immigration from the Muslim world then appears to be an attractive way to circumvent the will of the Swedish people,” he added.

In 2022, Swedes with a foreign backgroun already attracted around 68 percent of this electorate. Earlier surveys of Muslim voters had placed combined support for the Social Democrats, Left and Greens near 85 percent, with the Social Democrats alone above 61 percent. This slice of the electorate has expanded rapidly over the years.

About 13 percent of eligible voters, close to 1 million people, now have non-European origins, up from just over 3 percent in 2002 and 0.3 percent in 1982.

Many arrived from Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East, Africa and Asia through asylum, family reunification and earlier, more open immigration rules.

Sweden does not record religion in official statistics, yet estimates indicate that Swedish citizens from Muslim-majority countries number in the hundreds of thousands. Together, with other voters of non-European background, they form a reliable base for the left even as much of the rest of the country has shifted toward tighter immigration and crime policies.

Remix News reported on polling already six years ago which showed that a majority of Swedes wanted to tighten immigration substantially. While the native ethnic Swedish population has swung to the right, foreigners have incentives to vote for the left to ensure their families and fellow countrymen can arrive in Sweden unimpeded. Foreigners are also more likely to benefit from social welfare, which left-wing parties promote.

The overwhelming vote for the left from those with a non-European background has been seen across the Western world. In Germany, for instance, the Left Party has proposed giving voting rights to all foreigners who have lived in Germany for five years, regardless of whether they have citizenship. Similar proposals have been put forward by other left-wing parties in the country.

Read more here…

Russia’s foreign ministry has issued key warnings to Western officials and nations on Tuesday. The ministry’s spokesperson Maria Zakharova addressed recent provocative actions and signaling among NATO allies, which could lead to more nuclear saber-rattling. 

She weighed in on a widely reported French security initiative to bring European countries under its nuclear umbrella at a moment Washington is seen as taking a step back from NATO leadership amid Trump complaints Europe is not shouldering enough of the burden.

Zakharova blasted Paris’ pursuit of this alternative plan as a “reckless” policy that was “creating risks” for Moscow.

“Of course, this is creating risks for us. And of course, we must control it,” she told a press briefing. This isn’t the first such condemnation, after President Macron began getting more vocal about a French nuclear-sharing program throughout this summer.

Zakharova new warning is largely in response to what’s happening in neighboring Finland (Russia shares an over 800-long far northern border with the Scandinavian country).

Stars & Stripes reports “Finland will join a French-led effort to strengthen Europe’s nuclear deterrent, adding another NATO member to a group of countries looking to Paris as a potential backstop to the U.S. nuclear umbrella.

Finnish Defense Minister Antti Hakkanen unveiled the provocative move on Monday. “Europe must assume a greater role both in conventional defense and in nuclear burden sharing.“ 

“Discussions on reinforcing nuclear deterrence and strengthening the security of Europe are essential for Finland’s defense.”

Finland is the 10th country to join the French “Forward Deterrence” initiative, after it June it took the historic step of lifting a moratorium on stationing nuclear weapons on its territory.

Earlier this year, Hakkanen alleged Russian militarization of the border: “They are building new military facilities along our border, same as the Cold War. It would be wise to watch the Arctic and build Arctic capabilities” for deterrence, the defense chief had claimed in February.

The last thing the world needs at this moment of raging war in Iran and the Persian Gulf region is another round of nuclear saber-rattling related to that other raging hotspot – the Ukraine conflict, but that’s precisely what is happening.

Authored by Thomas Karat via The Libertarian Institute

On the evening of August 4, an airport employee at Leipzig/Halle noticed a small drone resting on the apron near a parked Ukrainian Antonov freighter. It carried an explosive charge and a detonator. The charge did not go off. A bomb-disposal robot rolled out across the tarmac, and by the account German officials would later give, the device had gone unnoticed for roughly four hours before anyone found it. Then the airport reopened and the country moved on.

Twenty-eight days later, on September 1, the German government told its citizens who had done it. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt and Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul stood together in Berlin and named Russia. The consulate in Bonn would close on September 18; the lease on Berlin’s Russian House cultural centre would be torn up; more Russians would be proposed for European Union sanctions lists. The attribution was delivered as settled fact. The evidence behind it was not.

Five days after that, on September 6, the voters of Saxony-Anhalt went to the polls with the Alternative für Deutschland polling around 41-43%, within reach of an absolute majority in a state the entire German establishment had spent months trying to deny it. The sequence is worth holding in the mind as a single object. A device found in early August, a public silence lasting four weeks, and then an official enemy announced in the final days of a campaign. Nothing about that ordering is illegal, but nothing about it is accidental either.

Dobrindt’s case, as he laid it out, does not rest on a single piece of proof. It rests on three strands said to point the same way: police forensics, the resemblance of the device to earlier operations, and intelligence reporting. “Taken together,” he said, the investigations, the pattern and the intelligence findings established Russian responsibility. He named no GRU officer. He named no unit. He said the people who carried out the plan appeared to be “low-level” agents acting on behalf of unspecified “Russian state entities.”

What the public was given, then, was a conclusion and a description of the kinds of evidence that produced it—not the evidence. An independent observer cannot test the chain. Even sympathetic accounts noted the gap: the ministers named the state but kept most of the underlying material out of view. NATO’s Secretary-General Mark Rutte pronounced the evidence “clear” without any of it being made public, and welcomed the German measures. The European Union’s foreign-policy chief Kaja Kallas went further still, telling reporters in Ireland that the incident bore “all the hallmarks of state-sponsored terrorism.”

This is the ordinary grammar of attribution in the sabotage era. A government states that its services and their partners have reached a judgement, allied governments affirm the judgement, the proof stays classified; and the citizen is invited to supply the trust that the missing evidence would otherwise earn. It may be that the classified material is overwhelming. It may be that it is thin. The structure is identical either way, which is precisely the problem. A public asked to accept an attribution on faith has no way to tell a strong case from a convenient one.

The load-bearing sentence in the German case is not about forensics at all. It is about familiarity. Wadephul said the drone’s configuration, its components, its explosives, and its ignition technology were “familiar to us from other Russian hybrid operations and from Russia’s war against Ukraine.” Dobrindt used almost the same words: elements “known to us,” a device of “high technical expertise” assembled with care. Recognition, in other words, is doing the work that a signature would normally do.

Set that claim against the way Russian military intelligence is documented to actually operate in Europe, and the argument begins to strain. The GRU’s European sabotage model, as reconstructed by investigators across several countries, is built entirely on deniability. It runs on “disposable agents”—petty criminals and drifters recruited over Telegram, paid in cryptocurrency, handed a task they barely understand and then discarded. The devices are disguised as consumer goods. When four incendiary parcels shipped from Vilnius caught fire in the summer of 2024, one of them ignited at a DHL depot at Leipzig-Halle itself—the same airport, a plot European prosecutors traced to Russian military intelligence through a chain of expendable cut-outs. The entire point of that architecture is that nothing recognizable survives to be traced back to Moscow.

So the official account asks the reader to believe one of two things. Either a service whose whole tradecraft is the erasure of its own signature built a device bearing its recognizable signature and parked it beside the single most obvious Russian target in Germany—a Ukrainian cargo plane on a NATO logistics hub. Or the word “familiar” is doing exactly the work a manufactured attribution would need it to do. If a device merely looks like what everyone already expects Russia to build, then “we recognize it” becomes a claim that can be made about almost any drone, by almost any authority, at almost any politically useful moment. Neither reading requires anyone to have planted anything. Both should make a careful citizen slower, not faster, to accept the conclusion on offer.

There was, to be clear, more than one drone. On the same night a second craft struck a cargo Boeing 757 in mid-air at around four hundred meters as the aircraft aborted its landing, and a third was reportedly recovered from airport grounds days later. Whatever this was, it was not nothing, and this piece does not pretend otherwise. None of it, though, establishes who was behind it. Russia may well have been. The point is narrower and harder to wave away. The specific reason the state has given for certainty—that the device was recognizable—is the weakest possible ground for certainty about an actor defined by not being recognizable. When the evidence for a proposition is also, on inspection, evidence against it, the logical response is doubt, and doubt is the one response the announcement was engineered to foreclose.

Ask the old question. In the four weeks between the drone and the announcement, nothing about the device changed. What changed was the calendar. The attribution landed in the last stretch of the Saxony-Anhalt campaign, and the writer Thomas Fazi noted what was hard to miss. Here was an official enemy announced on the eve of a vote the establishment feared it would lose, in a contest where the insurgent party is routinely cast as Moscow’s instrument. And the casting is not idle: the AfD is the one significant party that opposes the arming of Ukraine and the rearmament drive, that wants the sanctions lifted and relations with Moscow restored. A fresh Russian outrage, timed to the final days, was calculated to make exactly that party look like the Kremlin’s wittingly useful friend, and to herd frightened voters back toward the parties promising protection. The drone did not need to change the result. It needed only to fill the closing days of the campaign with the word “Russia.”

It did not work. On September 6 the AfD took 43.8%, more than double its 2021 showing, winning 39 of the 83 seats—three short of a governing majority, and so still walled out of power by the other parties, but a rout of the governing CDU all the same. Whatever the naming of Russia was meant to accomplish at the ballot box, the voters of Saxony-Anhalt were not moved by it. And the endorsements that arrived from abroad only underscored how crude the intended frame had been. U.S. President Donald Trump hailed the result as “a really big night”—and wrote not a word about drones or the Kremlin, casting the vote entirely as a revolt against immigration. Elon Musk, who has called the party “the only hope for Germany,” simply posted “Gut gemacht”—well done—and drew from the AfD’s lead candidate an open offer of “strong and constructive cooperation.” The scare had promised the electorate a party in Moscow’s pocket; what the electorate could see was a party being courted over immigration and investment by an American president and the richest man alive. The enemy-image did not match the thing itself, and the gap was visible to anyone looking.

Widen the lens and the incident slots into a program that predates it by years and does not depend on any single election. Germany is remilitarizing on a scale unseen since reunification. Defence Minister Boris Pistorius has told the Bundestag the country must be “ready for war by 2029.” From January 1, 2026, every young German man is required to register for potential military service, with conscription to follow automatically if volunteer numbers fall short. The 2026 federal budget lifts defense spending by around a third, toward roughly €108 billion. And the market has read the direction of travel unambiguously. Shares in Rheinmetall, the country’s largest arms maker, have risen more than tenfold since Russia’s 2022 invasion, the company posting record orders as European rearmament converts fear into backlog.

Into that current, Leipzig arrives as confirmation. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen described the incident as a Russian escalation “on European Union soil” and told Europeans they now faced a “new normal” and a “new era of European security,” pledging that the pressure on Moscow would only rise and that a fresh sanctions package was already in preparation. Chancellor Friedrich Merz had already told a French broadcaster, a year earlier, that Germany was “already in conflict with Russia”—the framing was in place long before the drone arrived to illustrate it. The beneficiaries of that framing are not hidden. They are the arms manufacturers with record backlogs, the security bureaucracies whose budgets and mandates expand with every declared threat, the sanctions apparatus that grows by accretion, and the governing parties for whom the enemy is at the gate is the one message that might yet drown out a domestic opposition that just took nearly forty-four percent of the vote.

There is a history here that German officials, of all people, have reason to know, and it is not being spoken. States manufacture the provocations that justify what they had already decided to do. This is not a fringe proposition, it is documented fact, entered into the record by the states themselves.

On the night of August 31, 1939—eighty-seven years, almost to the day, before the Leipzig announcement—SS operatives in Polish uniforms seized a German radio transmitter at Gleiwitz and broadcast an anti-German message, leaving a murdered prisoner dressed as a Polish attacker on the floor as evidence. It was one of a series of staged border incidents. The next morning Adolf Hitler cited Polish aggression as he sent his armies east. The pretext was found on the eve of the war it was built to license.

Closer to home, and closer to the present alliance, there is Operation Gladio. After the Second World War, NATO and the CIA built clandestine “stay-behind” networks not in one country but across Western Europe—armed, hidden cells nominally intended to resist a Soviet invasion that never came. When the Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti acknowledged the structure to parliament in October 1990, he made a point of insisting Italy was not alone. Identical networks had operated in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, West Germany, Greece, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, and beyond, with counterparts in neutral Switzerland and Austria. The scandal was continent-wide, and so was the response. On November 22, 1990 the European Parliament passed a resolution condemning the existence for forty years of “a clandestine parallel intelligence and armed operations organization in several Member States,” which had “escaped all democratic controls” and been “run by the secret services of the states concerned in collaboration with NATO.” The Parliament recorded that in certain member states military secret services had been “involved in serious cases of terrorism and crime.” Parliamentary inquiries followed in Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany. In Italy those inquiries reached the sharpest conclusion. A decade later a Senate commission found that a “strategy of tension”—bombings of civilians in public places, blamed on the left to frighten the electorate toward the anti-communist right—had been “organised or promoted or supported by men inside Italian state institutions and, as has been discovered more recently, by men linked to the structures of United States intelligence.” This is not a rumor a foreign broadcaster invented. It is the finding of the European Parliament and of national legislatures about their own recent past—a decades-long campaign, run across the continent by Western services in concert with the very alliance now delivering the verdict on Leipzig.

Nor is the pattern only European. In March 1962 the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, over the signature of their chairman, sent the Secretary of Defense a formally approved proposal titled “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba.” Operation Northwoods, declassified in 1997, laid out a menu of manufactured provocations—staged terror in American cities, a faked shoot-down, a sunk ship—all to be blamed on Havana to build public support for a war the planners already wanted. President John F. Kennedy rejected it. The significance is not that it was carried out; it wasn’t. The significance is that the most senior uniformed officers of a democracy considered the deliberate deception of their own public a usable instrument of policy, and put it in writing.

Raise these precedents and you are told, correctly, that they prove nothing about Leipzig. They don’t. What they establish is smaller and more unsettling, that the manufactured pretext is a real and recurring tool of statecraft, used by the strong when a public needs moving toward a war it has not yet chosen. A citizenry that cannot even hold that possibility in mind—that treats the very question as the enemy’s talking point—has been relieved of a defense it did not know it needed. The disinformation monitors now classify the word “false flag” itself as a hostile signal, to be flagged and debunked. It is a strange kind of security that makes the historical memory of one’s own governments into a category of foreign interference.

Whatever sat on that tarmac in August, the crucial fact about it is that the response was ready before the cause arrived. The conscription letters were already printed. The sanctions package was already drafted. The rearmament budget was already voted, the war-readiness date already set for 2029, the arms-maker’s order book already at record height. Merz had already declared the country in conflict. And on the very day it named Russia, the government raised the national threat level from “general” to “high”—Dobrindt telling reporters, “we are not at war, but we are the daily target of hybrid attacks.” The drone did not begin any of this. It was fitted into it—a piece of confirmation slotted, at the optimal moment, into a machine assembled in advance, and the machine responded by advancing itself another notch.

That is the part worth watching, and it holds regardless of who built the device, and regardless of how Saxony-Anhalt voted. A population is being readied—methodically, through its budgets, its conscription rolls, its threat levels, its ministers’ vocabulary and its evening news—for a war with Russia that its leaders increasingly describe as already under way. The electorate that just returned a resounding verdict against that project will find the project unaltered by its vote. In such a climate the origin of any single incident matters less than the use to which it is instantly put, and the speed with which doubt about it is reclassified as betrayal. The Germans of an earlier century learned, too late, what it costs to accept the enemy their government hands them without asking to see the proof. The proof, this time, is still classified. The certainty was on the news within the day.