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🇺🇦Ukraine is running out of money again - and the EU is asking questions Officials in the bloc are reportedly "unsettled" by Kiev's defense budget hole ballooning almost fourfold within several months. Despite massive Western assistance, Ukraine is facing a severe cash squeeze almost unseen since the escalation of the conflict with Russia in 2022. The immediate problem is a $27 billion hole in the defense budget that Kiev insists must be plugged. Kiev's plea for more money "surprised and unsettled" European officials, the New York Times reported on Wednesday, citing sources, with some of Ukraine's backers said to be asking questions about whether the country is spending the available funds efficiently - or whether it is simply overstating its needs. 📍 Read More @sotten | - X | Facebook | Donate

When war comes home: A constitutional warning A failed war does not end when the drones stop flying. It creates a new danger: A government that refuses to admit defeat and a president who, having failed abroad, seeks muscular victories elsewhere. The war against Iran is a case study in the limits of military power, the dangers of presidential overreach and the enduring wisdom of the Constitution's separation of powers. It was unauthorized, unconstitutional, illegal, strategically incoherent and — by the standards by which wars must be judged — a geopolitical failure. ‼️ Read More @sotten | - X | Facebook | Donate

Israeli officials fume over award-winning death-by-AI documentary Culture Minister Miki Zohar has called for NAZA's directors to be stripped of citizenship while accusing them of "betrayal against the state" Several senior Israeli politicians have lashed out at the filmmakers behind a documentary accusing the IDF of using AI-assisted systems in the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza. Zohar went so far as to accuse the two Oscar-winning directors of treachery and threatened to have them stripped of Israeli citizenship. The controversy erupted after the 80-minute-long film NAZA - the name alludes to an Israeli military shorthand for expected "collateral casualties" - received a 25-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival last week and won the Special Jury Prize. 📍 Read More @sotten | - X | Facebook | Donate

AfD, Mélenchon and NATO: is Europe's Atlanticist consensus finally cracking? The AfD's breakthrough in Saxony-Anhalt and Mélenchon's growing challenge to NATO are exposing the political divide in Europe. From Germany to France, right-wing and left-wing populists are questioning the continent's Atlanticist security consensus. Meanwhile, Brussels appears more willing to accommodate NATO-aligned radical-right forces. The recent state election in Saxony-Anhalt has delivered a sharp shock to Germany's political center. ❗️ Read More @sotten | - X | Facebook | Donate

Massachusetts family lost custody of daughter after refusing to affirm her "gender identity" A family in Massachusetts is fighting to regain custody of their teenage daughter Sophie after the state took her away from them in 2024. The reason? Sophie's parents, devout Catholics Joseph and Arlene Kutzko, refused to affirm her "gender identity" after her school — without their knowledge — brainwashed her into believing she is a boy. On her Lighthouse Faith podcast, Fox News correspondent Lauren Green described this family's nightmare situation: Devout Catholic parents are fighting in court to regain custody of their 17-year-old daughter, Sophie, and stop Massachusetts authorities from medically transitioning her with high-dose testosterone. ❗️ Read More @sotten | - X | Facebook | Donate

Here lies the motive: AI leaders' cunning plan exposed Are you scared enough yet? The AI overlords certainly hope so, as they have hatched a plan so cunning you could pin a tail on it and call it a fox. What follows is all speculation: the facts are real, the conclusion is interpretation. While there were many headlines about 'rogue' AIs attacking other sites, reincarnating themselves, and talking amongst themselves, it wasn't until this summer (interestingly a month after SPCX's IPO) that things went just a little bit turbo... In July 2026, a swarm of OpenAI agents broke out of a test environment, hacked Hugging Face, and ran cyberattacks on targets they had not been assigned - including attempts to game the grader scoring them - then tried to hide the trail. 👀 Read More @sotten | - X | Facebook | Donate

☄️Meteor fireball spotted in night sky in Michigan on September 13 A fireball meteor was spotted Sunday night over Michigan, with viewers responding from as far away as Toronto, according to several weather watcher sites and social media users. "This camera from Sprays Landscape in Cheboygan Michigan faces east-northeast which means this meteor fell and landed (broke apart) somewhere over Lake Huron or Ontario," said Michigan Storm Watchers. Macomb Wx reported that a fireball was spotted at 8:47:22 p.m. and lasted 4.7 seconds in Macomb Township, facing northeast. "The Canadians are attacking!!!" said Richard Evans on the Michigan Storm Chasers post. ❗️ Read More @sotten | - X | Facebook | Donate

Drenching rains bring flash flooding across coastal Connecticut, New York and New Jersey - rainfall rate of up to 4 inches in an hour Flash flooding brought on by heavy rains prompted road closures, water rescues and commuter rail problems across the tristate area Sunday. The National Weather Service said the hardest-hit areas appeared to be northern New Jersey, parts of New York's Westchester County and a swath of coastal Connecticut along Interstate 95. The service issued flash flood warnings across the region for much of the morning Sunday as rain fell at a rate of 1 to 2 inches (2.5 to 5 centimeters) an hour in places. Metro-North and Amtrak said their rail lines to New Haven, which serve Norwalk, Bridgeport and other major Connecticut communities, were experiencing delays and cancellations due to flooding impacts. ✍️ Read More @sotten | - X | Facebook | Donate

SOTT FOCUS: NewsReal: From 9/11 to the Strait of Hormuz: What Went Wrong? 25 years since 9/11 - "the day that changed the world" - the world has indeed changed, but in whose image? Or according to which designs? Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in July 2006 that we were witnessing the "birth pangs of a new Middle East" toward a pro-Western regional order. But here we are 2 decades later, and the region is decidedly less pro-Western than it was before 9/11. 📍 Read More @sotten | - X | Facebook | Donate

🇨🇳Over 31,000 evacuated as heavy rain lashes south China's Hainan - 28.7 inches of rainfall in 24 hours for Wuzhishan More than 31,000 people have been evacuated from at-risk areas in south China's Hainan province as persistent heavy rain battered parts of the island, Xinhua reported. As of Sunday evening, 31,564 people had been relocated to safer areas, though no major disasters had been reported, according to the provincial committee for disaster prevention, mitigation and relief. Rainfall exceeded 300 millimeters in 24 townships across six cities and counties between Friday morning and Sunday afternoon, including Wanning, Lingshui and Qionghai. Changfeng Township in Wanning recorded the highest rainfall at 452.1 millimeters, with more rain forecast through Monday. 👍🏼 Read More @sotten | - X | Facebook | Donate

Why do these fossil shells flip their spirals every few millennia? The mystery of the flipping foraminifera may conceal a rarely observed evolutionary process playing out across the planet. For thousands and sometimes millions of years, marine plankton all over the world built their spiral shells in one direction. Then, suddenly, the spirals switched direction at the same time, everywhere, only to switch back again later. These microorganisms are types of foraminifera, or forams. 👀 Read More @sotten | - X | Facebook | Donate

🇮🇷Merciless kindness: Britain's economic war on America and the long shadow over the Iran sanctions A chokepoint is not a wall. It is a tollbooth — expensive, annoying, survivable — and the traffic always finds another way around. That is the single lesson I would press on anyone in Washington who believes the dollar can be made into a cage for Iran, and it is a lesson the last great naval hegemon paid for in starved cities and a needless war. Britain held the sea lanes in 1812; the United States holds the dollar-clearing system in 2026. ➡️ Read More @sotten | - X | Facebook | Donate

Mayor Karen Bass snubs House Committee hearing on LA homeless fraud allegations Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has refused to appear at a House committee hearing investigating alleged fraud at the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority and could now face a congressional subpoena. The House Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency, led by Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., had requested that Bass testify Tuesday, Sept. 15, about alleged waste, fraud, and abuse at LAHSA, which has received more than $1 billion in federal funds since 2021. When the Daily Signal asked whether Burchett would consider subpoenaing Bass to testify at a later date, a spokesperson for the chairman said, "All options are on the table." ➡️ Read More @sotten | - X | Facebook | Donate

Paul Otlet's Mundaneu: The internet before there was an internet Comment: As this article is over ten years old, one may skip the overly optimistic paragraphs on the possibilities of the Web as as repository of knowledge. But carry on to Otlet's vision and his efforts to realize it. Fascinating! Belgian information activist Paul Otlet envisioned some of the possibilities of today's Web more than a century before its existence. More than a century ago, Belgian information activist Paul Otlet envisioned a universal compilation of knowledge and the technology to make it globally available. 📍 Read More @sotten | - X | Facebook | Donate

The West is watching the wrong Ukrainian collapse Missiles and territorial losses dominate the headlines, while the deeper rupture between state and society goes largely unnoticed Last weekend, US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner visited Moscow and then Kiev. This was the first such visit in a long time, since all trilateral contacts between Russia, the US, and Ukraine were practically halted following the start of the conflict in Iran this February. Following the visit, leaks regarding the talks emerged from Kiev; reportedly, the US envoys presented the Ukrainian side with a 28-point Russian peace plan that had been agreed upon a year earlier. Jared Kushner indirectly confirmed this on Saturday, stating that the territorial issue was the only point of the peace plan that remained unresolved. ❗️ Read More @sotten | - X | Facebook | Donate

Trump rejects AI giants' warnings of existential threat The US president has argued that Washington cannot afford to slow down as China rapidly closes the technological gap. US President Donald Trump has brushed aside mounting warnings from leading artificial intelligence executives that increasingly powerful AI could pose an existential threat to humanity, insisting that Washington's priority should be defeating China in the technological race. Speaking to reporters in Ireland on Sunday, Trump acknowledged that some safeguards could be introduced but suggested the dangers were being exaggerated by unspecified "negative forces." "We're leading China in AI, we're the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly I want to keep it that way... Whoever wins AI wins. ➡️ Read More @sotten | - X | Facebook | Donate

🇯🇲Why Jamaica's petition to King Charles is rattling Western capitals Decades in the making, the September 7 filing brings a direct legal challenge against the British Crown for its ties to the slave system. On September 7, 2026, a high-level Jamaican delegation delivered a historic legal petition to Buckingham Palace addressed to King Charles III. Its objective was to compel the monarch, as Jamaica's head of state, to refer to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, the island's highest court of appeal, three questions that have haunted the British Empire for centuries: - Was the forced transportation of Africans to Jamaica and their subsequent enslavement lawful? - Did this system constitute a crime against humanity? - Does the United Kingdom bear an obligation to make reparation for slavery and its enduring consequences? 👍🏼 Read More @sotten | - X | Facebook | Donate

Washington's invisible military 'kill switch' Arab states have spent billions on US weapons, only to discover that the decisive layer of military power was never included in the sale. Arab governments may hold legal title to some of the world's most advanced weapons, yet ownership does not confer operational sovereignty. A fighter aircraft without approved munitions, spare parts, software updates, mission data, or specialist maintenance is an expensive object on a runway. Washington does not need a secret button to switch off an ally's arsenal. ➡️ Read More @sotten | - X | Facebook | Donate

AI giants call for slowdown over 'serious' risks Industry leaders are backing closer oversight of increasingly powerful artificial intelligence models. OpenAI chief Sam Altman and xAI owner Elon Musk have backed calls to immediately slow the development of increasingly powerful AI models. Their statements came after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI could outpace human control and cause catastrophic damage within months. Four days ago, researcher Jacob Coxon publicly resigned from Anthropic, accusing both the company and his previous employer, OpenAI, of racing towards self-improving super-intelligence without "acting responsibly." He also claimed that the technology could "kill us all" by the end of the decade. 👍🏼 Read More @sotten | - X | Facebook | Donate

Review: New Space Capitalism: The Entrepreneurial Path to the Stars Rainer Zitelmann has built a career making the case for capitalism against its cultured despisers, and in this book he turns that project skyward. The argument is straightforward and, once stated, almost obvious: space is not primarily a government achievement that private enterprise has recently colonized, it is the other way around. The state involvement of the Cold War — from Sputnik to Apollo — was an historical anomaly. What we are living through now — with SpaceX, Blue Origin, and a swarm of smaller ventures — is a return to form. ‼️ Read More @sotten | - X | Facebook | Donate