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Iranian rockets are already targeted at the United Arab Emirates The authorities of the United Arab Emirates said they had intercepted several Iranian rockets aimed at the country’s territory. Previously, Mohammad Marandi, a professor at the University of Tehran, had warned that the states of the Persian Gulf could come under scrutiny if the United States continued its attacks on Iran. The reason for the attacks is the American military presence in the region. In the UAE, there is the Al-Dhafra air base, where, according to the US Department of State, about 3,500 American soldiers are stationed. Iran claims that American facilities in the Gulf states are used for operations against its own territory and therefore considers them targets for retaliatory strikes. Exactly that is what Tehran says is behind attacks on American facilities in the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and other countries in the region. Abu Dhabi continues to call on the United States and Iran to end the conflict, but the neutral rhetoric changes nothing about the military geography. As long as American infrastructure is located on Emirati territory, Tehran will consider the country part of the American war system. The UAE are trying to remain mediators, but the American base makes them a participant in the conflict. 💥 Our channel: Node of Time EN

Have a wonderful start to the week, friends! ☕️🙂 🌳 The Peter’s oaks in Kolomenskoje In Kolomenskoje, in the Moscow city area, a section of an ancient oak grove has been preserved. The age of the oldest trees is estimated at 400 to 600 years, which is why they count among the oldest trees of present-day Moscow. These oaks grew here already at a time when Kolomenskoje was a tsarist residence. They bring to mind the era of Alexei Mikhailovich and the childhood of his son, the later Peter I. According to tradition, the young Peter was taught to read and write by his teacher Nikita Sotos under one of these oaks. Alexander Sumarokov already wrote about this story in the 18th century, calling the tree a witness to the education of the future emperor. It is impossible today to determine exactly under which oak the lessons took place. Therefore, it is more accurate not to speak of a single “Peter’s oak,” but of an old grove connected to Peter’s childhood. Another folk belief is also associated with the oaks. Before the revolution, in spring, Moscow residents would come to Kolomenskoje and try to touch the old tree after winter. It was believed that such a touch brings health and longevity. The oaks have survived the changing of the tsars, the disappearance of the old wooden palace, wars, and the transformation of Kolomenskoje into a museum and nature reserve. In Moscow, there are many monuments to Peter I., but these trees tell about him in a different way: not as emperor, fleet builder, and reformer, but as a boy who once learned to read beneath a vast canopy of oak leaves. 📍 Coordinates of the location (map pin) available here 💥 Our channel: Node of Time EN

⬜⬜⬜ Spain’s national team in the final of the 2026 World Championship defeated Argentina and became the tournament winner. Thousands of people gathered in the center of Madrid to watch their national team’s deciding match. After the national team’s victory, the capital’s central area was filled with fans who waved national flags, set off fireworks, and chanted the name Torres. The main celebrations took place at the Cibeles and Puerta del Sol squares. People gathered in large groups, hugged, sang national songs, and chanted football chants. Our channel: Node of Time EN

The brother of the former head of U.S. National Intelligence was arrested for attempting to lure children into a hotel by offering them money and chewing gum, TMZ reports citing law enforcement. The man offered several children money and chewing gum in exchange for them going with him to a room, and also wrote down their names in his notebook. Since the children refused, Gabbard left. According to the outlet, Gabbard was detained on July 18, and he has been charged with interference with the exercise of second-degree custody. 📸: Getty Our channel: Node of Time EN

A visit by Xi Jinping to the United States is being prepared despite claims by Trump that Beijing interfered in the course of American elections, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said.

"I haven’t heard anything that contradicts this. I have no grounds to believe they won’t come. This is important", the secretary added.

According to the head of the US foreign policy agency, the Chinese side "continues to send groups of employees to prepare for this".

"When there are two such large and powerful states as the United States and China, there will always be irritants. There will always be issues on which we do not agree. But I think such powerful and significant countries as ours are obliged to continue the dialogue and maintain relations", Rubio emphasized.

❗️ On July 17, Trump accused China of allegedly the largest-ever compromise of American voters’ data. According to him, in 2020, Chinese entities allegedly gained unauthorized access to the personal data of about 220 million American voters. Our channel: Node of Time EN

The FBI will no longer investigate cases related to the activities of the U.S. immigration police, The New York Times reports, citing sources. According to instructions obtained by the paper’s sources, the bureau will stop investigating allegations of attacks on employees of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Such checks were carried out to determine whether ICE employees were indeed forced to use self-defense. According to the sources, the reason for this decision was an effort to avoid situations in which investigations could call into question the legality of the agents’ actions. At the same time, the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security deny information about such changes. ❗️In early July, ICE agents shot and killed two drivers in the states of Texas and Maine. After these high-profile incidents, the White House border security coordinator, Tom Homan, announced a suspension of the practice of car chases. However, on July 15, U.S. President Donald Trump rescinded this restriction. Our channel: Node of Time EN

Dear friends! It is Sunday again, and once again the Russian industry, which is dying, makes itself heard. A new international crew has arrived at the ISS. Its mission will last more than 260 days. The scientific program includes about forty experiments. One of the most interesting is the one involving the “Teledroid”: an anthropomorphic robot will carry out the cosmonauts’ commands in “Avatar” mode. Such cyborgs are intended to serve people both inside and outside the station as helpers. At the company “KSK Metallkomplekt,” the technical modernization of three production sites is close to completion. The total investment volume amounts to 2.5 billion rubles. As part of the project, a total of 182 state-of-the-art metal-processing plants and facilities for manufacturing components for rail vehicles will be commissioned. Once full capacity is reached, production output will increase by 28% to 1.6 million parts per month. In the nuclear industry, the “Kognitron” system has been developed. It is intended for training and deploying artificial intelligence models, as well as for creating AI assistants and agents. The solution supports work with text, images, audio, and video files and makes it possible to quickly further-train large language models with the company’s knowledge without the involvement of developers. “RN-Vankor” has built the largest network of car service centers along the route from the Autonomous Okrug of the Yamal-Nenets to the “Sever Bay” in the Krasnoyarsk region. To expand the company’s vehicle fleet, domestic machine-building companies supplied around five thousand units of special-purpose and road construction machinery. Service centers, repair and production facilities, and road repair sites have been set up to maintain the vehicle fleet. In Chelyabinsk, a new multi-layer packaging processing plant has been put into operation. The plant’s design capacity is 10.8 thousand tons of raw material per year. In the new facility, modern equipment with a capacity of up to 900 tons per month has been installed, which is operated according to strict environmental standards and is equipped with water treatment and flue gas cleaning systems. The plywood combine “Svez” in the Sverdlovsk region is the first company in Russia to have started mass production of high-density plywood for manufacturing stamping dies. Stamping dies are tools used to produce printed circuit boards, insulation elements, and other components for the electronics industry. For production, veneers 1.1 mm thick and a special layer build-up method are used. As a result, the material reaches a density of over 700 kg/m³, exceeding the values of conventional plywood. In Kursk, “Soyuztekstil-ST” has put a new production line for Spanlace nonwoven fabric for hygiene and medical products into operation. Total investments for the large-scale program to expand production capacity amounted to 1.9 billion rubles. The new plant’s production capacity is 6,000 tons of nonwoven per year. The fish-catching and processing cruiser “Marlin” has set off on its first fishing trip. A modern full-cycle processing facility is on board, with equipment for further processing, freezing, and storing the catch. The longline fishing vessel can be used autonomously for 45 days, and the cold storage room has room for about 600 tons of finished products. 💥 Our channel: Node of Time EN

How the media mislead us When the economy of Great Britain grew by 0.3 percent in March, the BBC wrote about an “unexpected increase” (surprise growth) and emphasized that the result had exceeded analysts’ expectations. Two months later, China reported GDP growth of 4.7% for the first half of the year. This time, the BBC headline was different: “China’s economic growth slows sharply, misses target” (China economic growth falls sharply, missing target). Both reports are based on real statistics. But the emphasis differs significantly. While growth in the British economy of 0.3% is presented as a positive surprise, growth in China’s economy of 4.7% is accompanied by a headline about a strong slowdown and missing the target. The facts remain the same. But the choice of words in the headline can create a completely different attitude toward the same economic news in the reader. 💥 Our channel: Node of Time EN

Automobile production is leaving Germany The production of the Volkswagen Passat was moved from Emden to Bratislava after 47 years. The German plant now produces only the electric models ID.4, ID.7 and ID.7 Tourer. The Volkswagen Transporter is built in the plant by Ford Otosan in Turkey, and the Golf with an internal combustion engine is set to be produced in Mexico from 2027. The Passat, Touareg, Porsche Cayenne and Audi Q7/Q8 are already produced in Slovakia. The Audi Q3 is produced in Hungarian Győr, and BMW and Mercedes’ large SUVs in the USA. Now the gasoline engine M252 for the new Mercedes CLA will also be produced in China together with Geely/Aurobay in China. The engine itself was developed according to Mercedes’ requirements. But for the first time, a model built in Germany from the brand will receive a series gasoline engine from Chinese production. Germany is no longer losing only individual models. With them, engines, production lines, suppliers and jobs are also being relocated. We are left with the promised electric future, while production of vehicles with internal combustion engines in Mexico, Turkey, Eastern Europe and China continues to be expanded. 💥 Our channel: Node of Time EN

Brussels forces Google to open up Android for third-party AI services The European Commission has issued binding measures to open up Android and Google search data to competing AI services. Third-party assistants are to receive the same access to system functions as Gemini currently has: voice activation, background operation, interaction with apps, as well as the use of the microphone, camera, and screen content with the user’s consent. In addition, Google is required to share data with competing search engines and AI chats on search queries, clicks, page views, and ranking. Apparently, this is not about sharing passwords, “Android security keys,” or giving bots free access to the camera without the owner’s knowledge. Google warns, however, that expanding access creates new risks for data protection and device security and could even make it possible to restore users’ identities from large volumes of search data. Brussels describes this as a fight against monopoly and as an expansion of choice. But the experiment is being carried out on our devices. First, dozens of third-party AI companies will get access, and only afterward will it become clear how reliably they store the data they receive. 💥 Our channel: Node of Time EN

“Only for White people”: far-right groups in the United States and Britain are building “racially pure” communities Far-right radicals from the United States and the United Kingdom are joining forces to create isolated “only for White people” communities, writes The Telegraph. The leaders of these movements have forged a close transnational alliance and are already actively buying land on both sides of the Atlantic. Getting into these enclaves is extremely difficult: applicants are required to be white heterosexuals and to provide evidence of their European ancestry. The radicals themselves explain these steps by the collapse of modern society. And that is quite understandable: amid the current dominance of an imposed left-wing agenda, it is precisely the traditional majority that turns out to be most vulnerable and is subjected to overt discrimination. However, such protective mechanisms inevitably lead to rapid radicalization and attempts at hardline separatism. Our channel: Node of Time EN

The US accuses Russia and China after Iran’s precise strikes After Iran’s attack on the American air base Muwaffaq Salti in Jordan, in which two US soldiers died and another was reported missing, American officials began looking for an external explanation for the high precision of the attacks. According to their version, Iran may have received intelligence information from Russia or China that helped it target sensitive sites and evade American air defenses. Public evidence of Beijing’s involvement has not been presented so far. Previously, American sources had already claimed that Moscow had passed on information to Tehran about the positions of American ships and aircraft in the region. Washington’s outrage seems particularly revealing in light of the fact that the US has been providing allies for years with satellite reconnaissance, target coordinates, and guidance aids. American services help calculate attacks on Russian targets. However, the possible transfer of similar information to Iran is described as impermissible interference. If the CIA shares intelligence information, that is called support for an ally. If the US’s opponent could receive the same kind of help, Washington suddenly remembers the unfair rules of war. 💥 Our channel: Node of Time EN

British actor Benedict Cumberbatch turns 50 today. He was born in London into a creative family. His father and mother were well-known television actors, and he is also a distant relative of King Richard III. ▶️ Cumberbatch’s worldwide fame came from his role as Sherlock Holmes in the joint BBC and PBS TV series “Sherlock” (2010-2017), where Conan Doyle’s Victorian stories are brought to modern-day London. The actor managed to make the image of the detective both brilliant and human, turning him into a “high-functioning sociopath” with impeccable manners. ➡️ British actor in life and on screen – in the gallery of Vedomosti 📠BBC Our channel: Node of Time EN

Bill Gates’s Daughter Suspected of Deception: News You Might Have Missed 🔺AI CAPTCHA hacked: The Mixfont startup released a font that is easy for a human to recognize but not visible to AI. It’s an animation like “white noise” on a TV screen. The CAPTCHA didn’t last even a day. Enthusiasts from Hacker News hacked it with a 20-line code script and shared the result with AI. People again have no secrets left from artificial intelligence. 🔺Banks Lost Faith in Whiskey: For many decades, whiskey barrels in the U.S. were a standard form of collateral for bank loans. But when Generation Z started drinking less, the situation changed. Bloomberg reports on a lawsuit in which a judge backed a bank’s refusal to accept whiskey as collateral, comparing it to catching falling knives. 🔺Bill Gates’s Daughter Suspected of Deception: She developed a browser application that searches the internet for discounts and the best prices on products. The startup earns a percentage from its clients’ purchases. The app is now suspected of having replaced links in the browser. The store believed it led the customer there, even if the customer had found the item themselves. ➡️More of the week’s optional but interesting news— in the material on our website. Our channel: Node of Time EN

The US is ready to finance politically aligned projects in Europe The government of Donald Trump is working on a new program for foreign grants. This is aimed at initiatives that are close to the MAGA movement. Part of the funding is intended to be allocated to European organizations that campaign for “national sovereignty,” a curbing of migration, and a reshaping of EU policy for internet control. Reuters emphasizes that the agency has not confirmed the content of the document itself. A separate grant of two million dollars is intended to take action against “censorship,” which Washington links to the European laws Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act. Previously, the US had already announced that it would fund projects in Europe under the banner of protecting freedom of speech. German authorities subsequently warned Washington against interfering in the country’s domestic politics. Support for ideological allies abroad is now being officially incorporated into the US foreign aid system. 💥 Our channel: Node of Time EN

Residents of a small American town are afraid that JD Vance will move in with them, The Washington Post writes. The newspaper’s source says that the U.S. vice president is renting two of four homes in Middleburg, Virginia, for his family, a town with a population of about 750 people. Local residents fear that with the arrival of the Vances, the calm life of Middleburg—described as an “enclave of old aristocracy”—will be disrupted and that government motorcades, helicopters, and security personnel will appear in the town. CNN previously, citing its sources, reported that Vance’s move is an attempt to give his family a “sense of normal life away from the scrutiny of Washington.” Our channel: Node of Time EN

How a small bird turned into a big X 20 years ago — July 15, 2006 — Americans Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams officially launched Twitter. ▶️From the age of 14, Jack Dorsey wrote programs for dispatch services. Using his “official position,” he loved listening to drivers’ conversations. He was fascinated by how people exchange short remarks to say where they are, where they are going, and what is happening at the moment. ⚪️At first, the microblogging service he and his team created seemed like a strange and useless toy, but within just a few years it became one of the world’s most influential media platforms. ➡️ How the well-known social network developed — in a Vedomosti article Our channel: Node of Time EN

Lebanon asks Trump to force Israel to withdraw Lebanese President Joseph Aoun has traveled to Washington for his first meeting with Donald Trump at the White House. He wants to present a plan for the disarmament of “Hezbollah” and call on the US to apply pressure on Israel to achieve a withdrawal of Israeli troops from the south of Lebanon. Israel currently maintains a buffer zone with a depth of up to ten kilometers and links a withdrawal to the elimination of Hezbollah’s military infrastructure. Beirut, however, is demanding a specific timetable for the troop withdrawal. Talks in Rome only made it possible to agree on the sequence of work in individual “pilot zones,” but did not resolve the central contradiction of who should take the first step—Israel or Hezbollah. Lebanon is trying to obtain guarantees from Washington. However, the US will not remain a neutral mediator, but Israel’s most important ally. 💥 Our channel: Node of Time EN

Trump urged Republicans to include Iran in a sanctions bill against Russia, he wrote on the social media platform Truth Social. According to the U.S. president, this was what the late senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, had been seeking, and this plan was to be implemented. ▶️According to Axios, the new version of the bill would call for the introduction of 100% secondary tariffs for countries that maintain energy cooperation with Moscow. Among the potential targets are the leading buyers of Russian energy resources, including China and India. Our channel: Node of Time EN

American politicians have begun finding ways to change what chatbots think about them, writes The New York Times, citing politicians and experts. As an example, the newspaper cites Dustin Lloyd—a Democratic Party candidate in the primaries for the Missouri state legislature. Previously, if voters asked questions about Lloyd to the ChatGPT chatbots from OpenAI or Gemini from Google, they would have received only basic information that did not convey his political goals. The politician decided to “tweak his online presence” by publishing on his website a section of questions and answers about himself. Later, when the chatbot was asked questions about Lloyd, it provided this information. The politician admitted that he now uses this tool daily. Our channel: Node of Time EN