MOSCOW (Sputnik) - President of the European Parliament Roberta Metsola is considering the possibility of banning access to the websites of Sputnik and RT within the networks and devices of the European Parliament, where they remain available despite EU-level restrictions, European media reported.

According to a European media, a number of media websites remain accessible despite the EU sanctions. The publication said that the European Conservatives and Reformists Group in the European Parliament has proposed banning access to the websites of Russian media outlets sanctioned by the EU within Parliament’s internal networks and devices.

The initiative was reportedly put forward by Latvian MEP Rihards Kols. Among the media whose websites would be restricted are RT, Sputnik, ANO TV-Novosti (the legal entity of RT), VGTRK, and others.

“But everyone else has one!”

This refers to a child’s desire – often expressed very urgently to their parents – to finally get their own smartphone. It is not easy to stand firm in such situations. “I don’t want my child to be an outsider” is a frequently heard argument – and sometimes also an excuse to avoid what may to become a difficult discussion. But who hasn’t seen the images of children and teenagers sitting side by side, hunched over their black boxes?

by Eliane Perret

Last week, a friend asked if I was worried about Chinese “nuclear threats".

I asked where he had heard that.

He showed me his phone.

“WE OPPOSE: CHINA ISSUES NUKE WARNING AFTER AUSTRALIA-US DEAL.”

Fred Zhang

Courtesy of News Corp. This time, the story was that China issued a “nuke warning” – because Anthony Albanese smiled a little too warmly at Donald Trump. Armageddon, apparently, was just around the corner.

Kremlin vows response if US violates nuclear moratorium
US leader Donald Trump earlier said he had ordered the Pentagon to resume nuclear arms trials

Russia will respond “accordingly” if the US violates a moratorium on testing nuclear weapons, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said.

On Thursday, US President Donald Trump said he had ordered the Pentagon to resume nuclear weapons testing, citing strategic competition with Russia and China. “That process will begin immediately” in response to “other countries’ testing programs,” he said.

When asked about the issue by journalists later in the day, Peskov noted “the statement by [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, which has been repeated many times, that, of course, if someone abandons the moratorium [on nuclear testing], then Russia will act accordingly.”

ASEAN is quite a delicate geopolitical entity: gracious, polite and consensual but at the same time, always privileging its “centrality”. The collective 11 Southeast Asians (East Timor is the new member) are very serious global players - with a GDP of $3.8 trillion, and constantly rising.

On a personal level, when I decided to move from the West to Asia, in 1994, I chose Southeast Asia: then, it was imperative to follow the Asian “tigers” – or flock of geese – with the Big Goose, China, flying right behind them.

Pepe Escobar: How ASEAN Keeps Its Centrality Between China & US

Even as Donald Trump crisscrosses the globe, bringing his purported peacemaking skills to parts of the world that did not even know they were at war, his administration has openly been preparing for militarised regime change in Venezuela. Neighbouring Colombia too isn’t safe.

Mahir Ali

“Keeping perspective” is Michael Pascoe’s mantra. He writes that AI mania has not just warped perspective, it risks blowing up reality.

Over more decades than I care to count of market watching and reporting, I haven’t seen a time when there’s been more wide-spread conviction that we’re experiencing a dangerous bubble that’s sure to pop, yet the money keeps pouring in to inflate it. 

The lead up to the “Crash of 87”, now viewed in the rearview mirror as a minor hiccup, was relatively muted. Not even the “dot bomb” bubble at the turn of the century, when all a company had to do to get a share price boost was to add “e” or “dotcom” to its name, was as widely perceived as over-cooked as the present outlook. 

What makes a life virtuous? The answer might seem simple: virtuous actions – actions that align with morality.

But life is more than doing. Frequently, we just think. We observe and spectate; meditate and contemplate. Life often unfolds in our heads.

As a philosopher, I specialize in the Enlightenment thinker Immanuel Kant, who had volumes – literally – to say about virtuous actions. What I find fascinating, however, is that Kant also believed people can think virtuously, and should.

Building a stable ‘abode of thought’: Kant’s rules for virtuous thinking

WHEN I WAS SIXTEEN, a hundred years ago

CUM SEDECIM ANNOS ERIM, ante centum annos

I wondered about men having tits

De viris uberibus cogitabam

To feed the kids when women were hunting

Ad liberos pascendos cum feminae venantur

And women speaking in a manly voice

Et mulieribus voce virili loquentibus

Rather than this grinding pitchy

Potius quam hac stridula 

Which turns songs into screams

Quae carmina in clamores mutat

But god had seen that only a few men

Sed deus viderat paucos tantum viros

Would develop the effimination of their feelings

Effeminationem affectuum suorum evolvere

Wearing the femme attire 

Vestimenta feminina gerentes

Until the pharmas invented blockers

Donec pharmaceutica medicamenta invenerunt

And the diversification came in

Climate change is serious, but we’ve made great progress. We need to keep backing the breakthroughs that will help the world reach zero emissions.

But we can’t cut funding for health and development—programs that help people stay resilient in the face of climate change—to do it.

It’s time to put human welfare at the center of our climate strategies, which includes reducing the Green Premium to zero and improving agriculture and health in poor countries.

A NEW WAY TO LOOK AT THE PROBLEM

Three tough truths about climate

What I want everyone at COP30 to know.

By Bill Gates published 19 hours ago

There’s a doomsday view of climate change that goes like this:

“Your mom” has become the accidental protagonist of October 2025. Once a throwaway line in online debates, she now features in exchanges at the highest levels of American politics. The unlikely transformation began with S.V. Date, a journalist from the HuffPost, who repeatedly tried to ask the Trump administration difficult questions. Each time, he was met not with answers but with taunts – and, eventually, jokes about his mother.

The empire of irony: Why memes are America’s new propaganda
How Trump rules the US with memes and why ‘brain-numbing’ content is the future of politics

By Vitaly Ryumshin

The United Nations has recently come under attack from the Trump Administration and, much as it goes against the grain, it’s difficult to argue with real-estate-developer-cum-ambassador-Representative for U.N. Management and Reform [sic], Jeff Bartos:

Over 80 years, the UN has grown bloated, unfocused, too often ineffective, and sometimes even part of the problem. The UN’s failure to deliver on its core mandates is alarming and undeniable.

Yet the problem isn’t really the UN.

It’s the largest living structure on Earth, 3000 individual reefs, 900 islands, 1430 miles, and it may be collapsing.

Alas, The Great Barrier Reef Annual Summary Report of Coral Reef Conditions, 2024-2025 presents a dire picture, the poorest condition ever, the worst report in recorded history. Moreover, mass bleaching of coral has been confirmed in 83 countries. Something is seriously wrong with the oceans; this is too anomalous, too massive to ignore as a passing one-off event.

Robert Hunziker

The ultimate expression of “everyone is twelve now” theory is in the mainstream worldview promoted by western pundits and politicians which holds that the world is full of evil villains doing evil things simply because they are evil, and that these Bad Guys are opposed by the virtuous Good Guys of the US-led world order.

You Believe the Mainstream Narrative? of Course You Do, You're Twelve

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE

When President Donald Trump announced that the C.I.A. had been authorized to conduct operations inside Venezuela, just as U.S drones struck another small boat off Venezuela’s coast, few people in the United States realized that much of this militarization begins on the soil of a land denied its own sovereignty: Puerto Rico.

The Oldest Colony, the Newest War: Puerto Rico as a Launchpad for War on Venezuela