Saudi Arabia's Untold Oil Wealth / Yemeni Houthis' Beggarly Strategic Threats

"Energy security can't be taken for granted."

"The events of recent weeks are serious, our response must be equally serious."

"For Saudi Arabia, these circumstances have tested our infrastructure, our institutions, our people, and our resilience."

Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, Saudi energy minister 

 

"[They -- Houthis -- will] face consequences [for their repeated attacks on the kingdom]."

"The Kingdom will not allow any threat to its security or to freedom of maritime navigation in the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab Strait."

Saudi Arabian Cabinet 

 

"[The warning and the attack show] the Saudis’ aims of upping the ante and striking deep in the heart of Houthi-controlled territory while attempting to control the narrative by presenting themselves as more careful and humanitarian actors than the Houthis."

"It may be a warning -- or it may be a sign of things to come."

Adam Baron, fellow, Washington-based New America institute

Oil tanks seen at the Saudi Aramco headquarters during a media tour at Damam city. REUTERS/ Ali Jarekji/File Photo

 

Not entirely insensitive to the Israel Defense Forces' routine pre-warning of civilians in enclaves in the Gaza Strip where the Israeli military's strategy to respond to the 7 October 2023 by destroying Palestinian terrorists' military emplacements, their weapons depots, their broadcasting systems, their labyrinthine tunnels, their leaders and their operatives, starting with the Hamas governing group which infamously has always used the civilian population as shields, the Saudi military leading a coalition of forces Tuesday on Sanaa, pre-warned the population to flee for safety.

Following the Houthi weekend strikes on Riyadh's international airport on Saturday and follow-up strikes days later, which killed 18 people and wounded hundreds more, Saudi Arabia warned the Houthis of their intention to strike back. Before they did, civilians were urged to leave the site of the Yemeni Oil Company and its nearby storage areas. That they have finally struck, it is impossible to ignore that the Middle East crisis is expanding with this series of fresh escalations behind which can be discerned the malign influence of the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

A man looking over the skyline of Sanaa, Yemen, on Tuesday.  Credit...Mohammed Huwais/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

That the airport strikes in Saudi Arabia have added to the energy export crisis now looming over the global community with the world's top oil exporter having been targeted, the coalition's counter-targeting of Yemen's Houthi-controlled oil sites is certain to jolt the world to attention. The Yemen civil war has brought the poorest country in the environs of the Middle East starkly divided between the legitimate government, forced to surrender their capital Sanaa to the Houthi rebellion, into a crisis situation. The government supported by Saudi Arabia, and the Houthis by Iran spell the ultimate in tribal-sectarian hostilities.

 

In Saudi Arabia, operations remain suspended at the King Khalid International Airport on the outskirts of Riyadh. On Saturday, Muslim pilgrims wearing their typical religious attire were awaiting their flights in departure lounges when a sudden flash tore through the building and flaming debris rained down killing 13 outright. The Houthi drone and missile attacks had city residents sheltering for safety even as the Houthis threatened to continue targeting Saudi transit hubs as "a theatre of operations for our forces". This is the reality of a new, unequal form of conflict, where guerrilla forces of a poor nation can access killing drones to wage its war against a richer nation's conventional military's reaction.

 

Smoke over Sana’a during a reported Saudi-led coalition airstrike on the Houthi-controlled Yemeni capital on 9 October 2026. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Sunday evening also saw eastern Saudi Arabia's Dammam airport hit. A day later, the Saudi-led coalition revealed that it had "intercepted and destroyed" a Houthi ballistic missile headed for a major military base in the southern city of Khamis Mushalt. The Houthi foreign ministry, referring to Saudi Arabia as the "Kingdom of the Horn of Satan -- must realize that security, stability and sovereignty must belong to everyone; otherwise, no one will enjoy them." 

 

Demeaning Ukraine, Elevating Russia, Trump's Stratagem

"I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal. For some reason [Zelenskyy] never does."

"[If I had been U.S. president in 2022], that war would have never started. There was no reason that that war with Ukraine and Russia started. It started due to incompetence."

"[Zelenskyy has] lost 30 per cent of your country and you've had over a million people go between the two of them, over two million people killed. That's a war that should have never started. And I think it's time for Ukraine to get a new president."

"I have just concluded a highly successful discussion with President Vladimir Putin, of Russia] to deliver millions of tonnes of diesel fuel over the next few months]."

"Diesel prices for Americans and, indeed, the world, will be COMING DOWN, IN RECORD NUMBERS, AND FAST! Lower prices for Americans, especially our Great Farmers, Ranchers, and Truckers, is my greatest priority."

U.S. President Donald Trump 

 

"Today, Russia expressed its thanks for the lifting of sanctions on diesel exports by dropping five glide bombs on residential buildings in Zaporizhzhia." 

"[The attacks show Moscow understands] any easing of pressure to mean they can keep fighting, to mean they can keep dropping bombs on cities."

"Russia's choice is war."

"[The diesel deal signalled to Moscow that] it is apparently permissible to continue attacking. And this needs to be corrected." 

"It plays into Russia’s hands — allowing it to kill more, wage war for longer, have even less respect for America, and inflict even greater losses and damage on the world."

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy

Zelenskyy and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz arrive for a news conference on Oct. 4. Zelenskyy on Saturday criticized the new U.S.-Russia diesel deal. (Thomas Peter/Reuters)

 

"Propping up Putin’s war economy is morally wrong as he uses that money to bomb cities."

"The President’s policies towards Russia and Ukraine are failures. We need moral clarity not moral ambiguity."

Republican Congressman Don Bacon, Nebraska  

Mercurial isn't quite the description of President Trump's instant thought process as he sets about in his typically idiosyncratic way solving problems whose details he doesn't quite grasp, offering solutions to conflicts startling in their simplicity, entirely lacking common sense. With an ego as wide as the Pacific Ocean and a belief in his persuasive impulses as a reflection of his genius for getting at the heart of the matter and arriving at a brilliant point where he personally and his political cronies stand to gain financially, and placing him once again on the short list for next year's Nobel Peace Prize, he is unstoppable.

 

The world balances itself on tenterhooks over what this man straddling the most powerful nation on earth's foreign political decision-making, volatile enough to take a U-turn at any moment, the reliable old international world order now stumbles into a future of growing uncertainty. What is certain is this man's fascination with the kind of power wielded by tyrants, an admiration for strongmen whose casual disregard of human rights and international treaties are appealing to a man who himself shreds signed and sealed agreements with impunity. 

 

That Mr. Trump has difficulty distinguishing allies from enemies, treating the former as hostile to his world view and proclivities, and the former as collegial think-alikes, puzzles both allies and enemies. And while allies have been forced by new circumstances beyond their control that is the sole agency of one single man to form new coalitions under the grave reality that dependence on the United States is no longer an option for the free world, countries like Russia and China whose hostility to the United States, vying against it for great power status find themselves honoured guests by an amiably-inclined American president. 

 

Trump rewards Putin and betrays Ukraine with Russia diesel deal - The Latest

 

A president who prefers to view victims as guilty of allowing themselves to become targets of aggressive warmongering territorial imperialists. The failure to use the power of his position to intimidate the Ukrainian president into submitting to his aggressor's demands to allow the evisceration of his country's geographic assets infuriated Mr. Trump while confusing Mr. Zelenskyy with its unreasonableness, even as he steadfastly refused the absurd recriminations tied to his government's counteroffensive against their mortal enemy rather than submit to Mr. Putin's demands.

 

Then came the news of the U.S.-Russia agreement of immediate supplying diesel fuel to the United States and to relieve global markets of its diesel shortage. Mr. Trump's calculated political imperative is to reduce the U.S. public's low approval rating of their president on economic grounds at a time of an increased cost of living, further aggravated by the on-again, off-again war on Iran and its effect of depleting the world supply of energy through the Persian Gulf, aligned with a similar situation with Russia's 'special military operation' in Ukraine.

 

The manipulation of public opinion at a critical time in the United States, with the approach of November 3's congressional elections to determine which party will control Congress, uppermost in the president's mind. So his 'highly successful' agreement where Vladimir Putin has agreed to supply an initial over 300,000 tonnes of diesel to U.S. and global markets, convinced Mr. Trump that the 'good news' would be universally welcomed. News, with its implied, if not actual forced surrender of Ukraine to Russia's ongoing predatory plans that served to stun an already-Trump-cynical world audience.

 

Washington had just latterly enacted additional sanctions on Russian energy producers, yet this latest scheme to isolate Ukraine and feed it bit by bit to the rapacious territorial appetite of Vladimir Putin to salve his own political future with a voting public irritated beyond end by the volatility and insensibility of their president as a prudent move, is destined for complete failure, adding another nail in the coffin of this president's reputation and historical legacy. 

Police officers standing next to the covered bodies of people killed by a Russian strike on a five-storey residential building in Zaporizhzhia. Photograph: Ukraine national police/AFP/Getty Images

A further one million tonnes are to be made available to the U.S. under the newly-minted general licence the U.S. Treasury Department issued to allow the importation of Russian diesel dating to April of 2027. Greater amounts would follow "based on the condition of their diesel refineries", damaged by Ukrainian attacks, noted Mr. Trump. Excoriating Ukraine for those attacks and demanding that they cease forthwith in Ukraine's response to Russia's unending attacks on Ukrainian civil infrastructure and energy depots to deprive the population of winter heating and cooking in a demoralization drive. 

"I said it to President Trump … to his team and to his people several times: we want peace, we are ready for [a] ceasefire, we are ready to begin from any kind of steps of de-escalation."

"And if the Russians want us not [to] attack their diesel, their refineries and etc., we are asking President Trump, give them signal not attack energy infrastructure of Ukraine."

"Don't attack us. Don't kill our children. We will stop attack[ing] your diesel. And I think it's [a] fair, fair deal."

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy

 

Islamism and the Progressive Left's 'Good' Jews

"Yes, I've taken a loss tonight, but our movement is so much bigger than one election or one motion."

"I put all my energy into the race in Holborn and St Pancras, despite Labour choosing the polling date so close to our conference, because I know that ultimately electoral success is how we drive change. I know, though, that some feel let down by that decision – and I hear that."

"[I would have voted against the motion but I agree] with the substance [and have no intention of  resigning]."

"It has been difficult knowing how to approach this imperfect motion, because its substance chimes with my understanding of Zionism as the ideology that underpins the displacement and genocide of Palestinians."

"This is something I share with many other Jewish people, including Stephen Kapos, the Holocaust survivor who was one of those supporting the motion."

"At the same time, Zionism is not easily defined, and I know for many Jewish people it is bound up with identity, safety and belonging. In my view it’s not the job of a political party to tell people what to believe – and a narrow focus on definitions is neither desirable nor strategic."

"There are also elements of the motion that I don’t agree with, such as dictating the future shape of a state in Israel and Palestine. While many people understandably see the idea of a two-state solution as standing in the way of concrete action to end the unbearable status quo, I believe it is not up to the British government – let alone the Green party – to decide the future for Israelis and Palestinians."

"Our party democracy must now evolve to meet that – creating wider engagement for members, giving leaders more responsibility to set the party’s strategic direction, and making our processes as robust and accessible as possible."

"What I'm experiencing is the immense amount of people who are saying they've never been prouder to be a Green Party member."

Zack Polanski, leader British Green Party

 

"I would have hoped he would have been a very strong critic of this motion."

"I want him to show the leadership that was frankly missing on Sunday."

"[I think the jury is out about whether he will do that, but I very much hope he will."

Former British Green Party leader Caroline Lucas 

Did the Zionism row lose it for Zack Polanski? | Politics Weekly

 

The parliamentary by-election lost by the Green Party was most definitely not good news for either Zack Polanski or the party; its temporary rise in the esteem of a greater proportion of the British electorate that inspired hope in the party that its performance would continue to find favour with the voting public has been dashed in the reality of waning support that followed the euphoria felt of a growing popularity, under former Prime Minister Keir Starmer. 

 

The party's recent conference which resulted in the adoption of a new Israel policy labelling Zionism as racist, calling for a single Palestinian state to engulf and destroy Israel has now to be dealt with to the satisfaction of its internal critics. His year-old leadership when the 43-year-old's easygoing manner helped it gain popularity, leading to its February by-election win as well as the May local elections when the party racked up hundreds of council seats had given the party new confidence.

 

Its membership soared to over 200,000 from its previous 68,000 when Greens support stood at 21 percent in opinion polls, almost equal in public opinion with the ruling Labour party. Polanski's own inattention to details and public perception stood him in ill stead when he reposted on social media a photograph of a T-shirt subtly encouraging the untimely death of Reform U.K. leader Nigel Farage. As an outspoken critic on the Gaza war, accusing Israel of committing genocide, the motion passed at last month's conference did not stray too far from his personal sentiments.

 

At the conference where the party's membership, not its leader, is permitted to establish policy, 1,022 members (0.4% of total membership) responded favourably to a motion that declared Zionism as a form of racism and calling for a single Palestinian state. Five of the party's MPs opposed the motion that drew the European Green party's notice, which supports a two-state solution. Despite which the motion passed by 1,022 votes to 813. Prompting the Greens' Westminster leader Ellie Chowns to point out the risk of extremists and racists capturing the party, demonstrating a vital need to modernize policymaking.

That the leadership of the Green Party in Britain is a Jew, raised in a conventional Jewish household, finding it in himself to acquiesce to the ideological philosophy of racists interpreting the reestablishment of the State of Israel on its own ancestral geography as being a racist apartheid enterprise, prepared to support a motion that would destroy the state in favour of handing it over to the colonialist enterprise of Arabs from Syria, Jordan and Egypt who claim the land as its own, speaks volumes of his warped mind

 

Citing the opposition to a Jewish state by a former child Holocaust survivor, makes one feel a similarity strangely shadows the proceedings, between the Kapos who during the Holocaust handled the Zyklon B-asphyxiated Jewish victims to shovel them into the gaping maw of the incinerators, to prolong their own lives, as Nazi enablers of the Final Solution, and one whose vehement denial of Zionism whose name bears a striking resemblance.

 

Holocaust Survivor Stephen Kapos meets Francesca Albanese SOAS 11.11.24

 

As for the two-state solution; it had its time in history. For over a lifetime of events one generation after another, Israel waited for the Palestinian leaders to acknowledge the internationally legal, immovable presence and right-of-existence-sovereignty of the State of Israel -- without which no formal agreement on statehood for Palestinians side-by-side with Israel would be possible -- in vain. While repeatedly attesting to the international community that Palestinians wanted peace along with their own state, among themselves they spoke an entirely different language of 'resistance to occupation'.

 

From the Palestinian refusal in 1947 to the United Nations' offer of Partition, with Israel accepting its geographic portion, a narrow strip representing a slender proportion of original Judaic territory dating back millennia in ancient history of the Middle East, the leadership of the Palestinians consistently, turned down all succeeding offers that would have resulted in the state they demanded, holding out for the state they envisioned they were entitled to, 'from the river to the sea'. 

 

There is no honour among those who view Israel, Zionism and the existential-need of a Jewish homeland as 'racist' and irrelevant in the greater need to accommodate Arabs calling themselves Palestinian, when they could just as well rename themselves "Jordanians" in reflection of a country where they form the majority, yet ruled over by a Hashemite kingdom, which keeps a wary eye out to ensure there is no repeat of 'Black September'.  Ironically enough, it was Mandate Britain that administered the territory and which failed to respect history, heritage and honour; the Green Party has picked up where Mandate Britain left off.

 

 

Iran Exploiting U.S. News Sites Planting AI Inauthentic News

"Because we're in a very red part of Florida, I usually don' run PeaceVoice columns, but this one struck me as thought-provoking and not a strident attack on Mr. Trump, which would be problematic for much of our readership."

David Adlerstein, publisher, Port St.Joe Star, Florida

 

"We identified almost 100 articles published or syndicated under the operation's bylines across roughly a dozen online outlets around the world."

"These were small to medium outlets, generally focused on international affairs, geopolitics, and events in the Middle East."

"The overall activity appeared consistent with a commercial actor running a for-hire influence campaign but we are unable to identify the particular actor involved."

"AI can give such false-front operations greater scale, efficiency, linguistic fluency, and editorial ability."

"The operators can use these advantages to exploit unsuspecting victims, such as employees or editors, and plant their content in front of audiences who have no idea who was behind it, or what their motivations were."

"The overall activity appeared consistent with a commercial actor running a for-hire influence campaign, but we are unable to identify the particular actor involved."

 "We have shared information on this case with the relevant authorities."

OpenAI

OpenAI says in a new report that it had shut down an influence operation from Iran that used ChatGPT to secretly push anti-American propaganda.

 

"[We have found, and disrupted operations by state actors, including Iran, that used Claude to] build, run, and otherwise facilitate surveillance operations [targeting ethnic minorities and dissidents]."

Anthropic

 

"Artificial intelligence has made it much easier to produce multilingual propaganda, create fake identities, and discredit critics." 

"On the other hand, authoritarian governments often use the fight against misinformation as a pretext for censorship, expanded surveillance, and even pressure to reveal users' identities."

Pooyesh Azizeddin, human rights and technology researcher 

No doubt there were many readers, in doubt regarding President Trump's conflict with the Islamic Republic of Iran who found titles such as, “Is America’s Iran Policy Being Privatized? The Jared Kushner Question,” and “The Iran War and the Collapse of Western Moral Credibility”, viewing them as cogent affirmation of their own perceptions. Published in what most readers might consider credible news outlets such as The L.A. Monitor and Middle East Monitor, it is even possible that these outlets had an inkling that what they were publishing was a collaboration between AI chatbots and skillfully deceptive Iranian agents.
 

After all, it is no secret that many users of social media platforms are not individuals at all, but faked personalities with faked backgrounds, used to perpetrate news fraud, and perpetuate a malign entity's version of events to manipulate public opinion and create dissent and chaos in the land of the enemy, targeting the version of events and the very authority of a government's decision-making, to influence its public that in the final analysis the costly business of prosecuting a war will come back to haunt the ordinary citizen, tasked unwillingly to support that war and paying for it under imposed economic duress. 

 

"The bill will follow Americans beyond the fighting itself", read an opinion piece published in a tiny Florida weekly. This warning of the Iran conflict was purportedly composed by an Ervin Hoskins, a named byline in other articles published in other, larger publications including the Daily Kos article critical of the prosecution of the Iran war. Over 3 million followers read Daily Kos and Middle East Monitor on Facebook.  

"It’s remarkable that the Iranians managed to land their content in real media outlets, expanding the potential reach of their campaign."

"We’re witnessing AI enab[ling] foreign adversaries to better hide their hand, building more sophisticated false fronts than they might otherwise be able to in order to launder their content through authentic channels, leveraging those channels for reach."

Jessica Brandt, of the now-shuttered Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s Foreign Malign Influence Center from 2023 to 2025

'Journalist' Hoskins has been revealed by  OpenAI to be part of an "influence campaign", its articles generated with the use of the OpenAI chatbot by users based in Iran. An estimated hundred fake articles across some 20 news outlets placed fake articles in a campaign to mislead and cause disruptions in the target countries. Editors failing to detect the artificial creation of some news they publish have finally taken to deleting AI-generated content under fake bylines.

 

A series of articles were removed by Business Insider and Wired last year, appearing under the byline Margaux Blanchard, and believed to be AI-generated. According to OpenAI, use of ChatGPT in political influence campaigns reflects an operation focused on seeding content related to U.S. military action in Iran. Negative impacts on Americans of the war are highlighted in the articles. A total of seven bylines in a series of AI-generated articles by users who sent instructions to the chatbot in Persian have been  outlined by OpenAI. 

 

 

 

"[We published the research to inform regulators, other companies and the public of] how we see threat actors trying to leverage AI, and to shine a light on the vulnerabilities they try to exploit."

ChatGPT 

Needless to say, it will not be only the Islamic Republic engaged in this covert AI-generated false news planted within unsuspecting media sites, but other countries as well, with whom the West has troubled relationships with; China and Russia, for example, as well as Qatar and non-state actors such as the Muslim Brotherhood. If OpenAI admits to be unable to identify the actors involved, turning the issue over to law enforcement is interesting, but they lack the level of expertise it would take to make such critical identification as has stymied Open AI.

France, in Social Disarray Once Again

"The French doctrine of crowd control and riot policing is certainly very different from that in the UK, and the police have a formidable array of ostensibly defensive weapons that include batons, tear-gas grenades fired from launchers and blast balls. All of these can inflict serious injury if not handled correctly. In some cases over the past week, ill-prepared authorities were obliged to deploy local officers with little experience of riot policing, and mistakes were undoubtedly made."

"Yet the armoury of the most violent protesters was also formidable. Apart from bricks and other heavy projectiles, the weapon of choice is the firework launched from a tube. These fireworks have been turned not only on the police but also on firemen who attempted to put out blazes. Another favourite tactic of rioters is to throw aerosol cans into fires and watch them explode. Among other weapons seized by the police were knives, hammers, baseball bats, Molotov cocktails and bottles of hydrochloric acid." 

Jeremy Stubbs, Spiked 

 

"Since the protests began in mid September, roughly 6,000 people have been arrested. About 300 students and staff have been injured, as have some 700 police officers. France's interior minister says the police response has been proportionate in -- quote -- "almost all cases."

"But it's also fueling defiance and anger, leading to today, as union activists joined 250,000 protesters nationwide, demanding more education funding amid understaffed schools, overcrowded classrooms, and dilapidated academic buildings."

"Students vowed to continue to mobilize as more blockades formed around hundreds of high schools."

Deema Zain, National Public Radio 

 

"[French] police said on Tuesday alone 488 people were arrested and 43 police officers were injured."

"There have been 18 internal probes launched in response to allegations of police brutality since the end of September."

"The Education Ministry said 528 high schools were 'totally or partially suspended' on Wednesday."

"Scenes in Paris, Marseille, Bordeaux and Lyon, among other cities showed hundreds to thousands of students, along with teachers and other protesters, voicing how fed up they were with the school system."

"Police used tear gas and water canons, in some cases, to break up clashes and riots. Protesters can be seen in videos and photos setting bins on fire and throwing objects."

"A 15-year-old student reportedly had his hand blown off by a stun grenade deployed by police. A source told RFI that the student grabbed the grenade and it exploded while he was holding it."

Courtney Greenberg, National Post   

Protesters gathered at Paris’s Place de la République, on October 6th.  Photograph by Geoffroy Van Der Hasselt / AFP / Getty

 

 In the third week of unrest over dilapidated schools and the lack of funding, a high school in the north-central region of Beaugency saw students chanting to M*R*H*, a song bearing the initials of Mohamed Merah, a French-born terrorist of Algerian descent who murdered three soldiers in 2012, then did the same to a teacher and three Jewish children  in Toulouse, targeting a Jewish school. He chased down an eight-year-old child and shot her at point-blank range. The song by the rapper Boro700 evidently resonated with the protesting high school students.

 

Obviously in some arcane manner, the song celebrating the murder of Jews by an Islamist terrorist found favour with the protesting students whose complaint was of a funding lack for schools, crowded classrooms, too few teachers, and decrepit schools lacking air conditioning in intolerable summer heat conditions. In Nice as well, protesting students have seen fit to play the song and sing along with it, as though delivering a message of vital importance to government that has failed to live up to an older generation's responsibility to the emerging leaders of tomorrow's France.

 

Students at Saint-Exupery located in a disadvantaged Paris suburb blockaded their high school on September 17 in a show of support to their teachers striking over under-staffing and overcrowded classrooms, inspiring pupils to take up the torch of  furious indignation over France's failure to adequately fund its schools preparing the younger generation to take their place as adults in representing their communities, their districts, their social and cultural peers as per the overall social contract.

 

Protesters marching in Marseille. Photograph: Sener Yilmaz Aslan/Getty Images

 

These are not quiet, orderly protests held by respectfully obedient-to-lawful-order students; there has been violence as the accusations escalate and students are joined by those with disparate axes to grind. Parents of course, and teachers have also joined the chaotic protests. Along with those who march to their own resentful and vicious aggravation against the state. A masked man in Marseille sprayed an aerosol at a woman's face, then lit it afire.

 

Among teachers who have come out to support and march alongside their pupils there have been incidents of teachers being assaulted. Arsonists have set fire to some high schools. Figures released to the public of 700 police officers, 85 school staff and 215 teens having been injured attests to the tempestuous tenor of the times. "Our country is witnessing the most powerful movement of high school and college students it has seen since May 1968", stated socialist presidential candidate JeanLuc Melenchon, galvanizing his followers to join suit. 

 

Viral social media footage is rife with the vision of a preponderance of rioters clearly the offspring of migrants from the banlieus, a political bonus to Marine Le Pen's National Rally party. As for the legacy French media, they are content to publish righteous stories of youth disappointed and angry over a government that fails to heed their needs and complaints. The lyrics of the song that has proved so popular among the rioting students who set fire to trash bins and toss Molotov cocktails at shield-bearing police, revel over the Bataclan massacre's success in murdering innocent people. 

 

Protesters hold a banner reading 'Rostand angry, Rostand supportive' during the protest in Caen, France, on Oct. 6. (Guillaume Saligot/AFP/Getty Images)

 

 

Deja Vu : from Wuhan, China to Siberia, Russia

"Who [World Health Organization] has requested further information to clarify the cause of the severe pneumonia."

"Media reports of a second employee with pneumonia of undetermined cause [is troubling]." 

"[Risk for the region considered] moderate to low [but lacking information to conduct a] full risk assessment."

WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

A security person wearing a face mask looks out from the door of an infectious diseases hospital in the town of Shelekhov, where an employee of the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute recently died, a mysterious fatality that has caused international concern. (Tatyana Makeyeva/AFP/Getty Images)

 

"Comprehensive preventive and anti-epidemic measures [have been implemented at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute in Irkutsk]."

"[There are no] epidemic risks to the population of Irkutsk and the Irkutsk Region."

"[Close to 5,000 tests were conducted, none revealing the presence of dangerous pathogens; the situation in Irkutsk region remains] stable." 

Rospotrebnadzor, Russian public health agency 

When curious cases of pneumonia began to show up in Wuhan, China, in 2019, local doctors were puzzled and concerned. They were muzzled by authorities who cautioned them to say nothing, facing penalties beyond mere censure if they leaked information out to a curious world. Beijing assured the World Health Organization that this was merely a local issue, and nothing to be concerned about. When it became obvious that the fast-spreading disease, later named as SARS-CoV-2 posed a potential large-scale threat, China was outraged at the world reaction to close borders, terming it 'racist'.

 

Travellers from the region arriving on foreign shores predictably carried the pathogen with them and it took no time at all for a pandemic to threaten world health. Russian authorities appear to be following a similar pattern of denial and reluctance to provide critical information to the WHO, which in short order assured the world that everything was under control and there was nothing concerning. The infection,      attributed to infection from live animals at the Huanan wholesale seafood market that spread like wildfire was later suspected to have originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in a case of a runaway virus.

 

With luck, this will not be repeated. The source of the infection that caused the death of a young plague laboratory worker last week will prove to be an accident, swiftly brought under control. In the brief time leading to that hoped-for conclusion, Moscow's secretive feints at stilling suspicion of a breakout plague virus does not instill confidence. Pneumonia of an "undetermined" cause is the Russian attribution but it has failed to satisfy the need-to-know of the WHO, the U.S. and the European Union, clamouring for more revelations.

 

Photograph: Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute via AP

 

The Russian news outlet People of Baikal, revealed that 28-year-old Darya Shipilova, an employee at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute, died from a suspected case of pneumonic plague which she may have contracted from a broken test tube. Speculation at this point, nothing conclusive. That it is infectious is beyond denial. And Ms. Shipilova had contact with an estimated 200 people, now under quarantine. With a second lab employee now dead -- which Russia denies -- should others swiftly follow, the world will have ample reason for suspense.

 

According to a local mayor, a local hospital has been placed under quarantine, obviously to care for the 200 individuals identified as potential risks for infection. A half-million people live in eastern Russia, and Shelekhov, where the first lab employee died, is a satellite town to the west of Irkutsk, itself a remote Siberian city. The Yersinia pestis bacterium is the cause of pneunomic plague. Swift treatment with antibiotics can avert death; if not treated an an early stage, it progresses fatally.

 

Reassuringly, the Irkutsk regional governor, Igor Kobzev, stated that Rospotrebnadzor's early inspection found that the death of the young lab worker had been caused by a pneumonia of "undetermined" origin. Concisely he said: "No micro-organisms linked to the young woman's professional work were found in her biological samples", and no other institute staff members had required medical attention following her death. Tellingly, plague is endemic to Siberia.

 

The World Health Organization is investigating reports of a second infection linked to an anti-plague institute in Siberia. This comes after the death of a researcher from the same laboratory earlier this month, which studies pneumonic plague.  AP

 

"The sanitary and epidemiological situation in the Irkutsk region … is calm."

"[Authorities are completing a] complex of prophylactic measures and medical observation over contacts."

"So far they have found two cases of COVID-19 and two of rhinovirus."

Rospotrebnadzor public health agency, Russia 

 

Suicidal-MartyrTerrorist Aboard FlyDubai Flight FZ1073

"There was blood all over the cockpit and very, very sharp fighting moves."

"I screamed, 'He's stabbing the pilot, he's stabbing the pilot, come  help'!"

"People looked at me and didn't understand." 

Tali Manes Flydubai passenger

 

"I was fighting for my life. I had suffered so many injuries that I had collapsed."

"At that time, I could feel that the aircraft was going down. I knew this was the last push, that the door was right there."

"Smit just do it. The door is right there. I was being hit even then, but I just opened the door and everyone came in."

Flydubai Flight FZ1073 Captain Smit Machchhar 

Flydubai pilot tells Indian prime minister Modi that he couldn’t ‘let anyone die’ – video

 

"There were no pilots on the chairs. One was down on the floor and one on the instruments."

"I caught the attacker. I put him in a chokehold and pulled him out first."

"I jumped back into the cockpit and pulled the yokes back."

Yaniv Hayoun, Plumber, Flight passenger 

 

"We're here during a hijacking of the plane."

"We control the terrorist. All the passenger are OK, but not the pilot.

"Whoever's hearing me, we need help."

Asaf Rejwan, Flight passenger

The United Arab Emirates prosecutor general has ordered an investigation into the ‌stabbing aboard FlyDubai Flight FZ1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv, which was diverted and landed in Saudi Arabia after a struggle in the cockpit. Still from video, CBC

 

That cry for help relayed over the airwaves immediately jolted action, with the Israeli military scrambling fighter jets, a 9/11 scenario unfolding uppermost in mind. Nina Manes, six years of age, asked to go to the bathroom and her mother Tali accompanied her to the bathroom at the front of the Flydubai plane on a routine trip from Dubai to Israel last week. The plane was several hours into its flight, over the Jordan desert at that point. That little trip to the bathroom coincided with the co-pilot of the plane attacking the pilot with an onboard-cockpit ax, a standard piece of equipment on all flights. 

 

Mother Tali, aware of strangely explosive sounds, looked through the window of the cockpit door and became witness to a startling attack just as the co-pilot lunged for the attack and his first strike at the unaware pilot. Her alarmed shouts roused the passengers, some of whom ran directly to the cockpit to swiftly assess the situation and to act by thwarting the co-pilot's intention to destroy all 182 lives aboard the passenger jet in a terror-suicide plot. The non-stop trip of 2,130 kilometres took on an air of panic and fear.  

 

The badly injured captain, his skull split, his right arm almost split in two, fought desperately against his assailant. The Indian captain had been informed by his co-pilot, an Omani national, that it was his intention to pray briefly, and as the captain looked away to give his companion some privacy, the axe was raised over his head, and came down to split his skull. Dreadfully injured, his attacker still slashing at him, Captain Machchhar managed to unlock the cockpit door. And when he did several passengers ready for action, swept into the cockpit.

 

Flydubai passengers react after realising there is commotion in the cockpit, September 30, 2026 in this screengrab taken from a handout video. Handout via REUTERS

 

An off-duty pilot who was onboard, immediately took the controls to stabilize the plane which had gone into a steep nosedive. It felt, said Almog Italie, another passenger, as though "we were having very big turbulence. And the crew member, along with the passengers gained control, took over". Flight tracking website Flightreadat24 tracked the Boeing 737 Max as it plummeted from about 34,000 feet to an altitude of 17,000 feet in fewer than two minutes. 

 

Video from within the plane showed the plane shaking while plunging, passengers screaming in fear and crying, children being shielded, other passengers crouched in prayer in the aisle. The plane was "pretty much out of control. It was really on the way to crashing, and it was simply the resourcefulness of many people who took control of the co-pilot and neutralized him", remarked passenger Miryan Shira Ohayon. 

 

The erratic flight that lasted an agonizing ten minutes was soon brought under control, the flight stabilized. 7700 and 7500 emergency distress codes were activated. Passengers sent out their own status reports along with pleas for outside help. An hour later, the plane made an emergency landing in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. A third Flydubai pilot in the cabin landed the plane, its tail damaged, according to Flydubai. "There were stabbings and a lot of blood. We're very emotional and under  terrible stress. It's very difficult for me to talk", one passenger said, on landing back in Tel Aviv when a replacement plane returned them to Israel.

 

A plane, carrying passengers who were on the FlyDubai aircraft bound for Israel from the UAE, which was diverted to Saudi Arabia following an emergency signal, arrives at Ben Gurion Airport, in Lod, near Tel Aviv, Israel, September 30, 2026.    Ammar Awad/Reuters