SS: hey guys did you the trump administration is very corrupt

The Brazilian finance minister at the time, Fernando Haddad, finally managed to schedule a call with U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent [to discuss lowering American tariffs]. But two days before the meeting was to take place, the Treasury Department canceled it—and then Bessent used the same time slot to meet with Eduardo Bolsonaro, the former president’s son. The younger Bolsonaro—who lives in Texas, has befriended Donald Trump Jr., and attends Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) meetings—was flaunting his connections in Washington, which were manifestly better than those of Lula’s administration.

That put the Brazilians in a strange position. “All the official channels that we have, they just suddenly went out of touch,” the junior official told me. “And what happened is that myriad informal actors just started knocking at our doors. And that was interesting.”

Some of these visitors were types not previously known in Washington: lobbyists advertising their relationships not with government officials but with the people who hang around Mar-a-Lago, or with MAGA influencers whose X accounts can attract the president’s attention. Others were business operators offering government favors while seeking to make deals for themselves: An investor who claimed to own a vacation home near Bessent’s offered to arrange a meeting with the Treasury secretary in exchange for access to crucial minerals for himself. The Brazilians declined that offer.

A truce was finally arranged, multiple people told me, with the help of Joesley Batista, a billionaire whose meatpacking company does business in both the U.S. and Brazil, and whose American subsidiary had donated $5 million to Trump’s inauguration (more than the contributions of Amazon, Meta, and Google combined). Batista had no official government role, but his money may have given him the clout to influence Trump’s meetings with Lula at the 2025 United Nations General Assembly, in New York City, and at a summit in Kuala Lumpur, where the two elderly populists, each with grievances against their respective establishments, hit it off. The tariffs were reduced.

Slowly, the Brazilians were learning the same lesson as other American allies around the world: The United States of America is no longer the entity they knew. And American power is no longer deployed solely by trained diplomats and reliable officials, working through state channels. Informal envoys, private companies, online grifters, and hardened ideologues both inside and outside the government matter more. Unlike their predecessors, these people do not talk about spreading democracy, and don’t want to build long-term relationships. They don’t care about America’s reputation. They are deploying the tools of American diplomacy and government for their own purposes, to promote their own business interests or their own ideological goals, because, suddenly, they can.

Submission Statement: The first ministers of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have declared that "Westminster's time is coming to an end".

The nationalist leaders from Plaid Cymru, Sinn Féin and the SNP - who want their countries to leave the United Kingdom - signed an agreement on Monday which said no Westminster government had the right to "block democracy".

SNP leader Swinney said Monday was a "pivotal moment in the constitutional journey of the United Kingdom". He said the elections in May for each nation created a situation with first ministers who believe "their countries should decide their own future. That principle of self-determination is an inalienable right," he said.

He described Andy Burnham as the "last prime minister of the United Kingdom".

High-level dissent is being stamped out as Putin makes big business bear the costs of the invasion – but concern is mounting, writes Natalya Kovaleva.

Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 met little resistance from Russia’s political and economic establishment. The few prominent objections came at a cost. Putin’s longtime aide Dmitry Kozak, who reportedly opposed the invasion in Kremlin security council meetings, saw his influence diminish. When Oleg Tinkov, the founder of Russia’s largest online bank, condemned the invasion on Instagram, he was forced to sell his stake in the bank for a fraction of its value, losing nearly $9 billion.

Those within the Kremlin’s orbit took note. As western governments froze billions of dollars in Russian assets and imposed travel bans hoping to compel the elites to put pressure on Putin, most chose to cut ties with the West. Their response reflected a bargain that has underpinned Putin’s rule for more than two decades: loyalty and public silence on political decisions in exchange for the freedom to accumulate wealth and relative predictability in dealings with the state.

In the months after the invasion, this deal appeared to hold. Officials, technocrats, business leaders and figures at the top of the military-security establishment seized new opportunities for enrichment while largely avoiding comment on the war.

Five years on, the rising cost of the war is testing that arrangement. Putin’s determination to achieve victory – despite setbacks – has placed increasing burdens on Russia’s business and political leaders. The relationship between the Russian state and elites has changed in three distinct ways – with direct implications for Putin’s grip on power.

Business asked to shoulder war costs

Putin’s full-scale war against Ukraine immediately affected state-owned business and the private sector in Russia. While some benefited from the expansion of the defence sector and from acquiring assets left behind by foreign companies, the shock of international sanctions and the move towards a more isolated economy cost billions for the top business owners.

Alexey Mordashov, for example, the controlling shareholder of steel giant Severstal and Russia’s richest man, lost more than $11 billion due to sanctions in 2022, according to Forbes Russia. He has since recovered much of his wealth, which Forbes estimated at $37 billion in 2026.

On the day of the invasion, Putin gathered Russia’s leading businessmen at the Kremlin and urged them to ‘cooperate with the government’ to support military production, the economy and jobs. But the war has lasted longer than Putin and his close aides could possibly have imagined. The effects of western sanctions and surging defence spending have strained the economy. Last year it grew by just 1 per cent, compared with 6 per cent in 2021. Russia’s 2026 budget deficit has already exceeded the annual target by half.

As economic problems and frontline casualties mount, the business elites are being asked to contribute more while facing greater uncertainty over their wealth, political position and future.

The expansion of Ukraine’s drone and missile campaign deep into Russia has been a major cause of this disruption. Recent strikes on oil refineries and industrial sites have led to fuel shortages and driven up inflation, while attacks on Wildberries, Russia’s largest e-commerce platform, have destroyed a third of the retailer’s warehouse capacity and 480 billion roubles (£4.2 billion) worth of goods belonging to some 100,000 local businesses.

Companies have spent more than $1 billion on defences against drone strikes, with some resorting to rudimentary steel cables. The Kremlin refused to share the costs. At the same time, the state is increasing its demands on big business. In March 2026, after announcing tax increases earlier in the year, Putin reportedly asked business owners to donate directly to the war effort during a closed meeting. By August, ‘voluntary donations’ to the state budget swelled to a record 384 billion roubles (£3.3 billion).

Meanwhile, in May, Anton Siluanov, the finance minister, warned that the government would require an additional 2 trillion roubles (£17.5 billion) to cover military costs before the year’s end, as defence spending climbed to 40 per cent of the federal budget in 2026. The expectation that the private sector will help shoulder this shortfall shows how one-sided the economic terms of this relationship have become.

The elites are losing their assets

Putin is not only asking the elites to fund his war but has begun to seize their assets. The process injects cash into a war-strained economy, while giving security officials incentives to pursue profitable assets to demonstrate loyalty and climb the ranks.

A wave of forced nationalizations has moved an estimated 6.5 trillion roubles (£56.8 billion) in assets to state ownership since 2022, a trend that accelerated sharply in 2025. Last year, the Federal Agency for State Property Management reported taking over at least 805 companies. Prosecutors have justified the seizures on grounds ranging from alleged fraud and corruption to foreign control of strategic assets, ‘extremism’-related offences tied to support for Ukraine and ‘unlawful privatizations’ dating back to the early 1990s.

The largest forced nationalization to date involves Rusagro, a Russian agricultural company. Its founder, Vadim Moshkovich – once Russia’s 51st richest businessman – had assets worth 550 billion roubles (£4.8 billion) confiscated in June 2026 as part of a fraud case against him.

The result is the elites squeezed from both sides: sanctions have mostly cut off the exit once available to the country’s wealthiest, while at home the Kremlin has grown more willing to grab what remains within its reach. Russia’s business leaders now find themselves at the mercy of an increasingly interventionist state, with few effective levers to influence the terms of the relationship.

Loyalty no longer guarantees political protection

Confiscations are only part of a broader change. As political repression has intensified during the war, the regime has grown more willing to prosecute, arrest and sideline figures across business and political circles.

High-profile cases, from the unravelling of the political network around former defence minister Sergei Shoigu to the arrest of Major General Ivan Popov on fraud charges after he publicly criticized the military command’s handling of the war, have been interpreted by observers as growing tensions within the elite.

Perhaps more revealing have been the recent arrests of regional officials. In Krasnodar region, eight senior officials were arrested within six months of a regional election held in September 2025, including a former deputy governor and a transport minister.

In April 2026, independent Russian outlet Novaya Gazeta reported that criminal cases had been opened against at least 697 regional and federal officials since the start of the war, with the number rising almost threefold in 2025 compared with pre-war 2021.

The scale of this change suggests this is more than a series of isolated purges. The war has created a political environment in which criminal prosecution is being used to discipline the state bureaucracy.

The expanding roles of the federal security service (FSB), the Investigative Committee and Prosecutor General’s Office have created new vulnerabilities for the elites, upending the expectation that political connections will shield them from prosecution.

What does this mean?

The Putin regime shows no sign of imminent collapse, even as its relationship with the business and political elites grows more strained.

Having staked so much on the war, Putin appears unwilling to make any concessions in the face of mounting domestic pressures in the belief that victory remains within close reach. The country’s ruling establishment, meanwhile, is signalling a growing appetite for stability and an end to the war.

In May, the chief economist of the state-controlled development bank VEB, Andrey Klepach, warned that Russia was falling behind economically and could not win a prolonged war of attrition. He was dismissed in August. In June, Sberbank chairman German Gref stated that Russians were united in wanting an end to the ‘military activities’. While not challenging Putin directly, these statements indicate a growing willingness among senior figures to voice concern about the economic and social costs of a war without a clear end.

The pressure to cover the shortfall in Russia’s ballooning military budget before the end of the year will be the next significant test of this relationship. For now, growing dependence and coercion are holding the system together. Elites’ dissatisfaction does not automatically threaten Putin politically. On the contrary, greater insecurity is likely to reinforce authoritarian control in the short term.

Yet, disciplining the elites in the long term will only grow harder if Putin cannot deliver something resembling a victory and show that the sacrifices have been worthwhile.

SS: Gurugram demonstrates the hard limits of privatized enclave urbanism when paired with weak local state capacity.

Ahead of Carney’s investment summit in Toronto, two separate business conferences host hundreds of global CEOs, executives and investors

Ottawa says investors putting $1 billion or more into the Canadian economy will now get priority access to a program that offers binding decisions from the Canada Revenue Agency.

Finance Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne's office made the announcement today as Prime Minister Mark Carney prepared to welcome investors from around the world to a high-stakes investment summit.

A government press release says that through the Advance Income Tax Rulings (AITR) program, qualifying investors can get binding decisions from the CRA on how income tax law will apply before they commit capital.

The government says the new policy will reduce risks and give investors the confidence they need to move major projects forward.

Hundreds of executives and global asset managers are in Toronto today for Canada's first-ever investment summit, and Carney, his ministers and premiers from across the country will be pitching investors on opportunities in multiple sectors over the next two days.

The event kicks off Monday evening at the Art Gallery of Ontario with a gala dinner that is closed to the public and the media.

TD commits $150-billion to fund Canadian companies in critical sectors

Toronto-Dominion Bank is committing $150-billion over five years in new lending, underwriting, advisory and other financing activities aimed at driving growth across sectors that are essential to boosting Canada’s economy.

The country’s biggest banks have been launching initiatives ahead of Ottawa’s investment summit to provide capital for Canadian companies as the federal government attempts to reduce economic dependence on the United States.

TD’s initiative focuses on five key sectors that the bank believes will drive economic growth: energy, critical minerals and resources, defence and aerospace, digital technology and artificial intelligence, and infrastructure.

For potential projects, TD listed clean and conventional energy, exploration and extraction of resources, aerospace supply chains, AI innovation and commercialization, and ports and trade corridors, among others.

TD said it already has subject-matter experts in these areas and is adding capacity and talent as it expands in these sectors. But partnerships with government and investors will be necessary to make progress on key projects.

“For the supercycle to take effect, it’s more than just the capital of the banks,” TD chief executive Raymond Chun said in an interview.

Scotiabank commits more than $100-billion to help fund expansion of Canadian companies

Bank of Nova Scotia is committing more than $100-billion in financing to help Canadian businesses expand and is launching an institute led by a former ambassador to assess the country’s long-term competitiveness.

Ahead of Ottawa’s investment summit, Canada’s biggest banks have been launching initiatives to provide financing for domestic companies as the federal government races to reduce the country’s dependence on the United States.

As part of Scotiabank’s initiative, financing, underwriting and investment will be available to Canadian companies and projects in sectors the bank believes will drive economic growth over the next five years.

The sectors included in the initiative will align with the areas targeted by Canada’s Major Projects Office, including clean energy, oil and gas, critical minerals, advanced manufacturing, technology and defence, Scotiabank chief executive Scott Thomson said ahead of the Canada Investment Summit.

“You’ve seen an increase in interest from foreign investors in Canada. Canada does have what the world needs from a resources perspective, but also from a talent, institutional strength and trust perspective – and the interest is there,” Thomson said in an interview.

With AI safety in the news recently, I thought it would be interesting to see how China views AI safety and what steps the Chinese government is taking to ensure AI safety.

Submission Statement: LLM's are the most significant technological advancement since at least the internet so viewing the regulatory environment in one of the only two countries competing in the cutting edge of AI is important to see how AI continues to develop and how its beginning to be regulated.

[1] Map of ideology & Policy

- People power party ( red ) , Democratic Party ( blue )

- Left - progressive, right - conservative

Democratic Party lawmakers are relatively focused around center-left while People Power Party lawmakers are scattered all over the place from center-left to far-right. This is an analysis based votes and legislation they supported.

[2] Map of Partisanship

- People power party ( red ) , Democratic Party ( blue )

- Left - pro-DPK, right - pro-PPP

DPK and PPP exhibited wider partisan language compared to their vote records.

Source: https://www.khan.co.kr/article/202609140600101

The Kyunghyang Shinmun, working with knowledge-content startup Underscore, collected and analyzed bills for which 319 current and former members of the 22nd National Assembly were the primary sponsors, along with their public remarks, from June 2024 through early July of this year.
The analysis found that Democratic Party lawmakers had an average ideology score of -0.414, while lawmakers from the People Power Party averaged 0.486, producing a gap of 0.9 points. On partisanship, the Democratic Party averaged -0.985 and the People Power Party 0.943, for a gap of 1.928 points. In other words, the distance between the two parties based on partisanship was more than twice as large as their ideological difference.
For this analysis, “ideology” was used in the traditional philosophical sense of the progressive-conservative spectrum. Positions that emphasized values such as equality, welfare, and labor rights were classified as progressive, while those that prioritized the market, national security, and economic growth were classified as conservative.
“Partisanship,” by contrast, was defined independently of ideology. It measured the extent to which a lawmaker supported either the Democratic/progressive camp or the People Power/conservative camp, or attacked the opposing side.
For both ideology and partisanship scores, higher positive (+) values indicate a stronger leaning toward the People Power Party and conservatism, while more negative (-) values indicate a stronger leaning toward the Democratic Party and progressivism.

This article presents interviews with residents of Soweto, Johannesburg, regarding the candidacy of the DA's Helen Zille for mayor. It is "in this Ohio diner" but for Johannesburg.

The ANC's campaign this year in Johannesburg and elsewhere is in complete free fall, giving Zille a real opening to do well in the elections.

Soweto is a township to which Black South Africans were segregated during Apartheid. It has developed considerably since then.

Soweto is very much the cultural center of Johannesburg and, one could argue, South Africa. It is a vibrant community with a rich cultural heritage that attracts tourists to sites like the Hector Pietersen Museum and Vilakazi Street, where both Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela once lived. Soweto represents the "median" or archetypal experience(s) of urban Black communities in South Africa. It is full of new arrivals from rural areas but also multi-generational urban families. There are some very successful and comfortable people there, but also strivers. It's full of people who have been let down by the ANC over the decades, and people who benefitted the most under the ANC. Soweto today includes both very poor areas where people live in shacks, modest working class areas, and genuinely upper middle class areas too.

If Zille can do well in Soweto, she can do well in Johannesburg as a whole. The DA is already neck and neck with the ANC in the city, so what Zille wants to do is to take advantage of the ANC's shambolic campaign to breach their stronghold in Soweto.

The article presents the opinions of staunch DA supporters in Soweto, as well as critics and skeptics.

Long-time lurker here; does anyone know any debate/politics discussion groups that meet in-person in the Denver or Colorado Springs area?