Source: BBC News [UK state media]
“Trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi between Russia, Ukraine and the US aimed at ending the war in Ukraine have concluded after a second day. Although the American side said they saw ‘some openings’, there was no hint of any breakthroughs to end the nearly five year-long war sparked by Russia’s invasion. … Both Moscow and Kyiv confirmed that a large-scale prisoner of war exchange was in the works and could be carried out soon. After the talks it was announced that on Thursday US negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner – President Donald Trump’s son-in-law – would travel to Moscow to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin, and then to Dublin to speak to Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky. This latest round of talks had been framed as centred around the ‘security architecture’ of Europe.” (11/11/26)
https://archive.is/mjDel
Source: spiked
by Michael CR Reiners
“Kristie Higgs lost her school job in January 2019 over Facebook posts expressing her Christian beliefs about sex and education. In February 2025, the Court of Appeal held her dismissal unlawful. It therefore took more than six years to establish that she should not have been sacked. Before congratulating ourselves on the strength of British free-speech protections, we might consider how many people could afford to wait that long. Britain possesses a remarkable variety of mechanisms by which it can ruin you for speaking your mind. Criminal prosecution is the most conspicuous. For someone with a professional qualification, a complaint to the profession’s regulator may be quite sufficient. For an employee, the threat of dismissal does the work.” (11/11/26)
https://archive.is/fp7Kl
Source: New York Times
“Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, Republican of Mississippi, conceded to Scott Colom, a Democrat, in a video posted to social media on Wednesday evening. … Colom’s win means Democrats will hold at least 55 Senate seats at the start of the next Congress. The contest in Alaska, in which the Democrat Mary Peltola has a narrow lead, is the last remaining Senate race in which a winner has not been declared.
Ms. Hyde-Smith, the first woman to represent Mississippi in Congress, was first appointed to the Senate to fill a vacancy in April 2018.” (11/11/26)
https://archive.is/4kBLY
Source: The Daily Economy
by Donald J Boudreaux
“Immigration skeptics fear newcomers will ruin America, but corruption of our constitutional order has come mostly from within.” (11/11/26)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/culture-makes-america-great/
Source: CoinDesk
“Strangers connecting through Tor could bypass spam and privacy protections on thousands of bitcoin nodes because the software treated them as trusted computers. Bitcoin Core published a formal security advisory on Tuesday, about 13 months after releasing a fix. The code change had been public on GitHub since September 2025, under a title explicitly saying whitelist permissions should not apply to incoming Tor connections. The flaw was one of three developers disclosed Tuesday, all patched in releases issued last October. Another could leave a mining node unable to build blocks until its operator restarted it.” (11/12/26)
https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2026/11/12/bitcoin-core-reveals-bug-that-made-thousands-of-nodes-trust-any-stranger-on-tor
Source: Common Sense
by Paul Jacob
“Politics and government have long been muddied by a chicken-or-egg issue. Which came first, people with good morals or the just institutions that nurture good people? Economist and social theorist Deirdre N. McCloskey surprised me, just a bit, by coming down hard on one side of the question last week. ‘It is ethics, good or bad, that guides pretty much all human relationships, from a marriage or a small circle of friends to a sports team, a business, or a nation-state,’ she wrote, adding that ‘well-designed laws, courts, catechisms, extrinsic motives, social approval, and even a few good and decent people are of no avail if too many people do not behave like self-respecting and other-respecting adults.’ While this sure seems true, I note that her fellow economists have been preaching the preeminence of proper incentives and disincentives to channel good outcomes. For a long, long time.” (11/11/26)
https://thisiscommonsense.org/2026/11/11/the-ethical-egg/
Source: Marine Insight [India]
“Iran has claimed a strike on Didamar, a small rocky island belonging to Oman at the entrance to the Persian Gulf, according to reports on Tuesday. Iran’s military said that personnel on the island were ‘helping the flow of oil smuggling by the enemy’. An unnamed official of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Navy told Iranian state media that navigational aid systems in the south of the Strait of Hormuz were destroyed. The official added that no vessels that Iran considers unauthorised passed through the route overnight. Oman confirmed that a loud explosion was detected at the base on the island.” (11/11/26)
https://www.marineinsight.com/iran-strike-omani-didamar-island-hormuz/
Source: The Atlantic
by Ali Breland
“Joel Webbon has a six-year plan to usher in the first Christian-nationalist president, and he’s sticking to it. Although some on the far right were shaken by last week’s rout of Republicans at the polls, seeing it as a setback for their own agenda, Webbon told me last week that he sees it as validation. Conveniently enough, the first phase of Webbon’s plan required that Republicans lose the midterms, getting rejected by voters after starting a wildly unpopular war that exacerbated the cost-of-living crisis. … Phase 2: Recruiting James Fishback to run in the 2028 Republican presidential primary. Fishback is a 31-year-old Floridian who ran a racist and anti-Semitic campaign in an unsuccessful GOP primary bid to be Florida’s governor. … Fishback would be too young to meet the minimum presidential age of 35, but that does not matter to Webbon, because victory is not the point.” (11/11/26)
https://archive.is/a20sB
Source: Jonathan Turley
by Jonathan Turley
“President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the BBC for defamation just received a green light from a federal judge to go forward to trial. Judge Jeffrey Kuntz (S.D. Fla.) ruled in Trump v. BBC that the media outlet must stand trial for splicing together lines from Trump’s January 6th speech to make it seem more violence-inducing before the riot at the Capitol. Judge Kuntz, however, rejected a claim under the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act. The biggest challenge for the court may be whether it can seat jurors who can overcome the case’s underlying political elements. … As a torts professor, I was critical of some past filings by the President that pursued overbroad or flawed defamation claims. BBC was different. It involved an act that is anathema to ethical journalists: cutting lines from different parts of a tape and then joining them as if they were stated together.” (11/11/26)
https://jonathanturley.org/2026/11/11/trump-wins-major-ruling-in-defamation-lawsuit-against-bbc/
Source: CNN
“Hundreds of schools across Italy were evacuated on Wednesday after bomb threats were sent to about 6,300 institutions, becoming the latest in a series of incidents targeting infrastructure across Europe. Schools in Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland also received emails Wednesday, although police warned these were likely hoaxes and education facilities were not evacuated. … Last week, a string of hoax bomb threats disrupted dozens of flights and targeted media organizations across the continent. And in the last few weeks, cyberattacks have hit supermarket refrigeration systems in France, Sweden, Belgium and Ireland.” (11/11/26)
https://www.cnn.com/2026/11/11/europe/italy-europe-bomb-threat-intl
