🇪🇺🎙 President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, revealed her priorities for the next year during the yearly State of the Union Address

Despite promising two years ago that she would find solutions and reduce the size of the EU's administrative apparatus and eliminate regulations, VDL announced the creation of a dozen new departments/agencies tasked with managing even more aspects of the daily lives of European citizens and take away more powers from national governments and hundreds of new rules and regulations to combat the effects of climate change even going as far as to promise that the 2026 European heatwave and wildfire season will not be repeated again.

The EU bureaucracy and red tape will further be expanded by plans for a EU wide security strategy, a new water management initiative, a new EU framework for crisis response & management, a new labour law, a "digital equity act" and an internet censorship body overseeing the implementation age-verification and content restrictions for certain demographics by social media companies (KIDS Act) which forbids the creation of social media accounts for children below the age of 12, limited use social media accounts for teenagers 13-15 and supervised social media access with full accessibility for teenagers 16-18.

VDL is still going ahead with the plan to mirror NATO and plans to create a European Security Council with the UK, Norway, Canada and Ukraine included as members but its duties are left vague. In addition to that, the VDL wants a EU-wide "article 4 of the NATO treaty" in which a member state can call for emergency consultations with the rest of the EU and decide on a joint-response to the threat.

In the wake of the U.S-Canada trade war, VDL wants to create the "Associate Member" title that may be given to certain friendly countries. The position carries a lot of benefits but its unclear how will it be made compatible with the EU's founding treaties.

Stuck in a trade war with China, the EU plans to create a "European Corporation on Critical Raw Materials" that will reduce dependency on China. Details on where the raw materials will be sourced from, where will they be processed, the funding for the extraction and processing of said materials and a timeline for it are not given by the president of the European Commission.

Ukraine will continue to receive billions in free money. Ursula acknowledged a problem with the U.S. monopoly on anti-missile defense systems like the MIM-104 Patriot system and promised again to break this monopoly and create a cheaper European alternative, a promise that has been made several times in the past years but which has not materialised nor is it close to becoming a reality.

📝: Ursula VDL is not following the advice of Mario Draghi and is adding more red tape and bureaucrats to its ranks. The centralisation of the EU into a superstate proceeds as planned with Brussels assuming ever more responsibilities which once belonged to the individual EU members who are tasked with the repression of nationalist movements who are named alongside Russian disinformation as a core threat to "European unity and values".

The EU is no closer to the superstate it wants to become than it was in 2007 with the adoption of the Lisbon Treaty but unlike 19 years ago, it is torn apart by geopolitical instability, the consequences of unrestricted legal immigration which reinvigorated nationalist movements and natural disasters to which the EU Commission has no answers for.

🔗 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/ov/SPEECH_26_1868

🇮🇷⚔️🇺🇸🇮🇱 Political advisor to the Iranian Supreme Leader, Mohamed Baqer Zulqadr, stated that Iran will not reopen the Strait of Hormuz unless U.S. president, Donald Trump and Israeli PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, are removed from power.

🔗 https://t.me/Tasnimnews/444907

🇸🇦🇨🇳🇮🇷 Saudi Arabia privately asked China to pressure Iran into restraining the Houthis after their seizure of Yemen's Red Sea coast and Bab al-Mandeb.

Three Iranian sources say Beijing passed the message to Tehran — going beyond its public calls for restraint.

Iran's response: regional stability depends on ending the US-Israeli war against us first.

China issued no threats and didn't leverage its economic power over Tehran.

🔗 https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-presses-iran-help-rein-houthis-after-saudi-appeal-sources-say-2026-09-17/

🕊 🇦🇺 👨‍💻 Julian Assange on X: "I'm back."

📎 Julian Assange

🇺🇸🤝🇸🇦 Reuters: The US Department of ‌State has approved the potential sale of F-35 Lightning ​II Joint Strike ​Fighter aircraft to Saudi Arabia, ⁠it said on Thursday as ​the kingdom has been ​drawn deeper into the Middle East war.

The estimated $24.3 billion sale would ​include 48 of the ​military aircraft and 49 Pratt & Whitney ‌engines ⁠along with communications equipment, spare parts and other support items, the department ​said.

🔗 bonzerbarry

🐈 🇧🇴 ⛰️ First new cat species discovered in over 100 years in Bolivia’s Yungas forest ecoregion.

So far, all scientists can say that L. tilcayo lives in Bolivia’s Yungas forest ecoregion, which lies on the eastern slope of the Andes Mountains. But as to what these cats eat or get eaten by, how they reproduce, and many other facets of their day-to-day lives, much mystery remains. “So many basic things are not known,” says Nogales-Ascarrunz, who is co-lead author of the new study.

Researchers propose the cat should be known as Leopardus tilcayo, in honor of the word local people know it by. "We asked the local people, ‘Why do you call it tilcayo?’” says Nogales-Ascarrunz, who is herself from Bolivia. “And they said, ‘I don’t know! My grandpa called it tilcayo, so I call it tilcayo.” (The name does not appear to mean anything particular in Spanish or the Quechua language spoken in Bolivia.)

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/meet-the-first-new-cat-species-discovered-in-100-years

📎 National Geographic