🇨🇭🗳 Swiss voters reject tighter neutrality rules that would have curbed NATO cooperation

All cantons and about 70% of voters rejected the proposal for a strictly defined version of neutrality to be written into the Swiss constitution, final results from the Federal Statistical ​Office showed.

While Swiss neutrality has been internationally recognised since the end of the Napoleonic wars in ​1815, how the government implements it is not spelled out.

The right-wing Swiss People's Party (SVP) has ⁠said that Switzerland's traditional position has been eroded after Bern imposed sanctions on Russia following its invasion of ​Ukraine.

The campaign had funded posters across the country urging people to vote "No war, yes to neutrality", featuring white peace ​doves, ahead of the vote.

Apart from the SVP, most parties and the Swiss government opposed the proposal, with Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis saying it would harm national security and prevent Switzerland from training with NATO.

The Green Party ​and the smaller Evangelical People's Party (EVP) expressed relief over Sunday's projections.

🔗 https://www.reuters.com/world/swiss-vote-tightening-neutrality-rules-ending-peacetime-cooperation-with-nato-2026-09-27/

🇾🇪⚔️🇾🇪 Latest Military Situation Map on the Taiz Front

🟡 Following the advances of Ansar Allah and the Yemeni army in the western part of the Kahbub mountains, the positions of the Yemeni forces in this sector and north of Bab al-Mandab have been consolidated.

✍️ Now most of the clashes continue in southern Taiz with the aim of cutting the Taiz-Aden road, from the left flank in the Al-Shamaytayn district of Taiz province and from the right flank on the border of the Al-Maqatira district of Lahij province and Al-Shamaytayn of Taiz.

✍️ It should be noted that AnsarAllah's positions on the right flank are closer to the Taiz-Aden road, but the geographical complexity of the region and the heights of Jabal Qala have so far prevented effective advances by the Yemeni army on this axis. During the past week, sporadic attacks were carried out from the northern heights toward this road, which were ultimately repelled by the Saudi coalition forces.

🔗 IWN

🇬🇧🇺🇸⚡️ — A local farmer may have helped foil the suspected bomb plot targeting RAF Fairford after discovering three suspicious white vans blocking a country road near the airbase used by the U.S. early Sunday, according to The Telegraph.

The woman said she spotted several masked men fleeing into nearby fields and trees, some heading toward the airbase. She immediately drove away, alerted police, and warned residents through a local WhatsApp group.

Five men were arrested less than 25 minutes later under the Explosives Act and subsequently on suspicion of preparing a terrorist act.

She also said that security around RAF Fairford had been significantly increased in the preceding days, with heavy machinery blocking entrances and armed American personnel operating checkpoints.

🇷🇸 Serbian president, Aleksandar Vučić, resigned.

He is expected to run for prime-minister in the October snap elections he called earlier this year.

@CIG_telegram

⛽️ 🇬🇧 🚗 The UK is now preparing to ration diesel and petrol and could impose a nationwide 50mph speed limit, with government contingency plans now on the table as pump prices hit a record, per the Express.

It comes as UK diesel broke its 2022 record yesterday at 199.11p a litre (£1.99).

The plans include a maximum purchase scheme limiting how much fuel drivers can buy per visit and restricting selling hours, priority filling stations for emergency services, directed bulk deliveries to utilities and public transport, prioritised diesel for food and health supply chains, and government allocation of crude and imported products.

The UK had 42 days of diesel left as of July, the lowest of any developed nation apart from Australia.

📎 Hormuz Letter

🇳🇱🇸🇱 He was one of the world’s most wanted men. So he bought a west African country

Jos Leijdekkers is one of Europe’s most wanted criminals. His greatest caper yet looks to be the takeover of a country. In half a decade Leijdekkers has turned Sierra Leone, a place previously best known for blood diamonds, into a hub for billions of dollars’ worth of Colombian cocaine, disguised as rice or plantain chips, which pass through each year en route to Europe.

By funnelling a share of the profits to Sierra Leone’s political elite and funding large parts of the state itself, Leijdekkers has amassed perks that would be the envy of a Bond villain. He is believed to have a Sierra Leonean diplomatic passport. The police and military establishment bow to him, squadrons of container ships and submarines ply the shores at his command, and he is escorted in a motorcade by the presidential guard beneath a cloud of drones.

For decades Africa played a minor role in the world of cocaine trafficking. In the 1980s, when the mass export of Latin American cocaine began, the smugglers sent their product straight to Europe aboard cargo ships. By the 1990s Rotterdam, the continent’s biggest container port, had emerged as the preferred destination. In 2000 a quarter of the 200 tonnes of cocaine reaching Europe was believed to enter through its docks. Within two decades nearly 50 tonnes were being seized each year at the port by customs officials, who estimated that they found less than a fifth of the cocaine dispatched to their quays.

Fighting the narco-traffickers was a game of cat and mouse. In the 2000s Dutch officials rolled out new mobile scanning units that could manoeuvre around a port and examine any container with ease. In response, the cartels built their own version in the Colombian Amazon, which they used to determine whether cocaine could go undetected within a consignment of cocoa beans (it could not) or be successfully smuggled inside sections of steel machinery (it could). In the late 2010s, when it had become clear that the criminal organisations also had some Rotterdam customs officials in their pockets, the port authorities took countermeasures: customs-workers were no longer told in advance which containers they would handle on any given day.

The tenfold increase in seizures between 2017 and 2021 seemed to be evidence that the port’s methods were effective. Yet when I arrived in Rotterdam this May, I found that seizures had slumped again, from 70 tonnes in 2021 to 12 in 2025. Plenty of cocaine is still being manufactured: production volumes in Colombia are believed to be at an all-time high. And plenty is reaching Europe: the current street price is €15,000 ($17,400) per kilo, the lowest figure ever recorded. Sewage samples confirm that up to 60,000 lines of cocaine are snorted every day in Rotterdam alone.

So how are drugs reaching Europe? One answer is the African connection, the importance of which has soared in recent years. In the mid-2000s, Latin American gangs looking to diversify their trafficking routes began to send some of their goods by fishing boat across the Atlantic to west Africa. The cargo would be hustled northwards by pickup through the Sahel or by trawler to the Mediterranean. At first the main entry point was the minuscule nation of Guinea-Bissau. By 2006 so much cocaine was passing through that fishermen took to whitewashing their houses with it.

Fast forward two decades and it is estimated that one-third of the cocaine reaching Europe now arrives via west Africa. Guinea-Bissau has been superseded by Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal and Cape Verde, but the logistics remain the same. Cocaine is kept in warehouses, often for months at a time, before being dispatched in small boats to the Mediterranean. Sometimes the destination is a mid-size port like Marseille or Gioia Tauro in Calabria. Other times, it is just a remote beach. “The problem used to be Rotterdam, Antwerp and Hamburg,” a customs analyst in Rotterdam told me. “Now it’s the entire southern coast of Europe!”

🔗 https://unwall.app/www.economist.com/interactive/1843/2026/09/18/cocaine-trafficking-sierra-leone?etear=nl_weekly_1