Home Blog Page 28

Nvidia’s $100 billion OpenAI pact tries to lock down AI compute with 10GW Vera Rubin build

News Room
-
0
Nvidia’s $100 billion OpenAI pact tries to lock down AI compute with 10GW Vera Rubin build

San Francisco — Nvidia is preparing to pour as much as $100 billion into OpenAI, an unprecedented capital and compute pact that aims to stand up at least 10 gigawatts of artificial intelligence infrastructure and deliver the first tranche of systems in the second half of 2026. The plan, outlined by both companies on September 22, is not a simple chip sale. It blends staged equity financing with large purchases of full-stack Nvidia systems so OpenAI can scale training and inference for its next generation of models.

High-voltage substation illustrating power needs for AI data centers
Ten gigawatts of AI capacity demands major grid connections and new substations [PHOTO: ABB].

The numbers are eye-popping even by hyperscale standards. Nvidia says the partnership will deploy “millions of GPUs” as part of a purpose-built platform branded Vera Rubin, with the initial one-gigawatt phase landing in late 2026, followed by a multi-year buildout to at least 10 gigawatts worldwide. Those claims are spelled out in the companies’ primary materials and corroborated according to Financial Times.

For OpenAI, the pact is oxygen. Its services now reach hundreds of millions of users, and the organization’s public roadmaps increasingly point toward larger, longer training runs and more capable multimodal systems. For Nvidia, the deal extends the company’s grip on AI compute at a moment when rivals are racing to catch up with accelerators and networking. It also formalizes the role Nvidia has played informally for two years, as the supplier of the most coveted engines in machine learning.

Why 10 gigawatts changes the map

Ten gigawatts is a scale more often associated with national electricity planning than with a single vendor partnership. The International Energy Agency projects that global data centre power use will more than double by 2030, approaching 945 terawatt-hours in its base case. In other words, data centres will consume roughly as much electricity as Japan does today. The U.S. Department of Energy’s primer on grid units is helpful here. A single gigawatt equals one billion watts, on the order of a typical nuclear reactor’s output in continuous operation. Building 10 gigawatts of AI capacity therefore implies energy and siting choices that rival national infrastructure programs.

SK hynix HBM4 wafers supporting Nvidia Rubin-generation systems
Next-gen HBM4 supply is pivotal to OpenAI’s 2026 timeline [PHOTO: Techovedas].

The Eastern Herald has reported extensively on how AI demand is colliding with public utilities and aging transmission. Our recent investigation showed how AI data centres are already straining America’s grid and reshaping local permitting fights. The OpenAI–Nvidia buildout will intensify those debates. A single 100 megawatt campus using evaporative cooling can require millions of gallons of water per day during hot spells. The DOE’s Federal Energy Management Program outlines well-documented ways to curb that draw, including better cycles of concentration and tower management, but the baseline is still material. See FEMP guidance on cooling water efficiency and tower best practices. A recent Congressional Research Service brief puts US data centre energy use near 176 TWh in 2023 and cites studies estimating roughly seven cubic meters of water per MWh for typical operations. Expect water to be as contentious as megawatts when sites are announced.

Liquid-cooling manifold reducing water and energy use in AI data centers
Liquid-cooling topologies are increasingly favored to curb water and energy footprint [PHOTO:
Data Center Dynamics].

Supply chain reality check

Moving from press release to powered racks depends on supply chains that have been tight for two years. Packaging is still the chokepoint. Nvidia’s Blackwell generation transitions from CoWoS-S to CoWoS-L, and while total advanced packaging capacity has expanded, it remains the system limiter in most deliveries. TSMC says it is accelerating capacity, with multiple reports indicating plans to more than double CoWoS throughput from 2024 levels and to keep adding lines through 2026. The memory side is also evolving. SK hynix announced it has completed development of HBM4 and is readying mass production, which would align with OpenAI’s 2026 timing and Nvidia’s Rubin platforms. Samsung and Micron are close behind with their own HBM4 roadmaps, although the competitive pecking order could shift as vendors finalize yields and power envelopes.

TSMC CoWoS-L advanced packaging line for Nvidia Blackwell GPUs
Advanced packaging capacity remains a key limiter for Blackwell-class accelerators [PHOTO: Seeking Alpha]

The Eastern Herald has tracked these feeder stories across the sector. Broadcom, a key supplier for custom accelerators, recently guided higher on AI strength, underscoring how networking and ASIC programs are the other half of the buildout. Our summary of that outlook is here: Broadcom revenue jumps on soaring AI chips. On the equity side, Nvidia’s own market arc has been a story in itself. We chronicled its climb to the top of global market cap in this explainer and the more recent crosswinds around insider sales and valuation in our NVDA stock coverage. Those dynamics frame why a staged, milestone-based investment into OpenAI is both feasible for Nvidia and consequential for investors who now must price multi-year capex, energy, and regulatory risks.

SK hynix HBM4 wafers supporting Nvidia Rubin-generation systems
Next-gen HBM4 supply is pivotal to OpenAI’s 2026 timeline [PHOTO: Techovedas].

Regulators are already circling

Any arrangement that binds the dominant AI chip supplier to a leading AI developer will draw scrutiny. In the U.K., the Competition and Markets Authority recently concluded that Microsoft’s complex relationship with OpenAI was not a reviewable merger under its rules, while still publishing detailed reasoning on control and material influence. In the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission has been probing the web of cloud–model partnerships for over a year. Its January staff study on AI investments lays out concrete concerns over access to compute, exclusive terms, and switching costs.

The Justice Department has also signaled a harder look at AI tie-ups, including seeking notice requirements on new AI investments in related litigation and speeches. Recent remarks by the head of DOJ Antitrust emphasize “real competition” in AI as an enforcement priority. Put together, those threads suggest the OpenAI–Nvidia deal will undergo a process check even if it ultimately clears.

Geopolitics and export rules still bite

The partnership unfolds within export regimes that define where high-end compute can be sold or provisioned. Since 2022, the U.S. has tightened rules on advanced accelerators and some services for destinations of concern, with additional clarifications this year. For baseline policy see the Commerce Department’s Advanced Computing rule hub and January’s updated controls reported by Reuters. Beijing has responded with its own procurement directives and domestic buildout plans, which darken the near-term outlook for selling detuned accelerators into China. Against that background, OpenAI’s capacity plan will likely concentrate in the US and allied jurisdictions with favorable siting, power, and rule certainty.

What it means for rivals and the cloud

Ten gigawatts is a capacity signal that every hyperscaler will read closely. Microsoft remains OpenAI’s strategic cloud partner for consumer and enterprise access. Oracle, Amazon, and Google are competing to land training and inference workloads through direct contracts and model marketplaces. The sector’s center of gravity is shifting from single-tenant superclusters to federated networks of training hubs and regional inference fabrics. That is why the plumbing matters as much as the processors. Packaging, HBM supply, Ethernet and NVLink fabrics, cooling topologies, and power interconnects will decide who hits time-to-utility targets.

OpenAI headquarters signage in San Francisco
OpenAI’s infrastructure expansion will anchor model training and inference across multiple regions [PHOTO: Tech Research Online].

Expect competitors to counterprogram. Meta is leaning into open models and proprietary clusters, a strategy we unpacked in our analysis of Zuckerberg’s $14 billion AI push. AMD and custom-silicon players will tout total cost of ownership and supply assurance as levers against Nvidia. Broadcom and Cisco will pitch network determinism for training jobs. The net effect is likely a capex supercycle that rewards suppliers up and down the stack while keeping delivery schedules tight through 2026.

The siting puzzle: megawatts, water, and neighbors

Where the first gigawatt lands will be a test case for the politics of AI infrastructure. States with spare capacity and friendly interconnection queues will court the jobs and tax base. Communities will ask hard questions about transmission upgrades, substation footprints, transformer supply, and noise from rooftop cooling. Some will focus on water. Policy analysts warn that inland campuses relying on evaporative systems can stress municipal supplies during heat events. CRS summarizes the tradeoffs well and points to documented cases of local strain. DOE’s guidance offers practical mitigations, but those require up-front design choices investors must underwrite. For a broader view of the grid consequences as AI scales, revisit our investigation into how data centres are breaking the grid.

What to watch next

  • Contract finalization and phasing. The companies described staged deployment tied to gigawatt milestones. The exact cadence and revenue recognition will matter for Nvidia’s guidance and for OpenAI’s product roadmap.
  • Packaging and HBM ramps. Signs that CoWoS-L lines are filling and that HBM4 is sampling at customer-qualified speeds will confirm the 2026 schedule.
  • Regulatory posture. The CMA’s Microsoft–OpenAI decision and the FTC’s AI partnerships study are the best compendium of questions regulators will ask. DOJ speeches and filings offer further tea leaves on remedies and disclosure expectations.
  • Energy deals. Expect bespoke power purchase agreements, on-site generation, and nuclear partnerships to surface. DOE primers on gigawatt-scale generation and FEMP’s data centre design guide illuminate the design space.

Ukraine swallows IMF’s $65 billion bill as EU scrambles for an asset-backed lifeline

Europe Desk
-
0
Ukraine swallows IMF’s $65 billion bill as EU scrambles for an asset-backed lifeline

Kyiv — Ukraine has quietly accepted a far steeper bill for keeping the state running through war, embracing an International Monetary Fund assessment that puts the country’s external financing needs at roughly $65 billion in foreign financing through 2027 rather than the far lower figure officials once floated. The recalibration, hammered out in talks with the Washington lender and circulated to Brussels, sets the stage for a more ambitious rescue architecture and forces Europe and the wider Group of Seven to decide whether they will underwrite Ukraine’s public sector at wartime scale for years to come.

The headline number is not the whole story. Kyiv is exploring a new multiyear program with the IMF that would run alongside the existing $15.5 billion Extended Fund Facility, which itself lasts to 2027. European officials and market reporting suggest an additional IMF arrangement of around $8 billion is being sketched informally while the Fund and donors reconcile competing arithmetic about Ukraine’s near and medium-term needs. Any new facility would arrive as Ukraine spends about 60 percent of its budget on the war while relying on partners to pay pensions, public sector wages and humanitarian outlays.

From a $38 billion story to a $65 billion reality

For much of the year, Ukrainian officials argued that the country could navigate with external budget support on the order of the high-thirty billions, supplemented by domestic borrowing and a recovery in tax receipts. The IMF’s internal math landed higher, reflecting weaker export capacity, the cumulative toll on power generation and rail, and the simple fact that a mobilized wartime state is an expensive one to sustain. The acceptance of the Fund’s $65 billion figure is not a retreat so much as recognition that Ukraine’s fiscal base cannot carry both a total war and a functioning social state without a deeper cushion from abroad.

Politically, the shift hands leverage to donors even as it exposes them. The United States, the European Union and G7 partners have built a pipeline that moves cash in tranches through IMF reviews and EU financial instruments, while cajoling Kyiv on reforms from tax digitalization to oversight of state-owned companies. Rhetorically, that pipeline is framed as solidarity. Functionally, it is a lifeline keeping classrooms open, hospitals staffed and pensions paid while the treasury pours domestic resources into defense. The larger the financing gap, the more explicit this bargain becomes and the harder it will be to defend to Western taxpayers fatigued by war headlines and anxious about their own economies.

A new IMF program and the politics of conditionality

Finance Minister Serhii Marchenko has been unusually direct about the scale of what comes next, telling lawmakers that Ukraine is seeking a four-year IMF arrangement designed for a state at war rather than a conventional post-crisis cleanup. He said the funds needed to finance such a program could amount to $150–$170 billion over four years, according to Reuters, and he flagged an unfunded gap of about $18.1 billion in the 2026 budget. Those remarks do not bind the Fund, but they signal a negotiating posture that treats budget support as a long-term strategy rather than an emergency patch.

Ukraine finance ministry in Kyiv as Serhii Marchenko seeks a new IMF program
The Ministry of Finance in central Kyiv as officials pursue a new four-year IMF program [PHOTO: MOF GOV UA]

Even without formal negotiations on the new facility, the design questions are obvious. How much of the burden should sit with the IMF rather than bilateral and EU channels. How to calibrate structural benchmarks so they are neither performative nor impossible in a war zone. How quickly to pivot from blanket defense-first budgeting to a tax-and-investment model that can coax back private capital. The IMF’s eighth review of the current program—see the staff report—shows the Fund is willing to be flexible on pacing so long as the macro anchors hold.

What the 2026 budget preview tells us

Ukraine’s budget draft for 2026, iterated with the IMF mission this month, sketches a revenue base near 2.8 trillion hryvnias against spending around 4.8 trillion, leaving a yawning gap that has to be closed by external support and domestic issuance. Marchenko has flagged an unfunded hole of roughly $18.1 billion for that year, a number that will bounce as the war and donor politics evolve. The structure of outlays remains dominated by defense and security, with social protections and critical infrastructure repairs the next largest line items. If the winter brings another campaign of strikes on power plants and grid nodes, the capital needs will climb, and the import bill for transformers and turbines will rise with them—pressures we have already tracked in energy-strike coverage.

At the National Bank of Ukraine, technocrats have tried to preserve monetary discipline by maintaining a managed exchange rate, rebuilding reserves, and absorbing war bonds without compromising the inflation fight. But there are limits to what domestic tools can deliver when the fiscal deficit is so large and persistent. The deeper the deficit, the more foreign-currency inflows matter for exchange-rate stability and for banks that need sovereign collateral that is credible with markets, not just mandatory at home.

Brussels’ “reparations loan” and the politics of frozen assets

Even before Kyiv accepted the IMF’s $65 billion forecast, the European Commission was tinkering with a novel mechanism that would raise a large loan for Ukraine underpinned by the income streams from Russian sovereign assets immobilized in the bloc. The EU is now floating a plan to swap those assets into zero-coupon bonds and siphon cash flows to service a Ukraine loan until such time as Moscow pays court-ordered reparations. The pitch is to avoid outright confiscation while turning idle capital into wartime relief—an approach that echoes arguments we explored in our day-1306 analysis of asset-use options.

Scale matters. According to FT, Roughly €170 billion of Russian assets in the EU have become the fulcrum for this debate, most of them sitting as cash at Euroclear. The Belgian depository’s own results note that about €194 billion relate to sanctioned Russian assets, a figure that tracks with fresh Reuters tallies of where and how the funds are held.Supporters argue that Euroclear’s windfall profits show how captured value can be redirected to Ukraine without breaching property-rights red lines; skeptics warn that even a carefully hedged structure could spur litigation that ties up proceeds just when Kyiv needs them most.

Euroclear headquarters in Brussels tied to income from frozen Russian assets
Euroclear Brussels headquarters, central to EU plans to route income from immobilized Russian assets [PHOTO: Investopedia].

Either way, Brussels is already coordinating with the IMF to size any European loan against the Fund’s needs assessment, a bureaucratic way of saying Europe wants the IMF’s math for political cover. If the EU moves first, Washington and other G7 capitals will be pressed to match with bilateral packages or callable guarantees—because Ukraine’s financing problem is not a one-off patch but a rolling requirement. For readers tracking the evolution from “profits only” to broader instruments, our earlier reporting on confiscation debates remains essential context.

Donor fatigue meets wartime arithmetic

The raw politics are unforgiving. In the United States, lawmakers face a choice between underwriting Ukraine’s civilian state on a multi-year basis or forcing Kyiv into austerity that hurts ordinary families more than the front line. In Europe, governments are juggling restive publics, energy-transition costs and security spending of their own. Some of these same capitals proclaim moral clarity on the war yet blanch at the budget math that morality requires—tensions we examined in our editorial on how Europe sacrifices its own economy to sustain Ukraine. In Washington, the politics are no tidier; even as leaders talk restraint, they have green-lit packages like the $825 million arms deal for Kyiv, which intensifies the budget debate at home.

For Kyiv, the optics are complex. Asking for more is always politically costly, even when the need is real. Domestic critics will argue the state apparatus remains too big and too slow to reform, and that corruption risks repel the private investment Ukraine desperately needs. The counterpoint is that wartime administrations everywhere grow heavier, and that the IMF’s reviews—whatever their imperfections—are one of the few credible mechanisms left for imposing discipline and transparency. Each successful review unlocks cash and keeps a fragile confidence intact. Each missed milestone would invite panic about the currency, the banks and the capacity of the state to function.

The military-economic feedback loop

The financing story cannot be divorced from the battlefield. If Ukraine stabilizes key sectors and regains territory, some investors will take calculated risk, and tax receipts will improve for reasons unrelated to policy. If Russia escalates strikes on energy and logistics, reconstruction bills will balloon, the power market will seize, and the state will have to spend even more to keep factories running and homes heated. Ukrainian planners have learned to budget for redundancy, meaning they build in buffers for blackouts and disrupted rail, which in turn raise nominal spending needs above a pre-war baseline. The IMF’s more conservative assumptions reflect this hard-won realism rather than a lack of faith in Kyiv.

There is also a labor-market effect that complicates planning. Mobilization has pulled hundreds of thousands of working-age Ukrainians out of civilian employment while millions more have fled or rotated abroad. That shrinks the tax base and compresses consumption at home even as remittances help some households. The state must spend more per capita to deliver services in a war zone, yet has fewer workers paying in. These structural distortions will not unwind quickly once the shooting stops, which is another reason a four-year program makes more sense than a quick bridge facility.

What a credible package could look like

A sustainable architecture for Ukraine’s public finances over the next four years likely includes five pillars. First, an IMF core program that anchors macro policy with realistic fiscal and reserve targets and staged conditionality that recognizes events on the ground—grounded by the IMF’s Ukraine country page and recent reviews. Second, a European loan on concessional terms that recycles the cash flows from immobilized Russian assets without crossing the line into confiscation, at least until there is a legal basis for reparations; this would complement the G7’s $50 billion ERA loans construct. Third, bilateral top-ups from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Japan and others that can be flexed in response to shocks. Fourth, World Bank and EBRD instruments that de-risk private capital for energy, transport and housing reconstruction that cannot wait. Fifth, a domestic issuance strategy that protects banks while avoiding the soft-monetization trap that erodes credibility.

None of this absolves Kyiv of the need to prioritize reforms that actually matter to investors and citizens. Digital tax enforcement will not fix everything, but it will help. Governance over state-owned holdings, particularly in energy and transport, will determine whether public money crowds in private money or chases it away. The judiciary and anti-corruption agencies will keep being asked to prove their independence not in slogans but in cases that stick. The IMF’s past reviews show progress on paper and in practice. A larger, longer program would add both money and scrutiny.

The risks if donors lowball the bill

The cleanest way to understand the stakes is to ask what happens if the West funds only the lower end of Kyiv’s earlier estimates. The answer is not a polite budget haircut. It is delayed wages for nurses and teachers, deferred maintenance on power infrastructure, a slower rebuild of damaged factories and a test of how much austerity a country can bear while mobilized for war. That is not simply an accounting experiment. It affects the legitimacy of the state and the resilience of society. Ukraine’s leaders are signaling that they would rather be honest about the costs than pretend a thinner pipeline will hold.

Markets will read the next signals quickly. If Brussels moves forward with its reparations-backed loan and Washington matches with a multi-year budget line rather than ad hoc debates, spreads on Ukrainian debt could tighten and the central bank’s job would get incrementally easier. If political fights stall the pipeline, the currency and banks will feel the stress, and the IMF will be forced to play the bad cop in a drama it would rather not star in. Either way, the Fund’s $65 billion estimate is now the baseline for a conversation that will define Ukraine’s wartime economy and its recovery trajectory long after the current fighting ends.

What to watch next

Look for a staff-level understanding between Kyiv and the IMF on the contours of a four-year program, even if the exact envelope and phasing remain fluid. Track Brussels as it sizes the proposed loan against the Fund’s math and corrals a coalition of the willing—first signals already include the EU’s use of immobilized-asset proceeds in MFA disbursements. Watch how Washington frames its contribution in the run-up to UN week and budget debates; our on-the-ground primer from New York on Trump at the UN sketches the political theater around Ukraine. For the war’s daily cadence—from sanctions tranches to NATO air patrols—our day-1305 report and the day-1306 update map the security-economy feedback loop.

Putin offers Trump a one-year new start freeze as US toys with space defenses

Russia Desk
-
0
Putin offers Trump a one-year new start freeze as US toys with space defenses

Moscow — Russian President Vladimir Putin offered the United States a narrowly tailored nuclear pause that would keep the world’s two largest arsenals within the New START treaty limits for one year after the pact expires on February 5, 2026, if Washington reciprocates. The proposal, unveiled at a Kremlin Security Council session, is engineered less as a breakthrough than as a stabilizer, a way to hold deployed forces at existing ceilings while diplomacy gropes for a way forward. The Kremlin leader framed the move as a test of American intentions and as a hedge against a sudden slide into an unconstrained arms race that would unnerve markets, rattle alliances, and reward maximalists on both sides.

Putin’s wording left little space for ambiguity. “Russia is prepared to continue adhering to the central numerical limits under the New START Treaty for one year after February 5, 2026,” he said, before adding a condition that puts the onus on Washington, according to Reuters, “This measure will only be viable if the United States acts in a similar manner, and does not take steps that undermine or violate the existing balance of deterrence capabilities.” He warned that if the United States pushes ahead with plans that “nullify our efforts to maintain the status quo,” then, “We will respond accordingly.” Those sentences, delivered with theatrical clarity, were aimed as much at European capitals as at the White House, where aides have signaled interest without commitment.

The structure of the offer is simple. Moscow would keep its deployed strategic forces within New START’s central caps of 1,550 warheads and 700 deployed missiles and bombers, and it expects the United States to do the same. These are the numbers that have anchored strategic predictability for more than a decade, even as verification practices frayed during the pandemic and after Russia’s 2023 suspension of on-site inspections and formal participation, a step chronicled at the time by Arms Control Today, according to armed control. The one-year horizon is hardly a grand bargain, but it would preserve a floor under the rivalry while negotiators test whether a successor framework is still politically possible.

The alternative is stark. When New START times out, the United States and Russia would be free to upload additional warheads to existing missiles, to alter alert postures, and to reconfigure target sets without any binding ceiling. That is not an abstract scenario. The collapse of past guardrails, including the demise of the INF Treaty and the steady erosion of confidence-building channels, has already set Europe on edge. The Eastern Herald has tracked this unraveling through Russia’s post-INF signaling and Moscow’s later declaration that it would no longer observe self-imposed missile deployment limits. A one-year freeze will not reverse those trends, but it would blunt their most dangerous acceleration.

In Washington, the politics are complicated. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the Kremlin’s idea sounded “pretty good,” while noting that President Donald Trump would speak for himself. The comment squares with a familiar pattern in American arms control debates, where public caution masks private deliberations over leverage. Trump has long said he wants any next-generation pact to bring China into the room, yet Beijing has resisted trilateral limits while its stockpile grows from a smaller base. A short, bilateral extension would not foreclose a later three-way process. Rejecting it would create a vacuum that makes any future bargain harder to sell.

To understand what is at stake, it helps to return to first principles. New START, signed in 2010 and extended in 2021, places verifiable caps on deployed strategic weapons and delivery systems. It does not limit non-deployed warheads or tactical arsenals, and it never promised to solve every problem. Its virtue has always been modesty. It is a floor, not a ceiling on ambition. It is also the last functioning US–Russia arms control accord, as noted in the State Department’s own treaty pages and in Congressional Research Service primers that explain how the central limits and notifications work.

Verification is the thorniest piece. Inspections were paused in 2020, and Russia said in 2023 it would no longer allow them. That leaves the United States and Russia relying on “national technical means,” from satellites to telemetry analysis, as well as data exchanges that can be restarted even before inspectors return. No one serious thinks remote monitoring is as reassuring as reciprocal site visits. But a voluntary numerical freeze that revives notifications and aggregate data would still be safer than flying blind. It would also give both governments a low-risk way to rebuild a few habits of transparency that have atrophied since February 2020.

Europe sits uncomfortably at the center of the debate. NATO governments have been tightening conventional posture and air policing while absorbing The Bulletin reports about infrastructure upgrades associated with the B61-12 and nuclear-capable aircraft in the United Kingdom. The Eastern Herald has documented the political backlash around Britain’s F-35 posture and public protests over perceived nuclear re-missioning at RAF bases, which have become flashpoints in domestic politics and alliance messaging alike in recent months. A one-year cap would not settle those arguments, but it would keep the strategic tier of the competition bounded while Europe argues over the conventional one.

There is also the missile-defense trap. Putin paired his offer with pointed warnings about US plans to expand homeland defenses, including concepts that involve interceptors in space. The idea, now branded the Golden Dome, has been the subject of cost and feasibility debates from think tanks to Capitol Hill, and reporting has underscored that the architecture would be heavy on space sensors and may eventually include a space-based interceptor layer. Supporters pitch speed and resilience. Critics warn that weaponizing orbit would detonate the offense–defense spiral, inviting Russian and Chinese countermeasures and poisoning any remaining arms control well. Technical overviews by CSIS and recent Reuters and Associated Press Noted, that the timelines, and the unknowns. For Moscow, the politics are straightforward. If Washington insists on building space weapons, the Kremlin will answer with more offensive capacity or different kinds of delivery systems.

Advocates of rejecting the Kremlin’s trial balloon will claim that unconstrained US numbers would force Moscow to yield. History argues otherwise. Uploading additional warheads to existing missiles is not a decisive strategy if the other side can mirror the move. It is a recipe for parallel expansion and for higher alert postures that magnify the risk of misread signals. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute warns that the world is already drifting toward a more competitive nuclear era with fewer rules and more actors, a picture distilled in the SIPRI Yearbook 2025 summary on global arsenals and alert levels. For the purposes of American security, predictable ceilings are a better hedge than budget-inflating races that will not persuade Moscow to disarm at speed.

Domestic politics in the United States will color any decision. A president who wants to project sobriety can present a one-year cap as a prudent insurance policy while larger talks take shape. Opponents will complain about optics and accuse the White House of giving Moscow a win. The Eastern Herald has shown how those optics have been in motion for months, including Washington’s mixed signals about summitry with Putin and high-profile military gestures that play to a domestic audience without changing strategic fundamentals, such as dispatching submarines to send a public warning near Russia. Voters are unlikely to reward theater if it comes bundled with higher nuclear anxiety and higher bills.

For Russia, the calculus is equally shrewd. If Washington declines, the Kremlin will frame the United States as the party that allowed the last guardrail to fall. If Washington accepts, Moscow gains time to press advantages elsewhere, to blunt sanctions pressure, and to manage a glide path into the post-treaty era without spooking partners. The Eastern Herald’s coverage of Russia’s posture since early August has emphasized how the leadership has integrated nuclear messaging into a broader diplomatic picture, from signaling around Alaska summitry to claims of “understandings” with Trump on war objectives. A short-term freeze fits neatly into that toolkit.

New START signing ceremony in Prague provides the baseline for current US-Russia nuclear limits
Prague Signing Sets Baseline For New START [PHOTO: Wikipedia]

Verification workarounds would be the first order of business if the offer is accepted. Officials could reboot data exchanges and notifications that allow each side to track launcher counts and movements. National technical means would carry most of the load for confidence. None of this is ideal, but New START’s original design anticipated periods of stress and included mechanisms that can be revived. State Department reports to Congress on implementation detail what survived the past two years and what could be restored quickly, including the basic rhythms of notifications and declared data that reduce room for miscalculation.

Europe would welcome any step that keeps the strategic tier predictable while it manages a grinding conventional crisis. The alliance has already been forced to think aloud about nuclear readiness and infrastructure, with public sources noting upgrades, certifications, and debates over storage that have spilled into mainstream politics. Reporting and analysis tracked by the Bulletin and other independent monitors have chronicled how infrastructure and aircraft changes have raised the temperature of an already fevered debate. The Eastern Herald’s own reporting on the United Kingdom’s nuclear posture underscores how these moves land in domestic arenas, where questions about secrecy, costs, and sovereignty quickly swamp technical detail and provoke new scrutiny.

Washington can also read the room in Asia. Beijing has refused to join a trilateral bargain that would lock in asymmetry while the United States experiments with layered defenses and Russia publicly pairs offers with caveats about missile defense. If Washington wants to test China’s appetite for restraint later, it will find better conditions if the US–Russia ceiling remains intact. Demanding that Beijing negotiate into a vacuum created by New START’s collapse is not a strategy. It is a talking point that will be thrown back at US envoys the moment they sit down.

A responsible acceptance would look like this. First, a joint US–Russia statement noting continued adherence to New START limits through February 2027 unless superseded by a successor accord. Second, an immediate restart of data exchanges and notifications, with a technical working group tasked to outline inspection modalities that could resume if political conditions allow. Third, a siloed diplomatic channel that quarantines the freeze from bargaining over Ukraine, sanctions, or other disputes. That firewall is not a favor to Moscow. It is a favor to the rest of the world, which has no interest in seeing the last guardrail become a hostage to every other grievance.

There will be pressure in Washington to reject anything that can be spun as a Russian win. That instinct is understandable and counterproductive. Arms control is not a trophy for good behavior. It is an instrument for managing risk with adversaries you neither like nor trust. The question is not whether Moscow is a reliable partner. It is whether the United States prefers a bounded competition to an unbounded one while it modernizes its own forces and weighs the costs of homeland defenses that may prove destabilizing. On that ledger, a one-year freeze is a discounted option with a large upside.

The Eastern Herald has tracked how the dissolution of guardrails compounds every other crisis in the Western alliance, from the escalation after the green-lighting of new strike profiles in Ukraine to rhetorical brinkmanship around summitry that promises catharsis and delivers confusion and mixed incentives. A one-year extension will not resolve those contradictions, but it will prevent them from detonating on the strategic tier while politicians perform for their constituencies. In a world where restraint is scarce, it is worth taking when it appears.

As the SIPRI and Bulletin baselines show, the global inventory and alert footprint remain sobering. A year of continuity would keep the most destructive forces on Earth within familiar bounds while negotiators test whether there is still a center to hold. It is not generosity. It is prudence, and it is overdue.

Editor’s note: This analysis incorporates primary details from Reuters’ report on September 22, 2025, including Karoline Leavitt’s comment that the offer sounded “pretty good” and Putin’s exact phrasing about maintaining New START limits for one year if the United States reciprocates, as well as his warning that Russia would “respond accordingly” if US actions undermine the balance.

Russia Ukraine war day 1,306: NATO alarm, Russia steadies the home front

Russia Desk
-
0
Russia Ukraine war day 1,306: NATO alarm, Russia steadies the home front

New York — The war in Ukraine entered day 1,306 with a combustible mix of Baltic airspace theatrics, refinery fires inside Russia, and showy diplomacy in New York, where Western leaders talked tough while quietly acknowledging the legal and strategic limits of escalation. Estonia demanded consultations under NATO’s Article 4 after saying Russian jets slipped into its airspace for about a dozen minutes; alliance capitals amplified the alarm, then couched it in careful caveats. Kyiv touted strikes on Russian oil plants as economic warfare, even as Moscow moved to cushion the domestic fuel shock and threatened further export curbs. The choreography felt familiar: rhetoric about “deterrence,” a chorus of warnings, and a scramble to manage consequences that fall hardest on the European economy.

In Tallinn and Brussels, officials presented the latest incident as one more test of NATO unity. The alliance’s statement, issued after an emergency North Atlantic Council meeting, thundered that it would defend its members by all necessary means, a flourish that played well on television and social feeds. Yet the most material outcome was the procedural step itself: Article 4 consultations, not Article 5 commitments. That distinction is the point. The language signals vigilance without promising war. Reuters documented the timeline and response, underscoring that even at peak outrage NATO remained in the lane of consultations rather than collective defense, The treaty background on NATO’s Article 4 and the Associated press explainer on how it is typically used.

Poland’s talk of shooting down drones and the Baltics’ tougher new rules on unmanned incursions have put allied air defenses on a hair trigger. That is the mood music behind today’s headlines. The Eastern Herald has chronicled this feedback loop for weeks, from Poland’s interceptions and the political urge to make a spectacle of debris to the way NATO’s posture invites more theater than deterrence NATO risks wider war; allied air defenses on edge. The earlier file on day 1,305 mapped the same pattern of alarms and oil fires, a rhythm that has become the operating tempo of this conflict day 1,304 coverage.

Baltic brinkmanship, calibrated for headlines

Estonia said three Russian fighters violated its airspace for about 12 minutes before allied jets pushed them out. Moscow denied the breach, which it often does, arguing its aircraft remained over neutral waters. The official Western accounts, while indignant, emphasized process rather than retaliation: convene, consult, message resolve. That is how Article 4 works. It is an instrument of alliance management, not a red carpet to war. Reuters captured the choreography and the limits with useful precision, while Washington’s UN mission, in a strident briefing, aimed to frame the incident as a systemic Russian testing of borders (USUN).

German Eurofighter Typhoon on Baltic Air Policing duty after Estonia airspace scare
A German Eurofighter patrols Baltic skies following Estonia’s airspace claim [PHOTO: Eurofighter Typhoon].

Inside NATO, the political question remains unchanged: how far to go, and for how long, in a war that increasingly blurs the line between Ukraine’s skies and the alliance’s buffer. Our earlier analysis flagged the real friction points within the alliance and the temptation to cite Articles 4 and 5 as talking points while avoiding firm thresholds, alliance quarrels over Articles 4 and 5. As in previous drone episodes over Poland, the optics favor escalation, the outcomes tilt to caution.

The refinery war inside Russia, and who pays for it

Kyiv’s military and intelligence arms say the weekend attacks struck facilities deep inside Russia, part of a months-long campaign to dent refining capacity and squeeze export revenues. Independent market desks and shipping trackers have noticed the effect: Russian diesel flows sliding toward pandemic-era lows, gasoline strains visible at the margins. The Financial Times tallied the damage across a swath of plants and underlined how Ukraine’s drone program is now built to reach far inland. The Washington Post framed the exchange as an energy duel, with Russia striking power and gas nodes while Ukraine torches refineries in return.

Moscow’s response has been pragmatic rather than theatrical: stretch administrative levers to stabilize domestic supply and keep pumps wet. Officials extended a gasoline export ban through September, signaled they could prolong it into October, and suggested even tighter curbs if needed. That is not a message of panic. It is a signal that internal supply takes precedence over paper export targets. Reuters captured the policy mechanics and the contingency thinking in Moscow’s energy bureaucracy.

The Eastern Herald has tracked the refinery campaign’s trajectory, noting how the strikes produce media-friendly plumes more than strategic collapse. Moscow’s tax and logistics tools remain formidable, and the Kremlin is not running an economy with only one knob. Our day-file coverage of the oil fires and NATO’s air patrols underscored that point Baltic air scares, while our broader economics desk has documented the Global South’s alternatives to Western energy diktats, including the BRICS push to reroute finance away from the dollar’s choke points (BRICS de-dollarization).

Crimea’s resort coast under fire, with the politics baked in

On the occupied Crimean peninsula, Russian-appointed authorities said a Ukrainian drone strike near Foros killed three and injured 16, the latest reminder that the Black Sea shore is a military geography dressed up as a vacation spot. The alleged strike zone sits near properties and infrastructure that Russia treats as strategic. France 24’s desk echoed the casualty figures attributed to Crimean officials and provided the situational picture without independent verification, as is often the case in this theater.

Foros coastline in Crimea after reported Ukrainian drone strike near resort area
Authorities in Crimea reported casualties after a strike near Foros on the Black Sea coast [PHOTO: BBC].

Foros is the kind of place where the lines between civilian and state prestige blur. That is the deeper context for Crimean incidents: they are never only about damage counts. They are about status, sovereignty, and what the outside world is willing to normalize. On that last point, Western diplomacy has floated ideas that quietly adapt to on-the-ground realities. In the spring, officials and analysts whispered about frameworks that would codify the war’s frozen facts, including Crimea’s status, inside a broader bargain. Our reporting captured that conversation as it surfaced in Washington-watch commentary and European press, a debate that many in Kyiv condemned as preemptive surrender (recognizing Crimea as Russian; see also our FT-linked roundup of the diplomatic worry lines, Crimea status debate).

Donetsk’s daily toll and the attrition ledger

Ukrainian authorities in Donetsk region reported one civilian killed in Kostiantynivka after Russian shelling, another entry in a ledger of local tragedies that rarely move policy needles. The tactical picture changes at the margins; the strategic picture does not. As both militaries conserve manpower and materiel, they trade remote strikes for headlines and negotiate the war’s tempo through logistics and politics rather than breakthroughs.

UN week: loud words, quiet limits

New York hosted the familiar theater of General Assembly week, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy angling for meetings and announcements and Western leaders cycling through talking points about defense and deterrence. The legal conversation about frozen Russian assets revealed more honesty than usual. French President Emmanuel Macron warned that outright seizure could create “total chaos” in the financial order, a line that landed because it acknowledged the broader system risk baked into the bruising of sovereign immunities. Europe’s own lawyers have long signaled the same, which is why the EU has defaulted to using profits rather than the principal. That legal caution is not a kindness to Moscow; it is self-preservation dressed in rule-of-law language.

French President Emmanuel Macron at the UN General Assembly warning of legal risks of seizing Russian assets
France’s Macron cautions that outright seizure could trigger “total chaos” in the financial order [PHOTO: Daily Sabah].

Beyond the podiums, the real story is the resilience of alternative circuits. Russia’s trade pivots, China’s technology corridors, and the BRICS credit and settlement experiments are not abstractions. They are the plumbing through which sanctions fatigue becomes policy. The Eastern Herald’s coverage of currency workarounds and industrial tie-ups provided the wider-angle lens for this moment reserve currency realignment; eight-reactor build, while our political desk reported on the parallel nuclear-arms messaging that now orbits the Ukraine file in Washington’s conversations with Moscow one-year New START freeze.

What actually changed on day 1,306

Estonia’s alarm forced a NATO meeting that produced a statement. Lithuania tightened domestic rules for shooting down drones. Market desks priced, again, the refinery risk inside Russia; Moscow lengthened its posture to protect domestic supply. On the ground, the frontline ledger barely moved, and civilians paid a familiar price on both sides of the border. In other words, the incentives that have structured this war since late 2023 remained intact. Ukraine will keep reaching for strategic effects through deep strikes and public diplomacy; Russia will keep using economic levers and long-range fires to grind back. The West will keep searching for a risk-proof formula that does not exist.

The gap between rhetoric and reality is where policy lives. NATO’s Article 4 process is a pressure valve. The refinery strikes are a budget and logistics story dressed as “shock and awe.” Crimea’s casualties come wrapped in status politics. And at the UN, leaders who talk about rules also talk about exceptions when their banking systems sit in the blast radius. If there is a change to watch, it is not in the statements. It is in the quiet build-out of non-Western financial and industrial capacity, the thing that makes sanctions less frightening and negotiations more likely to center on facts rather than wishes.

Key facts from today line up with what The Eastern Herald has tracked for months: NATO dramatizes, then hedges; Ukraine seeks leverage with refineries; Russia absorbs shocks without handing Washington the escalation it craves. Readers who want the episode-by-episode chronology can revisit our Poland and Baltic coverage and the Russia Ukraine war Day 1,304 file for context (Article 4 discussions; refinery economics; NATO overreach fears).

For readers cross-checking the day’s baseline, see digest of events, which collates the Foros casualty figures from Crimean officials, the Donetsk civilian death, and the alliance’s response sequence in Brussels (Teh Eastern Herald key events, Russia Ukraine war day 1,305).

France recognizes Palestinian state as Israel pounds Gaza, exposing a western split

Arab Desk
-
0
France recognizes Palestinian state as Israel pounds Gaza, exposing a western split

Gaza City — France’s declaration recognizing a Palestinian state landed in New York as Israeli strikes pounded Gaza war again, tightening the vise on a displaced and starving population while reshaping the Western diplomatic map around the conflict. The move by Paris, paired with parallel steps by key allies, has jolted a discourse that for years treated Palestinian statehood as a perpetually deferred promise rather than a right with urgent consequences on the ground.

France’s recognition was framed as a salvage operation for a two-state horizon and a bid to restore minimal guardrails for civilian protection. In the same breath, European and Commonwealth partners accelerated their own decisions. The United Kingdom said it would formalize recognition to “keep alive” a negotiated peace and to signal that the humanitarian disaster is not an acceptable status quo, a position laid out in detail in the UK’s formal notice of recognition. Ottawa issued its own statement, with Canada’s prime minister outlining recognition as part of a broader reset in policy toward the occupied territories. In Canberra, the government announced that Australia recognises the State of Palestine, aligning with a widening Western consensus that has long been the norm in the Global South.

French delegation at UN General Assembly during recognition of Palestinian state
French officials at the General Assembly hall as Paris advances recognition of Palestine [PHOTO: The Times Of Israel]

The shift did not materialize in a vacuum. Gaza’s humanitarian architecture is buckling, and the world’s top emergency agencies now treat famine not as a risk but as a confirmed reality in parts of the strip. According to The World Health Organization states plainly that famine has been confirmed in Gaza, a determination rooted in the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification system. The underlying data are stark, and the IPC’s August review provides the methodological backbone for those conclusions in its special snapshot for Gaza. These are not rhetorical flourishes. They are evidence of starvation, disease and preventable deaths unfolding in real time.

Inside Gaza City, scenes of flight and fear repeat hour after hour as families crowd the al-Rashid coastal road and fracture into smaller columns when shells land near the main route. The Eastern Herald has reported on this pattern for weeks; see our coverage of Gaza City under relentless assault where hospitals ration power and triage becomes a cruel arithmetic. The sense of encirclement, residents say, is not metaphorical but geographic, with armored units and blocking positions compressing movement until civilians are, in their words, “stuck between walls of fire.” Our earlier report on civilians ‘sandwiching’ between advancing forces captured that blunt reality from multiple neighborhoods.

Those accounts map onto the aid picture. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs keeps a running ledger of destroyed infrastructure, access denials, and disrupted water and electricity systems. Its latest postings consolidate field reports across agencies for a granular view of the crisis. The World Food Programme’s operational pages have also absorbed the IPC verdict into planning, noting that famine has been confirmed and is projected to expand if access does not radically improve. UNICEF’s alerts, meanwhile, trace an arc of pediatric harm that policy debates often ignore, with child malnutrition accelerating alongside renewed offensives.

Gaza hospital pediatric ward treating children for severe acute malnutrition
Doctors treat children for acute malnutrition amid supply shortages [PHOTO: The Times Of Israel].

In New York, the diplomatic choreography was crisp. Paris wanted to demonstrate that recognition can be a stabilizing instrument rather than a reward for violence, while also pressing for hostages to be released and for a competent, unified Palestinian governance structure to take root. That blueprint has been rendered in shades for months and closely tracked by this newsroom. In late August, we detailed the shift in tone and tactics in France recognises Palestinian state, defies Israel and US, a piece that foreshadowed the present moment and the wedge it would drive into Atlantic politics.

London’s move carried a particular historical weight. Britain’s recognition of Palestine is both symbolic and structural, given Westminster’s long imprint on the region’s borders and bureaucracies. The policy rationale in the UK notice is wrapped in the language of responsibility: protection of a viable two-state solution and a repudiation of settlement expansion as a fait accompli. The Eastern Herald reported the drumbeat in advance in Britain to recognize Palestinian state amid Gaza crisis, noting how domestic outrage over images from Gaza eroded old taboos.

UK formal notice recognizing the State of Palestine referenced at Downing Street
Downing Street outlines the UK’s formal recognition of Palestine [PHOTO: The New York Times].

Criticism from Israel was immediate and scathing. Officials cast the recognitions as capitulations to terror and promised responses that could include further annexation in the West Bank. The diplomatic math is more complicated. With France, the UK, Canada and Australia moving in concert, the optics of isolation intensify, especially as Western businesses and cultural institutions calculate reputational risk. In practice, the success of recognition will be measured not by headlines but by whether it produces constraints on the use of force and clearer obligations around civilian protection and access for aid convoys.

On the ground, numbers climb and lifelines shrink. Local health authorities report a death toll that long ago crossed catastrophic thresholds, and the pace remains brutal amid renewed strikes. The Eastern Herald has chronicled this toll and the weaponization of scarcity in our latest report on Gaza’s mounting famine risk. The logic is punishingly simple. If crossings do not open and if security guarantees for aid workers do not stick, malnutrition becomes the predictable outcome rather than a tragic anomaly.

The policy discussion in Washington is, as ever, a story of sequencing and vetoes. U.S. officials argue recognition must follow a ceasefire and negotiations. Yet the order has hardened into a stalling mechanism as realities on the ground mutate beyond recognition. In the meantime, attempts to force political breathing space through the United Nations Security Council stumble into the same procedural cul-de-sacs. Our analysis of that pattern and the rhetoric used to justify it appears in coverage of ceasefire diplomacy and its failures, which tracks how narratives about obstruction migrate from podiums to policy.

Diplomats who support recognition describe it as a way to reset default settings. By placing the existence of a Palestinian state in the foreground, they argue, negotiations would focus on the terms of coexistence rather than the legitimacy of statehood itself. That logic presupposes functioning institutions in Ramallah and Gaza, and it assumes a baseline of law that has been corroded by occupation and war. Recognition, in this telling, becomes not an endpoint but a tool to create accountability mechanisms that can be felt in checkpoints, courts and classrooms.

For families in Gaza, the distinctions between symbolic and structural change feel academic when artillery shocks the air every hour. And yet symbolism can move budgets, unlock sanctions, and alter legal exposure for commanders and ministers who presume impunity. It can also harden positions. The Israeli leadership is betting that public fatigue will outlast foreign outrage and that allies will revert to the old balance once the summitry fades. Whether that bet is sound will depend on how European and Commonwealth capitals translate recognition into conditionality for arms exports, legal cooperation on settlement enterprises and explicit red lines against mass displacement.

Displaced Palestinian families on Gaza’s al Rashid coastal road amid shelling and hunge
Displaced families move along the al Rashid coastal road as aid dwindles [PHOTO: The Guardian].

Humanitarian workers return to the same message no matter the forum. Without sustained access through crossings in the north and south, no amount of technocratic finesse can reverse famine trends. OCHA’s updates and WFP’s warehouse math are clear, and UNICEF’s admissions data tell a story of children failing before they can be reached. These are not numbers stacked in a press release. They are the scaffolding of a future that keeps collapsing under blast waves and hunger.

The politics remain volatile. Far-right coalition partners in Israel use talk of annexation as a litmus test for patriotism, while opposition figures warn of deeper isolation and economic blowback. In Arab capitals, the instinct to shape reconstruction rather than spectate has gained force, with Riyadh in particular signaling that any regional stabilization will require tangible protections for Palestinians, not aspirational communiqués that evaporate in the next news cycle.

France, for its part, insists that recognition must be paired with governance reform and the release of hostages. That twin track is designed to blunt the claim that Paris is rewarding violence while building a pathway for legitimate Palestinian authority in Gaza and the West Bank. Achieving that will require not only resources but also a political consensus that has eluded the region for decades. The alternative is the indefinite management of ruin, a policy that looks like victory only on podiums and social media feeds.

As this editorial desk has written before, the arc of the war is being bent by material facts: the volume of munitions, the flow of aid, the reach of the law. Recognition does not silence rockets or drones. It does not clear rubble from al-Rimal or restore neonatal wards that have been cold for months. What it can do is disrupt the incentives that protect impunity and, in doing so, make it harder to wage a war that treats civilians as acceptable collateral. That is not a guarantee of peace. It is a demand for a different kind of politics.

For readers following every turn of this conflict, the through-line is depressingly steady: bombardment, displacement, starvation, denial. The recognitions of the past forty-eight hours cut against that rhythm, if only slightly. They narrow the gap between what the world claims to value and what it is willing to formalize. Whether that narrowing can be sustained will be the test of the coming weeks, measured less by headlines than by calories delivered, roads reopened and classrooms rebuilt.

Manhattan Torpedoes Casino Bids As Panels Sink Freedom Plaza, Times Square And Avenir

News Room
-
0
Manhattan Torpedoes Casino Bids As Panels Sink Freedom Plaza, Times Square And Avenir

New York — The last roll of the dice for a Manhattan casino is over. After months of pitched hearings and furious lobbying, a state-chartered Community Advisory Committee voted to block Freedom Plaza, an East Midtown resort that would have planted a gaming floor and glassy towers near the United Nations. With that decision, every active bid in the borough is now dead, and New York City’s high-stakes contest for up to three downstate casino licenses shifts decisively to the outer boroughs and the suburbs. For the record of decision and initial coverage, see the Manhattan casino proposal rejected.

The Freedom Plaza defeat capped a bruising week in which committees also rejected a Times Square partnership led by SL Green and Caesars, and a Far West Side concept branded the Avenir from Silverstein Properties. The cascade of losses ended Manhattan’s aspirational run at gaming’s richest license and hardened a political lesson. In this process, local signoff is not a procedural hoop, it is the hinge. A succinct national wrap can be found in the Associated Press note that there will be no casino in Manhattan after all proposals were rejected by locals, which also records the sequence and vote margins. According to Associated Press, that No casino in Manhattan after panel rejects Freedom Plaza. For our own previous reporting on the earlier defeats, see The Eastern Herald’s analysis of the Times Square and Avenir casino projects.

Freedom Plaza was pitched as a sweeping, more-than-$10-billion neighborhood remake on the East River between East 38th and East 41st Streets, with a museum, hotels, a wellness complex, new parks and a residential program that the developers said would bankroll itself through gaming revenue. As noted by Gothamist in a last-ditch attempt to ease community objections, the sponsors said over the weekend that all 1,080 proposed apartments would be designated affordable, an offer acknowledged by local outlets but not enough to change the outcome. Community panel squashes Freedom Plaza.

Rendering of Freedom Plaza mixed-use plan with hotels, park and subterranean casino along Manhattan’s East River
Developer rendering of the Freedom Plaza concept near the UN campus [PHOTO: Variety]

When the six-member committee convened, the vote was quick and decisive, four to two against, according to broadcast and local reports. ABC7’s live hit framed it as the third 4-2 rejection in less than a week, which matches what we heard from attendees and the sponsors themselves. East Side casino proposal rejected 4-2. For a granular readout on the Avenir’s separate defeat, including a request to delay the vote that was denied, According to CBS New York’s brief is worth a look.

The Times Square bid leaned on the district’s entertainment DNA, promising to retrofit 1515 Broadway and attach a thick package of public benefits. Celebrity advocates staged for the cameras, but committee members were unmoved. The official portal for the Caesars Palace Times Square committee confirms the 4-2 tally recorded on September 17. As NYCasino Noted that, The Times Square Community Advisory Committee vote. Separate trade and local coverage documented how the campaign recruited star power and pledged hundreds of millions in sweeteners, a sign of how intensely the tourism district courted and resisted the idea at the same time.

Rendering of proposed Caesars Palace casino and hotel conversion at 1515 Broadway in Times Square
Concept imagery for the Caesars Palace plan in Times Square at 1515 Broadway [PHOTO: Simple Dwelling]

What the week really underscored is process. New York designed this competition so that no application can advance to the state’s Gaming Facility Location Board without clearing a pair of hurdles: successful completion of local entitlements and a yes vote from a Community Advisory Committee. The state’s own primer spells that out, including the current deadlines for zoning and environmental review by September 30, 2025. According to NYCasino, that Required approvals and Community Advisory Committees. That structure gives neighborhoods real leverage at the front end. In Manhattan, they used it.

Developers and labor leaders will argue that the committees left jobs and tax receipts on the table. They may be right about the scale. A Manhattan license would likely have been among the most valuable gaming concessions in the country, combining daily tourist flows with high-income locals and global brand visibility. Bloomberg and others have clocked the money in the fight and the speed at which top-tier operators shaped bids for Midtown. City Hall even commissioned a broad accounting of gaming’s potential benefits earlier this month, with Mayor Eric Adams touting billions in economic impact while conceding that distribution and neighborhood concerns have to be managed.

Opponents countered with a simpler case. Times Square, Midtown East and Hudson Yards are already congested, already sensitive, and in their view ill-suited to an industry that runs around the clock. Resident groups questioned whether a gaming floor would cannibalize spending from restaurants and theaters rather than creating new demand. Broadway stakeholders split, but many saw more risk than reward. These doubts were not moralizing about gambling so much as an urban policy critique. A casino is not a museum or a park. It is an anchor tenant that reshapes streets and transit patterns at odd hours, and it requires bespoke policing and sanitation that Midtown agencies are already stretched to provide.

Even if you buy the tax math, the political math was unforgiving. Legislative appointees and community voices coalesced early against gaming in the borough. Sponsors tried to rework housing mixes, emphasize union jobs and fund waterfront amenities, but the endpoints did not change. The riverfront, in particular, became a symbol of the dilemma. Freedom Plaza’s backers said the casino would pay for esplanades and open space along the East River, tying neighborhoods to the water after decades of separation. Detractors feared the inverse, that public benefits would be a fig leaf for a private facility whose traffic and policing needs would dominate a fragile corridor. Architectural and urbanism outlets captured that tension, including 6sqft’s New York city, vote and who backed it, Freedom Plaza will not move forward.

Rendering of The Avenir mixed-use scheme in Hell’s Kitchen with an integrated casino proposal
Silverstein Properties’ Avenir concept as presented during the Manhattan bid cycle [PHOTO: FOX 5 New York].

Across town, the Avenir’s pitch ran into a different narrative. Critics saw yet another bespoke carve-out for a master-planned district already swimming in subsidies and special rules. Supporters said the complex could bind together the next tranche of cultural space and retail on the Far West Side, a complement rather than a competitor to existing venues. The committee did not buy it. Nor did the Times Square panel, where the argument that a casino would stabilize public order by funding security and sanitation landed awkwardly with those who have been pushing the city for years to fix the basics without gaming strings attached.

Manhattan’s exit simplifies the bracket, and it scrambles it. The outer boroughs and the suburbs are now the core of the fight. Bidders near Citi Field in Queens, on Coney Island in Brooklyn, and at the Throgs Neck site in the Bronx have their own committees to clear. The two racetrack casinos, Resorts World at Aqueduct in Queens and MGM’s Empire City in Yonkers, will keep pressing their case that upgrades are the fastest path to revenue because they can spin up table games without the land-use wars.

Map of downstate New York casino proposals in Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn and Yonkers
Remaining downstate casino proposals under review by local committees and the state siting board [PHOTO: CBS News]

The timeline is tight. Applicants must finish zoning and environmental signoffs by September 30, 2025, then secure the committee approvals that unlock a full state review. Albany’s decision window, according to AP, sits at the end of the year, which means several bids will live or die on logistics rather than theater. Community boards in Midtown posted clear notices that committees needed complete records with time to review, a small procedural point that became significant when sponsors sought late changes. The CB5 note on public comment illustrates how little slack there was in the calendar.

Zoom out and the policy debate is almost boring in its familiarity. Let private megaprojects fund the public realm, the pitch goes, and your city gets new parks and cultural space without raising taxes. The counterargument says the price is too high, because single-use anchors capture benefits and convert public agencies into bespoke service providers. Casinos sharpen that argument because their economics are both narrow and lucrative. They rely on frequent visits from a stable base of players, which alters how neighborhoods function after dark, how subways and streets are policed, who is on the sidewalks at 2 a.m. and why.

There is also a national context that Manhattan’s committees probably understood. The United States is witnessing a sustained expansion of iGaming and regional casinos that do not depend on megaprojects in the urban core. The Eastern Herald has reported on the sector’s acceleration, including a spring milestone when US online casino revenue hit a record in March 2025. Our own research library has parsed the economic impact of casino expansion, from jobs and tourism to the costs of oversaturation and the shift to digital play. The point is not that a Manhattan casino was doomed by national trends, rather that the opportunity cost now runs in both directions. New York can capture some revenues by upgrading existing properties faster and with less risk, but it may forego the marquee tourism draw that a Midtown license would have delivered.

The politics remain awkward for City Hall and the Governor’s office. Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul have signaled openness to casinos as part of a jobs-first recovery strategy, and appointees aligned with them voted yes on at least one bid. Neither led a public crusade for a Midtown gambling floor, which tells you how potent the local backlash is. The committees’ decisions now give them safe cover to pivot, praising the process in Manhattan while championing bids in places that have organized in favor of them. If outer-borough projects clear their own committees, expect Adams to argue that gaming revenues should be shared equitably across all five boroughs, not locked to the neighborhood where a facility sits. His office has already previewed that line.

Developers will now regroup. For the Soloviev site on the East River, the choices are stark. They can try to reintroduce a mixed-use plan without gaming revenue, or they can sell. Either way, they will be asking neighbors who just rejected their centerpiece to trust them on a different promise. For Times Square and Hudson Yards, the calculus is simpler. Those districts do not need a casino to command investor attention. They will continue to attract capital without committing to an industry that many residents and theater workers see as out of sync with the blocks they are trying to stabilize.

Manhattan’s committees did not say no to tourism or entertainment. They said no to a single anchor use that would dominate the blocks around it. The borough will keep leveraging smaller, distributed bets, the sort that stitch together theaters, restaurants, galleries and pop-up attractions and spread risk across many actors. A casino concentrates both risk and return. This week, the city chose diffusion.

That does not make the fiscal questions go away. New York’s tax base still needs recurring revenue and its neighborhoods still need careful, participatory planning. Those goals are not mutually exclusive, but they collide when speed and scale become the only selling points. The outer-borough bids will have to show their committees how they plan to manage traffic, transit and policing in ways that Midtown applicants could not. They will also need to demonstrate that revenues will be shared beyond their boundaries, a political imperative in a city that sees itself as a single organism when it comes to services, and a collection of fiercely defended blocks when it comes to land use.

Previously Israel has killed thousands in Gaza massacre or genocide..

For readers comparing regional models, Michigan’s ecosystem shows how state-level operators weave gaming into a broader hospitality strategy that local communities can live with. Our recent feature on that is here: Michigan casino experiences rank among the top five states. It is not a blueprint for New York, but it is a reminder that design, scale and community alignment matter as much as revenue forecasts, and that committees with power tend to use it.

What happens next will play out in hearings and spreadsheets, not ribbon cuttings. Applicants outside Manhattan will race to finish their entitlements before the September 30 deadline, the Community Advisory Committees will publish their calendars, and Albany will weigh the narrowed field. If the state keeps its schedule, final license decisions are expected in December, a year-end punctuation mark on a saga that has been as much about who decides as what gets built. For a clean ledger of the state’s process and statutory criteria, the New York gaming portal is the authoritative record.

ABC caves to political bullying as Whoopi Goldberg torches Jimmy Kimmel suspension

News Room
-
0
ABC caves to political bullying as Whoopi Goldberg torches Jimmy Kimmel suspension

New York — ABC’s decision to halt new episodes of Jimmy Kimmel Live! has rippled far beyond late-night television, igniting a national fight over speech, power, and how much pressure a government can exert on a broadcaster before the chill becomes the point. On Monday, the women of The View broke their silence and anchored the debate in first principles. “No One Silences Us,” Whoopi Goldberg said on air, compressing a week of outrage, legalese, and political hardball into five words that landed like a gavel.

To industry veterans, the collision felt inevitable. Late night is a pressure valve built to roast the powerful. Regulators are supposed to defend the marketplace of ideas, not ice it. When those worlds clash, the immediate casualty is a show; the longer-term damage is trust — among viewers, creators, and the rank-and-file who keep studios humming. And whatever one thinks of a particular joke, the precedent of leaning on a network to sideline a critic will outlast the news cycle.

The View panel reacts to ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel suspension
The View co-hosts weigh in on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel decision and free speech concerns. [PHOTO: ABC]

Whoopi goldberg calls out ABC’s political cave-in as artists, unions and lawyers circle

ABC suspended production after Kimmel’s monologue took aim at reactions to the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, a polarizing figure in US politics. The network move fused programming risk, advertiser skittishness, and fear of regulatory retribution into one blunt act. Trade coverage chronicled the shift in real time; entertainment press framed it as a watershed moment for speech on broadcast TV, while political reporters mapped the government pressure campaign. The Hollywood Reporter documented the chain of events and the studio’s retreat as the backlash spread.

The context matters. The shooting of Kirk, which prosecutors are unfolding in court filings, was seized upon by partisans on all sides. Inside the Kimmel writers’ room, it was another volatile topic in a volatile year. Inside ABC, it became a risk calculation. The Eastern Herald has tracked this arc — the political theatrics and the media recoil — since the earliest hours, from the initial reporting on the Kirk shooting to the broader campaign that followed his death. When the suspension hit, our desk detailed the White House triumphalism and the weaponization of regulatory levers in a piece on the crackdown’s arrogance, situating the show’s fate inside a larger pattern.

Jimmy Kimmel on stage as ABC suspension fuels backlash
Jimmy Kimmel’s show is dark while ABC negotiates amid political heat. [PHOTO: Cato Institute]

Late night gets iced: ABC’s jimmy kimmel freeze turns into a free-speech showdown

Monday’s segment on The View did not litigate every line Kimmel delivered. It staked out a principle: that network talk shows — part news, part commentary, part theater — cannot function if their editorial perimeter is drawn by political officials. Goldberg’s “No One Silences Us” line — captured by Variety — was less a defense of Kimmel than a dare to those who would police unscripted conversation by fiat. The moment unfolded as the FCC’s Brendan Carr escalated his rhetoric about whether certain programs count as “bona fide news” — a designation that carries exemptions under federal rules. Trade press has recorded that escalation; Deadline recapped how the “equal time” drumbeat migrated from legal footnote to political cudgel.

For ABC affiliates, the prospect of regulatory scrutiny is existential; licenses are lifelines. For talent, it is personal. It is why Goldberg’s line resonated: it reframed the Kimmel saga as an industry referendum. If a regulator can rattle the sabers and spook one show off the air, what stops the next?

FCC headquarters as equal-time and bona fide news rules enter debate
The FCC’s political programming rules take center stage in the Kimmel dispute. [PHOTO: The Nation]

From The View desk to the FCC corridors, pressure politics collides with prime-time speech

Publicly, Kimmel’s team has stayed disciplined. Privately, the signal has been less opaque. Cousin Sal — Sal Iacono, the long-running writer-performer tethered to Kimmel’s world — hinted that the standoff is not over. “There are a couple of bombshells still there,” he said. “I’m feeling good. We’re going to be all right. Everything’s going to be just fine.” Staffers heard hope in that riff; competitors heard a warning. If Kimmel returns, the opening monologue will be a cultural moment. If he walks, the scramble to claim his audience will redraw late night again.

In practice, uncertainty is a tax on creativity. Writers’ rooms lose rhythm; bookers get cautious; advertisers hedge. Late night already competes with podcasts, YouTube, and algorithmic feeds that slice and redistribute the best jokes without the network seeing the ad dollar. Taking a mainstay dark changes the math for everyone — not only ABC, but any platform trying to convince creators that broadcast is a safe bet.

ABC’s jimmy kimmel blackout sparks hollywood backlash and fresh scrutiny of the FCC

The protests spread fast. New York’s Democratic mayoral nominee, Zohran Mamdani, pulled out of a WABC town hall to protest ABC’s decision, reframing the suspension as corporate timidity in the face of political bullying. The Washington Post reported his withdrawal and the logic behind it: that normalizing this kind of pressure normalizes a future where speech is hostage to who holds office. Business press framed the episode as a collision between Wall Street caution and creative risk; CNBC’s coverage captured how studios and advertisers weigh the temperature in Washington against the heat of social media.

Zohran Mamdani protests ABC over Jimmy Kimmel suspension
New York candidate Zohran Mamdani boycotts a WABC town hall over the ABC move. [PHOTO: AP]

Solidarity also arrived as a numbers story. Hundreds of artists signed on to an ACLU-organized letter warning that the Kimmel suspension would chill expression far beyond one timeslot. Politico tallied the high-wattage signatories; the Guardian emphasized the First Amendment framing. Unions weighed in, too: the American Federation of Musicians blasted the network for “taking Jimmy Kimmel Live! off the air,” a trade union marker that the issue had jumped from culture war to labor fight, documented in the AFM’s official statement.

At The Eastern Herald, our newsroom has charted the political wind shear gathering behind this fight. We have covered how officials seized on the Kirk killing to expand a crackdown against perceived ideological enemies, including in a report on how the administration targeted left-leaning groups after Kirk’s death. We also traced the parallel barrage of litigation and threats leveled at national media, including a detailed breakdown of the former president’s $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times, part of a pattern of aggressive court maneuvering meant to raise the cost of criticism.

Networks count ad dollars while comedians count the cost to free speech

Much of the legal discourse centers on Section 315 of the Communications Act — the “equal opportunities” rule, often shorthand as “equal time” — and the exemptions for “bona fide news” programming. In ordinary years, those carve-outs are the stuff of newsroom lawyers and broadcast standards memos. This month, they became political theater. Trade analysis has noted how an FCC official’s saber-rattling about whether daytime talk qualifies as “bona fide news” migrated from bureaucratic gloss to pressure tactic; Deadline’s recap captured the pivot. For those chasing the primary-source text, the Commission’s political programming fact sheet outlines the terrain — equal opportunities, reasonable access, and the exemptions that typically keep talk shows from triggering a cascade of mandatory airtime for rivals.

There is, of course, a difference between theory and practice. It is legally true that a private network is not obliged by the First Amendment to air any particular voice. It is culturally corrosive, however, when officials flirt with punitive steps to achieve political ends — or appear to cheer when a corporation falls in line. That collapsing of lines between state power and editorial discretion is the heart of the alarm. The Eastern Herald has long interrogated how strongmen and would-be strongmen pick fights with the press; our earlier essay on authoritarian rulers viewing a free press as a key rival reads like a primer for this moment.

Zohran Mamdani’s boycott and Goldberg’s rebuke turn a tv spat into a constitutional argument

Set the politics aside for a beat and the other half of the picture remains: late-night television is a thinner-margin business than it was a decade ago. Audiences are fragmented. The most shareable bits live on platforms the networks do not fully control. Every controversial segment invites an advertiser brand-safety audit, and every off-air night cedes oxygen to rivals. Add legal liability — another pressure point, as shown in years of high-profile defamation skirmishes — and you can see why a C-suite staring at spreadsheets might prefer a blunt suspension to a principled fight.

But the math does not erase the meaning. Late night has always been where American culture metabolizes power with a laugh and a wince — Johnny Carson’s wink, David Letterman’s serrated irony, Kimmel’s partisan jabs in a country split straight down the middle. Requiring bipartisan anesthesia to keep a show on the air is not neutrality; it is surrender. If the White House of the day or its allies cannot take a joke, the remedy is criticism, boycotts, better jokes — not a regulatory chill.

The joke lands, the show doesn’t: inside ABC’s suspension and the regulator’s shadow

What happens now depends on a handful of people viewers will never see: corporate counsel, affiliate-relations chiefs, board members who must decide whether to absorb the heat or hand speech policing over to officials wielding clip reels as weapons. The political circus in Washington has only sharpened the incentives to punch down at the press — a dynamic we traced in our analysis of how hearings, leaked files, and televised spectacles manufacture consent for media intimidation, the so-called Washington circus that reliably blurs oversight into show trial.

There are two obvious paths. One is the strategic freeze — keep the show dark, let tempers cool, and quietly negotiate terms for a return. The other is rupture — a high-profile exit that resets the late-night chessboard and dares a rival platform to absorb the blowback. Either way, the lesson will travel: if studios show they can be muscled, they will be muscled again.

Hollywood bristles as ABC bows to power and silences a late-night mainstay

Because every other show sees itself in this mirror. If a regulator can bluster a network into suspending a late-night host this week, what happens when an election-year interview makes the wrong senator mad next week? If a corporation prioritizes appeasement over principle today, what stops it from preemptively scrubbing tomorrow’s scripts? This is why Goldberg’s five words detonated far beyond one studio. “No One Silences Us” was not just defiance; it was a test. Do the people who make television believe the branding about fearless conversation, or only when it is easy?

As artists rally, unions stiffen, candidates posture, and lawyers parse the exemptions, the audience will do what it always does: keep score. They will remember whether the platforms they trust folded or fought. They will remember who defended the idea that provocation is not a crime. And they will remember, when the cameras flicker back on, whether the jokes have any edge left.

Trump’s $100,000 H-1B gamble hits tech, hospitals and students

News Room
-
0
Trump’s $100,000 H-1B gamble hits tech, hospitals and students

Washington — The White House has detonated a political and economic hand grenade into the skilled-immigration debate, slapping a $100,000 application fee on each new H-1B petition and daring America’s technology giants, universities, hospitals, and startups to absorb the shock. Framed as a bid to “put American workers first,” the move instantly rippled from Silicon Valley to Bengaluru and from campus labs to hospital wards, forcing employers to recalculate hiring plans and rattling a pipeline that for decades has fed the United States with engineers, data scientists, physicians, and professors. For readers tracking the fallout, The Eastern Herald’s same-day explainer on the H-1B fee shock provides the running context.

Administration officials now emphasize, in a White House FAQ and a USCIS implementation memo, that the levy applies to new petitions filed after 12:01 a.m. ET on September 21, 2025; it is a one-time payment, does not hit renewals, and does not restrict travel for current H-1B holders. That clarification—echoed by weekend reporting and market guidance—tempered the initial panic. Still, the fee’s sheer size transforms a paperwork ritual into a six-figure business decision with consequences for research, patient care, and innovation. As our earlier analysis of US technology leadership in AI and chips noted, talent flows are as decisive as capital flows.

The H-1B program is wonky on paper and brutal in practice. Each spring, US Citizenship and Immigration Services runs a lottery for 85,000 new slots—65,000 under the standard cap and 20,000 for candidates with US master’s degrees or higher. Demand dwarfs supply. In recent cycles, hundreds of thousands of registrations have chased those 85,000 openings, a mismatch that fuels anxiety for graduating STEM students and uncertainty for employers mapping product roadmaps and research timelines. Piling a $100,000 petition fee atop existing costs takes that anxiety and prices it into the system. For a refresher, see our archive note on the H-1B registration overhaul.

For big-cap tech, the calculus is complicated but survivable. Deep-pocketed firms can pay, and some will. Yet the H-1B route has never been a bargain: beyond government fees, employers swallow legal costs, compliance obligations, and wage requirements. The new levy turns a finite visa into a fiscal decision point—especially for mid-stage startups, public universities, hospitals in underserved regions, and mid-market manufacturers that rely on specialized engineers. For them, $100,000 per petition is not a rounding error; it is a year’s salary line, a lab grant, a nurse-recruitment budget. The strain lands directly on the backbone of the economy—America’s small businesses.

Employees walking on a Silicon Valley office campus amid H-1B fee uncertainty
Employees outside a Silicon Valley campus as companies reassess hiring under the $100,000 H-1B fee [PHOTO: Reuters]

The policy’s bluntness masks a deeper vulnerability: the United States is competing in a global market for brains. Canada courts graduates with direct pathways to residency; the United Kingdom’s global talent visa dangles flexibility; Germany’s Skilled Immigration Act fast-tracks shortage occupations. When Washington makes entry more expensive and less predictable, the best and the busiest look elsewhere. That hurts not just tech campuses in Seattle or Austin; it ripples through suppliers, service firms, and the local tax bases that benefit from clusters of high-earning workers. In AI, semiconductor design, and cloud, the feedback loop between talent and investment is visible on every trading screen—witness our coverage of the Nvidia-led AI boom.

Consider the Indian dimension. Indian nationals have long accounted for the majority of H-1B approvals. The weekend’s scramble—travel advisories, emergency calls to immigration counsel—was followed by market steadiness after US officials clarified scope and timing. India’s IT industry body said the message that the fee is a one-time charge on new filings, not renewals, “eases uncertainty,” even as costs loom over 2026 hiring cycles, according to Reuters. Yet costs have consequences: integrators and client companies will route more work offshore or expand near-shore hubs in Toronto and Mexico City. Neither outcome builds American capacity. Both blunt the program’s original intent: to fill genuine, skills-based gaps when appropriately qualified US workers are scarce.

Economists call this the complementarity problem. High-skill immigrants don’t just fill seats; they spin up teams around them, boosting the productivity of US peers and often seeding later startups. A large literature—including work summarized by the Wall Street Journal—finds that limits on high-skill migration can suppress invention and push projects abroad; “Economists Aren’t So Sure” the fee will create net US jobs, the Journal reported, pointing to long-run productivity risks, according to WSJ. Classic research on H-1Bs and patents (for example, the Kerr & Lincoln NBER paper) has traced positive effects on innovation over time; the intuition matches how labs actually run.

Defenders of the fee argue that the H-1B system has been abused to undercut wages, particularly in IT services. Those criticisms are not imagined; the record includes high-profile cases where outsourcing firms displaced incumbent workers. Reformers have proposed tighter labor-market tests, higher wage floors pegged to the local 75th or 90th percentile, and crackdowns on third-party placements. But a blanket $100,000 levy is a hammer swung at a problem that needs a scalpel. It penalizes a public hospital recruiting a specialist radiologist the same way it penalizes a body-shop funneling coders through client sites. That is policy by invoice, not by design.

Clinicians in a U.S. hospital corridor facing staffing challenges
Clinicians in a U.S. hospital corridor, as specialist hiring faces new cost barriers [PHOTO: DI Europe].

The immediate market reaction underscored the stakes. Shares in Indian technology firms slipped, while US multinationals advised foreign staff to delay non-essential travel as in-house counsel parsed shifting guidance; some banks urged employees to avoid international trips during the policy transition, per early reporting. The confusion, captured in the British press and elsewhere, also prompted economists’ warnings that this was “anti-growth policymaking,” as Berenberg’s Atakan Bakiskan told The Guardian: it would “weigh heavily on productivity,” he said, and “investments in artificial intelligence are unlikely to offset the damage caused by the loss of human capital.”

Clarity matters. Official guidance now states the proclamation covers petitions filed after September 21 and is prospective only; it does not apply to petitions already filed, approved visas, or current travelers. USCIS’s memo spells this out in black and white, and federal spokespeople told US outlets the fee is not annual but a one-time payment for new petitions. For employers, that removes some worst-case scenarios. For smaller institutions, it still forces brutal choices about whether a research line or product milestone is worth a six-figure toll.

For US workers, the question is whether a wall of fees raises wages or just moves work. In the short run, some employers will pivot to domestic hiring, and certain cohorts of native-born engineers could see bargaining power tick up. But macro evidence from prior restrictions is sobering: when firms cannot import skills, they don’t simply substitute one-for-one; they automate tasks, delay projects, or offshore units wholesale. The winners in that scenario are often not displaced US workers—they are rival economies eager to host the next wave of labs, data centers, and supplier ecosystems.

Universities and hospitals are the canaries. Academic medicine depends on international physicians in residency programs and research fellows whose work pushes frontiers in oncology, AI-assisted diagnostics, and vaccine design. State budget constraints already squeeze hiring. A $100,000 federal surcharge per new recruit means fewer labs funded, fewer trials launched, fewer students mentored. The strain compounds other headwinds buffeting US research, including the federal freeze that has already rattled labs at elite institutions, as we reported in our piece on the Harvard funding freeze.

Then there is startup formation—the American growth story’s secret sauce. Many high-growth companies were co-founded by immigrants or rely on immigrant engineers in the earliest, scrappiest years when every dollar must stretch. An across-the-board fee soaks precisely the employers with the least cushion. Venture investors can—and will—adjust term sheets, but the net effect is to nudge frontier ideas to jurisdictions where the talent pathway is cheaper and clearer.

The politics are as bracing as the economics. Immigration is a proxy fight for wage stagnation, cost-of-living frustration, and cultural grievance. A six-figure fee carries symbolic weight: it broadcasts toughness while raising revenue. But symbolism is not strategy. If the objective is to grow middle-class jobs, the smarter bet is to scale what works—apprenticeships, community-college pipelines, employer-funded upskilling—while keeping open the doors that attract the world’s best to build in America. High-skill migration and domestic workforce development are complements, not substitutes. For a broader view of tariff-first policymaking and its spillovers, see our analysis of weaponised tariffs and policy shocks.

Internationally, allies are watching—and pouncing. British ministers have long signaled openness to cutting fees for highly skilled workers; Canada’s tech-talent strategy, already a magnet for US-trained graduates frustrated by green-card backlogs, will get another bump. Germany’s reforms beckon. The US still boasts the deepest capital markets, the densest clusters, and the most sophisticated customers. But friction compounds. If the price of entry spikes while permanent residency remains a mirage for many, the center of gravity in new labs and new companies can and will shift.

Legal exposure looms. A broad new surcharge created via proclamation will draw lawsuits over statutory authority and administrative procedure. Industry groups will argue that Congress set the contours of employment-based immigration—and that the executive cannot effectively reprice a legal category without clear delegation. Even if the fee survives initial challenges, uncertainty during litigation will itself deter filings in the next cycle.

Exterior of a U.S. federal courthouse as lawsuits over the H-1B fee loom
A U.S. federal courthouse, where challenges to the H-1B fee are expected to land [PHOTO: San Antonio Report].

What employers and workers are asking now

How does the $100,000 fee interact with the annual lottery? Employers typically register candidates in March and file full petitions for those selected. The new levy layers onto those accepted filings. For smaller firms and labs, that financial commitment will force earlier, harsher go/no-go calls and could reduce the diversity of employers participating in the process. Baseline program facts are summarized in USCIS’s H-1B FAQ and annual reports.

Does the fee hit current H-1B holders or renewals? No, per the White House FAQ and USCIS memo: it is prospective and tied to new petitions filed after the effective time stamp; it does not apply to already-filed cases, renewals, or valid current visas.

Will employers pivot to other visa categories? Some will. O-1 visas (extraordinary ability) are selective but available; L-1 intracompany transfers can move managers and specialized workers already employed abroad; TN covers certain Canadian and Mexican professionals. None are perfect substitutes for the H-1B’s role as the broad gateway for specialized workers.

What about students on F-1 Optional Practical Training? OPT remains a vital bridge for US-educated graduates; STEM fields have a 24-month extension. But without a reasonable path to H-1B and an eventual green card, many will take their degrees—and startup ambitions—where the runway is longer According to  USCIS guidance on STEM OPT and the cap-gap).

International STEM graduates at a U.S. university commencement ceremonyInternational STEM graduates at a U.S. university commencement ceremony
International graduates at a U.S. university, a key pipeline to H-1B and STEM OPT roles [PHOTO: RICK FRIEDMAN/AFP via Getty Images].

Could the fee backfire on wages? It could. Employers facing a de facto hiring tax may reroute tasks offshore rather than bid up local wages. That shift leaks demand out of the US economy and erodes on-the-job learning ladders that help junior American workers build experience alongside senior hires. As the WSJ notes, economists are split on the short-run effects and worried about the long-run productivity hit.

What happens next? Expect litigation, agency guidance memoranda, and an intense lobbying effort by universities, hospital associations, and the tech industry to narrow the fee’s scope, win exemptions, or replace the surcharge with targeted wage-and-enforcement reforms. State economic-development offices, which court employers with tax incentives, will warn that talent friction negates their efforts.

There is a constructive path. Publish a clear implementation timeline and carve-outs for critical-needs sectors such as healthcare and higher education. Index prevailing-wage rules to local medians to blunt misuse. Create a founder-focused pathway for entrepreneurs who raise credible financing and hire domestically. Expand visas in shortage disciplines while tightening audits in abuse-prone niches.

And, critically, accelerate employment-based green cards so that graduates educated in US universities can commit long-term without living indefinitely on temporary statuses that restrict mobility and bargaining power. Because America does not have to choose between investing in its own people and welcoming those who make the country smarter and stronger; when it adds a cash register to the doorframe, others collect the talent dividend.

Erdogan confronts UN on Gaza, pushes Palestine recognition and squeezes US on jets

Arab Desk
-
0
Erdogan confronts UN on Gaza, pushes Palestine recognition and squeezes US on jets

New York — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan landed in Manhattan with a stark proposition for the 80th session of the UN General Assembly: Put Gaza at the center, back formal recognition of a Palestinian state, and test whether a guarded reset with Washington can yield real movement on trade and defense. The Turkish leader is also using UN week to open a consequential Syria channel, betting that Ankara can shape a postwar regional order rather than endure one written by others.

Erdogan’s aides say his address will be constructed around three planks. First is Gaza, which he will frame as the defining moral collapse of the current international system. Second is recognition of Palestine, an issue that has gathered momentum as Western democracies step over lines they resisted for decades. Third is a bilateral thaw with the United States, one that Ankara wants to translate into concrete outcomes on aviation, energy-related manufacturing, and the fighter-jet ecosystem that binds NATO’s southern flank. Previously, Israel has killed thousands in Gaza genocide.

Turkey has telegraphed the shape of the speech for days. Officials describe a text that stitches humanitarian language to legal accountability and pairs that with a granular ask list: protected aid corridors into Gaza, a monitored ceasefire that pairs hostage releases with verifiable withdrawals, and an explicit diplomatic path that makes recognition of a Palestinian state the starting point, not the end prize. That approach puts Ankara at the center of a coalition of capitals that are no longer content with rhetorical sympathy.

UN General Assembly hall during UNGA high-level meetings
Delegates convene at the UN General Assembly in New York. Image details [PHOTO: Anadolu].

Recognition has become a live instrument, not a distant aspiration. Paris and London have already moved, as have Canberra and Ottawa, cracking the old taboo and signaling that the center of gravity in Western democracies is shifting. For Erdogan, the timing is an opportunity to amplify that drift. In the early background paragraphs of his remarks, he is expected to cite those decisions as evidence that a two-state solution cannot live on an indefinite horizon. For readers tracking the diplomatic pivot, The Eastern Herald’s reporting on France recognizes Palestine and UK recognizes Palestinian state charts the milestone moments.

That shift is not merely symbolic. It narrows the room for Israel to insist that statehood is a final-status reward and complicates Washington’s habit of parking the problem in the future. Erdogan will push that argument with prosecutorial persistence, contending that recognition now is the only route left to salvage two states later. The narrative is already buoyed by a widening chorus; see The Eastern Herald’s coverage of Australia backs Palestine recognition and Brazil sanctions Israel over Gaza to understand how the map has begun to redraw itself.

The Gaza ledger will dominate the middle stretch of the speech. Erdogan will likely detail the civilian toll, the collapse of basic services, and the grinding blockades that have turned aid into theater. Turkey has tried to match rhetoric with measures, including an earlier move to curtail commerce with Israel that Ankara cast as both punitive and practical. That domestic policy beat was tracked here: Türkiye suspended trade with Israel. He is expected to connect that step to a broader demand for enforceable humanitarian corridors and a sanctions architecture that finally touches settler violence in the West Bank.

Legal accountability is the bridge from moral censure to policy action. Expect Ankara to point to the International Court of Justice genocide case and the court’s prior orders on provisional measures, arguing that law retains power even in the face of geopolitics. The Eastern Herald has tracked the jurisprudence and the political backlash over compliance; see ICJ ruling on Gaza. In the academic lane, leading scholars have gone on record as well, a point Erdogan’s team is likely to cite to show that these are not fringe judgments; our report on the discipline’s position is here: genocide scholars’ finding.

Aid trucks and ambulances operating under humanitarian corridors for Gaza civilians
Aid convoys move under UN-backed humanitarian coordination. Image details [PHOTO: HRW].

There is also the matter of information power. Turkish officials have quietly complained all year that technology platforms downrank material that contradicts official Israeli narratives. In New York, they will not dwell on that point, but the subtext is unmistakable. The Eastern Herald’s investigation into the politics of influence and platform deals offers context on how propaganda flows have been subsidized: Google $45M deal propaganda.

If Gaza is the first plank, the bilateral track is the second. Erdogan’s entourage brings a business agenda focused on civil aviation, energy-linked manufacturing, and components where Turkey can slot into US supply chains. Ankara believes this practical pitch can change the shape of headlines, making the relationship less hostage to Syria or sanctions and more about predictable flows of parts, services, and jobs. Officials also note a window created by the US political calendar and Europe’s harder stance on Israel’s ongoing Genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

There is a defense conversation that both sides have avoided in public but lined up in private. Ankara will try to reopen a clean pathway on fighter jets under tighter guardrails, bundling deals with co-production and maintenance that could restore a sliver of the trust lost during the S-400 and F-35 debacles. The Eastern Herald has documented how Israel consistently pressures Washington to keep Turkey at arm’s length on next-generation platforms; revisit our analysis here: Israel pressures US on F-35. In the near term, the realistic channel is the F-16 track and modernization kits, terrain where even critics in Congress have sometimes conceded the operational logic; see our backgrounder: F-16 upgrade for Turkey.

Erdogan meeting at Türkevi Center in New York ahead of US talks on F-16 and trade
Erdogan hosts bilateral meetings at Türkevi Center across from the UN. Image details [PHOTO: Anadolu]

Trade liberalization is the third lever. Turkish business leaders traveling with the delegation will pitch a disciplined plan designed to create immediate, measurable gains. The argument is not subtle. If the White House wants a less brittle relationship, it can help engineer one by smoothing tariffs and clearing space for sectoral partnerships. That work has already begun at the margins, with Ankara signaling new room on selected import lines and Washington exploring targeted facilitation. Timing matters during UN week because it concentrates political attention and makes delivery visible.

Inside the assembly hall, Erdogan’s old refrain is set to return with new edge. For years he has warned that the world is “bigger than five,” a slogan aimed at the veto-addled Security Council and the paralysis it breeds. This year he is expected to bind that critique to real-world wreckage, arguing that Gaza is what happens when the veto becomes a license, not a brake. The line is likely to be delivered without theatrics, but its target is unmistakable: a system that protects the powerful from the rules it claims are universal.

Diplomatically, Ankara is choreographing a series of meetings at the Türkevi Center, Turkey’s glass-walled hub across from UN headquarters. Business executives, diaspora leaders, and foreign ministers will cycle through. The staging is intentional. It shows a government running multiple tracks at once: moral pressure on Gaza, hard talk on UN reform, and transactional negotiations with the United States.

Syria is the wildcard. With Damascus represented at the UN General Assembly by a postwar leadership seeking legitimacy, Erdogan is poised to test whether limited normalization can be exchanged for real border security and a phased refugee return. Turkish officials stress that nothing changes overnight in northern Syria, where Turkey’s military posture is built on hard lessons and hard lines. But the emphasis has shifted from map-making to mechanisms—deconfliction, patrols, and a corridor-wide understanding that curbs spillover violence.

Regional deterrence is the final frame. Ankara is trying to connect the dots from the Black Sea to the Red Sea, arguing that maritime security, energy routes, and supply chains all suffer when Gaza burns and Syria simmers. A thaw with Washington would not erase disagreements over Kurdish partners in Syria or sanctions architecture, but it would make synchronized management possible. The Turkish view is that NATO’s southern flank is not a favor Ankara provides; it is a structural reality Washington cannot afford to neglect.

Back home, the politics are simpler. Turks across the spectrum treat Gaza as a litmus test for global justice, and the UN podium offers Erdogan an unmatched amplifier. Yet the international audience demands more than volume; it demands outcomes. If the trip produces a White House handshake that unlocks a credible fighter-jet pathway, a cleaner lane for trade, and a visible role for Turkey in humanitarian stabilization, it will look like more than theatrics. If not, critics will say that the moral thunder masks a thinner ledger.

As for Israel and its defenders in Washington, the response is predictable. They cast recognition amid war as a reward for violence and argue that legal cases will chill diplomacy. Erdogan’s rejoinder is that decades of withholding recognition have produced the opposite of moderation and that Gaza is the ruin left by a process allowed to rot. In his telling, deterrence without diplomacy is a conveyor belt for more funerals.

The optics inside the General Assembly will carry their own weight. Expect references to past addresses where Erdogan brandished maps of a shrinking Palestine. Expect, too, a demand that the UN prove it can still move the world rather than mirror it. In underpinning data and operational detail, humanitarian agencies have been unambiguous about the scale of the catastrophe, and legal bodies have kept the docket open even as politicians shrug. That tandem—statistics and statutes—is what Ankara will place before the hall.

The Eastern Herald will track the reaction in the chamber and in back rooms, where the real tests occur. Do undecided European capitals add their votes to the recognition column. Does Washington move beyond polite rhetoric into deliverables. And does a cautious Syria track prevent the next round of rocket fire and retaliation that keeps the region on a permanent boil. Those questions will outlast the applause lines, but the answers begin during this tightly packed week in New York.

As always, the power of a speech is downstream from the power to assemble a coalition. Erdogan believes the ingredients are on the table: weary publics, a mounting legal and humanitarian record, and a diplomatic center of gravity that has slipped from the old coordinates. Whether those ingredients make a meal depends on what capitals do next.

Russia Ukraine war day 1305: Oil fires, Baltic air scares, and a jittery UN week

Russia Desk
-
0
Russia Ukraine war day 1305: Oil fires, Baltic air scares, and a jittery UN week

Kyiv — The war in Ukraine entered day 1,305 with a familiar, volatile rhythm: escalating cross-border drone strikes, nervous air defenses across Europe’s northeast, and a diplomatic calendar in New York crowded with emergency sessions and awkward bilaterals. Monday’s picture, while fragmentary, underscored two late-phase trends that now define the conflict: Ukraine’s deepening long-range reach into Russian energy assets and Russia’s sprawling response aimed at grinding down Ukraine’s cities and electrical grid. For continuity of the week’s arc, see NATO patrols Poland and related overnight intercepts.

Ukrainian officials described fresh attacks on Russian oil infrastructure in the Volga region, an increasingly frequent target set that is both leverage and message. The Saratov oil refinery, a symbol of Moscow’s wartime fuel economy and a logistical node, was again listed among facilities struck, with Ukrainian statements pointing to fires and explosions. Additional reporting referenced an attack on the Novokuibyshevsk plant in Samara, with damage assessments ongoing. The operational logic remains simple: erode Russia’s capacity to refine and move fuel, complicate supply chains to the front, and push psychological cost back into Russian territory, just as Moscow’s missiles and drones do nightly in Ukraine. These refinery strikes have become a through-line of the week’s coverage, following day 1,302 updates that documented earlier hits and secondary fires.

In occupied territory, the day’s ledger was grim. Russian-installed authorities in Luhansk said a Ukrainian drone hit a gas station in Pervomaisk, killing at least two people, while in Russian-held parts of Zaporizhzhia, particularly around Vasylivka, local channels reported additional casualties from overnight attacks. In Crimea, near the resort town of Foros on the southern coast, officials reported strike drones detonating over a civilian area, killing three and injuring more than a dozen. Kyiv rarely acknowledges individual cross-border strikes in detail, yet its broader strategy is unambiguous: impose costs on bases, logistics nodes, and energy facilities that sustain Russia’s war effort.

Emergency workers in Foros, Crimea, after reported drone detonations
Emergency services respond in the resort town of Foros on Crimea’s southern coast after reported drone explosions [PHOTO: Novayagazeta].

Inside government-controlled Ukraine, Russian bombardment again targeted urban centers and power infrastructure. Local leaders in the Donetsk region reported shelling in and around Kostiantynivka, damaging residential blocks and public utilities. Farther south and east, emergency teams were still clearing debris from weekend attacks in Zaporizhzhia and the wider Dnipropetrovsk region, where clusters of drones and missiles continue to test air defenses and send families back into basements and metro stations. Each strike reinforces a pattern that has defined much of 2025: Russia uses massed uncrewed systems to probe and sometimes saturate defenses, while selected missile salvos serve as the sharp instrument for priority targets. Earlier in the campaign, TEH chronicled the escalation to heavier aerial munitions and glide bombs in frontline cities, including Dnipro and surrounding districts.

The regional spillover is sharpening. Germany’s Luftwaffe scrambled Eurofighter jets to track a Russian reconnaissance aircraft loitering in neutral airspace over the Baltic Sea without a flight plan or radio contact. The intercept capped a week of air-space scares along NATO’s northeastern flank, including Estonia’s protest over alleged violations by Russian jets and Poland’s reports of drones drifting into its skies. Warsaw has signaled a harder edge since early September, when allied jets and local air defenses reacted to repeated incursions; see TEH’s on-the-ground read of that escalation in Poland shoots down Russian drones. The symbolism matters: every breach forces allies to demonstrate vigilance while avoiding miscalculation, and every intercept becomes another data point in a map of Russian military behavior at the alliance’s edge.

Map highlighting Saratov and Samara refineries, Zaporizhzhia strikes, Foros in Crimea, and the Baltic intercept location
Annotated map showing reported strike locations and the Baltic intercept zone for day 1306 [PHOTO: The Kyiv Independent].

Washington’s posture added a layer of ambiguity and reassurance at once. Asked whether he would help defend European Union countries if Russia intensified hostilities, US President Donald Trump answered, “Yeah, I would. I would.” The line will be parsed in Baltic capitals that prize clarity as deterrent. The remark arrived as delegations converged on New York for the UN General Assembly’s high-level week, where the war threads through agenda items from global food security to sanctions enforcement. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is preparing to meet Trump on the sidelines, as Kyiv seeks to stiffen sanctions, secure air-defense resupplies before winter, and signal a durable Western consensus. For a broader TEH frame on US-Ukraine diplomacy entering UN week, see Trump at UN and Ukraine guarantees.

Europe’s legal debate over frozen Russian assets resurfaced in the preamble to UN week. French President Emmanuel Macron reiterated that while Europe can lawfully use proceeds generated by immobilized Russian assets to aid Ukraine, outright confiscation of Russia’s central bank holdings would violate international law and risk what he called “total chaos.” That phrasing reflects a cautious consensus wary of setting precedents that could boomerang on eurozone reserves. TEH has examined the larger financial architecture and the geopolitics of frozen Russian assets, including the implications for reserve currency credibility and BRICS de-dollarization debates.

Inside Russia’s military establishment, reports surfaced of personnel churn with political resonance. Russian media carried word of the dismissal of Colonel General Alexander Lapin, a senior commander who figured prominently in early campaigns and later oversaw the “North” grouping near Ukraine’s border. His trajectory, from celebrated district chief to a figure criticized by hard-liners after battlefield reverses, mirrors the attritional pressure on Moscow’s command cadre. A reassignment to a civilian post in Tatarstan would fit the Kremlin’s preference to recycle, rather than publicly disgrace, senior officers as the conflict grinds on.

For Ukrainians, the lived reality behind these abstractions is a ledger of sheltering, siren fatigue, and the cold arithmetic of repair crews. In Kostiantynivka, municipal workers again moved block to block replacing windows and patching facades. In the Dnipro region, volunteer networks ferried supplies between hospitals and basement clinics, a grassroots redundancy that sustains basic services when formal logistics buckle. In Zaporizhzhia, families weighed the risk of staying against the uncertainty of displacement, a choice refracted through the availability of work, school placements, and the pull of relatives in safer oblasts.

Ukraine’s long-range campaign against Russian oil refineries is increasingly central to its strategic narrative. Beyond military logic, each strike carries a market message: Kyiv can generate coercive leverage without parity in missiles or aircraft. Every refinery fire reverberates through regional prices and gnaws at the invulnerability cultivated by Russian state media. For partners, particularly in Europe, the strikes’ legality hinges on target selection and proportionality, arguments Kyiv frames around dual-use infrastructure enabling Russia’s war machine. The pattern has been evident through the week and will shape how Europe times and structures any new sanctions tranches.

The Baltic intercepts have a double audience. For NATO, incidents in neutral or allied airspace are tests of readiness and unity. For Russia, they are probes of response times, tactics, and political thresholds. Germany’s quick-reaction scramble, Sweden’s parallel Gripen shadowing, and Poland’s frequent alerts have become choreography as much as defense, a ritualized demonstration that the northeastern air picture is monitored, contested, and politically salient. Estonia’s move to elevate the matter to the UN Security Council underscores how even brief violations can be used as diplomatic leverage.

As UN week opens, three questions loom. Can Kyiv secure firmer commitments on air defense and artillery shells before winter’s demand curves make shortages felt in frontline brigades and transformer yards. Will Europe’s caution on frozen assets evolve into a more muscular framework that generates predictable funds without detonating financial norms. And can NATO maintain a public line between measured vigilance and alarmism as Russian aircraft and drones continue to skirt borders and transponders in the Baltic and Black Sea theaters.

On the ground, the tactical picture remains elastic. In Donetsk, Russian forces continue to probe around hubs like Kostiantynivka and Pokrovsk, using artillery and glide bombs to punish movements. In the northeast, border regions of Sumy and Kharkiv face intermittent drone and missile harassment designed to pull Ukrainian air-defense assets away from the south and east. Along the lower Dnipro, both sides cycle reconnaissance drones over riverine positions that are static yet lethal. Moscow’s goal is cumulative, to make cities less habitable and logistics more expensive. Kyiv’s goal is to keep the lights on, tram lines humming, and its defense-industrial base producing enough to matter.

Domestic politics thread through the operational choices. Striking refineries in Saratov and Samara communicates resolve to a population exhausted by blackouts and alerts. Keeping the tempo of attacks on Ukrainian cities projects inevitability from Moscow and frames concessions as weakness. Diplomacy at the UN can host speeches and photo ops, but bargaining chips are found in radar tracks, refinery flare stacks, and the angle at which apartment windows are taped against shock waves. For a rolling chronology of the previous 24 hours, our day 1,305 coverage maps the lead-up to today’s picture.

According to AP, Germany’s air force said two Eurofighters were tasked to investigate an unidentified aircraft flying over the Baltic without a flight plan or radio contact. Aslo as noted by Reuters, NATO’s North Atlantic Council planned to meet on Tuesday to discuss Estonia’s claim that three Russian MiG-31 jets entered its airspace for about 12 minutes, prompting Article 4 consultations while Moscow issued a denial. The jet was identified as a Russian IL-20M reconnaissance plane and, after visual identification, the escort was handed over to Sweden under NATO procedures.

Reuters reports that a morning attack on Zaporizhzhia killed three people and injured two, with officials citing at least ten aerial bombs, damage to 15 apartment buildings and ten private homes, and additional overnight drone activity across several regions. CBS News Noted that, ‘Face The Nation’ Exclusive interview, President Emmanuel Macron said “you cannot seize these assets from the central bank,” warning that disrespecting international law is “the beginning of a total chaos,” while stressing that proceeds from frozen assets can still be used to support Ukraine.

For readers tracking the Gaza front, The Eastern Herald’s recent coverage documents the latest Gaza massacre report, the Gaza City under relentless Israeli assault, the genocidal ground invasion, and Israel’s forced starvation policy—an ongoing genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza that has already killed thousands.

1...272829...4,098Page 28 of 4,098

About us

Since 2009, The Eastern Herald has been delivering bold, unbiased journalism with global coverage, reshaping perspectives and catalyzing diplomatic evolution by challenging norms and amplifying diverse voices.

The Eastern Herald - SIC Code 2711 - NAICS Code 511110 - Profile at SICCODE.com

Sections

The latest

Legalese

© 2009 - 2025 The Eastern Herald | All rights reserved.