VIDEO: Back in Odesa after a few weeks away, taking the city’s pulse from Taras Shevchenko Park. On one side stands Chornomorets Stadium, one of the port city’s landmark structures, badly damaged in a recent Russian strike. On the other is world port Odesa, visibly more battered - much more battered - than when I last saw it and worryingly silent. Meanwhile the war keeps spreading: into NATO waters, into Moldova and beyond.
Britain’s foreign office on Thursday announced new sanctions targeting individuals and entities it said were involved in the production or transport of Russian oil, facilitating military manufacturing and circumventing financial services sanctions. According to Reuters, the package included:
A further 12 oil tankers which Britain says are operating as part of Russia’s shadow fleet and helping Moscow evade sanctions on oil exports
Three crypto exchanges and two payment platforms suspected by Britain of being used by Russia to circumvent financial sanctions
Britain said two of those entities sanctioned had processed and facilitated transactions with the A7 illicit finance network
Seventeen entities and individuals involved in the supply of goods deemed by the UK, US and EU to be vital for the Russian war effort, including Russia-based importers of machine tools, electronics and materials used to produce missiles and drones
A Ukrainian drone attack ignited a fire at a data center owned by Russian tech giant Yandex in the Ryazan region overnight, the company said Thursday, suspending the site’s operations and triggering service disruptions. The attack marks the first confirmed strike against Russian data infrastructure since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, weeks after Moscow launched attacks against Ukrainian data centers. Yandex confirmed that operations at the facility in the town of Sasovo were fully suspended while emergency teams worked to contain the damage, according to a statement circulated in the media. Governor Pavel Malkov said the roof of a Sasovo district company, which he did not name, caught fire. No casualties were reported. Outage tracking platform Downdetector recorded more than 1,300 user reports of disruptions affecting Yandex Cloud, Yandex Documents and Yandex Tables, while core consumer tools like search and taxi services remained online. Yandex shares dropped more than 3.4% during Thursday morning trading on the Moscow Exchange - Moscow Times
Commentary: The WSJ’s Rogue Pilot Problem
The Wall Street Journal led today’s front page with a striking claim: pilots deliberately crashing their own planes is now one of aviation’s biggest safety threats.
In fairness, the news hook is legitimate: on 30 September, the Omani first officer of flydubai FZ1073 allegedly attacked his captain with the cockpit crash axe on a Dubai–Tel Aviv flight carrying more than 170 people, most of them Israeli. According to Israeli officials cited by Reuters, he told UAE interrogators he had planned the attack before flydubai hired him.
But the Journal’s wider case is weaker - much weaker. It puts MH370, China Eastern 5735 and Air India 171 alongside Germanwings, the only crash on its list officially ruled a deliberate act. China Eastern 5735, a Boeing 737-800 flying Kunming to Guangzhou in March 2022, plunged almost vertically from cruising altitude into a hillside in Guangxi, killing all 132 on board. Beijing has never published a final report, which has left US officials’ suspicions of a deliberate act to fill the silence. The others also rest on what unnamed US officials believe, while the investigators in charge have reached no such conclusion. MH370 remains officially unexplained. India’s final report on Air India 171 is still pending and fiercely contested.
MH370, a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 carrying 239 people from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, vanished in March 2014. It is believed to have ended in the southern Indian Ocean, but the main wreckage has never been found and the cause remains officially unexplained. Air India 171, a Boeing 787 bound for London, crashed into a residential area of Ahmedabad seconds after takeoff in June 2025, killing 260 people on board and on the ground. India’s final report is still pending and fiercely contested.
Connecting the dots: FlyDubai is a security failure, a would-be attacker who got onto a flight deck. A pilot in a mental-health crisis is a different problem with different fixes. Combining them into one alarming death toll makes a better front page than a sound diagnosis. Families still waiting for answers deserve findings, not leaks.
The White House chief of staff’s daughter has turned up in a photo, rifle in hand, at a shooting range in a pro-Russian Balkan statelet that pays her firm $35,000 a month. Katie Wiles, daughter of Susie Wiles, is a partner at Continental Strategy, according to the Financial Times. In February the firm signed on to lobby for Republika Srpska, the Serb entity in Bosnia run by Milorad Dodik’s party. CBS News verified the photo, which shows her beside Srpska’s interior minister. The firm says the August trip was for another client. But a fellow partner, ex-Trump campaign aide Alejandro Garcia, arranged a White House meeting last month between Susie Wiles and Dodik ally Željka Cvijanović. It follows a New York Times report that Trump operatives James Blair and Chris LaCivita advised the Srpska government before Bosnia’s 4 October election. Connecting the dots: Srpska has spent at least $8.9 million on Washington lobbyists since 2025. Sanctions on Dodik were lifted last October. A $1.5 billion pipeline deal then went to a firm run by Trump’s former lawyer and Michael Flynn’s brother. On election night, Dodik thanked Putin.
Nigeria’s president is spending his re-election campaign fighting a lone Californian in a US courtroom. For three years Bola Tinubu has used American lawyers to keep sealed the FBI records from a 1990s Chicago drug investigation, and he is losing ground. In August the FBI acknowledged for the first time that it holds an investigative file on him. Together with the DEA, it has since released hundreds of partially redacted pages. The man pushing for more is Aaron Greenspan, founder of the legal records site PlainSite. He is representing himself, has no stake in Nigerian politics, and is best known for years of litigation against Elon Musk and Tesla. Against him is Chicago firm Henderson Parks, which argues that releasing the files would be an unwarranted invasion of Tinubu’s privacy. The case centres on a 1993 IRS affidavit describing a heroin network allegedly run from Nigeria. It cites an associate saying Tinubu helped move money for the alleged ringleader. US authorities seized about $460,000 from accounts tied to Tinubu in a civil forfeiture. He was never charged and has consistently denied wrongdoing. His spokesman calls it a long-settled civil matter. The defence has stumbled. In one filing Tinubu’s lawyers described him in 1993 as a private “student” with full privacy rights. He had graduated 14 years earlier and was then a serving senator. They later withdrew the claim. Connecting the dots: Nigerians vote in January, and analysts expect the economy and insecurity to dominate the campaign, not a 30-year-old case. But a sitting president asking a foreign court to keep his own records hidden is a bad look. Rival Peter Obi has called it profoundly embarrassing. If the next release contains anything new, the story could quickly matter more. Source: Semafor.
Guilfoyle sought $100,000 from Trump donor ahead of confirmation, WSJ reports
Days before her July 2025 confirmation hearing as U.S. ambassador to Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle pressed Kentucky Trump donor Eric Deters to pay off a $100,000 American Express balance, according to Signal messages and texts reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. She sent him wiring instructions, telling him a direct payment to Amex “won’t show up anywhere.” Deters declined, saying it would cost him his marriage.
The request came as Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.’s former fiancée, was promising to use her access on Deters’ behalf. He had dangled payments of up to $1 million for help with an IRS dispute over a tax deduction, a push for the Justice Department to seek the extradition of a fugitive Ohio surgeon, and a Tucker Carlson booking. The messages show her forwarding her outreach to incoming IRS chief Billy Long, now ambassador to Iceland, and repeatedly warning Deters not to put money talk in writing because it could cost her the ambassadorship. Deters, a twice-suspended lawyer and former radio host who says he paid her $300,000 in speaking fees over the years, says she delivered nothing.
Guilfoyle’s lawyer says she disputes the messages’ authenticity and was owed money for past speaking work. Deters denies owing her anything. The report follows last week’s call by Democrats on the Senate and House foreign affairs committees for a State Department review of her conduct, prompted by an earlier Journal investigation into her promotion of a Greek company. On Wednesday in Athens, Secretary of State Marco Rubio publicly praised her as a “strong ambassador.”
Why it matters: The story raises a direct question about whether a nominee was trading on proximity to the Trump family for personal payment during Senate vetting, and Rubio’s endorsement signals the administration is standing by her for now.
The journals…
