Nscale’s $35 Billion IPO Is Wobbling Because Its Data Centers Aren’t Ready
Nscale’s Narvik, Norway site, built with Aker and backed by Nvidia and Point72, runs at 6.4 of a planned 30 megawatts, while net losses hit $1.02 billion in six months.
loomberg reported on October 15 that Nscale’s flagship Norway data center is six months behind schedule, with only 6.4 of its planned 30 megawatts actually running. For a company trying to go public on the strength of AI infrastructure it hasn’t finished building, that gap is the whole story.
Nscale filed to go public on the New York Stock Exchange last month under the ticker NSCL, targeting a valuation of roughly $35 billion. According to Bloomberg’s October 15 report, the UK-based GPU cloud provider’s marquee project, a data center in Narvik, Norway, built with Norwegian energy group Aker, has been hit by cooling system leaks, local permitting fights, construction delays and a fire. Workers are being housed on a floating hotel just to keep the build moving. Only 6.4 megawatts of the planned 30-megawatt facility is actually live.
That’s not a footnote. Nscale’s entire pitch to investors rests on the idea that it can turn signed contracts into running GPUs fast enough to justify a $35 billion price tag. Microsoft and Anthropic are its anchor customers, with multi-year deals together worth close to $88 billion, and the company says it has about $51 billion in total contracted revenue. But a contract is a promise, not a server rack, and Narvik shows how far the promise can drift from the concrete.
The numbers underneath the growth story are just as jarring. Nscale’s revenue for the six months ended June 30 came in at $140.6 million, up sharply from $10.4 million a year earlier. Net losses over the same period jumped to $1.02 billion, from $369 million the year before. Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan are reportedly working the deal, and Nscale is said to be separately raising up to $3.5 billion in pre-IPO financing. None of that changes the fact that the company is burning through roughly a billion dollars while its biggest site runs at a fifth of capacity.
Nscale isn’t the first neocloud to learn that Wall Street has started pricing AI infrastructure risk with a sharper pencil. CoreWeave’s five-year credit-default-swap spread hit roughly 881 basis points in December 2025 before easing to about 452 basis points more recently, a move that at its peak implied close to a 50% chance of default within five years. CoreWeave’s total debt has climbed to $35.6 billion, and its 2031 unsecured bonds yield in the low teens. Interest expense alone ate more than a quarter of its revenue last quarter. That’s the pattern now.
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n a landmark partnership, Stargate Norway plans to deliver renewable-powered, sovereign AI infrastructure, marking OpenAI’s first gigafactory initiative in Europe
Oslo, Norway – 31 July 2025 – Nscale Global Holdings Ltd. (“Nscale”), Aker ASA (“Aker”) and OpenAI today announced the launch of Stargate Norway: an advanced AI infrastructure project in Narvik, Northern Norway. Powered entirely by renewable energy, the facility will target to deliver 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs by the end of 2026, with ambitions to scale significantly in the years ahead. Stargate Norway will be designed to provide secure, scalable, and energy-efficient infrastructure for sovereign AI workloads across Europe, fully aligned with European regulatory frameworks. The initiative is led by global AI infrastructure provider Nscale, in partnership with Aker and OpenAI.
Stargate Norway is planned to deliver 230MW of capacity, with ambitions to expand by an additional 290MW – positioning it among the most significant AI infrastructure investments in Europe. The project marks OpenAI’s first data centre initiative on the continent and the inaugural European site under its “OpenAI for Countries” programme.
The facility will be located in Kvandal, just outside Narvik – a region characterised by abundant hydropower, low local electricity demand, and limited transmission capacity. These conditions result in power prices well below the European average, complemented by a cool climate and established industrial infrastructure, making Narvik an ideal location for large-scale data operations.
Stargate Norway is projected to generate significant activity and a long-term operational presence in the Narvik region. The project will also collaborate with local and regional academic institutions to advance AI research and development, supporting the growth of regional expertise and innovation in Northern Norway.
“Announcing Stargate Norway and delivering one of the first European AI Gigafactory to market is a strategic milestone for the region and boosts its role in the global AI landscape,” said Josh Payne, CEO of Nscale. “Sovereign, scalable and sustainable infrastructure is now essential to remain competitive. We’re proud to partner with Aker, drawing on the team’s extensive experience and impressive track record, to deliver a new generation of AI economic and productivity growth in Europe. Together, we are combining OpenAI’s leading models with Nscale’s vertically integrated AI cloud, to provide the sustainable infrastructure necessary to support public benefit, build industrial resilience and enable long-term regional innovation.”
The site will be designed and built by Nscale, leveraging its experience in delivering sovereign-grade AI infrastructure across Europe. It will be owned by a 50/50 joint venture between Nscale and Aker, to be formed through wholly owned subsidiaries of Aker following the planned merger with Aker Horizons. Completion of the joint venture is subject to agreed-upon closing conditions.
In parallel, Nscale and Aker will begin preparatory steps and mobilise resources for construction activities. Both parties have committed approximately USD 1 billion to the initial 20MW phase of the project, including upwards of USD 250 million in equity on a 100% basis, where each partner will contribute equally. The Kvandal site alone has the potential to scale tenfold in future phases as customer contracts are secured. OpenAI welcomes the opportunity to be an initial offtaker with the option to scale over time under its “OpenAI for Countries” programme.
The UK’s AI Growth Zones and What’s Actually Being Built NVIDIA, Nscale, CoreWeave, and Microsoft are building the UK’s next generation of AI infrastructure: 120,000 Blackwell Ultra GPUs, backed by up to £11 billion in investment, targeted to be operational by the end of 2026, according to NVIDIA’s own announcement. That makes it the largest single AI infrastructure rollout in the country’s history.
“The United Kingdom is building the infrastructure for the AI industrial revolution, advancing science, transforming industries and creating new economic opportunities,” said Jensen Huang, NVIDIA’s CEO, in that announcement. Sam Altman added: “Stargate U.K. builds on this foundation to help accelerate scientific breakthroughs, improve productivity and drive economic growth.”
The Five Designated AI Growth Zones The UK government has designated five AI Growth Zones so far, sites picked for access to at least 500MW of power and streamlined planning support:
Zone Location Designated Anchor Partner Culham Oxfordshire April 2025 UK Atomic Energy Authority campus Cobalt Park North East England September 2025 Nscale, part of Stargate UK North Wales Anglesey and Trawsfynydd November 2025 Former nuclear site redevelopment South Wales Bridgend (former Ford plant) November 2025 Site conversion for AI data centers North Lanarkshire Airdrie, Scotland January 2026 DataVita and CoreWeave Collectively, the first cohort has secured £28.2 billion in private investment and is projected to create more than 15,000 jobs, per a tracker of the program.
The North Lanarkshire zone alone, the newest of the five, is expected to attract $11.2 billion in private investment and generate over 3,400 jobs, according to
Bitdeer signed a $750 million stock sales agreement with Lutnick’s Cantor Fitzgerald six weeks after his nomination, and the Malaysia chip rule went unpublished before his sale of the firm closed
Yesterday Jensen Huang resigned as chief executive of Nvidia, the most valuable chip company in the world, after admitting to an affair with a woman American intelligence agencies believe was working as a spy for China. Her name is Alice Huang, and she is no relation to him.
Alice Huang ran Megaspeed, a company in Singapore whose Malaysian affiliate bought at least $4.8 billion of equipment containing Nvidia’s chips. The Commerce Department opened an investigation in 2024 into whether those chips were ending up in China.
Most of the coverage has stayed on the affair but I wanted to know whose job it was to keep her company from getting the chips in the first place, and the answer was a man I have been writing about since April.
Howard Lutnick is the Secretary of Commerce. If you have been following my work, you know I have traced his firm’s business with Jeffrey Epstein in The Lutnick Deal, his family’s stake in the digital dollar company Tether in my May investigation, and the betting markets his family’s companies run on facts his own department produces in my July piece on hurricanes. In August I wrote that the people building our future were racing to own chips, data centers and the government permission needed to move all of this advanced technology around the world.
This week the Senate asked Lutnick to testify about Nvidia, and he agreed.
Howard Lutnick was running Cantor Fitzgerald when it started selling stock for a company called Bitdeer in March 2024, under an agreement for up to $250 million.
Six weeks after he was picked to run the Commerce Department, Bitdeer signed a second agreement naming Cantor, this time for up to $1 billion. In August 2026 Bitdeer filed to sell up to $1 billion more.
Now, let me explain what exactly a “rule” is because it matters to understanding the next part of this.
A rule is a regulation, a written order from a federal agency that carries the force of law. Congress passed a law saying the Commerce Department may restrict the sale of sensitive technology. The department’s rules say exactly which chips, which countries and which buyers are allowed.
A rule only counts once it is printed in the Federal Register, the government’s daily record of new regulations. Until then it is a draft in an office, and every company can go on doing what it was already doing because it’s not officially a rule yet. When a rule says a license is required, a company has to apply to the Commerce Department before it ships anything, and the department can say no.
Now, a rule requiring a license to ship Nvidia chips into Malaysia went unpublished in July 2025, before Lutnick’s sale of Cantor had closed. The very next month Bitdeer told its investors it was installing Nvidia rack systems in Malaysia.
Bitdeer stock:
Why Bitdeer (BTDR) Stock Fell Even After Revenue Beat by $70 Million
Bitdeer (BTDR) stock slips after Q3 revenue jumps 89% to $320.7M but net loss widens to $125.5M. See the costs, bitcoin sales and AI Cloud backlog.
Lutnick’s longtime friendship with Trump may not save him
The Nvidia scandal has spread far beyond the tech company.
US President Donald Trump, left, and Howard Lutnick, US commerce secretary, during a campaign event in Wasilla, Alaska, US, on Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2026. | Nathaniel Wilder/Bloomberg/Getty Images
President Donald Trump is again facing pressure over his Commerce secretary and longtime friend Howard Lutnick as the department and its leaders face mounting bipartisan criticism in the wake of the Nvidia scandal, according to multiple current and former officials.
And he’s facing criticism from within the administration, too, for a close relationship with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang they say resulted in lax oversight of the chipmaker. Huang resigned amid the scandal.
Seven current and former administration officials said that the seriousness of the allegations makes this episode substantially different from past efforts to undermine Lutnick. But even some who believe the controversy should cost Lutnick his job are skeptical Trump will turn against his longtime friend, given the president’s own involvement in decisions about chip exports to China. The officials were granted anonymity to speak candidly about private conversations and assessments.
Yet the firm, formerly run by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and now led by his sons, Brandon and Kyle, reported a nearly 50% decline in the number of Nvidia shares it held between September 2025 and March 2026, according to a CNBC analysis of securities filings that excludes options. Nvidia had been one of the largest stock positions reported in Cantor’s filings.
The decline coincided with White House and U.S. intelligence officials pressing Lutnick to crack down on Megaspeed, a Singapore-based company suspected of funneling Nvidia’s advanced artificial intelligence chips to China. Lutnick repeatedly resisted those efforts, Axios reported Nov. 11.
By the time Cantor hosted Huang in New York, Lutnick had also received a classified intelligence warning, according to a Nov. 10 Axios report, about Huang’s ties to a suspected Chinese spy and had appeared alongside the CEO at a G20 technology summit in North Carolina.
Even as Cantor pared back its Nvidia stake, it continued doing business across the chipmaker’s AI empire. A CNBC review of securities filings, corporate announcements and Wall Street research found the firm has helped arrange billions of dollars in financing for Nvidia’s business partners while maintaining close ties to the chipmaker’s leadership.
Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton said on Wednesday that Israel must allow aid trucks into Gaza, a day after he visited the Rafah border crossing in Egypt.
Hamilton, a seven-time world champion, arrived in El Arish on Tuesday, where he was briefed on how aid is prepared and coordinated before it is sent into Gaza, as he toured the Rafah crossing and the Egyptian Red Crescent’s aid warehouses.
He has frequently posted on social media about children killed in Israeli airstrikes in Gaza and called for a ceasefire. A ceasefire agreement reached last year has halted major combat operations in Gaza, but the amount of aid reaching the territory continues to fall far short of the agreed-upon minimum of 600 trucks a day.
“The past three years of Israel’s genocide in Gaza is appalling. It’s an injustice for people to be denied their freedom, their safety and their dignity. No human being should be treated as though their life matters less,” the Ferrari driver wrote on Instagram.
Israel strongly denies accusations of genocide and says its military campaign in Gaza targets Hamas militants.
Hamilton described seeing food trucks lined up and ready to go at the border that were regularly held up or faced major delays.
“I saw walls stretching for miles, built to keep them in. Standing there, outside what felt like an open-air prison, all I could think about was getting in to help,” he said in the post. “At the Rafah border, I saw food trucks lined up ready to go, but they’re regularly not allowed in or face major delays. The first driver in line that I spoke to had already been waiting over 12 hours. At the nearby logistics centre, I saw the hard work of the aid workers, but I also saw what gets rejected for crazy reasons. Sleeping bags, first aid kits, medical equipment, wheelchairs even footballs for kids.
“Israel needs to fulfil its obligations under the ceasefire and let the aid trucks in. I know so many people feel that same helplessness. That same need to do something rather than just watch. No excuse. I don’t want us to get used to their suffering. I don’t want us to look away.”
Representatives from Nvidia told Illinois representative Bill Foster that it would be technically possible to implement the anti-smuggling measures called for in the Chip Security Act, Foster told MIT Technology Review in an interview on Thursday, even while an industry group claimed they were “potentially infeasible.”
Foster, a Democrat who serves on the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, is a cosponsor of the act, which would introduce geotracking requirements to verify the location of advanced AI chips in order to prevent their smuggling to China. It is one of three chip-security bills under consideration for inclusion in the Senate’s National Defense Authorization Act, each of which is drawing renewed attention after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s resignation and reported affair with an alleged Chinese spy.
Mass smuggling of Nvidia AI GPUs could be the underlying cause of Jensen Huang’s departure, analysts claim — more than 1.5 gigawatts of banned chips tracked to China despite export controls
Anton Shilov
Fri, November 13, 2026 at 11:41 AM GMT
Leading semiconductor research firm SemiAnalysis believes that Jensen Huang’s sudden departure from Nvidia may have been driven not only by revelations about his personal extramarital relationships, but also by widespread illicit exports of advanced AI accelerators to China. In its latest newsletter, analysts estimate that more than 1.5 gigawatts (GW) worth of restricted Nvidia hardware, which could be equivalent to up to 1.5 million GPUs, has reached the country despite U.S. export controls.
Go deeper with TH Premium: Taiwan, trade, and tariffs
Putin’s diesel tankers cast adrift after Trump deal hits the rocks
Iona Cleave
Thu, November 12, 2026 at 12:14 PM GMT
Hundreds of thousands of barrels of Russian diesel bound for the United States are drifting in the Atlantic with no willing buyers or a port to go to.
Such is the outcome of Donald Trump’s gambit of striking a deal with Vladimir Putin to lower fuel costs before the midterms.
Not one diesel tanker loaded in a Russian port has reached US shores since the Oct 9 agreement, which experts told The Telegraph is now effectively “dead in the water”.
The tanker billed as the first to carry Russian diesel to the United States under Donald Trump’s deal with Vladimir Putin has dropped New York as its destination. The Malta-flagged Agioi Fanendesleft Primorsk on October 22 with about 40,000 metric tons of ultra-low-sulfur diesel, due in New York on November 7. Lloyd’s List reported it idling off Skagen, Denmark, on October 26. Its tracking now shows “for orders,” meaning it has no declared port.
On October 27, Senator Richard Blumenthal wrote to Thanassis Martinos, managing director of the tanker’s Athens-based owner, Eastern Mediterranean Maritime. He demanded that the company recall the vessel if it intends to deliver to a U.S. port, and refrain from future Russian diesel deals.
Russia may have lost aircraft during an operation near St. Petersburg
Story by Fabio Villas Boas
• 3h
Russian Telegram channels mentioned three crews and seven military personnel, but the circumstances remain unclear. In the same early hours, a drone strike hit the Baltic port of Ust-Luga.
Russian channels that cover military aviation reported that Russia may have lost aircraft near St. Petersburg during an air defense operation on the night of November 10–11, 2026. The posts mentioned three crews and reported the deaths of seven military personnel. As of November 12, the sources consulted had reported no official confirmation of the losses from Russia’s Ministry of Defense.
In its November 11 report, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) noted an account from a Russian military blogger who claimed that the Russian Aerospace Forces had lost three helicopter crews. The institute also compiled conflicting accounts of what may have happened in the early hours of that morning.
Ka-52 and Mi-8 appear in the reports
According to the aviation news site Air Data News, one account mentioned two Kamov Ka-52 helicopters and one Mil Mi-8. Another mentioned a Ka-52, an Mi-8 and a MiG-31 interceptor. The types of aircraft involved remain unconfirmed, as does the number of helicopters that may have been lost.
The belief that Democrats will dismantle a system designed to serve the rapacious greed of the war machine and the ruling billionaire class is a mirage.
Power does not rest in the Congress. It does not rest in the courts. It does not even rest in the imperial presidency. It rests in the hands of Wall Street financiers, Silicon Valley, private equity firms, the fossil fuel industry, the predatory health care and pharmaceutical giants, agribusinesses and, most of all, the war industry.
No mainstream politician, including Bernie Sanders, dares utter a word against our entrenched militarism. If you do, you end up like Ralph Nader, who was turned into a pariah by a compliant media and our corporate-indentured political parties. Nader spoke the truth. He paid for his honesty.
We are about to witness the largest increase in war spending in American history with a proposed $1.5 trillion budget. The average taxpayer already shells out over $4,000 a year to the war industry as consumer and environmental agencies are dismantled, health care and education are defunded and programs such as Medicaid and food stamps (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) are slashed.
The new Pentagon budget will hand $58.5 billion to artificial intelligence and military command-and-control centers and see the effective merging of the United States and Israeli military industrial complexes. Seventy-four percent of the increase in the proposed $1.5 trillion budget will go to private contractors, including those who are building massive data centers on military bases.
None of this is good for us or good for the planet. The Pentagon, powered by the fossil fuel industry, is the world’s largest institutional polluter, emitting an estimated 66 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2024.
Americans, meanwhile, struggle with rising prices — nearly 30 percent of people go into debt to buy groceries. An estimated114,174. Americans die each year due to lack of health insurance or inadequate health care while a single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and reduce annual health expenditures by $1.04 trillion, or nearly 20 percent. Twenty-five percent of Americans are functionally unemployed. The minimum wage remains frozen, despite Democratic Party promises to raise it, at $ 7.25 an hour.
The elites use war not only for personal enrichment, but to stifle class conflict.
War, as W.E.B. Du Bois said, diverts the poor from their real interests. It funnels national frustrations into the “heroic” battle against a common enemy. The nationalist cant, with its endemic racism, seduces those who are alienated or on the margins of society into feeling they suddenly belong. It entices them to sacrifice themselves for a “noble” cause. They becime the architects of their own enslavement. They march like sheep into war’s purgatory.
By the time they wake up, it is too late. They are cast aside, as so many of our veterans have painfully discovered, like human refuse.
But as a tactic to consolidate power and enrich the billionaire class, it is unbeatable.
Wars will only be curtailed, if not halted, when we nationalize the weapons industry and dramatically reduce the military budget. Until then, nothing, absolutely nothing, will change.
Indeed, things will only get worse.
No one in Congress — or any other branch of government — will do this for us.
The masters of war sitting in the boardrooms of Boeing, General Dynamics or Northrop Grumman are not praying for peace in the Middle East or coexistence with China and Russia. The generals — who build their careers by orchestrating wars and post military careers enriching themselves working for defense contractors — are not seeking a cessation of global conflicts. They are seeking hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars and government debt to fuel the self-defeating cycle of endless war.
The corporate vultures — especially the war makers — are, as I write, descending on Congress. They are meeting with Democratic Party leaders and holding out promises of millions in cash. They will corrupt, neutralize and compromise most. They will destroy the careers of the very few who refuse to do their bidding.
They hold the real power. They have no intention of surrendering it.
The manufacturing of weapons systems and the waging of war are the chief activities of the U.S. government. It is no longer one among other means of advancing the national interest. War and violence are how we speak to the rest of the world.
The “shadow world,” — as the author Andrew Feinstein calls it in his book on the global arms trade — is defined by staggering levels of corruption, deception and senseless death. It is lawless and unregulated. Its criminal activities, cannibalization of national budgets and secrecy are sanctified in the name of “national security.”
Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon Technologies), Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Leonardo, Airbus, Rheinmetall and ThyssenKrupp, along with Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Palantir, Goldman Sachs, Citibank and Exxon, are the state.
We, including our political class, are the vassals.
The voters can send whoever they want to Congress, but until these corporations and the billionaire class are regulated, taxed and controlled, until their vast monopolies are broken up, until we stop squandering half of all discretionary spending on war, nothing will change.
Nothing.
Civilizations, as the historian Arnold J. Toynbee argued, “die from suicide, not by murder.” They are disemboweled by an uncontrollable and unaccountable military that drains state budgets and plunges dying empires into one military debacle after the next. These decaying civilizations finally collapse from within.
This is where we are headed.
The corporations, and the billionaires who run them, buy and trade politicians, academics and journalists like Pokémon cards. Their lobbyists write the legislation. They own the media. They have stifled the academy, shutting down free speech and purging critics. Judges offer them unlimited power. To defy them — and I speak from personal experience — is to be cast into the wilderness.
The military-industrial complex, as Karl Liebknecht said of German imperialists on the eve of World War I, is the enemy within.
The authors estimate that $130 billion was made from arms exports by Western nations to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates during the war on Yemen and over $50 billion from Israeli foreign military procurements.
“RTX Chairman and CEO Christopher T. Calio made $18 million in 2024, after being appointed halfway through the year, while his compensation package surged to almost $25 million in 2025,” the authors note. “His predecessor, Gregory Hayes, was remunerated to the tune of nearly $22 million in 2023. Lockheed Martin CEO and former U.S. Air Force pilot Jim Taiclet, who was deployed in Saudi Arabia while serving during the Gulf War, earns an annual package of more than $23 million. Since his appointment in 2020 he has raked in more than $136 million in total Lockheed Martin compensation.”
Phebe Novakovic, the CEO of General Dynamics, has a net worth estimated at $420 million, up $270 million since 2020.
But it is not only the CEOs who profit.
Members of Congress and their families traded between $24 million and $113 million worth of Pentagon contractor stocks in 2024.
Representative Josh Gottheimer from New Jersey — a Democrat — is a former Clinton speechwriter and a close ally of House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries. Gottheimer, who is heavily funded by the pro-Israel lobby and an ardent Zionist, traded $22 million worth of stock in the top 100 Pentagon contractors, including Microsoft — which received $414 million from the Department of Defense in 2023 for software and cloud computing services — Northrop Grumman and IBM.
Gottheimer serves on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Financial Services Committee. He is well placed to know which defense companies are enriched by government contracts and which are not.
Former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is not any better. She made an estimated $38.6 million profit in one year from her stock trading, the most of any lawmaker, in 2024.
These politicians run the Democratic Party. They carry out the same illegal insider trading and have the same conflicts of interest as the Republicans and the Trump White House. Hunter Biden is no less odious than Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump.
“Honeywell — which provides sensors and guiding devices to assist the Israeli military in airstrikes in Gaza — is the most commonly held arms company stock among members of Congress, followed by RTX, the company that makes missiles for Israel’s Iron Dome, among other weapons systems,” the authors write.
Members of Congress, they report, “made more than 13,300 trades totaling over $635 million in 2025.”
The arms trade, the authors illustrate, has created an unelected, shadowy cabal of foreign policy, corporate and military officials, along with academics, who — no matter who is in the White House or the Congress — feed the military beast.
This cabal, many parked in think tanks funded by the defense industry and given prominent platforms on cable news channels, preach endless war. They ensure the fabrication of bombs, missiles, warplanes, drones, ships, tanks and guns. They ship these weapons around the globe. They sustain the interconnected network of cutting-edge, high-tech systems of information warfare and surveillance, powered by data processing centers, cloud technologies and artificial intelligence.
Once these weapons and tools of surveillance are tested on Palestinians or Yemenis, they are brought back to manage and surveil us — an imperial boomerang abolishing what is left of our civil liberties and freedom.
The tyranny empire imposes on others, as Thucydides reminded us, it finally imposes on itself.
The choice, as Rosa Luxemburg pointed out, is socialism or barbarism. If we do not dismantle global capitalism, if we do not free ourselves from the tentacles of the war industry, we will descend into the Hobbesian world of totalitarian capitalism, failed states, mass migrations, endless war, ecocide and permanent immiseration.
Israeli strike on Gaza hospital kills six people including doctor and child
Story by Associated Press Reporters
An Israeli airstrike hit one of the main hospitals still operating in the Gaza Strip killing six people, including a surgeon and a 13-year-old boy, Gaza’s Health Ministry said.
The Israeli military said the strike on Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza on Thursday was targeting a Hamas commander and other militants, without providing evidence.
The commander it identified was not among the dead.
An Israeli air strike targeting the Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza has killed six people and wounded at least a dozen more, Gaza’s health ministry said.
The strike hit the hospital’s surgical wing, the ministry and witnesses said.
Footage showed several wards and operating rooms heavily damaged or destroyed, with debris scattered across hospital beds and equipment and rebar dangling from holes in the ceiling.
Zelensky: “The Russians have taken thousands of Ukrainian children from our land, and now we see something even worseịỊi
According to the Ukrainian president, Russia has already started sending some of these children into the Russian army.
These are children who were taken from Ukraine and have grown up over the years of this war.
“This is horrible. And it must stop.”
Putin sends Ukraine’s stolen children to military training at special camps
The abducted children are sent to indoctrination centres linked to Russia’s biggest oil companies, Gazprom and Rosneft
March 27, 2026 12:39 pm (Updated 3:40 pm)
3 min read
An image shared by Yale researchers in their report showing a military event hosted at a Russian camp. A child, thought to be Ukrainian, can be seen in military fatigues shooting a pistol. (Photo: via Yale HRL)
Thousands of children abducted from their homes in Ukraine and forcibly taken to Russia during the conflict have ended up at military training camps linked to two of the country’s leading oil companies, Gazprom and Rosneft.
Now, the scale of the Russian mechanism behind the child abductions has been laid bare, with the country’s leading oil companies found to be facilitating the transportation and re-education of more than 2,000 children between 2022-2025.
The UK has sanctioned both firms as part of efforts to choke off revenues that go into funding Putin’s war in Ukraine.
Rosneft has denied all of the allegations included in Yale’s report and described the findings as “misinformation”.
In these camps, the abducted Ukrainian children are indoctrinated into a pro-Russian mindset, with some turning their backs on their families. These camps often serve as accommodation, and some provide the children with military training.
In their report, the researchers at Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab said that one Gazprom subsidiary, Gazprom Transgaz Ekaterinburg, posted images and videos of children being given army training in August 2022.
“At the event, children reportedly performed military drills, hand-to-hand combat, grenade throwing, and rifle shooting,” the report stated.
At least 2,158 children from Donetsk, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia were taken to at least six camps that were owned by Gazprom subsidiaries, sponsored by Gazprom and Rosneft subsidiaries, or their trade union organizations since 2022, the researchers found.
“This study can conclude that Gazprom and Rosneft, under the leadership of executives financially and politically tied to Putin, willingly aids the Kremlin’s agenda to engage in widescale Russification of Ukraine’s children,” they found.
Children rescued and brought back to Ukraine have been found to carry physical and mental signs of trauma, with specialist therapy required to help them recover. Some have recounted alarming experiences, including being stripped naked by their captors and physically searched.
“This study is the first public demonstration that these companies’ have integral involvement in Russia’s systematic campaign of child deportation and indoctrination,” said Nathaniel Raymond, executive director at the Lab.
The revelation comes after US sanctions on Russian fuel were temporarily lifted by Donald Trump to ease the energy supply crunch sparked by the US-Israel war with Iran. But the effect has been that Gazprom and Rosneft are the first known Russian Federation-affiliated companies linked to Putin’s alleged war crimes, which are now profiting from another conflict.
However on Thursday, the US said it would provide $25 million (around £18m) in new funding to identify, return, and rehabilitate Ukrainian children.
Zelenskyy says SpaceX’s Starshield restrictions have returned—disrupting Ukraine’s drone defenses
Story by Siladitya Ray, Forbes Staff
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Topline
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Thursday that restrictions on its military’s use of Elon Musk’s Starshield satellite communications service have returned, disrupting its combat operations and allowing Russian drones to strike targets in the country, a month after similar restrictions triggered a diplomatic dispute involving the Ukrainian government, President Donald Trump’s administration and Musk’s company SpaceX.
White House counsel Will Scharf vowed Wednesday that the Trump administration is prepared to fight “tooth and nail” against congressional Democrats who launch what he called “inappropriate” investigations into the president and his officials.
Appearing on Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt Tonight, Scharf defended his warning letter to incoming House Oversight Chair Robert Garcia (D-CA), which suggested Democratic investigations into the administration could “cross the line into blatant criminality.”
“What we’ve seen in the last week is this explosion by new Democrat members of Congress, by existing Democrat members of Congress, and they’re talking about subpoenas and investigations for blatantly unlawful purposes,” Scharf claimed.
“I thought it was very, very important that just at the outset we set the tone,” he continued. “If there’s going to be an investigative process here, it should be a dignified, lawful investigative process.”
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Scharf went on to accuse Democrats of reviving the “lawfare” President Donald Trump faced before returning to the White House.
“I would have hoped that the Democrats would have learned a lesson from that,” he said. “The only thing they achieved was putting President Donald J. Trump back in the White House where he belongs.”
The White House lawyer insisted “the Constitution and the law are absolutely on our side” before laying out what he considered improper uses of congressional oversight.
“They can’t investigate for the purpose of inflicting pain on government officials; they can’t investigate things for their own self-aggrandizement. These are blatantly inappropriate uses of Congress’s power,” Scharf argued.
“We’re gonna see what happens in January, but we’re ready to fight tooth and nail here if that’s the road they want to go down,” he warned.
His remarks came after Garcia rejected the White House’s warning, accusing Trump of attempting to intimidate Congress ahead of Democrats taking control of bothchambers in January.
“We are a co-equal branch of government and will not be deterred by baseless threats from a weaponized DOJ or from the President’s lawyers,” Garcia declared.
CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig also dismissed the administration’s suggestion that Democrats’ threats of investigations could constitute criminal conduct.
“No, this is not anything even remotely close to a crime,” Honig said Wednesday.
Meet Will Scharf, Trump’s New White House Counsel Who Shares an Interesting History With the President
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Scharf served as a personal lawyer to Trump during the election interference case
Scharf, who hails from New York and graduated from Harvard Law School in 2011, has served as a federal prosecutor and a clerk for two federal judges.
When announcing Scharf’s new appointment, Trump acknowledged that the conservative lawyer had also previously represented him in “numerous cases, including at the Supreme Court.” Scharf was Trump’s personal lawyer from 2023 to 2025, as Trump faced a series of criminal and civil cases in-between his two stints in the White House.
Scharf was part of the team that put forth arguments to the Supreme Court in 2024 over whether Presidents should have immunity from prosecution for actions taken while in Office.
Scharf celebrated the ruling, calling it a “tremendous win for the Constitution” and for Trump, in a statement to the Kansas City Star. He said it had been an “honor” to represent Trump in the matter.
Scharf made an unsuccessful bid for Missouri Attorney General in 2024
After serving as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Missouri from 2020 to 2022, Scharf launched a bid for the Republican candidacy of Missouri’s Attorney General, going up against the incumbent Andrew Bailey in 2024.
Pointing towards the work he carried out as a federal prosecutor assigned to the Violent Crimes Unit as well as his “instrumental” role in the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett as Supreme Court Justices, Scharf honed in on his D.C. experience as he mounted his campaign.
“I’ve put hardened criminals in prison, and I’ve put constitutional conservatives on the Supreme Court. I’m ready to fight back against the woke left and out-of-control federal government to defend our rights and liberty,” read a statement from Scharf in a campaign prospectus.
In a campaign ad, Scharf claimed that then-President Biden and his legal team were “wrecking” the American legal system and “doing everything they can to stop President Trump and the MAGA agenda.” Scharf said it was time for a Missouri Attorney General “who will return fire” as he pretended to fire a grenade launcher at boxes of depicted legal documents and evidence against Trump.
In a candidate survey, Scharf said that “fighting for President Trump” was one of the three things he wanted voters to remember about his goals for office, should he be elected.
Scharf lost the Republican primary to Bailey, receiving just 37% of the vote.
Scharf was pivotal in securing Trump’s controversial White House ballroom plans
Trump appointed Scharf as the at-large commissioner to the National Capital Planning Commission in July 2025.
The President appointed several members of his Administration to the Commission as he sought overview of the renovations to the Federal Reserve building under former Fed chair Jerome Powell.
In the position, Scharf has played a pivotal role in bringing Trump’s controversial White House ballroom plans to life.
Trump has faced widespread criticism for demolishing the East Wing of the White House to make room for the grand ballroom design.
Scharf defended the project in April, insisting “the only constant in the history of the White House is that practically every change, every modification, every addition, and indeed every feature that we now celebrate as an iconic aspect of the White House was roundly and viciously condemned in its day.”
“Any argument that relies on the idea that the White House is unchangeable or should be unchangeable flies in the face of the very history of the structure such critics claim they are trying to protect,” he added.
Despite the Commission’s arguments, the construction of the $400 million ballroom—a space Trump insists is essential for security purposes—continues to face legal challenges.
A federal appeals court on Aug. 7 ruled that the construction of the ballroom could not continue without congressional authorization. Trump has said he intends to appeal the matter to the Supreme Court.
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