The European Union has authorized its naval mission in the Indian Ocean (apparently there is one) to stop and board Russian shadow fleet tankers suspected of operating under false flags, the bloc announced on Wednesday.
The Spanish Navy frigate Santa María F81, deployed as part of the European Union Naval Force Operation ATALANTA, seen off the coast of Mogadishu, Somalia, on April 24, 2025.EU member states have authorized Operation Atalanta, the union’s counter-piracy naval mission off the Horn of Africa, to begin conducting flag-verification boardings of vessels suspected of belonging to Russia’s shadow fleet in the western Indian Ocean, DefenseNews reported. The decision, announced this week by EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, extends to Atalanta a power already exercised by the EU’s Mediterranean mission, Operation Irini.
Kallas made the announcement alongside news that Irini forces had boarded the sanctioned oil tanker MV South Star on July 20, acting on suspicion that the vessel was sailing under a false flag. “Every illicit voyage helps sustain Russia’s war machine. We are matching our sanctions with action at sea,” Kallas said, adding that the Atalanta authorization “further tightens the net.”
The move considerably widens the EU’s geographic reach against the shadow fleet, a loosely defined network of tankers with opaque ownership structures that Moscow uses to sell oil above the Western-imposed price cap. While Irini patrols the Mediterranean, Atalanta operates across the Somali Basin, the Gulf of Aden, the Red Sea, the Gulf of Suez, the Gulf of Aqaba and waters around Oman, and was launched as the EU’s first-ever naval mission in 2008 to combat piracy.
It is separate from the EU mission ASPIDES, which is designed to protect shipping in the Red Sea from attacks by the Iran-backed Yemeni Houthi rebels. One look at the exploding price of oil shows just how much the market thinks of Europe "defending" this particular waterway.
The corridor where the mission operates is a critical transit route for tankers carrying Russian crude toward buyers in Asia. Brussels has already sanctioned more than 600 vessels suspected of belonging to the network.
Generally, ships on the high seas cannot simply be stopped and boarded by any third country. However, Article 110 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea permits warships to stop and inspect a vessel only where there is reasonable suspicion it is stateless or flying a flag to which it is not entitled. This falls short of a blanket authority to stop any sanctioned or Russia-linked ship, but flying false flags has been a frequent practice on Russian shadow fleet vessels.
The council decision, the operational plan and the rules of engagement that would spell out exactly how far Atalanta’s new powers extend have so far not been made public.
The approach has already produced results elsewhere. Irini’s flag checks contributed to pressure that culminated in a Cameroon purge of 39 vessels from its shipping registry after investigators uncovered fraudulent paperwork and fake registry websites used to disguise shadow fleet tankers.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has previously denounced such interceptions as “piracy,” underscoring how the expanded mandate is likely to further sharpen tensions between Brussels and Moscow over enforcement at sea.
One caveat to all this: unlike oil, Russian LNG (which Europe is absolutely desperate for) will remain exempt from EU sanctions. Which prompted Rabobank's Michael Every earlier today to ask rhetorically "realpolitik or real weakness?"
Tyler Durden Fri, 07/24/2026 - 04:15Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,
BBC naturalist Chris Packham has openly requested a guest role on the fictional soap EastEnders so he can turn the nation's most-watched entertainment show into a vehicle for climate crisis messaging.
In comments reported by GB News and drawn from a Radio Times interview, the veteran naturalist described his fantasy appearance: an environmental disaster such as a flood hitting the fictional London borough, followed by him marching through as himself with a placard to lecture the locals.
Packham told Radio Times he wants the role because it "would give me the capacity to communicate to an audience which I don't talk to in my sphere of work."
Chris Packham makes request for BBC EastEnders role to spread awareness of climate crisishttps://t.co/EGpYTlGvjp
— GB News (@GBNEWS) July 22, 2026He complained that while some people understand the "scale of the crisis," broader media fails at "truth telling" to "bring it home to everyone."
"The trouble is, I keep popping that bubble and looking outside, and I see that other people are not aware of the gravity of that crisis, or some of them are still in the position where actually they're denying ... and that's really scary," he said.
He called for the messaging to be "integrated into broader output, so properly into news obviously, properly into weather where we talk about climate as well as weather - but also into dramas."
? Chris Packham urges Barclays customers to set themselves on fire pic.twitter.com/0PtNRFqg7l
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) August 17, 2024Chris Packham should consider fucking off pic.twitter.com/zt9LlndWvP
— MrFezziwig™ (@MrFezz15) April 18, 2026Chris Packham, "Three things.. The message is to keep fossil fuels in the ground, we need a just transition towards renewables.. Stonehenge has been adequately cleaned.. For the first time we've seen people concerned about a rare species of lichen" @ChrisGPackham
"JSO have... pic.twitter.com/M8MQcO21hr
I challenged Chris Packham on BBC bias around trans and gender ideology... pic.twitter.com/6qQcFaGfTI
— Andrew Gold (@AndrewGold_ok) April 29, 2026This is not subtle. It is an explicit pitch to hijack prime-time entertainment and insert alarmist talking points into the daily lives of millions who never tune into nature documentaries.
British soaps have a documented history of being quietly weaponised for official narratives. FOI documents obtained last year revealed that during the Covid period the Department for Culture, Media and Sport held secret meetings with the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 to coordinate "national unity programming."
Officials explored inserting pro-vaccine storylines into EastEnders and Coronation Street. Characters were scripted to celebrate jabs as winning the lottery while sceptics were mocked as "anti-vaxxers." One MP later described the broadcasters as reduced to "mere arms of the state."
The same playbook has been applied to immigration. EastEnders has featured storylines about exploited African migrants and racially motivated murders of immigrants after hiring campaigner Ade Lamuye in 2022.
Lamuye sits on the advisory board of the Power of Pop Fund, which has directed nearly £5 million to organisations that use media to reframe migration debates.
Similar influence operations have shaped sympathetic asylum-seeker characters in the other popular long running British soap Coronation Street. Activists openly boast that entertainment "holds influence and power to make real change."
Far from being organic storytelling, this is coordinated social engineering, the same approach visible in other mainstream dramas that lecture audiences on pronouns, "deadnaming" and the supposed problems with classic literature. Channel 5's The Teacher delivered some of the most direct examples yet, training viewers to treat biological reality and cultural heritage as potential sources of harm.
Watch the pattern laid bare across programming:
Even children's programming is being enlisted. Netflix is developing a live-action reboot of the 1990s cartoon Captain Planet, the original of which pushed environmental panic, progressive multiculturalism, population control and the idea that humanity itself is the enemy requiring global governance.
Ted Turner's creation was steeped in Club of Rome thinking that treated pollution and climate as a common enemy to justify changed attitudes and supranational control.
The method is consistent: identify a captive, trusting audience, embed the message inside drama so it feels organic, and watch compliance rise. Packham is simply asking for the same treatment for net-zero ideology.
While Packham demands soaps lecture viewers about "climate breakdown," the actual evidence keeps undercutting the apocalyptic script. A bombshell Royal Society paper concluded that climate change is not causing mass extinctions, directly challenging one of the most repeated scare claims.
The IPCC itself has admitted that its most extreme apocalyptic scenarios are implausible, a quiet but significant climb-down from the catastrophe rhetoric used to justify rapid policy upheaval.
Research examining three million years of data has found no consistent link between CO2 levels and temperature, leaving net-zero activists without a straightforward causal story.
Temperature records underpinning the COP30 alarmist agenda have been shown to rest on heavily adjusted and questionable data, further eroding the foundation of official claims.
Even Bill Gates has publicly walked back the idea that climate change will end the world, prompting a triumphant response from those who have long argued the threat was overstated.
Meanwhile the Great Barrier Reef continues to defy the narrative, recording its fifth-highest coral cover on record even as media outlets insist a tipping point has been reached.
A major US government report has catalogued the systematic abuses of "settled" climate science and the role those abuses have played in driving net-zero policies that impose heavy economic costs for uncertain benefits.
The milder public messaging about weather reports and soap storylines sits alongside far more radical demands. Some German climate groups have openly called for total deindustrialisation of their country within 15 years, treating economic self-destruction as a moral necessity.
Others treat the entire agenda as a quasi-religious cult, complete with orthodoxy, heretics and demands for collective sacrifice that go well beyond practical environmental protection.
When the warming narrative softens under the weight of contradictory data, the same voices simply pivot. Scientists have revived ice-age doom scenarios, and Al Gore has shifted his public emphasis in ways that suggest the next scare is already being prepared.
Earlier claims of imminent climate armageddon have been quietly cancelled or scaled back, yet the institutional machinery that produced them remains intact and ready for the next iteration.
Packham's EastEnders pitch is the latest attempt to keep the emotional temperature high after the hard data has cooled.
Flood Albert Square on screen, march through with a placard, and hope the audience never notices that the real-world evidence keeps failing to match the script.
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Tyler Durden Fri, 07/24/2026 - 03:30What is there left to sanction and what is its effectiveness? Europe is boasting of no less that its 21st package of sanctions against Russia, approved by the EU on Thursday.
Apparently it has found plenty of entities still to sanction, as the compiled blacklisting is said to be the EU's largest in four years, targeting primarily financial and energy sectors. The bloc also agreed to freeze the Russian oil price cap at current levels for another year, alongside issuing 218 new designations.
Getty Images"At a time when Ukraine has built military momentum, our sanctions continue to weaken the economic foundations of Russia’s war effort," EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said.
And Kaja Kallas, High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and chair of the Foreign Affairs Council, announced that "With each round of sanctions, we squeeze Russia's economy and its capacity to prolong its illegal war. Our 21st package includes the highest number of listings in four years."
She described: "We’re hitting over a hundred banks and crypto operators, 40+ vessels in Russia’s shadow fleet, and several oil refineries in Russia and Belarus. More than 50 military-industrial entities are included, key actors involved in the production of Russia's long-range drones. Russia will only negotiate to end its illegal war and stop killing civilians if it is pressured to do so. Sanctions add to this pressure."
Notably the EU is targeting not just Russia's so-called shadow fleet, but any vessel that even assists ships under sanction. According to a rundown via an EU media readout:
Concerning energy, today’s package pauses the automatic adjustment of the oil price cap mechanism until 15 July 2027. This is to ensure that Russia's profits from oil sales remain contained, despite the exceptional market situation caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Today’s agreement foresees an interim review of the suspension to ensure that the mechanism remains necessary and proportionate. The EU is also continuing to target the shadow fleet by extending the scope of the existing rules also to cover vessels supporting the shadow fleet, by providing bunkering and other services, and listing 41 more vessels on top of the 632 already sanctioned. These measures target non-EU tankers that are part of the shadow fleet circumventing the oil price cap mechanism, that support Russia’s energy sector in other ways, or that transport military equipment for Russia or stolen Ukrainian grain. The EU is designating 8 entities and 1 individual active in the shadow fleet ecosystem, including companies operating on behalf of Russia’s oil majors and, for the first time, a crewing agency providing support to the shadow fleet.
Furthermore, the EU is targeting the oil sector, in particular refineries. It is designating 18 entities and 1 individual in the oil sector, including 3 refineries in Russia, a major Belarusian oil refinery, as well as a company created to sell Belarusian petroleum products within Russia. In addition, the package creates the possibility to prohibit transactions with listed refineries in Russia and in third countries which process or refine Russian crude oil and petroleum products. In that framework, the EU is imposing a transaction ban – entering into force in six months - on a Georgian refinery trading and processing Russian oil in Kulevi. Furthermore, the EU added five oil traders to the entities subject to transaction ban for frustrating the prohibition on purchasing Russian crude oil and petroleum products.
With the Iran war and Hormuz crisis seeing rising oil prices, Russia might not find itself so squeezed after all?
"Russia's state oil and gas revenue, which accounts for around a fifth of total budget income, is seen rising by 60% in July from the same month a year ago thanks to the increase in global oil prices, Reuters calculations showed on Thursday.
A steep rise from profit-based… pic.twitter.com/tFLV902APw
Also notable is that Russian LNG is to remain partially exempt from EU sanctions - in what some analysts are calling a sign of weakness.
EU countries have reached a deal on a sweeping 21st sanctions package against Moscow.
It was only possible by allowing Greece to keep sending Russian gas to countries outside the bloc.
🔗 https://t.co/tqqhCCbmqW pic.twitter.com/TRpiygcDQL
After previously holding up the EU passage of the new anti-Moscow measures, Greece won an exemption permitting continued shipments of Russian LNG to non-EU buyers indefinitely.
Tyler Durden Fri, 07/24/2026 - 02:45Authored by Iain Davis via Off-Guardian.org,
Let’s consider the arguments of those who advocate global governance, the people whom Hrvoje Morić identifies as the Multipolaristas. They are often engaged in China-maxxing and are, whether they know it or not, essentially serving as propagandists for the global oligarchy.
Research conducted by analysts working for the South China Morning Post (SCMP)—an English-speaking, Western-aligned Chinese news outlet—suggests that, between 2015 and 2025, a notable shift occurred in the way China and its government were portrayed by the leading Western media organisations.
Chief analyst Jianlu Bi, who is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Policy Studies and a research fellow at the Charhar Institute in Beijing, wrote:
[N]early 70 per cent of stories covering China’s economy, technology or environment in 2019 had a negative tone [but] by 2025, the share of negative stories dropped to around 40 per cent, along with an increase in neutral coverage across all categories and positive coverage of the [Chinese] economy.
This notable Western media narrative shift is part of a wider trend that can be described as “China-maxxing.” With outlets like The Economist, the Financial Times, and The New York Times—all previously known for their staunch anti-China propaganda—now quite regularly extolling the virtues of China and, most notably, its economy, “China-maxxing” is an identifiable phenomenon.
The Western mainstream media is gradually shifting to sell the Chinese government to us as the “good guys.”
Recently, Elon Musk has engaged in some China-maxxing of his own. Musk is part of the gaggle of oligarchs eager to roll out AI data centers wherever they can. Musk was keen to point out that the only national government that has, in his view, adopted the right approach is China’s:
The availability of energy is the issue. If you look at electrical output outside of China, it’s more or less flat. Very slight increase, but pretty much flat. [. . .] If you’re putting data centers anywhere except China, where are you going to get your electricity? Especially as you scale, how are you going to turn the chips on? Magical power sources? Magical electricity fairies?
The previous blanket Western media vilification of China was always absurd state propaganda. China has been framed as the comic-book villain to encourage Western populations to accept further suppressions of their rights by their own governments and to claim justification for increased public spending on the Western military-intelligence complex.
Meanwhile, the multinational corporations that benefit from the government contracts, supposedly awarded to protect Western populations from the fabricated Chinese threat, such as Musk’s SpaceX, are led by oligarchs who genuinely pose a threat to everyone.
Though he didn’t use the term himself, in trying to explain China-maxxing, Mr. Jianlu offered a list of potential reasons for it. These included the Western media’s recognition of China’s technological and economic progress, the Chinese government’s apparent commitment to tackling climate change, its drive for efficiency, and so on. Jianlu argued that all of this has combined to force Western media outlets to reevaluate how they cover China and China-related matters.
Nation-states and national governments are set to be replaced by a global Technocracy. At some point, therefore, the conversation about moving away from the extant governance system to which people are accustomed to the new one has to commence.
Returning to Jianlu’s analysis, he is a leading Western policy think tank representative, and the media outlets he discussed primarily serve as propagandists for Western policy. Buried in the analysis, there is a brief statement that indicates what the real purpose of China-maxxing is:
Unlike the US, where policy shifts can abruptly occur due to political changes and short-term economic pressures, [. . .] China’s long-term strategic planning and consistent policy implementation have yielded results.
Dark Enlightenment-enthused oligarchs like Peter Thiel want to “escape from politics in all its forms,” and beyond dictatorship, there is no political mechanism of any kind in the Technocracy advocated by oligarchs like Elon Musk.
The oligarchy intends to make itself the feudal lords (founders) of private smart city-states similar to those currently being developed in China. The UN desires the same transformation. China-maxxing suits their shared agenda perfectly.
China-maxxing is yet more Western media propaganda, this time intended to convince Westerners that the model of government they are accustomed to no longer works. The Chinese development of Technocracy is better because it “yields[s] results.” Irrespective of the fact that no Westphalian-model Western government has ever operated as a democracy, China-maxxing has arrived to persuade Westerners that the so-called “representative democracies” that they have been misled to believe are democracies are now surplus to requirements.
Multipolaristas, specifically those working in the independent media, perhaps unwittingly argue that the dictatorial state control of human beings’ access to resources is acceptable because the accompanying surveillance state seemingly “yields[s] results.” Some say it reduces crime or that the gleaming towers of the new city-states are so beautifully clean and convenient. Others that China’s infrastructure investment strategy shows the world a clear alternative to austerity.
China is nation-building while Western nations decline and collapse. Chinese Technocracy “yields[s] results” that failing Western nations cannot match. Unless, logically, they too adopt Technocracy.
To an extent, the Multipolaristas make reasonable points. Who wouldn’t want to live in safe, clean cities? Who wants austerity when the state could invest in much-needed infrastructure instead? Who wouldn’t want the employment opportunities and the economic benefits that result? But all of the Multipolarista’s ostensibly reasonable observations and commentaries are based upon fatal omissions that result in them essentially spreading Western propaganda, intentionally or otherwise.
No state needs to impose a centralised technological population surveillance system in order to improve public safety, clean the environment or the streets, or invest in public infrastructure and its own economy. By effectively promoting global governance and Technocracy, the Multipolaristas’ foolhardy suggestion is that functional oligarchies are benevolent and that we should trust them.
Oligarchs are constructing their digital kill chains, and oligarchs like Musk are also promoters of China’s blossoming Technate. This is not a coincidence.
There are no historical examples of a state ever successfully imposing the full gamut of despotic behavioural control systems on a large population. But with its Greater Bay Area initiative, linking China’s numerous smart city projects together, China is reaching that point. Now Western mainstream and independent media outlets are showcasing China’s development to sell all the alleged benefits of Technocracy to Western populations.
Neither fascism nor communism even comes close to the behavioural dictatorship Technocracy is designed to inflict. Ignoring this aspect of China’s undoubtedly impressive modernisation is an epistemological error so profound it renders the rest of the Multipolaristas’ arguments practically irrelevant.
If the objective was not to enslave us, no state and no oligarch would construct Technates. The sole purpose of Technocracy is systematic human bondage.
From humanity’s perspective, there is nothing good about living in a Technocracy. No matter what incentives we are given, irrespective of the claimed benefits offered to entice us, giving our consent to those who wish to foist Technocracy upon us is an act of generational suicide.
There is, of course, no reason why we should agree to any of it.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.
Tyler Durden Fri, 07/24/2026 - 02:00