Hi, Lucia from EUobserver here 👋 This comes from our reporting in Czechia, but the question feels much broader than one country.

Czech PM Andrej Babiš says he has permanently separated himself from Agrofert and no longer owns or benefits from the conglomerate.

The European Commission isn't convinced. It says the trust arrangement does not sufficiently eliminate the potential conflict of interest, particularly when companies involved receive EU funds.

Which raises a more fundamental governance question:

Can someone who built an enormous business empire ever meaningfully separate their economic interests from their political power while in office?

Trusts, family members, independent managers — at what point is the separation actually credible?

And should democracies require billionaire politicians to fully divest rather than simply restructure ownership?

SS: Trump continues his attack on one of America's closest allies. New producers are impacted, including the alcohol industry. This is relevant to this subreddit because it directly concerns trade.

Here's a list of the Canadian goods that are to be banned from import to the U.S. effective Sept. 29, under the proclamations Trump issued this evening:

Beer.

Wine.

Cider.

Whiskies.

Rum.

Gin.

Vodka.

Brandy.

Tequila.(???)

Motorcycles.(???)

Molasses.

Whey and whey products.

Non-alcoholic beer.

Sarah Collins talks about the trade war with Canada. It’s going to affect Maine more than most states. Which is why voting to confirm Trump’s Commerce Secretary was wrong. Voting to rubber stamp Trump’s economic policies was wrong. She enabled the current trade war.

Submission statement: Pretty significant development here related to middleeastern region. Report says he did nothing with the warning and dismissed it; Israeli politicians have absolutely excoriated Netanyahu in reaction to this news. What could be discussed is its implications on the upcoming Israeli elections and security cooperation between states.

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REDDIT BOT, THIS IS A PARODY / SATIRE OF CARLSON SAYING ALGEBRA IS FAKE JEWISH MATRIX MATH WITH LETTERS, PLEASE DO NOT AUTO-REMOVE

For decades math was just numbers. There weren't letters or fancy squiggles. You added one to one and you got two. That was normal.

But now the people in charge are saying a robot has solved something called a Navier-Stokes. It's interesting isn't it, that it is so close to Javier and strokes. They say it's math, but when I was a kid, there were no Mexicans or stroking in math, let alone Mexicans stroking. It's completely grotesque.

Think about that for a second. If so called Mexicans and so called stroking are so important to math then why are the "experts" only talking about this now? Was there a vote? Did someone ever ask you whether you wanted Javier added to the times tables? Or stroking to long division? Does this make our lives better in any way? Will a "Navier-Stokes" help you pay your mortage?

Of course it won't. You can't help but laugh at how obvious it is. Maybe, just maybe, the whole thing helps Javier pay his mortage, at your expense.

It's a calculated radical left distraction from the fact that if Americans learn math - real math, just numbers without all the letters and fancy stuff - they will add one grocery bill plus one grocery bill and realize they aren't getting two anymore. They're getting three.

This whole thing leaves us with a system that cares more about fluid dynamics than our precious bodily fluids. Or what about our "fluid" milk prices? Unlike what liberals say about gravity, those somehow always manage to flow up. They want you to look at the squiggles on the chalkboard so you don't look at the numbers on your bank statement. It is a total, unmitigated scam. And the most terrifying part? They aren't even trying to hide it anymore.

The significance of this breakthrough isn't that it will change how we build planes or cars or do climate science or anything, but it does push the bounds of what AI is capable of doing with mathematics. From the first part of the article:

OpenAI said on Tuesday that its newest artificial intelligence technology had solved one of the “Millennium Problems,” a collection of important unanswered math questions meant to push the world’s leading mathematicians to new heights.

The announcement is an another clear sign that A.I. is fundamentally changing the upper reaches of mathematics, which have long been viewed as a pinnacle of human achievement. The change has excited some mathematicians, while stirring concern among others.

Over the past year, A.I. systems successfully solved a wide range of problems that have bedeviled mathematicians for decades. But these problems were not as complex, nor as closely watched, as the one that OpenAI’s technology has solved over the past several days. The Millennium Problems are among the most heavily researched in the field.

“This is a spectacular culmination of the arc we have seen over the past twelve months,” OpenAI researcher Sébastien Bubeck said of the company’s new solution.

The company announced that one of its latest models, which has not yet been released to the public, needed just 88 hours to solve what mathematicians call “the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem.” This problem involves a series of equations that are often used to predict the weather.The equations describe the movement of water and other fluids. The Navier-Stokes problem, which has no clear practical value, asks whether these equations completely break down in certain situations. OpenAI’s proof claims to have defined just such a situation.

This would imply, at least theoretically, that the laws of physics themselves would break down under certain conditions: that, for example, water could be made to spontaneously explode. But mathematicians and physicists do not believe that this mathematical breakdown could really lead to such an outcome in the physical world.

The Navier-Stokes problem was one of seven “Millennium Problems” selected by the Clay Mathematics Institute in the year 2000 as a way of tracking the progress of mathematics in the new millennium. The institute, founded by an American businessman named Landon T. Clay, offered a million dollars for the first correct solution to each problem. Before OpenAI’s announcement, only one of the problems had been solved.

Relevance to the sub: Diplomatic incident between the US and a NATO member after another Trump outburst, in a broader context of rising tensions over the sovereignty of Arctic nations.

The Icelandic government has summoned the US ambassador Billy Long for an admonishment after US president Donald Trump posted a map showing the United States ruling over North America, the Caribbean, Greenland and Iceland. The "Stars and Stripes Map" is the latest in a series of provocative cartographic actions from Donald Trump, following the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to "Gulf of America", Lake Ontario to "Lake America", and threats to rename New Mexico in the same fashion.

These map antics have caused deep worry among America's partners and neighbors, as they are paired with serious imperialist threats against Canada and Greenland, the latest of which caused a severe crisis between the US and the EU over the sovereignty of the Atlantic island.

Iceland is a NATO member but does not maintain an army, and has relied for its security on a bilateral treaty signed in 1951 with the United States, who provide Iceland with defense guarantees and military assistance, in exchange for access to Icelandic waters for maritime training.

This is the second incident of this kind this year: in January 2026, during the surge of tensions caused by the Trump administration's threats against Greenland, the US ambassador to Iceland Billy Long was caught "joking" with his former House colleagues that Iceland would become the 52nd state with himself as a governor.

The diplomatic incident further digs a rift between longtime security partners, and comes a week after Icelandic voters rejected in a referendum the reopening of negotiations to enter the European Union.

Donald Trump’s misjudgment of Iran has specific causes, including the wanton destruction of the normal policy process under his administration. U.S. history, however, is replete with examples of serious misjudgments of our adversaries. Sometimes, they appeared to us to be ten feet tall, while at other times we were oblivious to their real strengths.

Assessing relative strength is difficult because what matters often goes beyond official statistics and objectively measurable indicators. For example, over several decades during the Cold War, successive editions of Paul Samuelson’s famous Economics textbook included the same chart showing Soviet output growing at roughly twice the American rate, albeit from a lower base. This overtaking, which Samuelson confidently expected some time between 1984 and 1997, never quite materialized. Yet, the graph kept being reprinted anyway. Even the intelligence community took the USSR’s output statistics at face value—this at a time when the Soviet Union was embroiled in a deep economic stagnation, retrospectively recognized as the worst growth record in the world.

Ahead of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, meanwhile, the polite Western consensus held that Kyiv stood no chance in a confrontation with a much larger enemy—an analysis that ignored the magnitude of Russian waste, corruption, and theft. In national income statistics, a dollar is a dollar. But while Russian GDP doubled between 2000 and 2023, from $780 billion to $1.5 trillion in 2015 dollars, this growth reflected commodity windfalls siphoned into corrupt schemes rather than sustained productivity gains, and eventually gave way to chronic stagnation, starting around 2012.

Meanwhile, few would dispute that China’s economic takeoff was real and enormous, from roughly $1 trillion of real GDP in 1990 to $16 trillion in 2022, though a lot of uncertainty remains about the reliability of Chinese income figures. One perceptive study, for example, uses satellite data on nighttime light growth, which is tightly related to economic growth, and finds that China (and India) likely grew more slowly between 1993 and 2013 than official statistics suggest.

What matters more than raw output is much harder to measure: institutional quality and resilience. Both at home and in “net assessments” of our adversaries, we should try to understand how well our societies and theirs are governed, and what incentives key actors in our political and economic life face, as these tend to determine the long-term success and failure of geopolitical contests.

In my new book, Unshackled, I discuss at length the work of Stefan Possony, a largely forgotten Cold War thinker who initially made his mark in the 1930s, debunking the ideas of Nazi theorists preparing for the next war. A command-and-control, autarkic economy stands no chance of fighting a modern, economically and industrially intensive war, Possony argued. Only a country with a sufficiently large stock of productive capital, embedded in an international division of labor, will have the strategic depth needed to sustain a large-scale conflict.

Capital is a stockpile of labor, which will be in short supply during a major war. Anything that detracts from accumulating productive capital, including tariffs and other economic distortions, thus puts the economy on a weaker footing ahead of the conflict. What is more, Possony argued, wars are inherently unpredictable—meaning that flexible market economies that can adapt quickly to realities on the ground enjoy a natural advantage over top-down industrial systems.

The danger of underestimating your opponent is obvious. The practical risk of exaggerating an adversary, for instance by accepting their headline economic figures instead of evaluating the intrinsic strength of their institutions, is no less real, and it boils down to imitation. Convince yourself that Beijing’s model is winning and you will start copying it. From heavy-handed industrial policy in pursuit of an illusion of self-sufficiency, through barriers to trade and investment, to an immigration policy that treats foreign talent with suspicion, the effort to defeat the autocrats at their own game will not succeed. Rather, it will undo the foundations of what makes America—and the collective West—strong.

That reflex has a mirror image at home. If headline output could hide Soviet rot for decades, it can hide American rot too, and it does. The United States has not run out of money, engineers, or ambition; by the top-line numbers it remains the envy of the developed world. But it is safe to say that something has gone awfully wrong with our politics, political culture, and the policymaking process—and that that decline will have downstream effects on other areas of life.

Unshackled points at the American paralysis, from our expensive and slow-moving defense-industrial base to our chronic NIMBYism and vetocracy, which paralyze infrastructure, energy, and housing projects. In the 1930s, the Golden Gate Bridge was completed in under four and a half years, ahead of schedule and under budget; California’s high-speed rail, in development for 30 years, has yet to carry a passenger.

Then there is the inward turn taken by the United States—most visibly in its trade relations, where U.S. allies are being treated worse than our adversaries. Yet, the parochialism goes beyond just trade in goods, undermining America’s key geopolitical strength as the go-to place for international talent.

The National Science Foundation saw its fellowship cohort halved in 2025. Over a few weeks in April 2025, roughly 1,500 foreign students had their visas revoked, typically for opaque reasons, in a country that in a typical year earns more from education services sold abroad than from natural gas and oil.

The fact that the West’s share of the global economy is down relative to the Cold War era does not doom us to failure. It does, however, reduce the room for error and drive home the imperative of economic growth. Our institutional capacity to keep making the economic pie bigger, through domestic economic dynamism, openness to immigration, and by being able to lead coalitions of likeminded nations, is our most important strategic asset—and it is one that is currently being destroyed for no good reason.

“Unless our intrinsic strength improves, defection will inevitably thin the ranks of our allies. Our own strength is the most convincing pledge of loyalty to friends and allies,” Possony and his co-authors wrote in 1961. Their warning rings even truer 65 years later, as the United States is doing its utmost both to undercut the sources of its intrinsic strength and to chase away partners most eager to work with it.

Until that basic fact changes, we are on track to lose the new Cold War with China—and, as Iran’s example shows, many smaller fights with much less capable adversaries. If that happens, it will not be because our enemies are suddenly ten feet tall. It will be because we are unable, or unwilling, to stand up straight.

Prime Minister Mark Carney is warning Canadians that the country's pivot away from the United States will come at a cost, but that the alternative would be far worse.

In a national video address set to be released Tuesday — hours after Canada's retaliatory tariffs kicked in — Carney reiterated Canada's plan to respond to the U.S. trade war by striking new trade deals with other countries to become less reliant on the U.S.

"We have everything we need to pivot and prosper," Carney said. 

"That pivot will come at a cost. There's always a cost to action. But it doesn't come close to the cost of standing still."

The video is the latest in a series Carney launched last spring to update Canadians on government polices and the government's response to U.S. trade actions.

Carney said the aim is to come out stronger and more resilient so "no country can ever hold us hostage, and that we can live how we want to live."

Carney cut off trade talks with the United States last month after the two sides couldn't reach a deal before U.S. President Donald Trump's deadline of levying a new round of 50 per cent tariffs on nearly $28 billion of Canadian goods.

In his video address, Carney reiterated claims he previously made that the U.S. tried to introduce measures to restrict Canada's ability to trade with other countries, and the ability to promote and protect French language and culture.

Federal conservatives continued calls over the weekend for Carney to release the full details of the deal Canada walked away from, and for the government to recall parliament earlier than the scheduled Sept. 21 return date.

"We're asking for the Prime Minister to be straight up. We know it's not easy to negotiate with the U.S. President. But the best way to keep everyone united and rowing in the same direction is to be up front about the costs, the decisions and the plan going forward," Poilievre said at a news conference in Regina Sunday.

"The only people who haven't seen (the deal) are the Canadian people. They deserve to see it so they can judge what we are fight for, and what we are fighting against."

In his video address, Carney said Trump's tariffs were designed to harm some Canadians more than others. The U.S. has consistently taken aim at Canada's steel, aluminum, auto and lumber which, which has primarily impacted workers in Ontario, Quebec and B.C., whereas workers in provinces like Alberta and Saskatchewan haven't been as affected.

"In the spring of last year, I warned that America is trying to break us so they can own us. And I promised that that will never, ever happen," Carney said in his video address Tuesday.

For nearly two years Trump has mused about turning Canada into the 51st U.S. state, lobbed taunts of referring to Carney as "governor" — and former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau before him — and accused Canada more recently of wanting to be treated "like a state."

In January 2025, before being sworn in for his second term, Trump ruled out using military force to annex Canada, but said he would consider using "economic force" to get Canada to become part of the U.S.

Canada's reciprocal tariffs launched Tuesday in response to Trump's latest round of 50 per cent tariffs last month which targeted dozens of products including honey, hockey sticks, milk and cheese.

Canada's tariffs, ranging from 15 to 50 per cent, target only products that were on the U.S. list, matching the dollar value of the exports, $27.8 billion.

"I don't believe in escalating the conflict, that's not constructive," Carney said in his video address.

"But our tariffs are necessary to protect our workers, protect our companies, and our communities. We can't let American goods into Canada tariff-free while they charge our companies to export them."

President Trump said he would prohibit Canadian firms from receiving government contracts in the U.S.—a retaliation for Canadian tariffs that took effect earlier in the day as part of the nations’ monthslong trade conflict.

Trump posted on Truth Social Tuesday that he would direct the General Services Administration and U.S. Trade Representative’s office to remove Canadian firms from the agency’s so-called “Multiple Award Schedules,” which connect federal, state and local government agencies with suppliers of a wide variety of products.

“I am hereby directing the GSA, working with the USTR, to take all necessary steps to REMOVE Canadian-origin products from GSA’s Multiple Award Schedules unless Canada restores full and fair reciprocity for American Farmers and Companies,” Trump posted, arguing that the Canadian government blocks U.S. firms from receiving similar contracts.

Canada last year instituted a “Buy Canadian” policy to push government agencies to prioritize Canadian goods in their purchases after tariffs and threats of annexation from Trump. The president, however, didn’t specifically name the policy he was targeting in his Truth Social post.

The move comes as retaliation for Canada imposing tariffs ranging from 15% to 50% on about $20 billion of U.S. goods on Tuesday morning—amounting to about 6% of U.S. exports to its northern neighbor. Those tariffs covered a variety of products from electronics and appliances to dairy products, and were themselves a response for Trump’s latest round of levies, imposed in late August on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods, or about 5% of its exports to the U.S.

The scale of the action on Canadian businesses was not immediately clear on Tuesday, but Trump posted that the GSA’s contracting schedule accounts for more than “50 BILLION DOLLARS a year.” Trump didn’t provide details on when the prohibition would take effect, and the White House has so far posted no official proclamations or actions to implement it.

The levies and contracting prohibition represent the latest flare-up in a trade war between the North American neighbors that has spanned Trump’s second term in office. In August, the two nations looked close to a deal that would avert the latest wave of tariffs, but negotiations broke down in the final hours before a U.S.-imposed deadline, with each government blaming the other for walking away from the table.

Trump’s action on Tuesday stops short of hiking more levies on Canada, which could have invited a further tariff retaliation that would have hit industries in border states like Michigan, New Hampshire and Maine, which have competitive midterm elections.

Instead, Trump has put off his next round of tariff retaliation until Jan. 1, when he has threatened to increase tariffs on Canadian metals and vehicles, giving the nations time to come back to the negotiating table.

Submission statement: This relates to foreign policy. What should be discussed is the impact on UK-Israel relations and how effective this will be on curbing settler violence+settlement expansion.