Nick Ashdown

In Lebanon people are sleeping in cars or sitting in front of schools, which have opened their doors to displaced, because there is nowhere else to go.

I witnessed one woman begin screaming outside one school who said they had no more place. People sat along the walls or on motorised scooters.

Some immediate thoughts on possible implications of the current US/Israel-Iran war for Turkey:

1) For Turkey, the security and economic risks of a prolonged war are significant. These include rising energy prices amid ongoing domestic economic fragility, potential declines in tourism revenues,

People keep saying that this goes against the Davis speech. It does not. Carney said the rules based international order was always hypocritical, is now dead, and we live in a time of rupture. I disagree with support but this is not against what he said. The sign is gone. GONE GONE.

What Could Go Wrong, or Right, in a War with Iran The foreign-policy analyst Karim Sadjadpour on what it would mean for the United States to pursue regime change in Iran, once again.

Was listening to interviews with Iranians in Iran at the beginning of this podcast, and they also supported an American attack.

www.newyorker.com/podcast/the-...

Putin will attack Europe next "If Russia Wins" author Carlo Masala on why Moscow is already looking beyond Ukraine, and how Europe can defend itself without America

"The more likely scenario is not columns of Russian tanks rolling into Poland, but rather a limited attack on a Nato member that challenges the alliance to risk a major military confrontation with Russia to come to that state’s defence."

There's lots of other good (and free) Euro alternatives to US software (hardware is harder) that also have much greater privacy and no enshittification.

Search engines: Ecosia (🇫🇷), Mojeek (🇬🇧), Qwant (🇩🇪)

Web browser: Vivaldi (🇳🇴/🇮🇸)

Email: Proton Mail (🇨🇭)

Word Processor: LibreOffice (🇫🇷)

Invest in Europe!

Americans Are Leaving the U.S. in Record Numbers More citizens are replanting overseas, drawn by a quality of life made easily affordable by the U.S.’s enviable salaries.

"America’s own citizens are leaving in record numbers, replanting themselves and their families in lands they find more affordable and safe...These days, the social democracies of Europe are luring Americans...The new American dream, for some of its citizens, is to no longer live there."

For research, make sure it provides citations (to credible sources) after *every paragraph*, and for translations/summarizations, you gotta check/supervise it, just like if you had an employee do it. And again, I'd never use it for actual writing (its proofreading is incredible though).

When people say AI hallucinates a majority or even large minority of the time, I don't know what to say, except that's never ever been my experience. I'd say less than 5% of the time for me. It's trial and error though, and it takes months (years?) to learn how to use AI well.

I use Whisper for transcriptions of audio (in any major language) and it works almost perfectly, even with accents, background noise, etc. You can use it unlimited for free if you download an application like Vibe, though it's bad at distinguishing between multiple speakers.

But then I tried Claude, and it summarizes book chapters almost flawlessly (you can write the first few words of each chapter to make sure it distinguishes between them) and translations are phenomenal if you use detailed parameters ("tell me if you're unsure about a word," etc.)

The only times I've seen bad hallucinating (with ChatGPT and Gemini) is when summarizing an epub book file, or translating long interviews (when it works, the translations are stunning though, much more natural than DeepL because its aware of the context).

One of Turkey's best reporters arrested for the usual political reasons.

EU commissioner Marta Kos’s visit to Turkey—and her warm rhetoric about Turkey’s growing importance and the EU’s need to deepen ties—has had the intended effect. In Ankar, it’s being hailed as the start of a new chapter in Turkey–EU relations. But that reading is far too optimistic. 1/4

Our recent article tackles this question directly. TL;DR: Turkey is not secularizing like Europe, where each younger generation is less religious. Instead, religiosity is being reshaped by political polarization, with decline concentrated among non-AKP supporters. A 🧵

Yeah I saw that too, and maybe the 3.2% was never sustainable, but still, 40 million!

What could have been....

Canada may be a small country, but 5% of the world's 9th largest economy is not too shabby, and we're now past 40 million people, with 2023 seeing the highest population growth (3.2%) since 1957, one of the highest anywhere in the world.

America's unravelling is like a mild heart attack that hurts like hell, but ultimately provides the impetus to make healthy, permanent life changes.

Ottawa’s shift away from US defence manufacturers aims to create 125,000 jobs ‘Buy Canadian’ strategy will raise military spending to 5% of GDP and boost economy, says new plan

I sadly think getting out of the F-35s is a pipe dream, but Canada will be allotting 5% of GDP to defence, and will award 70% of that defence spending to the country's own (~600) defence firms.

www.ft.com/content/cde7...?

Mistral’s revenues soar over $400mn as Europe seeks AI independence French start-up is riding a growing wave of demand from European businesses for alternatives to US tech

"Mistral’s customers include ASML, TotalEnergies, HSBC and several European governments including France, Germany, Luxembourg, Greece and Estonia. About 60 per cent of revenues come from Europe, with the rest from the US and Asia."

Am torn about this chart - it shows that despite the always defeatists talk, Europe and the EU in particular have stepped up for their security.

However, it also shows that the level of support is still notably smaller, and in consequence Ukraine has suffered.

For those wanting to avoid American products, I've been trying France's open source Mistral a bit lately, and it seems every bit as good as the other heavyweights. chat.mistral.ai/chat

Also don't forget that Deepl (German) generally scores higher for translation than Google Translate!

"Russia has increased its production of shells so much it is 'in effect, preparing for its next war.'"

"In 2025, Russian factories produced more than 7mn shells, mortar rounds and rockets, according to Estonian estimates, up from 4.5mn in 2024."

‘There’s no way my daughter would have jumped’: why are so many Turkish women falling to their deaths? Every year in Turkey, hundreds of women are recorded as having taken their lives by ‘throwing themselves from a high place’. But many grieving families maintain that investigators are missing the full...

“She was my daughter for 29 years – it’s impossible she jumped from that height."

Hundreds of women are recorded in Turkish state data every year as committing suicide by 'throwing themselves from a high place.' But did they all jump– or were they pushed?

Reporting with @berileski.bsky.social

What Is Your Emergency? 911 calls unlike any we’ve heard before, and other stories about immigration agents sweeping through America. Visit thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners to sign up for our premium subscription. Prologu...

People across the country have called 911 on ICE — for hit-and-runs, for broken laws, for shootings. Callers and dispatchers alike have to figure out what to do in this entirely new situation, where people are calling local police to do something about federal agents. link.podtrac.com/hrwz3zhh

"Even without an agreement on Ukraine that the Trump administration is pushing, some European officials and security analysts say, the Russian military could instantly free up as many as 200,000 battle-hardened troops just by switching from offensive operations to holding the line."

"Russian portrayals of the invasion as a humanitarian mission were sufficient for the U.S. to decline invoking NATO’s Article 5 that calls for allied assistance. Germany proved indecisive, and Poland, while mobilizing, didn’t send troops across the border into Lithuania."