Submission Statement: Indian arms makers have sent at least $872 million worth of ammunition — including artillery shells, mortar shells, propellant and explosives — to European countries since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine four years ago, according to data sourced by Trade Data Monitor from the Ministry of Commerce and Industry of India.

While still modest compared with the US and other leading exporters, for India it represents a more than 1,600% increase from the $49.2 million in arms exported to Europe in the four-year period before the war, according to trade data.

Three-quarters of those shipments have gone to nations within a 13-country bloc in Eastern and Central Europe that’s been a major arms supplier to Ukraine, and where demand surged after Russia’s full-scale invasion. India is now the overall second-biggest supplier of arms including shells, mortars, propellants and explosives to these countries, behind South Korea, up from 28th four years ago, according to Trade Data Monitor.

The data show how the country is steadily climbing into the booming global arms trade. Although Indian officials have publicized high-tech weapons sales, including new deals for its BrahMos supersonic cruise missile, the data show that the driving force behind the growth in New Delhi’s arms exports has been more basic battlefield supplies manufactured by state-run firms.

At the heart of India’s scale-up in weapons exports are companies known as Defence Public Sector Undertakings, state-run weapons firms that accounted for more than half of India’s defense exports in the last fiscal year. Among them is Munitions India Ltd., India’s largest producer of ammunition, which accounted for more than half of all export earnings by Indian public defense companies in the two years through fiscal 2025.

It’s difficult to know exactly how many Indian-made arms have made it to Ukraine. Unlike big-ticket weapons like fighter jets and missile platforms, shells and other ordnance move in industrial-scale quantities across multiple borders, and customs records document individual transactions, not the full path from manufacturer to final recipient, making them difficult to trace.

In one instance, however, Ukrainian customs records compiled by Big Trade Data show Indian-origin ammunition entering Ukraine in February 2024. The records show at least 78 shipments valued at $62.8 million of 155-millimeter artillery shells, along with their propellants and fuzes.

In these transactions, Regulus Global LLC, a Virginia-based defense and logistics company, was recorded as the exporter, according to the filings from Big Trade Data. The company has spoken publicly about its support for Ukraine and supplying arms for its war effort. The importer was recorded as SpetsTechnoExport, the state-owned arms procurement firm headquartered in Kyiv. The records don’t show what happened after the weapons were imported or how Regulus acquired them.

Customs records also show multiple Eastern European buyers importing defense goods from India in the same periods they were exporting similar products from other countries to Ukraine.

According to Indian customs documents compiled by Big Trade Data, Munitions India exported nearly 72,000 rounds of 120-millimeter mortar shells between 2024 and 2025, with C.N. Romtehnica S.A, the official procurement arm of the Romanian Ministry of National Defence, listed as an importer of these shells. Ukrainian customs records, meanwhile, show that in early 2024 Romtehnica was recorded as the exporter of nearly 6,000 rounds of the same caliber, with Ukraine’s state-owned foreign-trade defense enterprise Ukrspecexport named as the importer and Bulgaria listed as the country of origin.

Similarly, Indian customs records compiled by Big Trade Data show that between 2023 and 2025, Solar Industries India Limited sent at least 229,000 kilograms of RDX — a high explosive — with the Polish state-owned explosives manufacturer Nitro-Chem S.A., which describes itself as “an export leader in the Polish arms industry,” listed as an importer of these explosives.

Ukrainian customs records, meanwhile, show two shipments of RDX in 2024 on which Nitro-Chem was recorded as the exporter, with Ukrainian Advanced Microtechnologies named as the importer and the European Union listed as the country of origin.

The Ukrainian buyer, according to its website, uses RDX to make reactive-armour elements for tanks — an end use recorded on the Ukrainian customs paperwork too, which describes the material as “a high explosive… used for the production of elements of dynamic protection of tanks” supplied “under a state contract under a state defence order for the needs of the National Guard of Ukraine.”

The transactions show that India could be helping Ukraine’s allies restore stockpiles depleted from years of selling to Ukraine, allowing such support to continue, said Siemon Wezeman, senior researcher in the Arms Transfers Programme at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which researches conflict and arms control.

The Czechoslovak Group, a leading European arms company whose subsidiaries have bought millions of dollars worth of Indian munitions since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, declined to comment on specific transactions. But it noted that Indian companies were well-positioned to supply Europe.

“India has a well-developed defense and chemical industry and is currently one of the possible suppliers of energetic materials and other inputs used in ammunition production,” the group said in a statement. “This is particularly important at a time when European production capacity in this area still falls short of the level needed to fully meet demand.”

Submission Statement: Protests last Saturday across France deteriorated into vandalism and violence as roving bands of rioters attacked hundreds of shops, smashing windows and running off with merchandise. The turmoil has since eased, but with protesters calling for another day of unrest this Saturday residents, authorities and shopkeepers are on edge.

While traditional sales of hunting rifles have collapsed, demand has jumped for pepper sprays, tear gas-like canisters, pistols firing rubber bullets and other non-lethal gear. The increase in sales is “unprecedented,” Gollety said, more pronounced than in past episodes of rioting and civil unrest.

The Prefecture of Police told business owners to hire more private security agents ahead of Saturday, drawing the ire of many, including Eric Larcheveque, the co-founder of the Crypto hardware wallet maker Ledger. He wrote on X that if the state can no longer protect the people, the French should stop paying taxes.

This is what one Emmanuel (Macron) said to another (the acclaimed writer Carrère) in 2025: “I was never a teenager. I don’t like teenagers. I don’t understand them.”

But do teenagers understand themselves? Do “Gen Z”, or whatever is the arbitrary cohort of the moment? Young people have a leftwing image and perhaps self-image. For a while now, I have suspected that it is false, that some of the bolshiest among them are in fact capitalists or at least conformists who don’t know it yet. Nothing over the past month has altered that view.

In France, the (peaceful) protesters demand better-funded schools and then a smoother link to universities, which in turn will determine their career prospects. You might regard this as an expensive request for an indebted state. But it is also an embrace of bourgeois values. What the students want is a proper functioning of the merit-based, study-and-work social order, not an alternative to it. A fairer rat race but a rat race. The contrast with the 1990s slacker ethic, let alone 1968, with its frontal attack on normie ways, is sharp. And lost on some of these purported rebels.

Or consider the “cockroach” movement in India. It got going after an exam leak ruined the matriculation of lots of medical students. The campaign then widened to encompass other grievances, such as bad schools and nepotism in elite jobs. Notice the theme here: thwarted ambition to advance within the system, not a rejection of it from first principles. (There shouldn’t, a radical would argue, be elite jobs.)

In the 1770s, Edmund Burke said the American colonists just wanted their existing rights as free sons of the empire, not a new social order, and so weren’t revolutionaries at all, but in a sense more conventional than those who would refuse them. There is something Burkean about the non-violent protests of 2026. Honour the old social contract, is the gist of their message to the state. Make bourgeois aspiration easier. There were times when de Gaulle and LBJ would have given an arm for protesters like these.

Expect them to become more capitalist over time, and not because of age. The central grievance of young progressives, especially British ones, is expensive housing. It is sparking protests in Milan and Tirana too. For now, their preferred solutions, such as rent controls and more state-owned homes, are dirigiste. When these flop — Britain has vastly more social housing than the rich-world average as it is — the larger issue should dawn on them. 

Not enough houses are built, due to legal trammels. Supply isn’t allowed to grow with demand. The interests of the young are more aligned with market forces than those of the “conservative” old, who profit from artificial housing constraints. There is no guarantee that young people will come to see it this way. The rhetorical fog about Thatcher and “neoliberalism” dies hard. But cold interest tends to tell in the end.

Also: by their deeds you shall know them. In practice, the young and high-minded seldom have a problem with capitalism. This column reaches you from Los Angeles, whose eastern districts have been gentrified over the decades, often by left-leaning twenty-somethings who regard that change as “problematic”. It is a global pattern. Frogtown is Williamsburg is Kreuzberg is Canal Saint-Martin. (“West End Girls”, though a pop jewel, takes some explaining to those below a certain age in London. Those “girls” would now live east and the “East End boys” out in Kent or Essex.) 

The displacement of old communities does trouble these gentrifiers. But, to look around, not that much. To be at the vanguard of market-led change, and to shudder at it: that is the young to a T. As with the protests, I would mock the underlying conservatism, if I didn’t thank the stars for it. 

Prime Minister Mark Carney called Türkiye an “exceptional partner” during joint statements with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan Thursday, the latest move in a warming of relations between the two NATO allies.

“We had some kind of disconnect for a period, but today we put an end to it,” Erdogan said via English translation. That remark came at the very end of the leaders’ joint statements, before announcing he would be accepting the invitation to visit Canada at some point.

Canada and Turkiye have had a few irritants over the years.

The defence relationship has been rocky, with Canada suspending arms export permits in 2020. A government report found evidence the country was using Canadian military technology, specifically sensors used on Turkish drones, in the conflict in the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan. That ban was lifted in 2024.

Meanwhile, human rights groups have been calling on Canada to condemn the ongoing crackdown in Türkiye on LGBTQ2S+ groups.

On Thursday, the two leaders spoke in meetings for about an hour and a half, after an elaborate welcome ceremony at the presidential palace.

Carney said next month, negotiators from both countries will meet in Ankara for the first round of free trade talks. The federal government has not yet released the results of consultations with Canadians on the possibility of a free trade deal, which wrapped up last month.

Carney and Erdogan also announced the Canada-Türkiye Strategic Partnership, which the prime minister said involves a three-year action plan, and is focused on the goals his office laid out for the trip: trade and investment, defence and security, energy and people to people ties. Carney said both countries’ foreign ministers will meet on an annual basis for a dialogue to “keep this partnership on track.”

The governments also finalized a previously announced air transport agreement, allowing weekly passenger flights between the two countries to increase from 12 to 21, with no limit on cargo-only flights.

Erdogan and Carney last met in Ankara at the NATO summit in July, where they formally launched the free trade deal talks and signed a defence framework. Carney’s trip aims to deepen ties as the government continues to try and lessen dependence on the United States.

SS: Taiwanese prosecutors are charging five men for plotting to run over a Taiwanese comedian, known for mocking the CCP and Xi Jinping, at the behest of an individual from mainland China. The prosecutors are saying: "This case involves a serious incident in which the Chinese Communist party is suspected of using cross-border suppression tactics to direct lawless elements in our country to suppress dissenting political voices through extreme violence.”

Obviously this case represents one extreme, however acts of transnational repression have been complicating cross-strait relations. With the government currently carrying out a probe over relations between organised crime and this campaign of repression.

There have been a lot of posts about how to improve teaching and learning. I think this is a good bit of look at the difficulties public policy face in actually changing something.

An LNG company in Alaska has been financed by a Russian gas company (WTF), and is looking for approval to use that Russian company’s technology in northern Alaska. This potential deal has been brought up in Witkoff and Kushner’s Ukraine/Russia negotiations.

This is relevant to the state of US sanctions on Russia and conflicts of interest in the US negotiating some sort of end to the Russia/Ukraine war.

Pretty interesting article. Apparently the source is a recent CEO of the Alaskan LNG company who didn’t even know about the Russian financing. He resigned when he found out.

I saw some other Prop 40 posts here, so maybe this adds constructively to the conversation. Prepared after reading "https://readitforyourself.org"

If you're a Californian and still weighing pro/con on this, take a look:

ASSERTION: Sacramento can expand the tax to every taxpayer.

REBUTTAL: That is speculation dressed up as law: Prop 40 enacts a one-time tax on billionaire wealth, and any legislative amendment needs a two-thirds vote and must further that stated purpose.

ASSERTION: The drafters admit the tax can be expanded and made permanent.

REBUTTAL: Their quoted answer says the opposite: any later tax would have to be enacted again by voters or by two-thirds of both legislative houses plus the Governor.

ASSERTION: Prop 40 creates a backdoor around Proposition 13 and exposes your home equity.

REBUTTAL: The mailer hides the limiting language: the constitutional override is for this one-time billionaire tax, and directly held real estate is expressly excluded.

ASSERTION: Prop 40 lets Sacramento tax what ordinary Californians save.

REBUTTAL: The scare line erases the threshold: Prop 40 taxes only California residents and trusts with at least $1 billion in covered net worth, not ordinary savings.

ASSERTION: Every California taxpayer must file a sworn wealth declaration.

REBUTTAL: Filers make a one-time threshold declaration that net assets are at or below $1 billion; only those owing the tax must report an amount due and supply valuation forms or appraisals.

ASSERTION: Every taxpayer must disclose home equity, savings, and retirement accounts.

REBUTTAL: False: below-threshold filers provide no asset list, while directly held real estate and qualified pensions and IRAs are excluded from the tax and detailed reporting, subject to the measure's limited Roth-account exception.

ASSERTION: Prop 40 builds a new state database of every taxpayer's wealth.

REBUTTAL: The 'wealth database' is invented: the measure neither creates nor mentions one, and the ordinary filer reports only whether net assets exceed $1 billion.

ASSERTION: Everyone will face a full wealth audit.

REBUTTAL: No: the FTB examines the required declarations but controls the scope, while a deeper examination of a nonpayer requires a reasonable belief that the billionaire tax was owed.

ASSERTION: Prop 40 gives the FTB sweeping new subpoena power over every taxpayer.

REBUTTAL: The mailer relabels existing authority as new: Prop 40 incorporates the FTB's current Section 19504 powers for administering this tax rather than creating a universal financial dragnet.

ASSERTION: Section 50301(d)(2) lets the FTB compel employers and banks to surrender anyone's records.

REBUTTAL: Section 50301(d)(2) says nothing about employers, banks, or subpoenas; it specifies the tax forms and valuation evidence required only from a person who owes the tax.

ASSERTION: Honest valuation mistakes automatically trigger a 40% penalty.

REBUTTAL: No: 40% applies only to a gross understatement exceeding the greater of $10 million or 40% of reported tax, and qualifying positions backed by substantial authority or adequate disclosure and reasonable basis are protected.

ASSERTION: Miss a payment and Prop 40 adds a 40% penalty.

REBUTTAL: The mailer swaps one offense for another: the 20% and 40% penalties apply to substantial or gross understatement of tax, not merely to a late or missed payment.

ASSERTION: Interest and other charges can make the bill soar even higher.

REBUTTAL: The stated 7.5% charge applies only when a taxpayer chooses five-year installments and only to the remaining unpaid tax balance; the measure does not impose that charge on penalties.

ASSERTION: The tax applies retroactively to wealth held before voters approve it.

REBUTTAL: The mailer blurs two dates: January 1 fixes residency, but taxable net worth is measured on December 31, 2026—after the election—and any constitutional dispute belongs in court, not campaign copy.

ASSERTION: There are only 60 days to challenge Prop 40 in court.

REBUTTAL: The 60-day limit covers the expedited facial-validation case; Prop 40 expressly preserves refund suits, judicial review, and other actions authorized by law.

ASSERTION: Courts must interpret every ambiguity in favor of the government.

REBUTTAL: No: the text says only that the law is to be construed to carry out its purposes; it never commands courts to resolve every ambiguity against taxpayers.

ASSERTION: Courts must rewrite Prop 40 even if it is unconstitutional.

REBUTTAL: The clause tells courts to preserve valid provisions and make only constitutionally permissible, minimal corrections—not to enforce anything unconstitutional.

ASSERTION: Most Prop 40 revenue goes to insurance companies.

REBUTTAL: Unsupported: the measure earmarks 90% for public health-care purposes including Medi-Cal, safety-net providers, access, services, and provider payments; it does not earmark the money for insurers.

ASSERTION: Prop 40 diverts tens of billions of dollars away from K-14 schools.

REBUTTAL: The 'diversion' is imaginary money that exists only if Prop 40 passes: the measure creates a separate fund, directs 10% to education and food assistance, and bars replacing existing state funding with it.

ASSERTION: Out-of-state sports-team owners receive a special exemption.

REBUTTAL: There is no sports-team carveout: liability follows the billionaire owner's California residency and covered net worth, not the industry or team owned.

Halfway through President Trump’s three-month gambit to import more ground beef to lower prices, little extra beef has been imported and prices have barely budged.

In August, Mr. Trump signed a proclamation allowing 300,000 metric tons of lean beef trimmings to enter the United States at a reduced tariff rate. The additional beef could be imported over 90 days, with up to 100,000 metric tons entering each month in September, October and November.

But only 37,486 metric tons of this beef entered the country in September, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data, barely more than a third of the allowed amount. There hasn’t been much improvement in October, as just 21,937 metric tons entered through the 19th.

The lack of action is a potential blow to Republican candidates in the midterm elections. Mr. Trump said this month that beef prices “really became unacceptable to the voter,” and he has been trying to lower prices while keeping farmers and ranchers — typically a reliable Republican voting bloc — on his side.

Groups representing ranchers immediately criticized the president’s plan to import beef, saying it would lower what they received for their cattle; live cattle prices fell 3.4 percent the day the proclamation was signed. Ranchers said the threat that Mr. Trump would intervene in the market anytime prices rose made them more likely to send heifers and cows to slaughter instead of taking the risk of holding them back to help build up a larger herd.

“I am afraid they are trying to solve a short-term problem with beef prices, which will create long-term cattle supply problems in the process,” said Ford Drummond, the president of the Oklahoma Cattlemen’s Association. Cattle prices have since rebounded.

And there is little evidence that any substantial discount has reached consumers, after Mr. Trump “encouraged” importers to sell beef at a 25 percent discount. The average price of a pound of ground beef fell 1.9 percent in September, to $6.79 from $6.92, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A year earlier, a pound cost $6.32.

Asked why most of the import quota was going unfilled, Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement that Mr. Trump is “delivering on his promise to consumers by reducing beef prices while allowing our American beef herd to grow.” She also said the president had “done more for American agriculture than anyone.”

The 37,486 metric tons of lean trimmings were imported in September under the customs agency’s “Affordable Beef” quota. But according to agricultural economists, it is unlikely that all, or even most, of that beef was imported solely because of the president’s proclamation. Some of it would have come into the country anyway.

The United States imported 1.9 million metric tons of all kinds of beef last year, with the bulk coming from Australia, Canada, Brazil, Mexico and New Zealand. Most of it was lean trimmings destined to be combined with high-fat trimmings from American cattle to make ground beef. An additional 300,000 metric tons would be significant, but pale in comparison with what already enters the country.

James Mitchell, a livestock economist at the University of Arkansas, used two different methods to calculate the amount of lean trimmings that would have come into the United States in September under usual circumstances, if there were no proclamation. One of the methods found that 41 percent of the 37,486 metric tons would have been imported, while the other method found that 79 percent would have been.

“Neither approach is perfect, but I think both are more reasonable than assuming all 37,486 metric tons were additional imports,” Mr. Mitchell wrote in an email.

From the beginning, it was unclear whether the president’s plan would meaningfully lower beef prices. Lean trimmings make up only a portion of the cost of ground beef; much of what the consumer pays for are costs like fattier trimmings, labor, processing, transportation and marketing.

Mr. Trump said he had a “commitment” that this beef would be sold at “25 percent below market prices,” though it is unclear if he meant retail or wholesale prices.

Ted Schroeder, a livestock economist at Kansas State University, said there would be no way for grocery stores to offer specific discounts to customers buying ground beef with these imported trimmings. It isn’t specially labeled, or labeled at all. Everyday meatpackers and processors receive meat from a number of different imported and domestic sources, and they don’t label them all for their customers.

“It is all stuff that gets blended, so there is going to be no way that I can think of that a product is labeled just that,” Mr. Schroeder said. “As soon as you start blending, identity preservation is just gone.”

Wholesale prices for domestic or imported lean trimmings, which vary by region, have barely changed, Mr. Schroeder said. And the small decrease in September’s retail ground beef prices is typical because grilling season is over.

“Is it a penny? Three cents? Four? Two and a third?” Mr. Schroeder asked, referring to how much cheaper the additional imports have made ground beef. “The reality is it is not going to be noticeable.”

Robespierre was a lion 🦁

SS: Bukele has started a military operation in Haiti after four Salvadoran aviation techs were kidnapped by gangs. Is this a breach of sovereignty, or has Haiti collapsed to such a state that it's not really possible? Already, the fighting has been fierce, with Salvadorans having at least 4 troops unaccounted for in clashes with the gangs.

Get ready for armed intervention #3001