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Brighton boss Fabian Hurzeler says Yankuba Minteh can still "fulfil his dream" move in future after the Seagulls turned down Liverpool's offers for the winger.

Committee and political group meetings, Brussels

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

SEDE Opinion on the draft general budget of the European Union for the financial year 2027
Committee on Security and Defence
Mārtiņš Staķis

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

SEDE Opinion on the draft general budget of the European Union for the financial year 2027
Committee on Security and Defence
Mārtiņš Staķis

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

When Vladimir Putin takes the stage at a major public event, little is left to chance. Speeches, questions and answers are usually choreographed down to the smallest detail. Putin’s appearance at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok on September 3 was no exception. The plenary session began with a largely boilerplate speech by Putin on the socio-economic development of Russia’s Far East. But when Putin left the podium and returned to his seat on stage, the moderator immediately shifted the discussion to a different topic. He asked Putin about the state of the federal budget, pointing to the rapidly widening hole in Russian government finances.

The choice of question was certainly no coincidence. The Kremlin apparently wanted to send a reassuring message about the budget. “There is nothing critical here,” Putin told the audience of economic and financial elites gathered in the plenary hall in Vladivostok.

But Russia’s economic elites have plenty of reasons to be worried: The fiscal situation is deteriorating quickly as the costs of the war continue to soar. Newly released data on Russian spending in the first half of 2026 shows that military spending rose by 30 per cent compared with the same period last year, reaching 10.7 trillion rubles, or 4.7 per cent of projected GDP for 2026. Russia had originally planned to cut military spending this year. So far, the opposite is happening: If military spending continues at this pace, it will exceed 9 per cent of GDP by December, marking a new record in Russia’s post-Soviet history. 

Fiscal pressures are increasing

The unplanned growth of military spending is undoing the fiscal consolidation on which Russia’s budget for the current year was built. By the end of September, the Russian government is expected to present its budget plans for 2027. “Maybe we should start saving a little more?” the moderator suggested to Vladimir Putin at the Eastern Economic Forum, almost as if to pave the way for the president to justify painful new budget cuts. Putin responded that it’s not simply about cuts, but about spending rationally and with clear priorities, effectively laying the rhetorical groundwork for reductions that are increasingly likely to fall on the civilian parts of the budget.

Budget cuts, however, will not free up enough funds to cover the increase in war costs. As revenues are not keeping pace, the higher military spending will translate into a higher budget deficit. By the end of July, budget data showed a deficit of 2.8 per cent of GDP – almost twice the original annual target. In recent years, Russia has used its National Wealth Fund to finance budget shortfalls, but liquid assets in the fund have dwindled to just 1.6 per cent of GDP. This means that the Russian Finance Ministry has to rely on new debt as its primary source of financing. However, domestic borrowing has become extremely expensive for Moscow. Against the backdrop of high public expenditure and concerns about higher inflation, interest rates on long-term Russian government bonds climbed to almost 17 per cent in July. 

Doubts are not welcome in public

The Kremlin has gone to great lengths to shield the Russian public from the impacts of the war, preserving a veneer of normality as the war rages in Ukraine. But in 2026, the strains of the war have become increasingly apparent. Ukrainian long-range strikes on refineries have caused a petrol shortage that the Kremlin has struggled to contain. Attacks on large warehouses have further exposed Russia’s vulnerability to Ukraine’s expanding long-range strike capabilities. Russia’s budget worries add to the mounting pressures that Putin is facing at home.

On the sidelines of the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, another announcement was made that received little media attention: Russia’s state development bank VEB.RF presented a new chief economist. The position had previously been held by Andrei Klepach, a former deputy economy minister and one of Russia’s most prominent economists. Klepach had been dismissed after publicly warning about the mounting costs of the war and arguing that Russia was falling behind economically and technologically in a prolonged war of attrition.

Klepach’s removal sent a clear signal that such doubts are not welcome in public debate. Those who remain unconvinced by Putin’s reassuring words are apparently better off keeping quiet. But silencing the doubters will not make the mounting costs of the war disappear.

This analysis is based on data from the newly launched SWP Russian Budget Monitor. Click here for more information.

By James Alix Michel
VICTORIA, Seychelles, Sep 4 2026 (IPS)

There is an older wisdom, quieter than the noise of our times, that whispers a simple truth: we are not the architects of nature, only its guests. Long before there were nations, economies, or even language, there was the pulse of the tide, the patience of coral, the breath of forests exchanging air with the sky. Into that ancient conversation we arrived — late, curious, and forgetful — mistaking our cleverness for sovereignty and our tools for wings.

Yet the sea remembers what we have forgotten. It remembers that every drop of rain has travelled through the roots of trees and the bodies of fish before returning to us as thirst quenched or harvest gathered. It remembers that the reef and the child, the mangrove and the fisherman, the albatross and the sailor, are all verses of the same unfinished poem. To live well is to learn that poem by heart — to know that when one line is silenced, the whole song grows thinner.

And still, something in us reaches further. The same species that learned to read the tides also learned to read the stars. From the first firelit night when a human being looked up and wondered, we have carried within us a quiet, luminous restlessness — a longing to know what lies beyond the horizon, beyond the atmosphere, beyond the reach of our brief lives. It is not vanity that drives this longing, but memory. Perhaps some ancient part of us recognises, in the distant glimmer of a star, a trace of our own origin — the stardust from which our bones were made, the cosmic seed from which life on this small blue world first stirred.

To be human, then, is to live in two directions at once. Downward, into the depths of the sea, where life first learned to breathe. Outward, into the vastness of space, where light itself becomes a form of scripture. Both journeys are acts of reverence. Both remind us that we are neither the centre nor the summit of creation, but its wondering witnesses — creatures endowed with the extraordinary gift of consciousness, and with it, the responsibility to use that gift with humility.

This is the paradox of our species: we are small enough to be humbled by a single wave, and large enough in imagination to send our thoughts across galaxies. We build submarines to touch the ocean floor and telescopes to touch the edge of time. Yet both instruments, in the end, do the same thing — they extend our capacity to wonder. Wonder is the beginning of wisdom, and wisdom is the beginning of care.

Perhaps this is the deepest task of our century: not to choose between protecting our planet and exploring the cosmos, but to understand that the two callings are one. We cannot honour the stars while poisoning the seas. We cannot dream of new worlds while abandoning the one that gave us breath. The reef and the galaxy are written in the same handwriting. To care for one is to prepare ourselves, morally and spiritually, for the other.

Small-island nations know this instinctively. We live at the meeting point of sea and sky, where the horizon is a daily teacher. We understand that fragility and vastness are not opposites but companions — that the smallest coral polyp and the most distant nebula belong to the same continuum of creation. When we speak of protecting the ocean, we are not defending a resource; we are defending a relationship. And when humanity looks upward, dreaming of Mars or of life on some far-off moon, we are not escaping the Earth; we are extending the same longing that first drew our ancestors to the sea.

For those of us shaped by the ocean, this is not philosophy — it is instinct. We have always known that the horizon is not a boundary but an invitation, that the sea is not a possession but a companion, and that the night sky is not empty but full of the same silent kinship that binds us to the coral and the whale.

If humanity can learn, once more, to walk softly among its fellow travellers — on this small blue planet and among the countless worlds beyond — then perhaps our story will not end in exhaustion, but in reverence: the quiet dignity of a species that finally remembered it was never alone, and never was meant to be still.

James Alix Michel, is Former President of the Republic of Seychelles

IPS UN Bureau

 

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C'est l'effroi chez les journalistes de droite quand, à partir des années 1930, de nombreuses femmes entrent dans la profession. Elles y demeurent très minoritaires, mais, hormis les éditoriaux, plus aucun registre ne leur est interdit. Loin d'être cantonnées aux rubriques mode, couture, (…) / Femmes, Presse, France, Histoire, Socialisme, Communisme, Guerre d'Espagne 1936-1939

The arrival of the seventh Prime Minister in Number 10 since the 2016 referendum is an opportunity to try once again to get to grips with British European policy.

In practice, this is not a problem of wrestling Lots of Things, but instead more about trying to work out whether the absence of visible activity is a function of a very tight ship, or of a lack of activity.

Undoubtedly, negotiations on the May 2025 reset agenda in the Common Understanding has progressed well, to the point that several dossiers are largely wrapped up: SPS and ETS are the two big ones. Internal Energy Market talks finally got underway in the early summer too, the last big element to get going.

At the same time, once it became clear that Keir Starmer was stepping down, the EU decided to pause everything, there being little point in making deals with a departing leadership. Moreover, the arrival of a new PM might also offer new opportunities for the EU to secure more concessions, especially if Andy Burnham was really that much more pro-cooperation and wanted to get a quick win.

The evidence of the first couple of months of Burnham suggests that this has not been the case. Indeed, as the tracker below (mildly sarcastically) suggests, Burnham’s time in power has been marked by talking about pretty much anything apart from EU policy.

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic148

The ‘regular’ EU-UK summit heralded by the Common Understanding, and already rather uncertain by the time of the May anniversary of the first one, has only been pushed back since, with Burnham’s recent talk of November feeling more aspirational that definite. This is not a government in a rush to press forward on things, despite Burnham’s repeated invocations of the damage of Brexit to the economy.

From what little he has said, the impression is very much one of continuity-Starmer: use the reset process to secure some wins, plus avoid the worst effects of the continual activity of the EU to protect and promote its interests. The language about ‘Made in Europe’ reflects another common thread to Starmer, once the UK had determined the potential impacts on high-profile sectors of the economy and the possible leverage of working together in Europe in the face of – how to put it? – debatable international relations.

However, all of this has been very much off-camera, without much grandstanding by either side, neither of whom really feel any value in kicking up a fuss. Even the failure of SAFE talks was managed away without too much hand-wringing and with efforts to find other ways of building defence procurement cooperation.

But there has been one exception.

Youth mobility has become the poster-child of the reset, and the one with the most conspicuous disagreements.

As a reminder, the two sides have always had different positions with regard to the fundamentals of any scheme, grounded in its purpose, scale and operationalisation.

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic127

Since the 2025 summit, those gaps (on caps on numbers, university fees and permitted activities) have not definitively closed down. Instead, there has been a steady drip-feed of briefings by both sides to try to signal intent and (less often) offer possible landing grounds.

The following is a list of all Financial Times stories that include such briefings, the paper being a convenient shared space for negotiators:

• 7 November 2025. ‘EU officials’ flag the need for the scheme to be drawn up as a binding legal instrument, rather than the memoranda of understanding the UK has with other third countries
• 5 December. A leaked EU ‘draft text’ has no cap on numbers, and gives EU students access to UK university fees
• 15 March 2026. ‘UK officials’ offer to give way of fees, in return for a cap and other concessions
• 5 June. ‘UK officials’ reiterate their offer on fees
• 3 July. The ‘Commission’ says the proposed cap is too low, EU nationals need to be exempt from the NHS surcharge and have access to UK fees
• 13 July. ‘EU diplomats’ say the cap offered by the UK is a ‘non-starter’ and repeat points on the surcharge and fees
• 18 August. ‘EU diplomats’ again say the cap offered is too low, but might consider something in the ‘low 100ks’, and say fees is ‘vital’
• 23 August. A leaked UK negotiating brief from ‘UK officials’ says Starmer was willing to concede on fees and up to 100k on the cap, in return for access to Made in Europe or steel tariffs

This procession suggests a number of points that speak to the wider relationship.

Firstly, the UK has moved further than the EU on these points. We might reasonably assume that the EU will get domestic fees, but without any evident quid pro quo on caps or other dossiers. Indeed, when such cross-linkage has been mentioned by the UK, the reply from the EU has been very dismissive. This reflects the underlying asymmetry in the relationship: the UK needs this more than the EU, and the EU knows this.

Secondly, this is as much evidence as we have that Burnham is not going to stray very far at all from Starmer’s positions: The PM was talking again about Made in Europe in his first PMQs this week. Whether that helps or hinders progress on negotiations remains to be seen, but the sense that Brussels was ultimately underwhelmed by Starmer’s translation of rhetoric to action does not look set to be challenged by Burnham any time soon.

Finally, it points to the perils of low-stakes negotiating. None of the items on the table will be of notable macro-economic significance for either side, but instead act as markers of good intent and willingness to try to keep the wheels spinning on the minimal architecture of the Trade & Cooperation Agreement’s free trade area. Part of this might be the anxiety over who will be in power in the UK following the next general election, but more of it is that neither side see their relationship as either particularly important or in need of urgent attention. With plenty of other things to be getting on with, this is something that lacks any strong sense of pressure to wrap things up.

Of course, it’s still early days, but if the last seven PMs have taught us anything, then it’s that their revealed preferences on EU policy are pretty clear, pretty quickly.

The post Not even a new ‘reset’: The minimalist Burnham agenda on the EU? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

2026 ist kein gutes Jahr für das Putin-Regime. Die Front in der Ukraine bewegt sich kaum, ukrainische Drohnen und Raketen treffen Ziele weit im russischen Hinterland, die Wirtschaft schwächelt, und die Stimmung im Land verschlechtert sich. Unter diesen erschwerten Bedingungen muss die Kreml-Administration einen weiteren Sieg der Machtpartei Einiges Russland organisieren, denn im September steht die Wahl zur Staatsduma an. Dabei kann das russische Parlament seine Funktion als Legitimitätsressource in der personalistischen Putin-Diktatur kaum noch erfüllen. An der chronischen Schwäche der regimekonformen Parteien ist dies ebenso abzulesen wie an der Groteske um den Wahlausschluss der Jabloko-Partei.

Letsile Tebogo says his late mother is always with him "in spirit" as he prepares to run in Budapest, the city where she watched him make history for Botswana and Africa.