Englund

President Donald Trump said John Ratcliffe's trip to Russia was a "semi-routine" visit but there is nothing routine about the CIA chief making a secret, 10,000-mile return dash to Moscow. Ratcliffe met Russian intelligence officials on Tuesday - notably his opposite number in Russia's overseas spy agency, Sergei Naryshkin - after arriving unannounced on a US military plane, the Kremlin confirmed. One US official told Politico that the "meeting was primarily to warn Russia against any escalatory action against the Baltic states". You don't need the world's most powerful electronic eavesdropping organisation – the US National Security Agency – to know that Putin is under mounting domestic pressure to "do something" to break the deadlock. Ukraine's deep strikes with long-range drones have not only hammered Russia's energy industry, they have brought the war home to ordinary Russians. BBC 27 August 2026 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles...

  Pragvåren och invasionen var det viktigaste och mest bestående av allt som brukar betecknas som "68". Det som då hände visade att kommunismen inte lät sig reformeras, att den därför i praktiken var dödsdömd. På den tiden förstod väl ingen detta utom möjligen Leonod Bresnjev och hans politbyrå i Moskava. Michail Gorbatjov förstod det inte ens långt senare. https://www.internetional.se/1968swartz.htm Rolf Englund Svensk Linje nr 2, 1969: HUR MAN än söker närma sig det tjeckoslovakiska problemet hamnar man i den tyska frågan. Så skriver Alf Edeen, lärare i utrikes- och säkerhetspolitik vid försvarshögskolan, i Strategisk Bulletin nr 5 1968, utgiven av Utrikespolitiska institutet.  Detta är en allvarlig felbedömning. Den troligaste förklaringen till den sovjetiska ockupationen av Tjeckoslovakien mâste sökas i de effekter en fortsatt tjeckisk demokratisering skulle ha kunnat få på den inhemska politiska utvecklingen i hela Östeuropa och Sovjet självt. Om man inte inser vilken en...

  CIA chief John Ratcliffe travels to Moscow Ahead of the trip, the US told Ukraine that a senior delegation would be travelling to Moscow and asked Kyiv to suspend strikes until they had left, a senior Ukrainian official told CBS. John Foreman, who served as a British military attaché to Moscow between 2019 and 2022, told Radio 4's PM programme that the visit could be focused on "escalation management" He said: "The Americans don't normally send such a high ranking official to Moscow unannounced at short notice unless something is up." BBC 25 August 2026 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c87vg9x5d7do CIA director makes unannounced visit to Moscow to meet with Russian officials, source says, CBS News was first to report on Ratcliffe’s presence in Russia. CNN 25 August 2026 https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/25/politics/cia-director-visits-moscow Tjugo år efter studenten sitter hon här igen – nu som partiledare och vice statsminister med mindre än tre veckor kv...

Annika Ström Melin: Sluta hymla om att Sveriges riksdag inte är landets enda lagstiftare. QMV (Qualified Majority Voting)  QMV (Qualified Majority Voting) is the standard voting method used by the Council of the European Union for approximately 80% of all legislation. https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2025/12/meloni-ryska-pengar-till-ukraina.html China buys around 90% of Iran’s oil  Blacklisting Chinese companies risks opening a new economic confrontation with Beijing. Doing so now would fracture US-China ties just weeks before Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are set to meet in September. Asked directly about hitting China with new economic measures on Monday, Bessent said “no one is above the reach of US sanctions” but that he preferred “quiet diplomacy,” adding “we’re not going to name names.” Bloomberg 25 August 2026 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-25/trump-s-iran-pivot-from-war-to-sanctions-will-hit-china-or-fail Reports that the Treasury Department ...

  Yields on 30-year US bonds broke 5% last week, a level not seen since before the Great Financial Crisis.  The Treasury Department bought bonds in an attempt to lower yields. It worked — for a day, then bond yields went back up.  Meanwhile, in a not-exactly-unrelated development, the US national debt just passed $40 trillion. Bond doomers (I am one) have been waiting for this moment for about 15 years. But we are not yet vindicated. Yields may fall again. This is not a new normal — it is just normal, period. On of the first things I learned about long-term bonds is that, unlike stocks, they revert to the mean.  Bond prices can’t keep going up forever, because that would involve negative yields. Bond yields tend to oscillate around a long-term average.  That average may change over time, and it has fallen since the Middle Ages as the world became a less risky place. Allison Schrager Bloomberg August 24, 2026    https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/article...

  Bloomberg 23 August 2026 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-23/zelenskyy-says-ukraine-had-no-role-in-nord-stream-pipeline-blast Mattias Svensson: Välkomna de ukrainska flyktingarna Nästa år kommer många ukrainare att söka asyl i samband med att aktiveringen av EU:s massflyktsdirektiv löper ut. Ukrainare är den absolut vanligaste kategorin flyktingar som kommit till Sverige på 2020-talet. Bara 2022 kom det drygt 50 000. Omkring en tredjedel har återvänt, medan andra tillkommit. Ändå har ukrainarna på flykt av någon märklig anledning varit frånvarande i den svenska migrationsdebatten. Ingen av partiledarna tog upp dem i Expressen/Dagens Industris debattsegment om migrationen. Ingen fråga ställdes heller om deras status och möjligheter i Sverige, där låga dagbidrag och krångel med att kunna öppna bankkonto gjort det svårare än nödvändigt att få livet att fungera i vårt land. Finns det verkligen ingen av partiledarna som är stolt över att Sverige kunnat erbjuda en frista...

  Real GDP per person in the United States for the past 150 years. On a log scale, the time series is roughly a straight line.  Adam Tooze Aug 22, 2026 https://substack.com/inbox/post/210707665

Staying means accepting risks that have already become Ukraine’s new normal: regular Russian drone and missile strikes that kill civilians and leave a trail of economic destruction; the continued conscription of most men — and, eventually perhaps, women; and significant restrictions on democratic rights that Ukrainians repeatedly took to the streets to defend. Wartime martial law means the country hasn’t held an election in six years — an issue now highlighted by popular former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov. Leaving Ukraine carries its own costs: uprooted lives, divided families and the risk of ostracism at home. The most resilient Ukrainian, according to the survey, is a Kyiv resident aged 45 to 59. This generation was in the vanguard of protests against election-rigging in late 2004 in Kyiv’s Independence Square, or Maidan, helping trigger the pro-European Orange Revolution.  A decade later, their children were the students beaten by riot police for protesting President Vikto...

Simona Mohamsson Utbildnings- och integrationsminister https://www.regeringen.se/sveriges-regering/utbildningsdepartementet/simona-mohamsson/ Bland villorna i Ålsten blir det tydligt varför svensk borgerlighet behöver Liberalerna. Bland partiets fem starkaste valdistrikt vid förra valet återfanns inte mindre än fyra i Bromma. Det femte återfinns i en annan välmående villaförort till Stockholm, Danderyd.   En del skulle säga att det handlar om väljare som har råd med fina principer – luxury beliefs i anglosaxisk debatt.  Vad bensinen kostar spelar ingen roll, man har ju själv sedan länge elbil. Och ingen behöver väl bekymra sig över att Liberalerna, genom att förbjuda många av landets friskolor, kommer att göra det svårare att lämna stökiga kommunala skolor. I Ålsten fungerar närhetsprincipen utmärkt. Svend Dahl Smedjan 22 augusti 2026 https://timbro.se/smedjan/det-liberala-dilemmat-i-bromma/ Tolvanloppet 2026 https://tolvanloppet.se/ Familjen Brogren i Bromma är en av de sto...

Ebola Bundibugyo  The Democratic Republic of the Congo is gearing up to roll out an Ebola vaccine with some doses being used as part of a trial to see if it is effective against the Bundibugyo species of the virus that is currently circulating in the country. The Ervebo vaccine does help protect against the Zaïre species of Ebola but currently there are no proven vaccines or treatments for Bundibugyo. The rollout comes as the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a new warning that Ebola was "growing exponentially" in the north and east of DR Congo and the spread of infections now covered an area bigger than France. BBC 21August 2026 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czxe9n0vxzdo Pragvåren slutade med att Warszawapaktens makter invaderade Prag den 21 augusti 1968 https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragv%C3%A5ren Pragvåren och invasionen var det viktigaste och mest bestående av allt som brukar betecknas som "68". Det som då hände visade att kommunismen inte lät sig refor...