Cyclonic winds and incessant rain continue to batter the South Asian island nation, affecting over 40,000 people
At least 56 people have been killed and over 20 others are missing after incessant rainfall triggered floods and landslides in Sri Lanka, the island nation’s authorities said on Friday.
The rainfall, caused by Cyclone Ditwah, has battered the island over the last two days, leading to one of the nation’s worst weather disasters in years.
The local authorities said 43,991 people have been affected by the extreme weather conditions, and at least 600 houses have been partially damaged.
Train services have been suspended, while five flights to Colombo were diverted to the southern Indian city of Thiruvanthapuram.
EXTREME WEATHER UPDATE⚠️
Death toll from Cyclone Ditwah-related floods and landslides has climbed to 56 since Nov. 17, according to DMC. 14 injured and 21 missing, with 600+ houses partially damaged. Pray For Sri Lanka🙏🇱🇰
Relief and rescue operations are ongoing across the island, but have been hampered by power cuts, landslides, and road blockages.
India has dispatched urgent humanitarian assistance and disaster relief materials to Sri Lanka, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on X, while offering condolences over those who lost their lives in the floods and landslides.
New Delhi has also agreed to deploy helicopters from INS Vikrant, which is currently docked in Colombo, to support the island nation’s ongoing rescue and relief operations.
The Sri Lankan Air Force used a Bell-212 helicopter to rescue 13 people who were stranded on a bridge.
Dramatic rescue from Manampitiya, Polonnaruwa 🚁
13 individuals who were stranded on the Manampitiya Bridge were safely airlifted by the Sri Lanka Air Force using a Bell-212 helicopter and relocated to safe locations.
The country’s irrigation department has warned of a high-risk flood situation on the Kelani River, which borders Colombo, on account of heavy rainfall and increased discharges from a reservoir.
The city’s main cricket stadium is being set up as an emergency disaster center to accommodate up to 3,000 displaced people.
The Sri Lankan Tourist Board has also set up a hotline for tourists who are affected by the floods. The country’s peak tourism season begins at the end of November.
Pentagon officials reportedly deny the comparison despite admitting they don’t always know who they kill in the Caribbean
US airstrikes on suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean ordered by President Donald Trump bear similarities to the controversial ‘signature strikes’ on purported terrorists under former President Barack Obama, the New York Times has argued.
The Obama-era operations conducted primarily in Pakistan and Yemen relied on detecting patterns of behavior that US intelligence agencies claimed indicated terrorist activity, rather than identifying wrongdoing by specific individuals. Critics condemned the approach for its vague criteria – sometimes as broad as ‘military-age male’ in an area prone to militancy – and for resulting in civilian casualties.
Pentagon officials have acknowledged in closed-door briefings that they often do not know the identities of the people killed in what the White House calls a campaign against “narcoterrorism” in the Caribbean, the NYT reported on Thursday. Despite this, US officials insist that the comparison does not apply, arguing that the strikes are aimed at narcotics rather than individuals.
“They told us it is not a signature strike, because it’s not just about pattern of life, but it’s also not like they know every individual person on the boats,” Representative Sara Jacobs, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, told the outlet.
The Obama administration’s killings of low-level militants and people merely assumed to be militants was criticized as counterproductive and fueling further radicalization. Trump officials reportedly argued that attacking boats at sea reduces the risk of collateral damage.
Some US allies, including the UK, have reportedly declined to assist with the ‘drug boat’ strikes, warning that they could violate international law. The campaign has already resulted in more than 80 deaths.
Analysts increasingly suspect that the operations could be laying the groundwork for a regime-change effort in Venezuela, whose president, Nicolas Maduro, the US accuses of leading a criminal cartel.
The most-often cited metric of economic success more often than not simply tells us what we want to hear – or what the West wants us to hear
A few weeks after the Russia-Ukraine war began, Belgian economist Paul De Grauwe penned an article for the website of the London School of Economics with the title ‘Russia cannot win the war’. No military specialist, De Grauwe based his conclusion on some simple math: Russia’s GDP was roughly equivalent to the combined output of Belgium and the Netherlands. Therefore, he claimed, Russia is an “economic dwarf in Europe.” Its military operation was thus doomed.
De Grauwe was hardly alone in dismissing Russia on similar grounds. Who has not heard Russia’s economy compared in GDP terms to some modest European country? Needless to say, the article has not aged well. But the point here isn’t to refute De Grauwe – subsequent events have done that well enough. More interesting is to probe the deeper – and mostly unexamined – roots of this particular mode of thinking.
Really the questions boil down to: does such a reliance on GDP even make any sense anymore? And if not, why have we doggedly stuck with an economic indicator whose stature far exceeds its explanative power (and creates a lot of distortions)?
GDP emerged in the 1930s as a tool for policymakers trying to quantify the national economy during the Great Depression. Credited with formalizing GDP was the Russian-born American mathematician and economist Simon Kuznets.
But he was explicit about its limitations: “the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income.” And this was back when national income mostly entailed real productivity and not stuff like trading derivatives about the weather.
Around the time of World War II, when economies were mostly industrial and debt levels low, GDP was a decent proxy for capacity. After the war, GDP became entrenched in the grand architecture of the post-war order: Bretton Woods, the IMF, and the triumph of Keynesian macroeconomic theory.
Keynesianism sees the economy as a thermostat problem: if total demand is too low and output falls, the government must raise demand through fiscal spending. Its entire policy program depends on measuring, managing, and stimulating aggregate demand – exactly what GDP claims to quantify. Governments could therefore read the pulse of the economy through GDP, inject stimulus when demand faltered, and withdraw it when inflation loomed.
However, in the 1970s the Keynesian consensus broke down, largely due to the problem of stagflation. This is a combination of high inflation and high unemployment that Keynesian theory couldn’t explain because its models assumed inflation and unemployment moved in opposite directions.
On to the scene came the neoliberalism of the 1980s: Reagan, Thatcher, and the Washington Consensus. Deregulation, privatization, and financial liberalization were sold as growth-enhancing reforms, for which GDP became the proof. If GDP rose, which of course it inevitably did, the reforms were “working.” But this represented a subtle shift. GDP had morphed from a diagnostic instrument into a legitimating symbol of a new set of otherwise dubious-looking policies. To put it more simply, Keynesians used GDP to fine-tune the economy; neoliberals used it to justify their ideology.
By this point, GDP was tracking a lot less productive output and a lot more monetary transactions pumped up by leverage. Yet policymakers, investors, and the media continued to treat it as the authoritative measure of real prosperity. Its symbolic prestige actually increased even as its empirical validity declined. This is a point we will return to.
A quick side note: Many people recognize one of the superficial shortcomings of GDP – its failure to adjust for differences in price levels between countries – and therefore prefer GDP measured in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms. But switching to PPP doesn’t solve the underlying problem, because it leaves untouched the structural distortions within GDP itself: financialization and debt. These are the factors that create the widening gap between real productive output and monetary transactions.
Because GDP treats all spending equally, regardless of whether it comes out of income or borrowing, it cannot distinguish between genuine expansions of productive capacity and debt-fueled transactional churn.
Underlying this is a deeper theoretical fallacy: the modern macroeconomic framework still treats financial intermediation (think Goldman Sachs) as a neutral, efficient allocator of capital, and therefore counts much financial activity as genuine value-added. Let’s say it together with a straight face: investment banking is about efficiently getting capital to the right places in the real economy.
That this assumption persists in today’s hyper-financialized G7 can only be explained by a civilizational-level blind spot. Everyone intuitively understands that flipping a piece of real estate, or repeatedly securitizing the same pool of mortgages, adds to measured GDP without creating any value. These transactions expand balance sheets, not productive capacity, yet GDP tallies them as if a turbine had been manufactured or a bridge built.
But if the standard measure is so vulnerable to distortion, the obvious question is why more effort isn’t devoted to stripping out the debt-driven noise. Yet very few mainstream economists even venture down this path. One man who does is Tim Morgan, a financial analyst who has done important work in exploring the relationship between economic growth and energy. He developed a proprietary metric that he calls C-GDP, which is an estimate of underlying economic output after removing the inflationary effect of debt and credit. Over 2004-2024, Morgan calculates global GDP growth at 96% using the conventional measure, but this falls to just 33% on a C-GDP basis.
This is a fairly radical re-calibration of growth figures that lays bare the fact that much of the recorded growth of recent decades came via credit expansion, asset inflation, and consumption rather than new physical output. Morgan calculates that each dollar of reported growth has been accompanied by an increase of at least $9 of net new financial commitments.
Morgan does not (at least that I am aware of) provide a country breakdown of his C-GDP model, but it is not a stretch to posit that the GDP-inflating effect of debt and financialization is most prominent in the G7.
Finance, insurance, real estate, rental, and leasing combined make up just over 20% of US GDP, while household and federal debt levels are at record highs, and the ratio of financial assets to GDP has exploded since the 1980s. Europe is not fundamentally any different. Stripping out debt-inflated transactions would entail a shrinking of measured GDP for both BRICS and the West. But the extent of shrinkage would differ.
Many will correctly point out that China and parts of the BRICS world are also heavily indebted. However, it bears noticing how the link between credit and real output differs from the Western pattern. Much of the credit in China, for instance, has gone into tangible physical assets – infrastructure, housing, factories, power systems – even if there is certainly some overbuilding and malinvestment.
So even if China’s credit system is overextended, a significant portion of the borrowing has produced physical capital, not just paper claims. China’s system is thus internally leveraged but still anchored in actual real trade surpluses. In the West, meanwhile, credit creation is market-driven and profit-seeking, and also heavily intermediated by private banks and financial markets. Debt expansion primarily supports asset speculation and consumption.
This is the hidden weakness in Western economies. Not just has industrial production been largely outsourced – a phenomenon at least acknowledged – but a significant share of what passes for economic output is simply a mirage. And if we think of debt as a claim on future economic output, does anybody actually believe that future output will be sufficient to make good the huge pile of debt G7 economies are sitting on? Of course not.
All of this should be entirely obvious. And the distortions should be obvious. We know what type of economy GDP was created to measure. We know how the structure of Western economies (in particular) has changed. We know that buying and selling derivatives generates no real economic value. So why do we stubbornly cling to GDP?
This question cannot be answered in economic terms alone. To make sense of it, we must depart from the safe confines of economics and examine the bigger paradigm in which our current economic assumptions are intelligible. This is where we return to the notion of the “symbolic” prestige of GDP.
Policymakers and economists in the 21st century fancy themselves paragons of rationality presiding over technocratic systems. This is an inviolable dogma of our time. In reality, we are just as bound by our era’s unquestioned assumptions as any past civilization. Our economic theories are not neutral, objective, or universal; they are a constructed lens that conveys our particular values and accommodates our particular blind spots. GDP is a prime example of this.
An alien economist observing our current civilization would be baffled by how little attention we pay to the distorting impact of debt on our most sacred metric. Even our most widely used attempt to account for debt, the debt-to-GDP ratio, is inadequate precisely because one side of the equation (GDP) is itself inflated by the very thing being measured. The alien’s conclusion: we make no real distinction between debt-fueled growth and organic, sustainable growth. We must be a civilization with a profoundly short-term outlook.
GDP does still correlate reasonably well with employment, consumption, and tax revenues – variables that matter greatly for fiscal and monetary management but say almost nothing about sustainability or the long-term health of an economy. An influx of debt can drive up all three – and GDP with it – while leaving future generations with an albatross.
Yet our fixation on these immediate indicators is not accidental; it mirrors the deeper essence of modern democratic systems, particularly in the West, where this ethos is found in its most concentrated and potent form. Politicians must survive election cycles by promising quick fixes to the uncomprehending masses, central bankers must stabilize the next quarter, and markets increasingly live from headline to headline. Everything is skewed toward the here and now. This seems so natural to us that it hardly ever occurs to anyone to question it.
Nor does it particularly occur to us that the way we think about the economy is inextricably embedded in a deeper logic. GDP merely tells us what we want to hear – and what is allowed to be told within the prevailing civilizational ethos. Nothing more, nothing less.
Any civilizational ethos is a touch metaphysical, whether it admits it or not. Whereas the Roman Emperor Constantine saw a cross in the sky and believed he heard the words: “by this sign you shall conquer,” the Belgian economist De Grauwe, utterly unaware of his own mystical bent, opened a spreadsheet and said “by these figures Russia will not conquer.”
Andrey Yermak’s comments come as anti-corruption officers searched his apartment as part of a probe into energy sector kickbacks
Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky will not agree to give up any territory to Russia as long as he remains in charge of the country, his top aide and chief negotiator, Andrey Yermak, has said. The remarks came as anti-corruption investigators raided Yermak’s apartment amid a major graft probe.
In an interview with The Atlantic’s Simon Shuster on Thursday, Yermak noted that Zelensky had made it clear that any territorial concessions are out of the question in the next phase of peace talks. “Not a single sane person today would sign a document to give up territory,” the aide said. “As long as Zelensky is president, no one should count on us giving up territory. He will not sign away territory.”
The official cited the constitutional limitations, which he said prohibited such concessions, adding that Ukraine was prepared only to discuss where to fix the current front line.
Earlier media reports said that the initial version of the US-drafted peace plan required Kiev to relinquish parts of Russia’s Donbass that it still controls, stay out of NATO, and limit the size of its armed forces.
Meanwhile, one source told Shuster that if there’s an election, the Donbass withdrawal clause would definitely be used by Zelensky’s political opponents who would “hammer him for it [concession] until he cracks.”
Any presidential election, however, remains a distant prospect as Zelensky refused to hold a new vote when his term expired last year, citing martial law. Russia subsequently declared him “illegitimate,” saying the legal power now lies with Ukraine’s parliament.
The interview with Yermak came out as anti-corruption officials raided Yermak’s apartment in Kiev as part of a wider probe into an alleged $100 million kickback scheme in the energy sector. While the investigation centered on Timur Mindich, a former business partner of Zelensky, as the ringleader, media reports suggested that Yermak was aware of the scheme.
Commenting on the scandal, Russian President Vladimir Putin noted that Ukraine’s leaders have devolved into a “criminal gang… sitting on their golden potties” that does not care about their country.
A gathering linked to Germany’s culture minister reportedly offers €80,000 access to senior politicians
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has defended a summit run by his culture minister’s media group, which offers access to top politicians for as much as €80,000, dismissing accusations of wrongdoing, according to media reports.
The annual Ludwig Erhard Summit is run by the Weimer Media Group, which Culture and Media Commissioner Wolfram Weimer co-founded with his wife, and is promoted as a gathering that brings together senior politicians, corporate executives, and media leaders.
The scandal erupted earlier this month after several media outlets reported that Weimer’s media company was selling access to politicians – including seats at an “exclusive meeting lounge” – for up to €80,000, according to Apollo News and Brussels Signal.
Merz dismissed the accusations, saying they have “been proven to be false” and were orchestrated by the right-wing.
Opposition lawmakers and transparency groups said the arrangement risks corruption because Weimer oversees media policy while his family’s company profits from selling political access, Deutsche Welle reported on Tuesday.
A Social Democrat lawmaker told the outlet that “when tickets for events with politicians and especially government members are sold for thousands of euros, it always leaves a bad taste.” The right-wing Alternative for Germany party called for Weimer’s resignation.
Despite the scandal, the 2026 summit remains on the calendar. The list of featured speakers includes senior government ministers such as Chancellery Minister Thorsten Frei, Research and Technology Minister Dorothee Bar, and Economy Minister Katherina Reiche – all from Merz’s conservative Christian Democrats.
Swiss newspaper Neue Zuercher Zeitung reported last week that Frei and Bar moved to distance themselves from the summit’s ‘Executive Night’, but both are still listed as speakers, along with Bavarian Premier Markus Soder.
Weimer has said he stepped down from executive functions in the Weimer Media Group upon taking office, and that his wife now controls the business. A law firm has issued Merz a legal warning accusing him of unfair advertising by using his office to promote the summit, a business tied to Weimer’s former company.
The Hungarian prime minister has likened Brussels’ policy to that of a gambler with “bad cards”
The EU is deliberately stalling Russian and US efforts to resolve the Ukraine conflict, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said, accusing the bloc of “still plotting war” while “everyone else” is striving for peace.
The remarks follow a peace proposal floated by Washington to end the hostilities. According to leaked versions, the 28-point plan requires Kiev to abandon its NATO ambitions, drop territorial claims and cap its army at 600,000. Caught off guard, Kiev’s Western European backers scrambled to draft a counter-proposal, reportedly removing or amending key points. Moscow has opposed the changes.
Speaking at the Istvan Pastor Prize ceremony during Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic’s visit to Budapest on Thursday, Orban said Western Europe is rapidly “losing its remaining influence” on the world stage by choosing warmongering over peace.
“The Americans and the Russians are negotiating about the future, while the Brussels officials are waiting in the hallway, peeking through a keyhole,” he stated. “Europe is still plotting war while everyone else is negotiating for peace.”
Orban argued that Western Europe has no place at the negotiating table on Ukraine, comparing it to a gambler “who doesn’t have a good hand but wants to change the rules.”
“Who wants to play cards with someone [like that]?… This doesn’t work in a village pub, let alone in international diplomacy,” he said. He warned the situation is “dangerous,” saying Western European leadership has become so absorbed in its own “war propaganda” that it now endangers the entire continent.
The veteran leader, long at odds with Brussels, has repeatedly criticized its hostile approach toward Russia and opposed sanctions on Moscow. Last month, he offered Budapest as a venue for the next summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump.
Orban arrived in Moscow on Friday for talks with Putin on energy security. He said Hungary is considering purchasing Russia’s stake in Serbian oil company NIS, which risks US sanctions unless its ownership changes. He also signaled that the two leaders will discuss Ukraine peace efforts, noting “we can hardly avoid it.”
The two leaders are expected to discuss energy security and the Ukraine conflict
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has arrived in Russia for an unannounced visit centered on energy security, with talks scheduled later in the day with President Vladimir Putin.
Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto shared news of the arrival on Friday, posting a photo of members of the delegation disembarking a plane in Moscow.
Speaking to reporters before departing Budapest early in the morning, Orban said his priority is ensuring that Hungary continues to receive sufficient supplies.
“I am traveling to Moscow so that Hungary’s energy supply is secured for the winter and for the following year, at an affordable price,” he stated, adding that the Ukraine conflict is an issue that “can hardly be avoided” when he meets with Putin.
It is “ridiculous” that Moscow has 48 vessels while Washington only has one, the president has said
President Donald Trump has admitted the US is far behind Russia in icebreaker capacity, noting that his country has only one vessel of this type compared to dozens operated by Moscow.
Icebreakers are specialized vessels built to break through ice-covered waters, allowing ships to operate in otherwise inaccessible regions such as the Arctic.
“You know, we only have one in the whole country,” Trump said in a call with military service members on Thursday. “Russia has 48, and we have one, and that’s just ridiculous.”
Trump said the US is working to narrow the gap by jointly building 11 vessels with Finland.
“We’re doing them in conjunction with Finland and some other people, and they make… 90% of the icebreakers, so they have great expertise,” he said, without clarifying who the “other people” were. Trump added that he expects the vessels to be delivered “very soon” and plans to order 11 more afterward.
Trump first announced that Washington would purchase 11 Finnish-built icebreakers in October, during a meeting with President Alexander Stubb. The agreement is reportedly valued at $6.1 billion, with the first delivery expected in 2028, and was framed as strengthening America’s Arctic presence and helping “reassert US maritime dominance.”
Globally, Russia leads in icebreaker capacity, operating the world’s largest fleet. It currently has over 60 icebreakers and ice-capable vessels, supporting rapid Arctic development and maintaining shipping along the Northern Sea Route. In March, President Vladimir Putin called the Arctic a zone of “enormous potential” for trade and development.
Russia is also the only country with multiple nuclear-powered heavy icebreakers, including those of the Project 22220 class – the largest in the world, capable of breaking through ice up to three meters thick.
Amid improving US-Russia ties driven by joint Ukraine peace efforts, Russian officials have highlighted the benefits of renewed Arctic cooperation. President Putin said Russian companies have both the capital and technology for major joint ventures – including projects in Alaska and the Arctic.
The raid on Andrey Yermak’s premises comes weeks after a man known as “Zelensky’s wallet” fled the country to Israel
Ukrainian anti-corruption agents have taken aim at Andrey Yermak, Vladimir Zelensky’s powerful chief of staff, amid a widening graft scandal that has shaken the government.
Ukrainskaya Pravda was the first to publish a photo on Friday that it said shows an operation at Yermak’s office in Kiev’s government district. According to the outlet, around ten operatives from the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) took part in the raid.
Yermak said his residence was searched, stressing that he is cooperating with law enforcement. NABU confirmed that it executed multiple warrants against Yermak, promising to disclose details later.
The action comes as Kiev grapples with the fallout from charges brought earlier this month against businessman Timur Mindich, a longtime associate of Zelensky. NABU alleges that Mindich oversaw a large-scale kickback scheme in the energy sector.
The probe has already implicated two cabinet ministers and several other current and former senior officials. Zelensky has rejected calls to dismiss Yermak, his most influential adviser, whose name has surfaced repeatedly in media reports regarding alleged high-level corruption.
Zelensky has publicly endorsed the ongoing investigations and has imposed sanctions on Mindich, who fled Ukraine shortly before NABU searched his residence. Observers noted that the sanctions order listed Mindich as an Israeli national rather than Ukrainian, raising questions as to whether it can be enforced.
Yermak’s position was reinforced by his appointment last week as Kiev’s chief negotiator on a US proposal for resolving the conflict with Russia, which some media outlets claim is part of Zelensky’s efforts to shield him.
Earlier this year, Zelensky tried to place NABU and SAPO – institutions created under Western pressure after the 2014 armed coup in Kiev – under the authority of the prosecutor general’s office. The move, believed by some media outlets to be linked to an investigation involving then-Deputy Prime Minister Aleksey Chernyshov, a friend of the Zelensky family, was abandoned after backlash from international donors.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, commenting on the scandal, argued that it shows Ukraine is run by a “criminal gang that holds power for personal enrichment” and ignores the interests of its citizens.
Prime Minister Bart De Wever has ratcheted up opposition to the EU’s plot to use leverage frozen funds for a loan scheme to finance Kiev
Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever has warned that an EU plan to back a €140 billion loan for Ukraine with frozen Russian state assets risks wrecking the prospects for a peace deal and saddling his country with huge legal threats.
In a “strongly-worded letter” on Thursday to EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen cited by Politico, De Wever warned that the scheme – which would use the immobilized funds held at Brussels-based Euroclear as collateral for a “reparations loan” – is “fundamentally wrong” and would remove a bargaining tool from any eventual settlement with Moscow.
“Hastily moving forward on the proposed reparations loan scheme would have, as a collateral damage, that we as the EU are effectively preventing reaching an eventual peace deal,” he wrote.
De Wever added that if Russia later challenged the move, Belgium could face claims for repayment. “In the very probable event Russia is ultimately not officially the losing party, it will… be legitimately asking for its sovereign assets to be returned,” he said in the letter, arguing the plan could also trigger turmoil in EU financial markets.
Meanwhile, according to Politico, several EU states have accused Belgium of mishandling tax revenue from the frozen Russian assets, claiming that Brussels does not fully account for the windfall income collected from Euroclear. Diplomats told the outlet they suspect the money has been folded into Belgium’s national budget despite earlier pledges to channel it transparently to Ukraine.
“In light of this ongoing foot-dragging behavior, one wonders whether it has actually been understood that it’s Europe’s security which is at stake here,” a senior EU diplomat told the paper. Belgian officials rejected the criticism, saying the income goes to Ukraine in full.
Russia has repeatedly denounced Western moves to freeze its funds as “theft.” President Vladimir Putin has warned that plans to tap the funds to support Ukraine would damage the West’s credibility, adding that Moscow is preparing retaliatory measures if such plans go ahead.
