In Other News
Foreign hackers breached a U.S. nuclear weapons plant in Kansas City by exploiting a Microsoft SharePoint flaw in August. The breach gave hackers, presumably from Russia or China, some level of access to the plant’s computer networks. The Trumpet has warned that the U.S. superpower is vulnerable because of its heavy reliance on computer and electronic technologies. “We could lose the next war before we even begin, if somebody breaks our military codes,” warned Mr. Flurry in his 1999 article “America’s Achilles’ Heel.”
According to a Haaretz report published October 21, Germany has agreed to a $2.3 billion defense deal with Israel in which Germany’s Rheinmetall and Diehl Defense will partner with Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems to produce the precise and versatile Spike missiles. Last year, Germany purchased $357 million in Israeli weaponry—more than the previous four years combined. While many nations have distanced themselves from Israel, Germany is moving closer.
On Monday, the defense ministers of Germany and Norway visited Ottawa, Canada’s capital, to promote the sale of German–Norwegian submarines that they claim are the world’s most advanced. Canada, Germany and Norway formed a maritime security partnership last year, with Denmark joining earlier this year. Committing to the purchase means agreeing to decades of security partnership. Canada is also considering a competing offer from South Korea. German Defense Minister Pistorius argued, “They build excellent submarines; we build better ones.” This is part of Europe’s effort to pull Canada into its sphere.
Russian natural gas supplies to China reached a new record, Kommersant reported Monday. These exports reached 4.62 billion cubic meters in August—a 17 percent increase from last year. Russia is China’s largest natural gas supplier by far, further strengthening an alliance between the two that was prophesied in the Bible.
President Trump wants Turkish troops in Gaza as part of a peacekeeping force, Israel Hayom reported. President Trump wants the Islamic world to help reconstruct Gaza, but Turkey is one of Hamas’s biggest backers, with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan allowing the group to briefly establish a headquarters in Istanbul. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is pushing back against this. Bible prophecy says that Turkey and the Palestinians will form a special alliance “that the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance” (Psalm 83:4). Our Trends article “Why the Trumpet Watches an Alliance Between Arab Nations and Europe” explains this alliance in detail.
Germany is about to order 15 more F-35 fighter jets, Spiegel reported yesterday, at an estimated cost of $2.9 billion. This would bring Germany’s total fleet of F-35 stealth jets to 50. These jets can carry the nuclear bombs America has loaned them. Mr. Flurry’s article “America’s Naive Trust in Germany” explains the great danger in enabling Germany to carry out stealth nuclear strikes.
On Monday, Amazon Web Services failed, reminding the world of the fragility of the Internet and the global economy. The outage at the world’s largest cloud computing provider temporarily crippled thousands of services from some of the biggest companies on earth, such as Venmo, WhatsApp and Zoom, affecting more than 11 million people. The experience was a stark reminder that the entire technical backbone of the Internet consists of just three providers: Amazon, Google and Microsoft. In his 1999 article “America’s Achilles’ Heel,” Gerald Flurry highlighted how computer dependence is creating potentially catastrophic vulnerabilities.
Germany and the Netherlands will buy 222 infantry vehicles in a $4 billion deal, Germany announced yesterday. The Jackal wheeled vehicles will be supplied by Artec, a joint venture between Germany’s Rheinmetall and Franco-German conglomerate knds. Rheinmetall confirmed yesterday that it expects to receive $3.5 billion as part of the deal, prompting another surge in its stock, which is up from less than $100 per share five years ago to about $1,800 per share today.
The British monarch will pray with the leader of the Vatican for the first time in 500 years later this week. King Charles iii will visit Pope Leo xiv on Thursday, receiving a chair bearing his coat of arms and a Latin inscription translating to “That they may be one.” He will also accept the title of “Royal Confrater” of the Abbey of St. Paul’s Outside the Walls in Rome, acknowledging spiritual fellowship between the monarchy, which leads the Anglican Church, and the Vatican. Bible prophecy reveals that Protestant churches such as the Church of England will eventually be absorbed back into the Roman Catholic Church. This visit, coming as the Anglican Church is suffering a major internal split, is another sign that such a reunion is imminent.
A “tsunami” of Israelis have emigrated in recent years, a committee in Israel’s Knesset announced yesterday. Israel has fewer than 10 million citizens, and the committee says more than 125,000 of them moved abroad between 2022 and 2024. The Times of Israel characterized it as Israel’s “largest-ever loss of human capital in such a short period.” Committee chairman Gilad Kariv said, “This is not a wave of emigration, it’s a tsunami of Israelis choosing to leave the country.” Many Israelis sense that bad times are coming for their nation. The Bible prophesies that it will be much worse than they even imagine.
The Houthi military’s chief of staff has died after sustaining wounds from an Israeli strike in August, the Houthis announced Thursday. The Israeli military said Mohammed Abdul Karim al-Ghamari was “responsible for hundreds of missiles and [drone] attacks launched toward Israeli civilians and the State of Israel.” Israel has achieved considerable success in its war against Iran’s proxies. But because of Bible prophecy, the Trumpet expects Iran to continue to increase its power and influence despite these setbacks.
Col. Michael Randrianirina was sworn in as president of Madagascar on Friday, following a military coup. According to the World Bank, three quarters of Madagascar’s 30 million people lived below the poverty line in 2022, and 2 in 3 lacked access to electricity. Protests against electricity and water shortages brought down the previous government in late September and early October. Randrianirina has promised to hold new elections within 18 to 24 months, but he rejected a court order to hold them within 60 days.
Madagascar’s woes are a case study in the corruption that has dogged human government throughout history. There is only one government that truly works.
John Bolton was indicted yesterday by a federal grand jury in Maryland on 18 counts under the Espionage Act. Bolton allegedly shared over 1,000 pages of classified notes from his 2018–2019 tenure in the White House as National Security Advisor with two unauthorized relatives through personal e-mail and a messaging app, and he stored sensitive materials at his home. Prosecutors claim this exposed the information to an Iran-linked cyberhack in 2021. Bolton called the indictment politically motivated retribution; he is a vocal Trump critic and the author of a scathing memoir.
France is trying to create a Gaza peacekeeping force in the United Nations, the French Foreign Ministry announced yesterday. Spokesman Pascal Confavreux said France and Britain are drafting a UN Security Council resolution in collaboration with the United States to create a peacekeeping force to stabilize Gaza as part of a “day-after” plan. The Trumpet expects Europe to become increasingly involved in putting Gaza back together. Our relevant Trends article explains why.
Generation Z students are moving away from gender confusion and returning to sanity, a recent analysis of survey data from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (fire) involving over 60,000 U.S. undergraduates shows.
- The rate of transgenderism halved from 6.8 percent in 2022–2023 to just 3.6 percent in 2025.
The surge in nonbinary and queer self-identification peaked around 2023 after rising steadily since the early 2010s. The past two years have seen a near 10-point return to conventional norms in sexual orientation. This is a blow to “gender reassignment” surgeons, whose demented interventions had been projected to become a $5 billion industry by 2030.
Russia’s armed forces have deployed additional North Korean units to support Russian operations in Ukraine’s Sumy region, the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces reported Thursday. The North Koreans are helping Russia with uav reconnaissance, identifying Ukrainian positions, and carrying out strikes with multiple-launch rocket systems.
The Bible prophesies of a massive Asian alliance, headed by Russia and China, which will include smaller Asian nations such as North Korea. These countries will unite to face a growing European superpower. That is why the Trumpet closely watches the deepening military relationship between Russia and North Korea.
Germany will provide at least €200 million in immediate aid to reconstruct the Gaza Strip, Development Minister Reem Alabali Radovan announced yesterday. “That is the amount that is already available in the budget,” Radovan said in the Table Today podcast. Watch for Germany to become more involved in the region.
Yesterday, a protest of about 15,000 people set fires and attacked businesses like Starbucks and McDonald’s accused of supporting Israel, according to the Barcelona police. Fifteen people were arrested.
In Valencia, Israeli basketball players visiting for a tournament were moved to another hotel amid fears that a crowd 1,000-strong would surround the hotel and riot.
These protests assembled even as Israel and Hamas had supposedly just ended their war. Such anti-Israel actions in a country with such a checkered anti-Semitic past as Spain are another sign that Europe’s old ghosts haven’t gone away.
Chinese container ship Istanbul Bridge completed a journey through the Arctic Sea Route to the United Kingdom on October 13, taking just 20 days for the 7,500-nautical mile voyage. It marks the first time a container ship has transited from China via the Arctic to the UK, and the vessel will now stop in Germany, the Netherlands and Poland. Since a similar voyage to Europe through the Suez Canal generally takes more than twice as long, the Chinese, Russians and Europeans are working to fully establish the Arctic Sea Route. To understand the importance of this emerging route in the context of biblical prophecy, read “The Battle for the Arctic.”
Australia charges Sydney man for sending almost $650,000 to Iranian banks under sanctions, authorities announced today. The 34-year-old is accused of sending 543 transfers totaling $649,308 over a year. As Trumpet contributor Callum Wood recently wrote, this demonstrates how Australia has been infiltrated by Iran.
Phase-two talks between Israel and Hamas have commenced in Egypt, the Israel Defense Forces confirmed today. If agreed to, this would place Gaza under the authority of an interim political body not affiliated by Hamas, as well as an international peacekeeping force. Egypt claims that a 15-member governing committee has been formed, backed by Hamas and reviewed by Israel. Regardless how the current talks conclude, as we wrote in our October 13 Morning Brief, “Israel’s problems with the Palestinians are only getting started.”
Chinese Coast Guard and maritime militia vessels bullied Philippine boats near Pag-asa Island in the South China Sea yesterday, with one intentionally ramming a Philippine boat.
Pag-asa lies well within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone as defined by international law, based on the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and reinforced by a 2016 international court ruling. But China rejects international law when it doesn’t serve its purposes and claims almost the entire South China Sea as its own, including sections belonging to the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan and Vietnam. China enforces its claims partly by antagonizing the vessels of these other nations in their own waters.
Though yesterday’s ramming caused only minor damage and no injuries, it marks yet another instance of China’s illegal and destabilizing aggression in one of the world’s most important maritime regions. Watch for China to increase its belligerence in this area as it keeps pushing the world toward war.
A federal grand jury in Virginia indicted New York Attorney General Letitia James yesterday on charges of bank fraud and making false statements to a financial institution. Allegedly she misrepresented a three-bedroom home she purchased as her secondary residence to secure favorable mortgage terms while actually using it as a rental investment property.
James dismissed the indictment as a “baseless” weaponization of the justice system by the president. The evidence prosecutors have has not been released, so it is unclear how solid the case is. But it could not possibly be more baseless than the civil fraud lawsuit James successfully brought against Donald Trump in 2023 that resulted in a nearly $500 million judgment.
Whatever truth there may be to accusations that the president is unjustly using the Justice Department, what happened under his predecessor was far worse.
China asked India for assurances on Thursday that any heavy rare earth magnets it sells New Delhi will be used strictly for India’s domestic needs and not reexported to America. The request comes as relations between China and India are warming and trade frictions between China and the United States are intensifying. Those frictions have prompted China, which controls 90 percent of global heavy rare earth magnet production, to limit the export of these vital materials to many nations worldwide. If China receives the assurances it seeks, it will be able to continue inflicting pain on U.S. industry while empowering India’s electronics, aerospace, defense and other sectors. This development would advance the improvement in China-India relations and help set the two Asian giants on track for an alliance the Trumpet has long been expecting.
Back in 2020, German authorities recorded around 3,200 right-wing extremist-motivated crimes by individuals age 24 or under. Four years later, in 2024, this figure had more than doubled to over 7,100. It is just one troubling sign among many of how the extremes are rising in Germany.
