The Chinese People’s Liberation Army has for the first time deployed its new Z-20T Assault Eagle attack helicopter to participate in major exercises, marking a major turning point in the modernisation of Chinese close air support capabilities.
This followed the aircraft’s first public appearance during a military parade on September 3, and its subsquent debut in flight demonstrations at the 7th China Helicopter Exposition in Tianjin in October.
The exercises were conducted by an Army aviation brigade of the 71st Group Army in eastern Fujian province, in close proximity to the Taiwan Strait, and showcased its low-altitude penetration, semi-hover “single-wheel” landings, and rapid troop deployment capabilities under realistic field conditions.
Chinese Z-20T Attack Helicopter
The exercises provided rare insight into how helicopters may be utilised under combat conditions, including in a potential cross-straits war that pits the mainland’s People’s Liberation Army against the rival Republic of China Armed Forces based on Taiwan.
The two rival Chinese governments have been technically in a state of civil war for over 70 years.
Cisco’s May 2025 quantum entanglement chip, featured in the post’s video clip, generates 200 million entangled photon pairs per second, enabling scalable quantum networking without traditional radio frequencies.
Developed with UC Santa Barbara, the prototype supports distributed quantum computing, with Cisco and IBM’s November 2025 partnership aiming for fault-tolerant networks by the late 2030s.
A single photon’s potential to encode vast information relies on quantum superposition; studies show up to 10 bits per photon via orbital angular momentum, but encoding the world’s ~120 zettabytes remains theoretically possible yet practically infeasible today.
This has been a popular anti-immigration, anti-woke image in Japan and elsewhere.
Japan adapted to the challenging innovations of the West in the 19th Century.
At first, they experienced disorientation and self-doubt, but resolved to face the new world they saw coming by adapting to it while preserving their own civilization.
They were the most successful nation in the world to do this.
Today, they appear again to be the most successful nation in the world at resisting a demise similar to that of the West by not throwing open their borders to replace their own people and civilization.
The Japanese elite, though not flawless, is loyal enough to its citizenry to avoid national suicide. ABN
A Russian person could not visit New York, Chicago and Los Angeles and then say they visited The United States and have an understanding of Americans. They might think they understand, but any American would giggle at the notion.
Conversely, the same is true in Russia. You cannot visit Moscow, St Petersburg and Kazan and think you have an understanding of Russians. However, if you give yourself time, join in the daily tasks and challenges of ordinary Russians, you can easily discover some of the deeper stuff that really puts context on life in the Russian Federation.
Perhaps what follows is a different perspective.
It took a while, but I finally figured out what this phrase “the Motherland” is all about.
Let me start by sharing another phrase that almost every American will find familiar, yet virtually every Russian asked has no reference to comprehend: “you work for us.”
When talking to a federal, state or local government official in the United States and saying, “you work for us,” everyone listening would completely understand your sentiment. However, in Russia that phrase is akin to asking a Martian for a canoe. This is the way to understand “the motherland.”
Within Russia the social compact is organized around the premise (key word “premise“), that government is the mother figure within a family – and all of the citizens are children. The government knows best. The state engages in all facets, systems and structures as if they are the omnipotent mother who cares about the children.
This is a very good essay, well-worth reading. It provides an outsider’s sympathetic view of what Russia today is and why it is that way. It’s not easy to compose an overview of this type. ABN
Confidence in Minnesota‘s social safety net has been shaken by fraudsters who authorities say have stolen more than $1 billion in public funds from programs meant to feed children, assist the homeless and provide autism therapy.
Over the last five years, people mostly within Somali communities have gotten rich by running companies that bill the state for millions of dollars in social services that were never actually rendered, The New York Times reported.
Federal prosecutors say of the 86 people that have been charged, 59 have been convicted so far in what they describe as three separate fraud schemes.
One central case involved the nonprofit Feeding Our Future, which claimed to serve tens of thousands of meals to low-income children during the pandemic.
Prosecutors allege most of those meals never existed, and instead, the taxpayer money went to luxury homes, cars, jewelry and real estate abroad.
‘No one will support these programs if they continue to be riddled with fraud,’ Joseph H Thompson, the federal prosecutor who took on the cases, told The Times. ‘We’re losing our way of life in Minnesota in a very real way.’
I was unfamiliar with the idea of the scapegoat also being a “truth teller” in a narcissistic family. The truth teller might also be called a witness; it’s the child that knows something is not right and thus threatens the vulnerable narcissist. Many if not most traditional cultures have very large narcissistic components. Their moral strictures, religions, duties, values, manners, etc. almost all contain elements of narcissism. So there is an important historical dimension to this diagnosis.
Aspects of Buddhism as it is traditionally practiced even today can also be seen as being narcissistic or fostering narcissism. Same for all the Abrahamic religions, Confucianism, Aztec beliefs and so on across the globe. Just as consciousness is fundamental to our human reality so are the many ways of interpreting it, almost all of which historically have tended toward narcissistic systems.
Truth tellers typically are most likely to escape the web of the narcissistic family even though their role in it was to be the most despised, the scapegoat. Sometimes I see the Buddha as a truth teller who freed himself from his father’s make-believe world despite the power and luxury it offered. In this vein, Jesus can be seen as an outcast black sheep who was tortured and grossly humiliated. Both embody the hardship of earning freedom from delusion.
President Donald Trump has declared the airspace over Venezuela ‘to be closed in its entirety’ as the US continues to threaten military action against the country.
In a Saturday morning post to his Truth Social, he asked all ‘airlines, pilots, drug dealers, and human traffickers’, to steer clear of the area.
The Trump administration has accused Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro of leading and protecting a criminal network known as the Cartel de los Soles.
Troops have been amassing in Puerto Rico, some 500 miles from the South American county, with Gen. Dan Caine, Trump’s military adviser, visiting the area on Monday.
American Buddhist Net 
