Die Innenministerin kann sich ein Verbot in der Nacht vorstellen. Die Vorschläge des Bundesrats gehen ihr zu wenig weit.

Mit der Aussetzung von US-Sanktionen gegen Russland bringt Trump die Ukraine in Not. Eine Begründung gab er nicht.

Archaeologists have discovered an ancient base camp in Alaska that has evidence of the oldest dwelling and possibly the earliest domesticated dogs in the Americas.

Ramadan-Fasten, kein Schwimmen: Das Thema «Islam» hat das Potenzial, an Schulen zu Konflikten zu führen. Was tun?

Sobre o que cada um faz diante daquilo que vê

Get all of ICN's exclusive original articles and in-depth investigations each week, delivered every Saturday.

All'assemblea UDC di Bulle, Dettling attacca la sinistra sugli accordi bilaterali con l'UE e difende l'autodeterminazione svizzera. Presenti 420 delegati.

A judge ruled that the tech company must adopt measures to immediately secure equal treatment of the two presidential candidates ahead of an Oct. 25 runoff.

Presidenciável sinalizou que seguirá pelo mesmo caminho do pai: ausência (e destruição) de políticas voltadas a esses territórios e ataques ao modo de vida tradicional

O programa da semana fala da pressão do bolsonarismo nos terrítórios e das conexões dos incêndios que atingem a Amazônia com a mudanças climáticas, o El Niño e o cenário político do Brasil

“Trump and the Bolsonaros are the global political shield for big tech companies against the advance of European regulation and the Latin American left,” Meta AI chatbot tells Brazilian grad student

In May 2023, the Pentagon’s shiny new fighter jet was not looking so shiny or new. Already a decade late and nearly $200 billion over its original cost estimate, the F-35 program faced a new crisis. An internal government watchdog report detailed a cascade of new problems with the program, which was in a period of flux amid plans to upgrade the jet’s engine and cooling system. The report from the Government Accountability Office criticized the Pentagon for lumping those upgrades in with the overall purchase of the planes. Conflating the two, the authors said, would limit congressional insight into cost increases. And they criticized the contractors behind the aircraft for failing to deliver the F-35 in a timely manner. For Lockheed Martin, the main defense giant overseeing the development of the F-35, the timing was far from ideal. In a few weeks, Congress was set to debate the Pentagon’s mammoth budget — and with it, new funding for the military’s purchase of F-35 jets. > Collins was the largest recipient of Lockheed cash in the period surrounding the inspector general report. So Lockheed and its lobbyists went on a charm offensive in Washington. The weapons maker shelled out hundreds of thousands over a two-month period, in what the money-in-politics watchdog Open Secrets described as “one of the largest coordinated lobbying efforts” around that year’s military budget. No member of Congress benefited more than Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who at the time served as the ranking member on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. From May 1 to June 30, 2023, employees and top executives from Lockheed Martin donated $59,500 to Collins’s campaign committee. The donations were outliers during that period: Collins was among the largest recipients of Lockheed cash; the company was her largest single donor over those two months; and it was the largest spending blitz on Collins by Lockheed compared to the same period in other years. The effort appeared to pay off for Lockheed. In July 2023, less than two months after the release of the Government Accountability Office report, Collins voted in favor of appropriating funds to purchase 83 new F-35 jets. Later that year, when the final version of the military budget was signed into law, Collins celebrated the economic boon she said it would bring to the state of Maine. In response to questions from The Intercept, Phoebe Keller, a spokesperson for the Republican-controlled Senate Appropriations Committee, said Collins’s support for the jet had nothing to do with donations from Lockheed or any other firm. “Sen. Collins did not support the F-35 because of donations that she received,” Keller said. “The F-35 jet program is a longstanding bipartisan defense priority,” Keller said. “Sen. Collins has always publicly supported the F-35 jet program, as dozens of both Republican and Democratic Senators.” ## Related ### Company Behind California Chemical Leak Was Building F-35 Parts Amid Rush of Orders From U.S. and Israel Collins’s position on the Defense Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee likely played a role in the outsized donations, according to analyst Dan Grazier. And Collins, for her part, would have good reason to approve the spending: The F-35 program, Lockheed claims, has had a nine-figure economic impact in Maine. ## **Fight of Her Political Life** In the final weeks of the biggest fight of her political career against Democratic challenger Troy Jackson, fresh scrutiny on Collins’s donations from defense contractors has become a sore spot for her campaign. In some cases, the senator’s interactions with defense firms are the routine for Washington: glad-handing, lobbying, contributions, and directing pork-barrel spending back home. Not all of it, though, is standard. Last month, a bombshell report in ProPublica detailed an FBI investigation into an alleged pay-to-play scheme. A former defense contractor claimed to federal agents that he worked with figures tied to Collins to disguise campaign donations — and got federal contracts totaling $32 million in return. (The FBI probe fizzled after Trump returned to office and purged the bureau; Collins denied wrongdoing, pushing back on elements of the report.) On Wednesday, more than 250 Mainers signed a letter to the state’s attorney general asking the official to investigate the allegations of corruption, according to Maine Morning Star, a local news outlet. ## Related ### Susan Collins’s Committee Bought Trucks the Army Didn’t Want. Then Campaign Donations Poured In. And earlier this month, The Intercept reported on donations from another defense contractor, AM General, and its parent company, whose employees gave $58,000 to fundraising committees associated with Collins after a damning assessment from the Army put its federal contracts in jeopardy. As with the AM General donations, the contributions by employees and lobbyists of Lockheed Martin do not indicate wrongdoing by Collins or her donors.**** They instead illuminate how companies that garner lucrative contracts zero in on powerful members of Congress, who often tout the benefits to their states. “This is an example of what’s wrong with our approach to buying weapons,” said William Hartung, an analyst who has written critically of defense spending and influence peddling in Washington. “If we buy things because they’re in the state of a powerful member, we’re not going to have a coherent arsenal.” ## Most Read ICE Raid on Ilhan Omar Shows How Dangerous Two Years of Flailing Trump Could Get Natasha Lennard Susan Collins-Aligned Super PAC Buys Attack Ads in Portland… Oregon Noah Hurowitz An Arkansas Mom Obtained Public Records About a New Data Center. Then She Got Sued. Seth Stern ## **Lockheed Giving** Collins was not the only member of Congress to push for funding the F-35, which enjoyed broad bipartisan support — especially from lawmakers with eligible firms and facilities in their states. And she was not the only one to benefit from the largesse of Lockheed Martin. From May 1 to June 30, 2023, Lockheed’s corporate PAC doled out $421,000 in a bipartisan blitz to various campaign political action committees, campaign funds, state parties, and charitable foundations. (Aside from 2024, the year of the presidential election, contributions in that two-month period in 2023 eclipsed subsequent years. In the same period this year, Lockheed’s corporate PAC made 128 donations totaling $236,000; last year, it gave $286,000 across 158 donations during the same period.) Collins was by far the biggest single beneficiary of the influx of cash — which came at a time when she was not actively campaigning. And, unlike the donations spread out to other campaign committees, the cash going from Lockheed into Collins’s coffers during those months came exclusively in the form of individual donations by employees and executives, including the firm’s CEO and chief operating officer, data from the Federal Election Commission shows. > Of the 60 donations of $1,000 or more during May and June of that year, 56 went to Collins. Lobbyists working for Lockheed contributed another $5,000 to Collins during that period, and corporate PACs for Lockheed’s lobbying firms shelled out another $5,500 total, according to FEC disclosures. Among individual contributions by Lockheed employees, donations to Collins made up more than 10 percent of all donations during the two-month period surrounding the watchdog report. Only the firm’s in-house employee PAC, which received 75 percent of all employee donations, took in more from figures tied to Lockheed. Collins got more than twice as much as the next highest recipient, ActBlue, the Democratic Party-aligned fundraising vehicle, which received 4 percent of all Lockheed employee contributions in that period, according to FEC data. The vast majority donations from Lockheed employees and officials were under $1,000. Of the 60 donations of $1,000 or more during May and June 2023, 56 went to Collins. Virtually all employee contributions from Lockheed workers and executives to Collins during her current term came during that two-month window, according to the FEC. Lockheed donations made up a quarter of all contributions during May and June 2023 to Collins’s main fundraising arm, Collins for Senator. The next runner-up was telecom giant Charter Communications, whose employee contributions made up just 8 percent of gifts to the Collins campaign in the second quarter of the 2023 fiscal year. A spokesperson for Lockheed did not answer specific questions regarding the reason for the sudden influx of individual contributions to Collins in 2023. “Our employee PAC program continues to observe long-standing principles of bi-partisan political engagement in support of our business interests,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. ## We’re independent of corporate interests — and powered by members. Join us. Become a member ## Join Our Newsletter Thank You For Joining! Original reporting. Fearless journalism. Delivered to you. Will you take the next step to support our independent journalism by becoming a member of The Intercept? I'm in Become a member By signing up, I agree to receive emails from The Intercept and to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. ## Join Our Newsletter ## Original reporting. Fearless journalism. Delivered to you. I'm in ## **Another Vehicle Army Didn’t Want** Two years later, a similar pattern played out in miniature when a lesser-known defense firm with a troubled product enjoyed Collins’s support on Capitol Hill. Collins went out of her way last year to slam the Pentagon for canceling its plans to purchase robotic combat vehicles from Textron and its subsidiary Howe & Howe, the Maine-based developer of the Ripsaw. Collins has repeatedly hyped the unmanned robotic combat vehicle in Senate hearings and official statements. On June 18, 2025, she took issue with the fact that the vehicle had appeared in a recent military parade, but did not make the cut for further spending. “It’s the height of irony that you would feature this combat vehicle in your parade as the future of the Army at the same time that you’ve canceled the contract — the cancellation of a contract that was won over a lot of other competitors,” Collins said, describing the decision as “terribly unfair and a real mistake.” A month later, after the military budget cleared the Senate Appropriations Committee, Collins singled out Howe & Howe, and its plant in Waterboro, Maine, as a potential beneficiary of a portion of $44 million allotted to outfit the U.S. Marine Corps with amphibious and autonomous vehicles. She gave another shoutout to Howe & Howe in January, after the 2026 military budget was signed into law. This May, during the congressional testimony by then-Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll, Collins again took the military to task for cutting its planned purchase of the Ripsaw. Textron’s corporate PAC made contributions totaling $4,000 to various PACs associated with Collins just ahead of her vote on the 2026 military budget. $3,000 of the gifts came days after Collins criticized the military for cutting its plans for the Ripsaw program that would have brought millions of dollars to Howe & Howe. Later in the year, the Textron corporate PAC donated another $7,000 to Collins for Senator and the Collins-linked Dirigo PAC, according to FEC filings. (A spokesperson for Textron and Howe & Howe did not respond to a request for comment.) Keller, the Senate Appropriations Committee spokesperson, said that Collins was not a member of the Armed Services Committee that voted on funding the Ripsaw. “She doesn’t have the agency to fund or not fund the vehicle because it wasn’t through the Appropriations Committee,” Keller said, adding that Collins’s longtime support for the Ripsaw was not motivated by the Textron and Howe & Howe donations. Employees of Textron and its subsidiary, meanwhile, made contributions to various Collins-linked PACS totaling nearly $15,000 between September 2025 and October 15, 2026, FEC data shows. ## Related ### The Pentagon’s Secret Budget The donations, relatively small in the post-Citizens United era of campaign finance, still illustrate a troubling pattern of how influence plays out in Washington, according to Hartung, the analyst critical of military spending. “A lot of members lobby to get more units of something built in their state, or craft legislation for a system that only their local firm can produce,” Hartung said. “It’s kind of business as usual, but sometimes business as usual causes great harm.” **Update: October 15, 2026, 7:00 p.m. ET** _This story has been updated to include further statements from Phoebe Keller, a spokesperson for the Senate Appropriations Committee, that were made after publication._ Share * Copy link * Share on Facebook * Share on Bluesky * Share on X * Share on LinkedIn * Share on WhatsApp _IT’S EVEN WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT._ What we’re seeing right now from Donald Trump is a full-on authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government. This is not hyperbole. Court orders are being ignored. MAGA loyalists have been put in charge of the military and federal law enforcement agencies. The Department of Government Efficiency has stripped Congress of its power of the purse. News outlets that challenge Trump have been banished or put under investigation. Yet far too many are still covering Trump’s assault on democracy like politics as usual, with flattering headlines describing Trump as “unconventional,” “testing the boundaries,” and “aggressively flexing power.” The Intercept has long covered authoritarian governments, billionaire oligarchs, and backsliding democracies around the world. We understand the challenge we face in Trump and the vital importance of press freedom in defending democracy. ## We’re independent of corporate interests. Will you help us? $15 $25 $50 $100 $5 $8 $10 $15 One Time Monthly Donate **_IT’S BEEN A DEVASTATING_** year for journalism — the worst in modern U.S. history. We have a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking. In this most perilous moment for democracy, The Intercept is fighting back. But to do so effectively, we need to grow. **That’s where you come in. Will you help us expand our reporting capacity in time to hit the ground running in 2026?** ## We’re independent of corporate interests. Will you help us? $15 $25 $50 $100 $5 $8 $10 $15 One Time Monthly Donate **_I’M BEN MUESSIG,_** The Intercept’s editor-in-chief. It’s been a devastating year for journalism — the worst in modern U.S. history. We have a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking. In this most perilous moment for democracy, The Intercept is fighting back. But to do so effectively, we need to grow. **That’s where you come in. Will you help us expand our reporting capacity in time to hit the ground running in 2026?** ## We’re independent of corporate interests. Will you help us? $15 $25 $50 $100 $5 $8 $10 $15 One Time Monthly Donate ## Contact the author: Noah Hurowitz noah.hurowitz@theintercept.com @noahhurowitz.bsky.social on Bluesky @NoahHurowitz on X ## Related ### Susan Collins-Aligned Super PAC Buys Attack Ads in Portland… Oregon ### Pete Hegseth’s Military of the Future: Defined by AI and an Utter Lack of Oversight ### As U.S.-Funded Wars Rage in Israel and Ukraine, Pentagon Watchdog Warns of Military Failures ### “The Spoils of War”: How Profits Rather Than Empire Define Success for the Pentagon ## Latest Stories Voices ### Trump Is Targeting Ilhan Omar. Where’s the Elite Media Outrage? Adam Johnson - 1:54 pm Unlike the raid on John Bolton, the targeting of Omar has elicited zero condemnation from NYT, WSJ, and Washington Post. ### America’s Sordid History of Filming Executions as Entertainment Nikita Mazurov - 1:11 pm Hegseth’s plan to livestream an execution was not without precedent — it tapped into a dark and forgotten U.S. tradition. Chilling Dissent ### Inside ICE, Officials Question String of Trump Admin “Midterm Panic Moves” Karl Loftus - 12:07 pm One ICE official said the timing of the raid on Ilhan Omar’s home was “politically motivated.” Join The Conversation

Was bringt die jährliche Grippeimpfung? Die Meinungen in der Fachwelt und bei den Behörden gehen auseinander.

Hiérarchie de l'information selon France 2.

Preferência por bolsonarismo segue a geografia do desmatamento, da expansão da pecuária, das lavouras de soja e do garimpo ilegal; onde a floresta está mais intacta, Lula tende a ter mais votos

Support for the far right candidate follows the frontiers of deforestation, ranching, soybean farming, and illegal mining. Where the Forest is more intact, voters are more likely to favour Lula

The Trump administration on Friday placed sweeping sanctions on the International Criminal Court that target the institution as a whole. This comes on top of earlier sanctions against individual ICC judges and personnel. The administration has been escalating attacks on the ICC since the court issued arrest warrants in 2024 for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. It announced the sanctions just hours after former ICC Judge Navi Pillay — the South African jurist who led the United Nations commission of inquiry that concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza — was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. “This is really an insurance policy against accountability for crimes that the United States and its ally Israel are committing in plain sight,” says war crimes prosecutor Reed Brody, a member of the International Commission of Jurists. The sanctions, which prevent U.S.-based banks and companies from transacting with the ICC, constitute an “existential attack” on the court, he says.

Nadia Beller afirma que grupo de Fernando Cerimedo tinha contatos na Meta e atuou para reduzir a visibilidade de Lula nas redes.

Scientists have discovered a distinct change in the brains of people with long COVID that might explain some of the illness's most debilitating symptoms. The dopamine neurons of some patients could be damaged or burned out. That is still an early hunch, but a preliminary study in Canada of 24 people with long COVID found distinct changes in some brain regions, compared to healthy participants of the same age. The worse the symptoms of memory decline, slow physical movements, and a lack of motivation, the greater the differences measured in dopamine nerve endings. "Our findings provide compelling evidence that long COVID involves the loss of dopamine-releasing neurons," says psychiatrist Jeffrey Meyer from the Brain Health Imaging Center in Canada. "This kind of injury is well known to produce symptoms like lack of motivation and motor slowing, and may contribute to memory difficulties in other neurological conditions. Our results suggest a similar process is occurring in long COVID." PET scans show a weaker signal for a marker of dopamine-releasing nerve endings in a person with long COVID (left), compared with healthy people without and with a history of COVID-19 (center and right). (Liu et al., _eBioMedicine_ , 2026) Previous studies among people with long COVID mainly focused on brain inflammation and immune changes, but none directly examined whether the brain's dopamine-producing neurons were affected. "These results indicate that long COVID is, at least in part, a disorder of the brain's dopamine system," argues Meyer. Dopamine is famously known as the 'feel-good' hormone. It's a crucial chemical messenger in the brain, closely tied to the brain's reward system. But there are reasons to suspect that dopamine circuits may be vulnerable to injury during long COVID. Individuals with long COVID show elevated markers for some brain cells that prune back synapses. This may damage dopamine-releasing neurons. It's also possible that SARS-CoV-2 can directly infect dopamine-releasing neurons, injuring them from within. These brain cells tend to have a high density of receptors that SARS-CoV-2 could theoretically connect to. Using PET scans (positron emission tomography) with a radioactive tracer, researchers in Canada measured a marker of dopamine nerve endings among 24 participants with long COVID. None of these participants had an active infection, but they were all suffering from persistent and debilitating symptoms since first falling ill with COVID. To a certain extent, they all reported a lack of motivation, and as a group, they scored worse on tests of memory and movement speed. Compared to healthy controls, their brains showed a reduction in the density of dopamine nerve endings within several regions of the striatum. This part of the brain is involved in motivation, movement speed, and memory. The severity of some long COVID symptoms among patients was correlated with their density of dopamine neurons. This suggests that the two are connected. Roughly 25 percent of the variance in these symptoms among patients with long COVID was associated with a loss of dopaminergic neurons. In people with long COVID, a lower PET scan signal for a dopamine neuron marker was associated with more apathy and cognitive concerns, poorer memory, and slower performance on movement and reading tests. (Liu et al., eBioMedicine, 2026) "The present study makes a case for a hypothesis that interventions targeting dopamine-releasing neurons in long COVID would have therapeutic impact," the authors conclude. "This is a notable shift from present therapeutic development, given that no current trials focus on augmenting functions of dopamine-releasing neurons." Brain scans like these measure a protein found on dopamine nerve endings rather than measuring neuron density directly. However, they are very useful when investigating brain changes in living patients. The only way to directly examine dopamine-releasing neurons is to examine postmortem brain tissue. One small autopsy study found fewer dopamine neurons in people who died with severe COVID-19, but most were elderly, and some had signs of early dementia, including one person with Parkinson's, which confounds the results. This new investigation is only preliminary, but it suggests that perhaps long COVID impacts dopamine-releasing neurons in broadly similar ways to Parkinson's. If that is verified, then drugs like L-dopa, which are used for Parkinson's, could theoretically be repurposed to treat patients with long COVID. "These interventions would enhance tonic dopamine release broadly, and phasic release in intact synapses, thereby reducing impact of lost synapses," the study authors theorize. Still, these drugs aren't to be taken lightly, as they can have significant side effects. They may also only work for patients with a certain type of long COVID. The symptoms of this post-viral condition are very diverse, and not all patients report slower physical movements, a lack of motivation, or worsening memory. It's possible that other manifestations of long COVID don't involve dopamine neurons in the same way. The researchers argue for future studies in larger, similarly well-controlled cohorts to help confirm the robustness and generalizability of these findings. It's worth noting Meyer has a pending patent application for a dopamine-based long COVID treatment. Susan Deuville is a patient with long COVID who participates as a lived-experience research advisor to Meyer. "For five years I have been seeking answers on what happened to me after I contracted COVID in 2021," says Deuville. "It was a crushing loss of the life I had and the person I was before. The research of Dr Meyer brings hope. It also validates what long COVID sufferers have always known – long COVID is real, and the effects are devastating." The research has been published in _eBioMedicine_. This article was fact-checked by Rebecca Dyer and edited by Rebecca Dyer. While we pride ourselves on our process, we are only human. If you spot a mistake, please let us know.

Das Verfahren wurde eigentlich schon 2025 eingestellt. Doch nach erfolgreicher Einsprache muss Lukas Hässig vor Gericht.

RUAG e Lockheed Martin assembleranno tre F-35A a Emmen dal 2027: la Svizzera acquisisce competenze strategiche per la manutenzione dei caccia di ultima generazione.