At first blush, the proposed venture looks like it would further the Trump administration’s goal of global “energy dominance.”

An American energy company intends to buy Russian technology and use it to access a massive supply of natural gas in Alaska, liquefy it and export it to allies abroad.

The Kremlin and the White House were interested in the idea. President Vladimir V. Putin discussed the plan last month with President Trump’s peace envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, people familiar with the negotiations said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy. It is one of a series of energy deals White House officials believe could help smooth relations with Moscow and eventually pave the way to end the war in Ukraine.

But it turns out that the company was not an all-American affair. The multibillion-dollar project has received secret funding from the same powerful Russian company that was to provide the technology, according to the energy executive who until last month led the U.S. firm and two others involved in company negotiations.

Joel Riddle, who was chief executive of the company, Polar LNG, until he resigned in September, said he had been misled about the sources of the start-up funding, which ostensibly came from a company in the United Arab Emirates.

Instead, Mr. Riddle said he learned, the true source of at least some of Polar LNG’s money was Novatek, a Russian energy giant under partial U.S. sanctions.

“It’s not only unlawful, but it’s not in the U.S. interest to have Russian technology controlling the commercialization of Arctic gas in the North Slope,” Mr. Riddle said in a brief interview.

These previously unreported tensions were also detailed in legal memos that Mr. Riddle attached to his resignation letter, which was reviewed by The New York Times. The memos, prepared by Baker Botts, an international law firm, said the Treasury Department’s sanctions enforcement unit had raised concerns that Polar LNG had ties to Novatek that might present “potential Russia-related sanctions concerns.”

Polar LNG on Friday issued a statement announcing a new acting chief executive, Tim Talkington, and described Mr. Riddle as a “disgruntled former employee.”

But in a statement to The Times, Novatek said on Friday that in fact, it was moving to acquire “minority shareholder” status in the Polar LNG project — a striking effort by the Russian energy giant to seek ownership of American gas production.

The project, if it happens, is a long way off. In addition to the sanctions issues that would have to be negotiated, the technology envisioned is highly complex and must overcome some of the most brutal weather conditions in the United States. It also is competing with another Alaska gas plan that already has the support of the Trump administration. But that the Polar LNG deal is being discussed at all shows how business deals of almost any stripe are on the table during the talks with the Kremlin.

The sequence of events illustrates the unorthodox, opaque mixture of deal-making and high-stakes diplomacy that has defined Mr. Trump’s attempts to end Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II.

There is no indication that Mr. Witkoff or Mr. Kushner were aware of Polar LNG or its ties to Novatek, even as the broad outlines of the deal came up in their talks with Mr. Putin beginning last year. A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the closed-door talks, said that the deal had only been broadly mentioned and that no granular discussions had occurred.

The project, should it ever come to fruition, would doubly help Novatek, one of Russia’s biggest energy companies, first by using Novatek’s technology and second because the company would own an equity stake.

The Alaska gas discussions have taken place alongside talks to sell off part of another Russian energy giant, Lukoil, to the U.S. government and other investors, including some with business ties to Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner, causing consternation among some Washington lawmakers and outraging some of Ukraine’s supporters. The pair have also discussed the possibility of U.S. involvement in future Russian gas exports to Europe. (The administration has said that Mr. Kushner and Mr. Witkoff were guided only by U.S. interests.)

Geoffrey R. Pyatt, who served as an assistant secretary of state for energy resources during the Biden administration, said the idea of bringing Novatek into the high north of Alaska is a terrible one. “It is terrible on environmental grounds, it is a terrible idea on economic and geopolitical grounds, and most importantly this feeds the belief that Putin can get an out-of-jail-free card.”

The efforts to bring Novatek equipment to Alaska have also included a businessman, Gentry Beach, with ties to the Trump family. A college friend of Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, Mr. Beach served as a finance vice chairman for Mr. Trump’s 2017 inauguration. Mr. Beach said in February that he had held negotiations with Novatek about bringing its natural gas technology to Alaska.

Mr. Beach could not be reached for comment. It was not clear if he remained involved in the project, or whether he was aware of Novatek’s potential ownership stake in Polar LNG.

A spokesman for Donald Trump Jr. said the two men were no longer close, adding that Mr. Trump was not involved in the Polar LNG project. Novatek’s statement said that Mr. Beach had no role in its discussions to take a stake in Polar LNG. The U.S. official said Mr. Beach was not involved in the administration’s discussions related to Novatek.

Mr. Riddle is one of at least three Polar LNG executives who recently resigned. As they departed, Trump officials were notified about their concerns related to the secret Russian financing. Mr. Riddle said the executives had urged administration officials to investigate the matter. The Energy Department, where the warning was sent, did not respond when asked about the matter.

“I felt like I did the right thing to notify authorities at the appropriate time,” Mr. Riddle said.

A New York woman faces homicide charges four years after Maxine Messam was left unconscious following an alleged unlicensed buttock injection

I always get the same question when I return from reporting in Russia: When will Russians finally be fed up with the war?

They might seem to have good reason now. The war, for years mostly background noise among many Russians, feels more present. The economy is limping. Drivers have to wait in line for gas. Warehouses and data centers are going up in flames. Even Moscow at times comes under heavy attack, as it did on Thursday, when Ukraine launched 630 drones into the region.

One recent morning, I set out to ask Russians what they thought about all this. I went to Sofino, a town about an hour from Moscow, where Ukrainian drones a few days before had struck an industrial area, igniting a fire, and a residential complex, killing two people.

On the way, I pulled over at a Rosneft gas station where waiting cars snaked well past the exit lane. It had no diesel, but gasoline was available for about $3.25 a gallon — a steep price in Russia. A young man named Danya told me he had waited 30 minutes for gas.

He shrugged it off, repeating a refrain I hear all the time from Russians. “Everything is fine,” said Danya, who, like others I spoke with, asked that his last name not be used to avoid trouble with the authorities. He added that fuel shortages were overblown.

The war, he insisted, “doesn’t affect my life at all.”

“Everything is fine,” he said again.

Russians shrug for several reasons. They are silenced by the fear and conformity bred by a repressive government. They feel they have as much influence over their country’s politics as they do the weather. They are used to deprivation from centuries of political and economic crises. They keep their focus, as a coping mechanism, on what hasn’t changed. And they are flooded with anti-Ukraine propaganda from the state.

There is also a more fundamental explanation. Ukraine’s strategy, as it holds Russia to a near deadlock on the front lines, is to make Russians feel the war and demand an end. That includes the strikes on oil refineries that President Trump has pressured Ukraine to stop in recent days as he has openly favored President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

Although the Ukrainian campaign has significantly cut Russian oil production, causing clear economic damage, it has not been enough yet to drastically change life in Russia. Kyiv lacks the ballistic missiles and jet-powered drones that Russia fires at Ukrainian cities every day. And Ukraine’s strikes, focused mostly on economic and military targets, do not instill the same fear as Russia’s systematic assaults on Ukrainian civilian targets.

Ukraine’s attacks have politicized some Russians who before now had tried to ignore the war. People have rallied around the flag. In Sofino, outside an apartment building with a gaping hole in the third and fourth floors after the Ukrainian strike, I asked three warehouse workers if they felt angry at the Russian state for starting the war and letting it drag on for nearly five years.

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“Quite the opposite, the attacks make people hate them even more, because their homes have been damaged,” one young man said, referring to Ukrainians and their Western backers. He asked that his name be withheld.

Inside the building, a woman named Lusya was dragging a trash bag down the rubble-strewn stairs. She said it was surreal watching television that evening because there was no mention of the attack that had suddenly rendered her homeless. Still, she said she trusted Russia’s leaders.

“I support my president, even more so after all this, because you realize you just have to support the man and consolidate around him,” she said.

“I believe we are very lucky to have Putin,” she added.

A damaged apartment building in Sofino, Russia, last month.Valerie Hopkins/The New York Times
Enduring adversity is a source of national pride for Russians. Successive generations have heard tales of the sacrifices of World War II. Waiting in line for basic goods was common during the Soviet era. The war in Ukraine, for many, is just another hardship to bear.

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“People get used to a ‘new normal’ again and again,” said Elena Stein of the Berlin-based Center for Independent Social Research, which supports research inside Russia.

Many Russians are just tuning out the war. In a poll last month by the independent Levada Center, nearly 60 percent of respondents said they paid little or no attention to the fighting, the highest level ever recorded. Six in 10 said the country was on the right track, up 10 percentage points from the level in June, just after an earlier drone attack on Moscow.

The reliability of polling data is limited in autocratic Russia. But such numbers indicate that Mr. Putin’s yearslong effort to insulate Russians enough from the war that he can conduct it unimpeded is still largely working, despite mounting challenges.

“The pressure and the problems that are there are, in my view, not intense enough for him to reconsider at this point,” said Janis Kluge, a Russia analyst at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

Other analysts have said that the Trump administration’s recent decisions to engage in business deals with the Kremlin while demanding no concessions will only harden Mr. Putin’s resolve to continue fighting until he achieves his objectives in Ukraine.

While polls show that growing numbers of Russians want the war to be over, the vast majority say it should end only on Russia’s terms. Many appear ready to continue deferring to Mr. Putin.

Kirill, 36, a choreographer with a small hoop earring, said that aside from the price of gas, “I don’t feel it at all.”

“I’m not going to complain, because I know that this is my country, I’m going to support it no matter what,” he said. “I know that the people at the top can clearly see the bigger picture.”

As I spoke with Kirill and others at the Rosneft station, the store’s manager, Irina, came to admonish me for interviewing her customers. But soon she was sharing her own story.

Unlike the people in line, Irina did not deny the war’s role in her life.

She said she had told her 11-year-old daughter that if a drone or missile struck the gas station, she risked dying on the spot. Her mother-in-law works as a security guard at a warehouse complex that has been struck. And her brother has been fighting on the front since 2022. She said it was a miracle that he remained alive, adding that he had survived nights when up to 40 people were killed. He told her that he expected the war to continue until 2030.

She voiced the trademark sense of fatalism in Russia. “We’ll just have to endure it,” she said. “If we die, we die. I’ve already made peace with it.”

Irina was not as inclined as others to defer to the government’s approach on the war. She said she felt that officials were not telling the truth about casualties on the battlefield and in long-range strikes on Russian cities.

Eventually, this sort of mistrust, coupled with a worsening economic outlook, could set off more expressions of dissatisfaction, said Jeremy Morris, a sociologist at the University of Aarhus in Denmark who conducts fieldwork in Russia.

While it might not happen soon, he said, most Russians are not apathetic and apolitical, as they are sometimes portrayed. They just lack outlets for action as the government has grown more repressive.

During parliamentary elections last month, I visited the headquarters of Yabloko, Russia’s main antiwar party. I spoke with Maria, 24, one of the approximately 20 percent of Russians who tell pollsters they oppose the war.

She expressed indignation as she described reading English-language posts on social media describing Russians as a “slave nation.” She pointed to comments like one recently by a European Union spokeswoman, who said that “if Russian citizens face the consequences of this war, they have a chance domestically to take action against it.”

Maria described the costs of speaking up in Russia, where 1,856 people are currently incarcerated as political prisoners, according to the banned human rights group Memorial.

“None of you have gone through the experience of the average person living under totalitarianism, repression, total fear and the absence of free speech,” she said. “You can’t demand that we go on strike or turn out for protests, because all we’ll achieve is ending up in prison — or getting killed.”

Valerie Hopkins covers the war in Ukraine and how the conflict is changing Russia, Ukraine, Europe and the United States. She is based in Moscow.

Halfway through President Trump’s three-month gambit to import more ground beef to lower prices, little extra beef has been imported and prices have barely budged.

In August, Mr. Trump signed a proclamation allowing 300,000 metric tons of lean beef trimmings to enter the United States at a reduced tariff rate. The additional beef could be imported over 90 days, with up to 100,000 metric tons entering each month in September, October and November.

But only 37,486 metric tons of this beef entered the country in September, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data, barely more than a third of the allowed amount. There hasn’t been much improvement in October, as just 21,937 metric tons entered through the 19th.

The lack of action is a potential blow to Republican candidates in the midterm elections. Mr. Trump said this month that beef prices “really became unacceptable to the voter,” and he has been trying to lower prices while keeping farmers and ranchers — typically a reliable Republican voting bloc — on his side.

Groups representing ranchers immediately criticized the president’s plan to import beef, saying it would lower what they received for their cattle; live cattle prices fell 3.4 percent the day the proclamation was signed. Ranchers said the threat that Mr. Trump would intervene in the market anytime prices rose made them more likely to send heifers and cows to slaughter instead of taking the risk of holding them back to help build up a larger herd.

“I am afraid they are trying to solve a short-term problem with beef prices, which will create long-term cattle supply problems in the process,” said Ford Drummond, the president of the Oklahoma Cattlemen’s Association. Cattle prices have since rebounded.

And there is little evidence that any substantial discount has reached consumers, after Mr. Trump “encouraged” importers to sell beef at a 25 percent discount. The average price of a pound of ground beef fell 1.9 percent in September, to $6.79 from $6.92, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A year earlier, a pound cost $6.32.

Asked why most of the import quota was going unfilled, Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement that Mr. Trump is “delivering on his promise to consumers by reducing beef prices while allowing our American beef herd to grow.” She also said the president had “done more for American agriculture than anyone.”

The 37,486 metric tons of lean trimmings were imported in September under the customs agency’s “Affordable Beef” quota. But according to agricultural economists, it is unlikely that all, or even most, of that beef was imported solely because of the president’s proclamation. Some of it would have come into the country anyway.

The United States imported 1.9 million metric tons of all kinds of beef last year, with the bulk coming from Australia, Canada, Brazil, Mexico and New Zealand. Most of it was lean trimmings destined to be combined with high-fat trimmings from American cattle to make ground beef. An additional 300,000 metric tons would be significant, but pale in comparison with what already enters the country.

James Mitchell, a livestock economist at the University of Arkansas, used two different methods to calculate the amount of lean trimmings that would have come into the United States in September under usual circumstances, if there were no proclamation. One of the methods found that 41 percent of the 37,486 metric tons would have been imported, while the other method found that 79 percent would have been.

“Neither approach is perfect, but I think both are more reasonable than assuming all 37,486 metric tons were additional imports,” Mr. Mitchell wrote in an email.

From the beginning, it was unclear whether the president’s plan would meaningfully lower beef prices. Lean trimmings make up only a portion of the cost of ground beef; much of what the consumer pays for are costs like fattier trimmings, labor, processing, transportation and marketing.

Mr. Trump said he had a “commitment” that this beef would be sold at “25 percent below market prices,” though it is unclear if he meant retail or wholesale prices.

Ted Schroeder, a livestock economist at Kansas State University, said there would be no way for grocery stores to offer specific discounts to customers buying ground beef with these imported trimmings. It isn’t specially labeled, or labeled at all. Everyday meatpackers and processors receive meat from a number of different imported and domestic sources, and they don’t label them all for their customers.

“It is all stuff that gets blended, so there is going to be no way that I can think of that a product is labeled just that,” Mr. Schroeder said. “As soon as you start blending, identity preservation is just gone.”

Wholesale prices for domestic or imported lean trimmings, which vary by region, have barely changed, Mr. Schroeder said. And the small decrease in September’s retail ground beef prices is typical because grilling season is over.

“Is it a penny? Three cents? Four? Two and a third?” Mr. Schroeder asked, referring to how much cheaper the additional imports have made ground beef. “The reality is it is not going to be noticeable.”

First lady Melania Trump brokered a limited ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine for humanitarian relief in the besieged and occupied southern Ukrainian town of Oleshky, the White House said Friday, in an unusual direct intervention by a person who rarely gets involved in foreign policy.

Melania Trump brokered ceasefire at besieged Ukrainian town

The U.S. military’s oldest autonomous system has a supply-chain problem: most of its dogs come from Europe. Fewer than half make it through training. And the Pentagon is bidding against foreign governments for the ones that are left.

Ben Lamm is the co-founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences, the Dallas de-extinction company that announced in April 2025 it had brought back the dire wolf, a predator that died out more than 10,000 years ago. What Colossal actually produced was three pups, Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi. Its scientists took gray wolf cells, edited about 20 sites across 14 genes to match DNA recovered from ancient dire wolf remains, cloned the pups from those edited cells and had domestic dogs carry them to term.

Lamm and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey think the same tools, plus defense hardware, can fix that. Warhound, a defense tech startup the two came up with, is coming out of stealth with a $200 million seed round, Fortune can exclusively report. David Spirk, a former Marine and the Pentagon’s former chief data officer, is CEO. The company is based in Texas.

The backers are In-Q-Tel, Sequoia Capital, ARK Invest, Franklin Templeton, 8VC, USIT, Bob Nelsen, Breyer Capital, CAZ Investments, Neogenesis, Builders VC and Lux Capital, among others.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/10/22/palmer-luckey-dire-wolfe-billionaire-lamm-warhound-200-million-dogs-cloned/?utm_source=reddit/

JD Vance is widely seen as a potential successor to Donald Trump in 2028, but his involvement in a nasty Ohio political controversy is raising questions about his judgment.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy's campaign produced a $4 million attack ad featuring Amy Acton's estranged mother calling her daughter a lifelong liar.

The disturbing background: Acton says she was sexually abused as a child by her stepfather, who was charged with rape but fled Ohio before trial. Her mother stayed with him, and Acton hasn't seen her in nearly 50 years.

Even prominent Republicans, including Nikki Haley and Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, condemned the ad. But Vance defended Ramaswamy and criticized Republicans who complained about it.

Meanwhile, Vance has faced difficult questions over the Iran war, ICE deportations and allegations involving the Trump administration.

Here's the debate: Is Vance demonstrating the loyalty and political toughness that MAGA voters expect, or is defending such personal attacks damaging his credibility beyond Trump's base?

And looking ahead to 2028, should Republicans prioritize loyalty to Trump or a candidate capable of establishing an independent political identity?

This aged horribly

Collectors send their cards to authenticators for one reason: to find out what they’re worth, and usually to make them worth more. A card that comes back graded from an authenticator often comes sealed in plastic with a high grade can sell for many times what it did raw.

This month, a batch of them got the news they’d been waiting for. Their grades were in, some of them perfect 10s, and the cards were on their way home via delivery. But suddenly, the tracking stopped updating.

On Oct. 13, thieves broke into a FedEx truck outside Professional Sports Authenticator’s (PSA) office in Santa Ana, Calif., and drove off with nearly $1 million in Pokémon and sports cards. The collectors who owned them had spent months and thousands of dollars in fees proving what the cards were worth—all for thieves to take two pallets of the cards and make off with the rare collectors’ items.

No arrests have been made, and the cards have not been recovered. And for the thieves, the timing was good. Pokémon cards have risen 3,261% in value over 20 years, more than any other card category. Demand once ran so hot the Pokémon Company doubled its print run to cool speculation.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/10/21/collector-rare-pokemon-sports-cards-thieves-graders-million/?utm_source=reddit/

(No paywall)

The students marched from the campus to the Tarrant County subcourthouse polling site, which had a wait time over 45 minutes, according to the county’s own website.

An organizer of the protest, Emeri Callaway, called the county’s move “voter suppression.”

“For too long, the young people have been silenced,” Callaway said. “We’re standing up against that because we do matter.”