r/neoliberal

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I know Biden kinda hated that he was sidelined in favour of Hillary in 2016 but I didn't know they kinda dislike each other to this point . Anyone knows why exactly though ? Are there some other reasons why they don't get along well ? I think his son had an interview last year where he stopped just short of attacking obama , ( he did attack the staff apparently) and was open about his dislike for pelosi . I think the 2024 loss really messed up the lot and Biden kinda openly suggested that Harris wasn't a good candidate , Harris also blamed prominent dems in her book about their lukewarm response for the campaign akaik .

When Lady Fantasia LaPremiere and Mz Molly Poppinz—or, to use the names by which they are known outside of Thunder Bay’s drag circles, John Forget and Felicia Crichton—first started getting messages about a hateful post circulating on Facebook in 2022, they thought the mature thing would be to ignore it. The post was on a page called “Real Thunder Bay Courthouse—Inside Edition” and featured headshots of Lady Fantasia and Mz Molly from a poster for a drag queen storytime event at the public library. “Apparently, our City Council is completely unaware of local drag queens who have been criminally charged with child pornography,” the post read. “Don’t ask yourself why drag queens need an audience of children. The answer might involve the word ‘GROOMING.’” The page featured an image of the city’s imposing courthouse, suggesting official status, and it had 6,500 followers.

Thunder Bay is a mid-sized city of just over 100,000 people, but it can feel like a small town. The Thunder Bay region is also considered an area of news poverty. Its one daily newspaper, the Chronicle-Journal, currently has four reporters tasked with bringing local news to sixty communities over 1,200 square kilometres. The small local CBC station and Dougall Media, one of Canada’s few remaining independent media companies, cover an area that’s larger than France: from White River in the northeast to the Manitoba border, and from the northern shore of Lake Superior all the way up to Hudson Bay. Social media ends up being an important source of local news; Crichton’s son came home from kindergarten asking what “grooming” meant. Crichton and Forget decided to sue the owner of “Real Thunder Bay Courthouse—Inside Edition” for libel.

Douglas Judson, the lawyer who represented them, had been concerned about the Facebook page for years. Its administrator saw himself as a citizen journalist and excoriated local media for “refusing” to report on arrests. The account posted the names of people brought up on charges at the Thunder Bay courthouse, often using belittling or derogatory language (“WANTED JUNKIE FOUND LYING ON THE ROAD BY TBPS OFFICERS”). The anonymous posts also broadcast photos dug up on social media and sometimes published the names and home addresses of sureties. The comment section swelled with rage, with special venom reserved for Indigenous and racialized people.

As the case made its way through court proceedings, a court order forced Meta to disclose that “Real Thunder Bay Courthouse—Inside Edition” was registered to a man named Brian Webster, who admitted to authoring the post. In 2025, a judge found Webster liable, calling his conduct “high-handed, spiteful, malicious, and oppressive.” She ordered Webster to pay $380,000 in damages to Crichton and Forget, as well as Caitlin Hartlen, also a drag performer, and the Rainbow Alliance of Dryden and to reimburse their legal fees. Webster appealed the decision, and the case is still in litigation.

Thunder Bay is hardly alone in its paucity of news outlets. A 2025 update to a joint research project by Toronto Metropolitan University and the University of British Columbia found that Canada has lost 566 local news outlets in less than twenty years. The Canadian government currently counts only about 3,650 people working as journalists in Ontario, a number that sits somewhere between fishmongers and veterinarians. Research by Public Policy Forum found that between 2008 and 2017, coverage of court in particular dropped by 30 percent nationally. Some jurists may be tempted to quiet celebration; journalists can be a nuisance, and careless reporting can result in prejudicing prospective jury members or revealing the identities of anonymous witnesses.

But courts need us. They depend on the media to fulfill their institutional raison d’être: “Justice should not only be done,” Lord Hewart, chief justice of England said in 1923, “but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done.” The secret trial is a mark of authoritarian regimes, and in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, everyone is guaranteed a public trial. The scrutiny of the public gaze protects us from the enormous power of the state. This publicity is upheld by the open court principle, which allows anyone to walk into a courtroom and take a seat to watch the justice system at work. Anyone, that is, in theory; in practice, most people have neither time nor inclination to sit through slow legal processes and depend on reporters to fill them in.

At its best, responsible journalism about court cases serves to uphold due process and the presumption of innocence. As traditional media outlets fold or retreat from assigning full-time reporters to the court beat, it’s this function of the open court principle that is under threat.

Thunder Bay’s modern courthouse stands in the hollowed-out historic shell of Fort William’s downtown, surrounded by boarded-up businesses and nostalgic murals (one, a stone’s throw away, shows the red brick gables of the old Times Journal building). I’m here to meet Chronicle-Journal writer Doug Diaczuk, who arrives wearing, without apparent irony, a newsboy cap. The security guards greet him familiarly; where once there was a gaggle of reporters from different outlets assigned to the court beat, very few are now there consistently. “It’s basically just Jodi and me,” Diaczuk tells me. Jodi Lundmark is the assistant editor at TBnewswatch (a Dougall Media property), and neither of them is assigned to the courthouse full time; at the time, Diaczuk was the Chronicle-Journal’s only general assignment reporter, and tomorrow, he’ll need to cover the opening of a new medical clinic and the announcement of the blues festival lineup.

We walk over to the docket, a bulletin board hung with paper printouts of the day’s cases, with courtroom numbers scribbled in pen. The online version, which Diaczuk checks every morning, is of limited usefulness because while it lists defendant names, case numbers, and (theoretical) start times, it doesn’t say what the charges are. Diaczuk scans the printouts, which often cut off the words halfway through: dangerous operatio, assault with weapo, possession of weap. Diaczuk was here for a sentencing, which he heard about from Lundmark (with so many cases to cover, it’s easier if the two of them sometimes compare notes on the docket). I had seen the resulting story in that morning’s paper between a storm warning and a teddy bear drive: two men had pleaded guilty to manslaughter for beating twenty-one-year-old Ivan Achneepineskum to death in a motel room in 2022. All three were Indigenous: the perpetrators from Webequie First Nation and Kasabonika Lake First Nation, respectively, and the victim from Marten Falls First Nation. Diaczuk reported that one defence lawyer had argued for a reduced sentence for his client due to “significant Gladue factors.”

“I don’t know if people read that far down into the story,” Diaczuk says ruefully, when I ask if he thinks his readers know what this reference means. Since the 1999 Supreme Court case R. v. Gladue, judges at sentencing have been legally obligated to consider Indigenous offenders’ exposure to intergenerational trauma related to residential schooling, discrimination, and poverty. “People will think like, oh, Indigenous offenders get off easy, right?” Diaczuk has thought about sitting down to write a longer piece—an explainer—to help the public understand what Gladue reports are and why courts use them, but there’s no time.

In 2020, funding from the federal Local Journalism Initiative allowed Dougall Media to hire Karen Edwards as a full-time court reporter for a year. Usually, in the courtrooms, “it was just me and Brian Webster.” Journalism school hadn’t provided much training for covering court: she says her three-year diploma at Durham College only offered one day in a courtroom. (Edwards is now a second-year law student.) Matt Prokopchuk, who worked at CBC Thunder Bay for a decade before leaving in 2019 and sometimes covered court, told me the same. In his four years in Carleton’s journalism program, he had only one court assignment. “We were taught that court is open,” he told me, “but I do remember feeling pretty self-conscious, like, ‘Should I be here?’”

On the paper docket, Diaczuk points out to me several cases next to which the word “ban” appears, meaning a publication ban is in effect. However, the sheet doesn’t specify the type of ban—there are different code numbers for different purposes. Some judges, Diaczuk tells me, make an effort to explain at the start of a proceeding the type of ban in place. Still, it’s unclear exactly what would or wouldn’t be covered by a ban, and it isn’t easy for him to call his paper’s lawyer and ask.

The stress of potentially running afoul of bans—an infraction that can carry a fine of up to $5,000 or two years less a day of jail time—might dissuade journalists from taking on court stories. Then there’s the potential emotional toll. Diaczuk rubs his knuckles across his eyes when I ask what he’s seen that has stayed with him. He was in a courtroom where police played the arrest video of a mother screaming for forty-five minutes, covered in the blood of her eleven-year-old son whom she had stabbed to death. In another case, a girl went missing, and her family searched for her for years before two men finally admitted to helping dispose of her body. At the sentencing, the judge teared up. Diaczuk tried, for a while, to humanize homicide victims by using their first names, a practice he read about in Tamara Cherry’s The Trauma Beat: A Case for Re-thinking the Business of Bad News. But it didn’t fly with his editors.

While both Diaczuk and Webster try to be the eyes and ears of the public, neither the professional distance of traditional media nor the vitriol of social media could truly tell me what court in Thunder Bay is like. I spend a week visiting the courthouse’s eerily quiet chambers. What strikes me is the moral complexity of what we call justice.

I watch an autistic child in a tie-dyed sweatshirt with a happy face on it testify that the foster mother she had been placed with, on a First Nation territory, a few hours from Thunder Bay, had hit her with a hairbrush and a light blue flip-flop. The Crown needs the girl to give clear and consistent answers to her questions, but the child answers in loops and non-sequiturs. “How did she hit you?” the Crown, a young blond woman, asks. “Because I wasn’t listening,” the child replies. After forty-five minutes, the child asks if she can take a break, and I find myself nodding emphatically as if it were up to me. When she returns, the defence lawyer tells her that his own son is autistic, too, and just a bit younger than she is. Were you unhappy about leaving your previous foster family? Silence. Did other foster kids at school tell you that, if you want to leave a foster home, you can make up a story? “Yeah,” she says. It’s hardly a smoking gun. But the Crown hasn’t produced any physical evidence of injury. I walk out of the courtroom grateful not to be the one who has to decide, beyond a reasonable doubt, whether the woman sitting quietly to the defence lawyer’s right is guilty of assault.

In another bland room, I watch a woman caress the back of a man’s head before he gets up to give a tear-choked statement of apology for a decade of viewing thousands of online images of child pornography. “There really are no words to express the depth of shame I feel,” he says. The judge, who has a Bernadoodle cap of fizzy, light brown curls, accepts his apology. But the man has an addiction. The search terms police found on his devices include “eleven-year-old” and “eight-year-old daddy’s girl.” There were images of penetration; children were abused to produce these materials, the judge reminds us. The man, in his mid-fifties, hugs the people there with him, two women and a teenage boy before being led away in handcuffs to serve eighteen months in prison. Besides this group, I’m the only person sitting in the body of the court. It feels like a funeral, and I don’t know the bereaved well enough to share openly in their grief.

The pandemic initially worked wonders for the open court principle. After March of 2020, courts rushed to move proceedings to virtual platforms. Observers could attend much more easily, and trial judges commented that some civil cases had drawn as many as eighty people—more than many physical courtrooms could fit. It can also be easier to understand what’s going on at a virtual hearing, because everyone speaks into a microphone, looks into a camera, and has a screen name (in Canadian courtrooms IRL, neither judges nor lawyers have nameplates). But with virtual court came a noticeable change in decorum; defendants and witnesses zoomed in from showers or barbershop chairs or ordered double-doubles on speaker. “We aren’t all on one big telephone soiree,” a Nova Scotia judge is quoted as saying in a 2022 report.

Then, last spring and summer, southern Ontario’s virtual courts were hit with a rash of Zoombombings. The target was mostly remand court, a scheduling court where, Windsor defence lawyer Patricia Brown told me, there might be a thousand cases on the docket for triage on a given day and dozens of people at a time in the Zoom. Suddenly, the entire video screen would be taken over by a screaming wall of pornography and racial slurs. It started happening to Brown at least once a week, and she heard from other lawyers who were being Zoombombed every other day. There have been other problems with virtual access by the public: in April 2023, three Toronto-area men were convicted of recording and sharing videos on Instagram of witness testimony in a murder trial. In July of 2025, the attorney general’s office in Ontario sent out a memo to court staff: the public were henceforth banned from virtual proceedings in the lower court. If people wanted to observe the workings of the justice system, they could do it where they had to show their faces.

The limits of the open court principle are constantly being tested. Publication bans and sealing orders are themselves open to legal challenge; in 2021, lawyers for the Toronto Star won a precedent-setting Supreme Court victory against the heirs of Honey and Barry Sherman, the Toronto billionaires whose 2017 murder remains unsolved. The family wanted the details of the estate transfer to be sealed due to, as the decision carefully put it, “what they saw as the public’s morbid interest.” But there’s the rub: the public’s interest doesn’t have to be classy. The decision underlined that “discomfort or embarrassment” are not enough to override the presumption of openness; instead, public knowledge of the details of a proceeding must threaten the dignity of a person’s “biographical core.” This description is perhaps intentionally vague, and courts largely interpret it to confer anonymity on victims of sexual assault as well as to allow stigmatized medical conditions to remain private.

Tess Layton, an Edmonton-based lawyer, told me that since she began practising ten years ago, she has seen a significant drop in both the number of challenges to publication bans and the diversity of challengers. Small and large outlets used to mount challenges; now, the only venues with the resources are heavy-hitters, like the CBC or CTV. Layton has also noticed a worrying upward trend in the number of bans and sealing orders that courts issue. Judson told me that, as courts grapple with the dangerous ease with which information spreads online, “the legislative and judicial response has been to become a little bit obsessed with secrecy.” In Thunder Bay in particular, he believes, the presence of citizen journalists in the courts has caused “a knee jerk reaction of routinely invoking publication bans.”

Even information that isn’t under ban can be tricky to access: obtaining audio recordings, transcripts, or other documents related to court proceedings involves filling out complicated paperwork and, often, paying a fee. An open secret of the open court principle is the system’s reliance on “practical obscurity”—the fact that finding information theoretically available to the public is, in practice, a pain in the neck. As Osgoode Hall Law School researcher Jon Khan and associate professor Sean Rehaag write: “Practical obscurity is premised on the idea that individuals are ultimately lazy; that they will lack the time or money to follow through with an onerous access process; or that they will not even discover the access process.” The idea is to keep bad actors from accessing sensitive information, but time and money are in increasingly short supply for media outlets too.

Criminal courts tend to monopolize public attention, but the open court principle applies to many tribunals. Over a couple of months, I tour virtual hearings at the Federal Court, the Immigration and Refugee Board, and the Social Security Tribunal of Canada. In Federal Court, I am at first predictably bored: I’ve dropped into a land claim by Alberta’s Louis Bull Band in medias res, and most of my laptop screen is taken up by columns of numbers, accompanied by a long-winded exegesis by a valuation adviser with a plummy British accent. As with any slow-moving television show, however, I get sucked in as the story takes shape: If the band had not sold parcels of land in the early twentieth century, how much would they have gained from it over the years?

When I log on to the SST hearing, I’m surprised to find myself in a tête-à-tête with the adjudicator. A ginger-mustached man with the conscientious air of a high school vice principal, he wants to make sure I understand that I can’t report any identifying details. He also asks if he should introduce me to the appellant, when they come on, as media or simply as an observer. He tells me he’s never had a journalist attend before. Taken aback, I venture that since, in open court, people walk in and sit down without explanation, maybe describing me as an observer would be the closest parallel? The appellant, a woman wrangling a toddler and a barking dog, accepts my presence without question. As she and the adjudicator work through the problem—the woman has been denied six weeks of unemployment benefits because Mitch (not his real name) at the hair salon (not her real job) was, by his own admission, new to payroll and confused about which code to punch in—I feel like I’m eavesdropping on a brunch conversation or, perhaps, a telephone soirée. Watching the woman have her day in court, I experience a rare surge of faith and optimism in the state of our democracy.

On my last day in Thunder Bay’s courthouse, I attend a sentencing in a homicide. Two small groups—the family of the defendant and the family of the victim—sit in their parkas on either side of the gallery. The defendant, a young man with a brown ponytail sitting in the dock in a button-down, has already pleaded guilty to manslaughter. The Crown and the defence go over the facts. Two young men got to chatting at a bus stop and ended up smoking weed in the basement of the one who lived nearby with his mother. There was a question of payment, and while the man whose house it was went out to pick up a few quick bucks by shovelling a neighbour’s driveway, the other man stole a Playstation, an Xbox, and two knives from a collection. The first man saw the other man making off down the street and pursued him, wrestling him to the ground in a snowbank. The second man stabbed the first man in the arm. The first man stabbed the second man in the chest, and he died. The event was captured on the dashcam of someone driving by, and the Crown plays the footage of dark shapes moving against a white background.

Sitting behind me in the gallery are Diaczuk and a reporter from TBnewswatch. During breaks, they chat quietly, comparing notes about other upcoming hearings—and about the hamburger reviews their publications have been running this month in a city-wide charity burger battle. The Chronicle-Journal and TBnewswatch both run stories about the hearing within a few days, but they are not the first. An X account called Thunder Bay Courthouse posts the details of the robbery, the chase, and the death in the street. “The entire incident was captured on video, but local media refuse to show the video,” the post reads. “LOCAL MEDIA WAS PRESENT IN THE COURTROOM, BUT ARE NOTORIOUSLY SLOW & LAZY WHEN IT COMES TO REPORTING THE NEWS.”

Hold the line. Back Starmer.

The Trump administration is awarding $2 billion in grants to nine quantum-computing companies in deals that include U.S. government equity stakes, the Commerce Department said.

The move accelerates the administration’s plans to boost the nascent industry, which has attracted a wave of investment from investors and businesses in recent months.

The department has agreed to give $1 billion of the package to IBM, a leader in the race to build computers that use quantum mechanics to solve problems much faster than traditional supercomputers. Coupled with advances in artificial intelligence, quantum computing has the potential to turbocharge scientific research, making it an economic and national security priority for President Trump.

IBM and other companies are working to develop specialized chips for quantum computing, a focus for the government in its bid to spur domestic supply chains. Chip maker GlobalFoundries is receiving $375 million in funding. The rest of the firms are expected to receive $100 million, except for startup Diraq, which is slated to get $38 million.

A slew of companies pursuing various approaches to quantum are slated to be awarded funds, including publicly traded firms D-Wave Quantum, Rigetti Computing and Infleqtion.

The deals still need to be completed.

Premarket trading early Thursday pointed to large gains for the publicly traded companies involved, including about 7% for IBM and GlobalFoundries.

The funding for the quantum deals comes from the 2022 Chips and Science Act, which includes money for earlier stage technology projects. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has overhauled the office, asking semiconductor companies to increase their domestic investments and taking a nearly 10% stake in Intel, which has seen shares surge since the unusual deal.

The government will receive a minority equity stake in each quantum company, adding to a string of similar deals including rare-earths magnet maker Vulcan Elements and mining company MP Materials. The department didn’t provide details about the exact size and structure of each equity stake.

“The Trump administration is leading the world into a new era of American innovation,” Lutnick said in a statement.

The new funding comes as the administration works on an executive order focused on the industry, according to people familiar with the matter. Companies including Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google are also investing heavily in the space after recent quantum breakthroughs, attracting investors to the industry.

The sector is in a much better position and there is more line of sight to quantum really becoming a reality, a senior Commerce Department official said.

The Wall Street Journal previously reported the department was talking to quantum companies about funding and equity stakes.

Some tech analysts have said the quantum sector and others are too risky for the government to make equity investments, but Lutnick has argued that the deals are structured so taxpayers will ultimately benefit. The senior Commerce official said the agency did so many different deals to spread out its bets, acknowledging that it could take years for them to pan out.

“Everybody is excited about quantum because it is the next big thing. A lot of the expectations and hopes have yet to be realized,” said Dana Goward, president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, a charity advocating for policies and systems to protect GPS satellites, signals, and users. One application of quantum has the potential to replace GPS, tech analysts say.

Quantum executives say the amount of time it takes to make advancements in the field is falling thanks to the investments and research breakthroughs such as more powerful chips. “We think now the time frames have actually collapsed,” IBM Chief Executive Arvind Krishna said in a March interview. He compares quantum to where AI chips were a decade ago.

The other quantum startups expected to receive funding are Atom Computing, PsiQuantum, and Quantiniuum.

Iran has already restarted some of its drone production during the six-week ceasefire that began in early April, one sign it is rapidly rebuilding certain military capabilities degraded by US-Israeli strikes, according to two sources familiar with US intelligence assessments. Four sources told CNN that US intelligence indicates Iran’s military is reconstituting much faster than initially estimated.

The rebuilding of military capabilities, including replacing missile sites, launchers and production capacity for key weapons systems destroyed during the current conflict, means that Iran remains a significant threat to regional allies should President Donald Trump restart the bombing campaign, according to the four sources familiar with the intelligence. It also calls into question claims about the extent to which US-Israeli strikes have degraded Iran’s military in the long term.

While the time to restart production of different weapons components varies, some US intelligence estimates indicate Iran could fully reconstitute its drone attack capability in as soon as six months, one of the sources, a US official, told CNN.

“The Iranians have exceeded all timelines the IC had for reconstitution,” the US official said.

Drone attacks are a particular concern for regional allies. If hostilities resume, Iran could augment its missile production capability — which has been significantly degraded — with more drone launches, to continue firing at Israel and Gulf countries that are well within range of both weapons systems.

Trump has repeatedly threatened to resume combat operations against Iran if the two countries fail to reach a deal to end the war, including saying publicly on Tuesday that he’d been an hour from restarting bombing, meaning these military capabilities could come into play.

Iran has been able to rebuild much faster than expected due to a combination of factors, ranging from support it is receiving from Russia and China to the fact that the US and Israel did not inflict as much damage as the two countries had hoped, one of the sources told CNN. For example, China has continued to provide Iran with components during the conflict that can be used to build missiles, two sources familiar with US intelligence assessments told CNN, though that has likely been curtailed by the ongoing US blockade.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told CBS last week that China is giving Iran “components of missile manufacturing” but declined to elaborate further.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun denied the allegation during a press conference, calling it “not based on facts.”

Meanwhile, Iran also still maintains ballistic-missile, drone-attack and anti-air capability despite the serious damage inflicted by US-Israeli strikes, according to recent US intelligence assessments, meaning the quick rebuilding of military production capacity isn’t starting from scratch.

A spokesperson for US Central Command declined to comment, saying the command does not discuss matters related to intelligence.

Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell told CNN in a statement that “America’s military is the most powerful in the world and has everything it needs to execute at the time and place of the President’s choosing.”

“We have executed multiple successful operations across combatant commands while ensuring the U.S. military possesses a deep arsenal of capabilities to protect our people and our interests,” Parnell added.

CNN reported in April that US intelligence assessed that roughly half of Iran’s missile launchers had survived US strikes. A recent report increased that figure to two thirds partially due to the ongoing ceasefire providing Iran with time to dig out launchers that might have been buried in previous strikes, according to sources familiar with the intelligence.

The US intelligence assessment total may include launchers that are currently inaccessible, such as those buried underground by strikes but not destroyed.

Thousands of Iranian drones still exist — roughly 50% of the country’s drone capabilities — two sources previously told CNN the intelligence indicated.

The intelligence also showed a large percentage of Iran’s coastal defense cruise missiles were intact, consistent with the US not focusing its air campaign on coastal military assets though they have been hitting ships. Those missiles serve as a key capability allowing Iran to threaten shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.

Taken together, recent US intelligence reports overwhelmingly suggest that the war has degraded Iran’s military capabilities, but not destroyed them, with the Iranians demonstrating they can effectively limit the long-term impact of the war by quickly reconstituting after those strikes.

That includes rebuilding its defense industrial base, which CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper said on Tuesday has been largely eliminated.

“Operation Epic Fury significantly degraded Iran’s ballistic missiles and drones while destroying 90% of their defense industrial base, ensuring Iran cannot reconstitute for years,” Cooper testified during Tuesday’s hearing before the House Armed Services Committee.

But Cooper’s testimony stands in stark contrast to US intelligence assessments examining Iran’s ability to rebuild its military capabilities and the timeline in which they are able to do so, with two sources telling CNN the intelligence is inconsistent with the descriptions provided by the CENTCOM commander.

One of the sources familiar with recent US intelligence assessments told CNN that the damage to Iran’s defense industrial base has likely set its ability to reconstitute back by a matter of months, not years. And some of Iran’s defense industrial base remains intact, which could further accelerate the timeline for reconstituting certain capabilities, the source noted.

The rupee’s depreciation to a record low against the dollar, exacerbated by the Iran conflict, highlights India’s economic vulnerabilities. The Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) attempts to stabilise the currency, including interest rate hikes and currency controls, risk stifling growth. A weaker rupee increases the cost of living, particularly for the middle class, and strains the government’s finances, impacting infrastructure funding and potentially leading to higher borrowing costs for businesses.

Poland has charged three of its own citizens with working on behalf of Russian intelligence. They are accused of spreading disinformation, conducting reconnaissance of NATO troops, and undergoing firearms training in order to prepare for acts of sabotage.

On Wednesday morning, the National Prosecutor’s Office announced that charges had been brought against the trio, who were named only by their initials: AĆ (aged 62), DC (aged 50) and AP (aged 48). They were detained on 12 May by Poland’s Internal Security Agency (ABW).

“The suspects’ activities were aimed at providing propaganda support for Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, as well as actively engaging in fundraising for the purchase of equipment for the Russian military,” wrote the prosecutor’s office.

“The detainees also performed a number of intelligence-gathering tasks commissioned by an identified Russian citizen associated with Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), including reconnaissance of the location of NATO troops stationed in Poland,” they added.

Prosecutors also say that “members of the group underwent training in firearms and battlefield tactics, which constituted preparations for sabotage missions”.

The spokesman for the National Prosecutor’s Office, Przemysław Nowak, told a press conference later on Wednesday that “the suspects belonged to an informal pro-Russian paramilitary organisation”, reports news website Wirtualna Polska.

The trio have been charged under sections of Poland’s espionage law carrying a minimum sentence of eight years in prison, ranging up to life. After being charged and questioned, all three pleaded not guilty. A court has agreed to a request from prosecutors to place the suspects in pretrial detention.​ 

Poland has in recent years been a primary target for Russia’s so-called “hybrid actions”, which include acts of sabotage, disinformation and cyberattacks, as well as espionage.

A report earlier this year by the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism identified Poland as “the most frequently targeted country” in Europe for acts of sabotage orchestrated by Russia.

Earlier this month, the ABW released figures showing that it launched twice as many espionage investigations in 2025 as in 2024. Over those two years combined, there were more investigations than across the previous three decades.

Moscow often carries out such actions not through traditional agents trained at home and sent abroad to conduct missions, but through people already on the ground, often amateurs hired through online messaging service Telegram and paid in cryptocurrencies.

Many such “disposable agents”, as they are often called, come from Poland’s large Ukrainian and Belarusian migrant communities. But some others have been Poles, motivated either by the money on offer or in some cases by ideological sympathies with Russia.

Last October, Polish prosecutors indicted a former employee of Warsaw city hall accused of spying for Russia. In February, a 29-year-old Polish man was indicted on suspicion of passing on information about Polish and NATO infrastructure to Russian intelligence.

Last month, prosecutors charged a soldier from Poland’s Territorial Defence Force with espionage. The suspect was reportedly active in a pro-Russian, anti-Ukrainian far-right group.

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.

New Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar has visited Poland on his first foreign trip since taking office. Speaking alongside Polish counterpart Donald Tusk, he declared that his government can “learn from Poland” on restoring the rule of law, recovering frozen EU funds, and fighting corruption.

Tusk, meanwhile, hailed Magyar’s “historic victory”, which he said marked “Hungary’s return to Europe” after years of “problematic” rule by Viktor Orbán.

After Magyar won his landslide election victory in April, he confirmed that his first foreign trip as prime minister would be to Poland, which has longstanding ties with Hungary and where Tusk’s centrist, pro-EU government is closely aligned with Magyar’s Tisza party.

Unusually for a visiting foreign leader, Magyar first visited Kraków, Poland’s second-largest city, which was, in the second half of the 19th century and up to 1918, part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. There, he visited a number of historical sites connected to Hungary.

Magyar subsequently travelled to Warsaw by train, saying that this gave him an “opportunity to show Hungarians what infrastructure investments have been made” with the support of EU funds.

“Unfortunately, in Hungary over the last 20 years, we haven’t experienced this,” he added, referring to the record of Orbán’s former government.

On Wednesday morning, Magyar met with Tusk, after which the pair spoke at a joint press conference. The Polish prime minister, who also met with Magyar during his election campaign, welcomed his counterpart’s victory.

“It is a sign of hope for millions of people in Europe and around the world that democracy, the rule of law, decency and morality in politics are not lost causes,” declared Tusk, likening it to when his own coalition unseated the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) government, an Orbán ally, in 2023.

Tusk said that Poland and Hungary would now be able to “act as one, both in Brussels, on geopolitical matters, and in pursuing various common interests”.

Both he and Magyar indicated the Visegrad Group – a regional forum comprising Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, which has been largely moribund in recent years – could now be “renewed and revitalised”, in Tusk’s words.

This, in turn, would help strengthen the region’s voice in the European Union, “to make Europe more like us, because we have a lot to offer Europe”, said the Polish prime minister.

“The heart of Europe beats in Central and Eastern Europe,” added Magyar, who said that he hoped to expand Visegrad’s cooperation to also include Nordic and Balkan countries, as well as Austria.

The Hungarian prime minister, who is being accompanied on his trip to Poland by six of his ministers, said that his government would seek to follow the example of Tusk in restoring the rule of law, recovering frozen EU funds, and fighting corruption.

“Poland is a bit ahead [of us],” said Magyar. “Poland is at the forefront of all these countries [in central Europe]…It is a regional power…I’m very much counting on the [Tusk’s] experience, on the experience of the Polish government, the Polish nation.”

Tusk, meanwhile, said that Poland is “ready to provide assistance” in helping Hungary wean itself off reliance on Russian energy, as Poland itself has done in recent years.

He also expressed hope that, with Magyar in power, it would be easier to “work on a common European position towards Ukraine”. Orbán, a close ally of Moscow, often prevented the EU from taking a common stance in support of Ukraine.

After meeting Tusk, Magyar headed for talks with Polish President Karol Nawrocki, who is aligned with PiS and controversially visited Orbán shortly before the Hungarian elections.

Nawrocki’s office revealed that the pair were due to discuss bilateral relations, regional security and cooperation, and Polish support for Hungary’s efforts to become independent of Russian energy. However, no joint press conference was scheduled.

Subsequently, Magyar will travel onwards to the city of Gdańsk on Poland’s northern Baltic coast, which is Tusk’s hometown. The two prime ministers will meet there with Lech Wałęsa, the former Polish president, anti-communist leader, and Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.