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Aug. 14—Hamas has accepted the outline of a new peace plan for Gaza that would release all remaining hostages—living and dead—at once, and within 60 days lead to a withdrawal of Israeli forces and a new civilian government that would not include Hamas, which would also be demilitarized. Sources close to discussions between Hamas and mediators in Cairo say that the agreement is provisional upon Israeli acceptance of the plan, which has yet to be fully presented to the Netanyahu government.
Ultimately, these sources say that any agreement would come out of a joint meeting between Hamas, Israel, and mediators from Egypt, Qatar, and the United States. If Israel agrees to the outline of the plan, which had been worked out with the Arab mediators and President Donald Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff last week, such a meeting would be scheduled, depending on Witkoff's schedule. The Special Envoy is heavily involved in tomorrow's Alaska summit between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Pressure Mounts on Netanyahu
Hamas' agreement with the terms of the new plan, which will see the end of its rule in Gaza and its end as a military organization, puts pressure on the Butcher of Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu, whose announced plan for a new wave of slaughter and the full occupation of the Strip by the Israeli military has met with universal protest both inside Israel—where it is opposed by the leadership of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the families of the hostages, who say that it will kill all that remain alive—as well as in the rest of the world. Various European and other nations have used it as an impetus to announce their pending recognition of a Palestinian state.
Hamas' Diminishing Support
"Hamas has finally accepted the reality of its situation," said a source close to the negotiations. "It has no future, lacking support from both its former patrons, Bibi, who gave them guns and money to block the Palestinian Authority, and Iran, who totally lacks the means to supply its proxy. It has little or no support among Gazans who blame its stupid massacre and attack on Israel Oct. 7, 2023 for giving Netanyahu the pretext for unleashing his genocide against them. This deal can halt a new slaughter and get Hamas out of Gaza.
"And it backs Bibi into a corner," the source continued. "He has said that the only way to deal with Hamas is to exterminate them, perhaps freeing a handful of the hostages in the process. But the IDF leadership has said that the occupation of the rest of Gaza will kill all the hostages. This deal gets them home alive. If he refuses it, the families and the rest of Israel minus the insane Nazi Zionists represented by war criminals Bezalel Smotrich [Finance Minister] and Itamar Ben-Gvir [National Security Minister] will come for him."
Trump’s Role and Global Implications
"The key will be if Trump finally decides to turn up the pressure and demand sanity from Israel," said the source. "Trump wants the humanitarian disaster in Gaza to end. He knows that people are being starved to death by Bibi's denial of aid. This new deal will allow Trump and the United States to mobilize the world to put an end to this. It removes Israel from any role in determining how much humanitarian aid enters Gaza and who will distribute it. This provides the hammer needed to ram through such a deal.
"What has happened in Gaza is one of the most disgusting episodes in modern history, the worst genocide since the Nazis, done by an American ally, with America looking on," concluded the source. "Trump did not allow this to start, but ending the killing has eluded him. Until now. If the Arabs can bring Hamas on board, then the President must force Bibi to go along. If not, then what happens next is on Trump."
Aug. 13—Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov expressed hope that the upcoming meeting between the Presidents of Russia and the United States, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, will give an impetus to normalization of bilateral relations, TASS reported yesterday. “We hope that the forthcoming top-level meeting will give an impetus to normalization of bilateral relations, allowing [them] to facilitate resolution of certain issues,” he said in an interview with the Izvestia daily, speaking about resumption of direct air service. “Although, obviously, the leaders will focus on other subjects,” he added.
Trump, meanwhile, was reportedly dismissive of NATO's Ukrainian dictator Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose demands to be included in the summit were refused by Trump. “I get along with Zelenskyy, but, you know, I disagree with what he’s done. Very, very severely disagree. This is a war that should have never happened,” Trump said, reported The Hill.
The Hill notes that Trump has said the meeting will touch on some territorial swapping for “the betterment of both” countries, a proposal Zelenskyy rejected on Saturday, Aug. 9. “Of course, we will not give Russia any awards for what it has done. The Ukrainian people deserve peace,” he said, adding that “all partners” must understand peace and that “Ukrainians will not give their land to an occupier.”
Trump said he was perturbed by the Ukrainian leader’s resistance. “I was a little bothered by the fact that Zelenskyy was saying, ‘Well, I have to get constitutional approval.’ I mean, he’s got approval to go into war and kill everybody, but he needs approval to do a land swap—because there’ll be some land swapping going on,” Trump said. He added that the land swap will be “for the good of Ukraine,” before adding that a possible deal will also involve “some bad stuff for both” Kyiv and Moscow.
In a recent poll of Ukrainians, Gallup found that 69% believe that Ukraine should seek negotiations to end the war as soon as possible, with only 24% saying that Ukraine should keep fighting until it wins the war. This is a dramatic change even from 2024, when 52% supported peace talks and 38% preferred to continue the fighting. Sources report that Gallup also asked Ukrainians if they believed that they could win the war. They did not publish the results of that question that showed over 90% believed that such a victory was impossible.
Aug. 13—Brazil intends to develop, whether the Trump administration likes it or not.
Finance Secretary Fernando Haddad reported on Aug. 11 that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had cancelled his scheduled Aug. 13 Zoom discussion with Haddad. It was to have been the first high-level meeting between the two trading partners, despite President Trump imposing 50% tariffs on a number of key Brazilian exports to the U.S., beef and coffee among them. The meeting was not cancelled for any economic reason, Haddad charged, but at the instigation of “extreme right forces,” who “acted together with some of President Trump’s advisors” to cancel it. Nor was the meeting rescheduled. “What is clear to us is that the trade issue is not the focus,” Haddad said.
The Trump administration’s intent with the tariffs is regime change. When he announced the punitive tariffs, President Trump said as much, demanding that the Brazilian government order the Supreme Court to shut down the ongoing trial of former President Jair Bolsonaro, charged with attempting to organize a military coup so he could continue in power after President Lula da Silva defeated him at the polls in 2022. Bolsonaro’s son, Eduardo took a “leave of absence” from Congress to move to the United States, where he is currently coordinating the campaign against the Supreme Court and the Lula government with Trump advisors.
Brazil is therefore developing more beneficial relations. On Aug. 11, Brazil’s Minister for Integration and Regional Development Waldez Góes signed an MOU in Beijing with the Vice Minister of China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) Wang Changlin for cooperation on regional development policies. The agreement specifically focuses on policies for reducing regional inequalities, a problem which China has been working on for some time, and which is quite important for Brazil, where poverty in parts of the Northeast is similar to the poorest parts of Africa, as compared to the southeast of the country, where there is much more industry and infrastructure and where living standards are far higher. Joint case studies, technical visits, training and science and technological innovation programs are on the agenda. The NDRC has already invited 24 high-level officials from Brazil’s Planning and Budget Ministry and the Executive Office of the President (Casa Civil) to participate in a seminar on economic development strategies.
The same day, Finance Minister Haddad signed both a memorandum with Chinese Finance Minister Lan Fo’an, updating plans “to expand joint projects, raise the level of economic cooperation and boost sustainable regional integration,” and a separate MOU with Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov on the creation of a bilateral “Economic and Financial Dialogue.” The aim of the latter is reportedly to guarantee stable communication between the ministries, on seven priority areas, which range from macroeconomic policies, to “confronting challenges and reforms;” tax cooperation; infrastructure financing; new bilateral opportunities; joint action in multilateral forums—and “other topics of mutual interest.”
Aug. 13—“BRICS may be on the verge of its most significant strategic convergence since its inception,” the Indian weekly, Indian Eye, suggests. “The coming weeks will test whether the current wave of U.S. tariffs becomes a catalyst for deeper BRICS integration or merely another irritant in already complex international relations. [Indian Prime Minister Neranda] Modi’s dual engagement with Russia and China,[Brazilian President and current head of BRICS] Lula’s outreach to India, and Beijing’s criticism of U.S. trade policy suggest a moment of rare alignment in the group’s political calendars.”
The Aug. 11 story is credited to the New Delhi, Moscow, and Beijing Bureaus of the weekly, which is published in India, the U.S.A., Brazil, and Canada, thus reaching the Indian diaspora. The article reviews the diplomatic contacts between the BRICS in recent weeks (which EIR News has covered), but offers more details on developing India-Brazil ties.
“The Lula-Modi conversation gains strategic weight,” it reports. “The two leaders are not only the political heads of their respective nations but also the voices of two continents within BRICS. Their call underscored a shared vision for South-South cooperation that blends trade expansion with technological exchange, defense coordination, and multilateral reform…. The agreement to expand the Mercosur-India trade pact and the plan for [Brazilian] Vice President Geraldo Alckmin to visit India in October, accompanied by ministers and business leaders, point to a practical follow-through. The agenda will cover trade, defense, energy, critical minerals, health, and digital inclusion—all sectors where both countries can gain by pooling resources and reducing dependence on Western market.”
President Donald Trump’s tariffs have created “a political opportunity. The bloc can present itself as a collective shield against what it sees as arbitrary economic measures, and as an advocate for reforming global trade rules to protect the sovereignty of emerging economies,” it argues.
“While it is premature to predict a formal BRICS response to Trump’s tariffs, the diplomatic choreography of the past week hints at a converging strategy. Modi’s talks with Lula, [Modi’s] upcoming visit to China, [Indian National Security Advisor Ajit] Doval’s discussions with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, and the expected Putin visit to India are all part of a dense web of leader-level engagements that could culminate in a more united BRICS economic front.”
Indian Eye’s story adds the tantalizing suggestion that “joint infrastructure projects” are among the possibilities for a coordinated economic response. Coordination “might take the form of expanded intra-BRICS trade agreements, local currency settlements to bypass the dollar, joint infrastructure projects, and coordinated positions in the WTO and G20. Brazil and India’s interest in digital payment systems, as shown in the PIX-UPI exchange, also opens the door for fintech collaboration that reduces transaction costs and dependency on Western financial systems.” 
Aug. 13—Paulo Nogueira Batista, one of Brazil’s leading economists and a former Vice President of the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) from its creation in 2015 until 2017, believes the BRICS summit held in Rio de Janeiro in early July 2025 “was a success, contrary to what many had feared (including me).” In an article published in the leading Brazilian daily Folha de São Paulo on July 7, right after the summit ended, Nogueira wrote:
“In the financial area, some important initiatives were reaffirmed…. In particular, it was interesting that President Lula reiterated that the BRICS needs to create an alternative currency for international transactions. This is a fearless statement, as he ignores—and he is right to ignore—Donald Trump’s repeated threats against the BRICS and against any country that acts to weaken the dollar as a currency.”
Nogueira explained that the proposal is not meant as an attack on the dollar. “BRICS does not intend to deliberately weaken the dollar, but rather to create alternatives to the international system dominated by the West, a system that is inefficient, politically manipulated and does not meet the needs of the Global South. That’s why we need to create alternative and independent mechanisms, while still participating in the Western system.”
He also praised the steps taken so far by the BRICS and the NDB: "Increasing use of national currencies in transactions between countries (bypassing the dollar), the construction of a new international payments platform, and the outlines of a multilateral guarantee scheme within the framework of the NDB.
Nogueira regretted that “there was no mention in the Leaders’ Declaration of the creation of a new reserve currency, which is supported by President Lula and other leaders. This is the most important step,” Nogueira insisted, because it is needed to facilitate both trade and investment that is outside the speculative framework of the Western financial system. But the idea “faces stiff resistance from India. And also from the group’s central banks, which get in the way a lot and grant themselves the right to interfere in geopolitical issues! Brazil’s Central Bank is one of the worst. Incredibly, it often behaves as if it were a separate country, an 11th BRICS nation. It needs to be brought to heel.”
In other writings, Nogueira has gone out of his way to praise the approach taken by former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who is now the President of the NDB, who intervened when she was head of state of Brazil to stop the sabotage of the BRICS by Brazil’s Central Bank. Nogueira has urged current Brazilian President Lula da Silva, who is head of the BRICS for this term, to act similarly.
As for the political obstacles within the BRICS, which makes decision by unanimous consensus, Nogueira proposed that prompt action is required due to the gravity of the crisis, and that "the solution is to allow certain initiatives to be taken forward by a sub-group, on a voluntary basis, leaving the door open for those who don’t wish to participate from the outset, to come on board later.
The problem is, really, that the BRICS cannot exist as a subset of the existing totally broken and bankrupt global financial system. Anything that touches that system, which is dominated by the City of London and its Wall Street satrap, is corrupted and will eventually be destroyed. So, the efforts both collectively and independently by BRICS members to create new physical wealth through investments that are made for different purposes than making financial profit for investors or for establishing control of physical and resource assets that can be looted for financial profit must eventually be undermined and opposed by the central banks that are players for existing global system, and by agents and operatives of that old system.
Eventually, as Nogueira knows but does not say, the question must be called: either you are part of an old and collapsing monetarist system, and will be dragged down by its collapse or you are the embryo of what must be a totally new system, founded not for financial profits for the few, but for the expansion of physical wealth for the many, as part of a new just, world economic order that must replace the existing decadent order of London and Wall Street. It is a fools errand to think that the BRICS can become a pathway to escape the collapse of the old order, the which cannot be reformed or fixed. Whether the BRICS wants to pretend that it is not a threat to the old system, it is already recognized as such a threat and London and Wall Street will use whatever power they muster to destroy that threat. There ultimately can be no accommodation with the central banks. The BRICS must offer their new path to prosperity to the national powers of the old system, such as the United States of Donald Trump, to join with them in bringing a new system into being.
Aug. 13—Just three days before the summit between Presidents Putin and Trump in Alaska, the New York Times Aug. 12 drops what they hope will be a bombshell: Russia is suspected of hacking into the federal court filing system.
A cyber security specialist contacted about the report said there is absolutely no reason to believe that the information about the hack is true, "given what has now been proven to be false reports of Russian hacking during the 2016 election." The source says, as is well known, but the Timesneglects to report, the NSA has software that can mimic and falsely attribute to alleged foreign actors attempted and actual hacks into such systems, as has been exposed in leaks of materials reporting on such capabilities from Edward Snowden and others.
The source said that rather than assume that such reports of alleged Russian (or Chinese) hacks are true, it were better to assume that they are the work of sections of our own intelligence agencies, linked to NATO, that want to sabotage improved relations and cooperation between the United States and Russia and China, until proven otherwise. The timing of this leaked report, just days before the Alaska summit, gives a better clue as to who is behind this, the source said. "I don't think it is credible," he reported.
Federal officials are “scrambling” to figure out how deep this digital dumpster fire goes. While the coverage acknowledges that hackers have allegedly been in the system for years, this now “urgent matter” (as it is reportedly described by an internal memo). Another source reported that there has long been suspicion that hackers working for Dope, Inc, the international drug cartels, have attempted to hack the courts and justice system records.
While the hacking may be centered in New York, courts in places like South Dakota, Missouri, and even Arkansas have reportedly been affected. Judges, under instructions likely from the FBI, are taking measures like not uploading sealed docs to PACER (the software program/server that provides access to the documents).
Politico sniffed out that a “foreign actor” has been poking around courts since early July, although it were far more likely that such information was deliberately leaked to them, as they have no ability to check its veracity and are known to simply publish what leakers provide.. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (R-NY), a Zionist lobby asset, back in 2022 even claimed that three unnamed countries had breached the system starting in 2020.
Aug. 13—The Russian Ministry of Defense issued an alert that Kyiv is preparing a provocation to disrupt the Russian American summit negotiations scheduled for Aug. 15.
“For this purpose, a group of foreign media journalists were brought by SBU [Ukrainian Security Service] vehicles to the city of Chuguyev in the Kharkov Region on Monday, Aug. 11, under the cover of ‘preparing a series of reports about the residents of a city in the frontline zone,’” says the statement.
“Immediately before the summit on Friday, the Ukrainian Armed Forces have planned a provocative strike using UAVs and missiles against one of the densely populated residential areas or a hospital, with a large number of civilian casualties, which are to be immediately ‘documented’ by the Western journalists who were brought in.”
The Ministry of Defense concludes that the strike will be blamed on Russia, to create a negative media environment and the “conditions for the disruption of Russian-American cooperation on resolving the conflict in Ukraine” at the scheduled Friday summit between Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.
Aug. 13—Sergei Gavrilov, a Communist Party member of the Russian State Duma, and the head of its Committee on Property, Land, and Property Relations, told RIA Novosti on Aug. 11, that the upcoming Alaska summit talks between Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump, could address significant Arctic economic projects. While the Ukrainian issue is the primary agenda, global economic cooperation in the Arctic is also expected to be discussed.
Gavrilov, a member of the National Financial Council of the Bank of Russia, highlighted that the talks could address long-term economic interests, such as joint mechanisms for Arctic route development, investment in port and transport infrastructure, and increasing cargo flow to boost trade between Russia and the U.S. Key projects include enhancing the Northern Sea Route and modernizing navigation infrastructure.
The legislator singled out one particular possible project: a transport corridor across the Bering Strait, which could facilitate resource development and economic growth.
A flagship infrastructure project, like a Russia-U.S. transport link, could symbolize broader international cooperation in the Arctic and Pacific regions.
Gavrilov suggested that the billions of dollars in frozen Russian assets in the U.S. could theoretically be used to co-finance infrastructure projects, stimulating economic ties and attracting private capital participation.
Aug. 12—Prof. Enzo Siviero, who together with Claudio Celani, wrote a call for Trump and Putin to build the Bering Strait Tunnel, has explained in a June 29 video interview what an infrastructure such as the Bridge over the Strait of Messina can bring to the local economy as a driver, during its construction phase. He also encouraged to have a broader vision, which includes exploring the feasibility of a Sicily-Tunisia connection, which he called TUNeIT.
The executive project, which the Italian government approved last week, "provides for diversification, that is, the bridge is one thing, all the complementary works are another thing, which are more than half of the overall project and are works that are normally semi-standard, so they are bridges, viaducts, railways tunnels, and junctions, and then there is the whole expropriation operation, which takes time. Not only that, but a construction site like this one, and when we talk about that construction site, we are actually talking about dozens of simultaneous construction sites because otherwise it cannot be done. It requires logistics, incredible support logistics. … If we think about logistics, we think simply about feeding tens of thousands of people, washing, ironing, supporting the whole operation, including security from the point of view of hospital health, equipping those that exist and probably implementing those who do not yet exist with field hospitals, because when you have tens of thousands of workers, it’s obvious that you have to take into account that there will be accidents or other things. Of course, it’s an environment that takes into account all possible and imaginable variables, so it’s likely that nothing will happen, but the human variable [must always be considered] … then there is all the construction site logistics: Think about transportation, concrete, the water supply—we will make desalination plants that will then remain, available to the community Where does the spoil from the tunnels go? There will be beach nourishment, in short, there is also a very accurate environmental study, let’s say that.
“I must also say, just to broaden the scope, how visionary engineering has shaped the world. Visionary engineering is what has been done for Suez as well as the Panama Canal, but also many other things, such as the Messina Bridge and this idea that I launched—which, however, is not mine because it is now about 20 years old and was launched by the Sicilian Region—for a permanent link between Mazara del Vallo and Capo Bon, that is, between Sicily and Tunisia, or between Europe and Africa.”
The project is feasible “even within the limits we find ourselves in, which are essentially craftmanship, but ideas are based on vision and the ability to invent something that did not exist before. … I believe that this can work. We have the room to make it happen because if we think that in this way, with this operation, Sicily could become the logistical hub of Europe towards Africa, in turn Tunisia could become the logistical hub of Africa towards Europe.”
Aug. 12—In an Aug. 10 interview with TASS, Prof. Peter Kuznick, Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University proposed building a Bering Strait tunnel that would connect the United States with Russia through high-speed rail.
Kuznick, who is well-known as a collaborator with filmmaker Oliver Stone on several historical projects, urged building upon the upcoming Trump-Putin summit, by holding talks that would involve the leaders of Russia, Brazil, India, China, and the United States. “What I would like to see is a follow-up meeting between Trump, Putin, and [Chinese leader] Xi Jinping at the World War II commemoration [Sept. 3] in China. It would be even better if [Indian Prime Minister Narendra] Modi and [Brazilian President Luiz Inácio] Lula [da Silva] also join.”
He urged cooperation between Russia, the U.S., and perhaps other nations, on joint development projects in the Arctic “and perhaps a Bering Strait Tunnel connecting Russia and the U.S. with high-speed rails.” This sort of collaboration could “put the world back on the path toward peace and begin easing the tensions that have made our world so insanely dangerous of late,” he said.
EIR covered this idea on Aug. 8. On Aug. 11, Schiller Institute Founder Helga-Zepp LaRouche released an open letter to Presidents Trump and Putin, which said that as they meet August 15 at a summit in Alaska, “There is something even more elevated you can do, by not only fighting off the threats facing mankind, but by giving the whole world a beautiful vision for the future. You could agree to build a corridor across the Bering Strait, and with that rail and tunnel project unite the rail systems of Eurasia with those of the Americas.” This would produce physical development.
Zepp-LaRouche added, that as a result of such a project: “In the not so distant future, one could then travel by high-speed railroad around the world, from the most southern tips of Argentina and Chile in Ushuaia and Puerto Williams, all way through the Americas, then through the Bering Strait, across Eurasia, then with a tunnel under the Strait of Gibraltar, travel all the way through the African continent to the Cape of Good Hope.”
Aug. 12—The Sunday, Aug. 10 weekly magazine of the daily Calabria Live published an article by Claudio Celani, identified as co-editor of the EIR Strategic Alert and collaborator of Schiller Institute chair Helga Zepp-LaRouche, entitled “Messina, the Bridge of Records—Italy Challenged the World”. The magazine has several other articles dedicated to the Messina Bridge, including an interview with Italian Infrastructure Minister Matteo Salvini.
What follows is the translation of Celani’s feature:
The bridge that will break all records has already broken one, that of the opposition. Never before has there been, in the world, such procrastinated hostility against a project as bold as it is necessary to connect two territories of the same nation, a hostility that has at times turned into political sabotage and has postponed the work on a project that has been talked about for fifty years. Indeed, for 2,000 years, if the Romans were already thinking of a bridge, but, since at the time they were made of stone, they could not go beyond a pontoon bridge, not exactly destined to last. It is only thanks to the industrial revolution that today we possess the technology and materials that allow us to realize a 2,000-year-old dream.
Now that the construction of the Strait Bridge is a state law, its detractors will have to give up, even if there is reason to fear that organized minorities will continue to try to sabotage it. They do not realize that they are acting as useful idiots for interests that transcend national borders, and harken back to the times when colonial empires fought for supremacy in the Mediterranean. The times when France and England fought for control of Suez or Italian commercial ambitions in Tunisia were overridden by the French expeditionary force. Yes, the strategic function of the Mediterranean Bridge has not escaped those nostalgic for those times, if Anglo-American high-finance figures even write, without fear of ridicule, that the Strait Bridge will favor Putin, because it diverts resources from Defense (google: Brooks Sicily Bridge, to believe it). In reality, London, Wall Street, Brussels, and Paris understand well that the project will immeasurably increase our country’s political clout in the geographical area of reference.
We all understand that the Bridge, together with the high-speed train and highway connections, will bring Sicily closer to Italy and vice versa, but also Sicily and Southern Italy to Central and Northern Europe. If everything works north of the Alps, it will be possible to travel from Berlin to Palermo in eight hours. Furthermore, the Bridge will bring Italy and Europe closer to the African continent, whose development is Europe’s natural—and obligatory—mission. It is, in fact, inconceivable to stem the migratory phenomenon without intervening to create development, with a vision that goes beyond the Italian government’s Mattei Plan, laudable though its intentions are, but entirely insufficient.
In mid-July, I attended an international conference in Berlin that addressed precisely this topic, with the participation of European, Chinese, American, Russian, and African experts. One of the proposals that has gained support is to establish trilateral cooperation agreements between Europe, Africa, and China for major development projects capable of acting as “game changers,” that is, driving the agro-industrial development of large regions. The model has already been tested, for example in the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, a project built by the Italian company Webuild, the French company Alstom, which supplied the turbines, and the Chinese company, which, in addition to building the power lines, co-financed the project. The same model can be applied to bring water to the Sahel, through the Italian-led Transaqua project, which would serve as a driving force for the whole of Central Africa.
The Bridge thus fits into the perspective of integrating the Euro-Afro-Asian continental economies, defined by the great American economist Lyndon LaRouche as the “Land-Bridge of Development.” It’s no coincidence that LaRouche, who was well acquainted with the Strait Bridge project and had discussed it with Italian interlocutors, is considered the forerunner of the New Silk Road, “a visionary,” according to Giulio Tremonti, who anticipated its lines well before it was launched by the Chinese leadership under the name Belt and Road Initiative. The benefits of the Bridge for the Sicilian and Southern Italian economies have been extensively described, and we won’t repeat them here. We’re keen to broaden the framework within which it fits: A global economy driven by the great growth coming from Asia, from which it would be foolish to isolate ourselves. To conclude, we can already look to the future, in the TUNeIT and GRALBeIT projects of our friend Enzo Siviero, the stable connection between Sicily and Tunisia, the first, and between Italy and Albania, the second. A dream? Perhaps today, but not in the near future, just as the Strait Bridge was in the past and is no longer.
Aug. 12—The following is a machine translation of an article, published on Aug. 11, by the Russian news service TASS, based on an interview with Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche, who was asked for her perspective on the upcoming August 15 Summit in Alaska between Presidents Putin and Trump.
Zepp-LaRouche Expert: Russia and the U.S. Could Build a Tunnel under the Bering Strait
The founder of the international Schiller Institute said that the August 15 summit “promises to be more than just an attempt to find a way to resolve the crisis in Ukraine.”
WASHINGTON, August 11. /TASS Corr. Sergei Yumatov/. The meeting of Russian and U.S. Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump on August 15 in Alaska could allow the two countries to resume work on promising joint projects, including the construction of a tunnel under the Bering Strait that would connect Chukotka and Alaska. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the international Schiller Institute, expressed this opinion in an interview with a TASS correspondent.
According to her, the upcoming summit “promises to be more than just an attempt to find a way to resolve the crisis in Ukraine.” “The presidents of the two countries may finally decide to build a 100-kilometer tunnel under the Bering Strait, which would connect Eurasia and America and facilitate the development of the vast resources of Siberia and the Far East, where the largest deposits of all the elements that can be found in the periodic table are located,” the expert noted. According to her, “the joint development of these resources could become an ideal conflict prevention program and a benefit for all of humanity.”
The idea of implementing a project within the framework of which a more than 100-kilometer tunnel would be built under the Bering Strait to connect the transport systems of Eurasia and America has been discussed for decades. As The Times newspaper noted in 2011, citing British experts, the transportation of goods along the Eurasia-U.S.A. highway, which would also connect resource-rich but sparsely populated areas of the planet with key overpasses, would be less expensive, faster and safer than by sea.
On August 8, Trump said that he expected to meet with Putin in Alaska on August 15. Then, plans for these talks were confirmed by Russian presidential aide Yury Ushakov. According to him, the leaders will focus on discussing options for achieving a long-term peaceful settlement of the Ukrainian crisis. The Kremlin expects the next meeting between Putin and Trump to take place on Russian territory, Ushakov said.
The Bering Strait is a strait between the easternmost point of Asia (Cape Dezhnev) and the westernmost point of North America (Cape Prince of Wales). The strait’s narrowest width is 86 km, and its shallowest fairway depth is 36 m. The strait connects the Arctic Ocean (Chukchi Sea) with the Pacific Ocean (Bering Sea). It is named after the Russian navigator Vitus Bering, who passed through this strait in 1728. The first of the known navigators to pass through there, in 1648, eighty years before Bering, was Semyon Dezhnev, after whom the cape in the strait was named.
