Thousands of Ukrainians wrote the National Unity Radio Dictation today. People from all corners of Ukraine, of different ages, with entirely different professions and views. And all of this together is much more than a flash mob or a campaign. It is really about a very important ability of our language. Ukrainian brings people together. No matter how hard the enemy tries to erase this language, it is alive, it is strong, and it is thriving. It brings our people together, just as it did in the past and continues to do today. And we must do everything to make sure it stays that way in the future. Today, the Ukrainian language is much more than a means of communication. It is the language of courage, the language of dignity, the language of the fight for life that Ukrainians wage every day. I thank everyone who protects and preserves what is Ukrainian – within themselves, in their children, and in our shared future! Happy Ukrainian Writing and Language Day!

What is going on in the Western world? Britain, France, Sweden and Finland have all told their citizens to 'be ready for an emergency' and start stockpiling. Next Monday, Japan joins them. Last Thursday, the UK asked every household to keep 3 days of food and water, a flashlight, a radio, a power bank and CASH. Sweden mailed a booklet to every home telling people to keep a week’s supply. Germany’s official guide says 10 days of food. The official reasons are what you’d expect... storms, floods, wildfires and a more aggressive Russia. It would be easy to put all of this down to the anxiety that has followed Ukraine, and most people will. But I think it misses what governments seem to actually be preparing for. Sweden’s booklet dates back to the Second World War. It was shelved when the Cold War ended and only revived in 2018. For most of the last thirty years, Western states took it for granted that the power, the water, the phone networks and the payment systems would simply work. They asked nothing of their citizens in return. That assumption is now being withdrawn, and the reason has less to do with tanks than with software. Last week was a fairly good example: On October 21, AI researchers disclosed two flaws in PHP, the code underneath roughly 70% of the world’s websites. Every version released since 2012 was exposed. That same day, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Finland, Belgium and the Czech Republic took government websites offline. Cloudflare reported millions of attempted attacks. On day one, almost all of the 1.58M PHP servers Censys could check were still unpatched. Then this morning in Japan, hackers threatened GMO Internet with a ransomware attack at noon. The company told its customers to back up their files, unplug their computers and switch them off. Attackers are now probing the systems a modern state depends on faster than they can be repaired, and AI is making that cheaper every month. And the consequences go well beyond a cupboard of canned food. Systems we've taken for granted for years, are now all at risk of being taken down - digital payment networks, food supply chains, public welfare operations - all now far less secure than they were historically considered to be. America is no exception. In August, hackers got into water utilities in at least 12 states, with Iran the prime suspect. The water kept running, but the FBI told operators to be ready to run their plants by hand. Put together, this looks like the end of an era that began in the 1990s. Back then, governments and companies could treat resilience as a cost to be cut. Spare capacity, backup systems and stockpiles counted as waste. Now they’re being rebuilt, starting with the pantry. For those investing in the market, there's something to be said about decades of running everything as lean as possible now giving way to a decade of paying for backups: Cybersecurity, backup power, grid and water upgrades, and the stockpiles behind them. Once a government decides that kind of spending is about national security, it’s very hard to cut. But either way, when a government asks you to keep three days of water in the basement... You'd be right to question how much confidence they have in the systems supposed to provide it.

what i dislike about Western Europe and Austria 🇦🇹 in particular is how much life here pushes you into drinking alcohol we went out with my wife yesterday after work at around 18:00 - all shops and cafes were closed - museums closed as well - outside it's cold and dark, nothing interesting to do the only places open were bars, of course full of ppl drinking we went form cafe to cafe, one refused to serve us because they were closing in an hour, and another was out of food (yes!) we finally found one cafe that still served sweets and had apfelstrudel (pretty wonderful actually) i get why ppl are obsessed about sports (running, cycling, gym) in Vienna now – there is really almost nothing to occupy yourself with in the city apart from this perfect for locking in, quite boring for life

Hungary’s bishops marked the 70th anniversary of the 1956 Revolution with a Mass at the University Church of Our Lady in Budapest, amid growing anticipation of the publication of Communist-era secret police files on 4 November, expected to reveal the names of priests who acted as informants. thetablet.co.uk/news/hungari…