Sri Lankan Defence Secretary Air Vice Marshal (Retd) Sampath Thuyacontha, who is currently on an official visit to the Russian Federation, met with Russian Deputy Defence Minister Vasily Osmakov in Moscow.

The Defence Minister Osmakov stated that the meeting took place yesterday (26).

The meeting was held in conjunction with the Defence Secretary’s participation in the first International Security Forum and the Annual International Meeting of High-Ranking Officials Responsible for Security Issues, scheduled from May 26 to 29 in Moscow.

During this discussion, views were exchanged on important regional and global security challenges between the two countries.

The discussion also reaffirmed the importance of continued cooperation between Sri Lanka and the Russian Federation in areas of mutual interest, particularly military-technical cooperation, capacity-building initiatives and opportunities for enhanced training exchanges between the two countries. 

The two parties also deliberated on matters concerning former Sri Lankan military personnel currently serving in the Russian Federation.

The Sri Lankan Ambassador to Russia, Shobini Gunasekara, the Head of the Chancery Section of the Sri Lankan Embassy,  Mihiravi Dissanayake, and the Defence Advisor, Air Commodore Dinesh Kasagala, participated in this discussion.

Last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act created allowed parents and other authorized individuals to open tax-advantaged savings accounts for any child under 18 with a Social Security number.

During a panel discussion at the Milken Institute’s Global Summit on Monday, Cruz pointed out he wrote that part of the legislation, noting that half of Americans don’t own stocks and can’t benefit from decades of compounding growth.

For 50 years, he added, U.S. conservatives have been trying to mimic Australia’s superannuation program, which requires employers to pay into an employee’s investment fund to be accessed upon retirement as a way to reduce reliance on public pensions. Cruz described a U.S. version as Social Security personal accounts.

“Here’s the dirty little secret: Trump accounts are Social Security personal accounts,” he said.

Republicans tried to make changes to Social Security during President George W. Bush’s second term but retreated amid pushback on the politically charged topic.

Retirees and soon-to-be retirees have long been a potent voting bloc that instill fear in lawmakers, especially those contemplating any adjustments to Social Security and Medicare.

“How did we get it done this time? Because we gave the money to babies and so the old people didn’t get pissed,” Cruz said. 

The White House has estimated that fully funded Trump accounts could eventually grow to as much as $1.9 million by the time a child turns 28.

Cruz said that as parents see their kids’ Trump accounts surge, they will become more open to changing how their own payroll taxes are spent.

“Wouldn’t you like to be able to keep a portion of your tax payments that you’re paying already, and instead of sending it to Uncle Sam, wouldn’t you like to have a Trump account just like your kid does?” he added. “And my prediction is within five years, that is going to have a really compelling constituency because people will have seen it, and that is I think powerful and transformational.”

But that is where politics come into play. Social Security benefits are funded by workers currently paying payroll taxes, meaning diverting today’s tax payments would affect today’s retirees.

At the same time, the U.S. debt has eclipsed GDP with the outlook deteriorating on the back of soaring entitlement spending and exploding interest expenses.

Social Security tax revenue is already insufficient to cover benefits, with the difference currently bridged by the Social Security trust fund. But the trust fund projected to run out of money by 2034.

Without any changes to the program to raise additional revenue, benefits would have be slashed immediately to match the money that’s coming in, after the trust fund becomes insolvent.

For his part, President Donald Trump has vowed not to touch Social Security benefits. Instead, his One Big Beautiful Bill Act reduced the amount of income taxes recipients pay on their benefits.

Meanwhile, the White House has described the Trump accounts as a way to build wealth and get a head start on saving for retirement.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent last year called the accounts “a backdoor for privatizing Social Security” but quickly clarified that they instead add to benefits alongside Social Security.

For now, Trump accounts will likely become a ubiquitous workplace benefit, just like 401k accounts, with employers matching employees’ contributions, Cruz said.

“Relatively speaking, it’s a pretty inexpensive employee benefit,” he added. “But the benefit over time is massive.”

Donald Trump has said King Charles III will “be very safe” during his state visit to the US, which is due to begin later on Monday.

Further security talks took place between the White House and Buckingham Palace after a gunman gained access to an event attended by Trump in Washington DC on Saturday.

Asked about the security implications for the royal visit, the US president told CBS’ 60 Minutes on Sunday that the grounds of the White House, where King Charles will visit, are “really safe”.

The King and Queen’s programme will go ahead largely as planned, Buckingham Palace said, with the UK government hoping it could ease diplomatic tensions.

The UK’s ambassador to the US, Sir Christian Turner, said the visit would be about “renewing and revitalising a unique friendship” between the two countries.

He said Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer had spoken to Trump on Sunday, and the trip would proceed largely as expected.

The King and Queen privately reached out to the Trumps to give their sympathies after the attack, during which a Secret Service agent was lightly injured and the president and his wife were rushed to safety.

The four-day state visit will begin in Washington DC, with the King and Queen being greeted at the White House by Trump and the First Lady Melania Trump.

The president said on Sunday: “I think it’s great, he’ll be very safe… the White House grounds are really safe. This area of not very many acres is really safe.

“And he’ll be staying here, I believe he’s going to a couple of other locations because he’s here for a few days.

“He’s a great guy. They called him and they are so looking forward to being here. We spoke this morning.”

There are British and US flags flying in the streets around the White House, ahead of what will be several days of political theatre.

It will be a charm offensive by the UK, attending ceremonial events in Washington and making a symbolic show of solidarity at the 9/11 Memorial in New York.

For Trump, it will also be a chance to be seen on the world stage next to royalty and might be a welcome diversion from his own political battles. And he told the BBC that he thought the visit could help repair relations with the UK, saying: “Absolutely, the answer is yes.”

Sir Christian said the royal visit would emphasise the “shared history, shared sacrifice and common values” of the two countries and would show that the partnership meant both peoples were “safer, richer and happier”.

It is understood that diplomats no longer use the phrase the “special relationship”, but this visit comes at an unusually difficult time for the US and UK partnership.

Trump has criticised Starmer over not supporting the US in its conflict with Iran, and there have been disagreements between the two allies.

The state visit, which will include events in Washington DC, New York and Virginia, will show that the “partnership ranges well beyond the government of the day”, said the ambassador.

Following the event at the White House on Monday, during which the King and Queen will have tea with the Trumps, they will then attend a garden party with guests who have connections to the US and the UK.

State visits are carried out on behalf of the government and Sir Christian identified three strategic priorities – investment, military co-operation and encouraging “people to people” connections, including tourism and education.

But this visit has faced some criticism, including from Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey, who called for it to be cancelled, describing the US president as “unreliable”.

The diplomatic centrepiece will be the King’s speech to the US Congress on Tuesday, in which the King will have to achieve a balancing act between asserting the UK government’s positions and also maintaining friendly relations with Trump.

The US president will make his own remarks at a state dinner at the White House.

Trump has remained an enthusiastic fan of the monarchy and in an interview with Fox News on Sunday, he praised King Charles, saying: “He’s really a fantastic person and a tremendous representative.”

The UK government will be hoping that some of that warmth will translate to the political relationship.

But Labour MP Emily Thornberry, who chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee, said she remained “anxious” about the potential diplomatic implications of the visit.

She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “It is a really high-wire act and the president is so unpredictable, you just don’t know what he’s going to say.”

Speaking to Time Radio last week, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage rejected the suggestion Trump could embarrass the King, saying the president “just won’t do that”, and that he has an “extraordinary respect” for the royals.

Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch has also backed the visit, while other opposition parties have been critical of it.

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey has repeatedly called for the visit to be cancelled, pointing to Trump’s threat of tariffs against the UK, as well as his party’s opposition to the war against Iran, describing the president as an “unreliable” ally.

Green Party leader Zack Polanski told BBC 5 Live Breakfast that he “feels sorry” for the King ahead of the trip, and that the UK should seek to improve relations with the US by “taking a sterner line, not by sending a monarch to be paraded”.

Source: BBC

— Agencies

JPMorgan Chase will extend a $1.5 trillion investment program designed to bolster U.S. economic resilience across Europe, the Wall Street giant said on Tuesday.

The 10-year Security and Resiliency Initiative (SRI) was launched in the U.S. last October with the aim of facilitating, financing and investing in industries deemed critical to American economic security and resilience.

It was announced in November that the U.K. would be brought into the plan, which is focused on several key areas, including supply chains and manufacturing, defense and aerospace, energy independence, healthcare, and strategic technologies like AI.

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, said in a statement Tuesday that the U.S. and Europe have for too long relied on “unpredictable sources for things like critical minerals that are essential to collective security and prosperity.”

“Now, it is in our best interest to address these challenges together — because our security, freedom and economic growth depend on it,” he said.

The SRI’s key pillars are divided into around 30 subsectors, ranging from shipbuilding to spacecraft, nuclear energy, cybersecurity and the production of high-speed projectiles.

European aerospace and defense has seen an investment boom in recent years, with regional leaders and the NATO military alliance committing to ramping up spending on security.

The pledges are widely expected to boost European firms’ bottom lines, with regionally headquartered companies already reporting record order backlogs and huge upswings in income over the past year.

In 2025, the Stoxx Europe Aerospace and Defense index — home to the continent’s biggest defense companies, including Airbus, Rolls-Royce and Rheinmetall — surged 56.5%, with some regional defense players more than doubling in value.

So far this year, the index has gained 4.3%.

Chuka Umunna, a former British member of parliament who will be leading JPMorgan’s SRI initiative in the U.K., told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Tuesday that the bank’s strength is “built on the strength of the U.S.”

“The strength of the U.S. has three pillars to it: military might, economic prowess and the strength of its alliances,” he said. “And one thing that has become very clear is that the U.S. and the West have become too reliant on unreliable and unpredictable supply chains and sources for those things that are critical to its national economic security and resilience.”

Umunna said in Europe, there will be five key countries that the SRI will focus on — the U.K., France, Germany, Poland and Italy. But, he added, all EU and NATO member states will be included in the strategy.

In his 2026 letter to JPMorgan Chase shareholders, sent earlier this month, Dimon said the U.S. had allowed itself to become too dependent on unreliable sources for materials essential to national security, such as critical minerals, semiconductors and advanced manufacturing output.

“This is us putting our money where our mouth is, so to speak,” Umunna said of the bank’s SRI plan. “Unless you start to invest and seek to develop our capabilities here in the West in these particular markets, we’re going to continue to have the exposure we have.”

He pointed to energy, where the U.K. imports more than 40% of its energy needs, and semiconductors, where Umunna said the West was too reliant on East Asian economies for procurement.

“These are all things we are going to need to scale up and build capacity in,” he told CNBC. “We’re delivering this through the usual global banking products that we would use, but where you’ve got an SRI-aligned company, we will seek to lean in more. For example, from a credit point of view, you will potentially see JPMorgan doing smaller size deals, if they are in this space, than you would otherwise expect.”

The U.S. government has a lot to pay for at the moment: in addition to mandatory spending like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, it has also needs to fund its military endeavors. First came Venezuela, a relatively brief period of intervention; but the U.S. and Israel’s conflict with Iran has dragged on longer than expected.

Agreeing on budget packages hasn’t been Congress’s strong point during the second Trump administration: Already, there has been a government shutdown, and a significant amount of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is still closed due to the fact that spending to reopen it hasn’t been approved.

The demands on Treasury finances are a tightrope policymakers are going to have to learn to walk effectively, House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington said in a recent interview, suggesting that reconciliation (a budget procedure vote allowing for a simple majority of 51) may be the quickest way to ensure funding for DHS and prevent similar snags in the future.

Pakistan’s capital has been placed under tight security lockdown as it prepares to host the first round of direct negotiations between the United States and Iran, scheduled to begin on April 10, reported Pakistan’s state media on Thursday.

The army has been deployed in Islamabad’s Red Zone, with Rangers and police also stationed across the area. Security control of the Red Zone rests with the military for the duration of the talks.

Authorities have also announced a two-day public holiday for Islamabad and Rawalpindi, keeping schools, colleges, and courts shut through the period of talks, the report said. 

The district administration has extended the Red Zone perimeter from Zero Point all the way to Faisal Mosque, covering Parliament House, the Presidency, Prime Minister House, and the Diplomatic Enclave. The zone is the nerve centre of Pakistan’s government and houses most foreign embassies.

Only official vehicles will be permitted inside the Red Zone. Federal ministry employees in the area have been asked to work from home, and Section 144 has been imposed across Islamabad and Rawalpindi, banning gatherings of five or more people.

A special traffic plan is in place for the capital. Islamabad Highway and Srinagar Highway will be temporarily closed when foreign delegations travel between the airport and their hotel. Heavy vehicles have been barred from entering the city.

Delegations from both countries are being housed in a five-star hotel inside the Red Zone.

On the composition of the delegations, Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Saeed Khatibzadeh confirmed that the Iranian side will be led by Speaker of Parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, while White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the US delegation will include Vice President JD Vance, advisor Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner.

As per reports, more than 50 journalists from various countries have applied for visas to cover the talks, with press facilities likely to be set up at the Convention Centre or Pak-China Centre.

Source: NDTV

–Agencies

In a note on Tuesday, analysts pointed out that the current “petrodollar” regime goes back to a deal struck in 1974 when Saudi Arabia agreed to price its oil in dollars and invest surpluses in U.S. assets.

And because oil is a core input to global manufacturing and transport, supply chains have a natural incentive to dollarize, the note added. Indeed, Mideast oil and gas is used to make petrochemicals, fertilizer, and even helium, which is critical to chipmaking.

“The world saves in dollars in large part because it pays in dollars,” Deutsche Bank said. “The dollar’s dominance in cross-border trade is arguably built on the petrodollar: globally traded oil is priced and invoiced in USD.” 

In exchange for Saudi Arabia recycling its dollars back into the U.S., Washington guaranteed the kingdom’s security, which also involved stationing troops in the region, providing advanced weapons, and ensuring free navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.

That security shield was on display in 1990, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia. The U.S. assembled a massive international coalition to quickly defeat Iraq and lower oil prices.

Fast forward to today, and America’s role in the Mideast looks vastly different. While the U.S. and Israeli militaries have severely degraded Iran’s capabilities, the regime still retains enough to combat power to selectively close off the Strait of Hormuz—unless countries negotiate safe passage and pay in Chinese yuan.

At the same time, Iran’s swarms of missiles and drones have inflicted significant damage on U.S. aircraft, radars and bases, while American air-defense systems have failed to completely protect Gulf allies’ critical energy infrastructure.

But even before the Iran war, the petrodollar regime had come under pressure, Deutsche Bank noted. U.S. sanctions on oil from Russia and Iran created an illicit trade that relied on other currencies, like the yuan.

Saudi Arabia also joined mBridge project, a central bank digital currency initiative led by China that takes on the dollar-payment infrastructure.

“The current conflict may expose further fault lines, by challenging the US security umbrella for Gulf infrastructure and the maritime security for global trade in oil,” analysts warned.

GERARD FOUET/AFP via Getty Images

Until the U.S. can neutralize Iran’s salvos, the Gulf will continue to be pummeled. Not only are their oil shipments bottled up in the Persian Gulf, output has been slashed as supplies have nowhere to go.

Efforts by Gulf states to diversify from oil and become international finance and tourism hubs are also at risk amid the Iranian bombardment.

“Damage to Gulf economies could encourage an unwind in their foreign asset savings,” Deutsche Bank said. “In this context, reports that the passage for ships through the Strait of Hormuz may be granted in exchange for oil payments in yuan should be closely followed. The conflict could be remembered as a key catalyst for erosion in petrodollar dominance, and the beginnings of the petroyuan.”

Any loss of the dollar’s “exorbitant privilege” would also ripple through other areas of global finance, including the bond market. Due the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency, the federal government has long been able to issue debt at rates lower than investors would otherwise allow.

To be sure, dollar doomsayers have consistently been proven wrong, and the greenback has surged against other top currencies during the Iran war.

But there’s an even bigger potential threat to the dollar’s dominance than China’s currency: a permanent shift away from globally traded oil and gas.

With energy prices sky high, countries in Asia that rely heavily on Mideast supplies are scrambling to ration oil and gas while turning to coal, nuclear power, and renewables.

Demand for electric vehicles is also up across the globe, with Deutsche Bank saying energy choices of the Global South, Europe and North Asia will be key to track.

“A move away from oil could be as powerful as the pressure to price it in other currencies,” it added. “A world that becomes more self-sufficient in defence and energy could also be a world that holds less USD reserves.”

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Ethereum is beginning to formalize its post-quantum security push in public. ETH Foundation researcher Will Corcoran used a presentation at the Institutional Ethereum Forum in New York to lay out both the threat model and the protocol work already underway. The effort matters well beyond ETH, he argued, because the core bottleneck is not unique to one chain: every proof-of-stake network built on today’s cryptographic assumptions will eventually face the same scaling problem.

Alongside the talk, the Ethereum Foundation launched pq.ethereum.org, a new portal that packages the project’s roadmap, technical resources, FAQs for institutions, and a registration form for a post-quantum retreat in Cambridge in October 2026. Corcoran framed the site as a way to consolidate years of research and answer what he described as growing inbound interest from institutions asking how Ethereum plans to prepare for a future in which quantum computers can break elliptic-curve cryptography.

Ethereum Eyes Post-Quantum Industry Standard

That future is still projected to be years away, but Corcoran said Ethereum is already working against a tight window. He pointed to current estimates for “Q-Day”: the arrival of a cryptographically relevant quantum computer, clustering around 2032, while the current roadmap targets key post-quantum components for the protocol’s “L” or “M” fork, roughly around 2029.

The presentation’s core argument was that post-quantum security cannot be reduced to a simple signature swap. Ethereum today relies on elliptic-curve cryptography across the stack: validator attestations at the consensus layer, blob proof data at the data layer, and transaction and wallet signatures at the execution layer. If that cryptography is broken, large parts of the network’s security model break with it.

But replacing it introduces a second-order problem. Ethereum’s current BLS signatures are compact and aggregate extremely efficiently: 10,000 signatures still compress to 96 bytes. The proposed post-quantum replacement, a hash-based scheme Corcoran called Lean Sig, is around 3,000 bytes per signature, and naively aggregating them would produce roughly 30 megabytes of data per slot.

That tradeoff is not merely an engineering inconvenience. Corcoran repeatedly tied it back to Ethereum’s decentralization constraint, arguing that bigger signatures would raise bandwidth requirements, reduce the number of viable home validators, and weaken the chain’s security properties. In his telling, the entire design challenge is downstream from that point.

“So making Ethereum post quantum secure isn’t just as simple as swapping out the signature schemes because that one change cascades through everything else,” he said. “Bigger signatures would result in more bandwidth that would result in fewer home validators, less decentralization, and weaker security guarantees. So that one change cascades through everything.”

Ethereum’s proposed answer is a pairing of LeanSig with a proving system called Lean Multisig, which Corcoran described as a STARK-based aggregation engine. Instead of forwarding all of the signatures directly, the system aims to prove that they were verified correctly and compress the output to around 125 kilobytes. He called that roughly 250x compression “the moon math” that makes post-quantum consensus viable on Ethereum.

Corcoran also used the talk to stress that this is no longer a purely theoretical research thread. He said Ethereum is already running devnets with 10 client teams, has shipped four devnets so far, and is building around three-slot finality and four-second slots as a design basis. The broader effort, he added, spans more than eight years of research, about $25 million in funding, and roughly 1,500 contributors across more than 250 organizations and teams.

For Ethereum, the immediate message is that post-quantum readiness is becoming a visible part of its long-range protocol agenda. For the rest of crypto, Corcoran’s claim was broader.

“Really, every proof of stake blockchain faces the same challenge, and that challenge is the ability to aggregate at scale hash based signatures. It’s nonnegotiable,” he said. “When we succeed in shipping LeanSig and LeanMultisig and Lean consensus, we think that this could really become the de facto industry standard.”

At press time, ETH traded at $2,154.

Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com

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