With the recent heatwaves hitting Europe hard, one French expat on a business trip in Shanghai decided to skip the usual souvenirs. Instead of silk or tea, he bought a portable air conditioner and checked it on his flight back to Europe.

 The story was originally shared by a coworker and recently made the rounds on Chinese news and social media. The man’s 93-year-old mother in Paris was suffering through the heat with only an ice-cooling fan, which wasn't doing the job and just made the room humid. Portable AC units were reportedly sold out or very expensive locally.

So, he bought a portable unit in China for 1,260 RMB. He added 130 RMB for professional airport packing and 22 RMB for a European power adapter. The total came to 1,412 RMB - about €180.

Because he was flying business class, he had plenty of baggage allowance. After confirming with the airline that the unit had no lithium battery, it passed security and was checked for free.

 According to reports, he successfully landed with the AC in Barcelona (where he works) and is taking it onward to his mother in Paris.

 A €180 portable AC checked for free on a business class flight to beat the European heatwave. Modern problems require modern solutions!

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This is a video about EU work-life balance rules, based on reactions to comments and questions from social media

Unfortunately for him, that won't stop a new judiciary system without Orban's loyalists in charge and the European Public Prosecutor's Office to do their job.

I’ll start: Stargazey Pie. The weird pie with the fish head sticking out from Cornwall, I’ve had it home-made and it’s a hell of a lot better than people think. The fish heads aren’t doing it any favours, though.

The Kremlin, realizing just how dire its situation is, has stepped up the activities of its “opposition figures.” Yashin’s interview, Andrey Melnichenko’s article for The Economist, and similar moves are coordinated actions aimed solely at convincing Europe and the entire Western world that Russia’s defeat is dangerous.

The main argument plays on the West’s greatest fear: that if russia loses, it will break up into dozens of republics led by criminal gangs with access to nuclear weapons. And the main message is a literal call to put pressure not on the aggressor, but on the victim: “We must put pressure on Ukraine so that it stops attacking russia and sits down at the negotiating table.”

And the biggest problem with all of this is the Western media’s fascination with Russia. Whether out of naivety, bribery, or simply incompetence, many major media outlets portray russian oligarch Melnichenko and russian “opposition figures” as if they were truly standing up to the Kremlin.

But all it takes is a little common sense and everything falls into place. The West itself has declared that russia is a totalitarian country. The West has long equated Putin with Kim Jong Un. So why is it suddenly believed that a genuine opposition could possibly emerge and operate freely within such a system?

Against this backdrop, figures like Yashin or Kara-Murza look incredibly out of place. People who opposed the Kremlin sat quietly in russian prisons and were then conveniently exchanged and carefully transported to the West to promote those very same narratives of Putin’s, only now from European platforms. But now things in russia are so bad that they have to dust off all their “reserves” and deploy so-called “opposition" figures in a coordinated information operation. Because everyone in the Kremlin understands: if the war isn’t stopped immediately, their empire will fall.

The conclusion is simple. There is no such thing as a “good russia.” There is only a single imperial machine that, in moments of weakness, simply changes its tools: if it failed to intimidate with missiles, it will try to intimidate with “collapse” and “nuclear chaos” through the mouths of its systemic “opposition figures.”