First Brown University Shooting, Then MIT Professor Murder, Police Investigate Possible Link
First Brown University Shooting, Then MIT Professor Murder, Police Investigate Possible Link
Authorities on Thursday continued the search for the killer of a world-renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor and fusion energy physicist who was shot and killed inside his home near Boston earlier this week - a suspicious attack that occurred just days after the deadly shooting at Brown University.
MIT professor and fusion energy physicist Nuno F. Gomes Loureiro, 47, was pronounced dead at a local area hospital on Tuesday after being shot multiple times at his Brookline home on Monday night. The Norfolk district attorney's office and local authorities said they had launched a homicide investigation.
"It's not hyperbole to say MIT is where you go to find solutions to humanity's biggest problems," Loureiro recently said when he was named the new head of MIT's Plasma Science Lab. "Fusion energy will change the course of human history."
The murder of Loureiro occurred two days after the
, which took place fewer than 50 miles away.
Local media https://www.wpri.com/target-12/police-probe-potential-ties-between-brown-university-attack-and-mit-professor-slaying/
reports that investigators are now searching for a possible link between the two shootings.
Senior law enforcement sources say federal, state, and local authorities have uncovered evidence suggesting the two incidents may be connected, marking a major shift in the investigation. This contrasts with earlier statements from the FBI's Boston field office, which said there appeared to be no connection.
At Brown, the gunman killed Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov. Cook served as vice president of the Ivy League school's College Republicans. In both cases, the shooting suspects remain at large.
"Nuno was not only a brilliant scientist, he was a brilliant person," Dennis Whyte, a fellow MIT professor, wrote in an obituary posted by the university.
Whyte noted, "He shone a bright light as a mentor, friend, teacher, colleague and leader and was universally admired for his articulate, compassionate manner. His loss is immeasurable to our community at the PSFC, NSE and MIT, and around the entire fusion and plasma research world."
By midweek, Israeli news publication 
reported that Israeli officials were examining intelligence suggesting a possible Iranian connection to Loureiro's shooting death. The outlet cautioned that the assessment has not been verified and is not supported at this stage by official findings from U.S. investigative authorities.
Separately, https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-strange-death-of-nuno-loureiro/
published a blog post by journalist Rafael Baptista, who wrote:
Imagine having unlimited energy. Cheap, clean energy. What would that do to entrenched interests and powerful monopolies? Think of the hole it would blow in the fossil fuel industry. And national security? If I were a Putin or a Khamenei, I wouldn't be happy about a technological leap coming from his research. Even Israeli authorities haven't ruled out Iranian involvement. A breakthrough like this would leave such regimes permanently behind. It would redraw the balance of global power.
The strange shooting deaths occurred just days apart and less than an hour away from each other at two of America's leading Ivy League schools.
Thu, 12/18/2025 - 15:40
The murder of Loureiro occurred two days after the Four Days Later: Brown University Shooter Still At Large As Bizarre Anomalies Mount In Investigation | ZeroHedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
The Jerusalem Post | JPost.com
Israel examines if Iran had role in killing of scientist | The Jerusalem Post
This is an assessment that has not yet been verified and is not supported at this stage by official findings from the investigative authorities in ...
Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge
Zero Hedge
Suspect In Brown University Attack Found Dead, Was A Non-US Citizen | ZeroHedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
The legislation 
That principle underwrites reserve currencies, correspondent banking, sovereign debt markets, and cross-border investment. It is why central banks like Russia’s (once) accepted euros instead of bullion shipped under armed guard. It is why settlement systems like Euroclear exist at all. Once that rule is broken, capital does not debate. It reprices risk instantly and it leaves.
Confiscation sends a message to every country outside the Western political orbit: your savings are safe only as long as you remain politically compliant.
That is not a rules-based order. It is a selectively enforced order whose rules change the moment compliance ends. What we have is a compliance cartel, enforcing law upward and punishment downward, depending on who obeys and who resists.
Belgium’s fear is not legalistic. It is actuarial. Hosting Euroclear means hosting systemic risk. If Russia or any future target successfully challenges the seizure, Belgium could be exposed to claims that dwarf the sums being discussed. Belgium is therefore right to be skeptical of Europe’s promise to underwrite such colossal risk, given the bloc’s now shattered credibility. No serious financial actor would treat such guarantees as reliable.
Italy’s hesitation is not ideological. It is mathematical. With one of Europe’s heaviest debt burdens, Rome understands what happens when markets begin questioning the neutrality of reserve currencies and custodians.
Neither country suddenly developed sympathy for Moscow. They simply did the arithmetic before the slogans.
Paris and London, meanwhile, thunder publicly while quietly insulating their own commercial banks’ exposure to Russian sovereign assets, exposure measured not in rhetoric, but in tens of billions. French financial institutions alone hold an estimated €15–20 billion, while UK-linked banks and custodial structures account for roughly £20–25 billion, much of it routed through London’s clearing and custody ecosystem rather than sitting on government balance sheets.
This hypocrisy and cowardice are not accidental. Paris and London sit at the heart of global custodial banking, derivatives clearing, and FX settlement, nodes embedded deep within the plumbing of global finance. Retaliatory seizures or accelerated capital flight would not be symbolic for them; they would be catastrophic.
So the burden is shifted outward. Smaller states are expected to absorb systemic risk while core financial centers preserve deniability, play a double game, and posture as virtuous.
This is anything but European solidarity. It is class defense at the international level.
The increasingly shrill insistence from the Eurocrats that the assets must be seized betrays something far more revealing than hysteria or resolve: the unmasking of a project sustained by delusion and Russophobic dogma, in which moral certainty did not arise from conviction, but functioned as a mechanism for managing cognitive dissonance, a means of avoiding realities that any serious strategy would already have been forced to confront.
Not confidence, but exposure. Exposure of a war Europe never possessed the power to decide, only the capacity to prolong. Exposure of a financial system discovering that money, once stripped of neutrality and weaponized, forfeits its credibility as capital. And exposure of a ruling class confronting the reality that performance, however theatrical, cannot substitute for power that has long since been exhausted – power Europe relinquished decades ago when it outsourced real sovereignty to Washington.
Looting Russian reserves will not shorten the conflict. It will not pressure Moscow into capitulation. It will not meaningfully finance Ukraine’s future. And this is not because Europe has miscalculated, it is because Europe has knowingly abandoned reality.
There is no serious actor in Europe who does not understand how wars are won. They know that Russia’s war effort is driven by industrial throughput, manpower depth, logistics resilience, and continental scale and that on every one of these axes Russia has expanded its advantage while Europe has accelerated its collapse. Russia has retooled its defense-industrial base for sustained output, secured energy and raw materials at scale, reoriented trade beyond Western choke points, and absorbed sanctions as a catalyst for growth. This is not conjecture. It is observable fact.
This move will permanently accelerate reserve diversification away from the euro, expand bilateral settlement, hasten gold repatriation, and entrench non-Western clearing systems, and it will do so immediately.
What is being exposed here is not Russian vulnerability, but Western exhaustion. When economies can no longer compete through production, innovation, or growth, they turn to banditry. Asset seizure is not a sign of strength, but he terminal behavior of a rentier system that has exhausted surplus and begun consuming its own foundations.
This decision does not defend any lingering illusion of Western dominance. It advertises its expiry. The turn toward policing speech in Europe did not happen in a vacuum.
The Digital Services Act, platform intimidation, and the policing of dissent is all about pre-emptive damage control. European elites understand that the consequences of this policy will land squarely on households.
The people who will pay for this are not sitting in Commission buildings, they are the ones whose pensions, currencies, and living standards are being quietly offered up to preserve a collapsing illusion of power.
That is why dissent had to be neutralized before confiscation could be attempted. Not after. Criticism was pre-emptively reclassified as disinformation. Debate was recoded as existential danger. Speech itself was reframed as a security threat.
In their desperation to punish Russia, Europe’s leadership is handing Moscow something far more valuable than €210 billion. They are validating every argument held by the Global Majority about Western hypocrisy, legal nihilism, and financial coercion. They are demonstrating that sovereignty within the Western system is provisional, granted conditionally, revoked politically.
Empires do not collapse because they are challenged. They collapse because they cannibalize the systems that once made them legitimate.
This seizure will not be remembered as a blow against Moscow. It will be remembered as the moment Europe told the world that property rights end where obedience begins.
Once that message is received, there is no reset.
Blaise Metreweli, who recently became head of the Secret Intelligence Service—commonly known as MI6—said that Russia’s campaign against Ukraine and its wider hybrid operations pose an acute and enduring danger to Britain and its allies, according to a 
Mikhaila Peterson shared an update on social media this week—her first since October—to announce her father’s return home after spending time in an intensive care unit this fall, where he was treated for pneumonia and sepsis. Those conditions appeared after mold exposure this summer led to a “severe” flare-up of a chronic illness he has been battling since 2017, she said.
Specialists are continuing to work on determining the underlying cause of his illness and are considering a complex array of possibilities from neurological, to autoimmune, to a mixture of both.
Mikhaila said no answers have emerged thus far and he remains “very unwell.”
“I’m hopeful he will recover with time,” she said in a Dec. 9 video 
That latter part is likely designed to gain Trump's attention and sympathy, given the president has been emphasizing this point all the way back to his first term.
The bill if passed would require the US government to formally notify NATO that it intends to end its membership and halt the use of American funds for shared budgets. Republican Senator Lee actually introduced similar legislation earlier this year, but it stalled in committee.
Of course, most Congress members have viewpoints which merely reflect the 'pro-NATO' established position of the vast majority of Western politicians generally, so it's very unlikely to ever be passed.
Massie wrote on 
The remark, captured in a clip shared widely on X, comes as leftists ramp up efforts to sow chaos in the ranks, painting Trump as a threat to the Constitution while ignoring their own history of politicizing the military.
Watch:
Sen. Mark Warner: "I think, in many ways, the uniformed military may help save us from this President."
They're now just openly calling for military coups against President Trump. 
