Aggregator

Though August (plus most of September) is the quietest time of the NBA news cycle, there were some Knicks developments to address.

The City Council is investing an incredible $1 million scholarship fund to educate the Big Apple’s youngest on the world-shattering tragedy of Sept.11.

Steinem died Wednesday at her home in New York, surrounded by loved ones.

Dear Abby advises a widower who can't get over her husband's death after moving in with a new partner.

The American Civil Liberties Union is turning America’s own justice system against us — and keeping Khalid Sheikh Mohammed from paying the price for 9/11.

The brutal ad laced into Conley's public opposition to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which included a provision to block Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) funding for sex changes.

Ukraine's Drone Warfare Devouring 4% Of Global Germanium Demand As China Chokes Supplies

Our coverage of rare earths dates back to President Trump's first trade war, when we warned that "Rare Earths Are China's Most Potent Weapon In A Trade War."

What followed was predictable. During the 2025 trade war, Beijing steadily tightened its control over exports of gallium, germanium, antimony, tungsten and a growing list of other critical industrial metals to the West and its allies. These restrictions represent another weapon in Beijing's economic-warfare toolkit, aimed squarely at the most vulnerable chokepoints in Western defense, semiconductor and advanced-manufacturing supply chains.

The latest signals suggest that bilateral tensions are once again deteriorating. China was the sole G20 holdout on language addressing trade imbalances and an unsustainable export-oriented economic model, while Treasury has widened its Iran sanctions campaign to include Chinese entities, refiners and shipping networks.

The response from the Trump administration and other Western governments has been to accelerate efforts to restart dormant mines, expand processing capacity and build critical minerals supply chains outside Beijing's control.

Our coverage of this trade began with an April 2024 note titled "Next Big Mineral Trade Revealed By Morgan Stanley," which identified MP Materials as one of the miners best positioned to benefit from the Trump-era push to restore domestic critical material supply chains.

By early July 2025, we again highlighted MP Materials as one of the clearest stocks for positioning around this decoupling theme. Just weeks later, shares of the rare earth miner surged from around $30 toward triple-digit territory.

Wall Street may not fully recognize the decoupling theme until regulatory restrictions translate into physical shortages. Some analysts are beginning to understand the grim outlook facing the West. But Beijing does not need to announce a formal trade embargo to shock markets into a crisis. Slowing export approvals, restricting volumes, or denying shipments to select end users have already made it clear that the West must rebuild critical supply chains outside China, either domestically or through friend-shoring.

Another indication that Western critical material supply chains could become a major decoupling theme for Wall Street is the emerging global rearmament cycle.

BMO analyst George Heppel noted that the Russia-Ukraine war is expected to account for more than 4% of global germanium demand this year, with an estimated 15 million drones set to be deployed in an environment where China has weaponized critical materials supply chains, given its control of much of the space. 

"With a staggering 15 million drones estimated to be deployed in the Russia-Ukraine war this year, it is safe to say that the world has entered the era of mass drone warfare," Heppel said.

Heppel explained: "Our analysis suggests that gallium, germanium and NdFeB magnets are the most important enablers of drone warfare, with gallium and germanium (alongside heavy rare earths) also being vital components required for counterdrone systems."

"Consequently, we expect gallium, germanium and rare earth supply security to continue to be a major priority in the West in the face of this growing threat," he added.

Heppel said the massive deployment of drones has opened a new front in the global scramble for germanium, gallium and rare earth magnets. These critical materials are used throughout the drone and counter-drone parts ecosystem, including in systems designed to detect, track, jam and destroy one-way attack drones.

The numbers surrounding drone-driven demand for critical materials are staggering:

• Drones now account for more than 80% of enemy targets destroyed by Ukrainian forces.
• Governments and military alliances have pledged roughly $150 billion for drone and counter-drone capabilities since 2025.
• About one-third of that planned spending is directed toward counter-drone systems.
• Drone warfare could consume 4.3% of global germanium demand this year.

Heppel said this is only the beginning of a "high-volume, high-precision" era of warfare that combines industrial-scale drone production with precision-strike capabilities. The transition in warfare technology is making militaries increasingly dependent on these obscure metals, much of whose production and processing is controlled by China. That represents a major vulnerability for the West.

Heppel estimates that the average FPV drone contains 46 grams of neodymium-iron-boron magnet material, 0.1 gram of gallium and 1 gram of germanium. Across 15 million drones, this translates into annual battlefield demand of roughly:

• 690 metric tons of NdFeB magnets
• 1.5 tons of gallium
• 15 tons of germanium

Global germanium demand was estimated at just 343 tons in 2025, meaning the Russia-Ukraine battlefield could consume more than 4% of worldwide supply this year. That source of demand did not exist before the war. 

The Squeeze On Prices...

Germanium is used in thermal-imaging lenses and in the fiber-optic cables attached to tethered one-way attack drones.

China's grip on germanium supply is becoming increasingly alarming (read here) as the US and allied governments commit an estimated $150 billion to drone and counter-drone capabilities.

Heppel told clients that several publicly traded companies offer exposure to the critical minerals theme:

1. MP Materials (MP-NYSE; $54.75; Outperform rated by Max Yerrill and Raj Ray) stands out for its NdPr magnet materials business, production of strategic rare earths such as samarium and gadolinium, and efforts to support drone manufacturing through Project Swarm.
2. Neo Performance Materials (NEO-TSX; $31.38; Outperform rated) provides downstream exposure through rare earth separation, magnet production and refined gallium products.
3. Energy Fuels (UUUU-NYSE; $14.75; Outperform rated) offers leverage to the redevelopment of a domestic US rare earth supply chain.
4. For gallium, Rio Tinto (RIO-LSE; £76.74; Outperform rated) and Alcoa (AA-NYSE; $49.95; Market Perform rated) are emerging as prospective Western suppliers, although gallium is unlikely to become a major revenue driver for either company.
5. For germanium, Teck Resources (TECK.B-TSX; $94.51; Restricted) remains a key non-Chinese producer and is evaluating a capacity expansion. Ivanhoe Mines (IVN-TSX; $12.11; Outperform rated) provides indirect exposure through the germanium- and gallium-bearing Kipushi deposit and its potential role in future US critical-mineral supply chains.

"As a result, we expect drone and counterdrone technologies to become another important driver of government efforts to secure domestic production, strengthen processing capacity, and reduce dependence on vulnerable foreign supply chains," Heppel explained.

We have already highlighted Piper Sandler's coverage of LightPath Technologies, whose germanium-free infrared materials offer a synthetic alternative for the West as Chinese export restrictions tighten the global germanium market.

Beyond the critical materials covered by Heppel, Jefferies analysts initiated coverage on several critical minerals companies earlier Wednesday, including Almonty Industries. Jefferies assigned Almonty a "Buy" rating, highlighting the miner's direct public-market exposure to Western tungsten supply. 

Jefferies initiates critical mineral companies Almonty, Materion, USA Rare Earth and Neo Performance with Buy; the firms are expected to benefit from increased demand for supply outside of China.

Almonty (buy, PT $26.25)

Sees Almonty offering public exposure to Western tungsten…

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 2, 2026

Read more here.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/03/2026 - 05:45

Lindsay Clancy Jury Deadlocked Again; Insane Karen Arrested For 'Aggravated Intimidation' Of Jurors

The jury in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial is once again deadlocked over whether the former mother of three should be given a pass due to hysteria and hormones. 

The indecision followed five days of deliberations and two notes from jurors saying they could not agree. On Wednesday, Judge William Sullivan gave the panel a Tuey-Rodriguez instruction, Massachusetts' last-resort charge telling a deadlocked jury to reach a verdict or else it's an automatic mistrial.

Clancy, 36, a former labor-and-delivery nurse, was charged with three counts of first-degree murder in the January 24, 2023, deaths of her children - Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months - at the family's home in Duxbury. She has not disputed that she killed them. The question for the jury of nine women and three men was whether she was criminally responsible.

The killings

Evidence at trial showed Clancy spent part of that morning on ordinary errands of motherhood, including a pediatrician visit for Cora and playing in the snow. She then asked her husband, Patrick Clancy, to leave for takeout and a pharmacy run. While he was gone, she strangled the three children with exercise bands in the basement. She cut her wrists and neck and jumped from a second-story window. The fall left her paralyzed from the waist down; she has appeared in court in a wheelchair.

Patrick found her injured in the yard, then found the children. Cora and Dawson were pronounced dead that day. Callan died days later. All three deaths were ruled ligature strangulation. Clancy later said a voice told her it was her last chance: kill the children so she could kill herself.

What the jury was asked to decide

Prosecutors conceded she was mentally ill, but is still responsible for the killings. Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague told jurors Clancy planned the killings, sent her husband out of the house, and checked how long the errands would take. They pointed to her functioning that day as proof she could form intent. Sprague called the killings "a choice." First-degree murder in Massachusetts can rest on deliberate premeditation, extreme atrocity or cruelty, or both. That conviction is life without parole.

Defense attorney Kevin Reddington argued she lacked criminal responsibility because of postpartum psychosis and bipolar illness, worsened by psychiatric medications and missed warning signs. Under Massachusetts law, the Commonwealth has to prove criminal responsibility beyond a reasonable doubt. Clancy had been hospitalized and discharged about three weeks before the killings.

Jurors heard more than 80 witnesses and saw more than 300 exhibits. For each child's death they could choose first-degree murder, second-degree murder, manslaughter, not guilty, or not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility. Second-degree murder is life with the possibility of parole. A lack-of-responsibility finding typically means commitment to a state psychiatric hospital with periodic reviews and no fixed release date. As noted above, a hung jury would be a mistrial.

Lindsay Clancy’s attorney says Clancy would not be able to “emotionally handle” another trial.

— Leading Report (@LeadingReport) September 2, 2026 Arrest outside the courthouse

The deliberations themselves became part of the story. On Tuesday afternoon, as the jury left after reporting it could not agree, Massachusetts State Police arrested Dawn Light, 56, of Sutton, outside the Plymouth courthouse. She was charged with aggravated intimidation of a witness, juror, or person furnishing information in a criminal proceeding, and was arraigned Wednesday in Plymouth District Court, where she pleaded not guilty and was released on personal recognizance. Her attorney, Jennifer White, called the episode a complete misunderstanding and said Light had only wanted to see Clancy. The judge ordered Light to stay away from the courthouse, have no contact with jurors or witnesses, and release no photographs connected to the case.

Dawn Light, the retired nurse who is facing 20 years in prison for allegedly intimidating Clancy jurors, giggles when asked how she feels now that she's a celebrity.

Reporter: How do you feel that you're a celebrity now?

Light: *Giggles*

Zero remorse.pic.twitter.com/vdnvrQvO0R

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) September 2, 2026

Prosecutors said troopers were told someone may have been filming jurors in the courthouse parking lot. They found Light in a car parked in a restricted area and asked whether she was photographing anyone. "She was adamant she was not," Assistant District Attorney Nicole Piacentini said, according to NBC Boston. "She stated she was waiting to see if Lindsay Clancy would come out of the building." An initial search of Light's phone turned up nothing, investigators said, but the deleted folder held images of people later confirmed to be jurors, taken from her vantage point in the car.

Light told CT Insider she had been trying to record Clancy and lowered her phone when she realized the person on camera was not the defendant. She said a court employee asked for her license and phone; she handed over the license and refused the phone, and troopers were called. "That's the long and the short of it," she said. "I don't know how I intimidated anyone."

BREAKING: The woman accused of filming jurors in the Lindsay Clancy trial is in serious legal trouble.

Prosecutors say 56-year-old Dawn Light filmed jurors outside the courthouse and entered a restricted area despite a court order prohibiting jurors from being photographed or… pic.twitter.com/Pz0yx2sQ22

— Fox News (@FoxNews) September 2, 2026

Light is a retired nurse with no prior criminal history. Before deliberations resumed Wednesday, Sullivan questioned each juror individually at sidebar about whether they had seen or heard anything that would affect their ability to decide the case fairly.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/03/2026 - 05:44

Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky blasted the country’s two top spy agencies for shooting at each other on the streets of Kyiv while a Russian terrorist plot was reportedly being foiled.

“I don’t think it’s the United States government’s business to honor some country western star,” he said.

UK Government To Fund School Forcing Seven-Year-Olds Into Hijabs

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

A Labour-run London council has put an Islamic primary school that makes girls as young as seven wear the hijab onto the public payroll.

From 1 September, Barnet Hill Academy in West Hendon stops being a fee-paying independent and becomes a voluntary-aided school - almost entirely funded by the taxpayer, legally free to pick every pupil and every teacher by religion, and still listing a white hijab as compulsory from Year 3.

Barnet Council called the uniform "legally compliant" and the school's policies representative of "equality of opportunity." The National Secular Society called it appalling.

An independent Islamic faith school that requires girls as young as seven to wear hijabs is to become state-funded.@rakibehsan: "We have a school that is enforcing that rule – I think many people would find that to be an unacceptable state of affairs."@JuliaHB1 pic.twitter.com/FJyKzaTDeu

— Talk (@TalkTV) September 1, 2026

Barnet Hill Academy has operated as an independent Islamic day school since 2006, but until this week families paid more than £6,500 a year. Those fees will now vanish, as the Dedicated Schools Grant takes over.

Voluntary-aided status is the mechanism. The local authority maintains the school and pays the bills. The governing body keeps the religious character, employs the staff and sets the admissions rules. Faith designation lets a VA school give priority to 100 per cent of places on religious grounds and appoint teachers by faith.

The school's own uniform page is blunt. For girls in Years 3 and 4 a white hijab sits in the same list as the branded pinafore, black shoes and book bag. In Years 5 and 6 the hijab remains, with a jilbab or ankle-length skirt as the alternative lower garment.

Notes on the page state that full uniform is compulsory and the hijab must be "plain white ONLY." Year 3 in English primary schools is seven years old.

Stephen Evans, chief executive of the National Secular Society, wrote to John Anthony, the council's executive director of children's services, stating "It is appalling that taxpayers are being asked to fund a school that forces girls as young as seven to wear the hijab. Women should be free to choose religious dress; young girls should not have it imposed upon them."

"It's appalling that taxpayers are being asked to fund a school that forces girls as young as seven to wear the hijab."

I'm quoted here for @NatSecSoc about plans to bring an Islamic faith school into the state sector:https://t.co/eSWqYwcm5l

— Stephen Evans (@Stephenmevans1) September 1, 2026

He added: "State-funded schools should bring children together, not divide them by faith and, by extension, ethnicity. The council must pause the implementation of this decision and subject this proposal to proper public and democratic scrutiny."

In the same letter he said the society was "deeply concerned both by the substance of this decision and by the procedure through which it was reached."

Barnet's reply is the standard diversity script. A spokesman said the borough prided itself on "the diverse nature of our school landscape" and that the uniform policy was legally compliant. The written judgment claimed there was "a very limited level" of state-funded Islamic primary provision across London, "unevenly spread and primarily concentrated outside of Barnet."

It added that the school's "inclusive policies" support the "elimination of discrimination" and the "advancement of equality of opportunity."

There are already 15 voluntary-aided Church of England schools in the borough. Barnet Hill will be the first VA Muslim school. The 2021 Census counted 47,700 Muslim residents in Barnet - just over 12 per cent.

The council's argument is that Islam was "not represented within the state-funded education sector" and that "Muslim families do not have the same opportunity as those of other faiths to access a school aligned with their religious ethos."

Evans responded that the NSS "failed to understand how a school very likely to be made up entirely of pupils from one religious background and which discriminates against pupils who don't share its faith can be considered 'inclusive'."

Campaigners have said for years that making primary-age girls cover their hair treats childhood as a prelude to sexual availability. The hijab, in the conservative reading the school is enforcing, marks modesty before men. Imposing it at seven is not a fashion choice. It is a theological statement paid for by people who never signed up to that theology.

Some concerning news.

Labour will provide funding to a school that forces seven-year-old girls to wear hijabs...

Why are we now imposing religious garb on children?

This is coercive, cult?like and a breach of parental guidance!

Britain is losing its Christian roots by... pic.twitter.com/7gVYt7hY4h

— Sedd (@SeddSezz) September 1, 2026

This is happening all over. The emancipation of migrant women that comes with better education is no longer happening. Increasingly, girls are being corralled into "faith" schools where religious education is prioritised over academic rigour.

These girls will not be expected to... pic.twitter.com/UPdUugzgSO

— Richard North (@ollieparrot) August 31, 2026

There are Muslim faith schools in other parts of the country, such as Bradford, which are already state funded.

Theoretically open to all faiths, they are the exclusive domain of the Muslims as the dress code for girls included not only hijab but also the abaya (the full length... https://t.co/XLzInYGCv5

— Richard North (@ollieparrot) September 1, 2026

NSS research in 2017 found the hijab compulsory in eight state-funded Islamic schools in England, three of them primaries. The Telegraph reported that a handful of state-funded schools still run the same rule in 2026.

Barnet is not a one-off experiment. It is the latest conversion of a private religious enclosure into a public one, with the dress code intact and the admissions sieve intact.

The classroom numbers around that enclosure have already flipped. A Telegraph analysis of the school census found White British children are now the minority in one in four schools in England. In 72 schools the census recorded no White British pupils at all.

In 454 they were under 2 per cent. In every London borough except Bromley, White British children are a minority; in Newham the figure was 5 per cent, in Harrow 7 per cent.

The same paper has shown White British pupils down to 46 per cent of grammar-school rolls and White students in the minority at 27 universities.

Minorities in their own country.

But remember: it's not happening. pic.twitter.com/ZjY1mtlVMt

— iamyesyouareno (@iamyesyouareno) September 1, 2026

That is the country into which Barnet has just poured a faith-selective, hijab-compulsory primary and told the rest of the borough to call it inclusion.

Meanwhile, in yet another example of the parallel society of the UK now, Cardiff Council has spent more than £2 million of council-tax money over recent years translating and interpreting for people who do not speak English.

Council spends over £2m in taxpayer cash to translate materials for people who cannot speak Englishhttps://t.co/SxUam54Drn

— GB News (@GBNEWS) September 1, 2026

The five-year bill published by GB News came to £2,047,975: £1.14 million on pre-booked interpretation, £506,000 on instant interpretation, £396,000 on document translation, across more than 60 languages. Arabic alone accounted for £314,446.

The 2025/26 year logged 13,000 instances of support. A council spokesman said Cardiff is "a proudly diverse, multicultural and multilingual city" and that translations help residents "access essential council services."

Conservative councillor Calum Davies asked why a city "running out of money under Labour" was "frittering away millions on translation and interpretation, indulging a broken immigration system and failing integration policy." William Yarwood of the TaxPayers' Alliance said ratepayers face record bills "yet councils continue to subsidise foreign families that don't bother to learn the language."

The same state that will not require English will require a seven-year-old girl to cover her hair if she wants a desk in the new VA school. The same state that lectures the native majority about cohesion builds the institutions that make cohesion optional.

The pattern extends to other areas of society. In July the Home Office was shown to have handed Skilled Worker sponsorship powers to Islamic bookshops stocking Sayyid Qutb's Milestones - the text that argues for toppling secular governments by "physical power and jihad" - alongside works flagged for antisemitism and Bilal Philips's The Fundamentals of Tawheed, which UK prison inspectors ordered out of jails in 2016 over wife-beating guidance.

Reform UK's Lee Anderson called it "a perfect illustration of 14 years of Tory failure: rather than doctors and engineers, we brought in staff for Islamic shops selling books on jihad."

In March, Labour-run councils in Leeds, Calderdale, Oldham, Wakefield, Sefton and Tameside circulated "Sharing the Journey" guidance warning schools that children's drawings of human figures or prophets "could be blasphemous" under some Islamic interpretations.

Music, dance, drama and mixed PE were listed as potential flashpoints. The text told staff it was "very important that the school understands this and is also careful not to ask its students to reproduce images of Jesus, the Prophet Mohammed or other figures considered to be prophets in Islam."

The same week Whitehall urged schools to monitor and report "anti-Muslim hostility" under a new non-statutory definition. Communities Secretary Steve Reed said the definition gave "a clear explanation of unacceptable prejudice, discrimination and hatred targeting Muslims, so we can take action to stop it."

Critics including Jonathan Hall KC and the Free Speech Union warned it would chill legitimate criticism of Islamism. An "anti-Muslim hostility tsar" was promised for schools and universities.

The leaked social-cohesion draft that sat behind that drive branded the Union Flag and the St George's Cross as potential "tools of hate" the "extreme right" had tried to turn from "symbols of pride." Reform's Richard Tice called the paper "divisive nonsense that should be consigned to the bin."

By late August the two-tier was no longer a draft. Birmingham City Council sought a High Court injunction against "unauthorised" England and Union flags on lampposts, with breach carrying unlimited fines and up to two years in prison.

Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Palestine flags were confirmed as exempt. Palestinian flags had flown for months after 7 October 2023 without an injunction. Raise the Colours co-founder Ryan Bridge said he would carry on: "If I go to jail for it, so be it." Robert Jenrick called it "blatant two-tier bias against the British people."

The state will now bankroll a school that sorts children by mosque attendance and covers girls at seven. It will translate council forms into sixty languages so nobody has to learn English. It will license bookshops that sell jihad primers to sponsor visas. It will tell teachers a child's drawing might be a blasphemy incident. It will build a snitch channel for "anti-Muslim hostility." And it will treat the national flag as a hate exhibit and leave foreign flags on the lampposts.

If this isn't evidence of a completely hostile cultural takeover, then what on earth is?

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/03/2026 - 05:00

Last month the US and Ukraine revealed radically different approaches to the future of warfare — and America seems to be taking a wrong turn.

Cassandra Wilson, the two-time Grammy Award-winning jazz singer, songwriter and producer has died. She was 70.

Cassandra Wilson, the two-time Grammy Award-winning jazz singer, songwriter and producer has died. She was 70.

A Florida man who challenged a police officer to a fight was left with quite the shiner and a bloodied-up face in a horrific mugshot following his ill-advised provocation.

He said, ‘I’m going to shoot people.'"

EU's Kallas Says No Progress On Zelensky's Cash Infusion For Patriot Missiles

On Wednesday EU leadership revealed that the Zelensky government has formally asked the European Commission to provide several billion euros from the EU’s €90 billion ($105 billion) support loan to purchase US-made Patriot air defense missiles.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced just ahead of a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, "It is worth several billion euros and would cover Ukraine’s air defense needs, including high-end PAC-3 air defense systems."

via EU Council

At the same time, the EU’s top foreign affairs official, Kaja Kallas, is coming off a meeting of the bloc's defense ministers wherein she cited no progress made on the Patriot funding plan.

"There were calls and talks about these missiles but there was, unfortunately, no concrete success today regarding this," the EU top diplomat had spelled out Tuesday. "Patriot missiles about to expire [by Nato standards] should be sent to Ukraine."

Looking back further, the last time that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was in the White House, he pleaded with President Trump for a "winter package" of 300 Patriot missiles. 

Zelensky has long been warning that cities remain largely unprotected against Russia's more advanced ballistic missile arsenal - a problem that only mass supplies of Patriots can remedy.

Ukraine's supply have run dry, with batteries sitting in some locations, unable to be fired.

In mid-August, here's what a CNN team observed on the ground in Ukraine:

CNN was the first media outlet to be given access to a Patriot on Ukrainian territory so Ukrainian officials could reveal one fact: the country has pretty much run out of interceptors. CNN agreed not to reveal details of the Patriot model or its location.

The 16 tubes of the system that CNN saw show signs of regular use, but its chief engineer in Ukraine, who gave only his first name Dmytro for security reasons, said he had not seen a Patriot launcher fire for six weeks. Ukraine has been reluctant to specify exactly how many interceptors, if any, it has left – President Volodymyr Zelensky says the country needs 5% of the US stockpile to survive the winter, but currently only has 1%.

There have notoriously been immense backlogs when it comes to Patriot production, and there's said to be great global demand among US allies, especially given depletions which have come as a result of the Iran war.

Taking it back? Trump earlier talked about giving Ukraine a license to make Patriot systems...

Trump on Ukraine and Patriots:

We have the greatest weapons in the world, and we have to be careful about giving out secrets to the weapons. You can't copy them.

It is like NVIDIA—they have a chip. They say you cannot copy it. pic.twitter.com/BLdJxzqOu2

— Clash Report (@clashreport) July 31, 2026

Trump had announced in July that Washington would give Ukraine "the right to make Patriots" - after Zelensky had for at least six months been relentless in requesting this, framing it as urgent and for the protection of cities and civilians. But such local production would take years to tool and set up, with the reality of a nightly air war making the prospect daunting.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/03/2026 - 04:15

Video captures USS San Antonio Marines boarding and sinking a Los Choneros narco-terrorist floating refueling station in the Eastern Pacific.

COVID-19: The Great Forgetting

Authored by John MacLeod via The Critic,

We have repressed the memories of the pandemic that changed all of our lives...

It is a little drawer in a cabinet by my bedside and I have not opened it in years. I have to steel myself to open it now. And, yes, they are all there yet in every variety - black, chequered, colourful.

The ear-looped face-coverings behind which I spluttered for two long years, tugging on and off as needs be, as we queued obediently outside supermarkets, danced on and off pavements, or chilled if anyone in the vicinity so much as coughed.

Obediently protecting the NHS by, um, not using it. And, for weeks on end in 2020, biddably stood outside our front gates to hail its endeavours each Thursday evening, clapping our hands and banging saucepans.

The initial weeks of panic, when hand-sanitiser, soap and masks were nowhere to be had. An inexplicable run on toilet-rolls. The later, weird scarcities: flour, yeast, eggs.

On all sides the shuttered shops and restaurants, many of which would never reopen. The funerals you could not go to and the weddings that never happened. Untold rings, accordingly, engraved with the wrong date.

I have the sort of bardic, Highland memory that could immediately tell you something interesting that happened in my life in, say, August 1976 or September 2002. I'd struggle to detail much between March 2020 and April 2022.

Those were months without form, and void. Without the usual milestones of big social occasions and family celebration. In hindsight, they have a nightmarish hue.

I was trapped in Edinburgh shielding two elderly parents, one living with cancer. I lurched out on my lonesome for daily needs and the weekly Big Shop, three debit-cards in my wallet.

In the early weeks - I was fifty-four; had a bit of a tummy - I was wholly resigned to catching Covid; darkly confident I would die. Time and again I washed my hands, till they were raw; sometimes I was tempted to wash the groceries - and I know of households where husbands, returning from such an outing, had to strip in the porch before being granted admittance.

Nicola Sturgeon? Gaw, that woman never seemed to be off the box. Nightly my mother tuned in for her latest and-furthermore-I-say-unto-ye lecturettes, screened live on telly by our reverent broadcasters and without the First Minister's political rivals granted any part whatsoever.

In a particularly North Korean moment, STV even broadcast online sickly footage of assorted Scottish children mewling, "Thank you, Nicola, for keeping us all safe," and variants thereof. (It was belatedly pulled, after an outcry.)

I still remember the worst moment. A Saturday evening in October 2020. It had rained all day. Our brief re-opening had ceased after a sustained uptick in infections: the First Minister (who, weeks earlier, had been braying to all Europe how Scotland had eliminated coronavirus) had announced a "16-day re-set" with renewed restrictions.

So successful was the16-day re-set it lasted till the spring of 2022. That October evening - I could not return to my own home; I was totally trapped; my parents had been in particularly foul temper that day - I stood at the kitchen sink and wept.

Weeks later, it was announced that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine had been successfully trialled. Great-grandparents were enjoying their first armfuls by Christmas.

I had my own in March 2021 - for which I had to motor home, at last, to my Hebridean lair, by sleepy streets and through a deserted countryside, past fraying posters for 2020 Highland Games and agricultural shows that had never taken place.

I never caught coronavirus. Nor did my parents, nor either of my brothers. Even in my widest social circle, I only know of four people who died - all of them infected in hospital or care-home settings, and who may well have died with it rather than of it. In a national emergency that bore most brutally on schoolchildren and young adults, the average age of Covid mortality was eighty-two.

The abiding sense that Britain had a particularly awful pandemic under a particularly useless Government is not fair. We were among the first countries to have a reliable test for Covid-19. Humiliated the EU with our rapid development, testing and rollout of an effective vaccine.

Our world-leading research early identified useful treatments. (One, Remdesivir, in October 2020 might well have saved President Trump's life.)

In terms of excess deaths, we fared better than Italy, Spain, Greece, the United States and indeed most of central and eastern Europe. Five European nations did worse than us: eight better.

Britain had three vulnerabilities: considerable population density, especially in England; a high BAME population, many in cultures of extended family in crowded homes; and, in London Heathrow, the world's busiest international airport.

Yet appalling British mistakes were made and Sweden, which refused to lock down, had the lowest excess deaths of all.

Haplessly, back in 2011 and when detailed plans were laid, we had prepared for the wrong pandemic - influenza.

You might think flu and Covid much of a muchness. There are key differences. Flu has a briefer incubation period. It is potentially dangerous to children and in a bad year - our last was 2018 - can carry off over 30,000 people. (In 2020, seven British children of nine or younger died of flu: only three succumbed to Covid-19.)

Bluntly, more children, trapped out of sight in awful family situations, were 'murdered' as a consequence of coronavirus than would die of it.

There had been two fundamental mistakes.

One was that we were rather slow to grasp that many with Covid had no symptoms - after we had blithely decanted thousands of elderly hospital patients into eventide homes.

The other was the belief, in the early months, that Covid-19 was primarily spread by "fomites". Things you touched that infected people had touched.

That's certainly true of maladies like norovirus - the winter vomiting bug - but, in fact, coronavirus is essentially an airborne respiratory infection.

We would have been far better throwing our windows open and did have one great stroke of luck: the spring and summer of 2020 were exceptionally fine.

It took me time, after it was all over, to unlearn some habits, like raising my left hand in me-Tarzan-you-Jane greeting as I was being served in shops - the mask denied staff the dazzle of my disarming smile - or daring to press buttons on cash-machines and at pedestrian-crossings with a naked finger, rather than using the "Covid key" that long dangled from my belt.

Yet by the late summer of 2022, even as normality resumed, the public clamoured for vengeance and the most convenient scapegoat was Boris Johnson

Toppled hastily from power not on account of Covid misjudgements, but revelations as to how life in No 10 - at the height of the pandemic - had become something of a wine-fuelled Lower Sixth disco.

A far more extraordinary aspect of Covid-19 is how comprehensively it has been forgotten.

Most great affairs of moment are immortalised in our culture, and often for many years. Our broadcasters were still making Second World War dramas in the Eighties. John F Kennedy's presidency and murder yet shift books and films. The 1936 Abdication crisis remains a lucrative cottage-industry for authors and screenwriters.

But there are no coronavirus movies. There may be no poems and novels - in stark contrast to the Aids pandemic, wherein more young Americans died than had fallen in Vietnam, and whose notable British casualties alone included everyone from Derek Jarman, to Freddie Mercury, to Bruce Chatwin.

There was much related fiction, drama and cinema, and as recently as 2021 we had Russell T Davies's powerful Channel 4 drama, It's A Sin.

But Aids - and this is in no way to belittle its victims, or those who loved them - tended to endanger a specific demographic. It was precisely because Covid-19 terrified the bejapers out of all of us that it has been collectively repressed as a memory.

Incredibly, given the huge decisions made around it and how these blew up our economy, the pandemic, its handling and those decisions were not even points for discussion at the 2024 general election.

There is an evident reluctance, too, in high places to discuss Covid-19's origins - likely, far more sinister than some random in Wuhan nipping out for bat and chips.

And there is, in fact, a precedent for this strange amnesia.

The so-called Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19, all the worse because it coincided with the last vital months of the Great War and the vast transport of American troops, killed - globally - some thirty million people.

At a conservative estimate, at least 550,000 Americans - 195,000 of them in just thirty-one days. In October 1918 11,000 perished in Philadelphia. The city ran out of coffins: at night, corpses were collected from porches by horse and cart, in scenes straight out of the Black Death.

In my late father's native district on the isle of Lewis, forty people died in just five weeks, with four or five funerals every day. In a village further south, that November, my maternal grandfather lost a beloved sister to "influenzial pneumonia".

That influenza - first noted in Kansas, brought to Europe by sniffling American doughboys and mutating to new horror amidst the filth and decay of the Western Front - was of special dread because it could kill with extraordinary speed and, rather than the very young or the very old, most who died were in their twenties - husky youths and bonny lasses, in the very prime of life.

"If the epidemic continues its mathematical rate of acceleration," physician Victor Vaughan chilled that dreadful autumn, "civilisation could easily disappear from the face of the Earth."

It did not, of course. By 1919 it was already in retreat and by March 1920 had burned itself out: like pandemics everywhere, it simply ran out of people to infect.

But there is no Spanish flu fiction. There was no subsequent cinema. It is remembered within families - earlier this summer, my 94 year-old uncle spoke sorrowfully of that aunt he had never known - but, collectively, and as a society, we wiped that tape.

"It is in the individual memory of a great many of us," author Alfred W Crosby mused in 1998, "but it is not in the collective memory. That for me is the greatest mystery, how we could have forgotten anything so horrendous - so massively horrendous, which killed so many of us.

"Why was our reaction to forget it? So awful, so frightening, people just got rid of the memory. But it always lingers there, as a kind of uneasiness."

Like those masks in my drawer - clung to, still, just in case...

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Tyler Durden Thu, 09/03/2026 - 03:30

Brooke Shields went on an adventure-filled getaway to Croatia.