Zero Rss

Beijing Threatens To Cancel Trump-Xi Summit If US Approves New Arms Sales To Taiwan

Chinese President Xi Jinping used today's 18th BRICS Summit to push for a greater diplomatic role in Gulf affairs. The move appears to be transforming the bloc's economic weight into geopolitical influence, really positioning it as a counterweight to US foreign policy.

Beijing's leverage also rests on its control over rare-earth and other critical-material supply chains, as it maintains a "quasi-monopolistic" grip on the industry that will persist through the end of the decade.

Keeping that leverage in mind, Japanese news outlet Kyodo News reported that Beijing threatened earlier today to cancel the summit with President Trump in Washington if the US approves new arms sales to Taiwan.

Kyodo stated:

China has told the United States that it intends to cancel a planned meeting between their leaders later this month if Washington approves any new arms sales to Taiwan by then, multiple sources familiar with bilateral ties said Saturday.

U.S. President Donald Trump, apparently eager to showcase some diplomatic achievements ahead of November's midterm congressional elections, places great importance on holding the summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

While preparing for Xi's upcoming trip, China has restated its position that the Taiwan issue is a "red line" in bilateral relations, sources said.

The report comes ahead of Xi's planned summit with Trump at the White House on September 24. The threat is another obstacle for the administration as it seeks to maintain an already fragile diplomatic and trade truce amid worsening relations over the Gulf conflict.

Polymarket traders appear unfazed by the Kyodo report, with Xi still leading the "Who will Trump meet with in September?" market at 95% and odds showing little reaction to the reported threat.

Taiwan arms sales have already emerged as a critical focal point for both superpowers. After meeting Xi in May, Trump declined to commit to approving another weapons package, while Beijing warned that mishandling Taiwan could spark a conflict.

A late-August report cited by Taiwan's main English-language daily newspaper, the Taipei Times, said that China had deployed a record 244 coast guard, research, and other government vessels around the island amid mounting fears of a blockade next year.

"Might be the first in history to see a power play coming from China when it comes to this. Not because they want, but because they can. One of the main reasons would be because of the control they have over critical minerals US has to pick which front to focus on- China or Iran," Teo Sinamin, who runs a Substack focused on rare earths, wrote on X.

Might be the first in history to see power play coming from China when it comes to this.

Not because they want,but because they can.

One of the main reasons would be because of the control they have over critical minerals

US has to pick which front to focus on- China or Iran https://t.co/VIyOSuHaOp

— Teo (@Teo_Sinamin) September 12, 2026

Sinamin continued ...

Greenest Monday ever for critical minerals https://t.co/tgxwyZj1jo

— Teo (@Teo_Sinamin) September 12, 2026

A further deterioration in US-China relations could trigger tighter export licensing or renewed restrictions on critical materials, intensifying pressure on Western industrial and defense supply chains. This issue resurfaced earlier this month when Reuters reported that some Chinese rare-earth suppliers refused shipments to US customers for fear of repercussions from Beijing.

The ongoing disruption supports the bullish investment case for reducing dependence on China, with junior miners and established producers offering alternative supplies. That is certainly the talk among private equity and hedge funds to date. Further escalation could push the decoupling theme to the forefront across the investing world, as these critical-material supply chains are the building blocks for AI data center buildouts, electrification upgrades, reindustrialization, and the upcoming rearmament cycle.

The strongest beneficiaries would likely be companies that can deliver ex-China supplies at scale in time to ease Western shortages as demand soars for the reasons mentioned above.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/12/2026 - 12:15

Gen Z Has No Idea What 9/11 Is

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

Twenty-five years after Islamist hijackers murdered 2,977 people on American soil, a young man in Lower Manhattan looked at 2,977 memorial drones drawing the towers in the night sky and asked why anyone would build a "fake" building.

He called the Tribute in Light the "Batman signal."

This is what happens when media and universities treat the Islamist nature of the attack as a political embarrassment instead of a fact.

?? Young American outraged by a 9/11 memorial action

2,977 drones, one for each victim, went up at once to draw a full-size silhouette full-size silhouette in the sky over Lower Manhattan.

The man did not understand what was going on and sharply commented: "We have enough... pic.twitter.com/6gkGbIbpRt

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) September 11, 2026

"We have enough buildings, bro. Why are they making a fake one?" The guy filming the video states.

Critics assert that education about the September 11 2001 attacks has been avoided due to the Islamist nature of the terror attack, leaving large parts of Gen Z with almost no knowledge of what happened that fateful morning.

Gen Z's indifference to Sept. 11 is inexcusable | RESTORING AMERICA by @SouthernKeeks https://t.co/vscKWQag7k

— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) September 11, 2026

Washington Examiner columnist Kimberly Ross called the indifference inexcusable. Younger Americans cannot be blamed for being born after 2001, she wrote, but they can be charged with treating the day as a bother.

"If you have the immense privilege of calling yourself an American, you have a duty to understand both the scope of loss and how it forced a titanic shift in our national perspective," she writes, noting that the dead, the jumpers, Flight 93, Todd Beamer's "let's roll" cannot be treated as optional educational content.

The vacuum is not accidental. Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia told teachers not to "associate the 9/11 attacks with Islam or Muslims" and not to "center the extremists."

Roughly half of that district's commemorative guide is devoted to "safe spaces" for Muslim students.

Penn GSE's "Teaching Beyond 9/11" curriculum, pushed into New York City schools and several state education departments, gives the attacks themselves a single paragraph, says the United States merely "accused" Osama bin Laden, and then piles on units about Islamophobia, right-wing extremism, and "avenues for solidarity."

Only a handful of states mandate real instruction. Texas just approved language tying "radical Islam" to the attacks; Democrats on the board called it an outrage.

One Navy veteran put the motive in the open:

What should be taught in every single American school is intentionally hidden and lied about by our own education system. They don't want them to know Muslims were responsible for thousands killed that day and years after by war. That's why people are stupidly voting for them,...

— megourd1967 (@ProudUSNvet67) September 11, 2026

Others expressed consternation about the lack of knowledge among Gen Z:

If they don't even know history from 25 years ago, what do they know?

— Creature of Habit2 (@CreatureHabit2) September 11, 2026

Generation Z is a disaster. They are completely out of touch and stupid. They respect nothing and don't study their own history.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
George Santayana.

— Roger Pellegrini (@Pellegrini_RG) September 11, 2026

Media and universities are to blame, yes. But where TF are the parents on this? If my kids had no idea 9/11 even happened, I have failed. It's kind of a big deal..

— TheArmedGardener (@Cheeky1iam) September 11, 2026

While that ignorance played out over Manhattan, New York's first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, stood at Ground Zero after families and first responders spent weeks begging him to stay away.

Giovanni Galante, whose wife Grace was killed in the North Tower, organized a petition that passed 100,000 signatures. "We don't believe in what he believes in, and we really want us to be left alone," Galante said. "This 25th anniversary is for victims and survivors... not have a circus around us."

Charles Wolf, who lost his wife, said: "This mayor is not serving us. He's serving himself." Monica Iken asked him to "respect us from 7 to 11 and let us have our mourning." Cheri Sparacio, whose husband Tom died on the 84th floor of the South Tower, pointed to Mamdani's chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem, who previously represented a convicted al-Qaeda operative.

City Councilwoman Vickie Paladino demanded he "not show his face at that sacred ground." The Port Authority Retired Police Association, which lost 37 officers that morning, told him the day was "not a political occasion, a photo opportunity, or a platform."

He came anyway. Cameras then caught him laughing with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez while family members read the names of the dead.

They're Showing You EXACTLY Who They Are...

Mourner Walter Matuza, whose father was killed and who helped push the petition, said: "He showed up anyway. It does bother us." Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani had already said Mamdani's presence "offends" him and that the mayor "stands in direct support of the movement that killed their children."

Andy Ngo documented another face of the same contempt a few blocks and a few hours from the names: a trans 'activist' who regularly dances at Pride events ripping pages from a Bible at a 9/11 "direct action."

NYC (Sept. 11) — A trans activist who regularly dances at Pride events rips out pages of the Bible at a 9/11 direct action. pic.twitter.com/6qtsAyaIzO

— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) September 11, 2026

Sick. Just sick.

Meanwhile, 9/11 families have once again demanded release of files that the deep state has spent a quarter-century ducking. Terry Strada, after reading her husband Tom's name, asked: "How can it be 25 years and still we have no justice for the role that Saudi Arabia played in your murder?"

She said families had "proved that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia fomented a rancid culture of anti-American terrorism" and sent agents to support the hijackers. "For 25 years, administration after administration... chose to protect the Saudis instead of standing with the 9/11 families." She told Vice President JD Vance: "Stand with the families. Stand with the survivors. Stand with Americans."

The nephew of Lisa Marie Terry said: "For 25 years, the Deep State has hidden the truth about what happened 25 years ago. President Trump, you're our last hope. Release the unredacted files that implicate Saudi Arabia, while what's left of the victims' families are still alive to see it."

9/11 Family Members Demand Trump Admin Release Docs 'Deep State Has Hidden'

A generation that cannot identify a silhouette of the towers has no grounding in modern American society. A school system that treats "Islamophobia" as the real lesson of 9/11 will not produce one.

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 Sat, 09/12/2026 - 11:40

"Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda": Hillary Clinton Gives Flippant Answer When Pressed On Patriot Act Support

Hillary Clinton attempted to wave off criticism of her post-9/11 votes this week, telling a Columbia University audience that Monday-morning quarterbacking carries its own bias and that relitigating the Patriot Act does little good.

The former secretary of state, who teaches crisis decision-making at Columbia's Institute of Global Politics, was pressed by a moderator on whether Americans were "served well" by the Patriot Act and the Authorization for Use of Military Force, and on what she remembered about the deliberations.

https://x.com/kenklippenstein/status/2098234790692446256?s=20

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) September 2026

"I think what you just heard is such a reminder about how difficult decision-making is in the midst of a crisis," Clinton said, speaking at a Columbia SIPA Institute of Global Politics panel titled "The 9/11 Attacks 25 Years Later: Lessons Learned, Lessons Forgotten."

"And that's the course that the dean and I teach every day, or every week, because hindsight is always perfect."

"But it's got as much bias as anything else. And so looking back and saying shoulda, coulda, woulda doesn't really help us," the failed presidential candidate added.

Clinton was a freshman senator from New York when hijacked airliners slammed into the World Trade Center towers in her home state. Clinton joined 97 colleagues in voting for the USA Patriot Act that October. Then-Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) was the lone no.

Days earlier, the Senate had cleared the AUMF 98-0. Across the Capitol, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) stood alone as the only member of Congress to vote against it.

That authorization became the legal blank check for roughly two decades of American military adventurism spanning multiple wars in the Middle East and multiple administrations, power lawmakers in both parties have since tried, and failed, to claw back.Gives 

The Patriot Act's Section 215, the so-called "business records" provision, became the legal foundation for the National Security Agency's bulk collection of American phone records, a program the public learned about only in 2013 through the Edward Snowden leaks. Congress scaled it back with the USA Freedom Act in 2015. The authority finally lapsed in March 2020.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/12/2026 - 11:40

Left-Wing Media Doxxes And Attacks Black "Rogue" Lindsay Clancy Juror

Critics say they have never seen a more egregious example of political groups and the media attempting to expose and destroy a juror for not making the decision they wanted. 

During the Lindsay Clancy trial Judge William Sullivan sealed the identities of all 12 jurors until at least September 18th, citing safety concerns after the high-profile trial.   An incident in which a woman was arrested for allegedly attempting to film and intimidate the jury added weight to the decision.  Deranged feminist activists have been rallying for weeks hoping to manipulate the outcome of deliberations in favor of Clancy, a mother who brutally strangled her three small children and then claimed "postpartum psychosis" as a defense.  

The announcement of a mistrial due to one male juror triggered a rabid fervor among leftist wine moms, leading to immediate calls for the juror to be doxxed, harassed and potentially "punished" for his refusal to conform to the wishes of the rest of the jury.  Evidence suggests that a pro-Clancy group formed very early in the deliberations process, and this group pressured the few holdouts to give in.  Only one man remained.  

Lindsay Clancy juror Paula Devlin tells @gayleking that the holdout juror was a Black man, whom she estimates is in his 30s. Devlin says after watching a video of an interview with Clancy, the holdout juror “realized that it wasn’t murder in the first degree,” adding the jury… pic.twitter.com/ZxFa2hgSsY

— CBS Mornings (@CBSMornings) September 11, 2026

The problem for the political left?  The juror is black, and they were hoping for an "evil white man".  This revelation has caused liberal heads to explode because black people within woke culture generally rank higher on the DEI totem pole than white women.  However, as everyone knows, when a black person leaves the liberal plantation these activists can become some of the most racist people on the planet.  They would rather destroy a minority than let him "go rogue".  

Lindsay Clancy supporter learns the lone holdout juror was a Black man—and suddenly says it “changes the landscape of the conversation.”

“I think a lot of us were assuming that it was a white man.”

Absolutely wild.pic.twitter.com/0vCiWsWrG0

— Real America's Voice (RAV) (@RealAmVoice) September 11, 2026

New outlets and online headhunters have been scrambling to dig up dirt on the black juror in order to gain some kind of narrative leverage.  Media sources have somehow obtained the man's name, though they can't release it yet without violating the court order.  NBC published a hatchet job article outlining the jurors criminal history.  

EXCLUSIVE: The holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy trial had a history of domestic violence allegations, the NBC10 Boston Investigators have learned through court documents and interviews with family members. Read the full investigation here. https://t.co/qSjIiU8Og8

— NBC10 Boston (@NBC10Boston) September 11, 2026

Defense Attorney Kevin Reddington's wife is apparently leading the charge on social media to undermine the juror's credibility.  It's a bizarre decision given that the trial is already over, unless the goal is to intimidate future jurors in a future trial. 

Kevin Reddington's wife is leading the slander campaign against the black hold-out juror.

You heard that right.

The wife of Clancy's lawyer is putting a target on the back of the one brave person who stopped her husband from getting a 3X child killer off the hook.

This is… pic.twitter.com/GXVuuzwWjM

— Pro America Politics (@proamericapol) September 11, 2026

The man's previous charges include a restraining order filed in 2021 by his wife, who claimed at least one incident of physical abuse.  It should be noted, though, that all criminal charges were dismissed.  NBC also dug up a $12,000 civil dispute the juror had with a landlord.  NBC has not attempted to dredge up dirt on any other juror in the Clancy trial, only the juror who refused to accept the insanity plea.

It's only a matter of time before the juror's full identity is revealed, opening the door to a barrage of harassment from activists and journalists.    

It shouldn't need to be explained, but the man's past is completely irrelevant to his duties on the jury.  He was approved by the defense and criminal histories of all candidates are examined during jury selection.  Perhaps Reddington assumed that the jury was stacked in Lindsay Clancy's favor and adding a black man to the list was the same as adding another sure vote.  This explains why the lawyer acted so aggressively to have the juror pressured or removed - His "rogue" decision" is viewed as a betrayal.     

This effort by political movements and establishment journalists to assassinate the character of a juror from a trial that has already ended represents a dangerous subversion of America's justice system.  If future juries cannot make decisions based on evidence without being worried that they'll come under attack after the trial is over, this would mean the death of the jury based system.  

Such a precedent would devolve into absolute chaos within the legal structure, and of course, vigilante justice to fill the void that follows. 

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/12/2026 - 11:05

No Secretary Bessent, We Aren't Magically Growing Our Way Out Of Debt

Authored by Vincent Cook via The Mises Institute,

As the official federal debt hit the $40 trillion mark and attracted a lot of negative publicity, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tried to reassure CNBC's Sara Eisen in an August 20 interview that there is nothing to worry about:

Well, yes, I mean, look, Sara, there's nothing magic about the $40 trillion number. And we can grow our way out of that. So, but what we do want to signal is, I think that there's been a lot of misinformation in terms of what's going on with the deficit, what's going on with the deficit to GDP. We actually had a fiscal consolidation for the calendar year 2025. We had, we are at about 5.7 percent of GDP. And one of the things that's temporary here that's influencing the deficit has been these tariff refunds. And we won't have to do that again. . . . The other big item in the budget that we're seeing is the hit that we're taking from, to revenues for the immediate expensing of factories and of equipment and farm structures. And I think that, if people sit back and think, that's not government spending. That is actually an investment in the future and we're increasing the tax base. And that's how, that is what measures the wealth of a nation, is the ability to increase after-tax return on capital. So we're pulling back the, think of it as pulling back the slingshot here. We have a lot of potential energy that will turn into kinetic energy during this year, next year, as these factories come online.

While Republicans have long been chanting "voodoo economics" incantations (i.e., claiming that increased growth happens in spite of federal deficit surges caused by tax reductions, so tax revenues will eventually catch up to spending over the long run), Bessent's remark does represent a new wrinkle on this theme. Here Bessent focuses attention on the ratio of the official budget deficit to GDP, as if the official budget is the only relevant factor affecting the future growth of total public debt and as if a short-run increase in GDP is a strongly positive indicator of the economy's long-run ability to sustain increased taxes.

The most basic objection to Bessent's argument (and indeed to the older versions of "supply-side" voodoo as well) is that it doesn't make any fundamental difference in the physical quantity of capital goods if private savings are consumed by higher deficits instead of being consumed by higher taxes. Either way, the labor and natural resources that otherwise could have been devoted to increased net capital accumulation are instead diverted towards increased present consumption and/or increased governmental malinvestments. Giving a tax break to encourage greater investment without corresponding decreases in government spending is self-defeating, since increased deficits divert the additional savings away from private businesses towards the government and its clients and minions.

We can see through the Republican smoke and mirrors to visualize the relationship between deficits and net saving with a graph of historical data. Figure 1 shows these amounts as fractions of net national product (NNP, a measure of what was actually earned by Americans at home and abroad) over the past seventy-five years, with the green line representing net saving and the green line representing federal surpluses and deficits.

Figure 1: Net saving, federal surpluses/deficits as fractions of net national product, 1950-2025

Source: BEA and OMB via FRED®

During the first twenty-four years, net saving varied between ten percent to fifteen percent of NNP, while the federal budget was close to being balanced. However, net saving peaked in 1965, and has since declined to very nearly zero percent in the 2020s. This sixty-year decline in net saving coincides with the emergence of steadily worsening federal deficits, which started becoming particularly acute in the 1980s and early 1990s at around 5 percent of NNP (roughly comparable to the New Deal deficits of the 1930s). During Clinton's two terms things turned around and the federal budget climbed all the way back to a small surplus, coinciding with a partial recovery of net saving.

Since the Clinton era the deficit situation has severely deteriorated, punctuated by sharp spikes during the 2008 financial crisis and during the 2020 covid lockdowns. It is in this fiscal morass that net saving has almost vanished. While Bessent can truthfully boast that net saving in 2025 was a little bit better than in 2024, keeping up this rate of improvement for three more years won't even get net saving back to the level achieved under the first Trump administration in 2019.

Chronic deficits have canceled whatever successes Republicans have had otherwise in reducing tax rates on investors. Their failure since the Eisenhower administration to keep spending under control, in conjunction with the equally reckless fiscal policies of the Democrats, has had a catastrophic impact on America's ability to keep increasing its stock of capital goods out of its own private thrift. While soaring deficits didn't cause the entire decline of net saving over the past sixty years, they did account for roughly half of it.

The official debt figure as such isn't even accurate as a measure of the problem, let alone magical, as $40 trillion gravely understates total federal obligations. This official figure does not include the net present value of the unfunded liabilities of the Social Security, Medicare, and federal employee trust funds, which the trustees (including Secretary Bessent) estimate will put the federal government a further $80 trillion in the hole in the absence of any growth-killing tax increases or political career-killing benefit cuts. The total liabilities of the federal government add up to at least $120 trillion; just servicing such an almost incomprehensible burden requires extremely powerful magic indeed, since no politician even dares acknowledge that two of the trust funds are set to go broke in the early 2030s, let alone come up with a plan to balance all the trust fund budgets.

So what are we to make of Bessent's contention that everything is fine because GDP is growing faster than deficits are? The deficit/GDP ratio referenced by Bessent (figure 2) did decrease from 6.2 percent in 2024 to 5.8 percent in 2025, but such a tiny improvement is barely noticeable when viewed over a seventy-five year perspective.

Figure 2: Federal surpluses/deficits as a fraction of GDP, 1950-2025

Source: BEA via FRED®

The deficit-GDP ratio in figure 2 looks very similar to the red line of figure 1, the main difference being that GDP is somewhat larger than NNP because it includes capital depreciation expenses (which makes "gross" metrics bigger than "net" metrics), offset slightly by the overseas earnings of Americans (which makes "national" metrics smaller than "domestic" metrics). GDP has grown slightly faster than NNP over this period, but it is NNP that is the better proxy of the income tax base, since depreciation expenses are not taxable while overseas income is taxable.

Admittedly Bessent overstating growth slightly by his preference for GDP over NNP is a minor issue, but it highlights a more fundamental methodological problem in his thinking. He starts by cherry-picking a popular metric to compare to the deficit metric and then extrapolates long-term trends from a single year's changes in each metric. What he fails to do is to apply sound economic theories deduced from the incontrovertible fact of human purposefulness to the historical statistics, a priori theories which are necessary both for selecting the most relevant comparative metric and for correctly inferring what possible combinations of causal factors might account for observed changes. Moreover, extrapolating a sustained trend reversal from a single, small year-over-year improvement makes absolutely no sense; a credible time-series analysis of these data can only show a worsening budget trend.

The GDP growth illusion conjured up and widely touted by Trump, and Vance, as well as by Bessent depends heavily on wicked black magic of the monetary variety. The accelerating creation of fiat dollars out of thin air by the Federal Reserve and the creation of fractional reserve dollar deposits and other dollar-denominated substitutes out of thin air by the banking system - that is, accelerating inflation and faster inflation-caused price increases - are what temporarily boost GDP, what permanently increase trust fund obligations via statutory cost-of-living adjustments, and what fuel wasteful boom-bust cycles characterized during the bust phase by burgeoning deficits, severe declines of net saving due to intensified government interventions, and the writing off of massive quantities of malinvested capital.

This sort of monetary hocus-pocus never makes tax revenues catch up with soaring expenditures over the long run; inflation can "solve" the federal liabilities problem only by utterly destroying the purchasing power of the dollar and thereby making all dollar-denominated obligations worthless. Whatever one may think about the efficacy of the central bank's monetary wizardry and the Treasury's fiscal sorcery, none of their spell-casting, witchery's brews, or prestidigitations are equivalent to private restraint of present consumption by Americans making more labor and natural resource inputs available for growing the physical quantities of sustainably-productive factories, equipment, and farm structures in America. The green line in figure 1 demonstrates that such growth has virtually halted; over the decades Republicans and Democrats alike have put a bipartisan hex on growth.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/12/2026 - 10:30

"Riyadh In Difficult Position": Saudis Shutter Critical East-West Pipeline After Drone Attacks

Saudi Arabia temporarily shut its 7 million-barrel-a-day East-West pipeline following multiple drone attacks, exposing a massive vulnerability in a critical export route used to bypass the Strait of Hormuz during more than six months of US-Iran conflict.

The closure puts new pressure on Saudi oil exports as the pipeline designed to bypass the Hormuz chokepoint becomes a target. The Energy Ministry described the shutdown as precautionary while emergency crews secured the pipeline and assessed its safety.

The oil pumping station on the Saudi East-West pipeline was completely destroyed during yesterday’s attack, according to satellite imagery released today.

This is incredibly important news, as the East-West pipeline can transport up to approximately 210 million barrels of crude… https://t.co/6GCaYnkkAs pic.twitter.com/YggT4Lwzwm

— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) September 11, 2026

Here's the ministry's statement:

An official source at the Ministry of Energy stated that the East-West Pipeline in the Riyadh and Madinah regions was subjected to multiple attacks on the morning of Thursday, 10 September 2026. The pipeline was shut down as a precautionary measure. The attacks resulted in a number of injuries, and medical care was provided to those affected.

The source said emergency and specialised technical teams responded immediately following the attacks, taking the necessary measures to secure the pipeline and assess its safety in line with approved safety procedures and emergency response plans, in coordination with the relevant authorities. Any further developments will be announced in due course.

The shutdown deepens an already severe export squeeze on the kingdom. Saudi oil shipments fell to about 3 million barrels a day in August, the lowest level on record since early 2017.

Iran-backed Houthis seized the strategic island of Mayun in the Bab al-Mandeb Strait last week, tightening pressure on the kingdom's Red Sea export hub. With Hormuz already disrupted, ongoing threats to both maritime chokepoints are narrowing the kingdom's options for moving crude to global markets. 

"Riyadh is in a difficult position," said Rapidan Energy Group analyst Fernando Ferreira. "As the US maintains the blockade and succeeds in escorting more tankers out of the region, Iran will pivot toward increased attacks on Gulf energy facilities."

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/12/2026 - 09:55

UK Government Reserves Two-Thirds Of Elite Jobs By Race; Leaked Doc Exposes

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

Sixty-six per cent of the slots are ringfenced for staff who are ethnic minority, disabled, or from a lower socio-economic background. Everyone else - including the white working-class kids the same government claims to champion - can take whatever is left. They've essentially built a public-sector caste system.

The Cabinet Office's defence is the same tired formula used across the British state. The scheme, it says, complies with the "positive action" provisions of the Equality Act. In plain English: race, disability status and class background are now official sorting criteria for who gets accelerated towards the top of the machine that writes the country's laws.

Exclusive: The Civil Service is reserving two-thirds of places on a taxpayer-funded talent programme for "diverse candidates".

A leaked document reveals 66% of places are ringfenced for ethnic minority, disabled and lower socioeconomic background staff.

The Cabinet Office says...

— Steven Edginton (@StevenEdginton) September 8, 2026

Reform UK's home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf put the objection in one line: "Jobs and opportunities should be awarded on merit, not handed out according to someone's ethnicity."

"Positive action" is the legal fig leaf. Positive discrimination is illegal in Britain. Positive action is the workaround: employers may favour a candidate from an under-represented group if they are "as qualified" as the other person. In practice, the ringfence comes first. Two-thirds of the places are already spoken for before a single application is scored on competence.

The Civil Service already runs dedicated fast-tracks for favoured identities. META - the Minority Ethnic Talent Association - sits on top of the Future Leaders Scheme. DELTA does the same for disabled staff. Mentoring, mock interviews, senior sponsorship and extra visibility are reserved for those groups. The leaked 66 per cent figure is simply that architecture made explicit: most of the taxpayer-funded pipeline is not open competition. It is a reserved lane.

Official numbers make the "under-representation" story look thinner by the year. Civil Service Statistics 2026 put ethnic minority representation at a record 19.2 per cent, against 19.6 per cent of the economically active working-age population.

Declared disability among civil servants is now 18.4 per cent - above the national working-age average. The gap that remains is concentrated at the Senior Civil Service, where ethnic minority staff sit at 10.6 per cent. The official answer is not to test harder for the best people. It is to fence off two-thirds of the development scheme and call it justice.

This is not an isolated HR experiment. Britain's domestic intelligence service has already told white students, including poor ones, not to bother applying.

For the 2026/27 academic year, MI5's Summer Intelligence Internship is confined to people "from a Black, Asian, mixed heritage or ethnic minority background and from a socially or economically disadvantaged background."

The agency's own careers page states: "We're confining the applications for this internship to those within this demographic due to a current underrepresentation in our workforce." White British applicants - even those from the most deprived postcodes - cannot submit a form. A narrow "White other" box exists for Romany Gypsy, Scottish Travellers or Irish Travellers. Ordinary white Britons are out.

Shadow home secretary Chris Philp called it "flagrant racism from MI5 & GCHQ." He wrote: "White applicants for summer 2027 internships - including from disadvantaged backgrounds - can't apply. The scheme must be scrapped." And: "Applications should be merit-based and colour blind. Working class white boys are among the most disadvantaged - yet are ignored."

Security minister Dan Jarvis has defended the internships as "a lawful measure (as set out in the Equality Act 2010) used to encourage people from under-represented demographics to consider national security careers." The same statute, the same incantation. The people who will one day hold files on the rest of the country are being pre-sorted by ethnicity before they sit a single test.

The National Audit Office ran the same play. Its six-week paid public-sector accounting internship in Newcastle accepted only applicants who were female, of black heritage, or from lower socio-economic backgrounds. Middle-class white men were barred. Yusuf called that "blatant discrimination."

The same pattern reached frontline policing in April 2025. West Yorkshire Police, one of the largest forces in the country, told white British candidates to wait while "under-represented groups" were waved through the door.

The force's recruitment page stated: "We are currently accepting applications for the two police constable entry programmes (uniform and detective) from people from our under-represented groups... If you are not from one of these groups, please keep checking this page for future recruitment opportunities."

A whistleblower report to senior officers, seen by The Telegraph, said the effect was blunt: "the pipeline for anyone white British is strangled, whilst anyone not white British is ushered through." Over a 15-month stretch, ethnic minority candidates were given 446 days to apply. White British applicants were given 99. In one round they had 48 hours.

West Yorkshire denied it was a ban. It said early applications from minorities were "positive action" and that those files were held until the scheme opened to everyone. The force still employs a small army of DEI officers. Chief Constable John Robins has argued that the law itself should be changed to permit open positive discrimination.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch called the episode "social engineering." She said she believes in "meritocracy, not race-based quotas," and warned that such policies risk "the perpetuation of harmful stereotypes that ethnic minorities cannot succeed unless a well-meaning Leftie is holding the door open." Police, she added, exist "to prevent crime and catch criminals, not social engineering."

Once the recruitment gate is racialised, the training follows. Thames Valley Police put officers through "equity training" covering "white privilege," "micro-aggressions" and the difference between being "non-racist versus anti-racist."

The course landed a month after an employment tribunal found the same force had positively discriminated against white officers by handing an unadvertised inspector post to an Asian sergeant.

An independent review ordered by the police and crime commissioner noted that white privilege "can often be seen as demonising white people and therefore building barriers to the learning." The training went ahead anyway.

Police Scotland's anti-racism package lists the same canon: white privilege, white fragility, micro-aggressions, allyship. The National Police Chiefs' Council Race Action Plan treats "unconscious bias" as a fact about everyone and proceeds from the premise that many people still believe policing is institutionally racist.

Officers are taught to see their own skin as a problem before they are taught to see a suspect. That is not operational training. It is political catechism, paid for by the public those officers are supposed to protect.

The legal profession also has its own reserved lane. The Bar Council partnered with the 10,000 Interns Foundation on a paid six-week scheme that excluded white applicants. Sophie Corcoran, a commentator who had been exploring a legal career, applied and was shut out.

She said she was "shocked to discover that the scheme is restricted to applicants of a particular racial background." She has since issued proceedings. "This case is not simply about my own experience," she said. "I am pursuing it because I believe that no person in Britain should be denied opportunities because of the colour of their skin. I believe strongly that equality before the law must apply to everyone."

The Bar Council's answer is, again, the Equality Act. It has called the scheme "lawful positive action under sections 158 and 159 of the Equality Act based on evidence of under-representation in relation to access to the profession," filed a defence, and said it will "vigorously contest" the claim. The 2026 intake went ahead.

Rupert Lowe, then an independent MP, had already described the programme as "anti-white racism."

He further urged, "What message does this send to a generation of talented, hard-working young people who happen to be white - that their ambitions are less worthy? That they must be excluded to balance some imagined historical scale?"

The body that speaks for barristers is defending a racial filter on entry to the profession that exists to interpret the law equally.

The same logic has already eaten the Treasury. In 2020 the department that runs the public finances quietly scrapped the numerical reasoning test on its policy adviser graduate scheme.

Internal papers obtained by The Spectator explained why. "The Numerical Reasoning Test (NRT) was removed due to evidence of the test having adverse impact on candidate diversity."

Board minutes were more direct: "We want more diverse ethnicity at assessment centre." Two tests were treated as "an additional 'hurdle'" and "another opportunity for candidates to be sifted out of the process."

The verbal reasoning test later went the same way. In its place came a "Civil Service Strengths" questionnaire, including items such as "I find it frustrating when others don't understand my ideas." Dr Zubir Ahmed's verdict on the numeracy decision was short: "I'm sorry, but this is insane and helps no one."

A state that deletes the maths test from the Treasury application so that the ethnicity numbers look better is a state that has stopped caring whether the people who will spend your money can count.

Every one of these schemes points back to the same statute. The Equality Act 2010, passed by Labour and left standing by the Conservatives, created the "positive action" gateway.

Ministers, permanent secretaries and police chiefs now treat that gateway as a mandate. The Civil Service Code itself tells officials they must support "equality and diversity." Once that is written into the operating system, every talent board, internship and constable intake becomes an exercise in demographic engineering.

Labour has pushed the same logic from the other direction. In 2025 Pat McFadden announced that the main Civil Service undergraduate internship would be restricted to students from "lower socio-economic backgrounds," judged by what their parents did when they were 14.

"We need to get more working class young people into the civil service so it harnesses the broadest range of talent and truly reflects the country," he said. Class ringfences and race ringfences now sit side by side. The one group that is never the intended beneficiary is the ordinary white applicant who is neither poor enough nor minority enough to clear the new hurdles.

Across the Atlantic, the second Trump administration has spent two years ripping DEI out of the federal government and the universities. Whitehall has spent those same years thickening the paperwork. America First meant colour-blind hiring. Britain First, in the hands of the Blob, has meant the opposite.

Edginton's leak does not reveal a rogue HR officer. It reveals the settled doctrine of the British governing class. A taxpayer-funded talent programme with 66 per cent of places reserved is not "inclusion." It is a quota with better branding.

MI5 internships that refuse white applications, police portals that tell white Britons to check back later, classrooms that instruct officers in their privilege, and a Bar scheme that locks white graduates out of paid chambers experience are not separate scandals. They are one policy, applied wherever the state still controls the gate.

A country that sorts its future mandarins, spies, constables and barristers by ancestry should stop calling itself a meritocracy. It should at least have the honesty to admit what the leaked paper already says: two-thirds of the ladder is reserved, and the people who built the state are no longer first in line to run it.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/12/2026 - 09:20

President Xi Urges BRICS To Stand On "Right Side Of History", Calls For Gulf Peace

At the 18th BRICS Summit earlier today, held at the Bharat Mandapam convention center in New Delhi, India, Chinese President Xi Jinping urged member nations to help end the war in the Middle East, positioning the bloc as a force for global stability.

Speaking Saturday at the BRICS summit, Xi said members should stand on the "right side of history" and take a leading role in promoting peace, according to China's state-run Xinhua news agency.

President Xi Jinping attended Session I of the 18th BRICS Summit and delivered an important statement.

President Xi stressed that BRICS must stand firmly on the right side of history and strive to be a pioneer of our times.

1️⃣ BRICS should be a pioneer in advancing… pic.twitter.com/4ZGd1zKuqi

— Mao Ning 毛宁 (@SpoxCHN_MaoNing) September 12, 2026

Xi said the conflict in the Gulf region undermined the international community's shared interests and pledged Beijing's cooperation in ending hostilities. Those shared interests include importing cheap Iranian crude and other products to Asia. 

"BRICS countries should firmly stand on the right side of history," Xi said.

Xi, Putin and Modi are meeting in at the BRICS summit in India today pic.twitter.com/j4etgsYqAd

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) September 12, 2026

Xi's comments show that Beijing is turning BRICS's economic weight into geopolitical influence and positioning the bloc as a diplomatic power broker. However, the remarks stopped just short of a concrete ceasefire plan.

The Trump administration, including the president himself, has framed BRICS as "anti-American" and threatened steep tariffs over efforts to challenge the dollar.

Trump has made several comments about BRICS, including threatening tariffs against member nations if the bloc creates a rival currency. He has also threatened additional tariffs on countries aligning with BRICS' "Anti-American policies."

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/12/2026 - 08:45

Tylenol Use In Pregnancy May Reduce Daughters' Fertility, Study Finds

Authored by Rachel Roberts via The Epoch Times,

Female reproductive organ development could be impacted by a mother taking Tylenol - also known as acetaminophen or paracetamol - during pregnancy, according to researchers in Denmark.

Tylenol and acetaminophen tablets in a CVS store, in this file photo. Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP via Getty Images

On average, infant girls exposed to the pain relief drug in the womb had smaller ovaries; fewer ovarian follicles, which are the structures that contain immature eggs; smaller wombs; and lower levels of reproductive hormones, according to the findings of the study published Wednesday in Human Reproduction Open.

Long-term follow-up will be required to determine whether the differences observed in infants have implications for fertility later in life and a woman's age at menopause, study leader Margit Bistrup Fischer of Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen said in a statement accompanying the study.

Animal studies have previously suggested that fetal exposure to Tylenol, the most commonly used drug in pregnancy, might affect ovarian egg reserve and later reproductive function, but this is the first time that research has reported similar findings in humans.

Women 'Should Not Be Alarmed'

Women who have used Tylenol, the brand name for the generic drug acetaminophen, widely known as paracetamol outside of North America, during pregnancy should not be alarmed, Fischer said.

"Animal studies have demonstrated that impaired formation of ovarian follicles can lead to reduced fertility and earlier reproductive aging. Whether the differences observed in our study have implications for fertility and age at menopause in humans remains unknown and will require long-term follow-up of the girls in our cohort.

"Women who have used paracetamol during pregnancy should not be alarmed by our findings. Our study examined associations at the population level and cannot predict outcomes for any individual woman or child," she said.

The researchers studied 302 3-month-old girls whose mothers' use of Tylenol had been tracked during pregnancy. Of these babies, 92 were first exposed to the drug in the womb before 17 weeks of pregnancy, 67 were exposed after 17 weeks, and 143 were born to mothers who had not used the drug while pregnant.

The women all took relatively low amounts, with none exceeding the recommended daily maximum dose of 4,000 milligrams. Most took it to help with headaches or musculoskeletal pain.

A girl's ovarian reserves are established while she is a developing baby in the womb, although other factors may determine the age she goes through puberty and menopause.

The 3-month-old girls in the study who were exposed to Tylenol in utero had ovaries that were 40 percent smaller, wombs that were on average 13 percent smaller, and 23 percent fewer ovarian follicles, the researchers found.

Babies exposed early in pregnancy - before 17 weeks - also had lower levels of Anti-Müllerian hormone, an indicator of the number and quality of eggs in the ovaries.

Smaller Wombs and Ovaries

The researchers also followed a separate group of 1,210 girls from infancy to adolescence whose mothers had reported Tylenol use during pregnancy. Fetal exposure in this group was associated with smaller uteruses at puberty and smaller ovaries during adolescence.

The study cannot predict outcomes for any individual female, Fischer said, explaining that many women who used Tylenol during pregnancy had daughters whose ovarian measurements were similar to those of daughters born to women who did not use the drug.

Current guidelines from health authorities recommend Tylenol as safe for treating pain and fever during pregnancy. Untreated high fever or severe pain can themselves pose risks to both mother and baby, Fischer said.

Dr. Christian De Geyter, a reproductive medicine specialist at the University Hospital of Basel, Switzerland, said in an accompanying commentary that the findings of the study fit well with data from animal research, and that their importance "cannot be stressed enough."

Follow-up of girls in the study should extend into menopause, he said, adding that recommendations on the drug's use during pregnancy should be reconsidered.

Franziska Denk, professor of neuroscience at King's College London, said the study was "good quality research," although he thought the sample size was too small for the 13 different variables being examined.

"Right now, I think it is too early to recommend a change in behavior - as correctly indicated by the authors in the press release," he said.

'Several Notable Weaknesses'

Stephen Burgess, professor of biostatistics at the University of Cambridge, said the study had "several notable weaknesses."

"Mothers who took paracetamol during pregnancy are likely to differ substantially from those that did not - this is known as confounding. Confounding makes it difficult to know whether differences between outcomes are attributable to paracetamol itself or to other characteristics of the mothers or their pregnancies," he said.

He said that it could not be determined that the drug was the cause of the differences found by the researchers.

"It may be that these findings are driven by infection or fever - women take paracetamol due to mild sickness, and this sickness is the cause of differences in early-life ovarian volume. It may be that impaired fetal development and its causes are what lead to increased paracetamol usage, not that increased paracetamol usage leads to impaired fetal development."

Burgess added that even if there were negative consequences of taking paracetamol during pregnancy, there were "likely future negative consequences attributable to taking away one of the only remaining available and widely tolerated medications from pregnant women."

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announces that acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, may be associated with autism, at the White House on Sept. 22, 2025. With Kennedy are President Donald Trump and acting Assistant Secretary for Health Dr. Dorothy Fink. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images US Officials Linked Drug to Autism

President Donald Trump's administration has said that evidence suggests the use of Tylenol during pregnancy could be linked to autism, although the claim was dismissed by major health organizations.

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. and Trump spoke about the use of Tylenol during pregnancy in September 2025, with the government subsequently advocating caution over prenatal exposure. The department's current fact sheet says exposure to the drug during pregnancy is an unresolved area of concern, while acknowledging that causality has not been established.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) continues to monitor and evaluate the drug's use in pregnancy, but states that it has not found clear evidence that Tylenol's use at recommended safe levels causes adverse pregnancy, birth, neurobehavioral, or developmental outcomes.

The FDA and HHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the Danish study.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement that the clinical significance of the study's findings remain "uncertain or unknown," and that current guidelines for women should not change because of it.

"The oldest participants evaluated were adolescents, and the study cannot determine whether the observed differences are associated with future reproductive outcomes such as fertility, ovulatory function, reproductive lifespan, or other measures of reproductive health," it said, adding that the observational study had various limitations.

"These findings should be viewed as a potential area for further investigation and do not indicate that current clinical recommendations should change. Consistent with ACOG's existing guidance, acetaminophen remains one of the only safe medications that can be used during pregnancy when indicated, and patients should consult their obstetric care professional before making any changes to medication use."

Ongoing Lawsuit

The Danish findings come as Tylenol manufacturers face an ongoing lawsuit in the United States over alleged risks associated with prenatal exposure.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued Kenvue, which now owns the Tylenol brand after Johnson & Johnson spun off its consumer health business into a new company in 2023. The suit alleged that the company engaged in deceptive advertising by failing to disclose evidence concerning a possible link between prenatal Tylenol exposure and autism.

While a judge dismissed most of the claims, one consumer-protection claim against Kenvue Brands LLC has been allowed to proceed, with the company's attempt to have it dismissed rejected in February.

In an emailed statement to Reuters, Kenvue advised pregnant or breastfeeding women to check with a health professional before using acetaminophen, which the company says is the most studied and safest pain reliever during pregnancy.

It noted that the study has methodology limitations and does not support a causal relationship between the drug and postnatal reproductive development.

Kenvue shares fell more than 3 percent Wednesday following the study's publication.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/12/2026 - 08:10

Report Sounds Alarm Over Return Of Iranian Mass Ballistic Missile Production

Among an array of shifting official goals of the Iran war offered by the US administration, there's one which has remained consistent: President Trump and White House officials have time and again proclaimed that Iran's ballistic missile arsenal is mostly obliterated.

Yet, this very week - as well as the past several weeks - Iran has been intermittently responding to US provocations by unleashing large ballistic missile salvos on some of the Gulf states, but especially Jordan. Here's the NY Times commenting on the latest attack on US bases in Jordan just yesterday:

The Jordanian military said that it had intercepted 18 of the 20 missiles and that two had fallen in unpopulated areas. But the two U.S. officials acknowledged that the base in Azraq, Jordan, was hit.

How then are the Iranians sustaining such large repeat strike waves after US-Israeli attacks supposedly destroyed much of their missile program?

The Arab Weekly/via state media

For a very brief trip down memory lane spanning various phases of the six-month long conflict...

*  *  *

March 9, 2026. President Trump very early in the Operation Epic Fury campaign told Fox News:

"We have sunk all Iranian ships and destroyed most of its missile launch platforms, with only 20% remaining."  

April 1, 2026. Roughly a month into the conflict, Trump delivered a formal address outlining the scope of the destruction, claiming the following:

"That means eliminating Iran’s navy, which is now absolutely destroyed, hurting their air force and their missile program at levels never seen before, and annihilating their defense industrial base. We’ve done all of it; their navy is gone. Their air force is gone. Their missiles are just about used up or beaten."  

June 5, 2026. Trump in NBC News Meet the Press interview, actually reiterated what seemed like very specific figures:

"Most of the missile manufacturing areas have been knocked out... I would say, percentage-wise, maybe 21, 22 per cent of their missiles. It's a lot of missiles, but it's not what it was when we first attacked."

*  *  *

Now, on Thursday, enter The Wall Street Journal with a new report saying the Islamic Republic has again ramped-up its damaged defense sector, producing ballistic missiles once again:

Iran has resumed its production of ballistic missiles using stockpiled components and working in underground facilities, officials from the U.S. and Middle East familiar with the matter said, eroding what the U.S. and Israel have touted as a major achievement of the war. 

Despite heavy attacks on its missile sites and industrial facilities during the initial phase of the war, Iran has been busy assembling liquid-propellant missiles, which have to be fueled just before launch, as well as solid-propellant missiles, which can be stored ready to fire, some of the officials said.

Iranian officials have all along claimed that they kept up weapons production even under the height of US bombing raids.

Earlier this week, Iranian Brigadier General Alireza Elhami, who serves as the commander of Iran's Khatam al-Anbiya Joint Air Defense Headquarters, assessed the following as cited in PressTV: "The equipment produced [inside Iran] passed a successful test during that conflict, and now they are being rapidly mass-produced to be deployed across the entire expanse of the Islamic Republic of Iran."

Israel FINALLY Releases 12-Day War Footage After Censorship LIFTED

It shows TWO Iranian Missiles making DIRECT HITS on the Haifa Oil Refinery

This was BEFORE the alleged Interceptor shortage too pic.twitter.com/iSyQlKJjwT

— Ryan Rozbiani (@RyanRozbiani) September 8, 2026

The new WSJ report is consistent with the Iranian military official's words: "Intelligence points to activity at several underground sites, including the Khojir missile facility in southeastern Iran, those officials said. Iran is also attempting to build new underground assembly points to avoid getting struck again, they said."

"So far, Iran is mainly assembling the new missiles from existing components in more limited quantities than before the war, the U.S. and regional officials said," the report continues. "The U.S. and Israel damaged a number of industrial facilities needed to produce missile components and missiles themselves, and the naval blockade has complicated imports of parts and ingredients for solid fuel."

Iran sees itself in a situation of an existential fight for its survival as a people and a nation, so is pulling out all the stops and seeking to demonstrate resiliency, charging full steam ahead. 'Victory' for Tehran is survival, and it seems to only now be sinking in for Washington just how hard it will be to remove the country's rulers and institutions.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/12/2026 - 07:35

Countries Have No Duty To Admit 13 Children From 3 Marriages In Yemen, Rules Top Human Rights Court

Via Remix News,

A Yemeni asylum seeker living in the Netherlands cannot rely on family reunification rules to bring over children from two additional marriages that Dutch law does not recognize, ruled the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The ECHR dismissed the migrant's complaint on Tuesday, holding that Council of Europe states are not required to treat polygamous family arrangements as they would a monogamous household.

The man, 56, has three wives and 13 children from those unions. After arriving in the Netherlands in 2018 and receiving asylum, he was allowed to bring one wife and their eight children.

Dutch authorities refused entry to the five children born of his other two marriages, citing that "polygamy is prohibited in the Netherlands."

He lost his challenges in the Dutch courts and then turned to Strasbourg, according to French newspaper Le Figaro. He argued the case was not about importing polygamy, because he was not seeking to bring the other two wives, only the remaining children. The court rejected the argument that the refusal violated his right to respect for family life.

If a European state "establishes an immigration policy that takes family ties into account," it "cannot be obliged to recognize polygamous marriages that conflict with its own legal system," the judges in Strasbourg ruled.

🇩🇪A tale of two Germanys🇩🇪

🔴The first Germany represents illiterate Syrian migrant Ahmad A. and his 2 wives and 6 children. The entire family received free housing and welfare thanks to German taxpayers.

"I would to thank Mommy Merkel very, very, very much," he told Spiegel… pic.twitter.com/dywvPx6m9K

— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) April 28, 2026

The court also noted that he could have divorced the two other wives, as Dutch authorities had proposed, but declined to do so.

Notably, the second wife is already in the Netherlands with her children after she received asylum in June 2025. However, the fact that she entered the Netherlands did not change the ruling, the ECHR stated.

"The fact that polygamy is prohibited in all member states of the Council of Europe shows that there is a strong European consensus on this issue," the judges noted. Under those circumstances, "Member States have considerable discretion as to whether or not to grant fathers and children born of polygamy the right to family reunification."

🇫🇷🚨In France, an Ivorian polygamist has been sentenced to 30 years in prison for torture, rape, and for imposing a hard-line Islamic regime on his 4 wives and 29 children.

The 45-year-old Ivorian migrant, held in pretrial detention since 2022, was said to have stripped the home… pic.twitter.com/1NVsbWmJcl

— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) December 4, 2025

The ECHR, based in Strasbourg, oversees compliance with the European Convention on Human Rights by the member states of the Council of Europe.

Read more here...

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/12/2026 - 07:00

9/11, Anwar Al-Awlaki, And Our Unanswered Questions

Authored by Patrick Pillow via The Libertarian Institute,

In 1990, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) provided "full funding" for one Anwar Nasser Abdulla al-Awlaki for studies in civil engineering at Colorado State University.

There was only one problem: the USAID document listed his birthplace as Sana'a, Yemen. Awlaki was actually born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, an inaccuracy which federal security agent Ray Fournier and The New York Times describe as being done in an attempt to qualify for scholarship money.

Awlaki returned to the United States on October 23, 2000, just two weeks after the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. This sequencing is worth mentioning, but at this time the FBI did not establish any connection between Awlaki and the attack.

Just months before September 11, Awlaki moved to Virginia and became an imam at the Dar Al-Hijrah Mosque in Falls Church. After the events of 9/11, on September 15, he was questioned by authorities and claimed he flew into Washington DC's National Airport at 9 AM - less than an hour before the Pentagon was hit.

Significantly during interrogations, Awlaki would not show his passport and left the interview at one point to take an "urgent" phone call. When asked about his feelings about jihad, he would go on to state "I would like not to comment on that."

Years later, in 2003, Awlaki himself would initiate a conversation with the FBI, stating he was "astonished by some of the talk circulating in the media." This included allegations of him serving as a "spiritual advisor" to the hijackers, to which Awlaki stated he would like to "clarify any misunderstandings."

As one FBI agent asked upon receiving correspondence from Awlaki, "Holy crap - isn't this your guy?"

While they discussed a potential meeting in London, the meet up never happened as Awlaki stopped replying. Still, the story didn't end there.

In 2004, the 9/11 Commission Report was released in which Awlaki's relationship with the hijackers was detailed. In the report, it discusses hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdar who were reported to have "developed a close relationship" with Awlaki.

Years later, on July 16, 2010, Awlaki was revealed by the U.S. Treasury as a key leader for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and described as being increasingly dangerous with an "operational role" in the group.

This included assistance to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, known by some as the "underpants bomber," who attempted to detonate a device in mid-air during a flight on Christmas 2009. Awlaki also exchanged messages with Nidal Hasan before he killed thirteen people at Fort Hood in 2009. In 2010, Faisal Shahzad - who attempted to use a car bomb in Times Square - stated he was a "fan and follower" of Awlaki.

Awlaki was killed a year later in Yemen by a drone strike. Weeks later, his 16-year old son was also killed by a drone strike which raised multiple legal and ethical questions, as he was a U.S. citizen and killed in a country the United States was not formally at war with. His daughter was also killed in a raid over five years later.

As families of 9/11 victims sued the Saudi Arabian government, more potential reveals were provided in 2015. This included a witness during a civil lawsuit who stated they saw Hazmi and Mihdhar at a second-floor guest room at Awlaki's San Diego mosque and also that he had "closed-door meetings in San Diego with al-Mihdhar, al-Hazmi, and another individual, whom al-Bayoumi had asked to help the hijackers."

An April 4, 2016, FBI "Encore" Investigation Update, Review and Analysis discussed how Awlaki had phone contact with Ziyad Khaleel - an alleged equipment procurer for Osama Bin-Laden. It was this connection that led the FBI to open an investigation into Awlaki in the first place in 1999.

A part of Operation Encore released in 2021, the Joe Biden administration revealed that Saudi diplomat Fahad al-Thumairy had directed an associate to look after "two very significant people," who were later identified as Hazmi and Mihdhar.

Later reveals also show Omar al-Bayoumi - who supported both Hazmi and Mihdhar - worked as an agent of Saudi intelligence. Awlaki was later revealed to have phone calls with Bayoumi just days after Bayoumi was setting up bank accounts for the hijackers in San Diego. Videos released in 2022 show Awlaki warmly greeting Bayoumi before the events of September 11.

With the U.S. government having years of warnings, connections, and unanswered questions, Awlaki's story has continued to raise questions about intelligence failures, foreign alliances, and the consequences of intervention. As we approach the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the question Awlaki leaves behind is why so many warning signs were missed, and why some answers remain hidden.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 23:25

Lefty Seattle-Area Corporate Giants Begin Revolt Against Progressive City Hall

Seattle-area corporate giants, including Microsoft, Starbucks, Costco, and Alaska Airlines, are pressuring City Hall for a new public safety plan amid concerns about violent crime and ongoing disorder after years of failed progressive experiments have transformed parts of the metro area into a hellhole. 

🚨THIS IS INSANE!!!!

A community is now BEGGING for help after a tiny homeless encampment in Seattle EXPLODED into a SEVERAL ACRE camp.

In just over a year, a small cluster of tents became a GIGANTIC tent city.

The people who live there, families, homeowners, taxpayers, have… pic.twitter.com/aPm2WVLNmS

— Matt Van Swol (@mattvanswol) September 7, 2026

The coalition includes Microsoft President Brad Smith, Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol, Costco CEO Ron Vachris and executives from Nordstrom, Alaska Air Group and other major employers, according to local outlet Komo News. Their letter, sent to City Hall on Thursday, brings coordinated pressure from the business community to change how City Hall governs. 

2024 donations (employees + PACS):

Starbucks: 92% went to Democrats
Microsoft: 84% went to Democrats
Costco: 80% went to Democrats

Ya'll literally voted for it https://t.co/V3XPDnOcdC

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) September 11, 2026

"The clearest message" from an August poll of Seattle voters, the coalition wrote, is that residents expect the city "to act with urgency, fund the actions needed to improve public safety, and provide a clear plan for measuring progress." 

DO YOU TIME TRAVEL? Literal madness on the streets of Seattle Monday afternoon. A woman was totally naked on the sidewalk across the street from Seattle City Hall. This is the best I could do with the blurs. 🙃
I asked if she needed help. Instead, she wanted my muffins. Then she… pic.twitter.com/EhfsepupF9

— Jonathan Choe (@choeshow) September 5, 2023

The coalition wants cameras in Pioneer Square, the Stadium District and other areas hosting large events. It also seeks more foot and bicycle patrols, adherence to a seven-minute response standard for priority 911 calls, and an end to open-air drug markets. 

"We need action," former Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire, now the CEO of Challenge Seattle, said. "We've got a crisis on our hands right now, and we need action on public safety."

Breaking — Following the inauguration of Seattle’s newly-elected Social Mayor Katie Wilson, Seattle police has been ordered to stop making arrests for open-air drug use.

This is the current scene in Seattle, close to Lumen Field, where the World Cup is set to take place.… pic.twitter.com/s5FwdDpzXD

— Katie Daviscourt 📸 (@KatieDaviscourt) January 7, 2026

Perhaps the progressive experiment of defunding police and open-air drug markets has run its course, and shame on the corporations that fueled this era of left-wing stupidity. 

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 23:00

PLA Purge May Be Driving China To Rely More On Military Pressure Against Taiwan: Analysts

Authored by Michael Zhuang via The Epoch Times,

China's purge of senior military leaders may be pushing Beijing to rely more heavily on military intimidation and gray-zone operations against Taiwan, even as the upheaval leaves the Chinese military with a weakened command structure, according to two Chinese academics and an insider familiar with the Chinese military.

Chinese ships patrol as the People's Liberation Army (PLA) conducts drills on Pingtan island—the closest point to Taiwan—in eastern Fujian Province, China, on Dec. 30, 2025. Adek Berry/AFP via Getty Images

The insider and academics spoke to The Epoch Times on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal.

The developments are raising concerns that Beijing's increasingly aggressive operations around Taiwan could become more difficult to control as analysts say political loyalty takes precedence over military expertise within the People's Liberation Army (PLA).

Taiwan's Defense Ministry has reported near-daily Chinese military activity around the island, describing the operations as increasingly aggressive and unpredictable, according to Taiwan's national news agency CNA. Chinese military planners are studying drone swarms, long-range strikes, ammunition consumption, maritime blockades and coordination with other countries, while exploring methods that could potentially isolate Taiwan, cut off outside supplies, and weaken its defenses during the early stages of a conflict.

At the same time, the PLA is undergoing an unusually extensive leadership purge. The seven-member Central Military Commission (CMC), which formally oversees China's armed forces, is down to just two members.

A Chinese military academic told The Epoch Times that the continuing purge suggests Xi remains deeply concerned about the loyalty of senior military commanders.

"The CMC has had so many people fall. There are already very few military members of the Central Committee," he said. "The possibility of war is not very high, but the harassment [against Taiwan] will not stop."

Military Pressure Continues

The academic said the purge has created serious gaps in the military command structure at a time when Beijing continues to use military pressure against Taiwan.

He said former CMC Vice Chairman Zhang Youxia had been authorized to oversee simulated training for operations against Taiwan and that it would be difficult to find a replacement with comparable experience.

"At present, the pressure on Taiwan is concentrated on military intimidation," the academic said. "If they give up intimidation, they simply cannot come up with a better method."

The leadership turmoil has unfolded alongside a series of high-level purges. In October last year, nine senior military officers, including CMC Vice Chairman He Weidong, were expelled from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the military.

In January, the Chinese regime announced investigations into Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli, chief of the CMC's Joint Staff Department.

The academic said the military could be experiencing an unusually broad leadership vacuum ahead of the CCP's 21st National Congress next year.

The leadership upheaval does not necessarily mean that Beijing is preparing to launch an invasion of Taiwan. Instead, military pressure could continue precisely because it is one of the few tools available to a command structure weakened by political purges, according to the academic.

Chinese military activity around Taiwan has increasingly extended beyond conventional military exercises. Beijing has also been combining military drills, combat-readiness patrols and China Coast Guard operations, creating pressure that remains between ordinary peacetime activity and open warfare.

Taiwan's National Security Bureau Director-General Tsai Ming-yen told reporters in July that the months of July through September are typically a period of heightened Chinese military exercises. Taiwan had detected increased activity by the Chinese navy and other maritime forces, including four Chinese naval formations operating in the western Pacific at the time.

A Chinese military academic and researcher told The Epoch Times that Beijing was increasingly integrating military exercises with combat-readiness patrols and coast guard enforcement.

The approach allows China to maintain sustained pressure on Taiwan without crossing the threshold into open conflict, the researcher said.

He cautioned, however, that the pattern should not necessarily be interpreted as preparation for an imminent attack.

"If [the CCP] wants to launch military action against Taiwan, [it] needs to first carry out war mobilization, deploy logistical support, and even more importantly, have powerful offensive weapons and a strong and effective command system," he said.

Potential Blockade

Taiwan's Defense Ministry has assessed that China does not yet possess all the capabilities required for a full-scale amphibious invasion of Taiwan. But Beijing has other options, including maritime isolation, a joint blockade, missile strikes, cyberattacks, and information warfare.

A blockade or maritime isolation campaign could require fewer forces than a full-scale invasion and could be conducted under the cover of military exercises or law-enforcement operations, according to researchers who spoke to The Epoch Times.

That creates a dilemma for Taiwan. If Taipei does not respond, Beijing could gradually expand its control over surrounding waters. If Taiwan responds militarily, Beijing could portray Taipei as the party responsible for escalating tensions.

Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te said on Sept. 2 that Taiwan's defense budget for next year would exceed NT$1 trillion ($32 billion) for the first time, according to CNA. The government plans to invest in unmanned systems, AI, and Taiwan's domestic defense industry.

The Chinese military researcher said the continued expansion of Chinese military and maritime operations around Taiwan is reducing the island's warning time.

The greater concern, he said, is not a deliberate decision by Beijing to start a war, but the possibility that an incident could escalate when military judgment is compromised by political considerations.

For Taiwan, he said, that makes continued vigilance essential.

Shi Youliang contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 22:35

Appeals Court Won't Allow Trump Admin To Implement New Rules For Mail-In Voting

A federal appeals court on Sept. 10 declined to permit the Trump administration to enforce a new U.S. Postal Service (USPS) rule that changes mail-in voting requirements before the midterm congressional elections on Nov. 3.

The Supreme Court is currently considering a similar request.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit declined to pause an injunction issued on Sept. 4 by Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, which extended a temporary restraining order that she granted on Aug. 27. The injunction halted key parts of the Postal Service's final rule.

The injunction applies to the Nov. 3 elections and any federal elections that take place before then.

The injunction blocks the mandatory parts of the Postal Service's final rule published on Aug. 26 that implements Section 3 of President Donald Trump's executive order 14399. That provision would assign federal agencies a larger role in who receives a mailed ballot and how those ballots are processed by the USPS.

As Matthew Vadum reporets for The Epoch Times, the Trump administration previously said the executive order would help to keep federal elections honest. The Department of Justice argued that the USPS is imposing mailpiece design and data standards under its general authority to regulate the mail, not deciding who is eligible to vote; states are still free to set voter lists and count ballots.

Talwani had said the postal rule could disenfranchise voters, was probably unlawful, and likely violated the U.S. Constitution, which gives states authority to run federal elections taking place within their borders. The judge previously said the postal agency presented no evidence of fraudulent mail-in voting that would justify the new Postal Service rule.

Talwani held that the USPS lacked authority to enforce the rule, and that, as election officials have said, given existing time constraints, complying with the rule for the midterms was "likely impossible."

Talwani said Congress never agreed to delegate its powers under the Constitution's elections clause to the USPS, so the rule "clashes with Congress's statutory scheme, and is unconstitutional where it intrudes not only on ... [those] powers but also that power left to the States."

The judge added that even a small glitch in the new system would be problematic and could mean that ballots never go out, that eligible voters would almost certainly lose the chance to vote by mail, and that the disenfranchisement of plaintiff groups such as the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts was "practically inevitable."

Advocacy groups and a coalition of Democrat-led states had sued to block parts of the rule, arguing that implementation would lead to voter disenfranchisement. Republican states intervened in support of the federal government, arguing that the rule would promote election integrity.

In its new ruling, the First Circuit said the federal government failed to show that the Postal Service rule was likely lawful or that the district court's ruling was in error.

The appeals court panel said it agreed with the district court that the rule likely regulated the manner of holding elections for members of Congress, which the Constitution assigns to the states and Congress, not to an executive agency such as the USPS acting without congressional authorization.

The federal government is trying "to avoid the constitutional problem by denying that the Final Rule regulates the manner of holding elections," but "this denial rings hollow," the panel said, quoting the district court.

"The title of the Final Rule is 'Ballot Mail for Federal Elections,' and the Final Rule explicitly and exclusively regulates election mail," the panel said.

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Sept. 3 to allow the government to begin implementing a regulation that tightens rules around mail-in voting. After Talwani dissolved the temporary restraining order, the federal government withdrew its application and filed a new one targeting the Sept. 4 injunction.

That application is still pending before the Supreme Court.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 22:10

Somali Piracy Was Under Control, Then Came The Iran War...

Authored by Khaled Mahmoud via Responsible Statecraft,

From the start, the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has been a story of unintended consequences. Contrary to President Donald Trump's hopes for a quick victory, the conflict has morphed into a sustained crisis, one that has driven up oil prices, driven down tourism in the Middle East, and reshaped the region's geopolitical map.

Somali pirates on captured MV Faina off the coast of Somalia in 2008. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass communication Specialist 2nd Class Jason R. Zalasky)

Now, a new unintended consequence has emerged: the return of piracy to Somalia's coasts. This shift, which comes after a decade of quiet, threatens some of the world's most important shipping lanes and the interests of the United States and its allies.

Pirates have attacked at least 15 vessels in the region this year, a sharp uptick from the five attacks that occurred last year, according to data from the International Maritime Organization. The renewed criminal activity has led to extended hostage situations, including one ongoing seizure of an oil tanker and its crew.

A controversial operation to free the MV LATUF, carried out by Somali forces and the Turkish navy late last month, raised questions about whether a ransom was paid. The government of Puntland, a semi-autonomous region of Somalia, says it has evidence of phone contacts between Somali government officials and the pirates, which undermines the official story from both Ankara and Mogadishu. The vessel was carrying Turkish weapons and satellite and communication equipment bound for a Turkish training facility in Mogadishu.

Global piracy dropped in the first half of 2026 to its lowest level since 1992 - only 38 incidents, compared to 90 in the same period of 2025 and 60 in 2024. But data from the International Chamber of Commerce shows that, by the end of last month, six commercial ships were still being held, with more than 90 seafarers on board.

When ransom money funds the pirates

The pirates recently received a new ransom estimated at around $1.7 million for the release of the hijacked ship MV Sward off the coast of Puntland, along with its crew of Syrian and Indian sailors, after a crisis that lasted more than four months.

On 26 April, about ten armed Somali men in three speedboats intercepted the ship near the town of Garaad. The vessel flies the flag of St. Kitts and Nevis and is managed by Turkey-linked companies. It was only six nautical miles from the coast. The ship had left the Egyptian port of Adabiya/Suez heading to Mombasa in Kenya with a cargo of cement or fertilizer.

According to a well-informed maritime source in Puntland, this incident shows the pirates going back to their classic method: using the hijacked ship as a mother vessel to carry out more attacks, including the hijacking of Iranian fishing boats.

Before the war on Iran, the threat from piracy to international shipping had dropped significantly. Now that the pirates are active again, the international community needs to rethink how military forces are deployed in the Middle East and the Red Sea to close the security gap the pirates are exploiting - a gap that stretches from Somalia's eastern coast through the Gulf of Aden to the route linking the Indian Ocean with the Red Sea and the Suez Canal.

Dr. Ian Ralby, a maritime security expert at Auxilium Worldwide, says the Houthis are playing a key role in the return of piracy. He points to the transfer of know-how and technology from them to Somali pirates, which could increase their ability to disrupt shipping.

Ralby says the main beneficiaries are the pirates themselves. But he does not rule out that other groups, including the Houthis and Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, may find an indirect interest in the ongoing chaos. He also notes that the attacks have reached the waters off Yemen, widening the threat and increasing pressure on naval forces and coast guards.

The gaps behind the return of piracy

Somali State Minister for Foreign Affairs Ali Omar admits that the return of piracy shows there are still gaps in maritime security. The long Somali coastline makes monitoring difficult, and the country's naval capabilities are still being developed, he told RS.

But Omar stresses that today's Somalia is not the same country that faced the global piracy crisis more than a decade ago. It now has federal institutions, security forces and maritime authorities, along with wider international cooperation, especially with Turkey, to strengthen its naval capacity.

But the problem is not limited to poor policing, Omar said. It is linked to illegal fishing, organized crime, poverty in coastal communities, weak maritime surveillance and the wider security situation in the Gulf of Aden.

This view matches what Ralby says: the return of piracy is no longer a purely Somali issue. Attacks have moved further into the Gulf of Aden, and there are signs of technology and expertise being passed from the Houthis to the pirates. The challenge for Somalia is not only to regain control of its coastline, but also to stop piracy from becoming part of a wider effort to disrupt shipping.

Egyptian national security expert Mohamed Abdel Wahid, who focuses on Somalia, believes the international focus on securing navigation through Bab el-Mandeb (at the mouth of the Red Sea) and the Strait of Hormuz has helped create a security vacuum.

Who benefits from the return of piracy?

Colonel Mohamed Jama, a maritime security expert in Puntland, says the pirates' return has become a cross-border regional threat that exploits a gap in maritime coverage, partly because Puntland forces are busy fighting ISIS.

According to Jama, the pirates successfully hijacked six commercial ships between April and August. Their operations have extended into Yemeni waters and deep into the Indian Ocean, putting vital shipping lanes in the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea at greater risk.

Jama says the beneficiaries of the return of piracy to the region include financiers and investors; arms and ammunition suppliers; fuel and logistics providers; suppliers of khat and drugs; and maritime smuggling networks. Somali and Yemeni networks are also moving resources, people and information across maritime borders.

Jama stresses that the focus should not only be on those who board the ships, but on those who finance the operations, supply the weapons and control the money.

Omar, the Somali minister, has warned about what he calls fragmented security arrangements as an additional reason for the return of piracy off the north-eastern coast. For years, Somalia has cautioned against outside actors training, funding and equipping security or maritime forces without the knowledge, coordination or supervision of the federal government. Such arrangements, he says, create parallel security structures, intelligence gaps and make accountability almost impossible.

The Somali solution

Warships alone will not defeat piracy, the Somali minister says. The whole issue requires unified national institutions and a responsible, coordinated international partnership.

As a journalist who has followed the pirates' activity for nearly 18 years, both at its peak and in its quiet periods, I can say that those I once described as the jinn of the sea and a headache for the world and international shipping are the result of mistakes both inside and outside the country. Not least among them is the conflict of authority between the federal government in Somalia and the Puntland administration.

But the most dangerous trend now is the security vacuum in the Red Sea created by the war on Iran, which has allowed the pirates to return in force. As long as the war continues, there is little hope of stopping this burgeoning banditry on the high seas.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 21:45

"Stud Or Dud" Dating App Launches A Platform For Background Checking Prospective Matches

The Daejon Love story is already having an impact on the dating world...

And singles who want to know more about a match before agreeing to a date now have another option besides scrolling through social media and playing amateur detective, according to the NY Post.

Stud or Dud, a new platform from public-records company PeopleFinders, is designed to gather publicly available information about a potential partner in one place. The service can surface details such as past addresses, bankruptcies and other records, while also organizing some of the findings into easier-to-read red- and green-flag categories.

The tool is aimed at a familiar modern dating problem: online profiles can create a convincing picture without proving that the person behind them is being truthful. A seemingly normal Instagram account, polished dating bio or professional-looking LinkedIn page may still leave major gaps about someone’s identity or history.

PeopleFinders CEO Amber Higgins said that distinction is important. “Records give you context, not certainty,” she said, describing background information as another layer of verification rather than definitive proof that someone is trustworthy.

The Post writes that the launch also comes as romance fraud and fake online identities remain a concern for daters. According to survey figures cited in the article, one-quarter of Americans said they had interacted with a fake profile or AI bot, and 15% reported losing money through an online dating or romance scam.

Stud or Dud is meant to streamline work that many singles already do before meeting someone: searching names online, checking employment claims, reviewing tagged photos or asking friends to investigate. Instead of relying heavily on material that a person can curate themselves, the platform emphasizes public records that may be harder to manipulate.

Still, a background search cannot replace judgment. Higgins pointed to behavior as another important warning system, including refusing video calls, changing details about work or location, pushing a relationship ahead unusually quickly or introducing financial problems early in the conversation.

Money requests are an especially significant warning sign. “If money comes up before you’ve met in person, that’s a moment to pause, not lean in.”

The broader idea behind the service is to make basic vetting a routine part of online dating rather than something people do only after becoming suspicious. For users already accustomed to checking a match before meeting, Stud or Dud essentially packages that research into a faster, more centralized process.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 21:20

Prosecutors In Huawei Criminal Trial Allege Company 'Cultivated Culture Of Crime And Corruption'

Authored by Nicholas Zifcak via The Epoch Times,

NEW YORK CITY - Prosecutors in the criminal trial against Chinese telecoms firm Huawei alleged that the company used lies, theft, cover-up, and a criminal conspiracy in its efforts to dominate the global telecommunications market.

A worker stands in the window of a Huawei store in a commercial area in Beijing on Nov. 5, 2024. Photo by Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

In opening remarks at a federal court in the Brooklyn borough of New York City on Sept. 9, Assistant U.S. Attorney Taylor Stout said that Huawei "engaged in a pattern of criminal activity to expand its business empire." He alleged that its two subsidiaries in the United States, Huawei Device USA and Futurewei Technologies, served as outposts to steal technology.

The trial covers 20 years of Huawei business activity in the United States and around the globe.

The prosecution said it will present evidence against Huawei in three categories: alleged theft of trade secrets from competitors, alleged bank and wire fraud in relation to efforts to skirt sanctions against Iran, and Huawei's alleged cover-up and efforts to block law enforcement from investigating its business activities.

A subsidiary of Huawei, Skycom, provided Iran's government with tools to spy on its own citizens, specifically during 2009 protests in Tehran, according to the U.S. government. Huawei employees falsely claimed that Skycom was not owned by Huawei.

Prosecutors allege that Huawei used confidentiality agreements, competitors' employees, and third parties to acquire trade secrets on technology for routers, storage, and wireless technology.

Huawei "cultivated a culture of crime and corruption," said Stout, such that employees who stole from competitors were just "following company practice." Stout alleged that an engineer who stole from New York state-based Quintel, which develops cellular antennae technology, received a bonus for the information obtained.

Huawei defense attorney Brian Heberlig portrayed Huawei as a global player serving underserved and remote communities. He said the government is relying on five incidents that happened over the course of 20 years.

Heberlig argued that the prosecution's witnesses are unreliable, as many were involved in civil litigation over commercial disputes with Huawei, including Cisco, T-Mobile, and Quintel. He also claimed that the government cherry-picked incidents to support racketeering charges but won't be able to prove a broad overarching conspiracy.

He challenged the government narrative that Huawei fostered a culture of stealing trade secrets, saying that when such activity was discovered, "Huawei acted appropriately in all three incidents," including by firing the employee caught taking pictures of a Fujitsu device at a conference.

Heberlig said that to prove a racketeering conspiracy, the government must prove that the "same people agreed to carry out the same criminal plan." He said the incidents cited by the government are isolated and insufficient to prove that there was some "blueprint for a criminal conspiracy."

The government also alleges that Huawei violated U.S. sanctions by involving the U.S. financial system in its business dealings with Iran and North Korea.

Heberlig contested prosecutors' narrative that Huawei knowingly violated U.S. sanctions, arguing that Huawei had no intention to violate U.S. laws but that the banks it was using in its business with Iran caused the funds to route through the U.S. financial system.

Prosecutors allege that Huawei misrepresented to banks its connection with Skycom, a subsidiary that was doing business with Iran, which prosecutors say received instructions to remove all Huawei logos from hardware sold to Iran.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 20:55

ICE Hits Legal Wall On Two Fronts As Denver Targets Polling-Place Enforcement And Appeals Court Curbs Detention Power

The Trump administration's immigration crackdown ran into two separate legal challenges Thursday, as Denver sued to keep armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents away from polling places while a federal appeals court rejected the government's attempt to subject millions of illegal immigrants already living inside the United States to mandatory detention without bond hearings.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents walk outside the Ventura County Government Center in Ventura, California, on July 27, 2026. Blake Fagan/AFP via Getty Images

The disputes involve different statutes and different courts, but the underlying fight is increasingly the same: how far can the executive branch push immigration enforcement under existing federal law before judges conclude that Congress never gave it the authority being claimed?

On one front, Denver and several national advocacy groups filed suit in federal court in Washington seeking to stop ICE officers from carrying out immigration enforcement at voting locations ahead of November's midterm elections.

On the other, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that immigrants who have been living inside the United States for years - even if they originally entered illegally - cannot automatically be placed into mandatory detention under the provision the administration has been invoking.

Together, the cases put fresh judicial pressure on one of the administration's signature second-term policies.

Denver Takes ICE To Court Over The Polls

The City and County of Denver joined the League of United Latin American Citizens, Common Cause and UnidosUS in challenging what the plaintiffs characterize as a federal policy permitting armed ICE officers to conduct enforcement operations at polling locations.

The lawsuit, filed Sept. 10 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, invokes a rarely litigated Civil War-era federal statute, 18 U.S.C. § 592, that generally prohibits federal officials from bringing "troops or armed men" to places where elections are being conducted, except when needed to repel armed enemies of the United States.

The plaintiffs argue that even the prospect of armed immigration officers appearing at voting sites could deter voters, disrupt election workers and force municipalities to divert resources toward preparing for confrontations with federal agents. Denver officials are already training election personnel on how to identify federal agents, document encounters and de-escalate potential conflicts, according to the complaint.

The complaint also alleges that armed agents have already appeared at polling locations in San Antonio, Ventura County, California, and Syracuse, New York.

The lawsuit follows comments by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who said ICE would not patrol polling places but would not exclude them from normal enforcement activity.

Mullin said agents could enter a voting location if there were a security threat or if officers were serving a warrant on a person they had been tracking, while the administration's position is not that polling places are enforcement targets. It is that they are not automatically enforcement-free zones either.

DHS has similarly said ICE is not planning operations targeting polling sites, while maintaining that officers could make an arrest there if an active public-safety threat or targeted enforcement action required it.

That distinction is now headed for federal court - where the plaintiffs want a judge to declare the policy unlawful and prevent armed federal immigration officers from carrying out enforcement at polling locations and other places where votes are collected. The case arrives as election officials around the country prepare for a midterm season already saturated with litigation over voting rules, federal-state authority and election administration.

Fourth Circuit Rejects ICE Detention Theory

Hours away from the political fight over polling sites, the Fourth Circuit delivered a more immediate legal setback for the administration's detention policy.

In Lopez Garcia v. Guadian, a divided three-judge panel held that two immigrants who had lived in the United States for years could not be mandatorily detained without an opportunity to seek release on bond.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detain an illegal immigrant after a court hearing in Stamford, Conn., on July 3, 2025. John Moore/Getty Images

The dispute centers on two sections of federal immigration law.

The administration contends that immigrants who entered the country without being legally admitted remain "applicants for admission" under Section 1225 of the Immigration and Nationality Act and therefore can be detained without bond while removal proceedings play out. The detainees argued - and the Fourth Circuit majority agreed - that immigrants already established inside the United States instead fall under Section 1226, which generally allows for bond consideration.

Judge Nicole Berner, joined by Senior Judge Barbara Keenan, said the latter interpretation better fits the text, structure and historical application of the statute. The court noted that Section 1226 had for decades generally governed detention of noncitizens already inside the country, while Section 1225 had traditionally been associated with people seeking admission at the border. 

Berner warned that accepting the government's interpretation could expose millions of people to mandatory detention without bond and said such a reading would imply Congress quietly authorized an unprecedented expansion of immigration detention when it rewrote immigration law in 1996.

The majority eventually compared the implications to some of the darkest chapters of American detention policy, including the confinement of Chinese immigrants in the late 19th century and the internment of roughly 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II.

The court ultimately affirmed habeas relief for Oscar Enrique Lopez Garcia and Juan Jose Rivera, ruling that both had to be given an opportunity to argue for release at a bond hearing.

The Dissent: Congress Meant What It Wrote

Judge Allison Jones Rushing rejected the majority's reasoning - with her dissent focusing heavily on the wording Congress adopted in its sweeping 1996 immigration overhaul. Earlier immigration laws explicitly referred to "arriving" immigrants, ports of arrival and people attempting to enter the country. Congress removed much of that language in 1996 and instead defined a broader category of "applicants for admission."

If Congress intended mandatory detention to remain limited to people physically arriving at the border, she argued, lawmakers could simply have retained the older language. Instead, Congress deliberately adopted terminology broad enough to include people physically present in the United States who had never been lawfully admitted. The statute treats anyone present without admission as an applicant for admission, and an applicant is by definition seeking admission, she wrote. "It's that simple."

The majority, she added, "clearly has strong views about what it considers the 'moral implications'" of denying bond, but those views do not rewrite the text.

That statutory disagreement is no longer confined to one court - meanwhile, the Fourth Circuit has now joined the First, Second, Third, Sixth, Seventh, Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh Circuits on the side of bond eligibility for immigrants already living inside the country.

The Fifth and Eighth Circuits have taken the opposite view, concluding that the government's mandatory-detention interpretation is consistent with the statute.

That 9-2 split puts the issue squarely in territory the Supreme Court often steps in to resolve.

ICE's Next Battle May Be At The Supreme Court

The two developments illustrate the rapidly expanding legal front surrounding the administration's immigration agenda. Denver's lawsuit asks whether federal immigration officers can carry their normal enforcement authority into one of the most legally protected environments in American civic life: the polling place.

The Fourth Circuit case asks a different but potentially far larger question - whether the government can automatically detain broad categories of immigrants already living in the country without first giving them access to a bond hearing.

DHS maintains that the administration is enforcing immigration law as Congress wrote it. The Fourth Circuit majority says the government is attempting to extract sweeping detention powers from statutory language that does not clearly provide them.

And Denver is effectively making the same structural argument from another direction: whatever authority ICE may have to execute immigration law, Congress imposed special limits around elections. So while the administration continues expanding immigration enforcement on the ground, the courts are increasingly being asked to define the perimeter.

For ICE, that means the next phase of the immigration fight may be determined less by how many agents Washington deploys - and more by how the Supreme Court ultimately reads statutes Congress wrote decades ago.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 20:30

Leopold Is Back: Situational Awareness Rerunning Exact Same Trades Which Blew It Up A Month Ago

A few days ago before it became public knowledge that the hilariously misnamed "hedge" fund Situational Awareness, run by a 24-year-old German ultra liberal who was fired by OpenAI, and then launched a new career investing like the most degenerate Korean momentum chaser blew up in explosive supernova fashion as a result of massive leverage in a handful of high beta momentum stocks like Sandisk, AMD and Bloom Energy, we warned that someone was blowing up - as indicated by the surge in Total Return Swap funding rates - and told our followers as much one week before the Leopold Aschenbrenner news hit.

ok Archegos 2.0... you can come out now https://t.co/xtxZL8wNTZ

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) July 24, 2026

We just didn't know who it was... 

Fast forward a little over a month when earlier this week we pointed out that in a very bizarre case of deja vu, it was as if Leopold had emerged from the career grave and was rerunning his entire high beta momo - with massive leverage - playbook. 

Specifically, in "What's Behind The Market's Sullen Vibe, And What Comes Next" we said that the market appeared to *lean forward*  last Friday and again on Tuesday's post-Labor Day holiday reopening, when as Nomura's Charlie McElligott pointed out, the market saw a string of large Flex Calls trade in many of those same "Concentrated AI"-names which were unwound during the Summer calamity, where the Nomura desk saw this "mystery buyer" spending $315 million of total Options Premium, $1.1B of Delta and $5.8mm of Vega on the buys.

McElligott went on, noting that the “Return of the mystery AI / Tech Vol Buyer” was feeding back into the same “Spot Up, Vol Up” / “Positive Spot / Vol Correlation” dynamic in these single-names that defined much of the pre-July market action, which after the recent single-stock Tech Vol bludgeoning was now acting as a much-needed positive PnL driver for Vol Dispersion (Short Correlation) trades again locally. McElligott listed some examples of this rampant tech vol buying observed in the Friday/Tuesday period, from the Nomura desk:

AMD (+10.9% past 2 sessions):

• Fri: 5k Jan 540.01 Calls x $37.42 = $18.7M , $100M delta, $560k vega
• Tue: 3.7k Jan 580.01 Calls for $47.50 = 17.5M, $93M delta, $515k vega

BE (+17.5% past 2 sessions):

• Fri: 5k Jan 250.01 Calls for $53.50 = $26.7M , $80M delta, $300k vega.
• Tue: 4k Jan 310.01 Calls for $53.75 = $21.5M, $60M delta, $265k vega

CRWV (+18% past 2 sessions):

• Fri: 19k Jan 105.01 Calls for $11.03 = $21M , $80M delta, $400k vega
• Tue: 15k Jan 115.01 calls for 14.88 = 22.3M, $80MM of delta, $370k vega

DRAM (+8.9% past 2 sessions):

• Fri: 30k Jan 65.01 Calls for $7.1 = $21.5M , $90M delta, $430k vega
• Tue: 29k Jan 70.01Calls for $7.30 = $21.2M, $83M delta, $425k vega

INTC (+14% past 2 sessions):

• Fri: 22k Jan 105.01 Calls for $11.52 = $25.3M , $105M delta, $500k vega
• Tue: 15k Jan 115.01 Calls for $14.88 = $22.3M $80M delta, $370k vega

SKHY (+13.4% past 2 sessions):

• Fri: 10k Jan 190.01 Calls for  $22.85 = $22.85M, $92M delta, $420k vega
• Tue: 6.5k Jan 210.01Calls for $24.60 = $16M, $56M delta, $290k vega

SNDK (+11.8% past 2 sessions):

• Fri: 1250 Jan 2040.01 Calls x $230 = $28M of prem, $103M delta, $520k vega
• Tue: 1250 Jan 2200.01 Calls x $231 = $29M of prem, $95M delta, $520k vega

In short: all massively out of the money calls meant to trigger momentum ignition by starting a gamma squeeze, and all in danger of blowing up spectacularly - again - once the momentum flips

Upon reading this, our first thought - of course - was that Leopold had somehow come back from the trading dead, and that someone Prime Broker was allowing him to put on massive leverage yet again, knowing perfectly well how it ended up last time around .. but then we quickly ignored that because if true, it would mean that not only was the 24-year-old rerunning the exact same trade he had put on and which ended in tens of billions in losses for his investors in July, but that he was actively telegraphing to the entire world that he was back by putting on trades that intentionally moved the underlying prices and attracting attention to themselves - thus putting a very clear and palpable bullseye on his back, daring the entire market to stop him out... again.

Surely, he couldn't be that stupid, could he? 

It turns out he was. 

Two days after we first pointed out the bizarre activity in Flex Calls, today the FT reported that Leopold Aschenbrenner’s hedge fund Situational Awareness "has started building relationships with new brokerages as it attempts a rebound from the largest loss in the history of the hedge fund industry."

Not only has it started "rebuilding relationships" (more on that in a second), it has started trading: 

"Now, Aschenbrenner is rebuilding large trading positions in technology stocks such as semiconductor manufacturers AMD, Intel, SK Hynix and Sandisk and AI start-ups including CoreWeave, according to people familiar with the matter. His efforts have been bolstered by new relationships on Wall Street like with Clear Street." 

So all the same names that he blew up on the first time, he is going in for round two.

As for how young master Leopold is planing on handing his now wife another imploded hedge fund sujpernova (if not quite galaxy), why here too we find more of the same: only instead of Total Return Swaps courtesy of Goldman, this time Leopold was going all in using deep out of the money leverage in the form of the abovementioned "flex calls", to wit:

Situational Awareness in recent days has placed large new bets using so-called “flex options”, according to people familiar with the matter. Using fully-paid options reduces the risks a fund takes on because it can only lose the money it has already paid to open the trade and nothing more. 

These specialised options trades, which allow traders to customise the terms of the contract, can only be made through large brokerages.

Right... the same brokerages that were his counterparts on the TRS trades and who decided one day to gang up on him and destroy him on that one beautiful late July morning. Those same brokerages are now his option counterparts, and somehow the outcome is supposed to be different. 

Ok, fine, but the Unawareness fund would surely need some prime broker to vouch for him and hand him the leverage Leopold needed for his 2nd attempt at ramping memory/momentum names. This would be challenging since after July, he was now radioactive on Wall Street where every broker who had worked with him was now being probed by the DOJ.

So where do you go when even JT Marlin, sorry, your former Prime Broker JPMorgan, tells you to fuck off? 

Why you go deep off the grid... to a name nobody has ever heard of: "the investor has recently begun working with specialist brokerage Clear Street, according to people familiar with the matter, as he begins rebuilding a portfolio of aggressive bets on technology companies."

That's the FT's take, and it is dead wrong, because if what Leopold wanted to do was just "rebuild his portfolio" he could certainly do that in quiet fashion - the way most traders do when they hope to accumulate a position without tipping off everyone else - where nobody would have any idea it was him. He did not want to do that.

Instead what he clearly intended to do was bring as much attention to his trades as possible, in hopes of making it clear to the market he was once again rerunning the same doomed play that nearly ended his career a month ago. In short, he is hoping that once it becomes clear he is back, his "followers" will follow him into triggering an other "meme stonk" gamma squeeze, one which allows Leopold to then dump everything to his witless followers. 

Only it won't work, because once again the "Nostradamus of AI" finds himself stuck in extremely illiquid names, and what's worse, instead of sharing risk exposure with his TRS counterparts, this time it is only his P&L that will blow up when his brokers rug pull him, which they will very soon now that it is again clear he is trying to squeeze them all, while the SEC is sniffing around. 

Which is why the only question we have is how to bet - in the cheapest possible way - on the second collapse of Situational Awareness in the coming days (especially now that DeepSeek is making a mockery of the massively overpriced memory space) a trade which even Leopold would profit from, as he prepares to hand his hedge fund over to Ken Griffin for the second time.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/11/2026 - 20:10