Steve Witkoff Pockets More Than $100 Million Through Crypto Bets

Wall Street Journal

Steve Witkoff co-founded World Liberty, a cryptocurrency company, with Trump and his…

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Trump Offers a New Way To Buy The Midterms / Trumpapalooza is a Two-Night Snooze in Dallas / Energy Prices Fuel Democratic Chances / Merz turns up the heat on the neo-Nazis / Another Warning About AI Ending the Human Race

If You Can't Beat 'Em, Buy 'Em:

Trump Promises Every Citizen $5,000

Associated Press

Charles: Revealing the utter desperation of Republicans, who have literally nothing to offer voters this fall, the ultimate huckster retreated to his default strategy: bribery.

At the Republican “midterm convention” last night, Trump promised to send every American adult $5,000 if Republicans retain control of the House and Senate

The extremely dubious proposition would cost $1 Trillion—which would raise an already bulging budget deficit of nearly $1.8 trillion by more than 50 percent.

Trump speaking in Dallas last night.

Freudian Cravat?

The color of his tie revealed the real direction of this year’s election.

Within an hour, J.D.Vance was walking back the president’s promise, saying it wouldn’t go to the wealthy. The vice president pretended the president’s bribe could be paid for by revenues from tariffs, but so far the government has only collected $154.47 billion in net customs duties in fiscal year 2026.

The Associated Press noted, “Congress would need to approve or otherwise acquiesce to the payment. The sum would far exceed U.S. tariff revenues even before the Supreme Court tossed much of the president’s tariff program last year.”

The great Michael Tomasky writes the Dallas confab will definitely produce a bonce—for the Democrats:

You must be as excited as I am for this week’s GOP midterm convention. I’m being serious—well, kind of. I’m excited because a midterm convention is such a preposterous notion, such a display of desperate, indulgent, Napoleonic vanity, it will undoubtedly make a terrible situation for the Republicans even worse.

Except for the Kool-Aid-drinking third of the population, America is sick of Donald Trump. The third of us who’ve always seen him as a fascist were sick of him 10 minutes after he descended that escalator. The middle third, well, their enthusiasm for him has waxed and waned, but in these last couple of months, they finally seem to have realized what a charlatan the man is.

Trump Will Now Headline Both Nights of the Republican National Convention in Dallas, aka Trumpapalooza

The Independent

Rubber ducks in the image of President Donald Trump are seen at a store outside of the American Airlines Center in Dallas, TX, ahead of the 2026 Republican National Committee Midterm Convention (Getty)

Scott: In his 1911 book on political parties (Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie), sociologist Robert Michels charted the rise of political parties from the late eighteenth into the nineteenth centuries. These parties recruited membership, organized at local, regional and national levels, held conventions, selected party leadership and put forward candidates for office and established procedures—especially with party conventions—for the formulation of programs, platforms and agendas. Much as they might seek to adhere to democratic principles, Michels wrote, parties invariably succumbed to the “iron law of oligarchy” under which a small band of elites usually came to dominate them and run their processes. Michels, who emigrated and became an Italian, died in 1936 in the heyday of Mussolini and his fascism. No doubt Michels would see in the transformation of the GOP under Trump the same forces at play. In the past, the Republican party convention had two major functions, which were the nomination of presidential and vice presidential candidates and the deliberation and adoption of a party program or platform. But the convention the Republicans will shortly convene in Dallas does neither of these things. Instead, this convention will serve only one purpose, which is the magnification and glorification of the leader, Donald Trump. It will be “Trumpapalooza,” as the RNC announced. And that is all as Trump personally dictated. Thus under Trump, the GOP has made the transition from a political party to a mass movement marked by a cult of personality—on a trajectory almost identical to the one Michels chronicled in Italy from the late twenties through his death.

Republicans are hoping to generate enthusiasm among potential voters and bring in money for the GOP – in part by charging donors $88,600 for a photo with Trump

One House Republican told Politico the midterm convention was a “waste of time” and said planning had been “a mess.”

The event is also meant to raise money for Republicans fighting tough races, such as Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is trying to defeat Democratic candidate James Talerico in the Senate race.

The RNC reportedly asked sitting House members to spend $25,000 for themselves and a guest to attend the two-day event or $100,000 for a higher tier.

But the event’s timing has also raised eyebrows, given Day 2 happens the day before the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and as Trump’s approval rating remains at historic lows in recent polls.

Spiking Energy Prices Could Guarantee a Democratic Landslide

Politico

Ben Lefebvre and Victoria Guida write that the President’s suicidal war of choice against Iran is creating dismal prospects for Republicans everywhere—especially in Michigan, Maine and Iowa. A barrel of oil topped $100 yesterday and diesel prices were breaking national records last week.

According to Republican strategist Alfredo Rodriguez

The increasing price of diesel is going to have an effect on how voters pull the levers in those races. We have 56 days left until Election Day. The cake is already baked.

Petroleum analyst Patrick De Haan said the jump in oil prices is dragging down the whole economy:

With diesel prices $2.25/gal higher than a year ago, businesses are paying $284 million more per day on diesel, while gasoline stands $1.02/gal higher than a year ago, consumers are paying $377 million more per day, adding up to a $4.63 billion additional surcharge every week.

The rise in oil prices driven by Iran’s constraints on oil tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has been one of the big reasons prices keep rising. And that inflation might push the Federal Reserve next week to do exactly what Trump doesn’t want them to do: hike interest rates.

“They have no good options,” a former administration official, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said of the president’s aides. “And, if anything, inflation may get worse because you’ll get some bleed-through from diesel, which impacts everything.”

Following on the Bombshell Disclosures About Netanyahu and Oct 7, He Threatens to Sue, but the Emiratis Confirm It’s True

Times of Israel

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presents the new members joining the Likud party’s candidate list ahead of the upcoming general elections, in Jerusalem, September 8, 2026. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

Scott: Charles summarized yesterday the three bombshells reported by Ha’aretz in an investigative piece it researched over a period of 18 months. Suggestions that Netanyahu had received warnings in advance have been made before, but never stood up in quite the detailed and methodical manner found in the Ha’aretz report. It’s entirely unclear what impact, if any, this will have on Israel’s looming elections. But Netanyahu obviously thinks there will be some impact, since he is now threatening to sue Ha’aretz. His suit won’t be easy, since Times of Israel reports that the Emiratis are confirming the thrust of the report.

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Netanyahu Received Explicit Warnings Days Before October 7, Told Security Chiefs Nothing

Haaretz

Charles: In a bombshell report that might finally end Benjamin Netanyahu’s political career, Haaretz reported that UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed warned the Israeli prime minister ten days before the October 7 attack that Hamas was planning a major attack on Israel that had the potential to upend the entire region.

The revelation is in a new book by Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval, “Hostages: 843 Days of Abandonment.” The authors of the book also wrote the piece about it in Haaretz.

A Palestinian who had emigrated years ago from Gaza and maintained strong ties to the strip was also present during the conversation between the UAE president and the Israeli prime minister. The reporters’ sources said “the Emirati ruler impressed upon Netanyahu the need to prepare for the threat.”

The Emirati leader was surprised that the Israel prime minister reacted calmly and insisted Israel was ready for any scenario.

Zayed also shared with CIA director William Burns that “something there is about to explode.”

But the book says that neither the head of the Shin Bet, the head of Mossad, nor the Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff were informed of Zayed’s warning.

Netanyahu called the story “an absolute lie.” His office said “No warning was given to the Prime Minister from the United Arab Emirates before October 7th.”

Benjamin Netanyahu arrives in parliament in Jerusalem on July 16, 2026

Nevertheless, after the bombshell report was published opposition leaders declared the prime minister unfit to serve.

The book also said that Hamas and Israel were on the verge of concluding an agreement that would have allowed gas for Gaza, a gradual lifting of the blockade of Gaza and increasing the shipments of food and raw materials. The Egyptians were also willing to offer safe passage for Gaza residents on their way to the airport in Sham-el-Sheikh, which would give them an opening to the outside world.

By the summer of 2023 there was broad optimism that a new agreement could be reached. “However, Netanyahu repeatedly postponed convening the committee. Perhaps he did so out of fear of reaching an agreement with Hamas, or perhaps out of fear of the reaction from his extremist partners in his new government.”

Then the Hamas representative “simply vanished from our radar, evaporated,” because he had lost patience with the “Israelis’ pace.”

The Israelis were then told that if they didn’t make progress toward an agreement, they should “expect an earthquake.”

Yaha Sinwar then sent a message to the Emiratis that he was “preparing the mother of all surprises, a terrifying operation. Something extraordinary.” But the Emiratis hesitated about conveying the warning, thinking it might prompt a preemptive strike by Israel.

But on September 5 the warning was relayed to the head of Shin Bet, who called Netanyahu,and two days later he met with the defense minister and military intelligence representatives.

When the Emirati leader saw that the Israelis were not responding to the clear warning, he decided to speak to the Israeli prime minister for 45 minutes at the end of September. “A similar call reached the prime minister’s bureau from the Egyptian intelligence Chief, warning of “a terrifying operation” about to be launched by Hamas.

When Shit Bet recommended targeting senior Hamas officials, Netanyahnu gave the same response he had given before, “Prepare plans for me and I will consider them.”

“He never said no,” said a senior defense official. That was always his way of postponing dealing with the problem. And the prime minister never mentioned the warning calls he had received.

The book also said that Hamas had been willing to release all of the civilian hostages almost immediately. Their only conditions was to bring in an agreed-upon mediator. The Qatar prime minister told American secretary of state Antony Blinken he had offered the Israelis “a quick deal for their release, but they are not interested.”

Blinken reportedly suggested a three-day delay, which proved to be a disastrous suggestion. A senior official told the authors, “to be honest the issue of the hostages was not seriously on the agenda at this stage, and no one at the military or political level was open to discussing the proposal.”

Merz’s CDU in crisis after far-right victory in Saxony-Anhalt

Financial Times

Scott: The object of Putin’s influence campaign targeting Germany is not to install AfD as a new, pro-Kremlin government in Berlin. He recognizes that this is not feasible. But it does aim to use every available lever of the apparatus of German democracy to create disorder, chaos and dissatisfaction with the central government. A next objective would be to bring down the chancellorship of Friedrich Merz (CDU) who is seen as distinctly hostile to the Kremlin. And a study recently completed in Poland shows how some of this works: AfD deputies, once elected to a legislative body, use their position to make parliamentary inquiries which are essentially little more than a wish list for the Russian intelligence services, collecting confidential and sensitive data that can be used to make hybrid attacks more effective by understanding the defenses and safeguards in place against them.

And this leaves the current CDU/CSU/SPD government in Berlin studying its options, including getting much tougher in its dealings with the AfD and its possible ally BWS. That may include litigation and a judicial application to have the party banned. And other options are even less palatable.

For German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, the far right’s crushing victory in Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday — and the drubbing it inflicted on his Christian Democratic Union — strikes close to home.

When he launched the first of three bids for the CDU leadership in 2018, returning to politics after a decade in business, Merz vowed to “halve” support for Alternative for Germany (AfD). His answer was to steer the CDU to the right, pairing a tougher line on immigration with pro-growth economic reforms.

Eight years on, and 16 months into his chancellorship, Merz has failed to deliver on that promise. The AfD is stronger than ever, displacing the CDU in an eastern stronghold it had dominated for more than two decades.

“It’s disastrous for the CDU,” said Andreas Rödder, a history professor at Mainz University, warning the party now faced an “existential risk”.

The scale of the defeat triggered crisis meetings at CDU headquarters in Berlin on Monday. Hours later, Saxony-Anhalt premier Sven Schulze resigned.

One party insider warned the result risked accelerating a downward spiral, with regional elections in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern less than two weeks away.

Defeat in Saxony-Anhalt, a state of just 2.1mn people marked by the economic and social upheaval of reunification, had long been expected. But the scale of the loss has crystallised an unthinkable fear within the CDU: that the party of Konrad Adenauer could be reduced to political oblivion.

With just 17.2 per cent of the vote, the CDU recorded its worst result in Saxony-Anhalt since reunification. Until Sunday, the conservatives had led every state government there since 2002. Before that, the Social Democrats (SPD) — the other postwar Volkspartei — had governed for eight years.

The AfD secured nearly 44 per cent of the vote, the best result of any party in the eastern state since 1990.

Nationally, too, the CDU has slipped since the 2025 federal election, polling at about 20 per cent as the AfD has risen to 28 per cent, making it Germany’s most popular party…

One option is for Merz’s CDU to muddle through, pressing ahead with unpopular welfare reforms alongside its junior coalition partner, the SPD, whose poll ratings are also languishing. The hope would be that an economic recovery eventually restores voters’ trust, Rödder said.

Another would be to end the coalition and govern as a minority administration with the current Bundestag, freeing the CDU from having to dilute its policies to secure SPD backing. That would be a bold but “risky” course, Rödder said.

A third option would be to replace Merz with a more popular chancellor while keeping the coalition intact.

Hendrik Wüst, the 50-year-old premier of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, is frequently cited — including by CDU insiders — as the obvious chancellor-in-waiting. But replacing Merz would do little to resolve the party’s deeper dilemma over the Brandmauer against the AfD, Rödder said.

It would also require Merz to step aside. On Monday, he gave no indication he was prepared to relinquish the office he had coveted for so long.

The Historical Roots of the AfD: A Primer

Der Spiegel

Campaigning for the right wing in 1925: The AfD’s roots go back to Weimar. (Photo: SZ Photo / picture alliance)

Scott: Is it fair to describe the AfD as a Neo Nazi Party? Historians are pretty broadly agreed on the answer to that question. The answer is “yes.” Under German law, the use of Nazi images and slogans is formally banned and even criminalized, which explains why the AfD must claim that it has no factual or intellectual connection to the Nazis. But anyone doing a consequential historical study would come to a different conclusion. Der Spiegel presents a definitive study of the roots of the AfD.

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In German Regional Elections, Putin’s Strategy of Convergence of the Extremities Is a Brilliant Success

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Scott: Secret documents from the Russian intelligence service which leaked in 2023 detailed a long-term Russian influence operation in Germany, denominated the “convergence of the extremities.” Under this plan, two German political parties would be fueled and promoted by the Kremlin. One on the right, the Neo Nazi Alternative für Deutschland; the other on the left, Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, named for the former co-chair of Die Linke (and wife of SPD grandee Oskar Lafontaine) who went on to found her own distinctly pro-Kremlin party. The two parties would unite to form governments after successfully contesting regional elections in states of the former GDR. This would provide a springboard for further destabilization campaigns in Germany and an effort to put an end to German support for Ukraine.

On Sunday, this strategy appears to have succeeded in a spectacular fashion as the AfD emerged as the strongest party in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, while BSW cleared the 5% hurdle. The two parties are therefore in a position to form a government, alternatively, BSW can sign a “toleration” agreement which would allow an AfD minority government.

The Kremlin’s major objective, however, is not a pro-Russia government in a minor central German state. It is to bring down the government of Friedrich Merz, now viewed as a major irritant. We will likely see this played out in the next few days.

For Sahra Wagenknecht, it was a make-or-break moment this time; election night turned into a nail-biter for her and her alliance, the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW)—with moments where they seemed on the brink of disaster. After the polls closed, it was initially unclear whether the BSW would secure any parliamentary seats in the Saxony-Anhalt state election or fail to clear the five-percent threshold. Only after several hours did the picture become clear: according to projections, the BSW would make it into the state parliament—and likely play a decisive role in forming the government in Magdeburg. The looming demise of the party—and a personal fiasco for Wagenknecht—was averted; instead, a fresh start as a potential kingmaker could now be on the cards. Federal Chairwoman Amira Mohamed Ali spoke of a “very good result,” noting that the party had gained “momentum for the upcoming elections as well.”

However, BSW lead candidate Claudia Wittig made it clear that her parliamentary group did not intend to elect AfD lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund as Minister-President. The goal, she said, was to install a non-partisan head of government. Cooperation with the AfD on specific projects was possible, Wittig added, noting that the BSW would always decide on such collaborations based on policy substance: “We want to engage on the issues; the AfD will have to show its true colors there, too.” While AfD Chairwoman Alice Weidel welcomed the BSW’s stance and called for talks, Siegmund was more critical. Political change was not possible with the BSW, Siegmund said; “the BSW is part of the problem.”

Either way, Wagenknecht’s calculation paid off: she had attempted a series of bold maneuvers to turn things around following poor poll numbers. By adopting rhetoric similar to that of the AfD, the party founder sought to position the BSW as the potential kingmaker for a change of power in Magdeburg, thereby winning over dissatisfied voters who sympathize with the AfD but are put off by its ethno-nationalist undertones. In an interview with our editorial team just a few days ago, Wagenknecht stated: “The AfD is a legal party, and people vote for it. Many of its positions align more closely with the CDU—the party from which most of its leading figures come.”

Wagenknecht, in any event, is poised to be the kingmaker.

Trump Now Fighting To Elect Democrats to Congress

The Guardian

Charles: Recent polls show 75 percent of Americans oppose the construction of data centers near them. This has made opposition to them the single most powerful bipartisan issue of the current election cycle, with the potential of delivering control of both houses of Congress to the Democrats.

Thus there is almost nothing Trump could do that would be more helpful to Democrats than what he posted on Truth Social last week:

The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor. If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign. The good news is that there are plenty of other places that want them. If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame. China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement. Actually, they can’t believe it is happening!

A couple of days later Trump’s idiot Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was equally helpful when he went on CNBC and declared, “One of my favorite things is when people talk about data centers using water. The No. 1 product in America that uses water is cattle. I mean, data centers don’t use water. This is propaganda by our adversaries to try to slow us down.”

As The Hill reported,

Data centers used an estimated 66 billion liters of water in 2023, most of which went to hyperscale data centers, according to a 2024 report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Hyperscalers alone are expected to consume between 60 billion and 124 billion liters in 2028, the report projected.

In 2015, the total U.S. water use was estimated to be about 322 billion gallons per day, or more than 400 trillion liters per year. At that time, the government estimated that power plants were the nation’s largest water users, followed by irrigation.

The truth is Donald Trump and his cronies have always had terrible political judgement. The only thing he has ever offered his supporters is permission to behave as badly as they wanted to–to hate Blacks, women, trans people and the millions of hard-working immigrants who perform all the essential tasks that keep the American motor running.

Trump’s advocacy of data centers is crystallizing what has been so obvious for so long to the rest of us. The only people who have benefited from his policies are the billionaires who have purchased him by contributing billions of dollars to his campaigns, and by paying him off directly through his outrageous crypto schemes.

As Aaron Regunber wrote recently in The Guardian, “the movement against datacenters is uniting Americans because they perfectly illustrate how a few individuals hold all the power to control decisions that affect our lives.”

The good news is the billions those same billionaires are now planning to spend in this election cycle may be worthless. That is the most hopeful lesson of Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in the Democratic primary in Michigan, where he was outspent 9-to-1 by AIPAC and corporate Super PACs in the most expensive Senate Democratic primary of all time.

As Claire McCaskill explained on MS Now last week, you don’t need to spend the most money to win an election. You just need enough money to get your message across.

For his next disappearing act, Trump wants to erase New Mexico

The Independent

Scott: On Saturday, Trump repeatedly posted to his social media account his intention to change the name of “New Mexico” to “New America.” In response to inquiries, the White House only reinforced this message. New Mexico officials have suggested in response that Trump should be asked to pee into a cup and be tested for the presence of psychotropic substances.

But Trump has a long and difficult history with New Mexico. It’s not simply that the state has never voted for him, and under his presidency tilted from being a purple to being a solidly blue state. Even before Trump was in politics, he feuded with the New Mexicans, trying unsuccessfully to block Native American casino projects.

Trump seems not to know that New Mexico was called New Mexico before the first English-speaking settlers ever showed up in North America. That happened in the 16th century, when the first conquistadores, supported by porters from the valley of Mexico, pressed into the area. After trekking through a thousand kilometers of hostile territory from the valley of Mexico, the Nahuatl-speaking porters discovered to their shock that the peoples in the pueblos along the Rio Grande spoke a Nahuatl-like language they could understand. The Spanish therefore called the area “Nuevo México” after the Valley of Mexico. But since Trump is illiterate, he can’t be expected to know such things.

President Donald Trump has already changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario, and now he’s targeting a US state for a rebrand.

Trump is spending the holiday weekend dreaming up his next demand to relabel America’s geography. He posted a map on Truth Social Sunday afternoon of New Mexico, but the word Mexico was crossed out and replaced with America.

The HKR Look Back: Shontel Brown on Trump and Law and Order

Charles: We are coming up on the first anniversary of Ohio Congresswoman Shontel Brown’s legendary attack on Donald Trump’s presidency. What she said remains one of the most potent five minute summaries ever given of all of Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors:

President Trump’s only expertise on crime is committing it, not preventing it, enabling it, not ending it, and covering it up, not cleaning it up. He is a convicted felon who has illegally frozen federal funding, he has assaulted the rule of law at every turn, he has consistently violated constitutionally protected due process rights, and he has unleashed a corporate agenda to enrich himself and his wealthy donors.

Right now as we sit here Trump is bending over backwards to protect Ghislaine Maxwell a convicted sex trafficker who preyed on children..

In the last ten months he has pardoned countless white collar fraudsters who ripped off the American people, often conveniently after they cosy up to him. And let’s not forget he pardoned every single person charged and convicted in the January 6 insurrection including 172 people who pleaded guilty to assaulting law enforcement and at least 10 individuals who have already been convicted of new crimes.

So spare us this talk of law and order, because under Trump that only means lawlessness for his friends and punishment for everyone else.

Watch her whole harangue here:

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Labor Day, 2026, is the first weekday we’ve taken off since we started The Horton-Kaiser Report six months ago.

Since then we’ve posted 350,000 words, 110 pictures of outer space and 110 Online Moments of Zen.

Open the Substack app and leave a comment if you appreciate our efforts.

And tell your friends about us if you do.

Tomorrow we’ll be right back at it all over again.

Charles & Scott

Your Online Moment of Zen

Penny Lane

By Paul McCartney and John Lennon (mostly Paul)

Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever were the first two songs recorded for Sgt. Peppers. Penny Lane was recorded in 9 sessions between December 29, 1966 and January 17, 1967.

Brian Epstein and EMI were pressuring the boys for a new single so Penny Lane was released as one side of a double A 45 with Strawberry Fields on February 13, 1967 by Capitol Records and four days later by Parlophone.

In 1967 the Beatles had an iron rule that singles were never included on their albums. So both songs were left off of their masterpiece.

George Martin said that was the biggest mistake of his career.

Four young men from Liverpool at the top of their game.

Here are your three minutes and six seconds of pure joy from 1967, when everything seemed possible, but only some of it was.

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Expelling All Arabs / Bottomless Crypto Support For Reform UK / Next Up A Supersized El Niño / ICE Coming Soon To A Polling Place Near You / Flock Cameras the New Instrument of Mass Surveillance

This Israeli Government Wants to Expel Every Arab

Haaretz

Charles: Writing in Haaretz, Israel’s finest newspaper, veteran journalist Amira Haas argues her county isn’t debating a Palestinian State, ”it’s preparing for Expulsion.”

Hass has lived in the occupied territories for more than thirty years, and first started comparing Israeli policies with apartheid in 2006.

An Israeli settler herding sheep in the West Bank and recording Palestinian villagers as they filmed him.

Gadi Eisenkot, the election frontrunner and leader of the Yashar party, has a stance on a Palestinian state that is ultimately irrelevant. What is at stake today is not a “diplomatic solution,” but the very existence of the Palestinian people between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The Israeli forces striving to “erase” them recognize no limits or restraints. Their supporters are too numerous for us to rely solely on the steadfastness and resilience of a people that has already endured expulsion plans carried out by Israel.

The world stands by. The left is tiny, weak and hoarse from sounding too many warnings. The anti-Bibi opposition oscillates among downplaying the danger, remaining indifferent to it and outright supporting expulsion.

The debate over one state, two states or a federation is more theoretical than ever. Any agreed-upon solution requires first acknowledging the problem and agreeing on what it is. Too many Jews in Israel have been conditioned to believe that the problem is the very presence in this land of a Palestinian people with roots, historical and economic continuity, cultural capital and material assets, a rich agricultural heritage and a profound love of homeland.

“Erasure” is the nightmare solution being written into reality every day. Knesset laws, politicians’ declarations, militaryorders, school textbooks and the holy real estate battalions operating in Gaza, the West Bank and the Negev all work, together and separately, to advance this “solution” diligently and without fear of international condemnation.

Israeli policy is directed toward making life unbearable for Palestinians wherever they live, so that their emigration can be described as an act of free will. Within Israel itself, the authorities give Arab crime organizations free rein to arm themselves and kill Palestinian citizens in their homes. In the West Bank, those same Israeli authorities give “God’s battalions” free rein to arm themselves, kill and expel, while the official army continues its raids day and night. In devastated and thirsty Gaza, the government and the army cultivate armed militias of criminal collaborators, while Israeli pilots continue to launch missiles of revenge and retribution that claim the lives of still more children. All these testosterone-fueled displays are interconnected.

At the same time, Israel is destroying or severely restricting Palestinians’ ability to earn a living. In Gaza, that mission has been completed. A “living dead” population of aid recipients, two million people carrying the weight of some 74,000 fresh graves, families and memories, talents and professions, and evaporated savings, is crammed into roughly 150 square kilometers of scorched earth. Creativity, resourcefulness and mutual aid are dwarfed by the scale of the destruction and by Israel’s prohibition on rebuilding and recovery.

In the West Bank, the Finance Ministry’s financial noose is tightening around the necks of approximately three million people and the Palestinian Authority. The systematic theft of revenues is compounded by the army’s campaigns of destruction in cities and refugee camps, as well as by the other methods used to prevent Palestinians from cultivating and developing their land: checkpoints, bureaucratic prohibitions, fences and Israeli-Jewish shepherds.

Within Israel itself, the “Judaization of the Galilee and Negev” was and remains code for stealing land and resources from Palestinian citizens of Israel. Discrimination against them in allocations, subsidies and employment, along with building prohibitions and demolitions, has always featured prominently in official policy within the Green Line.

Let me reiterate: The very existence of the Palestinian people between the sea and the river is now in danger. Too many active forces are creating that danger: Israel’s military might andcapabilities; the cult of military service under all conditions and under every government; obedience as a value; weapons and military attacks as the default modus operandi; the normalization of PTSD among soldiers and of soldiers dying by suicide; the attractions of a military career and the doors it opens; the lure of an affordable villa in a Galilee exclusionary community or a settler suburb in Samaria; the falsehoods of official and unofficial propaganda; indifference to the hell on earth Israel has created in the Gaza Strip; denial of 60 years of occupation and forced rule; the Pavlovian response, “But October 7”; the synergy among the army, the government, the rabbis and the kippa-wearing militias in the West Bank; equanimity in the face of Lebanon’s destruction; disregard for the occupation of more parts of Syria; the normalization of expulsion discourse; justice and education systems tainted by secular and religious racism; and the army of jailers who abuse thousands of Palestinian prisoners, both under orders and by choice.

My brother David Kaiser, an historian and the author of eleven books, believes the Israeli government never intended to remain within its original 1949 borders. “Authors from Benny Morris (Righteous Victims) to Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick (Israel’s Lobby) have left no doubt about that. Since 1967 there has been only one brief period when they seriously considered giving up a lot of the West Bank. Since then they haven’t had any interest in a two state solution. It does seem to me they are moving to the final step of expelling most of the Arabs.”

Meanwhile The New York Times reports a growing number of retired Israeli generals are condemning the violence against Palestinians inside Gaza and the West Bank. They are part of “a small but rapidly expanding array of influential Israelis, including many from the upper echelons of the military and intelligence apparatus, who are publicly declaring the lawlessness in the West Bank a threat to Israel’s existence as a democracy.”

“This is ethnic cleansing, to put it simply,” Ephraim Sneh, a retired brigadier general and former minister of health, said of Israeli settlers’ attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank.

Asaf Agmon, a retired Air Force general, went even further, comparing it to what some Israelis’ forebears endured in the Holocaust — not in the scale of the violence, he explained, but in the effort to erase the Palestinian presence from much of the West Bank.

“Once a society behaves this way,” he said, “that society is doomed.”

Reform received £5.3m in donations and most was from crypto tycoons

The Times

Nigel Farage and his Reform cabinet. Photo: Richard Pohle/The Times

Scott: So how has the rise of crypto influenced politics in the developed world? We have some very colorful chapters in this narrative, like the rise of the crypto-fueled Palestinian émigré and friend of Trump Nayib Armando Bukele Ortez, the president for life of El Salvador. But among the major democracies, a series of exposés by The Times, The Guardian and independent journalists in the UK has provided a first deep look. What we learn is this: the crypto brothers have found that they could buy and fuel a “populist” party and send it ballooning to success—the name of the party is Reform UK, and its crypto friendly leader is Nigel Farage. What do the crypto bros want in exchange? That’s very murky at this point. But it is clear that they are very keen on relaxing restrictions on money laundering—which is after all the raison d’être of crypto—and Reform UK is only all too happy to pursue this, uh, “reform.”

Reform UK received more than £5 million of donations in the second quarter of this year, including £4 million from a cryptocurrency billionaire and £75,000 from a company linked to the co-owner of Chelsea football club.

Nigel Farage’s party received £5.3 million and the bulk of it came from Ben Delo, who relocated from Hong Kong to the UK so that he could continue giving money.

There were no donations from Christopher Harborne, another cryptocurrency billionaire who is based in Thailand and had previously given the party more than £9 million. He is at the centre of an investigation by parliament’s watchdog into a £5 million gift he gave Farage shortly before he became an MP.

The parliamentary commissioner for standards is investigating whether the gift should have been declared. Farage says that he did not need to declare it. The government has announced a £100,000 annual cap on political donations from British citizens living abroad.

The donations to Reform eclipsed the other parties. Labour received £3.5 million, the Conservatives £2.8 million and the Liberal Democrats £1.3 million.

Reform also received £75,000 from a company linked to Todd Boehly, the co-owner of Chelsea football club. Boehly is chief executive and co-founder of Eldridge Industries. Eldridge Capital Management Services, a company which is ultimately controlled by Boehly, made the donation to Reform.

Other significant donations included £180,000 from Bassim Haider, a telecoms entrepreneur and former Tory donor, and £100,000 from Johan Christofferson, a hedge fund manager who previously donated to Boris Johnson.

Labour received £550,000 each from two long-standing donors — Gary Lubner, the billionaire founder of Autoglass, and Lord Sainsbury of Turville, the supermarket billionaire who has long been Labour’s biggest backer.

‘Supersizing before our eyes’: UN warns of record El Niño approaching

The Guardian

Scott: Major US corporate media are under great pressure not to talk about climate change, and indeed, to deny it. And this they are only too happy to accommodate. But climate change has now led to the creation of a record-breaking el Niño, and the world is already seeing what damage it can unleash. The Guardian offers an introduction here.

The El Niño climate phenomenon is “supersizing before our eyes”, the UN has said. The event is near certain to shatter temperature records, according to the latest forecasts.

The El Niño is likely to be the largest in at least 1,000 years and will pile extra heat into an atmosphere where temperatures are already rising rapidly due to global heating. The combination means 2027 is set to “blow apart” the record and be the hottest year ever recorded.

The rising heat from the El Niño is already having impacts, from worsening wildfires in Indonesia to the weakening of vital monsoon rains in India. The impacts will spread globally, from greater fire risk in Australia to more intense floods in South America. The World Food Programme said in August that the El Niño was likely to push about 50 million people into acute hunger.

The climate crisis, caused by pollution from fossil fuels, is already supercharging extreme weather and killing people, with the most extreme heatwave ever recorded hitting Europe this summer and leading to at least 35,000 deaths. The El Niño will ratchet up the impacts even further, with the scale of the event having been described as “truly mind-blowing” and a “Godzilla-level” event.

El Niño is a natural climate cycle where wind changes over the Pacific lead to rising ocean temperatures and the transfer of huge amounts of heat to the atmosphere. The most recent data, from Monday, shows the temperature of the ocean at the heart of El Niño at 2.6C above the 30-year average. That is already close to the highest anomaly ever recorded in the satellite data era, 3.1C in 2015, with months to go before the peak is expected.

That peak is forecast to reach about 4C in November, according to the average of 14 different models. Data from analysis of corals, tree rings and historical documents suggest no El Niño has reached this level in the last millennium, said Zeke Hausfather, a climate analyst. Any temperature anomaly above 0.5C is classed as an El Niño.

A further concern is that recent research shows global heating is now intensifying El Niño cycles, which then in turn intensify the impacts of the climate crisis.

“El Niño is being supersized before our eyes,” said UN secretary general António Guterres. “The science leaves no room for doubt: the planet is in uncharted waters, and those waters are heating up. The world is in the danger zone of extreme weather. The race now is between rising risks and our commitment to take climate action and protect people. We must win that race.”

“El Niño has the potential to deliver a massive blow to communities and economies across the world,” said Celeste Saulo, Secretary-General of the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO). “We are already seeing disruption and devastation from droughts and floods and we expect these impacts to increase as El Niño intensifies.”

ICE Lays the Foundation for the Trump Administration’s Enemies List

Wired

Scott: There’s good reason to expect that Trump will deploy his secret police, known as ICE, to the polls around time for the midterm elections. Indeed, at a press conference yesterday, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullins refused to deny that. And to help ICE with its new role of master of ensured-outcomes for the elections, ICE hey Siri, what time is it? Hey Siri what time is it is now looking to start the creation of an enemies list for the White House. As usual, the cover for this venture is an effort to target voter fraud—which has nothing whatsoever to do with ICE’s supposed mission of immigration enforcement.

In a bid to tackle alleged voter fraud, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is preparing to award a contract worth up to $5 million to a company that will create a massive national database of voters.

ICE first detailed what the contract would entail in a document published last week. “The purpose of this acquisition is for the handling and secure delivery of publicly available voter registration files and voter history files to support Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) fraud detection and data segmentation activities,” the document reads.

In the document, ICE says that the agency will initially provide a list of specific states it wants to acquire public voter registration files from, though the successful contractor will need to have the capability to obtain data from all 50 states. ICE is also seeking voting history data “for each federal election specified by the government, including general, primary, runoff, and special federal elections.” ICE is seeking publicly available information from each state, which each have their own rules around how it is obtained. This would include voter registration, and in many cases, voting history. Either could potentially include party affiliation—a move that experts believe will violate a right to privacy for US voters.

The document states that the successful contractor won’t be asked to collect and share party affiliation data fields for voters but that could change if “explicitly directed in writing by the contracting officer.” That contracting officer is listed as Michael Royer, section chief at Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative unit within ICE. ICE, DHS, and Royer did not respond to a request for comment.

On Monday, the agency published an acquisition forecast document that revealed the ICE contract would be worth between $2 million and $5 million. The final contract is expected to be published next Monday, and is likely to be awarded soon after, given that the term of the contract will expire on September 30.

ICE’s effort to create a national voter database is part of a much broader effort within the Department of Homeland Security and the Trump administration to undermine trust in the upcoming midterm elections. For more than a year, the Department of Justice has been seeking to create a national voter database by demanding states hand over unredacted voters rolls. States and courts, however, have pushed back.

Read more

The wheels are coming off the US world order

Financial Times

© Ann Kiernan

Scott: Assume that a Manchurian candidate is installed in Washington with an assignment: the systematic destruction of the US system of defense alliances and trading partnerships, with nothing to replace them. This approach would do irreparable injury to the US position on the world stage, both as leader of history’s most powerful network of military alliances, and as the center of the world’s financial and monetary institutions. Looking back over Trump’s actions and accomplishments 20 months into his second term, it is hard to imagine that anyone could have better performed this mission than Trump.

Martin Wolf takes the measure of what Trump has achieved in his orgy of destruction in a feature for the FT, with a focus not on NATO and Europe, but on Korea.

On August 16, Donald Trump announced a substantial reduction in joint military exercises with South Korea. On August 19, he announced what came, five days later, to be called “Operation Economic Outcast” against Iran, defined as an effort to “sever the economic lifelines that sustain the Iranian regime”. On August 21, US trade talks with Canada collapsed, after the Americans made new demands that would limit Canada’s freedom to make trade deals with other countries and keep its rules protecting the French language. On August 28, Trump announced “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY!” which would give the US 55 per cent control of the output of a new Venezuelan company that would develop 17 fields with a “proven potential” of 65bn barrels.

That is an astonishing effort in just two weeks. The behaviour itself is not surprising. But it does reveal the sort of world Trump believes in. It is a world in which the US does not have allies but satellites; one in which the US can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, to whomever it wants; one in which power alone matters; and, above all, one in which the US thinks that it alone has the power, with that power concentrated in the hands of one man, who is, not coincidentally, a bully.

It was not ever thus. In 1969, Dean Acheson, secretary of state to Harry S Truman from 1949 to 1953, published Present at the Creation, in which he laid out the logic of post-second world war US policy. In its prologue, he describes “a tale of large conceptions, great achievements, and some failures . . . Its hero is the American people, led by two men of rare quality, President Truman and General Marshall.” He goes on to explain “the enormity of the task before all of them” as being “to create half a world, a free half” out of chaos, “without blowing the whole world to pieces in the process. The wonder of it is how much was done.” Yes, it truly was.

Because of what they then created, the then embattled “free half” won the cold war, the last of the great European empires, the Soviet Union, fell and much of the world dreamt of peace and prosperity. When Trump writes his autobiography, I hope he calls it Present at the Destruction. That is not because he was personally responsible for the death of those dreams. But he is certainly the man now nailing their coffins shut.

Just consider the four actions he took in the two weeks briefly noted above. We are in a lawless and unpredictable world. Trump is not the creator of that world. But he is surely its prime mover. Let us start with the story of South and North Korea. The Korean war began when the latter invaded the former in 1950. Overall casualties of this conflict were some 5mn. The US itself lost 37,000 soldiers in the three years of conflict. Today’s long-lasting armistice, not a true peace, was the result.

When explaining his decision to cut down this year’s exercises, Trump cites his “very good relationship with Kim Jong Un”, hereditary ruler of a communist regime. Moreover, it is not just any communist regime: North Korea is the world’s most totalitarian country. South Korea, however, is the product of one of the world’s greatest economic miracles and a democracy now rated more highly by Freedom House than the US. The exercises never caused a war. But cutting South Korea off might.

Now turn to the trade war against Canada. This, too, is astounding. Behind it lie three characteristically Trumpian beliefs: Canada is not a sovereign country; trade surpluses are predatory; and constant changes in trade policies are costless. The outcome of these beliefs is, inevitably, disorder. But, for Trump, chaos is an opportunity, not a problem. He loves it. Again, contrast that with what Acheson lauded. The great creations of the Truman era included the Marshall Plan and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. But these are, for Trump, idealistic follies. Will his trade war with Canada work? No. Might it lead to war between these erstwhile friends and neighbours? Who knows?

Then there is the next stage in the Iran war. With hostilities recently reopened, we are back to wondering what disruptions come next. What is certain is that the outcome has been far from the one promised when the conflict started in February. Any reopenings of the Strait of Hormuz are fragile. It is also still hard to see any positive longer-term outcome from this war for the US or its allies, be the latter in the Gulf or elsewhere. Is it likely that “Operation Economic Outcast” will make the difference? In my view, no, for three reasons: first, the Iranian regime has survived prolonged hostility and now war; second, its leaders know what is likely to happen to them if they lose power; and, third, when cancelling Barack Obama’s nuclear deal in 2018, Trump promised that his then new programme of “maximum pressure” would do the trick. It failed to do so. Will this new variant achieve more? As Paul Krugman argues, China is likely to ensure it does not.

When trying to understand Trump’s view of the world, it is impossible to look for ideas or principles. It is not even a return to Palmerstonian realism. What it is, rather, is the antithesis of what was created after the second world war. We are all “present at the destruction”. Today’s disorder is Trump’s present to the world.

Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied

New York Times

Charles: The indispensable Adam Liptak describes how the built-in sluggishness of the Federal judiciary first allowed Donald Trump to avoid prosecution for all the crimes he was indicted for, and now makes it possible for him to behave as if the judiciary doesn’t exist at all.

The all-deliberate delay of the Supreme Court, highlighted most recently by its decision allowing construction of the ballroom, has been particularly fatal for democracy.

The challenge to Mr. Trump’s enormous White House ballroom project is just the latest example of a mismatch between a judicial system characterized by unhurried deliberation and a presidency built for speed.

“Trump is going to get his ballroom — even if courts conclude it’s illegal,” said Leah Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan.

Aziz Huq, a law professor at the University of Chicago, said there was a pattern.

He pointed to cases in which he said the administration had “immediately shut off funding in violation of law when the recipient depends on the funding and is discouraged from suing by even the temporary loss of funding.”

This, Professor Huq said, “is a striking use of practical power to outrun law.”

Many presidents have been aggressive in pursuing their policies, and few have been eager to be second-guessed by the courts. But Mr. Trump’s actions are different in kind, said Pamela Karlan, a law professor at Stanford.

“He really has decided that he can just go ahead and do what he wants,” she said, “daring courts to stop him across a huge range of subject matters.”

Quote of the Day

–Linda Adams Marcus

New Mail Voting Rules Moved Forward Despite USPS Officials’ Concerns About Mass Disenfranchisement

Pro Publica

An election worker processes mail-in ballots at the Los Angeles County Ballot Processing Center during California’s state primary election in June. Photo: Patrick T Fallon/ AFP/ Getty Images

Scott: When we examine the full scope of Trump’s approach to the midterm elections, it becomes clear that his major objective is not to win them for the GOP—which he appears to agree is no longer really feasible—but rather to create complete chaos as a predicate to throwing the results out, dismissing or denigrating them. The story from inside the USPS makes this very clear. Don’t expect the judiciary to salvage this for the voters. Lower courts will do their duty. Then the question will pass to the Opus Dei majority on SCOTUS, which will do whatever Trump asks of them.

Top U.S. Postal Service officials tasked with issuing new regulations on mail voting expressed concerns in internal meetings about how the rules they were drafting could delay or block ballots from reaching large swaths of eligible voters for the upcoming midterms, but the rules moved forward anyway, ProPublica has learned.

The revelations about the discussions, from someone familiar with the rulemaking process, come as a separate anonymous federal employee filed a whistleblower disclosure with U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, warning that the new system is untested and error-prone, and could lead to mass disenfranchisement in the upcoming election. The whistleblower described the entire process as “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed.”

In a March executive order, President Donald Trump directed the Postal Service to create the new rules, including requiring states to give USPS a list of all voters eligible to receive a ballot in the mail and requiring USPS to use those lists to determine which ballots get sent to voters. USPS officials were tasked with crafting the details of how the new system would work, including the creation of a new portal for states to upload their voters’ information and the back-end software that would allow mail delivery sites and local post offices to track, and potentially block, ballots entering into the mail on their way to voters.

Voting rights organizations, state officials and Democratic political groups filed lawsuits challenging the new rules, and a federal court has temporarily blocked the requirements for states. The merits of the new rule are expected to reach the Supreme Court before the November election. Even if the Supreme Court allows the plan, though, election officials and experts say that the new system could not be ready in time for this election, given that ballots for people who are in the military or overseas must be sent out this month.

During meetings in which top USPS officials discussed how to comply with the executive order, there was much discussion about the controversial nature of what they needed to do, according to the person familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. The focus was on limiting the impact to voters while also complying. One repeated concern regarded how to avoid invalidating an entire batch of ballots if one voter among thousands couldn’t be confirmed as eligible. Some in the meetings recommended trying to limit harm to voters by not rejecting the entire batch, according to the person familiar with the discussions. Despite that, according to the whistleblower who contacted Blumenthal, the directive to reject entire batches if they included just one unverified ballot moved forward.

“As presently designed, if even one bar code on one single ballot in a bulk-mailing of 10,000 ballots fails to properly scan during the verification process, the entire batch is rejected and sent back to the state — effectively stopping the ballots from being mailed to voters,” the whistleblower wrote.

Everything You Wanted To Know

About Those French Forest Fires

But Were Afraid to Ask

Los Angeles Times

Charles: In a masterly account for the Los Angeles Times from the Gironde department of France, the great Michael Finnegan details the damage of last summer’s brutal fires, how the urban sprawl around Bordeaux created the same dangers as over-development in California–and even tells us who invented that French pine forest, and why.

Wildfires burned vast portions of a pine forest near Le Porge, France, this summer.

It’s a terrific read:

LE PORGE, France — A monster fire-induced thundercloud towered over Bordeaux this summer, the first time firefighters had ever seen this type of ominous smoke-and-lightning weather system in France.

The wildfire that produced it drove more than 200,000 people to evacuate in July and tore through 162 square miles of dense pine forest on the Atlantic coast.

Wildfires this summer in France, Greece and Spain, several of them deadly, have led to a painful reckoning as Europeans ponder a question all too familiar to Californians: Have they endangered their cities and suburbs by building too far into the wildlands?

Over the last decade, hundreds of homes have burned down near the outer limits of Lisbon, Milan and other European cities, including scores this summer outside Madrid and Athens.

In the Bordeaux region, where aerospace and technology jobs, splendid beaches and moderate housing prices have been attracting 20,000 new residents each year, suburban sprawl has pierced well into the pine forest, testing the limits of building in fire zones.

The forest between Bordeaux and a line of majestic sand dunes on the Atlantic is the largest in France, far bigger than any in the Alps or Pyrenees. It is almost entirely artificial

For centuries, it was a vast swamp where mosquitoes spread malaria among shepherds.

Then in 1857, the regime of Emperor Napoleon III ordered the planting of maritime pines to drain the bogs of southwestern France. The trees would absorb enormous volumes of water, thrive in the sandy soil and slow coastal erosion.

The pines would also enrich landowners and the Bordeaux bourgeoisie: The hardscrabble culture of sheep grazing gave way to a booming industry of wood, paper and resin.

The forest, the “Landes de Gascogne,” now employs more than 40,000 people, spinning off $10 billion a year, according to the government.

Read more

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Germany Declares Russia Responsible for the Drone Attack on Leipzig Halle Airport, Prepares Sanctions

Süddeutsche Zeitung

Ukrainian Antonov transport on the tarmac at Leipzig Halle airport at the time of an armed attack by three Russian drones laden with explosives. Photo: Hendrik Schmidt/dpa

Scott: While receiving inexplicably little attention in the United States where the media focus instead on Trump’s daily ration of bread and circuses, the Russian attack on a leading German airport has galvanized assessments across Europe to the effect that Russia’s war effort against Ukraine has now escalated to include targets in NATO members across Europe. Germany today announced the conclusion of its probe into the incident involving three armed Russian drones—this was a carefully planned armed attack involving drones and Russian intelligence agents on the ground. Moreover, it is inappropriate to brush this aside as more Russian “hybrid warfare,” because the drone attack was a full-throated act of conventional warfare that constitutes casus belli under the laws of war. Germany prepares a series of escalating sanctions against Russia as a result, and major NATO powers express their support. Countermeasures are likely to focus on disabling the Russian shadow fleet, from which drones are apparently being deployed. Who’s the outlier in the NATO club? As usual, Donald Trump. He continues to be a friend to the Kremlin and a grumbling participant in NATO at best. Kremlin strategy at this point is to highlight this difference, probably with a far more daring military assault on NATO’s eastern flank in response to which the US will do nothing.

Foreign Minister Wadephul announces tough measures against Moscow. The Consulate General in Bonn is to close, and the “Russian House” faces shutdown.

Following weeks of investigations by security agencies and intelligence services, the German government is convinced that Russia is behind the explosive-laden drone attack at Leipzig Airport. Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul (CDU) and Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) announced on Tuesday evening during a joint appearance that investigators had traced the evidence back to Moscow. The explosives used, as well as the components and technology, were reportedly known from other Russian operations. Furthermore, the perpetrators involved pointed to orders originating from Moscow.

Initially, the government had remained cautious following the attack in early August. Interior Minister Dobrindt had at first attributed the assault only to “foreign powers.”

However, the information situation has since changed. German and international investigators and intelligence agencies have secured evidence, analyzed connection data, and reconstructed the plan of attack. On the evening of August 4, a drone rigged with explosives was discovered in the secure area of ​​Leipzig/Halle Airport, situated among Ukrainian cargo planes. The airport serves as a key hub for aid to Ukraine.

The German government announced tough countermeasures. The Russian Consulate General in Bonn is to close on September 18. In addition, the contract for the “Russian House” in Berlin is being terminated, Wadephul said. The building in Berlin-Mitte—nominally intended to foster cultural and scientific exchange—is regarded as a covert espionage hub and a center for Russia to recruit agents. The planned closure of the facility aims to put a stop to these activities. Additionally, the German government is once again summoning the Russian ambassador, and entry controls for Russian nationals are being tightened.

Countermeasures include tackling the evasion of sanctions on oil exports by these vessels—a practice that has so far largely gone unpunished. Wadephul stated that pressure would be increased, though he did not provide specific details. On Tuesday, during an informal EU meeting of defence ministers in Ireland, State Secretary for Defence Sebastian Hartmann had already remarked that “all spotlights” must now be turned on the shadow fleet. Russia uses these often dilapidated tankers to circumvent international sanctions and finance its war of aggression against Ukraine.

The preliminary decision to attribute the incident to Russia had reportedly already been made on Monday evening during a strictly confidential meeting of high-ranking state secretaries from key ministries at the Chancellery. On Tuesday, Wadephul interrupted an official trip—which was supposed to take him from Algeria directly to a foreign ministers’ meeting in Ireland—to make a stopover in Berlin.

Invoking the NATO treaty is not currently part of the government’s planned response. Security experts had recently recommended that German policymakers trigger Article 4 of the NATO treaty in light of Moscow’s increasingly aggressive hybrid warfare against Western targets. This article mandates consultations whenever an ally perceives a threat to “the territorial integrity, political independence, or security of any of the Parties.” The article could still be invoked should the hybrid attacks from Russia persist or even intensify, it was further stated.

The Split Personality of The Washington Post

The Washington Post

Charles: Seven months ago the newsroom of The Washington Post was decimated, when 300 of its 800 journalists were fired.

Then a funny thing happened: the reporters left behind proved they were undaunted. All year they have been breaking one devastating story after another about the Trump administration, even though their owner, Jeff Bezos, now spends as much time as possible cozying up to the president.

The dual personality of the Post was particularly obvious yesterday when Post reporter Jonathan Edwards reported that more than half of the publicly known donors to Trump’s ballroom have won $50 billion in new or expanded Federal contracts in the last six months.

Most of these same 14 companies “are also facing federal enforcement actions over alleged wrongdoing or have had such actions suspended by the Trump administration since the start of Trump’s second term,” according to a new report from Public Citizen, a nonprofit.

Naturally, the single biggest winner was the military-industrial complex. Defense giant Lockheed Martin won about $43.8 billion in new or expanded contract funding since last fall, followed by Booz Allen Hamilton, with $4.2 billion, and Palantir with more than $1 billion.

The story noted that Amazon, founded by Post owner Bezos, was among the other contributors who won new contracts this year.

“These giant corporations aren’t funding the Trump ballroom fiasco out of the goodness of their hearts,” said Jon Golinger, a public policy advocate at Public Citizen and an author of the report. “They have massive interests before the federal government, and they hope to curry favor with, and receive favorable treatment from, the Trump administration.”

Construction at the site of the former East Wing, seen last week. (Anne Lebreton/AFP/Getty Images)

Unlike the news department, the new editorial board of The Washington Post has turned sharply to the right since the massive layoffs occurred earlier this year. So on the same day the news department was exposing the ballroom as the latest of the administration’s dozens of pay-for-play schemes, the opinion section was praising the latest 5-4 decision of the Supreme Court, which allowed Trump to proceed with the construction of his latest monstrosity.

The Court ruled in a case brought by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, one of whose members, Alison K. Hoagland, said she was injured by the aesthetic change being wrought on the White House.

The conservative majority of the Court (without chief justice John Roberts) said the National Trust didn’t have the proper standing to challenge the president’s right to desecrate the grounds of the White House. As Robert Reich wrote on Substack, if the National Trust (and its longtime member) “doesn’t have standing to complain about Trump’s mayhem on the People’s House, I can’t imagine who would.”

But The Washington Post editorial writers disagreed. Without ever mentioning that their boss was himself a beneficiary of the ballroom pay-for-play scheme, they asserted the Court’s decision was completely appropriate.

They never mentioned that Amazon was contributing to the ballroom’s construction.

Donald Trump Jr Boosts Polymarket Investment by Around $300 Million, Dad Steps in To Help Out

Wall Street Journal

Polymarket held a promotional event at a Washington, D.C., bar in March. Photo: Graeem Sloan/Bloomberg

Scott: I wonder why Trump is pulling out all the stops trying to block the states from licensing or regulating internet gambling, particularly where internet prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi are involved? Might it be because Trump family money is behind both of them in a big way?

The investment fund 1789 Capital, in which Donald Trump Jr. is a partner, is investing around $300 million into Polymarket, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The investment is part of a $1 billion round led by 1789 that would value Polymarket at $21 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

Polymarket declined to comment.

The investment will make 1789 one of Polymarket’s largest backers. Intercontinental Exchange, Polymarket’s largest investor, disclosed in July that its $1.6 billion stake in Polymarket amounted to 22% of the company’s shares outstanding.

Polymarket, along with rival Kalshi, has attracted controversy for permitting users to place bets on sports, which some regulators have criticized as gambling. Both platforms have listed markets that have led to charges of insider trading. Both also see more traders losing money than winning, The Journal previously reported.

1789 had previously invested a total of around $200 million into Polymarket, according to a person familiar with the investments.

Polymarket has a data partnership with Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal. Bloomberg previously reported that 1789 was leading the billion-dollar round.

1789 made its first investment in Polymarket before the 2024 election. That year, Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan was seen at a table with Trump Jr. and Omeed Malik, founder of 1789 Capital, at the Republican National Convention

After his father won the presidential election, Donald Trump Jr. joined 1789 as a partner and the firm invested in Polymarket again.

Earlier in August, Malik hosted a Republican fundraiser with Vice President JD Vance at Malik’s New York Hamptons home. Among the attendees were Trump Jr. and Polymarket’s chief executive, Shayne Coplan

The venture-capital firm’s success has attracted scrutiny from House Democrats. Last week, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md.) wrote to 1789’s leadership demanding a list of the firm’s investments, communications with the government and information about its decision to hire Trump Jr.

Read more

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Pete Hegseth: Programmed by His Wife, Challenged By His Generals, Promoted By Paid Influencers

Washington Post

New York Times

Charles: No Defense Secretary in recent memory has tried harder to prevent leaks than Pete Hegseth. Last year he launched investigations into at least nine separate stories, and threatened DOD personnel with polygraph tests. Last month he posted a video about a new joint investigation with the Pentagon to identify and prosecute leakers.

He has hollowed out the senior leadership of the Pentagon, purging the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the chiefs of the Army, Navy and Air Force. Overall, he has fired or sidelined nearly three dozen general officers and admirals and blocked the promotion of 40 senior colonels or Navy captains who had been chosen for flag rank.

Last night Army Secretary Dan Driscoll announced his resignation.

The Atlantic reported “Trump was surprised when Driscoll told him [last week] how many generals and other top officers had been fired, pushed out, or passed over for promotion under Hegseth and “Trump expressed concern about the deep cuts to the Army’s senior leadership.”

But if Trump really said that, he couldn’t possibly believe it. If Trump actually cared about the decimation of the armed forces, he would have replaced Hegseth with Driscoll, instead of accepting Driscoll’s resignation. As my partner Scott Horton pointed out here last week, Hegseth guarantees his invulnerability by steering millions of dollars of Pentagon contracts to companies affiliated with Trump’s two sons.

Incredibly, the officers and civilians who remain at the Pentagon are so disgusted with Hegseth’s supreme incompetence, last year’s stream of leaks has been supplanted by a river of disclosures, gushing with the power of the Mississippi.

The resulting journalism is a tribute to the courage of America’s men and women in uniform and the talent of a dozen brilliant reporters for The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Pete Hegseth

This week, through the efforts of Alex Horton and Tara Copp, assisted by their Washington Post colleagues Dan Lamothe, Noah Robertson and John Hudson, we learned that the prolonged catastrophe of America’s war with Iran had severely limited our capacity to defend ourselves everywhere else in the world.

Several U.S. military leaders have advised Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that prolonging large-scale operations against Iran is unsustainable and risks weakening their ability to confront threats elsewhere,

The warnings — detailed for Hegseth by the heads of the Army, Navy and Air Force and the four-star commanders overseeing U.S. operations throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America — appear in the Aug. 14 edition of the Secretary of Defense Orders Book (SDOB), these people said. They described the assessment to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity because the document is classified.

The SDOB, typically produced twice monthly, outlines the worldwide availability of U.S. warships, aircraft, personnel and weapons systems. It reflects the president’s priorities for the force, which are carried out by the defense secretary, and includes insights from the military’s top generals and admirals that inform the directives the Pentagon issues.

Leaders of the U.S. European Command, the U.S. Pacific Command and the U.S. Southern Command, along with the Navy’s top admiral, responded with what is characterized in the SDOB as a “non-concur,” those familiar with the assessment said — meaning they disagree with the secretary’s order to extend their forces but will execute it nevertheless.

Adm. Daryl Caudle, the chief of Naval Operations, provided Hegseth with the dimmest picture, saying in the SDOB that the Navy cannot sustain its current level of support for the Iran conflict because there is no anticipated end date, those familiar with the assessment said.

Two weeks ago John Ismay of The New York Times revealed that the reason the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier could not be properly resupplied was Iran’s almost total evisceration of a crucial American naval base in Bahrain, in retaliation for the U.S.-Israeli assault on Tehran.

And as it went up in smoke, so did a major logistics hub that the Navy has relied on for decades.

Yesterday, in another blockbuster story, Dan Lamothe and Tara Copp revealed in The Washington Post that the Pentagon has installed right wing influencers with large followings in government roles, refusing “to disclose their assignments as they amplify Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s viewpoints and attack those who scrutinize the Trump administration.”

At least some of the influencers have been assigned to civilian roles that could lead to changes in policy…

Neither the Pentagon nor those involved have disclosed the government roles despite the Trump administration’s claims that they are running the most transparent Defense Department ever.

Those involved include Rob Maness, a retired Air Force colonel, and Kurt Schlichter, a retired Army colonel, people familiar with the matter said. Pentagon records reviewed by The Washington Post show that both have active official government email addresses as of this past week and are assigned to the office of Anthony Tata, the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. The email addresses include a “.civ” suffix, meaning they are labeled as civilian employees, rather than as military personnel or contractors.

Both served for decades in uniform and, since retiring, have turned from the military to conservative commentary. Maness has more than 135,000 followers on X, while Schlichter has nearly 620,000.

Another retired Army colonel and influencer, Thomas Anderson, was listed in Pentagon records earlier this year with a “.civ” email address and assigned to Tata’s office, according to people familiar with the matter and records reviewed by The Post. An attorney, he writes online under the pen name Cynical Publius and has more than 323,000 followers on X. He was no longer listed in Pentagon records late this past week, the people familiar with the issue said.

Pentagon spokesman Joel Valdez declined to comment to The Post about whether any of the three are drawing a taxpayer-funded salary, what roles they have or how long those jobs are expected to last. Tata did not respond to a request for comment.

Maness and Schlichter did not respond to emails or other messages requesting comment. Anderson declined to comment in a short phone call.

Dan Driscoll resigned last night as Secretary of the Army

Finally, in The New York Times last month, the redoubtable Elisabeth Bumiller published a superb 3300-word profile of Pete Hegseth’s wife Jennifer which actually had a headline worthy of its content: ‘It’s Bonkers’: Jennifer Hegseth’s Hands-On Role in Her Husband’s Pentagon.

With contributions from Bumiller’s colleagues Adam Entous, Greg Jaffe and Sharon LaFraniere and interviews with twenty current or former administration officials or people who worked with her in her previous job as a producer at Fox News, the story made it clear that Jennifer Hegseth is definitely the spouse who wears the pants in her family.

Elisabeth Bumiller

Mrs. Hegseth was for years Mr. Hegseth’s producer at Fox News as he built a broadcast career. Now, seven years into their marriage, she is his most influential adviser and his de facto producer at the Pentagon. She has prepped him for appearances, sat in on his meetings with journalists, interviewed potential members of his staff and brainstormed ideas for the Defense Department videos he — and sometimes she — appears in.

Mrs. Hegseth has also encouraged Mr. Hegseth’s adversarial relationship with the news media…and although she was a journalist for two decades, she has worked with her husband to bar reporters from the building.

Last year she was in a highly sensitive meeting with her husband and top British defense officials after the United States temporarily stopped sharing military intelligence with Ukraine, The Wall Street Journal first reported. In a previously undisclosed part of that meeting, a Trump administration official told The New York Times, the British indicated that they had officers on the ground in Ukraine and that without the U.S. intelligence, including early warnings of incoming missiles from Russia, the officers’ lives were at risk.

The British spoke in general terms, the official said, because the presence of Mrs. Hegseth made them uneasy. Later they had a smaller meeting, without her, to go into detail.

“It’s bonkers that a defense secretary would involve his wife in his sensitive official duties, including sharing details of an impending military operation, and face zero consequences,” said John Ullyot, who left the Pentagon as chief spokesman after three months working under Mr. Hegseth and has been critical of his leadership. “Any president deserves better judgment from his national security leaders.”

Naturally, in the face of all of these embarrassing disclosures, a Pentagon spokesman doubled down on Mrs. Hegseth’s role, calling her “an accomplished leader in her own right and a devoted military spouse” who “is a vital asset and a true force multiplier for our mission.” The Defense Department, he said, “not only welcomes her current leadership but actively plans to involve her even more deeply in the future.”

The New Mexico Defense Contractor that Funds Nigel Farage and Reform UK

The Guardian

Scott: Following the money that lands in the coffers of Nigel Farage and his Reform UK seems now to draw on two major sources, one a posh English aristocrat and convicted felon whose principal business is helping drug lords hide their money from the prying eyes of law enforcement. The other is a Thai-based crypto billionaire who holds a UK passport, who made his money finding aviation fuel from dodgy sources for the US Department of Defense. The vehicle he used to do all of this is based in Albuquerque, NM (note that New Mexico journalists haven’t figured out that the biggest political scandal in recent UK history sits quietly right under their noses—indeed, they’re oblivious to it). Tom Burgis takes us on a wonderful voyage of discovery.

As he struggles with questions about the millions he has received from the billionaire Christopher Harborne, Nigel Farage has made no secret of his enthusiastic support for the industry that made part of his benefactor’s fortune – cryptocurrency. The Reform UK leader even urged the governor of the Bank of England to drop a crypto policy that may be costly for Harborne.

But another element of Harborne’s business interests could prove still more consequential if it shapes Farage’s positions. There appears to be no precedent for a major UK donor who is so entwined with the military.

The Guardian’s ongoing investigation into the origins of Harborne’s riches and whether his donations inform Farage’s agenda has established the Thailand-based tycoon’s global web of commercial interests in the arms industry and military contracts. Among Harborne’s business collaborators are a striking number of former army officers, air force pilots, military officials and even, it seems, a former MI6 officer.

Described by his lawyers as an “intensely private” man, Harborne’s military interests reveal another side to the proprietor of a wellness sanctuary on a paradise island off Thailand.

A businessman who works with Harborne’s jet fuel venture describes it as a top supplier to US military operations worldwide, “strengthened by former US Department of Defense specialists and retired US military pilots, bringing decades of operational and strategic expertise to every mission”.

And Harborne is the biggest shareholder in what was once the research arm of the UK military, now a private company developing autonomous weapons.

At a moment when one of the biggest questions political leaders face is how much of the state’s resources to divert to military spending, Farage’s reliance on Harborne’s money presents a potential conflict of interest. Harborne has given Reform two-thirds of its funding, plus a £5m undeclared gift to Farage that the MPs’ watchdog is investigating.

Sam Power, a political funding expert at the University of Bristol, said: “It doesn’t necessarily follow that Reform will have policies that will benefit Harborne’s interests in the military-industrial complex. But it warrants a spotlight. It will be interesting if Reform’s policies start aligning with Christopher Harborne in this area as they have in cryptocurrency.”

Harborne’s lawyers at the London firm Schillings said: “The policies or positions Mr Farage may choose to adopt are a matter for Mr Farage and the Reform party. Our client’s commercial interests are unconnected in any way whatsoever with his political affiliations.”...

While Albuquerque, NM-based AML Global issues few statements, publicity material by its Northern Irish partner, Jet Assist, says no other company supplies the US military with jet fuel in more places beyond its borders – 62 by the end of 2025. The material trumpeted AML Global’s recruitment of US military personnel and envisaged its role in “future US, UK and allied military deployments into Europe”.

AML Global’s $140m from the Pentagon may not be a big share of the billions it spends each year on fuel but Harborne is trusted to supply the American armed forces in strategic locations, from Europe’s frontier with Russia, to the Middle East, a South Pacific outpost and Asian allies threatened by China.

“The government vets these companies,” says Jerry McGinn, a military procurement expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies thinktank in Washington. “They take this very seriously.”

According to documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, bankers filed an alert with US authorities in 2014 saying they had been “unable to identify the economic, business or lawful purpose” for large payments Harborne made related to crypto dealings under his Thai name, Chakrit Sakunkrit. But such suspicious activity reports are evidence of concern, not wrongdoing. Harborne denies any, and the Pentagon evidently sees him as a trusted supplier.

Read more

Spy Sheikh is the Trump Brothers Newest Backer / Big Hope from the Heartland / America Seizes Venezuela’s Oil / ICE Wants Robot Dogs with Guns / Zuckerberg Unbound (as ever)

Emirati Spy Chief Will Fund the Trump Family Bank

Wall Street Journal

Trump was greeted by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al Nahyan, the UAE’s Spy Chief, in Abu Dhabi last year. Photo: Alex Brandon/AP

Scott: The emoluments clause of the US Constitution prohibits any person holding an “office of profit or trust under the United States,” such as the president, from accepting any present, emolument, office, or title from any “king, prince, or foreign state” without the consent of Congress. Republican judges have now repeatedly manipulated standing notions to block any attempt to enforce the emoluments clause against Trump. And this is the result: in Trump’s second term, he and his entourage are increasingly brazen and open about taking the money for foreign governments. In this case, Trump has granted his family the charter for a federal bank. And the Trump bros have turned to the notorious Emirati, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al Nahyan (known as the “spy sheikh”) to finance the venture. According to West Coast FBI agents, Sheikh Tahnoon’s name appeared repeatedly in investigations into Emirati efforts to bribe politicians (largely, but not entirely, Republicans), and it appeared he was running a significant influence operation targeting American politicians. Now this operation has stepped out of the shadows. The Wall Street Journal has the story.

The Abu Dhabi royal sometimes referred to as the “spy sheikh” is a major shareholder backing a new U.S. bank the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture is preparing to launch, according to people familiar with the matter.

Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al Nahyan and co-investors are behind an entity that owns the largest stake—49%—in the holding company that World Liberty Financial created to house its banking venture, according to people familiar with the matter. The sheikh last year backed a $500 million investment into World Liberty Financial in exchange for a 49% stake in the company, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency earlier this month granted preliminary conditional approval for World Liberty Financial to launch a federally chartered national trust bank to issue, redeem and safeguard USD1, the dollar-backed stablecoin World Liberty launched last year.

The new venture marks an expansion of the business relationship between the Trump-backed crypto company and a foreign government official. Tahnoon serves as the United Arab Emirates’ national security adviser and is brother to the country’s president. He oversees a more than $1.3 trillion empire funded by his personal fortune and state money.

Stablecoins are pegged to the value of real assets held in a reserve. USD1 now has a market value of $4 billion. World Liberty says the dollars backing USD1 are invested in U.S. Treasurys and other cash equivalents, generating an estimated $150 million a year in interest. Previously, World Liberty issued USD1 through BitGo, a separate trust bank that held the stablecoin’s reserves and kept a portion of the interest.

The more USD1 in circulation, the more revenue World Liberty can generate from its reserves.

World Liberty says it plans for the trust bank to drive “mainstream adoption” of USD1 and to offer new services to clients, such as holding their cryptocurrency for a fee.

After the OCC approval, Chief Executive Zach Witkoff, son of U.S. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, said World Liberty’s ambition was “to build the most trusted and widely used digital dollar in the world.”

Hope From The Hinterland

The Guardian

Charles The very best news of the week came in this headline in The Guardian: The datacenter backlash is bringing the entire political spectrum together – against big tech billionaires

For everyone who has been waiting for something that would finally drive the citizenry into the streets because of the blindness, greed, corruption and stupidity of the Tech Bros behind AI, the prairie fire engulfing mega datacenters is the answer to our prayers.

Aaron Regunber is a former Rhode Island state legislator and the current director of the Climate Accountability Project at Public Citizen.

In The Guardian he writes “the movement against datacenters is uniting Americans because they perfectly illustrate how a few individuals hold all the power to control decisions that affect our lives.”

They also prove that oligarchs have terrible judgement.

Bryce Gustafson is the lead organizer with Citizens Action Coalition (CAC), a consumer and environmental organization. Knocking on doors all over Indiana for the last ten years, he’s used to hearing a lot of different reactions to whatever he’s pitching to voters.

Not this time.

He talked to 50 people at a festival in Monrovia, Indiana about a proposed 550-acre Google project proposed for the town of 1,600. None of them wanted it there. “And at least a half a dozen people came up to me to say, ‘Hey, I voted for Trump. What the heck’s he doing, supporting these things?’”

If there’s one thing Gustafson sees uniting Hoosiers of all stripes – from rural areas such as Morgan county to suburbs such as Franklin Township to the historically African American neighborhood of Martindale-Brightwood in Indianapolis – it’s fury over these water-guzzling, air-polluting behemoths and the tech oligarchs imposing them.

The enemy within.

Over the last year, intensifying waves of local opposition to big tech’s datacenter buildout have surged into a nationwide tsunami of resistance…

Today, three-quarters of Americans oppose local datacenter development, a swing of more than 30 points in just a year. More than 500 counties and municipalities have passed datacenter bans or moratoria, while dozens of proposed projects have been killed outright. And the issue has come to define some of the highest-profile political races in the country. In the battle for US Senate in Ohio, populist Democrat Sherrod Brown has made Republican senator Jon Husted’s support of datacenters the centerpiece of his campaign, prompting warnings from the National Republican senatorial committee that “datacenters are the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck”.

People protest during a news conference near the construction site of ‘The Barn’ datacenter, developed by Related Digital for Oracle and OpenAI, in Saline Township, Michigan, on 30 July 2026. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

The movement could constitute the best opportunity we’ve had in generations to truly shake up American politics, by redirecting the partisan anger that oligarchic forces have long used to divide regular Americans and channeling that energy instead against the billionaires that are actually the cause of so many of our shared problems.

People are realizing that the left-to-right divide isn’t as important as the divide between the working class and big corporate interests

The datacenters have finally given voters a concrete reason to rise up against authoritarianism.

The political science term for this strategy, coined by Jennifer McCoy and Murat Somer, is “transformative repolarization”. McCoy and Somer argue that opponents of authoritarianism need to redraw the lines of contestation that define their politics – to shift the “us versus them” struggle from, for example, a left-to-right polarization, to a different axis of conflict that can bring a large majority of the public together against real structural threats.

“On many issues, people come in with a baked-in partisan lens that influences their thinking,” said Ben Inskeep, program director at CAC. “On datacenters, we don’t have those firm camps formed. And so we’re seeing broad concern from Republicans, Democrats and everyone else on the political spectrum. We’re seeing folks saying, ‘Hey, I might be a Maga Republican and you might be a liberal yahoo from the big city, but if you’re coming to our community to help us fight this datacenter, you’re my best friend.’”

Westfield, Massachusetts, residents applaud as their city council votes in favor of a temporary moratorium on the construction of a datacenter within the city on 6 July 2026. Photograph: Boston Globe/Getty Images

This is an issue powerful enough to give Democrats the Senate.

An organizer I spoke with who’s been opposing datacenter construction in Texas noted a similar dynamic playing out in his state. “I’ve never seen anything that mobilizes this many rural Texans before,” he told me. “Folks are starting to get politicized through this work. They’re realizing when they reach out to their state reps, their state senators, that these people are not batting for them. They’re batting for the tech oligarchs. The electoral implications of this process should be obvious. But for anyone too thick to draw their own conclusions, voters themselves are starting to get quite explicit. When MS Now asked a woman in Hood county, Texas, which is 80% Republican, “you’re willing to forgo every conservative issue and let the Senate fall into the hands of Democrats if that’s what it takes to kill datacenters?”, her response was immediate: “Yep. My entire community’s going to break rank.”

What remains to be seen is whether Democrats will seize this opportunity – or let Republicans regain the initiative.

And all of this is for what? Though the development of datacenters creates temporary construction work, once developed, the facilities do not provide communities with significant long-term jobs. The only thing these sites produce (other than many shades of pollution) is added compute for a technology that we’ve all been told will soon put billions of people out of work. In the meantime, as we wait to see whether that dystopian future materializes or it was all an economy-wrecking bubble, AI is largely being experienced as the thing making the internet more annoying, our jobs more stressful, surveillance more terrifying, and big tech billionaires – already widely despised – more powerful than ever. It’s not hard to understand why this doesn’t constitute a very compelling case for datacenters.

What it does provide is a perfect canvas on which to illustrate the broader problems with our political and economic system: how a few individuals have all the money and power to control the decisions that impact our lives. “Datacenters are the physical manifestation of the greed and the hubris and the power of the AI oligarchs,” Gustafson said. “That gets people thinking about why we are allowing these tech billionaires to just run roughshod over our state.

With Deal in Venezuela, US Government Suddenly Plans to Become a Fossil Fuels Major

Financial Times

Delcy Rodríguez, Venezuela’s acting president, signed the deal with US secretary of state Marco Rubio and defence secretary Pete Hegseth © Bloomberg

Scott: So what was Trump’s Venezuela gambit all about? At this point it is clear there was no clear plan or design at the outset—it was a spontaneous act done because Trump thought it would play well to the MAGA base. But “taking their oil” was a Trump object from the outset, however vague. Now that goal is taking clear form for the first time, as Trump signs a deal with the Caracas regime for some 63 billion barrels of oil (in reserves), what Trump proudly proclaimed as “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY” on his Truth Social account.

Major US media thus far have been faithful stenographers to the White House, not seriously examining two facets of this deal that demand attention.

First, what does this mean for the US relationship with Venezuela? It reveals that this relationship is very much like that of a major-league crime overlord, the capo di tutti capi, to a subsidiary gang leader. The ultimate capo always gets his cut, and the underboss is obliged to pay it out—unless he can manage a gang war that would take the capo out. This is Trump’s cut from the kleptocrats in Caracas, for the moment at least. Will it withstand scrutiny in legal or diplomatic terms? Of course not. But the Trump/Rubio attitude is simple: who cares.

Second, what is the significance of this deal in purely commercial terms? As oil industry mavens know, there is a reason why these oil fields are undeveloped—and that is that they are uniquely undesirable on the global stage. The cost of extraction and refining is huge (see chart below). This is why major fossil fuels industry CEOs said flatly “no” when Trump offered them this deal in the beginning. For Trump, this is all about bravado, not about serious business.

In the back of Trump’s mind, no doubt, is Iran. This is the solution he would want from Iran: take some of their oil reserves. It’s not going to happen, but it does help demonstrate that late 19th century imperialist motives are very much the essence of Trump’s foreign policy.

Donald Trump has said the US has struck a deal to gain majority control of more than 65bn barrels of oil in Venezuela.

The US president described the agreement between US secretary of state Marco Rubio, defence secretary Pete Hegseth and Venezuelan interim president Delcy Rodríguez as “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY!” on Truth Social on Friday night.

“This Historic Transaction MORE THAN DOUBLES American Oil Reserves, greatly increases our Oil Supply, and will substantially lower Gas Prices for all Americans, long into the future, while helping to continue to set Venezuela on a course toward Tremendous Success and Great Prosperity,” Trump said on his social media platform.

“This Transaction will greatly strengthen the already growing relationship between Venezuela and the United States!”

A White House official claimed the US had gained 55 per cent of the “effective output of a new private joint venture that will be the second-largest private oil company by reserves in the world” after Saudi Aramco.

The official said the joint project of the US government and an “experienced private operator in Venezuela” would have 100-year concessions for oilfields totalling 65bn barrels of proven reserves.

Rubio said the deal would bring “nearly $100bn in private investment” to Venezuela and “drive the reconstruction” of its economy.

The announcement of the oil deal comes as the Trump administration faces growing public frustration over rising petrol and diesel prices ahead of November’s midterm elections to decide control of Congress.

The Venezuelan government did not respond to a request for comment.

One source close to the Venezuelan government said “a major agreement has been reached establishing the operational management framework for 17-21 oilfields, which involves a significant investment in drilling rigs to boost oil production”.

In January, the US captured former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife during a night-time military raid in Caracas. They are set to go on trial next year in Manhattan federal court on drug trafficking charges. Former vice-president Rodríguez became interim president after Maduro’s removal.

“This initiative is the result of strengthening relations between Venezuela and the United States, and it will facilitate a significant flow of investment aimed at recovering and reconstructing strategic infrastructure for the development of our hydrocarbons industry,” Rodríguez said.

Since Maduro’s arrest, Washington has lifted sanctions enabling US companies to invest in Venezuela’s oil sector. Venezuelan authorities in January also passed a hydrocarbons law that drastically weakens state oil firm PDVSA and allows private companies to operate wells directly.

The Trump administration has repeatedly said that stabilising Venezuela’s economy is the first part of a three-phase plan for a political transition in the South American country, which has been under revolutionary socialist rule since Hugo Chávez was elected president in 1998.

Oil majors Repsol, Eni and Shell have made agreements with Venezuela’s government this year, while Chevron, which has operated in Venezuela for a century, increased its stakes in its joint ventures with PDVSA in April.

Analysts said many questions remained unanswered about the details of the agreement and warned that any significant boost in production would require billions of dollars of investment and years of development.

Read more

A Criminal Probe of Fifa’s Infantino / Bill Gates is Very Afraid / Qatari’s Learn Trump Is Too Expensive to Buy / States Challenge Prediction Markets / Europe Should Follow Canada’s Lead

Uefa prepares criminal complaint against Fifa’s Infantino

Financial Times

Infantino is facing pressure to resign over the affair. Photo: Reuters

Scott: Let us not lose sight of the fact that all of the criminal conduct enumerated here relates to Infantino’s dealing with Trump, in which the crimes were, in each case, actually initiated by Trump (indeed, the Uefa investigators appear to believe that the award of the “Fifa Peace Prize” to Trump is just a part of the total corrupt bargain). Nevertheless, no investigation into any of this has been undertaken or even suggested by any US federal or state law enforcement agency, nor has any oversight inquiry been held in Congress or by any agency with oversight authority. All of which points to the current environment in the United States, in which corruption of the most outrageous sort is not merely indulged, but actively encouraged. America was once a democracy. It is now a kleptocracy.

European football’s governing body Uefa said it is preparing a criminal complaint against Gianni Infantino over the Fifa president’s failed plan to sell a stake in the World Cup to private investors.

In US court filings, Uefa said it was seeking to recover documents from Joshua Kushner, his investment firm Thrive Capital and Fifa’s Americas arm, as it presses ahead with efforts to oust Infantino from his role at world football’s governing body.

Thrive Eternal, an associated investment vehicle, had been lined up as the lead investor in a new commercial entity called Fifa Forward Enterprise (FFE). Joshua Kushner, founder of both Thrive firms, is the brother of Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Infantino’s plan sought to raise $4bn by selling a 20 per cent stake in Fifa’s commercial rights, but the implied $20bn valuation of the proposed entity was “absurdly low”, Uefa said in the documents seen by the FT.

Uefa was “preparing to bring criminal claims in Switzerland against Infantino and possibly other Fifa officials and advisers for criminal mismanagement”, the documents said. Thrive and Fifa did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The legal move comes as Uefa seeks to keep up the pressure on Infantino over the proposal, which would have split Fifa’s commercial activities from its role as the game’s governing body and rulemaker.

Be Afraid, Very Afraid

New York Times

Charles: Bill Gates joins the AI minority warning that the mad gazillion dollar dash to AI supremacy could easily be the road to perdition.

In an interview with The New York Times, Gates said people “who understand how good this stuff is” are “very worried.” But they won’t say anything in public about the dangers of unregulated AI because it would be bad for business: “Hey, man, don’t say that. It’s bad for us — the next trillion dollars we’re trying to raise.”

Gates said the industry is ignoring what used to be bright red lines for caution, including AI escaping the control of its creators or making recipes for bioweapons.

Even Google DeepMind’s chief executive, Demis Hassabis has called for the U.S. to create an AI watchdog to mitigate potential risks. “Nobody in the world knows for sure what is going to happen from here, and even the experts disagree,” Hassabis wrote in an online post. “When there is a large degree of uncertainty and the stakes are this high, proceeding with cautious optimism is the sensible and correct strategy.”

But the tech brothers effectively purchased Donald Trump before he was inaugurated, and he has obliterated all the AI regulations in an Joe Biden’s extremely sensible Executive Order 14110.

The words of Peter Thiel’s former collaborator Eliezer Yudkowsky are still the ones to remember on this subject:

Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die. Not as in “maybe possibly some remote chance,” but as in “that is the obvious thing that would happen.”

Eliezer Yudkowsky

The Qataris Gave Trump a Luxurious Jet. In Exchange He Crippled Their Country.

The Atlantic

Scott: Across the Gulf area, the US forged over a period of several decades an impressive alliance system that includes 18 US military installations of some significance. All of this can now be counted as a casualty of Trump’s war on Iran. The Gulf Arabs lavished fabulous gifts on Trump and his major surrogates, particularly Jared Kushner (whose take appears to approach some $3 billion) and Donald Trump Jr and his brother Eric. They assumed this would buy them not simply access, but substantive input on issues of importance to them, including the war with their neighbor, Iran. But that’s not how it has worked out. Israel is Trump’s full (and often direction-giving) partner in this war, but the Gulf Arabs are not really viewed as partners at all. They get no meaningful notice of Trump’s often rash and ill-considered actions, and the US devotes no serious resources to their defense against Iranian sabotage, missiles and drones—making them into Iran’s favored whipping boys. And that’s particularly the case for nations like Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia which are home to large-scale US military installations.

US media have largely ignored the Gulf Arab’s plight in this conflict, because it doesn’t figure on the White House-supplied list of talking points that provides the outline for their coverage. But in this masterful essay in The Atlantic, Shane Harris offers a superb survey of Trump’s dealings with Qatar, and what they got in exchange for their lavish gifts. It all starts with the tale of Trump’s new AF1:

The Qataris knew Trump would want the plane. They understood the man, and his taste. It sat in the same aesthetic register as the comparatively puny “Trump Force One,” the gold-heavy Boeing 757 that he had flown as a private citizen. They also knew that Trump didn’t like the aging, baby-blue 747s that had been carrying presidents since 1990. He’d ordered two new planes from Boeing in 2018, but they were years behind schedule. Trump wanted the 11-bathroom Qatari plane, repainted in a red-white-and-blue color scheme. And he wanted it in time for a flyover on America’s 250th birthday.

This was an absurd demand. Air Force One is meant to serve as an airborne military command post. The Qatari jet would have to be stripped to the studs and retrofitted with encrypted-communications equipment, as well as special material to shield it against the radiological blast of a nuclear weapon, and a variety of countermeasures to foil missiles and rockets. It had taken a Parisian design firm four years to complete the plane’s interiors. It could take American engineers at least that long to convert the jet into a flying fortress.

But these were details to be worked out later. Or not. The Qataris drew up the paperwork for a government-to-government sale. But they should have seen Trump’s next move coming.

People close to Trump—it’s still not clear who—suggested to the Qataris that instead of selling the plane, they could donate it to the United States. A gift. A freebie from “friends” who had already put hundreds of millions of dollars into Trump’s son-in-law’s private-equity firm and bought a debt-laden Manhattan hotel belonging to Steve Witkoff, his Middle East special envoy, for $623 million. That’s to say nothing of the $8 billion they’d spent to build the Americans an air base—the biggest U.S. military base in the Middle East—or their plans to spend $10 billion more to enhance and maintain it. What was another $400 million, for a plane that the president so dearly loved?

Even some Qatari leaders were surprised by the president’s gall. But they did what they’ve always done when an American official has asked them for something dubious—politically, ethically, or even legally. They said yes.

It’s not easy to buy good press, though the Qataris have tried. But it also takes real effort to generate the kind of bad press the plane brought to a country whose name many Americans probably can’t pronounce correctly (it’s kah-tar). The bipartisan outrage in Washington was incandescent. The plane was a flying emolument, an obvious constitutional violation. “Only a FOOL would not accept this gift on behalf of our Country,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. But what Trump couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see is that only a fool would view the plane as anything other than a massive bribe, especially given that Trump said publicly that he planned to have it transferred to his presidential library once he leaves office…

The Qataris play every side, and many of their partners resent them for it. Nonetheless, for decades their experience seemed to show that they really could just buy their national security, along with global influence and even a cosmopolitan culture. Trump must initially have seemed to them to be an ideal partner. And indeed, just four months after the delivery of his airplane, in September 2025, the president signed an executive order that ostensibly guaranteed American protection.

But recently, Qatar’s leaders haven’t gotten what they paid for. In February, the United States attacked Iran with practically no warning to the Qataris, despite the fact that they host a major U.S. military base. Then Iran attacked Qatar, badly damaging the country’s natural-gas facilities, the main source of its wealth. Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, the only route available to Qatar to export its natural gas, which must be liquefied for transport and is complex to deliver. The country’s neighbors can move oil over land and are planning to build new pipelines now that Iran controls the waterway. But Qatar is stuck, uniquely afflicted by the misadventures of the guy who took their airplane.

In Trump, the Qataris had met a man who could not be bought. He could be paid, and expected to be. But the security the Qataris hoped for turned out to be a protection racket. A man who doesn’t remember yesterday never asks Are we friends? He only wants to know, What have you done for me lately?

Read more

Pay for Play at the Pentagon / Meta’s Mega Settlement / Israel’s AI-Driven PR Campaign / Trade War Drives Up Toilet Paper Prices / A New Gigantic Telescope / After The Gold Rush

Trump Corruption Watch

Boss of Trump Jr-backed start-up donated to Republicans after winning US contract

Financial Times

Scott: Pay-to-play in the Trump administration. This is how it works. And this is how Pete Hegseth holds on to his job, even as he is considered the worst performing secretary of defense in US history.

The boss of a defence manufacturing start-up backed by Donald Trump Jr’s investment firm donated almost $450,000 to Republican causes just months after winning a $900mn contract from the US government.

Hadrian chief executive Chris Power gave the maximum individual donation allowed to a number of Republican National Committee entities in July, after Trump Jr’s firm increased its investment in the company as part of a $1.4bn funding round.

Other executives at Trump Jr’s firm, 1789 Capital — whose portfolio companies have won several government contracts — gave a combined $300,000 to the RNC in the same month.

Hadrian is the latest 1789-linked company to prosper since Donald Trump won re-election as US president. At least four of 1789’s other portfolio companies have won contracts from Trump’s administration, while other groups backed by the president’s eldest son Donald Jr have received regulatory relief.

Last year, the FT reported that a little-known rare earths start-up, Vulcan Elements, secured a $620mn loan from the Pentagon, three months after 1789 invested in the company. Vulcan’s chief executive and officials at the Pentagon and commerce department said Trump Jr was not involved in the company’s deal with the government. Trump Jr told the FT he had no involvement in negotiations with the government on behalf of 1789’s portfolio companies.

Rocket propulsion start-up Firehawk Aerospace, backed by 1789, received more than $10mn worth of contracts from the US Air Force, while AI group Cerebras Systems, another 1789-backed company, signed a $45mn deal with the Pentagon. Quantum computing company PsiQuantum — a 1789 investment — also won more than $10mn in air force contracts last year, and this year secured a $100mn equity stake from the Trump administration.

Last October, the FT revealed drone maker Unusual Machines, in which Trump Jr held a multimillion-dollar stake, won its biggest contract from the Pentagon. Unusual Machines said Trump Jr was not involved in the deal. Representatives for the president’s son have repeatedly said he is not involved in any contract negotiations with the US government.

META Settles Landmark Suit For $18 Billion

The Wall Street Journal

Charles: In a landmark settlement which marks the first time a social media company has agreed to nationwide guardrails in America for users under the age of 18, Meta platforms will pay up to $18 billion to 48 state attorneys general because of social media’s harm to teenagers.

The company will pay $12.1 billion over ten years to end the trial that started last week, accusing it of purposely designing its platforms to addict children. The company will pay an additional $5 billion if its competitors agree to a similar settlement.

Meta’s chief legal officer, C.J.Mahoney, called on YouTube, TikTok and other social media platforms to follow Meta’s example and agree to the same restrictions, because it “will only work if all our peers join us. Because teens move fluidly across dozens of apps, we need an industry-wide solution.”

The company agreed to an additional payment of more than $1 billion to Texas, and a $459 million settlement to end outstanding privacy claims from the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The key app changes required by the settlement included

• A default two-hour daily time limit and nighttime blocks on the apps for users under 18

• Muting all platform notifications by default during school hours

• Strict new “age assurance” technology to keep children under 13 off the platforms entirely

• Limiting Meta features that psychologists link to negative social comparisons, such as beauty filters and a tallying of the “like” button clicks.

• Bringing in an outside auditor to guarantee long-term safety compliance.

“Today, we have secured a settlement with Meta that will make social media less dangerous for our kids and make a world of a difference for children and their families,” said Rob Bonta, the attorney general of California. “Meta has agreed to make massive transformations that will reduce the risk of harm from its platforms – and will do it within months.”

The settlement is the latest example of state attorneys general assuming the regulatory role which has been completely abandoned by the Federal government under the Trump administration. Big Tech companies have proven that the right amount of money contributed to enough Trump-related entities can prevent nearly all Federal regulation of their industry.

Meta had many reasons to seek a settlement to end the trial before Federal District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California. Last month, it disclosed that it had spent about $2 billion in the second quarter alone to handle its legal challenges. And New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez had previously convinced a Santa Fe jury that the company was liable for 75,000 violations of the state’s consumer protection law and ordered it to pay $375 million in civil penalties. A judge added another $567 million in August after ruling that Meta had created a “public nuisance” similar to air pollution, bringing New Mexico’s tally against the company to roughly $942 million.

In a separate Los Angeles trial earlier this year Meta and Google’s YouTube were jointly ordered to pay a 20 year-old plaintiff $6 million. She claimed that addictive platform features like infinite scrolling and video autoplay led to compulsive use resulting in severe depression, anxiety, and body dysmorphia.

The case settled yesterday was brought by the state attorneys general of California, Kentucky, New Jersey and Colorado. It sought $200 billion and alleged that Meta violated their states’ consumer-protection laws and the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, commonly known as COPPA, by knowingly making its platforms addictive and going after young users.

The Wall Street Journal noted the company is still facing thousands of lawsuits that have been filed by school districts and individual plaintiffs alleging social-media harms. The suits are aimed at holding it accountable for the design of its products, Instagram and Facebook, via a novel legal product-liability argument.

Israel’s Latest PR Operation Targeting Americans Features AI and Bots

The Guardian

A crow perches on an Israeli flag near an empty beach along the Tel Aviv coastline in April 2026.

Photograph: Ahmad Gharabli/AFP/Getty Images

Scott: Recognizing that it faces an increasingly difficult time with US voters, and particularly with youth, Israel has strongly increased its spending on US influence campaigns. One of its latest projects involves a fake US think tank called the Hanover Institute for Public Policy. The Guardian takes us on a tour of this effort, which is heavily driven by AI.

A pro-Israel messaging website badged with the name of a thinktank that does not exist has published more than half a million words in nine days, built on a commercial platform that promises to optimize content so that AI chatbots will cite it.

The site gives Israel’s position on subjects including the torture of Palestinian prisoners, Israeli war crimes and whether Israel has deliberately starvedPalestinians in Gaza, all presented as neutral research.

Read more

Vive La France! / America’s Secret Police / IDF Whistleblower Reveals the Truth About the Bombing of a Gaza Hospital / Trump thinks Troops Can Boost Bonds / Putin’s Assassinations / The Earth’s Shadow / Dolly Parton RIP

The HKR Look Back

Aux Armes, Citoyens!

Charles: In 1940 the Nazis invaded Norway, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and the Channel Islands. By the end of that year, it was almost impossible for any civilized person in Europe to feel any optimism about the future.

And yet, less than four years later–82 years ago this week–Free French Forces liberated Paris.

The tiny handful of optimists of 1940 had been vindicated.

On the evening of August 24, 1944, Charles de Gaulle gave a five minute speech on the radio which set the tone for all of his future efforts to bind up the wounds of his tortured nation:

Why should we hide the emotion which seizes us all, men and women, who are here, at home, in Paris that stood up to liberate itself and that succeeded in doing this with its own hands? No! We will not hide this deep and sacred emotion. These are minutes which go beyond each of our poor lives. Paris! Paris outraged! Paris broken! Paris martyred! But Paris liberated! Liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the help of the French armies, with the support and the help of all France, of the France that fights, of the only France, of the real France, of the eternal France! With those words, de Gaulle immortalizes all those who had fought the Germans as the only “real” Frenchmen of “eternal France.”

Charles de Gaulle in front of the Arc de Triomphe, August 25, 1944

The next day, de Gaulle defies American commanders who want to use General Leclerc’s troops to guard the northeast approaches to the city. The French general concedes that militarily, the Americans are correct, but he insists, “We must have this parade,” and he needs Leclerc’s troops to provide security for the huge festivity. “Today we were to revive, by the spectacle of its joy and the evidence of its liberty, the self-awareness of a people who yesterday were crushed by defeat and scattered in servitude.” At three o’clock in the afternoon, de Gaulle lays a huge wreath on the tomb of the unknown soldier under the Arc de Triomphe and relights the eternal flame, the first Frenchman to do so without German minders watching since the Occupation had begun four years earlier. De Gaulle thinks Parisians are watching him “as though I were the materialization of a dream.” Shots ring out as de Gaulle leaves the Champs-Élysées to turn into the place de la Concorde, and thousands dive to the sidewalks, although de Gaulle thinks most of the fire is pointed up into the air. The same thing happens againwhen he arrives in front of Notre-Dame, and it even continues inside the cathedral. But no one has ever been more certain that he is a man of destiny than he is. He wrote about himself on this day, “Since each of all of those here had chosen Charles de Gaulle in his heart as the refuge against his agony and the symbol of his hopes, we must permit the man to be seen…so that the national unity should shine forth at this sight.” And so de Gaulle walks straight down the nave of the cathedral, never flinching at the sounds of gunfire.

–The Cost of Courage

It is that handful of 1940’s optimists who make it possible for me to remain optimistic about America’s future.

As my father always said, “La Marseillaise is the only one that really works.”

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The Scope of ICE Surveillance Operations Targeting Americans in Minnesota is Exposed

The Guardian

People look on from a skyway as demonstrators march during a “Nationwide Shutdown” demonstration against ICE enforcement on 30 January 2026 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

Scott: Trump sought and the MAGA Congress granted a total of $145 billion for ICE and its operations in 2025 and 2026, a sum that exceeds the military budgets of all of America’s NATO allies. The funding is described as designed to fund the removal of “illegal immigrants” from the United States. But only a modest part of the budget is actually used for that purpose. A significantly large amount is being expended for the creation, outfitting and intelligence gathering support for America’s first secret police force that fully meets the definition. As is the case with other secret police forces around the world, the American one, ICE, is under the direct control of the Leader, guided out of the White House. Its major preoccupation is identifying the enemies of the regime, and taking steps to silence them. The experience of failed ICE operations in Minnesota is now leading to discovery of just how that works. As is the case of most totalitarian states, the secret police uses undercover agents in an effort to incite unlawful conduct as a pretext for enforcement actions. The Guardian’s Sam Levin reports.

Newly disclosed records reveal how undercover federal agents posed as concerned community members to spy on residents and activists who opposed Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) crackdown in Minnesota.

Internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) files, disclosed in federal court and reviewed by the Guardian, document the actions of several undercover agents, including one who went by the username “peanutbutterjelly” in Signal chats with activists. The documents show that the officer kept records of Signal conversations, screenshotting chats about protest plans, and offering to help with fundraising efforts and volunteer recruitment.

Another undercover agent took photos at demonstrations and protest planning meetings, including of demonstrators in frog costumes, a poster that mocked JD Vance with heavy eye makeup, and a protester writing an anti-ICE message in chalk. Other DHS agents trailed a protester as he left his home, got coffee and went to a church.

The records were released as part of the Department of Justice’s ongoing prosecution of 15 Minneapolis protesters, accused of being part of a “conspiracy” to “impede” ICE.

A tranche of internal DHS files disclosed in the case earlier this month revealed DHS extensively spied on prominent leftwing groups and protesters as part of its investigation into anti-ICE activity. DHS called the investigation “Operation Puppet Master”, the files showed, sending undercover agents to community meetings, infiltrating Signal chats and obtaining financial records of left-leaning non-profit organizations and unions.

The surveillance escalated during widespread anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January. Civil rights groups and the protesters’ attorneys have argued the government was surveilling people without justification and is criminalizing lawful protest activity.

DHS and the DoJ did not immediately respond to inquiries on Tuesday. In response to questions about the previous records released in the case, a DHS spokesperson said earlier this month that HSI, its branch that carried out the investigations, “does not comment on the existence or status of specific on-going investigations, nor on investigative methods”.

Undercover agent 9843, who went by the name “peanutbutterjelly” in the Signal chats of organizers, worked for homeland security investigations, the investigative arm of ICE, records show. In December 2025, the agent was deployed to “participate” in virtual and in-person meetings, records show. The agent’s objective was to “gather intelligence regarding any organized networks of conspirators – operating online and in person – who may be providing material support to violent opportunists and individuals engaged in impeding federal law enforcement”, DHS summarized in a February report.

The undercover agent attended a virtual “ICE watch” training on 3 December during which community members discussed how to monitor ICE officers’ activities. Organizers at the meeting “urged participants to observe nonviolently and obey law enforcement commands”, DHS said. The agent attended another “legal observer” training in person four days later, reporting there were no signs of “threats to public safety”.

IDF Soldier Blows the Whistle on IDF Disinformation About the Bombing of Gaza’s Nasser Hospital

Le Monde

Scott: One year ago, on Aug 25, 2025, one of the worst war crimes in the history of the Gaza conflict was perpetrated by Israeli forces through an attack on what was then the Gaza strip’s principal hospital, which Israel decided to put out of operation. Twenty-two persons were killed and dozens seriously injured. Responding to international uproar over the event, the Israeli government scrambled to describe the hospital as a center for Hamas operations and to describe victims as Hamas agents. Now an IDF soldier has come forward to put the lie to Israel’s claims about a Hamas presence at the hospital, and to describe the frenzied effort to cobble together claims after the attack.

One year after the bombing that killed 22 people, including five journalists, at Nasser Hospital in the south of the Gaza Strip, an Israeli soldier has told several media outlets, including Le Monde, how the Israeli army pulls out all stops to link bombing victims to Hamas.

It is a rare account from a military source who spoke out to shed light on one aspect of the information war: How the Israeli army responds and organizes itself when there is suspicion of a war crime, in order to counter and minimize the impact of published footage or information. Under strict conditions of anonymity, the soldier described to Israeli non-governmental organization (NGO) Breaking the Silence, as well as to several media outlets including Le Monde, the standard method used by the military, drawing on a significant episode from the war in Gaza.

Shortly after 10 am on the morning of August 25, 2025, an Israeli military strike hit a building at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, in the south of the Palestinian territory. A few minutes later, the hospital compound was targeted a second time. In total, 22 people were killed and 50 injured. Among them were healthcare workers and five journalists, including correspondents from the Associated Press and Reuters news agencies. From outside, a camera recorded the second strike, which hit rescuers and journalists as they were helping victims of the initial explosion.

The attack sparked strong international outcry. The soldier who spoke out described the method used by Israel to try to contain the consequences in international public opinion. First, the military claimed that the target on the hospital roof was a camera used by Hamas to monitor the movements of Israeli soldiers. The claim was not true, as a Reuters investigation later showed. Above all, the military initiated what it called a “retrospective incrimination”: making every effort to link the victims of this double strike to Hamas, the group responsible.

Read more

SCOTUS Sows More Chaos / Bessent announces Impotent D-Day for Iran / Washington Post Columnist Gets Her Job Back / Kagan says Iran Is Gulf’s Supreme Power / New Mexico Continues Funding for Gender Affirmation / Netanyahu Wants War With Turkey / Putin Re-nationalizes The Oil Business

SCOTUS Rules For Chaos

The Guardian and The Hill

Charles: In a wildly irresponsible opinion, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court lifted one injunction against Donald Trump’s outrageous executive order regulating mail in ballots, but left another one in place.

So the 6-3 majority guaranteed nothing but chaos less than one hundred days before the fall election.

The Court explicitly said nothing about the legality of what Trump is trying to do:

The Court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful. On that score, time will tell.

Associate Justice Ketani Brown Jackson

The superb Ketanji Brown Jackson, who will be remembered as Joe Biden’s finest legacy, excoriated her conservative colleagues for needlessly injecting chaos into this year’s elections.

“It also lets another shoe drop in the Kafkaesque nightmare that our precedents have been steadily creating for certain plaintiffs who seek to bring election-related challenges.”

Jackson said her colleagues lacked “situational awareness” in ruling that blue states needed to wait for the U.S. Postal Service to at least begin implementing Trump’s policy before challenging it. She called it a “catch-me-if-you-can” approach.

“When the Government’s obvious goal is to interfere with the Plaintiff States’ practices and prerogatives in a manner that the Constitution does not authorize, it is both a serious legal error and a grave misuse of our equitable emergency powers to let the Executive proceed even one step further.”

Democratic minority leader Hakeem Jeffries echoed Jackson:

The sycophantic Supreme Court majority’s decision in the vote-by-mail case is sowing chaos in service to Donald Trump’s effort to undermine our free and fair elections. The Trump-aligned justices on the supreme court did not and cannot give the President the power to decide how states run elections or who gets to vote by mail. The legal fight against Donald Trump’s unlawful executive order is not over, the order does not override the Constitution and the power to regulate elections remains with states and the Congress.

Bessent Declares D-Day for Iran, World Laughs in Response

The Times

Scott: After threatening bombing attacks that would destroy Iran’s civilization forever and making leaks suggesting that he is discussing using nuclear weapons with his advisors, Trump has turned to Scott Bessent for the next volley. Bessent dramatically announced “D-Day for Iran,” and then proceeded to itemize a series of economic sanctions which are remarkably similar to those that were in place when Trump took office, and at which he scoffed.

But the bottom line is clear: unless China, Russia and India abide by these sanctions, few believe they will amount to much. And not one of Iran’s three allies is signalling its intent to do so.

The bigger question is whether the Trump bros and their crypto friends who have run up immense profits from sanctions evasion for the benefit of the IRGC will abide by them. I doubt that. Far more likely, they will see the sanctions as another opportunity for profitmaking with impunity.

The US has pledged the “economic ­asphyxiation” of the Iranian regime in an escalation of sanctions that would widen the conflict to all of Tehran’s trade partners, raising the prospect of a fresh clash with China.

Scott Bessent, the US Treasury secretary, said that all nations continuing to do business with Iran were being given timelines to cut ties in what he called D-Day for Operation Economic Outcast.

Bessent said the aim was to “sever every economic lifeline” for Iran in “the single greatest financial offensive ever marshalled against an adversary”. However, he declined to specify the time frame.

Tehran derided the economic offensive as “empty boasts” and said its trading partners, which include not only China but also Russia, India, Turkey and Iraq, would ignore Bessent’s threat to make them pariahs and exclude them from the US dollar system.

“In the Second World War, D-Day marked the historic beginning of a campaign with our allies to target and drive the enemy from its positions, including those in third countries,” Bessent said in a press conference at the US Treasury. “In that same spirit, we are launching an economic onslaught against Iran’s financial connections around the globe. Our objective is to sever every economic lifeline that sustains this tyrannical regime until Tehran stands alone.”

When a reporter pointed out that D-Day was not the threat of an invasion nor the setting of a timeline for Germany, Bessent replied: “Well, we are giving everyone the opportunity to remedy bad behaviour … we believe that a warning shot and a level set of expectations is appropriate. If people do not want to meet our expectations, then we expect, and they should expect, that they will leave the dollar system.”

Bessent was asked repeatedly how his threat of a “zero leakage approach” would apply to China, after President Trump’s bruising tariff conflict that has resulted in an uneasy truce before a planned visit to the US by President Xi next month. “We want to make clear here today that no one is above the reach of US sanctions,” Bessent said. “That if they facilitate transactions and are part of the ecosystem that turns Iranian oil into money into repression, they will be targeted.”

A Little Good News (part 1)

Washington Post Ordered to Reinstate Fired Columnist

New York Times

Charles: A funny thing happened after a wave of firings of people who described Charlie Kirk accurately after he was murdered.

A lot of them got their jobs back and collected six figure settlements from their employers.

The latest victory for the First Amendment went to Karen Attiah, a veteran Washington Post columnist who was fired in September after her social media posts about Kirk.

Yesterday an arbitrator ordered her rehired with back pay.

The arbitrator found that the Post “did not have good and sufficient cause” to terminate Ms. Attiah and “violated” its labor agreement, “The Washington Post failed to establish the grievant engaged in gross misconduct.”

Washington Post Columnist Karen Attiah

The Post said yesterday “it respects the arbitration process.” The paper made no further comment.

The Post fired the columnist after Attiah posted on Bluesky, “Refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that exposed violence is not the same as violence..Part of what keeps America so violent is the insistence that people perform care empty goodness and absolution for white men who espouse hatred and violence.”

Yesterday Attiah posted on Substack, “My God. I fought the Washington Post—and won.”

As I reported here on June 24th, after being fired by the state of Iowa for her online comments about Kirk, Maria Ruttenberg got her job back and $125,000 in damages.

And Brittney Brown, formerly a biologist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, was fired after reposting a satirical account that pretended to be a whale: “they care exactly as much [about the shooting of Kirk] as charlie kirk cared about children being shot in their classrooms, which is to say, not at all.” She was fired a day after the right-wing influencer account Libs of TikTok, which was spearheaded by Chaya Raichik, highlighted Brown and called for her firing. She settled with the state for $485,000 and left the agency.

Read more

Trump’s War of the Week On Canada / Data Centers Galvanize The Midterms / Jeffries’ Insane Meeting with Kushner / Trump’s Plans For a Fake Emergency / Mariam Abu Dagga is the 274th Journalist Murdered in Israel

Trump’s War With Canada

Financial Times

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks after withdrawing negotiators from trade talks with US © Reuters

Scott: America invaded Canada twice with the objective of conquest and absorption: the first time was in 1775, the second during the War of 1812. Both invasions ended in abject failure for the American forces, which is why they are carefully excised from high school history texts in the United States. Most Americans react with a blank expression when told of them.

The third US effort to subjugate Canada is underway now, and the US media is remarkably reticent to report on it, seeking to mischaracterize everything that is going on as some sort of petty disagreement about tariffs.

Not so in Canada, nor indeed the balance of the planet. “We cannot accept what they’ve offered and we will not give what they’ve asked” says Prime Minister Mark Carney in remarkably lucid and compelling remarks delivered to his fellow countrymen. “We are at war,” he concluded.

A detached review of the course of the talks with Trump’s representatives underscores Carney’s take. After months of professional back-and-forth on conventional trade issues, an agreement seemed at hand. Then Trump introduced an entirely new set of points to the negotiations which had the cumulative effect of gutting Canada’s sovereignty as a nation and reducing it to the status of a de facto dependency of the United States. No Canadian leader could ever accept such dictated terms, and Carney did not. He appears to have a historically united Canada at his back, a country that fully recognizes the gravity of the threat that Trump and his regime present.

Canada was “at war” over trade with the US after President Donald Trump “miscalculated” by escalating his tariff attack, Prime Minister Mark Carney said.

Carney delivered a defiant address to the nation on Saturday after suspending trade talks with the US overnight, saying the Trump administration had demanded a “bad deal”.

The collapse of talks ushers in a new wave of tariffs on $20bn-worth of Canadian exports on top of existing levies on steel, aluminium, lumber and vehicles.

“You’re at war when you’re attacked, and we got attacked,” Carney told reporters in Ottawa.

Trump underestimated Canada’s resolve to stomach economic hardship in a “miscalculation” that escalated the trade war, he said.

“We cannot accept what they’ve offered and we will not give what they’ve asked,” he added.

Carney said last-minute changes proposed by the US were unacceptable. Ottawa had made no new demands and was “continually disappointed” by US answers to the issues Canadian officials raised as a midnight deadline loomed, he added.

Trump posted on his social network, Truth Social, overnight: “Canada wants the benefits of being a State, without being one!!! They have also charged our great farmers, for many years, massive amounts of Tariffs. No more!!!”...

Carney said Ottawa was willing to lift retaliatory tariffs on strategic sectors, particularly steel and aluminium, if the US “substantially lowered” theirs on Canadian companies. “In exchange for a fair deal, we would encourage our provinces to return US alcohol to the shelves,” he said.

But despite “progress made towards a possible agreement” this week, the US suddenly changed its position, he said. “They asked too much and they offered too little,” he said. “It’s a power play.”

Carney listed numerous concessions Canada made to satisfy the evolving list of US complaints, from issues concerning the fentanyl drug trade to anti-tariff advertisements that had attracted the US president’s ire.

Canada had acted “in good faith to try to find compromise and secure a comprehensive deal in the best interests of both Canadians and Americans”, he said.

Carney said there was “no rationale” for new US demands on the auto industry, adding that they “would make production more uneconomic over time”.

At the eleventh hour, the US also introduced measures to restrict Canada’s ability to seal trade deals with other nations, he said. The US was seeking “exclusive access” to Canada’s critical minerals, which was a new red line, Carney said.

The US had also raised new concerns over perceived trade barriers due to language provisions in French-speaking Quebec, he said.

Carney suggested that tensions among US negotiators fuelled the talks’ breakdown. While Greer led Washington’s side of negotiations, car, aluminium and steel levies also brought the talks under commerce secretary Howard Lutnick’s purview.

Data Centers Are The Hot Issue For The Midterms

New York Times

Charles: The bipartisan uproar against data centers across the country is one of the most encouraging developments of 2026, with 71 percent of Americans telling the Gallup poll they are opposed to their local construction. While Wall Street tycoons debate AI’s future at East Hampton confabs without ever mentioning its environmental impact, ordinary citizens are fiercely aware of what its rollout is already doing to the water supply and electricity grids.

As the Financial Times reported earlier this year, researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory forecast that so-called hyperscaler data centres will consume anywhere between 60bn and 124bn litres (16bn and 33bn gallons) of water on-site each year in 2028. This figure excludes the indirect water use tied to electricity generation, which the lab previously forecast could be as much as 12 times higher than direct consumption.

Last year American electric rates went up by 6 percent, and in states that are already heavy with data centers like Pennsylvania and Virginia, bills rose by 19 and 10 percent.

Of the roughly 100GW of additional electricity capacity that the US is projected to need at peak times by 2030, roughly half will be used by data centres, according to the Department of Energy.

The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy says the newer, AI-focused “hyperscale” data center can use as much power as 100,000 homes or more. Meta’s Hyperion data center in Louisiana, will use more than twice the power of the entire city of New Orleans.

In The New York Times, political reporter Shane Goldmacher hinted at the potential impact of these statistics without ever mentioning any of them. He writes the “fight over data centers is suddenly at the epicenter of the midterm elections” and experts call it “an unusually fast-moving force that is already reshaping races for the House, the Senate and governor’s mansions.”

Goldmacher says “Democrats have chiefly been the ones racing to harness voter anger about data centers,” and then spends most of the rest of the article contradicting that, by citing Republicans who have jumped on the anit-data center bandwagon:

Some Republicans are now using “data center” as an epithet, and casting themselves as the real opponents of corporate tax breaks and unfettered construction. Last week, Mike Rogers, the Republican running for Senate in the key swing state of Michigan, said that he supports a one-year moratorium on data center construction.

On Wednesday, a remarkable memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee warned that data center politics was endangering Senator Jon Husted of Ohio, a Republican. His challenger, Sherrod Brown, the state’s former Democratic senator, has aired millions of dollars of ads, calling Mr. Husted “the face of data centers in Ohio.”

“More than any other thing in this race, data centers are the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck.

Zac McCrary, a Democratic pollster, said that opposing data centers offered Democrats a rare chance to make inroads in rural areas and small towns that are resisting the developments.

“It absolutely shakes up the snow globe on the partisan coalitions in a part of the world where Republicans have been dominant,” he said. “It’s one of the few issues today that does not immediately code as red or blue, left or right.”

In Florida, Representative Byron Donalds, the Republican nominee for governor, spent more than $2 million on one ad in his primary, vowing to “protect” the state from data centers that “jack up utility rates.”

In Michigan, William Lawrence, a progressive activist, rode an anti-data center message to win the Democratic nomination in a key Michigan House seat this month and then immediately made a general election ad targeting Representative Tom Barrett, the Republican incumbent, on the issue.

The next day Mr. Barrett began airing a new data center ad of his own, in which he claimed that “I stood up to my own party and voted against giving your tax dollars to data centers.”

In an interview, Mr. Lawrence, who supports a moratorium, called the ad “outrageous” and said voters would not be satisfied with half measures. Data center opposition, he said, was “number one in terms of intensity” in the district.

Even Texas Governor Greg Abbott has been dampening his own enthusiasm for data centers, after bragging that Google’s $40 billion investment in his state made Texas “the epicenter of A.I. development,” bringing both construction jobs and tax revenues.

But this summer he announced new standards for data centers on water use and electricity and called to end some tax incentives. Earlier this month he directed the state’s utility commission to audit all data centers seeking permits before they could move forward.

With his usual perspicacity, Goldmacher finally uses a quote from Michigan Democratic Congressional candidate William Lawrence, which actually describes the breadth and depth of the opposition to these centers–in the final graph of his story:

“It’s bringing together three-time Trump voters, anti-vaxxers, environmentalists, independents, nonvoters, people who are in our cities, people who are in the rural areas. And it’s bringing together all these people because none of us trust big tech to do right by our communities.”

Inside the Jeffries-Kushner Summit

New York Times

Scott: By holding a secret summit with Jared Kushner in a “quest for common ground,” Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries has provided the most dramatic demonstration yet of his poor judgment. Democrats will now need to scramble to find a new leader in the House.

Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, met privately in recent weeks with Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and top outside adviser, and discussed potential areas of common ground, according to five people with knowledge of the meeting.

The rare engagement was held in a private space in New York City, offered up by a mutual friend of the two men, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting and a third who was briefed on it. They and others were granted anonymity to discuss a meeting about which they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Through aides, neither man would comment on the session, which was described by one person with knowledge of it as a broad conversation on a range of topics. Still, its timing underscored that those around Mr. Trump were well aware of the likelihood of a Democratic-led House, and trying to foster as much of a working relationship as possible before any change. Mr. Jeffries is in line to be the speaker, were Democrats to win the majority.

Assuming, as the political world now does, a Democratic House of Representatives following the November midterms, the first order of business for the new Congress is likely to be investigative work focusing on unprecedented corruption in the Trump administration—which the Financial Times has labelled the most extreme kleptocracy in modern human history. Exhibit A for this corruption is Jared Kushner, the president’s son in law, who has taken some $2.2 billion in Saudi money and serves as their advisor while ostensibly representing Trump in sensitive negotiations across the Middle East. He has wielded his ostensible authority on behalf of Trump to raise billions more in funds for his investment services and his real estate empire. The act of “reaching out” to him for friendly discussions was an amateurish demonstration of Jeffries’ complete lack of seriousness as a political leader. It would be unforgivable for a political novice. It’s disqualifying for a supposed party leader.

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California Draws More Investment Than All Other 49 States Combined

Wall Street Journal

Silicon Valley’s unrivaled concentration of AI workers, companies and investors keeps the money flowing. Photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters

Scott: Viewers of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News know that California is a dystopian hellhole from which business executives are only too eager to exit in favor of Texas or Florida. In the meantime, of course, Rupert and his family have no doubts about where they prefer to live, and that’s in California. The actual numbers of course tell a totally different story. California is by a long distance the best performing economy in the United States, and neither Texas nor Florida come within hailing distance (though Texas does rank at the top of CNBC’s worst states to live in). Here, the fact-based island in Rupert’s empire chronicles California’s ability to attract enormous amounts of capital and what drives it.

California is in the midst of a record-shattering investment wave, fueled by the artificial-intelligence boom in Silicon Valley.

Companies based in the Golden State have drawn around $366 billion of venture capital since the beginning of the year, according to data provider PitchBook. That’s more than three times the amount of venture funding that has gone into the other 49 states combined, and nearly double California’s previous record, set in 2025. New York state ranks a distant second in venture-capital investment, with $27 billion in deals announced so far this year.

California’s funding keeps coming despite the threat of a billionaire tax that detractors, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, have warned could scare off investors. Thus far, at least, investments in the biggest AI companies are keeping the frenzy going while the state’s billionaire class waits to see if voters back the new levy in November.

The capital pouring into AI has supercharged housing prices in San Francisco and created a new class of millionaires overnight. But the boom is reverberating beyond the tech-centric Bay Area: the money has also helped ease the state government’s chronic budget deficit by helping push income-tax revenues well above forecasts.

In May 2025, California’s finance department projected $126 billion in personal-income tax revenues for the fiscal year that ended June 30. Actual income taxes instead generated around $147 billion, as AI enthusiasm fueled a soaring stock market and boosted compensation for tech workers. Future initial public offerings of young AI companies that are raising venture funding today will produce additional tax revenue from capital gains.

Europe’s Oceans Are Boiling; Humans Are Turning Up The Heat

The Guardian

Charles: As Europe reels from massive forest fires in France and Spain, a new study says carbon pollution has fueled a “massive expansion” of marine heatwaves in Europe, with some waters recording temperatures 6C (10.8 F) higher than normal.

The hottest fortnights of this year would have been “virtually impossible” in a preindustrial climate in three of the four sea regions studied, according to analysis by World Weather Attribution, while in the Celtic region, which covers much of the water around the British Isles, heat hit levels that used to strike just once a century.

Climate breakdown was responsible for about two-thirds of the observed excess heat, the researchers said, having warmed waters by about 2C in the Mediterranean, 1.4C in the Bay of Biscay and Iberian Peninsula, and 1.3C around Ireland and the Channel.

While hot seas receive little attention, they can lead to the death of habitat-forming species such as corals and macroalgae, disrupting ecosystems and leading to large-scale mortality of fish and seabirds. They also raise dangerous overnight temperatures in coastal regions, as oceans cool more slowly than land.

There has been a “massive expansion” of marine heatwaves in 2026 that has so far hit 90% of the Bay of Biscay and Iberian coast region, and 80% of the western Mediterranean. In a hypothetical climate not heated by humanity, scientists said they would expect those figures to be half as big.

Removing the effect of climate breakdown cut the expected marine heatwave area from 70% to 9% in the eastern Mediterranean, and from 80% to 30% in the Celtic region, the analysis showed.

Separate research published in January found that marine heatwaves lead to more intense rainfall on land. Globally, about 5-25% of extreme rainfall over coastal land is accompanied by a nearby marine heatwave, the study found. Rainfall during extreme downpours influenced by a strong heatwave was found to be 20-30% higher.

Europe is the fastest-warming continent and is increasingly reckoning with the consequences of planet-heating pollution with which it has disproportionately polluted the atmosphere. In recent years, it has been struck by a series of catastrophic weather events found to have been made worse by climate breakdown, even as national governments have sought to extract more polluting fuels and roll back policies to stop the planet from heating.

Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, a climate thinktank, who was not involved in the study, said it showed “there is no safe corner of the planet in a climate crisis” and questioned the continent’s expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure.

“Europe cannot acknowledge the science with one hand while continuing to expand fossil fuels with the other,” he said. “Every new oil and gas project locks in more warming and pushes ecosystems closer to limits from which they may not recover.”

The Trump Bros Crypto bank offers depositors way to ‘gain favor’ with White House

The Guardian

Scott: Is the Trump Bros new bank, World Liberty Financial, really anything other than a thinly disguised vehicle for bribing and corrupting public officials? Not really. Aram Roston explains in this essential Guardian piece.

Two fundamentals underpin the business model of a new crypto bank partly owned by the Trump family, cryptocurrency experts tell the Guardian.

World Liberty Trust Company received conditional approval this month from the US office of the comptroller of the currency (OCC) to start a bank. An entity affiliated with Donald Trump and his family members owns about 38% of the company. The agency is led by a political appointee of the US president.

The first distinctive feature of this bank – and stablecoin operations like it – is that there is almost no risk that it can lose money. The second is the sole logical motivation for depositors to put their money into it, according to five experts: the financial connection to the president and his family.

World Liberty is not really a bank, in the conventional sense: it won’t be lending money to businesses or individuals, issuing mortgage or credit cards, or getting federal insurance on deposits.

What it will be able to do is directly issue the Trumps’ dollar-pegged stablecoin, USD1. Stablecoins, unlike other cryptocurrencies, are pegged at fixed values such as $1, and used almost exclusively to buy and sell riskier crypto assets, like bitcoin.

Because of the way stablecoins are regulated – under a law signed by Trump in 2025 – World Liberty’s bank will not be allowed to pay its depositors, the companies and individuals who buy its stablecoins, any interest. The bank, however, can earn interest for itself by putting the cash it collects from those depositors into high-quality liquid investments – US government-backed treasury bonds.

Why would depositors be interested in buying the Trump family’s little-used stablecoins? Experts point to their ties to the White House.

“The only reason really to do it is because they want to appease Trump, because they want to gain favor with Trump or in some way help Trump for whatever reason,” said James Angel, an associate professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.

Button of The Day

H/t Sarah Burke

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How the White House Manages Brendan Carr’s Attacks on the Media

The Guardian

Scott: Unlike any FCC chair before him, Brendan Carr has wielded the power and authority of the FCC as a muzzle on critics of the administration he serves. And now a Guardian exposé reveals that all of this has been micromanaged from behind the scenes by the Trump White House—and how Rupert Murdoch TV is complicit in all these schemes.

Internal documents obtained by Guardian show White House meetings, scheduled calls with top Trump officials and communications with Fox News producers.

Brendan Carr was very firm.

“As a general rule, we don’t get into any discussions that happen with the White House or don’t happen with the White House,” Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), told Politico’s Dasha Burns in a recent interview. Burns had pressed Carr to explain how exactly he came to issue a highly unprecedented order forcing ABC to apply early to renew its eight local broadcast licenses just one day after the man who appointed Carr, Donald Trump, and his wife Melania called for ABC to be punished for a joke made by the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel.

“Did you get a call or talk to the president either before or after you made that announcement?” Burns had asked. Later in the interview, Carr repeated his policy: “As a general matter, I don’t speak publicly about conversations with the White House, or whether they happen or don’t happen.”

While Carr may not be keen to detail his relations with the Trump administration, a trove of FCC documents – obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request and lawsuit filed by the advocacy group Democracy Forward, and provided to the Guardian – shed light on the close working relationship between Carr, his top staffers and members of Trump’s White House team.

Between 12 March 2025 and 11 February 2026, Carr attended at least eight meetings at the White House, according to the records, and had at least three scheduled calls with administration officials, including two conversations with the chief of staff, Susie Wiles. He also spoke by phone with administration officials such as the controversial health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr.

In addition, the files provide insight into Carr’s media strategy, including communications with producers at Fox News, and make public previously undisclosed meetings he has held with media titans such as the Fox Corp chief executive, Lachlan Murdoch, and Sinclair Broadcast Group chair, David Smith.

“These records show a remarkable breadth of access to FCC leadership for this administration’s political allies, conservative media figures, and powerful industry interests, including companies and organizations with business before the commission,” said Dan McGrath, special counsel, oversight at Democracy Forward. “This raises serious questions about whether the FCC is operating as an independent regulator, or whether political relationships and industry influence have become too intertwined with its decision-making.”

The White House meetings, which are memorialized as Microsoft Outlook calendar items, occasionally include details about the topic of discussion. For example, on 29 August 2025, Carr was listed as the organizer of a “White House deputies” meeting focused on “FAA/Spectrum issues,” which also included the FCC’s chief of staff, Greg Watson, and Arpan Sura, a senior counsel focused on spectrum, space and artificial intelligence.

Trump’s Broken Promises, in 5 Charts

New York Times

Charles: Before he became an investment banker and a money manager, Steve Rattner was a fine reporter for The New York Times. He has never lost his reporting chops. Through his frequent appearances on Morning Joe he has become newly famous as the best chart maker of our time.

Steve Rattner

Here are five that he published in The Times this week. They should become the backbone of every Democratic campaign this fall.

1. ‘We’re going to grow like nobody’s ever grown before.’

Economic Club of New York, Sept. 5, 2024

The economy is slowing

In this year’s second quarter, growth dropped to an annual rate of just 1.5 percent, a shift substantially caused or exacerbated by Mr. Trump’s policies. Rising energy prices and inflation. Decreased government spending. A deteriorating trade balance, thanks to his tariffs. That’s added up to materially slower growth than the healthy 2.75 percent rate that Mr. Trump was bequeathed by President Joe Biden.

2. Deficit

Trump’s Promise

‘In the near future, I want to do what has not been done in 24 years: balance the federal budget.’

Address to a joint session of Congress, March 4, 2025

The estimate for 2026 uses the Congressional Budget Office’s August projections. Estimates for 2027-36 use the C.B.O.’s February 2026 baseline. Sources: FRED; Congressional Budget Office.

Spending was high under Mr. Biden as he worked to combat the lingering effects of Covid and invest in priorities like clean energy and infrastructure. But even as Republicans cut a number of these initiatives, the deficit rose in Mr. Trump’s first budget after his return to office, largely because of his huge tax cut. And the Congressional Budget Office projects that it will continue to climb to $3.1 trillion by 2036. That makes the notion of Mr. Trump balancing the budget just plain laughable.

3. Debt

Trump’s Promise

‘But now it’s our turn to prosper, and in so doing, use trillions and trillions of dollars to reduce our taxes and pay down our national debt, and it’ll all happen very quickly.’

Tariff announcement, White House Rose Garden, April 2, 2025

Federal debt as a share of G.D.P., by fiscal year

The ratio of total debt held by the public to the size of our economy is about to surpass the World War II record. By 2036, the C.B.O. projects our national debt will reach 120 percent of gross domestic product.

4. Manufacturing

Trump’s Promise

‘America will be a manufacturing nation once again, and we have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have.’

Second inaugural address, Jan. 20, 2025

Manufacturing employment has stalled

Total monthly manufacturing employment

Manufacturing employment, which grew during much of Mr. Biden’s administration because of his ambitious industrial investments, has slipped to 12.6 million, down 62,000 since Mr. Trump’s second inauguration.

5. Tariffs

Trump’s Promise

‘Without tariffs, and all of the TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS we have already taken in, our Country would be completely destroyed.’

Truth Social, Aug. 31, 2025, after the appeals court ruling against the IEEPA tariffs

Monthly net U.S. customs revenue

The only visible changes are to tariffs themselves, given that the Supreme Court ruled that the bulk of Mr. Trump’s new tariffs were illegal and lower courts ordered those payments refunded. It should be noted that the refunds are going to the companies that paid them rather than to the consumers who probably bore much of the cost. And the array of new tariffs Mr. Trump has rolled out since have already been challenged in court. Even if they are upheld, they stand to generate only $121 billion in 2026 — far less than the $166 billion that the government must refund.

Trump’s cuts to South Korean military drills stir doubts about US resolve in Asia

Financial Times

Demonstrators in Seoul protest against US President Donald Trump’s policy on South Korea © Jeon Heon-Kyun/EPA/Shutterstock

Scott: On North Korea’s Liberation Day, Pyongyang dictator Kim Jong Un received two love letters. One came from Vladimir Putin, with effusive words of praise for North Korea’s decision to sent him a fresh 50,000 troops to back up the war on Ukraine. That was expected. More surprising was the love letter from Donald Trump, which reiterated North Korean propaganda blasts against the annual joint US-Korean war games, saying they were offensive to his friend Kim and ratcheting them down. In the wake of this, two theories have been put forward by way of explanation. One is that Trump is preparing to jettison the US alliance system with the East Asian rim, just as he is seeking to demolish NATO. There is a remarkable list of evidence for this, much of which US media don’t bother to report. The second is that Trump was just venting a fit of anger over Korea’s failure to volunteer support for his failed military effort in Iran. Either way, the Trump moves furnish a shocking victory for the Eurasian alliance of Moscow, Beijing and Pyongyang, which is behind the scenes working very hard with their ally Tehran to expand the scope of Trump’s defeat in the Gulf. The lesson for US erstwhile allies is clear: being Trump’s friend and ally is a very dangerous thing.

Donald Trump’s decision to scale back joint military exercises with South Korea has deepened concerns about US reliability among Indo-Pacific allies who were already nervous about his rhetoric on Taiwan.

On Sunday, hours before US and South Korean forces were to start their annual Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises, Trump declared on Truth Social that the drills would send a “hostile” message to Pyongyang, echoing North Korea’s criticism that it was a “rehearsal for a war of aggression”.

The abrupt decision came on the heels of the USS George Washington aircraft carrier strike group setting sail from the Pacific for the Middle East, in a move that will leave the region without a US carrier as China continues to take a more aggressive stance in the region.

Michael Green, head of the United States Studies Centre in Sydney, said one US ally likened working with the Trump administration to “going into space with Sigourney Weaver” in the movie Alien.

“The latest monster to spring from the ceiling was the president’s threat to cancel US military exercises with South Korea,” said Green, who served as the top White House Asia adviser to George W Bush.

The recent developments, which come five weeks before Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected to visit Washington, have undermined US efforts to reassure allies by telling them to focus on Trump’s actions, not his rhetoric.

Elbridge Colby, the top Pentagon policy official, told an audience in Manila last week that the US would “not engage in peacocking” but would “speak softly” while carrying “the world’s biggest stick” — a paraphrase of Theodore Roosevelt’s remark in 1901 before he became president.

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Trump’s Disappearing Data Archives

The Guardian

Scott: Trump’s burning hot hatred of science is matched by his disgust over the collection of raw data, the basic building block of scientific research. Why? Because this enables scientific research and often enough the lies that he and his collaborators spew about subjects like vaccinations and global warming. The Guardian has surveyed the damage he has done in “disappearing” government data bases.

Health data appears to be most affected by administration’s attempt to wipe findings that don’t align with its priorities, tracker shows.

A database of federal law enforcement officer misconduct records. A survey measuring physical, sexual and emotional violence against children and youth. Real-time pollution readings collected by air quality monitors from US embassies around the world.

These are among the hundreds of federal datasets that the Trump administration has taken down or altered as part of its aggressive campaign to wipe all mentions of data findings that do not align with the administration’s priorities.

Over the past year and a half, at least 28 federal datasets have been deleted and another 338 data collections have been modified, according to an online tracker released last week from dataindex.us, a group of data policy experts, researchers and developers that formed last year to monitor changes to government data.

“We’re at a very vulnerable point as a nation,” said Denice Ross, former US chief data scientist under the Biden administration and a co-founder of dataindex.us. “We’re facing a future where we are not going to have the information that we need to make decisions that will save lives and benefit American communities.”

The tracker includes detailed information about deleted or altered datasets from more than 60 federal agencies that span the environment, labor, law enforcement and other topics. But datasets on health appear to be the most affected by the Trump administration’s crackdown, comprising about 40% of the total number of terminated or altered data collections tracked by dataindex.us.

One of the main changes to these health datasets is that they no longer collect information on queer and trans people – as part of Donald Trump’s executive order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”.

Multiple Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) surveys, for example, have removed questions about respondents’ gender identity. These include the National HIV Surveillance System, the primary source of case data for HIV infections, the National Violent Death Reporting System, the CDC Diabetes Prevention Recognition Program, the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey and specific surveys evaluating Prep uptake among gay men and in communities of color.

In addition, there are at least four health datasets that are no longer being updated at all, including the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration’s (Samhsa) Drug Abuse Warning Network, a surveillance system that doctors and public health researchers used to track drug-related emergency room visits in near real-time to spot emerging overdose trends.

“These data are critical for identifying emerging epidemics and what parts of the population are most vulnerable to different types of health conditions,” said Thomas Babor, a professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut who specializes in public health and addiction.

“Never before have we seen so little effort to hide so much corruption.”

The Guardian

Charles: Last weekend in Augusta, Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff tore into Donald Trump with the barnstorming millions of Democrats have been waiting for. Nothing was off limits, from the massive corruption of the Trump family–”they’re crooks, and everybody knows it”–to the constant presence of Trump’s favorite blonde aide, Natalie Harp.

Ossoff declared:

Did you hear what this man said two weeks ago? Quote: ‘It’s not possible,’ the president said, ‘for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid or Medicare.’ He said: ‘We can only afford to fund war.’ Because draft-dodging Donald loves sending other people’s children to war…

A war no one voted for and no one can explain, And the daily, the hourly lying to the American public about why we’re at war, whether we’ve won, what’s been agreed to, not to mention the insane genocidal threats.

Georgia Senator and budding Presidential Contender Jon Ossoff

On day 10 of the war, the president said, quote: ‘The war is very complete.’ That was day 10. Then, day 11: ‘Going to be finished pretty quickly.’ Day 12: ‘We won.’ Day 21: ‘Getting very close.’ Day 32: ‘Leaving very soon.’ Day 40: ‘Total and complete victory.’ Yesterday, day 49, Trump said Iran had opened the strait – except this morning the strait was closed, and it looks like Iran hit a cargo ship.

He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.

The faithless president depicts himself as Christ while he plunges the nation into wars of choice, while he and his family rake in billions from foreign princes, while he plunders our healthcare to cut taxes for the rich.

Meanwhile, rent, power, groceries and healthcare have all hit all-time highs this year. While you pay more for everything, the first family’s wealth is growing by billions of dollars – because they’re crooks, and everybody knows it.

White House Aide Natalie Harp

How much do you guys know about Jared Kushner, Ivanka’s husband? He’s on the Saudi payroll for $2bn, did you know that? And now he’s leading American diplomacy in the Middle East, apparently, while at the very same time asking princes and sheikhs across the Arab world to give him billions more.

Can you imagine, like a normal, sitting US ambassador just hitting up Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman for billions of dollars? But he’s a Trump, a royal, a princeling. The rules are for us, not for them. And it’s not just Jared getting in on the action. Never before have we seen so little effort to hide so much corruption. The Mar-a-Lago mafia has taken American corruption to spectacular new heights.”

Big Tech’s data centre boom poised to drive up carbon emissions

Financial Times

Meta’s $1bn, 520-acre data centre under construction in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin last month, one of seven major data centre projects pending in the state © Mark Hoffman/USA Today Network/ Reuters

Scott: Big Tech is quick to ensure that their new data centers will have incalculable positive effects for the entire world, starting with the communities in which they are located. But they’re remarkably hesitant to share hard numbers. So FT decided to take a look at just one simple question: how will the data centers affect carbon emissions?

Big Tech’s data centre building boom could create a huge new source of carbon emissions as the surging demand for electricity sparks a wave of fossil-fuel power plants, despite companies’ climate commitments.

An FT analysis of 60 of the largest planned data centres being built in the US by Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta found that they could together produce 101.5mn tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions a year once fully operational, based on the most recent snapshot of US power generation.

That would be equivalent to about 7 per cent of US power-sector emissions in 2025 — the annual emissions of 27 coal plants or 24mn petrol-powered cars.

“This is a reasonable ballpark estimate,” said Jonathan Koomey, an energy researcher who has studied energy efficiency and climate solutions. “It is a relatively small fraction of the total but it’s still a big increase compared to what the data centre companies were saying they were going to do five years ago, because they all had emission-reduction plans.”

The data centre boom is also spurring the construction of new fossil-fuel power plants. Three-quarters of the utilities serving the 60 projects are planning or building new gas-fired capacity, according to the FT’s analysis, based on utility filings, S&P data and analytics firm DC Byte. A third of those that operate coal plants are also delaying retirements.

The FT estimates underscore how the AI infrastructure boom threatens to undermine years of progress in cutting emissions from US electricity generation, even as Big Tech companies pledge billions of dollars for clean energy.

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Why Big Tech’s AI Spending Is $3 Trillion Higher Than It Seems

Wall Street Journal

Scott: Big Tech now completely dominates the US stock market. And Big Tech is expending historically unprecedented sums in its quest for AI. It has also been playing some tricks with the books, struggling to keep its commitments off the books. Is this a good thing? Of course not. And if, or rather when, the AI bubble pops, it will be a catastrophic thing for US equity markets. WSJ reports and offers some excellent graphics:

Each quarter, big tech companies disclose their massive capital expenditures on artificial-intelligence infrastructure, from data centers to chips.

But those figures don’t come close to expressing the full extent of future spending to which Google parent Alphabet, Meta Platforms, Oracle and many others have committed. That is because a huge swath of their coming financial obligations aren’t reflected on their balance sheets.

Nine top tech companies had some $3 trillion of off-balance-sheet commitments mostly related to AI, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of footnotes in their most recent securities filings. Those obligations are growing faster than traditional “capex,” which totaled about $600 billion over the past year they reported, and were about triple what the companies owe under their outstanding leases and long-term borrowings.

America’s blue-chip tech companies are placing these huge bets based on assumptions about what the demand for AI computing—and availability of AI hardware—will be in several years. Their hope is that they will easily meet all their obligations with future revenue as consumers and businesses adopt AI in every facet of American life.

If those assumptions about technology and demand prove wrong, these deals to clinch future capacity could become a monstrous burden for the tech companies and their investors.

Meta’s gigantic “Hyperion” data-center project in Louisiana, which is the size of about 1,700 football fields, helps explain how big obligations wind up off tech companies’ balance sheets.

Trump’s Disastrous Track Record in the Middle East

Le Monde

Trump during a meeting of his cabinet to discuss Middle East issues at Camp David (Maryland) on July 21, 2026. Photo: Anna Moneymaker/AFP

Scott: For many American presidents, conflict in the Middle East has proved a low point of their presidency. But none has acquitted himself with quite the level of catastrophic failure of Donald Trump. And it’s not over yet. The editors of Le Monde attempt an assessment of Trump’s achievements so far. He hasn’t yet turned to nuclear weapons, but before it’s over, who knows. Marjorie Taylor Green insists he’s been raising the prospect of using nukes on Iran with his advisors.

The Middle East has always revealed the true nature of an American president. In Donald Trump’s case, it has exposed his incompetence and lack of foresight. In less than two years, he has racked up a string of failures.

That is obviously the case for the war he launched against Iran, in partnership with Israel, whose most tangible result to date has been the closure of the strategic Strait of Hormuz. Before February 28, hundreds of container ships, oil tankers and gas carriers passed through it without incident. From the outset, the United States exposed the limits of the world’s most powerful military. Then, Washington resigned itself to signing an agreement with Iran, whose ambiguous wording allowed the Iranian regime to claim unprecedented control over the strait.

In response, the US hinted that it would resume fighting, only to later back down, likely under pressure from the Arab Gulf states, which were directly exposed to Iran’s retaliation for the US-Israeli intervention. The alarming state of US ammunition stockpiles for certain weapons systems, despite the administration’s denials, may also have played a part in this.

The intended show of force thus turned into an illustration of impotence. The US’s weakness also prompted three of its allies – Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey – to conclude a mutual defense pact, a clear rebuke of the US’s role as the historical protector of the Arabian Peninsula.

Israel, which clearly played a decisive role in convincing Trump to embark on this adventure, is also responsible for the other major deadlock in which Trump has become entangled: the Palestinian issue.

The Horton-Kaiser Book Report

Out There: New Architecture Across America

Charles: This gorgeous new 500-page encyclopedia of American architecture between the coasts is exactly what everyone needs right now: 170 new reasons to celebrate our country. Written by Cathleen McGuigan, Robert Ivy and Peter MacKeith, the book profiles 170 projects and fifty US architectural practices, including Observation Studio (Oregon), Modus Studio (Arkansas), Rand Elliott Architects (Oklahoma), Renée del Gaudio Architecture (Colorado), Salmela Architect (Minnesota), and Duvall Decker (Mississippi), winner of the 2026 AIA Architecture Firm Award.

Perusing these pages will renew your faith in the possibilities of American invention. The book weaves together “an architectural tapestry that reflects the breadth and diversity of the American landscape.”

As co-author McGuigan explains, these are the

groundbreakers who did not succumb to the thrall of past ‘isms,’ eschewing postmodernism, deconstructivism, and contemporary corporate modernism, and who have avoided the heroic, shape-shifting formalism in architecture that seems to be a magnet for public attention.

But they also avoid imitation and slavish historicism: while their designs connect, at some level, to their localities, their most innovative projects interpret their context in ingenious ways, to create unique works of architecture that clearly belong to our time. They reject the vernacular or reinvent it as an abstraction, as Blackwell has put it: “We are transgressing the vernacular—breaking it down and re-presenting it.”

Here are dozens of professionals of the next generation, who often came to appreciate the values of placemaking and sustainable architecture through their education and their own apprenticeships. Emerging technologies and research, particularly about the environment ,have greatly affected contemporary architecture, but the underlying values of place-based design, especially in flyover country, remain; originality and honesty, in the hands of the best up-and-coming architects “out there,” are part of a tradition and lineage that extend back decades. It is an approach to architecture that remains a bulwark against the homogenization of global culture, a sensibility that respects wide-ranging, diverse communities everywhere, by both fitting in and standing out.

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Trump Bros Crypto Operation Gets OK to Open a Bank

Wall Street Journal

Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump of World Liberty Financial cheer outside t…

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